[8] It is reported of Teribazus that, being seized by the Persians, he drew out his scimitar, and being a very stout person, defended himself bravely; but when they cried out and told him he was apprehended by the king’s order, he immediately put up his sword, and presented his hands to be bound. Is not this the very case of the superstitious? Others can oppose their misfortunes, repel their troubles, and furnish themselves with retreats, or means of avoiding the stroke of things not under the disposal of their wills; but the superstitious person, without anybody’s speaking to him,—but merely upon his own saying to himself, This thou undergoest, vile wretch, by the direction of Providence, and by Heaven’s just appointment,—immediately casts away all hope, surrenders himself up, and shuns and affronts his friends that would relieve him. Thus do these sottish fears oftentimes convert tolerable evils into fatal and insupportable ones. The ancient Midas (as the story goes of him), being much troubled and disquieted by certain dreams, grew so melancholy thereupon, that he made himself away by drinking bull’s blood. Aristodemus, king of Messenia, when a war broke out betwixt the Lacedaemonians and the Messenians, upon some dogs howling like wolves, and grass coming up about his ancestors’ domestic altar, and his divines presaging ill upon it, fell into such a fit of sullenness and despair that he slew himself. And perhaps it had been better if the Athenian general, Nicias, had been eased of his folly the same way that Midas and Aristodemus were, than for him to sit still for fear of a lunar eclipse, while he was invested by an enemy, and so be himself made a prisoner, together with an army of forty thousand men (that were all either slain or taken), and die ingloriously. There was nothing formidable in the interposition of the earth betwixt the sun and the moon, neither was there any thing dreadful in the shadow’s meeting the moon at the proper time: no, the dreadfulness lay here, that the darkness of ignorance should blind and befool a man’s reason at a time when he had most occasion to use it.
1
which as soon as the pilot sees, he falls to his prayers and invokes his tutelar daemons, but neglects not in the mean time to hold to the rudder and let down the mainyard; and so,
Glaucus, behold!
The sea with billows deep begins to roll;
The seas begin in azure rods to lie;
A teeming cloud of pitch hangs on the sky
Right o’er Gyre rocks; there is a tempest nigh;
By gathering in his sails, with mighty pain,
Escapes the hell-pits of the raging main.
Hesiod
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directs his husbandman, before he either plough or sow, to pray to the infernal Jove and the venerable Ceres, but with his hand upon the plough-tail. Homer acquaints us how Ajax, being to engage in a single combat with Hector, bade the Grecians pray to the Gods for him; and while they were at their devotions, he was putting on his armor. Likewise, after Agamemnon had thus prepared his soldiers for the fight,—
he then prayed,—
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Each make his spear to glitter as the sun,
Each see his warlike target well hung on,—
Grant me, great Jove, to throw down Priam’s roof.
For God is the brave man’s hope, and not the coward’s excuse. The Jews indeed once sat on their tails,—it being forsooth their Sabbath day,—and suffered their enemies to rear their scaling-ladders and make themselves masters of their walls, and so lay still until they were caught like so many trout in the drag-net of their own superstition.
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De Superstitione. Plutarch. ed. William W. Goodwin. Boston. 1874.
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