4. I remember also to have heard these encouraging words from that noblest of men, Demetrius. “This one complaint,” said he, “I have to make against you, ye immortal gods: it is that ye did not sooner make known to me your will; for of my own accord I would have come to those things to which I am now summoned. Do you wish to take away my children? For you I have brought them up. Do you wish any portion of my body? Take it. No great thing it is that I am offering you; soon I shall resign it entirely to you. Do you wish my life? Why not? I shall not be slow to give back to you what ye have entrusted to my keeping; ye shall find me willing to give up anything ye ask. Still I should rather have proferred it to you than given it up. What need was there to take what you could have had as a gift. Yet not even now do ye need to constrain me, since that is not taken from a man which he does not try to retain. I am in no sense the victim of constraint or violence, nor am I God’s slave, but I am in accord with Him, and this all the more cheerfully because I know that everything takes its course in accordance with an immutable law established from all eternity.”
5. The fates lead us, and our lot is assigned to us from the very hour of our birth. Cause depends upon cause; an unbroken chain of events links together public and private affairs. We ought therefore to bear with fortitude whatever befalls us because everything takes place, not as we think, by chance, but in its due order. A long time in advance, all our pleasures and our pains have been determined, and although in the great diversity of individual lives, one life may seem to stand apart, it all comes to this: transitory beings ourselves we have entered into a transitory inheritance.
6. Why then does this disquiet us? Why indulge in complaints? it is the law of our existence. Let nature use our bodies, which are its own, as it wishes; let us cheerfully and bravely meet whatever comes, bearing in mind that what we lose is not our property. What is the duty of a good man? To resign himself to his destiny. It is a great consolation to share the fate of the universe. Whatever it be that decrees how we are to live, how to die, it binds even the gods by the same inexorable law; an irresistible current bears along terrestrial and celestial things.