150

Chance in marriage.  If I were a god, and a benevolent god, the marriages of mankind would make me more impatient than anything else. The individual can go far, far in his seventy years, indeed in his thirty years if that is all he has  it is amazing, even to gods! But when one then sees how he takes the legacy and inheritance of this struggle and victory, the laurel-wreath of his humanity, and hangs it up at the first decent place where a little woman can get at it and pluck it to pieces: when one sees how well he knows how to gain but how ill to preserve, that he gives no thought to the fact, indeed, that through procreation he could prepare the way for an even more victorious life: then, as aforesaid, one grows impatient and says to oneself: 'nothing can come of mankind in the long run, its individuals are squandered, chance in marriage makes a grand rational progress of mankind impossible  let us cease to be eager spectators and fools of this spectacle without a goal!'  It was in this mood that the gods of Epicurus once withdrew into their divine happiness and silence: they were tired of mankind and its love affairs.