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?[1] 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 Automedon[2] 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
- ↑ Epictetus refers to the passage in the Iliad xxiv. 5, where Achilles is lamenting the death of Patroclus and cannot sleep.
- ↑ "This is a wretched idea of friendship; but a necessary consequence of the Stoic system. What a fine contrast to this gloomy consolation are the noble sentiments of an Apostle? Value your deceased friend, says Epictetus, as a broken pipkin; forget him, as a thing worthless, lost and destroyed. St. Paul, on the contrary, comforts the mourning survivors; bidding them not sorrow, as those who have no hope: but remember that the death of good persons is only a sleep; from which they will soon arise to a happy immortality." Mrs. Carter.
Epictetus does not say, 'value your deceased friend as a broken pipkin.' Achilles laments that he has lost the services of his friend at table, a vulgar kind of complaint: he is thinking of his own loss, instead of his friend. The answer is such a loss as he laments is easily repaired: the loss of such a friend is as easily repaired as the loss of a cooking vessel. Mrs. Carter in her zeal to contrast the teaching of the Apostle with that of Epictetus seems to forget for the time that Epictetus, so far as we know, did not accept or did not teach the doctrine of a future life. As to what he thought of friendship, if it was a real friendship, such as we can conceive, I am sure that he did not think of it, as Mrs. Carter says that he did; for true friendship implies many of the virtues which Epictetus taught and practised. He has a chapter on Friendship, ii. 22, which I suppose that Mrs. Carter did not think of, when she wrote this note.
