Never will the wise man cease to be angry if once he begins. Every place is full of crime and vice; too many crimes are committed to be cured by any possible restraint. Men struggle in a mighty rivalry of wickedness. Every day the desire for wrong-doing is greater, the dread of it less; all regard for what is better and more just is banished, lust hurls itself wherever it likes, and crimes are now no longer covert. They stalk before our very eyes, and wickedness has come to such a public state, has gained such power over the hearts of all, that innocence is not rare — it is non-existent. For is it only the casual man or the few who break the law? On every hand, as if at a given signal, men rise to level all the barriers of right and wrong:
No guest from host is safe, nor daughter’s sire
From daughter’s spouse; e’en brothers’ love is rare.
The husband doth his wife, she him, ensnare:
Ferocious stepdames brew their ghastly banes:
The son too soon his father’s years arraigns.5
And yet how few of all the crimes are these! The poet makes no mention of the battling camps that claim a common blood, of the parents and the children sundered by a soldier’s oath, of the flames a Roman hand applied to Rome, of the hostile bands of horsemen that scour the land to find the hiding-places of citizens proscribed, of springs defiled by poison, of plague the hand of man has made, of the trench flung around beleaguered parents, of crowded prisons, of fires that burn whole cities to the ground, of baleful tyrannies and secret plots for regal power and for subversion of the state, of acts that now are glorified, but still are crimes so long as power endures to crush them, rape and lechery and the lust that spares not even human mouths. Add now to these, public acts of perjury between nations, broken treaties, and all the booty seized when resistance could not save it from the stronger, the double-dealings, the thefts and frauds and debts disowned — for such crimes all three forums6 supply not courts enough! If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the shamefulness of crimes compels, he must not be angry merely, but go mad.