Book 2
29
This then is Aesop's fable, showing that trust in friends and relatives is usually idle and vain. But what different warning do the more highly revered books of the philosophers give us, than that we should rely on ourselves alone, and regard everything else that is outside us and beyond our control as helpful neither to our affairs nor to ourselves? This parable of Aesop has been rendered in tetrameter verse by Quintus Ennius in his Saturae most cleverly and gracefully. vv. 57–58,Vahlen, who reads in promptum in the first verse. The following are the last two lines of that version, and I surely think it is worth while to remember them and take them to heart:
30
An observation on the waves of the sea, which take one form when the wind is from the south, and another when it is from the north.
