If everyone would be like me...

Menander (Μένανδρος Menandros) was alive from 342/41 to around 290 BC. He was a Hellenic dramatist and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy. He wrote 108 comedies and took the prize at the Lenaia festival eight times. His record at the City Dionysia is unknown but may well have been similarly spectacular. One of the most popular writers of antiquity, his work was lost during the Middle Ages and is known in modernity in highly fragmentary form, much of which was discovered in the 20th century. Only one play, Dyskolos, has survived almost entirely.

Dyskolos (Δύσκολος) translates as The Grouch, The Misanthrope, The Curmudgeon, The Bad-tempered Man or Old Cantankerous. It's an ancient Hellenic comedy that won Menander the first-place prize at the Lenaian festival in 317–316 BCE. It was long known only through fragmentary quotations; but a papyrus manuscript of the nearly complete Dyskolos, dating to the 3rd century, was recovered in Egypt in 1952 and forms part of the Bodmer Papyri and Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
In it, Menander has his character say the following that I stumbled upon recently.

“I would like to tell you a few things about me and my character.

If everyone were like me, there wouldn’t be any courts at all,

They wouldn’t take each other to prison.

There would be no war and everyone would be happy because they had enough.

Ah, maybe the way things are is more pleasing. Act as you will.

This old cranky grump will be out of your way.”

[Menander, Dyskolos 742-746]

I love these lines, as they make clear something very prudent: that we all look at life from our own perspective, and with only a small level of ability to incorporate the views of others into it. We are, especially in the eyes of the Gods, very human. The Theoi don't have these limitations, which is why we place divine justice and retribution into their hands and work hard to better ourselves, not others in our lifetimes. To me, this is a message of hope and I wanted to share it with you today.