The Anatomy of Melancholy

Cato the Censor—that upright Cato to whom Paterculus pays the honourable tribute, “he did right because he could not do otherwise”—was indicted and accused fifty times by his fellow citizens.

And, as Ammianus rightly puts it, “Who will be innocent if a private or public accusation is enough?” If merely accusing a man openly or privately is sufficient, who will escape?

Even if there were no other consideration beyond Christianity, religion and the like to induce people to be forbearing and patient, the nature of injury itself seems to me enough to keep them quiet. The disturbances, uproars, miseries, discontents, anguish, losses and dangers attending it might check the calamities of quarrelling. As with ordinary gamblers, whose winnings go to the gaming box, so with those who litigate: the lawyers get everything. If people would consider this—“other men’s dangers make us cautious”—the misfortunes of others in such matters and common experience might hold them back.

The more they quarrel, the further they become entangled in a labyrinth of woes; the final outcome is mutual destruction, as in Pliny’s contest between the elephant and the dragon. The dragon got beneath the elephant’s belly and sucked its blood until the elephant fell dead upon it, killing it in the fall: both were destroyed.

Contention is a Hydra’s head: the more people struggle, the more struggling remains. It is like Praxiteles and his mirror: seeing an ugly face in it, he smashed it, but in place of that one face he instantly saw many more equally ugly. For one injury they provoke another “with interest,” and twenty enemies in place of one.

“Do not stir up hornets”: do not set yourself against a multitude. If you have suffered a wrong, consider it wisely and, if you possibly can, compose yourself to bear it patiently. This is the safest course; you will find the greatest relief in remaining at peace.

I say the same of mockery, slander, insults, abuse, defamation, disparagement, satirical libels and the like, which may in any way bring us into disgrace. It is only opinion: if we could disregard or scorn them, or absorb them patiently, they would rebound upon those who first offered them.

A wise citizen, from I know not where, had a quarrelsome wife. When she scolded, he played his drum, which maddened her still more because she saw that he would not be disturbed.

When Diogenes was in a crowd, someone called him back and told him that the boys were laughing him to scorn. “I am not being laughed at,” he replied, and took no notice.

Aristophanes put Socrates on the stage and abused him to his face, but Socrates laughed as though it did not concern him. As Aelian relates, whatever good or bad event or fortune befell him, whether going in or coming out, Socrates always kept the same expression.

A Christian soldier should do the same: as Jerome describes him, “advance through ill repute and good repute towards immortality”—march on through good and bad reports towards immortality, unmoved.