at the same time continue to eat and drink and indulge your desires and be fastidious, just as before? Nay verily, for you must watch and labour, and withdraw yourself from your household and be despised by any serving-boy and be ridiculed by your neighbours, and you must take an inferior position in all things, in reputation, in authority, in courts of justice, in dealings of every kind.
η. Consider these things; whether you are willing at such a price to gain serenity, freedom, and immunity from vexation. And if not, renounce that aim at once, and do not like a child at play be now for a little a philosopher, then a tax-gatherer, then a public speaker, then a procurator of the Empire. For these things do not agree among themselves, and, good or bad, it behoves you to be one man. You must either cultivate external things or your own essential part, you must show your skill in the management of either your outward or your inward life—in short, you must take up the position either of a sensualist[1] or of a sage.
- ↑ Wherever Epictetus uses the word ἱδιώτης, I have rendered it by sensualist. Ἰδιώτης originally meant simply a private citizen, one who took no part in the government of the State. Epictetus
