Where then is progress? If any of you, withdrawing himself from
externals, turns to his own will ([Greek: proairesis]) to exercise it
and to improve it by labor, so as to make it conformable to nature,
elevated, free, unrestrained, unimpeded, faithful, modest; and if he has
learned that he who desires or avoids the things which are not in his
power can neither be faithful nor free, but of necessity he must change
with them and be tossed about with them as in a tempest, and of
necessity must subject himself to others who have the power to procure
or prevent what lie desires or would avoid; finally, when he rises in
the morning, if he observes and keeps these rules, bathes as a man of
fidelity, eats as a modest man; in like manner, if in every matter that
occurs he works out his chief principles ([Greek: ta proaegoumena]) as
the runner does with reference to running, and the trainer of the voice
with reference to the voice--this is the man who truly makes progress,
and this is the man who has not travelled in vain. But if he has
strained his efforts to the practice of reading books, and labors only
at this, and has travelled for this, I tell him to return home
immediately, and not to neglect his affairs there; for this for which he
has travelled is nothing. But the other thing is something, to study how
a man can rid his life of lamentation and groaning, and saying, Woe to
me, and wretched that I am, and to rid it also of misfortune and
disappointment, and to learn what death is, and exile, and prison, and
poison, that he may be able to say when he is in fetters, Dear Crito, if
it is the will of the gods that it be so, let it be so; and not to say,
Wretched am I, an old man: have I kept my gray hairs for this? Who is it
that speaks thus? Do you think that I shall name some man of no repute
and of low condition? Does not Priam say this? Does not Oedipus say
this? Nay, all kings say it! For what else is tragedy than the
perturbations ([Greek: pathae]) of men who value externals exhibited in
this kind of poetry? But if a man must learn by fiction that no external