Or, as Pliny complains, all things considered, Nature might better be called our stepmother than our mother. No creature’s life is so fragile, so fearful, so mad, so furious; only humanity is afflicted by envy, discontent, grief, greed, ambition and superstition.

Our whole life is an Irish Sea, where nothing can be expected but raging storms and troublesome waves without end—

I see so vast a sea of troubles That there is no chance of swimming free.

No halcyon days, when a person can feel safe or be content with his present condition. As Boethius concludes, there is something in each of us that we seek before trying it and abhor once we have tried it. We wish for it earnestly and covet it eagerly, then soon grow tired of it.

Thus between hope and fear, suspicion and anger—“between hope and dread, amid fears and angers”—between making friends and falling out, and so on, we squander our best days and fritter our time away foolishly. We lead a quarrelsome, discontented, turbulent, melancholy, miserable life; so much so that, if we could foresee what lay ahead and had the choice, we would refuse this painful life rather than accept it.

In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves and cheats, full of filthy puddles, dreadful rocks and precipices; an ocean of adversity, a heavy yoke. Illnesses and calamities overtake and follow one another like the waves of the sea. If we escape Scylla, we run into Charybdis; and so, in perpetual fear, labour and anguish, we pass from one plague, one misfortune, one burden to another, “serving a harsh servitude.” You could as easily separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moisture from water or brightness from the sun as misery, discontent, care, calamity and danger from a human being.

Our towns and cities are so many dwellings of human misery, enclosing grief and sorrow, innumerable troubles, mortal labours and every kind of vice as though in pens—as the writer aptly observes from Solon. Our villages are like molehills, and people like so many ants, busy, forever busy, going to and fro, in and out, thwarting one another’s plans as the lines of different sea charts cross on a globe or map.

Now light-hearted and merry, but presently—as another writer continues—sorrowful and dejected; now hopeful, then distrustful; patient today, crying out tomorrow; now pale, then red; running, sitting, sweating, trembling, limping, and so on. A few, perhaps one in a thousand, may be “Jupiter’s chick” in the world’s opinion, “the white hen’s son”: a happy and fortunate man, “happy enough to be envied,” because he is rich, handsome, well connected, honoured and in office. Yet ask the man himself and perhaps he will say that he is the most miserable and unhappy of all. A fine shoe: “This shoe is new and elegant,” as the man said, “but you do not know where it chafes”—you do not know where it pinches.

Another person’s opinion cannot make me happy. As Seneca aptly puts it, the man who does not consider himself happy is a miserable wretch, even if he rules a world. He is not happy if he thinks himself otherwise: what does it matter what your condition is, or seems to others, if you yourself dislike it?

It is a common human tendency to think well of other people’s fortunes and dislike our own: “Whoever admires another’s lot plainly hates his own.” But “how does it happen, Maecenas,” and so on—how does it come about, what causes it? Many people are so perverse that nothing pleases them, says Theodoret: neither riches nor poverty. They complain when well, and when ill; they grumble at every turn of fortune, in prosperity and adversity. They are troubled in a year of low prices and in a barren year, in plenty or scarcity. Nothing pleases them: war or peace, having children or having none.

For the most part this is the disposition of us all: discontented, miserable and profoundly unhappy—at least in our own opinion. Show me someone who is otherwise, or ever was! The Romans endlessly admire Quintus Metellus’s good fortune. As Paterculus says, scarcely anyone of any nation, rank, age or sex can be found whose happiness compares with his. In a word, he had “the goods of mind, body and fortune”—goods of mind, body and fortune; so did Publius Mucianus Crassus.

Lampsaca, the Spartan lady, was another such person in Pliny’s opinion: a king’s wife, a king’s mother, a king’s daughter. And everyone thought as highly of Polycrates of Samos. The Greeks boast of Socrates, Phocion and Aristides; the people of Psophis especially of their Aglaus, “happy throughout his life, immune to every danger”—which Pausanias, incidentally, held impossible. The Romans boast of Cato, Curius and Fabricius for their settled fortunes, withdrawn ways of life, command of their passions and contempt for worldly things. Yet none of them was happy or free from discontent: neither Metellus, Crassus nor Polycrates, who died violently, as did Cato. And how much evil Lactantius and Theodoret say of Socrates, a weak man—and likewise of the rest.

There is no contentment in this life. As he said, “All is vanity and vexation of spirit”—lame and imperfect. Even if you had Samson’s hair, Milo’s strength, Skanderbeg’s arm, Solomon’s wisdom, Absalom’s beauty, Croesus’s wealth, “Pases’s coin,” Caesar’s courage, Alexander’s spirit, Cicero’s or Demosthenes’s eloquence, Gyges’s ring, Perseus’s Pegasus and the Gorgon’s head, and Nestor’s years still to live, none of this would make you complete, give you contentment and true happiness in this life, or preserve them. Even amid all our mirth, merriment and laughter there is sorrow and grief; or, if true happiness exists among us, it lasts only a while—

A woman beautiful above ends in a fish below.