“And will I know the evils I shall do, But wrath is lord of all my purposes?” _Medea_, 1079. For, did she hold this very thing, to gratify her wrath and avenge herself on her husband more profitable than to spare her children? Even so: but she was deceived. Show her clearly that she was deceived, and she will not do it; but so long as you show it not, what else hath she to follow than the thing as it appears to her? Nothing. Wherefore, then, have you indignation with her, that the unhappy wretch has gone astray concerning the greatest things, and has become a viper instead of a human being? If anything, will you not rather pity, as we pity the blind and the lame, those that are blinded and lamed in the chiefest of their faculties? 4. ——“So that all these great and dreadful deeds have this same origin in the appearance of the thing?” The same, and no other. The _Iliad_ is nought but appearance, and the use of appearances. The thing that appeared to Paris was the carrying off of the wife of Menelaus; the thing that appeared to Helen was to accompany him. Had it, then, appeared to Menelaus to be sensible that it was a gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only had there been no _Iliad_, but no _Odyssey_ neither. ——“On such a little thing do such great ones hang?” But what talk is this of great things? Wars and seditions and destructions of many men, and overthrow of cities? And what is there of great in these? Nothing. For what is there of greatness in the deaths of many oxen and sheep, and the burning or overthrow of many nests of swallows or storks? ——“But are these things like unto those?” They are most like. The bodies of men are destroyed, and the bodies of oxen and of sheep. The dwellings of men are burned, and the nests of storks. What is there great, what is there awful in this? Or show me wherein differeth the dwelling of a man, as a dwelling, from the nest of a stork, save that the one buildeth his little houses of planks and tiles and bricks, and the other of sticks and mud? ——“Are a stork and a man, then, alike?” What say you? In body they are most like. ——“Doth a man, then, differ in no respect from a stork?” God forbid; but in these matters there is no difference. ——“Wherein, then, doth he differ?”