icity, needing no instruments nor ministers.
For tyrants, anxious to make those whom they punish wretched, keep
executioners and torturers, and contrive branding-irons and other
instruments of torture to inspire fear[309] in the brute soul, whereas
vice attacks the soul without any such apparatus, and crushes and
dejects it, and fills a man with sorrow, and lamentation, and
melancholy, and remorse. Here is a proof of what I say. Many are silent
under mutilation, and endure scourging or torture at the hand of despots
or tyrants without uttering a word, whenever their soul, abating the
pain by reason, forcibly as it were checks and represses them: but you
can never quiet anger or smother grief, or persuade a timid person not
to run away, or one suffering from remorse not to cry out, nor tear his
hair, nor smite his thigh. Thus vice is stronger than fire and sword.

Sec. III. You know of course that cities, when they desire to publicly
contract for the building of temples or colossuses, listen to the
estimates of the contractors who compete for the job, and bring their
plans and charges, and finally select the contractor who will do the
work at least expense, and best, and quickest. Let us suppose then that
we publicly contract to make the life of man miserable, and take the
estimates of Fortune and Vice for this object. Fortune shall come
forward, provided with all sorts of instruments and costly apparatus to
make life miserable and wretched. She shall come with robberies and
wars, and the blood-guiltiness of tyrants, and storms at sea, and
lightning drawn down from the sky, she shall compound hemlock, she shall
bring swords, she shall levy an army of informers, she shall cause
fevers to break out, she shall rattle fetters and build prisons. It is
true that most of these things are owing to Vice rather than Fortune,
but let us suppose them all to come from Fortune. And let Vice stand by
naked, without any external things against man, and let her ask Fortune
how she will make man unhappy and dejected. Fortune, dost thou threaten
poverty? Metrocles laughs at thee, who sleeps during winter among the
sheep, in summer in the vestibules of temples, and challenges the king
of the Persians,[310] who winters at Babylon, and summers in Media, to
vie with him in happiness. Dost thou bring slavery, and bondage, and
sale? Diogenes despises thee, who cried out, as he was being sold by
some robbers, "Who will buy a master?" Dost thou mix