1. The same attitude that we have toward young slaves, the wise man has toward all men whose childhood endures even beyond middle age and the period of gray hairs. Or has age brought any profit at all to men of this sort, who have the faults of a childish mind with its defects augmented, who differ from children only in the size and shape of their bodies, but are not less wayward and unsteady, who are undiscriminating in their passion for pleasure, timorous, and peaceable, not from inclination, but from fear? 2. Therefore no one may say that they differ in any way from children. For while children are greedy for knuckle-bones, nuts, and coppers, these are greedy for gold and silver, and cities; while children play among themselves at being magistrates, and in make-believe have their bordered toga, lictors’ rods and tribunal, thine play in earnest at the same things in the Campus Martius and the forum and the senate; while children rear their toy houses on the seashore with heaps of sand, these, as though engaged in a mighty enterprise, are busied in piling up stones and walls and roofs, and convert what was intended as a protection to the body into a menace.11 Therefore children and those who are farther advanced in life are alike deceived, but the latter in different and more serious things. 3. And so the wise man not improperly considers insult from such men as a farce, and sometimes, just as if they were children, he will admonish them and inflict suffering and punishment, not because he has received an injury, but because they have committed one, and in order that they may desist from so doing. For thus also we break in animals by using the lash, and we do not get angry at them when they will not submit to a rider, but we curb them in order that by pain we may overcome their obstinacy. Now, therefore, you will know the answer to the question with which we are confronted: “Why, if the wise man cannot receive either injury or insult, does he punish those who have offered them?” For he is not avenging himself, but correcting them.