form purpose after purpose, and fix again and again the days after which you will begin to attend to yourself, you will not see that you are making no advance, but will be now and always a sensualist, living and dying.
β. Therefore hold yourself worthy forthwith to live as a man of full age, and with your foot on the path; and let whatever appears to you as the best be to you as an inviolable law. And when anything is presented to you which involves toil, or pleasure, or reputation or the loss of it, remember that now is the conflict, here are the Olympic games, and you can put them off no longer; and that in a single day and in a single trial ground is to be lost or gained.
γ. It was thus that Socrates made himself what he was, on every occasion bringing forward his true self,[1] and never having regard to anything else than Reason. And you, though you are not
- ↑ This translation (for the reading ἐπὶ πάντων προσάγων ἑαυτόν) is unprecedented, and will, no doubt, be criticised. Yet it seems to me that this pregnant use of the pronoun is often distinctly visible in Epictetus, and that this translation should not seem farfetched to anyone who has found reason in the view of his teaching which I have tried to suggest in the Preface,
