But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every [Sidenote: C] loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend. Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed [Sidenote: D] object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning. How are you going to address the superstitious in like case, wherein to bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever [Sidenote: E] they choose to bring! VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, [Sidenote: F] thy sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various superstitions. Midas[279] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias[280], the Athenian [Sidenote: 169] general, to find the same release from superstition as Midas or Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and die ingloriously.