Discourses 2.19 ¶3 — Epictetus

Epictetus, Discourses 2.19 ¶3

“Speak to me about good and evil.” Listen: The wind from Ilium to Ciconian shores Brought me. Of things some are good, some are bad, and others are indifferent. The good then are the virtues and the things which partake of the virtues: the bad are the vices, and the things which partake of them; and the indifferent are the things which lie between the virtues and the vices: wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, pain. “Whence do you know this?” Hellanicus says it in his Egyptian history; for what difference does it make to say this, or to say that Diogenes has it in his Ethic, or Chrysippus or Cleanthes? Have you then examined any of these things and formed an opinion of your own? Show how you are used to behave in a storm on shipboard? Do you remember this division (distinction of things), when the sail rattles and a man, who knows nothing of times and seasons, stands by you when you are screaming and says, “Tell me, I ask you by the Gods, what you were saying just now: Is it a vice to suffer shipwreck: does it participate in vice?” Will you not take up a stick and lay it on his head? “What have we to do with you, man? we are perishing and you come to mock us?” But if Caesar send for you to answer a charge, do you remember the distinction? If when you are going in pale and trembling, a person should come up to you and say, “Why do you tremble, man? what is the matter about which you are engaged? Does Caesar who sits within give virtue and vice to those who go in to him?” You reply: “Why do you also mock me and add to my present sorrows?” “Still tell me, philosopher, tell me why you tremble? Is it not death of which you run the risk, or a prison, or pain of the body, or banishment, or disgrace? What else is there? Is there any vice or anything which partakes of vice? What then did you use to say of these things?” “What have you to do with me, man? my own evils are enough for me.” And you say right. Your own evils are enough for you, your baseness, your cowardice, your boasting which you showed when you sat in the school. Why did you decorate yourself with what belonged to others? Why did you call yourself a Stoic?