Discourses by Epictetus (good books to read for beginners txt) 📕

things unworthy of a free man, send gifts to many, daily presents to some. And what is the thing that is got? Twelve bundles of rods (the consular fasces), to sit three or four times on the tribunal, to exhibit the games in the Circus and to give suppers in small baskets.762 Or, if you do not agree about this, let someone show me what there is besides these things. In order then to secure freedom from passions (ἀπαφείας), tranquillity, to sleep well when you do sleep, to be really awake when you are awake, to fear nothing, to be anxious about nothing, will you spend nothing and give no labor? But if anything belonging to you be lost while you are thus busied, or be wasted badly, or another obtains what you ought to have obtained, will you immediately be vexed at what has happened? Will you not take into the account on the other side what you receive and for what, how much for how much? Do you expect to have for nothing things so great? And how can you? One work (thing) has no community with another. You cannot have both external things after bestowing care on them and your own ruling faculty:763 but if you would have those, give up this. If you do not, you will have neither this nor that, while you are drawn in different ways to both.764 The oil will be spilled, the household vessels will perish: (that may be), but I shall be free from passions (tranquil).⁠—There will be a fire when I am not present, and the books will be destroyed: but I shall treat appearances according to nature.⁠—“Well; but I shall have nothing to eat.” If I am so unlucky, death is a harbour; and death is the harbour for all; this is the place of refuge; and for this reason not one of the things in life is difficult: as soon as you choose, you are out of the house, and are smoked no more.765 Why then are you anxious, why do you lose your sleep, why do you not straightway, after considering wherein your good is and your evil, say: Both of them are in my power? Neither can any man deprive me of the good, nor involve me in the bad against my will. Why do I not throw myself down and snore? for all that I have is safe. As to the things which belong to others, he will look to them who gets them, as they may be given by him who has the power.766 Who am I who wish to have them in this way or in that? is a power of selecting them given to me? has any person made me the dispenser of them? Those things are enough for me over which I have power: I ought to manage them as well as I can: and all the rest, as the master of them (God) may choose.

When a man has these things before his eyes, does he keep awake and turn hither and thither? What would he have, or what does he regret, Patroclus or Antilochus or Menelaus?767 For when did he suppose that any of his friends was immortal, and when had he not before his eyes that on the morrow or the day after he or his friend must die? “Yes,” he says, “but I thought that he would survive me and bring up my son.”⁠—You were a fool for that reason, and you were thinking of what was uncertain. Why then do you not blame yourself, and sit crying like girls?⁠—“But he used to set my food before me.”⁠—Because he was alive, you fool, but now he cannot: but Automedon768 will set it before you, and if Automedon also dies, you will find another. But if the pot in which your meat was cooked should be broken, must you die of hunger because you have not the pot which you are accustomed to? Do you not send and buy a new pot? He says:

No greater ill than this could fall on me.

—⁠Iliad xix 321.

Why is this your ill? Do you then instead of removing it blame your mother (Thetis) for not foretelling it to you that you might continue grieving from that time? What do you think? do you not suppose that Homer wrote this that we may learn that those of noblest birth, the strongest and the richest, the most handsome, when they have not the opinions which they ought to have, are not prevented from being most wretched and unfortunate?

XI About Purity (Cleanliness)

Some persons raise a question whether the social feeling769 is contained in the nature of man; and yet I think that these same persons would have no doubt that love of purity is certainly contained in it, and that if man is distinguished from other animals by anything, he is distinguished by this. When then we see any other animal cleaning itself, we are accustomed to speak of the act with surprise, and to add that the animal is acting like a man: and on the other hand, if a man blames an animal for being dirty, straightway as if we were making an excuse for it, we say that of course the animal is not a human creature. So we suppose that there is something superior in man, and that we first receive it from the Gods. For since the Gods by their nature are pure and free from corruption, so far as men approach them by reason, so far do they cling to purity and to a love (habit) of purity. But since it is impossible that man’s nature (οὐσία) can be altogether pure, being mixed (composed) of such materials, reason is applied, as far as it