On guarding treasure

Epictetus opens his manual not with consolation but with an inventory. Before offering a single rule for living, he divides the whole of existence into two columns: what answers to our will and what does not. It is a deliberately austere way to begin. He puts property in the second column on purpose, next to the body and reputation, because his students were young Romans on the rise who assumed their estates and standing were extensions of themselves. He wanted the sorting done before misfortune did it for them. A thing you can lose in a night was never yours in the sense that mattered.

This week thieves slipped into a museum in Villena, Spain and, in barely four minutes, made off with 59 pieces of gold, silver, iron and amber dated to the Late Bronze Age, the Villena Treasure being one of the most valuable Bronze Age goldwork collections in Europe. The material value of the stolen pieces could exceed 1.5 million euros. Gold survived three thousand years in the ground and was gone in the time it takes to boil an egg. What outlasts theft is never the metal. It is the knowing that made it worth burying.