1. Having touched upon the first part of the discussion, let us now pass to the second, in which by arguments — some of them our own, most of them, however, common to our school — we shall disprove the possibility of insult. It is a slighter offense than injury, something to be complained of rather than avenged, something which even the laws have not deemed worthy of punishment. 2. This feeling is stirred by a sense of humiliation as the spirit shrinks before an uncomplimentary word or act. “So-and-so did not give me an audience today, though he gave it to others”; “he haughtily repulsed or openly laughed at my conversation”; “he did not give me the seat of honor, but placed me at the foot of the table.” These and similar reproaches — what shall I call them but the complainings of a squeamish temper? And it is generally the pampered and prosperous who indulge in them; for if a man is pressed by worse ills, he has not time to notice such things. 3. By reason of too much leisure, natures that are naturally weak and effeminate and, from the dearth of real injury, have grown spoiled, are disturbed by these slights, the greater number of which are due to some fault in the one who so interprets them. Therefore any man who is troubled by an insult shows himself lacking in both insight and belief in himself; for he decides without hesitation that he has been slighted, and the accompanying sting is the inevitable result of a certain abjectness of spirit, a spirit that depreciates itself and bows down to another. But no one can slight the wise man, for he knows his own greatness and assures himself that no one is accorded so much power over him, and all these feelings, which I prefer to call rather annoyances than distresses of the mind, he does not have to overcome — nay, he does not even have them.
4. Quite different are the things that do buffet the wise man, even though they do not overthrow him, such as bodily pain and infirmity, or the loss of friends and children, and the ruin that befalls his country amid the flames of war. I do not deny that the wise man feels these things; for we do not claim for him the hardness of stone or of steel. There is no virtue that fails to realize that it does endure. What, then, is the case? The wise man does receive some wounds, but those that he receives he binds up, arrests, and heals; these lesser things he does not even feel, nor does he employ against them his accustomed virtue of bearing hardship, but he either fails to notice them, or counts them worthy of a smile.