a cup of poison?
Didst not thou offer such a one to Socrates? And cheerfully, and mildly,
without fear, without changing colour or countenance, he calmly drank it
up: and when he was dead, all who survived deemed him happy, as sure to
have a divine lot in Hades. And as to thy fire, did not Decius, the
general of the Romans, anticipate it for himself, having piled up a
funeral pyre between the two armies, and sacrificed himself to Cronos,
dedicating himself for the supremacy of his country? And the chaste and
loving wives of the Indians strive and contend with one another for the
fire, and she that wins the day and gets burnt with the body of her
husband, is pronounced happy by the rest, and her praises sung. And of
the wise men in that part of the world no one is esteemed or pronounced
happy, who does not in his lifetime, in good health and in full
possession of all his faculties, separate soul from body by fire, and
emerge pure from flesh, having purged away his mortal part. Or wilt thou
reduce a man from a splendid property, and house, and table, and
sumptuous living, to a threadbare coat and wallet, and begging of daily
bread? Such was the beginning of happiness to Diogenes, of freedom and
glory to Crates. Or wilt thou nail a man on a cross, or impale him on a
stake? What cares Theodorus whether he rots above ground or below? Such
was the happy mode of burial amongst the Scythians,[311] and among the
Hyrcanians dogs, among the Bactrians birds, devour according to the laws
the dead bodies of those who have made a happy end.

Sec. IV. Who then are made unhappy by these things? Those who have no
manliness or reason, the enervated and untrained, who retain the
opinions they had as children. Fortune therefore does not produce
perfect infelicity, unless Vice co-operate. For as a thread saws through
a bone that has been soaked in ashes and vinegar, and as people bend and
fashion ivory only when it has been made soft and supple by beer, and
cannot under any other circumstances, so Fortune, lighting upon what is
in itself faulty and soft through Vice, hollows it out and wounds it.
And as the Parthian juice, though hurtful to no one else nor injurious
to those who touch it or carry it about, yet if it be communicated to a
wounded man straightway kills him through his previous susceptibility to
receive its essence, so he who will be upset in soul by Fortune must
have some secret internal ulcer or sore to make external things so