Discourses - Book III   

us by the gods for the purpose of unhappiness and misery, that we
may pass our lives in wretchedness and lamentation? Must all persons
be immortal and must no man go abroad, and must we ourselves not go
abroad, but remain rooted like plants; and, if any of our familiar
friends go abroad, must we sit and weep; and, on the contrary, when he
returns, must we dance and clap our hands like children?
Shall we not now wean ourselves and remember what we have heard from
the philosophers? if we did not listen to them as if they were
jugglers: they tell us that this world is one city, and the
substance out of which it has been formed is one, and that there
must be a certain period, and that some things must give way to
others, that some must be dissolved, and others come in their place;
some to remain in the same place, and others to be moved; and that all
things are full of friendship, first of the gods, and then of men
who by nature are made to be of one family; and some must be with
one another, and others must be separated, rejoicing in those who
are with them, and not grieving for those who are removed from them;
and man in addition to being by nature of a noble temper and having
a contempt of all things which are not in the power of his will,
also possesses this property, not to be rooted nor to be naturally
fixed to the earth, but to go at different times to different
places, sometimes from the urgency of certain occasions, and at others
merely for the sake of seeing. So it was with Ulysses, who saw

Of many men the states, and learned their ways.

And still earlier it was the fortune of Hercules to visit all the
inhabited world

Seeing men's lawless deeds and their good rules of law:

casting out and clearing away their lawlessness and introducing in
their place good rules of law. And yet how many friends do you think
that he had in Thebes, how many in Argos, how many in Athens? and
how many do you think that he gained by going about? And he married
also, when it seemed to him a proper occasion, and begot children, and
left them without lamenting or regretting or leaving them as
orphans; for he knew that no man is an orphan; but it is the father
who takes care of all men always and continuously. For it was not as
mere report that he had heard that Zeus is the father of for he
thought that Zeus was his own father, and he called him so, and to him
he looked when he was doing what he did. Therefore he was enabled to
live happily in all places. And it is never possible for happiness and
desire of what is not present to come together. that which is happy
must have all that desires, must resemble a person who is filled
with food, and must have neither thirst nor hunger. "But Ulysses
felt a desire for his wife and wept as he sat on a rock." Do you
attend to Homer and his stories in everything? Or if Ulysses really
wept, what was he else than an unhappy man? and what good man is
unhappy? In truth, the whole is badly administered, if Zeus does not