[2] Let us therefore, when we are alone, question with ourselves concerning the things that have befallen us, considering them as heavy loads. The body, we know, is under pressure by a burden lying upon it; but the soul oft-times adds a further weight of her own to things. A stone is hard and ice is cold by nature, not by any thing from without happening to make such qualities and impressions upon them. But as for banishment and disgraces and loss of honors (and so for their contraries, crowns, chief rule, and precedency of place), our opinion prescribing the measure of our joys or sorrows and not the nature of the things themselves, every man makes them to himself light or heavy, easy to be borne or grievous. You may hear Polynices’s answer to this question,
1
But you may hear Alcman in quite another strain, as the epigrammatist has brought him in saying:
2
Thus one man’s opinion makes the same thing commodious, like current money, and another man’s unserviceable and hurtful.
JOCAST. But say, is’t so deplorable a case
To live in exile from one’s native place?
POLYN. It’s sad indeed; and whatsoe’er you guess,
’Tis worse to endure than any can express.
Sardis, my ancient fatherland,
Hadst thou, by Fate’s supreme command,
My helpless childhood nourished,
I must have begg’d my daily bread,
Or else, a beardless priest become,
Have toss’d Cybele frantic down.
Now Alcman I am call’d—a name
Inscribed in Sparta’s lists of fame,
Whose many tripods record bear
Of solemn wreaths and tripods rare,
Achieved in worship at the shrine
Of Heliconian maids divine,
By whose great aid I’m mounted higher
Than Gyges or his wealthy sire.
De exilio. Plutarch. Boston. 1874.
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