rief? It was plain, that the
friends of Cnaeus Pompeius, when they saw him fainting under his wounds, at
the very moment of that most miserable and bitter sight were under great
uneasiness how they themselves, surrounded by the enemy as they were,
should escape, and were employed in nothing but encouraging the rowers and
aiding their escape; but when they reached Tyre, they began to grieve and
lament over him. Therefore, as fear with them prevailed over grief, cannot
reason and true philosophy have the same effect with a wise man?

XXVIII. But what is there more effectual to dispel grief than the
discovery that it answers no purpose, and has been undergone to no
account? Therefore, if we can get rid of it, we need never have been
subject to it. It must be acknowledged, then, that men take up grief
wilfully and knowingly; and this appears from the patience of those who,
after they have been exercised in afflictions and are better able to bear
whatever befals them, suppose themselves hardened against fortune; as that
person in Euripides--

Had this the first essay of fortune been,
And I no storms thro' all my life had seen,
Wild as a colt I'd broke from reason's sway;
But frequent griefs have taught me to obey.(95)

As, then, the frequent bearing of misery makes grief the lighter, we must
necessarily perceive that the cause and original of it does not lie in the
calamity itself. Your principal philosophers, or lovers of wisdom, though
they have not yet arrived at perfect wisdom, are not they sensible that
they are in the greatest evil? For they are foolish, and foolishness is
the greatest of all evils, and yet they lament not. How shall we account
for this? Because opinion is not fixed upon that kind of evil; it is not
our opinion that it is right, meet, and our duty to be uneasy because we
are not all wise men. Whereas this opinion is strongly affixed to that
uneasiness where mourning is concerned, which is the greatest of all
grief. Therefore Aristotle, when he blames some ancient philosophers for
imagining that by their genius they had brought philosophy to the highest
perfection, says, they must be either extremely foolish or extremely vain;
but that he himself could see that great improvements had been made
therein in a few years, and that philosophy would in a little time arrive
at perfection. And Theophrastus is reported to have reproached nature at
his death for giving to stags and crows so l