Chance (5-6)

It is therefore amazing how, if the arts have no need of chance to accomplish their own ends, the greatest and most perfect art of all, the consummation of the high repute and esteem to which man can attain, can count for nothing! But in the tightening and loosening of strings there is involved a certain sagacity, which men call music, and also in the preparation of food, to which we give the name of cookery, and in the cleaning of clothes, which we call fulling; and we teach our children to put on their shoes and clothes, and to take their meat with the right hand and hold their bread in the left, on the assumption that even these things do not come by chance, but require oversight and attention.[*] But can it be that those things which are most important and most essential for happiness do not call for intelligence, nor have any part in the processes of reason and forethought ? But nobody wets clay with water and leaves it, assuming that by chance and accidentally there will be bricks, nor after providing himself with wool and leather does he sit down with a prayer to Chance that they turn into a cloak and shoes for him; and when a man has amassed much gold and silver and a multitude of slaves, and has surrounded himself with spacious suites of rooms, and, in addition, has furnished them with costly couches and tables,[*] does he imagine that these things, without the presence of intelligence in himself, will be happiness and a blissful life, free from grief and secure from change?

Somebody asked Iphicrates [*] the general, as though undertaking to expose him, who he was, since he was neither a man-at-arms, nor archer, nor targeteer; and he answered, I am the man who

commands and makes use of all these.

Intelligence is not gold or silver or repute or wealth or health or strength or beauty. What then is it? It is the something which is able to make good use of all these, and something through whose agency each of these is made pleasant, noteworthy, and profitable. Without it they are unserviceable, fruitless, and harmful, and they burden and disgrace their possessor. It is surely excellent advice that Hesiod’s [*] Prometheus gives to Epimetheus:

Never to welcome Any gifts from Zeus of Olympus, but always return them,

meaning the gifts of chance and external advantages; as if he were advising him not to play the flute if ignorant of music, nor to read if illiterate, nor to ride if unused to horses, thus advising him not to hold public office if a fool, nor to be rich if miserly, nor to marry if ruled by a woman. For not only is it true, as Demosthenes [*] has said, that undeserved success becomes a source of misconception for fools, but undeserved good fortune also becomes a source of misery for the unthinking.