Laws

Ath. He that thus shares these should be honored as highest in merit; and he that would fain share them but cannot, as second in merit; while if a man is jealous and unwilling to share any good things with anyone in a friendly spirit, then the man himself must be blamed, but his possession must not be disesteemed any the more because of its possessor,—rather one should strive to gain it with all one’s might. Let every one of us be ambitious to gain excellence, but without jealousy. For a man of this character enlarges a State, since he strives hard himself and does not thwart the others by calumny; but the jealous man, thinking that calumny of others is the best way to secure his own superiority, makes less effort himself to win true excellence, and disheartens his rivals by getting them unjustly blamed; whereby he causes the whole State to be ill-trained for competing in excellence, and renders it, for his part, less large in fair repute. Every man ought to be at once passionate and gentle in the highest degree. For, on the one hand, it is impossible to escape from other men’s wrongdoings, when they are cruel and hard to remedy, or even wholly irremediable, otherwise than by victorious fighting and self-defence, and by punishing most rigorously; and this no soul can achieve without noble passion. But, on the other hand, when men commit wrongs which are remediable, one should, in the first place, recognize that every wrongdoer is a wrongdoer involuntarily; for no one anywhere would ever voluntarily acquire any of the greatest evils, least of all in his own most precious possessions. And most precious in very truth to every man is, as we have said, the soul. No one, therefore, will voluntarily admit into this most precious thing the greatest evil and live possessing it all his life long. Now while in general the wrong-doer and he that has these evils are to be pitied, it is permissible to show pity to the man that has evils that are remediable, and to abate one’s passion and treat him gently, and not to keep on raging like a scolding wife; but in dealing with the man who is totally and obstinately perverse and wicked one must give free course to wrath. Wherefore we affirm that it behoves the good man to be always at once passionate and gentle. There is an evil, great above all others, which most men have, implanted in their souls, and which each one of them excuses in himself and makes no effort to avoid. It is the evil indicated in the saying that every man is by nature a lover of self, and that it is right that he should be such. But the truth is that the cause of all sins in every case lies in the person’s excessive love of self.