THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Globed from the atoms, falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and their suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
Thou too, O Earth thine empires, lands and seas
Least, with thy stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too
Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these.
Nothing abides. Thy seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are shall other seas in turn
4
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.
To astronomical evolution and dissolution add the origin and elimina-
tion of species.
Many monsters too the earth of old tried to produce, things of strange
face and limbs; . . . some without feet, some without hands, some without
mouth, some without . . . eyes. Every other monster ... of this kind
earth would produce, but in vain; for nature set a ban on their increase,
they could not reach the coveted flower of age, nor find food, nor be united
in marriage; . . . and many races of living things must then have died out
and been unable to beget and continue their breed. For in the case of all
things which you see breathing the breath of life, either craft or courage or
speed has from the beginning of its existence protected and preserved each
particular race. . . . Those to whom nature has granted none of these
qualities would lie exposed as a prey and booty to others, until nature
brought their kind to 5
extinction.
Nations, too, like individuals, slowly grow and surely die: "some
nations wax, others wane, and in a brief space the races of living things
are changed, and like runners hand over the lamp of life." In the face of
warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, "to
look on all things with a mind at peace." Here, clearly, the old pagan joy
of life is gone, and an almost exotic spirit touches a broken lyre. History,
which is nothing if not humorous, was never so facetious as when she gave
to this abstemious and epic pessimist the name of Epicurean.
And if this is the spirit of the follower of Epicurus, imagine the ex-
hilarating optimism of explicit Stoics like Aurelius or Epictetus. Nothing
in all literature is so depressing as the "Dissertations" of the slave, unless
it be the "Meditations" of the emperor. "Seek not to have things happen
as you choose them, but rather choose that they should happen as they do;
and you shall live prosperously." 6 No doubt one can in this manner dic-
tate the future, and play royal highness to the universe. Story has it that
Epictetus' master, who treated him with consistent cruelty, one day took
'Paraphrase by Mallock: Lucretius on Life and Death, pp. 15-16.
"V., 830 f., translation by Munro.
^Enchiridion and Dissertations of Epictetus; ed. Rollestonj p. 81.