benefits, but cannot take them away: a man who dies, yet has lived;
a man who becomes blind, nevertheless has seen. She can cut off her
blessings from us in the future, but she cannot prevent our having
enjoyed them in the past. We are frequently not able to enjoy a
benefit for long, but the benefit is not thereby destroyed. Let
Nature struggle as hard as she please, she cannot give herself
retrospective action. A man may lose his house, his money, his
property--everything to which the name of benefit can be given--
yet the benefit itself will remain firm and unmoved; no power can
prevent his benefactor's having bestowed them, or his having
received them.

III. I think that a fine passage in Rabirius's poem, where M.
Antonius, seeing his fortune deserting him, nothing left him except
the privilege of dying, and even that only on condition that he
used it promptly, exclaims,

"What I have given, that I now possess!"

How much he might have possessed, had he chosen! These are riches
to be depended upon, which through all the turmoil of human life
will remain steadfast; and the greater they are, the less envy they
will attract. Why are you sparing of your property, as though it
were your own? You are but the manager of it. All those treasures,
which make you swell with pride, and soar above mere mortals, till
you forget the weakness of your nature; all that which you lock up
in iron-grated treasuries, and guard in arms, which you win from
other men with their lives, and defend at the risk of your own; for
which you launch fleets to dye the sea with blood, and shake the
walls of cities, not knowing what arrows fortune may be preparing