BOOK II. XVIII. 31-XIX. 2
much as notice that you are doing wrong, but you will even begin to offer arguments in justification of your conduct; and then you will confirm the truth of the saying of Hesiod:
Forever with misfortunes dire must he who loiters cope.[1]
CHAPTER XIX
To those who take up the teachings of the philosophers only to talk about them
The "Master argument"[2] appears to have been propounded on the strength of some such principles as the following. Since there is a general contradiction with one another[3] between these three propositions, to wit: (1) Everything true as an event in the past is necessary, and (2) An impossible does not follow a possible, and (3) What is not true now and never will be, is nevertheless possible. Diodorus, realizing this contradiction, used the plausibility of the first two propositions to establish the principle, Nothing is possible which is neither true now nor ever will be. But one man will maintain, among the possible combinations of two at a time, the following, namely, (3) Something is possible, which is not true now and never will be, and (2) An impossible does not follow a possible; yet he will not grant the third proposition (1), Everything true as an event in the past is necessary, which is what
- ↑ Works and Days, 413.
- ↑ So called because thought to be unanswerable; it involved the questions of "the possible" and "the necessary," in other words, chance and fate, freewill and determination. The matter was first set forth in a note contributed to Upton's edition of Epictetus by James Harris, and republished, with additions, by Schweighäuser. Definitive is the discussion by Eduard Zeller, Sitzungsber. der Berliner Akad. 1882, 151-9. See also his Philosophie der Griechen⁴, II. 1, 269-70. For the context in which these problems appear, see also Von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, I. 109; II. 92 f.
- ↑ That is, any two are supposed to contradict the third.
