CHAPTER 2

Of Tranquillity

Consider, you who are going into court, what you wish to maintain
and what you wish to succeed in. For if you wish to maintain a will
conformable to nature, you have every security, every facility, you
have no troubles. For if you wish to maintain what is in your own
power and is naturally free, and if you are content with these, what
else do you care for? For who is the master of such things? Who can
take them away? If you choose to be modest and faithful, who shall not
allow you to be so? If you choose not to be restrained or compelled,
who shall compel you to desire what you think that you ought not to
desire? who shall compel you to avoid what you do not think fit to
avoid? But what do you say? The judge will determine against you
something that appears formidable; but that you should also suffer
in trying to avoid it, how can he do that? When then the pursuit of
objects and the avoiding of them are in your power, what else do you
care for? Let this be your preface, this your narrative, this your
confirmation, this your victory, this your peroration, this your
applause.
Therefore Socrates said to one who was reminding him to prepare
for his trial, "Do you not think then that I have been preparing for
it all my life?" By what kind of preparation? "I have maintained
that which was in my own power." How then? "I have never done anything
unjust either in my private or in my public life."
But if you wish to maintain externals also, your poor body, your
little property and your little estimation, I advise you to make
from this moment all possible preparation, and then consider both
the nature of your judge and your adversary. If it is necessary to
embrace his knees, embrace his knees; if to weep, weep; if to groan,
groan. For when you have subjected to externals what is your own, then
be a slave and do not resist, and do not sometimes choose to be a
slave, and sometimes not choose, but with all your mind be one or
the other, either free or a slave, either instructed or
uninstructed, either a well-bred cock or a mean one, either endure
to be beaten until you die or yield at once; and let it not happen
to you to receive many stripes and then to yield. But if these
things are base, determine immediately: "Where is the nature of evil
and good? It is where truth is: where truth is and where nature is,
there is caution: where truth is, there is courage where nature is."
For what do you think? do you think that, if Socrates had wished
to preserve externals, he would have come forward and said: "Anytus
and Meletus can certainly kill me, but to harm me they are not
able?" Was he so foolish as not to see that this way leads not to
the preservation of life and fortune, but to another end? What is
the reason then that he takes no account of his adversaries, and
even irritates them? Just in the same way my friend Heraclitus, who
had a little suit in Rhodes about a bit of land, and had proved to the