is there any opportunity (seeing the thing is in our own power) that we
should let slip of getting rid of care and grief? It was plain that the
friends of Cnæus Pompeius, when they saw him fainting under his wounds,
at the very moment of that most miserable and bitter sight were under
great uneasiness how they themselves, surrounded by the enemy as they
were, should escape, and were employed in nothing but encouraging the
rowers and aiding their escape; but when they reached Tyre, they began
to grieve and lament over him. Therefore, as fear with them, prevailed
over grief, cannot reason and true philosophy have the same effect with
a wise man?

XXVIII. But what is there more effectual to dispel grief than the
discovery that it answers no purpose, and has been undergone to no
account? Therefore, if we can get rid of it, we need never have been
subject to it. It must be acknowledged, then, that men take up grief
wilfully and knowingly; and this appears from the patience of those
who, after they have been exercised in afflictions and are better able
to bear whatever befalls them, suppose themselves hardened against
fortune; as that person in Euripides,

Had this the first essay of fortune been,
And I no storms thro' all my life had seen,
Wild as a colt I'd broke from reason's sway;
But frequent griefs have taught me to obey.[46]

As, then, the frequent bearing of misery makes grief the lighter, we
must necessarily perceive that the cause and original of it does not
lie in the calamity itself. Your principal philosophers, or lovers of
wisdom, though they have not yet arrived at perfect wisdom, are not
they sensible that they are in the greatest evil? For they are foolish,