nointed?" And Aristotle, writing to Antipater,
said, "Not only has Alexander a right to plume himself on his rule over
many subjects, but no less legitimate is satisfaction at entertaining
right opinions about the gods." For those that think so highly of their
own walk in life will not be so envious about their neighbours'. We do
not expect a vine to bear figs, nor an olive grapes, yet now-a-days,
with regard to ourselves, if we have not at one and the same time the
privilege of being accounted rich and learned, generals and
philosophers, flatterers and outspoken, stingy and extravagant, we
slander ourselves and are dissatisfied, and despise ourselves as living
a maimed and imperfect life. Furthermore, we see that nature teaches us
the same lesson.[747] For as she provides different kinds of beasts with
different kinds of food, and has not made all carnivorous, or
seed-pickers, or root-diggers, so she has given to mankind various means
of getting a livelihood, "one by keeping sheep, another by ploughing,
another by fowling,"[748] and another by catching the fish of the sea.
We ought each therefore to select the calling appropriate for ourselves
and labour energetically in it, and leave other people to theirs, and
not demonstrate Hesiod as coming short of the real state of things when
he said,

"Potter is wroth with potter, smith with smith."[749]

For not only do people envy those of the same trade and manner of life,
but the rich envy the learned, and the famous the rich, and advocates
sophists, aye, and freemen and patricians admire and think happy
comedians starring it at the theatres, and dancers, and the attendants
at kings' courts, and by all this envy give themselves no small trouble
and annoyance.

Sec.XIV. But that every man has in himself the magazines of content or
discontent, and that the jars containing blessings and evils are not on
the threshold of Zeus,[750] but lie stored in the mind, is plain from
the differences of men's passions. For the foolish overlook and neglect
present blessings, through their thoughts being ever intent on the
future; but the wise make the past clearly present to them through
memory. For the present giving only a moment of time to the touch, and
then evading our grasp, does not seem to the foolish to be ours or to
belong to us at all. And like that person[751] painted as rope-making in
Hades and permitting an ass feeding by to eat up the rope as fast as he
makes it, so the