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BOOK I, CHAPTER XXX 263

This is a subtle consideration of philosophy. It is possible both to love virtue overmuch, and to be excessive in a right action. To this point of view are conformed the divine words: Be no more virtuous than is needful, but be soberly virtuous.! (c) I have seen a man of high rank? injure his reputation for devoutness by exhibiting himself as devout beyond all examples of men of his quality. I love temperate and moderate natures. Lack of moderation, even in what is right, while it does not offend me, amazes me, and it per- plexes me to give a name to it. Neither the mother of Pau- sanias, who gave the first directions and brought the first stone for her son’s death,’ nor the dictator Posthumius, who caused his son to be put to death, whom the ardour of youth had caused to dash successfully upon the enemy a little in advance of his time ‘— neither of the two seems to me so right as strange; and I prefer neither to counsel nor to fol- low a virtue so barbarous and which costs so dear. The archer who overshoots the mark fails equally with him who does not reach it; and my eyes trouble me as much in look- ing up suddenly toward a bright light as in looking down into the darkness. Callicles, in Plato, says § that philosophy car- ried to an extreme is harmful, and counsels us not to enter into it beyond the limits of profitableness; practised in moderation, it is agreeable and advantageous, but it makes a man uncivilised and unsound, scornful of common religions and laws, a foe to social intercourse, a foe to merely human pleasures, incapable of any political function and of giving aid to others or to himself — a man to be cuffed with im- punity. He speaks the truth; for in its excess it enslaves our natural freedom, and turns us aside, by too great refinement,

1 See Epistle to the Romans, XII, 3: Dico enim . . . omnibus qui sunt inter vos, non plus sapere quam oportet sapere, sed sapere ad sobri- etatem. — For I say . .. to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly.

Tel grand. Probably King Henri III.

That is, the first stone for walling up the door of the Temple, in

which he had taken refuge. See Diodorus Siculus, XI, 45; Cornelius Nepos, Pausanias, V.

4 See Diodorus Siculus, XII, 19; Valerius Maximus, II, 7.6. Livy (IV, 29, and VIII, 7) denies this.

§ See the Gorgias.

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