enough for me if it shall ever be in my power to pass my life free from hindrance and free from trouble, and to stretch out (present) my neck to all things like a free man, and to look up to heaven as a friend of God and fear nothing that can happen.' Let any of you point out such a man that I may say, 'Come, young man, into the possession of that which is your own, for it is your destiny to adorn philosophy: yours are these possessions, yours these books, yours these discourses.' Then when he shall have laboured sufficiently and exercised himself in this part of the matter (τόπον), let him come to me again and say, 'I desire to be free from passion and free from perturbation; and I wish as a pious man and a philosopher and a diligent person to know what is my duty to the gods, what to my parents, what to my brothers, what to my country, what to strangers.' (I say) 'Come also to the second matter (τόπον): this also is yours.'—'But I have now sufficiently studied the second part (τόπον) also, and I would gladly be secure and unshaken, and not only when I am awake, but also when I am asleep, and when I am filled with wine, and when I am melancholy.' Man, you are a god, you have great designs.
No: but I wish to understand what Chrysippus says in his treatise of the Pseudomenos[1] (the Liar).—Will you not hang yourself, wretch, with such your intention? And what good will it do you? You will read the whole with sorrow, and you will speak to others trembling. Thus you also do. "Do you wish me,[2] brother, to read to you, and you to me"?—You write excellently, my man; and you also excellently in the style of Xenophon, and you
- ↑ The Pseudomenos was a treatise by Chrysippus (Diog. Laert. vii. Chrysippus). "The Pseudomenos was a famous problem among the Stoics, and it is this. When a person says, I lie; doth he lie, or doth he not? If he lies, he speaks truth: if he speaks truth, he lies. The philosophers composed many books on this difficulty. Chrysippus wrote six. Philetas wasted himself in studying to answer it." Mrs. Carter.
- ↑ Epictetus is ridiculing the men who compliment one another on their writings. Upton compares Horace, Epp. ii. 2. 87.
ut alter
Alterius sermone meros audiret honores—
Discedo Alcaeus puncto illius? ille meo quis?
Quis nisi Callimachus?
