If we are willing in all matters to play the just judge, let us convince ourselves first of this — that no one of us is free from fault. For most of our indignation arises from our saying, “I am not to blame,” “I have done nothing wrong.” Say, rather, you admit nothing wrong. We chafe against the censure of some reprimand or chastisement although at the very time we are at fault because we are adding to wrong-doing arrogance and obstinacy. What man is there who can claim that in the eyes of every law he is innocent? But assuming that this may be, how limited is the innocence whose standard of virtue is the law! How much more comprehensive is the principle of duty than that of law! How many are the demands laid upon us by the sense of duty, humanity, generosity, justice, integrity — all of which lie outside the statute books! But even under that other exceedingly narrow definition of innocence we cannot vouch for our claim. Some sins we have committed, some we have contemplated, some we have desired, some we have encouraged; in the case of some we are innocent only because we did not succeed. Bearing this in mind, let us be more just to transgressors, more heedful to those who rebuke us; especially let us not be angry with the good (for who will escape if we are to be angry even with the good?), and least of all with the gods, for it is not by their power, but by the terms of our mortality, that we are forced to suffer whatever ill befalls. “But,” you say, “sickness and pain assail us.” At any rate there must be an ending sometime, seeing that we have been given a crumbling tenement!
It will be said that someone spoke ill of you; consider whether you spoke ill of him first, consider how many there are of whom you speak ill. Let us consider, I say, that some are not doing us an injury but repaying one, that others are acting for our good, that some are acting under compulsion, others in ignorance, that even those who are acting intentionally and wittingly do not, while injuring us, aim only at the injury; one slipped into it allured by his wit, another did something, not to obstruct us, but because he could not reach his own goal without pushing us back; often adulation, while it flatters, offends. If anyone will recall how often he himself has fallen under undeserved suspicion, how many of his good services chance has clothed with the appearance of injury, how many persons whom once be hated he learned to love, he will be able to avoid all hasty anger, particularly if as each offense occurs he will first say to himself in silence: “I myself have also been guilty of this.” But where will you find a judge so just? The man who covets everybody’s wife and considers the mere fact that she belongs to another an ample and just excuse for loving her this same man will not have his own wife looked at; the strictest enforcer of loyalty is the traitor, the punisher of falsehood is himself a perjurer, and the trickster lawyer deeply resents an indictment being brought against himself; the man who has no regard for his own chastity will permit no tampering with that of his slaves. The vices of others we keep before our eyes, our own behind our back;28 hence it happens that a father who is even worse than his son rebukes his son’s untimely revels, that a man does not pardon another’s excesses who sets no bound to his own, that the murderer stirs a tyrant’s wrath, and the temple-robber punishes theft. It is not with the sins but with the sinners that most men are angry. We shall become more tolerant from self-inspection if we cause ourselves to consider “Have we ourselves never been guilty of such an act? Have we never made the same mistake? Is it expedient for us to condemn such conduct?”