“After communing with myself in this vein and pulling myself out of bowshot as Zeus did Hector in Homer, From out the slaughter, blood, and battle-din,Iliad 11, 163. I decided to be a stay-at-home in future. Choosing thereby a sort of life which seems to most people womanish and spiritless, I converse with Plato, Philosophy and Truth, and seating myself, as it were, high up in a theatre full of untold thousands, I look down on what takes place, which is of a quality sometimes to afford amusement and laughter, sometimes to prove a man’s true steadfastness.