vice, and hide your deadly and irremediable disease from your friends,
fearful to show your superstitious fears, palpitations as it were, to
those who could admonish you and cure you." Our remote ancestors paid
public attention to the sick, and if any one had either had or cured a
similar complaint, he communicated his experience to the patient, and so
they say medical art became great by these contributions from
experience. We ought also in the same way to expose to everyone diseased
lives and the passions of the soul, and to handle them, and to examine
the condition of each,[898] and say, Are you a passionate man? Be on
your guard against anger. Are you of a jealous turn? Look to it. Are you
in love? I myself was in love once, but I had to repent. But nowadays
people deny and conceal and cloak their vices, and so fix them deeper in
themselves.

Sec. III. Moreover if you advise men of worth to live unknown and in
obscurity, you say to Epaminondas, Do not be a general; and to Lycurgus,
Do not be a legislator; and to Thrasybulus, Do not be a tyrannicide; and
to Pythagoras, Do not teach; and to Socrates, Do not discourse; and
first and foremost you bid yourself, Epicurus, to refrain from writing
letters to your friends in Asia, and from enrolling Egyptian strangers
among your disciples, and from dancing attendance on the youths of
Lampsacus, and sending books to all quarters to display your wisdom to
all men and all women, and leaving directions in your will about your
funeral. What is the meaning of those common tables of yours? what that
crowd of friends and handsome youths? Why those many thousand lines
written and composed so laboriously on Metrodorus, and Aristobulus, and
Chaeredemus, that they may not be unknown even in death, if[899] you
ordain for virtue oblivion, for art inactivity, for philosophy silence,
and for success that it should be speedily forgotten?

Sec. IV. But if you exclude all knowledge about life, like putting the
lights out at a supper party, that you may go from pleasure to pleasure
undetected,[900] then "live unknown." Certainly if I am going to pass my
life with the harlot Hedeia, or my days with Leontium, and spurn at
virtue, and put my _summum bonum_ in sensual gratifications, these are
ends that require darkness and night, on these oblivion and ignorance
are rightly cast. But if any one in nature sings the praises of the
deity and justice and providence, and in morals upholds the law and