[5] Now both this and miny other excellences are obscured by vice, as a thicket springs up beside seeds planted in a garden. Or are we to say that man has no natural love for himself just because many men cut their throats or hurl themselves from precipices? And Oedipus
1
and Hegesias
2
by the eloquence of his reasoning persuaded many of his hearers to starve themselves to death.
Smote his eyes with a brooch and at each blow
The bloody eye-balls wet his beard;
In many a guise the gods appear.
3
But these are like those diseases and morbid states of the soul which drive men from their natural condition, as they themselves testify against themselves. For if a sow tears to pieces her suckling pig, or a bitch her puppy, men grow despondent and disturbed and offer to the gods sacrifices to avert the evil, and consider it a portent on the ground that Nature prescribes to all creatures that they should love and rear their offspring, not destroy them. Moreover, as in mines the gold, though mingled and covered with much earth, yet gleams through, so Nature, even in characters and passions which are themselves perverted, reveals their love for their offspring. For when poor men do not rear their children it is because they fear that if they are educated less well than is befitting
4
they will become servile and boorish and destitute of all the virtues; since they consider poverty the worst of evils, they cannot endure to let their children share it with them, as though it were a kind of disease, serious and grievous....
De Amore Prolis. Plutarch. William Clark Helmbold (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1939.
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