all things are tolerable which others have borne and are bearing.

XXIV. Is poverty the subject? They tell you of many who have submitted
to it with patience. Is it the contempt of honors? They acquaint you
with some who never enjoyed any, and were the happier for it; and of
those who have preferred a private retired life to public employment,
mentioning their names with respect; they tell you of the verse[40] of
that most powerful king who praises an old man, and pronounces him
happy because he was unknown to fame and seemed likely to arrive at the
hour of death in obscurity and without notice. Thus, too, they have
examples for those who are deprived of their children: they who are
under any great grief are comforted by instances of like affliction;
and thus the endurance of every misfortune is rendered more easy by the
fact of others having undergone the same, and the fate of others causes
what has happened to appear less important than it has been previously
thought, and reflection thus discovers to us how much opinion had
imposed on us. And this is what the Telamon declares, "I, when my son
was born," etc.; and thus Theseus, "I on my future misery did dwell;"
and Anaxagoras, "I knew my son was mortal." All these men, by
frequently reflecting on human affairs, had discovered that they were
by no means to be estimated by the opinion of the multitude; and,
indeed, it seems to me to be pretty much the same case with those who
consider beforehand as with those who derive their remedies from time,
excepting that a kind of reason cures the one, and the other remedy is
provided by nature; by which we discover (and this contains the whole
marrow of the matter) that what was imagined to be the greatest evil is
by no means so great as to defeat the happiness of life. And the effect
of this is, that the blow is greater by reason of its not having been
foreseen, and not, as they suppose, that when similar misfortunes
befall two different people, that man only is affected with grief whom