Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/73

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BOOK III. VIII. 5-IX. 1

each man makes on his own responsibility. "But," you say, "Zeus does not do right in all this." What makes you think so? Because He has made you capable of patient endurance, and high-minded, because He has taken from these things the quality of being evils, because you are permitted to suffer these things and still to be happy, because He has opened for you the door,[1] whenever they are not to your good?[2] Man, go out, and do not complain.

Hear how the Romans feel about philosophers, if you care to know. Italicus, who has a very great reputation among them as a philosopher, once, when I was present, got angry at his friends, as though he were suffering something intolerable, and said, "I cannot bear it: you are the death of me! you will make me just like him," and pointed at me![3]


CHAPTER IX

To a certain rhetorician who was going to Rome for a lawsuit

There came in to visit Epictetus one day a man who was on his way to Rome, where he was engaged in a lawsuit involving an honour to be bestowed on him.[4]

  1. Compare I. 9, 20; III. 13, 14. and Vol. I. p. xxv f.
  2. For the particular expression here, see II. 6, 22.
  3. The sense of this curious and apparently quite detached anecdote, which has puzzled some scholars, seems to be that the otherwise quite unknown Italicus, who was clearly not a philosopher propria persona, but merely enjoyed some local reputation among people at Rome for dabbling in philosophy, was being urged by his friends to submit to some hardship in a truly philosophic manner, and resented the implication that he actually was a philosopher like the mean and humble slave or freedman Epictetus. Roman popular feeling about philosophy is probably not greatly overdrawn in the well-known advice of Eunius (frag. sc. 376 Vahlen) to taste of philosophy, but not to gorge oneself upon it; and the jest of Plautus (Captivi, 284), apropos of a reckless romancer, that "he is not simply lying now, he is philosophizing."
  4. The situation seems a bit strange to us, but the famous lawsuit between Aeschines and Ctesiphon, in which Demosthenes delivered the oration De Corona, technically, indeed, in behalf of Ctesiphon, but actually in his own cause, offers a close parallel.
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