Kitap 2
43
The school and sect of Chrysippus Chrysippi porticus. The Porticus was a famous gallery at Athens, where Zeno held his school, which, from the Greek word στόα, Porticus, took the name of Stoic. deem every man mad, whom vicious folly or the ignorance of truth drives blindly forward. This definition takes in whole nations, this even great kings, the wise man [alone] excepted. Now learn, why all those, who have fixed the name of madman upon you, are as senseless as yourself. As in the woods, where a mistake makes people wander about from the proper path; one goes out of the way to the right; another to the left; there is the same blunder on both sides, only the illusion is in different directions: in this manner imagine yourself mad; so that he, who derides you, hangs his tail, Caudam trahat. A metaphor, as the old commentator well observes, taken from a custom among children, who tied a tail behind a person whom they had a mind to laugh at. not one jot wiser than yourself. There is one species of folly, that dreads things not in the least formidable; insomuch that it will complain of fires, and rocks, and rivers opposing it in the open plain; there is another different from this, but not a whit more approaching to wisdom, that runs headlong through the midst of flames and floods. Let the loving mother, the virtuous sister, the father, the wife, together with all the relations [of a man possessed with this latter folly], cry out: "Here is a deep ditch; here is a prodigious rock; take care of yourself:" he would give no more attention, than did the drunken Fufius Fufius was an actor who, playing the character of Ilione, was supposed to be asleep, when the ghost of her son Polydore called to her, "Dear mother, hear me." Fufius, having drunk too much, fell really asleep; and Catienus, who played Polydore, having called to him, without waking him, the whole house, as if each of them was a Catienus, cried out, "Dear mother, hear me," The number of twelve hundred is a pleasant exaggeration. Accius or Pacuvius wrote a tragedy on the story of Ilione, and the whole passage is preserved to us in Cicero: Mater, te adpello, tu quae somno curam suspensam levas, Neque te mei miseret, surge et sepeli natum Priusquam ferae volucresque. some time ago, when he overslept the character of Ilione, twelve hundred Catieni at the same time roaring out, O mother, I call you to my aid. I will demonstrate to you, that the generality of all mankind are mad in the commission of some folly similar to this.
