The Scythian or Consul (71)

HERMOTIMUS

Look at what you have done to me, Lycinus. You have shown my treasure to be nothing more than ashes, and all these years and heavy toil are lost in all likelihood.

LYCINUS

Well, Hermotimus, you will not be nearly so hurt if you remember that you are not the only one left outside the hoped-for blessings. No, all those who study philosophy are, as it were, wrangling over the shadow of an ass. Who could go through all that process I described? Even you yourself say that it is impossible. And now you seem to me to be acting like a man who wept and blamed fortune because he could not go up to heaven or dive deep into the sea off Sicily and come up at Cyprus, or fly like a bird from Greece to India in one day. His disappointment was due, I fancy, to expectations following a dream on some such subject or an invention of his imagination without prior enquiry whether his wishes could be fulfilled and were humanly possible. You too, my friend, have had many wonderful dreams, and the argument has poked you in the ribs and made you jump up out of your sleep. Then while your eyes are scarcely open you are angry with it, and you cannot easily shake off sleep for delight in what you have seen. Those who fabricate an unreal blessedness for themselves have just the same experience, surrounded by wealth, digging up treasure, kings, heaven-blest for some other reason—all this the

goddess Wishing easily manages, great in her gifts and never saying “no,” whether you want to fly, to be as big as a Colossus, to discover whole mountains of gold; and if a slave interrupts their reverie with a question on day-to-day necessities—with what he is to buy bread, what he is to say to the landlord who has been waiting ever so long with a demand for the rent—they are so angry with him for taking all those good things away with his troublesome questions that they come near to biting off his nose.