How to Profit by One's Enemies

​Furthermore, then, adopt the saying of Diogenes, which is highly philosophical and political: “How shall I defend myself against the enemy?” “By yourself becoming noble and good.” They are grieved when they see the enemies’ horses winning fame and their dogs being praised. If they see a well-cultivated field, or a flourishing garden, they groan. What then do you think? If you show yourself as a man just, sound-minded, good, approved in words, pure in deeds, orderly in life, “harvesting a deep furrow through your mind, from which good counsels sprout”? Pindar says: “Defeated men are bound by silence,” not simply nor all, but as many as see themselves defeated by their enemies in diligence, goodness, magnanimity, benevolence, and benefactions; these, as Demosthenes says, “turn back the tongue, block the mouth, choke, and make silent.” “Do you, indeed, differ from the wicked; for it is permitted.” If you want to grieve the one who hates you, do not abuse him as a pathic, nor as soft, nor as intemperate, nor as a buffoon, nor as illiberal, but be a man yourself and practice self-control and speak the truth, and deal kindly and justly with those you meet. And if you are led on to abuse, distance yourself as far as possible from the things for which you abuse him. Enter into your soul, look around at its rotten parts, lest some vice from somewhere whisper to you that saying of the tragic poet: “A physician of others, yourself teeming with sores.” If you call him uneducated, increase the love of learning and love of labor in yourself; if cowardly, arouse rather what is courageous and manly; and if licentious and intemperate, wipe out from your soul any hidden trace of love of pleasure. For nothing is more shameful and more painful than a back-firing slander; but just as reflected light seems to trouble weak eyes more, so do the reproaches that are referred back by the truth to those who reproach. For as the northeast wind draws the clouds, so a bad life draws abuses upon itself.

​Plato, then, as often as he was present with people behaving indecently, used to say to himself: “Am I not, then, perhaps such a one?” But he who has abused the life of another, if he immediately examines his own and readjusts it, directing and turning it to the opposite, will have something useful from abusing, which otherwise seems to be and is useless and empty. Most people, then, laugh if someone who is bald or humpbacked abuses and mocks others for these very things; but it is altogether ridiculous to abuse and mock anything that can be returned in abuse, as Leon of Byzantium, when abused by a humpback for the weakness of his eyes, said: “You reproach a human affliction, while carrying Nemesis on your back.” Therefore, do not abuse an adulterer if you yourself are mad after boys, nor a spendthrift if you yourself are illiberal. “You are of the same blood as a husband-killing woman,” said Alcmaeon to Adrastus. What then did the latter do? Casting back a reproach not foreign but proper to him: “But you indeed are the murderer of the mother who bore you.” Did not Domitius say to Crassus: “Did you not weep for a lamprey that was kept in a pond for you and then died?” And the other: “Did you not bury three wives without shedding a tear?” He who is to abuse others should not be talented, loud-voiced, and aggressive, but free from abuse and blameless. For God seems to command “Know thyself” to no one so much as to the one who is about to censure another, lest, saying what they wish, they hear what they do not wish. For such a person, according to Sophocles, is accustomed “to hear against his will the words he spoke willingly, having poured out his tongue in vain.”