HKB
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Often appears with: will, choice, and freedom · the fear of death · provision for family · providence and divine governance · poverty and wealth · justice as a virtue · inner freedom · fate, destiny, and necessity · death as no tragedy · cato the elder · banishment · aristides
Usually: exhortation (2) · argument (1) · reflection (1) · confronting death (1) · injustice endured (1) · censure (1) · detachment (1)
“What most of all enables a man to serve the public is not wealth, but content and independence;” Plutarch, Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans · insight
“Riches ought to be proportioned to the use we have of them; for he that scrapes together a great deal, making use of but little, is not independent;” Plutarch, Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans · precept
“Make no tragedy show of the thing, but speak of it as it is.” Epictetus (translated by George Long), A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with th · precept
Plutarch argues that a just man should not be judged by lack of wealth, contrasting Aristides’s poverty and failure to provide for his daughters with Cato’s long line of Roman glory.
was not dear, nor household cares to me, Whose increase rears the thriving family; But well-rigged ships were always my delight, And wars, and darts, and arrows of the fight: as if the same characters carelessly neglected their own estates, and lived by injustice and rapine from others. For it is not as the physicians say of oil, that outwardly applied, it is very wholesome, but taken inwardly detrimental, that thu…
He lists examples—poverty, power, banishment, and death—to show that external outcomes are manageable by maintaining right judgments, since nothing external can truly deprive a person of freedom.
value on the materials (things), but values the pleasure that he has with them and the occupation, what tyrant is then formidable to him, or what guards or what swords? What hinders a man, who has clearly separated (comprehended) these things, from living with a light heart and bearing easily the reins, quietly expecting everything which can happen, and enduring that which has already happened? Would you have me to …