Otherwise all the heavens and all nature must perish, for it is impossible that they can of themselves acquire any power of producing motion in themselves.
XXVI.

As, therefore, it is plain that what is moved by itself must be eternal, who will deny that this is the general condition and nature of minds?
For as everything is inanimate which is moved by an impulse exterior to itself, so what is animated is moved by an interior impulse of its own; for this is the peculiar nature and power of mind.

And if that alone has the power of self-motion, it can neither have had a beginning, nor can it have an end.
Do you, therefore, exercise this mind of yours in the best pursuits.
And the best pursuits are those which consist in promoting the good of your country.

Such employments will speed the flight of your mind to this its proper abode; and its flight will be still more rapid, if, even while it is enclosed in the body, it will look abroad, and disengage itself as much as possible from its bodily dwelling, by the contemplation of things which are external to itself.
This it should do to the utmost of its power.

For the minds of those who have given themselves up to the pleasures of the body, paying, as it were, a servile obedience to their lustful impulses, have violated the laws of God and man; and therefore, when they are separated from their bodies, flutter continually round the earth on which they lived, and are not allowed to return to this celestial region till they have been purified by the revolution of many ages.
Thus saying, he vanished, and I awoke from my dream.
A FRAGMENT.
And although it is most desirable that fortune should remain forever in the most brilliant possible condition, nevertheless, the equability of life excites less interest than those changeable conditions wherein prosperity suddenly revives out of the most desperate and ruinous circumstances.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES: [1] Archilochus was a native of Paros, and flourished about 714-676 B.C.His poems were chiefly Iambics of bitter satire.