and sickly condition
of the body, whose very utmost good we are warned to dread and prevent?
For an exquisite habit, Hippocrates saith, is slippery and hazardous.
And

He that but now looked jolly, plump, and stout,
Like a star shot by Jove, is now gone out;

as it is in Euripides. And it is a vulgar persuasion, that very handsome
persons, when looked upon, oft suffer damage by envy and an evil eye;
for a body at its utmost vigor will through delicacy very soon admit of
changes.

But now that these men are miserably unprovided for an undisturbed life,
you may discern even from what they themselves advance against others.
For they say that those who commit wickedness and incur the displeasure
of the laws live in constant misery and fear, for, though they may
perhaps attain to privacy, yet it is impossible they should ever be well
assured of that privacy; whence the ever impending fear of the future
will not permit them to have either complacency or assurance in their
present circumstances. But they consider not how they speak all this
against themselves. For a sound and healthy state of body they may
indeed oftentimes possess, but that they should ever be well assured of
its continuance is impossible; and they must of necessity be in constant
disquiet and pain for the body with respect to futurity, never being
able to reach that firm and steadfast assurance which they expect. But
to do no wickedness will contribute nothing to our assurance; for it is
not suffering unjustly but suffering in itself that is dismaying. Nor
can it be a matter of trouble to be engaged in villanies one's self, and
not afflictive to suffer by the villanies of others. Neither can it
be said that the tyranny of Lachares was less, if it was not more,
calamitous to the Athenians, and that of Dionysius to the Syracusans,
than they were to the tyrants themselves; for it was disturbing that
made them be disturbed; and their first oppressing and pestering of
others gave them occasion to expect to suffer ill themselves. Why should
a man recount the outrages of rabbles, the barbarities of thieves,
or the villanies of inheritors, or yet the contagions of airs and the
concursions of seas, by which Epicurus (as himself writeth) was in his
voyage to Lampsacus within very little of drowning? The very composition
of the body--it containing in it the matter of all diseases, and (to use
a pleasantry of the vulgar) cutting thongs for the beast out of