previous next

Weapons ready for difficult occasions.

When you are going before any of the great, remember that there is another who sees from above what passes, and whom you ought to please, rather than man. He therefore asks you, -

" In the schools, what did you use to call exile, and prison, and chains, and death, and calumny? "

I? Indifferent things.

"What, then, do you call them now? Are they at all changed?"

No.

"Are you changed, then?" No.

" Tell me, then, what things are indifferent." Things not dependent on our own will. "What is the inference?"

Things not dependent on my own will are nothing to me.

" Tell me, likewise, what appeared to be the good of man."

Rectitude of will, and to understand the appearances of things.

"What his end?"

To follow Thee. [p. 1107] "Do you say the same things now, too? " Yes. I do say the same things, even now.

Well, go in then boldly, and mindful of these things; and you will show the difference between the instructed and the ignorant. I protest, I think you will then have such thoughts as these: "Why do we provide so many and great resources for nothing? Is the power, the antechamber, the attendants, the guards, no more than this? Is it for these that I have listened to so many dissertations? These are nothing; and yet I had qualified myself as for some great encounter." [p. 1108]


The Works of Epictetus: His Discourses, in Four Books, the Enchiridion, and Fragments. Epictetus. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. translator. New York. Thomas Nelson and Sons. 1890.

This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1916)
load focus English (George Long, 1890)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: