“’One self-approving hour whole worlds outweighs
      Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas;
      And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels,
      Than Caesar with a senate at his heels.’

“And as for poverty every one who is not corrupted by the madness of avarice and luxury know that it is no evil.  How little does man need, and how easily can he secure that!  As for me, I consider myself as having lost not wealth, but the trouble of looking after it.  Bodily wants are few—­warmth and food, nothing more.  May the gods and goddesses confound that gluttony which sweeps the sky, and sea and land for birds, and animals, and fish; which eats to vomit and vomits to eat, and hunts over the whole world for that which after all it cannot even digest!  They might satisfy their hunger with little, and they excite it with much.  What harm can poverty inflict on a man who despises such excesses?  Look at the god-like and heroic poverty of our ancestors, and compare the simple glory of a Camillus with the lasting infamy of a luxurious Apicius!  Even exile will yield a sufficiency of necessaries, but not even kingdoms are enough for superfluities.  It is the soul that makes us rich or poor:  and the soul follows us into exile, and finds and enjoys its own blessings even in the most barren solitudes.

“But it does not even need philosophy to enable us to despise poverty.  Look at the poor:  are they not often obviously happier than the rich?  And the times are so changed that what we would now consider the poverty of an exile would then have been regarded as the patrimony of a prince.  Protected by such precedents as those of Homer, and Zeno, and Menenius Agrippa, and Regulus, and Scipio, poverty becomes not only safe but even estimable.

“And if you make the objection that the ills which assail me are not exile only, or poverty only, but disgrace as well, I reply that the soul which is hard enough to resist one wound is invulnerable to all.  If we have utterly conquered the fear of death, nothing else can daunt us.  What is disgrace to one who stands above the opinion of the multitude? what was even a death of disgrace to Socrates, who by entering a prison made it cease to be disgraceful?  Cato was twice defeated in his candidature for the praetorship and consulship:  well, this was the disgrace of those honours, and not of Cato.  No one can be despised by another until he has learned to despise himself.  The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow, and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.  Such men inflict disgrace upon disgrace itself.  Some indeed say that death is preferable to contempt; to whom I reply that he who is great when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no more an object of contempt than when men tread on the ruins of sacred buildings, which men of piety venerate no less than if they stood.