49.  Consider the past,—­such great changes of political supremacies; thou mayest foresee also the things which will be.  For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now; accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years.  For what more wilt thou see?

50.  That which has grown from the earth to the earth,
    But that which has sprung from heavenly seed,
    Back to the heavenly realms returns.[A]

This is either a dissolution of the mutual involution of the atoms, or a similar dispersion of the unsentient elements.

51.  With food and drinks and cunning magic arts
    Turning the channel’s course to ’scape from death.[B]
          The breeze which heaven has sent
    We must endure, and toil without complaining.

    [A] From the Chrysippus of Euripides.

    [B] The first two lines are from the Supplices of Euripides, v.
    1110.

52.  Another may be more expert in casting his opponent; but he is not more social, nor more modest, nor better disciplined to meet all that happens, nor more considerate with respect to the faults of his neighbors.

53.  Where any work can be done conformably to the reason which is common to gods and men, there we have nothing to fear; for where we are able to get profit by means of the activity which is successful and proceeds according to our constitution, there no harm is to be suspected.

54.  Everywhere and at all times it is in thy power piously to acquiesce in thy present condition, and to behave, justly to those who are about thee, and to exert thy skill upon thy present thoughts, that nothing shall steal into them without being well examined.

55.  Do not look around thee to discover other men’s ruling principles, but look straight to this, to what nature leads thee, both the universal nature through the things which happen to thee, and thy own nature through the acts which must be done by thee.  But every being ought to do that which is according to its constitution; and all other things have been constituted for the sake of rational beings, just as among irrational things the inferior for the sake of the superior, but the rational for the sake of one another.

The prime principle then in man’s constitution is the social.  And the second is not to yield to the persuasions of the body,—­for it is the peculiar office of the rational and intelligent motion to circumscribe itself, and never to be overpowered either by the motion of the senses or of the appetites, for both are animal:  but the intelligent motion claims superiority, and does not permit itself to be overpowered by the others.  And with good reason, for it is formed by nature to use all of them.  The third thing in the rational constitution is freedom from error and from deception.  Let then the ruling principle holding fast to these things go straight on, and it has what is its own.