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.
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