Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Homer, looking at the mortal races of living creatures and comparing them with one another in their ways of life and modes of subsistence, declared that nothing is more wretched than man, of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth—awarding to the human being an unhappy pride of place in the excess of its miseries. We, however, as though man had already been proclaimed the winner in misfortune and the most wretched of all living creatures, will compare him with himself, dividing body and soul against each other in a contest of their private evils—not uselessly but quite appropriately—so that we may learn whether it is through fortune or through ourselves that we live the more wretched life. For disease arises in the body through nature, but vice and depravity concerning the soul are first a deed and only then a suffering of the soul itself. And it is no small help toward peace of mind, if the worse part proves curable and lighter and without violent throbbing.
Now Aesop's fox, pleading her case against the leopard over which had the finer markings—since the leopard displayed her body and its surface as bright-flowered and dappled, while the fox's own tawny coat was rough and unpleasant to look upon—said, "But if you look at what is within me, judge, you will find me more variegated than she is," thereby showing the versatility of her character, which adapts itself in many ways to circumstances.
Let us then say to ourselves: many diseases and afflictions, O man, your body both produces from itself by nature and also receives, falling upon it, from outside. But if you open yourself up from within, you will find a varied and much-suffering storehouse and treasury of evils, as Democritus says—evils that do not flow in from outside, but have, as it were, indigenous and native springs of their own, which vice, being copious and abundant, sends forth for the passions.
If the diseases that occur in the flesh are detected by throbbing pulses and pale discolorations, and their fevers and sudden pains betray them, while the evils in the soul escape the notice of most people precisely because they are evils, is it not for this very reason that they are worse—because they additionally rob the sufferer of any perception of what he suffers?
For in the case of diseases of the body, reason, being sound, perceives them; but when reason itself is diseased along with the soul, it has no power of judgment concerning what it suffers, since it suffers in the very faculty by which it judges. And one must count folly as the first and greatest of the soul's ailments, through which vice, incurable, dwells with most people, lives with them, and dies with them. For the beginning of release from disease is, in the case of the body, the perception
that brings the sufferer to seek the help of one who can assist; but the soul, through disbelief in its own sickness, not knowing what it needs, refuses the remedy even when it is at hand. And indeed, among bodily diseases those accompanied by loss of sensation are the worst—lethargies, headaches, epileptic fits, strokes; and fevers themselves, when they intensify into delirium, disturb the sensation as if it were an instrument and set in motion strings
that ought to remain still in the mind. This is why physicians' apprentices wish, above all, that a man not be sick, but if he is sick, that he not fail to recognize that he is sick—a condition which befalls all the passions of the soul. For neither those who act foolishly, nor those who behave licentiously, nor those who commit injustice think they are doing wrong; some even think they are acting rightly. No one, after all, has ever called a fever health, or consumption a good constitution, or gout swiftness of foot, or jaundice a healthy glow—yet many people call anger
courage, and call passionate love friendship, and call envy rivalry, and call cowardice caution. And so the sick call in physicians, since they perceive what they need for the ills that afflict them; but the others flee from philosophers, since they think they are succeeding in the very things in which they are failing. Indeed, by this reasoning we might say that ophthalmia is a lighter thing than madness, and gout lighter than delirium. For the one who suffers from ophthalmia perceives it and calls
for the physician, crying out, and offers his eye to be treated by whoever is present, submits to having a vein opened, hands over his head to be treated; but of the raving Agave you hear, when in her madness she does not recognize her own dearest kin, "we bring from the mountain a freshly cut tendril to the halls, a blessed catch." And indeed the man sick in body immediately gives way, lies down upon his couch, and keeps quiet while being treated; but
if the body should somewhere leap up a bit and thrash about when inflammation sets in, someone sitting beside him says gently, "Be still, poor fellow," and steadies him and holds him quiet in his bed. Those, however, who are in the grip of the soul's passions are then most active, precisely when they are least at rest—for impulses are the beginning of actions, and the passions are the violent intensifications of impulses. That is why they do not allow the soul to be still,
but precisely when the man most needs solitude and silence and withdrawal, then they drag him out into the open; then anger, contentiousness, love, and grief lay him bare, compelling him to do many lawless things and say many things ill-suited to the occasion. For just as a storm that prevents putting in to harbor is more dangerous than one that merely prevents sailing, so the storms of the soul are heavier, since they do not allow a man
to make port, nor even allow his reasoning, once thrown into confusion, to come to a stop; but, unsteered and without ballast, tossed about in turmoil and wandering through ruinous and frenzied courses, he is dashed headlong into some fearful shipwreck and shatters his own life. And so, for these reasons and by these means, it is worse to be sick in soul than in body: for the body, it means only to suffer, but for the soul, it means both to suffer and to do
evil. And what need is there to speak at length of the passions, when the very occasion itself is a reminder of them? Do you see this great and motley crowd gathered here, surging and seething about the platform and the marketplace? These people have not come together to sacrifice to their ancestral gods, nor to share in rites common to their kin, nor to bring to Zeus of Ascra the firstfruits of Lydian crops, nor to celebrate for Dionysus
the sacred branch in holy nights and shared revels; but, as though in a yearly recurring cycle the crisis of a disease had roughened all Asia and driven it, arriving before its appointed time, to lawsuits and contests here in this place—a multitude, like gathered floods, has poured into a single marketplace, and it seethes and, in the poet's words, has broken forth "of those destroying and those being destroyed." What fevers, what chills produce these things? What blockages or relapses, what ill-mixture of hot
or overflow of moist humors? If you were to examine each lawsuit as you would a man, asking whence it was born, whence it came, you would find that this one was begotten by headstrong anger, that one by contentious rivalry born of madness, and another by unjust desire.