Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"Plutarch
Philosophy
Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 2 (of 5) : $b Comprising all his works collected under the title of "Morals"
Plutarch
Classical literature; Essays; Ethics; Philosophy
5. Further, envy is always unjust; for none wrong by being happy, and
upon this sole account they are envied. But hatred is often just; for
there are some men so much to be avoided and disliked, that we should
judge those worthy to be hated themselves who do not shun and detest
them. And of this it is no weak evidence, that many will acknowledge
they hate, but none will confess they envy; and hatred of the evil is
registered amongst laudable things.
Therefore, as some were commending Charillus, the nephew of
Lycurgus and king of Sparta, for his universally mild and gentle
disposition,—How, answered his colleague, can Charillus be a virtuous
person, who is pleasing even to the vicious? So the poet too, when he
had variously and with an infinite curiosity described the deformities
of Thersites’s body, easily couched all the baseness of his manners in
a word,—
Most hateful to Achilles and Ulysses too;
for to be an enemy to the good is the greatest extravagance of vice.
Men will deny the envy; and when it is alleged, will feign a thousand
excuses, pretending they were angry, or that they feared or hated the
person, cloaking envy with the name of any passion they can think of,
and concealing it as the most loathsome sickness of the soul.
6. Moreover, these disturbances of the mind, like plants, must be
nourished and augmented by the same roots from which they spring;
therefore hatred increases as the persons hated grow worse, while
envy swells bigger as the envied rise higher in the true braveries of
virtue. Upon this consideration Themistocles, whilst he was yet young,
said that he had done nothing gallant, for he was not yet envied. And
we know that, as the cantharis is most busy with ripe fruits and roses
in their beauty, so envy is most employed about the eminently good and
those who are glorious in their places and esteem.
Again, extreme badness makes hatred more vehement and bitter. The
Athenians therefore had so utter an abhorrence of those who accused
Socrates, that they would neither lend them fire, nor answer them any
question, nor wash with them in the same water, but commanded the
servants to pour it out as polluted; till these sycophants, no longer
able to bear up under the pressure of this hatred, put an end to their
own lives.
Yet envy often gives place to the splendor of a matchless prosperity.
For it is not likely that any envied Alexander or Cyrus, when they
arrived at the height of their conquests and became lords of all. But
as the sun, where he passes highest and sends down his beams most
directly, has none or very little shadow, so they who are exalted to
the meridian of fortune, shining aloof over the head of envy, have
scarce any thing of their brightness eclipsed, while envy retires,
being driven away by the brightness overspreading it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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