lives
were noble; we deplore; their destiny because their end was sudden and
cruel; and we are fain to admit that misfortune prevails over wisdom
and virtue alike. But, first of all, you yourself are neither just nor
wise if you seek in wisdom and justice aught else but wisdom and
justice alone. And further, what right have we thus to sum up an entire
existence in the one hour of death? Why conclude, from the fact that
Socrates and Antigone met with unhappy ends, that it was their wisdom
or virtue brought unhappiness to them? Does death occupy more space in
life than birth? Yet do you not take the sage's birth into account as
you ponder over his destiny. Happiness or unhappiness arises from all
that we do from the day of our birth to the day of our death; and it is
not in death, but indeed in the days and the years that precede it,
that we can discover a man's true happiness or sorrow--in a word, his
destiny. We seem to imagine that the sage, whose terrible death is
written in history, spent all his life in sad anticipation of the end
his wisdom prepared; whereas in reality, the thought of death troubles
the wise far less than it troubles the wicked. Socrates had far less
cause than Macbeth to dread an unhappy end. And unhappy as his death
may have been, it at least had not darkened his life; he had not spent
all his days in dying preliminary deaths, as did the Thane of Cawdor.
But it is difficult for us not to believe that a wound, that bleeds a
few hours, must crumble away into nothingness all the peace of a
lifetime.

51. I do not pretend that destiny is just, that it rewards the good and
punishes the wicked. What soul that were sure of reward could ever
claim to be good? But we are less just than destiny even, when it is
destiny that we judge. Our eyes see only the sage's misfortune, for
misfortune is known to us all; but we see not his happiness, for to
understand the happiness of the wise and the just whose destinies we
endeavour to gauge, we must needs be possessed of wisdom and justice
that shall be fully equal to theirs. When a man of inferior soul
endeavours to estimate a great sage's happiness, this happiness flows
through his fingers like water; yet is it heavy as gold, and as
brilliant as gold, in the hand of a brother sage. For to each is the
happiness given that he can best understand. The sage's misfortune may
often resemble the one that befalls other men; but his happiness has
nothing in common with t