BOOK III. XVIII. 5-XIX. 3
another.[1] Again, it is your function to defend yourself firmly, respectfully, without passion. Otherwise, you have destroyed within you the son, the respectful man, the man of honour. What then? Is the judge secure? No; but he too runs just as great a risk. Why, then, are you afraid of what decision he is going to render? What have you to do with another man's evil? Your own evil is to make a bad defence; only guard against that, but just as being condemned or not being condemned is another's function, so it is another's evil. "So-and-so threatens you." Me? No. "He blames you." He himself will attend to how he is performing his own proper function. "He is on the point of condemning you unjustly." Poor devil!
CHAPTER XIX
What is the position of the layman, and what that of the philosopher?
The first difference between a layman and a philosopher: The one says, "Woe is me because of my child, my brother, woe because of my father"; and the other, if he can ever be compelled to say, "Woe is me," adds, after a pause, "because of myself." For nothing outside the sphere of the moral purpose can hamper or injure the moral purpose; it alone can hamper or injure itself. If, then, we too tend in this latter direction so that, whenever we go amiss,
- ↑ On this point see the Introduction, Vol. I, p. xx: "Every man bears the exclusive responsibility himself for his own good or evil, since it is impossible to imagine a moral order in which one person does the wrong and another, the innocent, suffers"; or, as here, where a person might do wrong in the moral sphere, and yet not suffer also in the moral sphere. Compare also the note on I. 28, 10, in Vol. I. This general position, which as an unverifiable postulate underlies the whole Stoic philosophy, and is the very starting-point of their whole system of thinking, is what might be styled the πρῶτον ψεῦδος of Stoicism.
