§ i. I propose to discuss what is called and…

mourning with him, and chiming in with him, and rioting with him,—in a word, falling in with the vein and emotions and characters of those that play on them. And they say that Zeno on one occasion, going into the theatre when Amœbeus⁵ was playing on the harp, said to the pupils, "Let us go and learn what music can be produced by guts and nerves and wood and bones, when they preserve proportion and time and order." But passing these things over, I would gladly learn from them, if, when they see dogs and horses and birds domesticated, and by habit and training uttering sounds that can be understood, and making obedient movements and gestures, and acting quietly and usefully to us, and when they notice that Achilles in Homer cheers on horses as well as men to the fight,⁶ they still wonder and doubt, whether the passionate and emotional and painful and pleasurable elements in us are by nature obedient to the voice of reason, and influenced and affected by it, seeing that those elements are not apart from us or detached from us, or formed from outside, or hammered into us by force, but are innate in us, and ever associate with us, and are nourished within us, and abound in us through habit. Accordingly moral character is well called by the Greeks ἧθος, for it is, to speak generally, a quality of the unreasoning element in man, and is called ἧθος because the unreasoning element moulded by reason receives this quality and difference by habit, which is called ἔθος.⁷ Not that reason wishes to expel passion altogether (that is neither possible, nor advisable), but only to keep it within bounds and order, and to engender the moral virtues, which are not apathetic, but hold the due proportion and mean in regard to passion. And this she does by reducing the power of passion to a good habit. For there are said to be three things existing in the soul, power, passion, and habit. Power is the principle or matter of passion, as power to be angry, ashamed, or