I. 4. 16
(Armstrong Selection and Translation AP)
(The good man’s independence of and care for his body and bodily life.)
If anyone does not set the good man up on high in this world of Noûs, but brings him down to chance events and fears their happening to him, he is not keeping his mind on the good man as we consider he must be, but assuming an ordinary man, a mixture of good and bad, and assigning to him a life which is also a mixture of good and bad and of a kind which cannot easily occur. Even if a person of this sort did exist, he would not be worth calling happy; he would have no greatness in him, either of the dignity of wisdom or the purity of good. The common life of body and soul cannot possibly be the life of well-being. Plato was right in maintaining that the man who intends to be wise and happy must take his good from There, from above, and look to that Good and be made like it and live by it. He must hold on to this only as his goal, and change his other circumstances as he changes his dwelling-place, not because he derives any advantage in the point of well-being from one dwelling-place or another, but considering how the rest of his environment will be affected if he lives here or there. He must give to this bodily life as much as it needs and he can, but he is himself other than it and free to abandon it, an he will abandon it in nature’s good time, and always plans for it with independent authority. So some of his activities will tend towards well-being; others will not be directed to the goal and will really not belong to him but to that which is joined to him, which he will care for and bear with as much as he can, like a musician with his lyre, as long as he can use it; if he cannot use it he will change to another, or give up using the lyre and abandon the activities directed to it. Then he will have something else to do which does not need the lyre, and will let it lie unregarded beside him while he sings without an instrument. Yet the instrument was not given to him at the beginning without good reason. He has used it often up till now.