by Epictetus
Every error involves a contradiction. For since he who is in error does not wish to err, but to be right, it is clear that he is not doing what he wishes. For what does the thief wish to achieve? His own interest. Therefore, if thievery is against his interest, he is not doing what he wishes. Now every rational soul is by nature offended by contradiction; and so, as long as a man does not understand that he is involved in contradiction, there is nothing to prevent him from doing contradictory things, but when he has come to understand the contradiction, he must of necessity abandon and avoid it, just as a bitter necessity compels a man to renounce the false when he perceives that it is false; but as long as the falsehood does not appear, he assents to it as the truth.
He, then, who can show to each man the contradiction which causes him to err, and can clearly bring home to him how he is not doing what he wishes, and is doing what he does not wish, is strong in argument, and at the same time effective both in encouragement and refutation. For as soon as anyone shows a man this, he will of his own accord abandon what he is doing. But so long as you do not point this out, be not surprised if he persists in his error; for he does it because he has an impression that he is right. That is why Socrates, because he trusted in this faculty, used to say: “I am not in the habit of calling any other witness to what I say, but I am always satisfied with my fellow-disputant, and I call for his vote and summon him as a witness, and he, though but a single person, is sufficient for me in place of all men.” For Socrates knew what moves a rational soul, and that like the beam of a balance it will incline, whether you wish or no. Point out to the rational governing faculty a contradiction and it will desist; but if you do not point it out, blame yourself rather than the man who will not be persuaded.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
Of personal adornment
Once, when he was visited by a young student of rhetoric whose hair was somewhat too elaborately dressed, and whose attire in general was highly embellished, Epictetus said: Tell me if you do not think that some dogs are beautiful, and some horses, and so every other creature. — I do, said the young man. — Is not the same true also of men, some of them are handsome, and some ugly? — Of course. — Do we, then, on the same grounds, pronounce each of these creatures in its own kind beautiful, or do we pronounce each beautiful on special grounds? I shall show you what I mean. Since we see that a dog is born to do one thing, and a horse another, and, if you will, a nightingale for something else, in general it would not be unreasonable for one to declare that each of them was beautiful precisely when it achieved supreme excellence in terms of its own nature; and, since each has a different nature, each one of them, I think, is beautiful in a different fashion. Is that not so? — He agreed. — Does it not follow, then, that precisely what makes a dog beautiful, makes a horse ugly, and precisely what makes a horse beautiful, makes a dog ugly, if, that is, their natures are different? — So it appears. — Yes, for, to my way of thinking, what makes a pancratiast beautiful does not make a wrestler good, and, more than that, makes a runner quite absurd: and the same man who is beautiful for the pentathlon is very ugly for wrestling? — That is so, said he. — What, then, makes a man beautiful other than just that which makes a dog or a horse beautiful in its kind? — Just that, said he. — What is it, then, that makes a dog beautiful? The presence of a dog’s excellence. What makes a horse beautiful? The presence of a horse’s excellence. What, then, makes a man beautiful? Is it not the presence of a man’s excellence? Very well, then, young man, do you too, if you wish to be beautiful, labour to achieve this, the excellence that characterizes a man. — And what is that? — Observe who they are whom you yourself praise, when you praise people dispassionately; is it the just, or the unjust? — The just; — is it the temperate, or the dissolute? — The temperate; — and is it the self-controlled, or the uncontrolled? — The self-controlled. — In making yourself that kind of person, therefore, rest assured that you will be making yourself beautiful; but so long as you neglect all this, you must needs be ugly, no matter if you employ every artifice to make yourself look beautiful.
Beyond that I know not what more I can say to you; for if I say what I have in mind, I shall hurt your feelings, and you will leave, perhaps never to return; but if I do not say it, consider the sort of thing I shall be doing. Here you are coming to me to get some benefit, and I shall be bestowing no benefit at all; and you are coming to me as to a philosopher, and I shall be saying nothing to you as a philosopher. Besides, is it anything but cruel for me to leave you unreformed? If some time in the future you come to your senses, you will have good reason to blame me: “What did Epictetus observe in me,” you will say to yourself, “that, although he saw me in such a condition and coming to him in so disgraceful a state, he should let me be so and say never a word to me? Did he so completely despair of me? Was I not young? Was I not ready to listen to reason? And how many other young fellows make any number of mistakes of the same kind in their youth? I am told that once there was a certain Polemo who from being a very dissolute young man underwent such an astonishing transformation. Well, suppose he did not think that I should be another Polemo; he could at least have set my hair right, he could have stripped me of my ornaments, he could have made me stop plucking my hairs; but although he saw me looking like — what shall I say? — he held his peace.” As for me, I do not say what it is you look like, but you will say it, when you come to yourself, and will realize what it is and the kind of people those are who act this way.
If you bring this charge against me some day, what shall I be able to say in my own defence? Yes; but suppose I speak and he not obey. And did Laius obey Apollo? Did he not go away and get drunk and say good-bye to the oracle? What then? Did that keep Apollo from telling him the truth? Whereas I do not know whether you will obey me or not. Apollo knew perfectly well that Laius would not obey, and yet he spoke. — But why did he speak? — And why is he Apollo? And why does he give out oracles? And why has he placed himself in this position, to be a prophet and a fountain of truth, and for the inhabitants of the civilized world to come to him? And why are the words “Know thyself” carved on the front of his temple, although no one pays attention to them?
Did Socrates succeed in prevailing upon all his visitors to keep watch over their own characters? No, not one in a thousand. Nevertheless, once he had been assigned this post, as he himself says, by the ordinance of the Deity, he never abandoned it. Nay, what does he say even to his judges? “If you acquit me,” he says, “on these conditions, namely, that I no longer engage in my present practices, I will not accept your offer, neither will I give up my practices, but I will go up to young and old, and, in a word, to everyone that I meet, and put to him the same question that I put now, and beyond all others I will especially interrogate you,” he says, “who are my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as you are nearer akin to me.” Are you so inquisitive, O Socrates, and meddlesome? And why do you care what we are about? “Why, what is that you are saying? Vou are my partner and kinsman, and yet you neglect yourself and provide the State with a bad citizen, and your kin with a bad kinsman, and your neighbours with a bad neighbour.” “Well, who are you?” Here it is a bold thing to say, “I am he who must needs take interest in men.” For no ordinary ox dares to withstand the lion himself; but if the bull comes up and withstands him, say to the bull, if you think fit, “But who are you?” and “What do you care?” Man, in every species nature produces some superior individual, among cattle, dogs, bees, horses. Pray do not say to the superior individual, “Well, then, who are you?” Or if you do, it will get a voice from somewhere and reply to you, “I am the same sort of thing as red in a mantle; do not expect me to resemble the rest, and do not blame my nature because it has made me different from the rest.”
What follows? Am I that kind of person? Impossible. Are you, indeed, the kind of person to listen to the truth? I would that you were! But nevertheless, since somehow or other I have been condemned to wear a grey beard and a rou
gh cloak, and you are coming to me as to a philosopher, I shall not treat you cruelly, nor as though I despaired of you, but I shall say: Young man, whom do you wish to make beautiful? First learn who you are, and then, in the light of that knowledge, adorn yourself. You are a human being; that is, a mortal animal gifted with the ability to use impressions rationally. And what is “rationally”? In accordance with nature and perfectly. What element of superiority, then, do you possess? The animal in you? No. Your mortality? No. Your ability to use impressions? No. Your reason is the element of superiority which you possess; adorn and beautify that; but leave your hair to Him who fashioned it as He willed. Come, what other designations apply to you? Are you a man or a woman? — A man. — Very well then, adorn a man, not a woman. Woman is born smooth and dainty by nature, and if she is very hairy she is a prodigy, and is exhibited at Rome among the prodigies. But for a man not to be hairy is the same thing, and if by nature he has no hair he is a prodigy, but if he cuts it out and plucks it out of himself, what shall we make of him? Where shall we exhibit him and what notice shall we post? “I will show you,” we say to the audience, “a man who wishes to be a woman rather than a man.” What a dreadful spectacle! No one but will be amazed at the notice; by Zeus, I fancy that even the men who pluck out their own hairs do what they do without realizing what it means. Man, what reason have you to complain against your nature? Because it brought you into the world as a man? What then? Ought it to have brought all persons into the world as women? And if that had been the case, what good would you be getting of your self-adornment? For whom would you be adorning yourself, it all were women? Your paltry body doesn’t please you, eh? Make a clean sweep of the whole matter; eradicate your — what shall I call it? — the cause of your hairiness; make yourself a woman all over, so as not to deceive us, not half-man and half-woman. Whom do you wish to please? Frail womankind? Please them as a man. “Yes, but they like smooth men.” Oh, go hang! And if they liked sexual perverts, would you have become such a pervert? Is this your business in life, is this what you were born for, that licentious women should take pleasure in you? Shall we make a man like you a citizen of Corinth, and perchance a warden of the city, or superintendent of ephebi, or general, or superintendent of the games? Well, and when you have married are you going to pluck out your hairs? For whom and to what end? And when you have begotten boys, are you going to introduce them into the body of citizens as plucked creatures too? A fine citizen and senator and orator! Is this the kind of young men we ought to pray to have born and brought up for us?
By the gods, young man, may such not be your fate! But once you have heard these words go away and say to yourself, “It was not Epictetus who said these things to me; why, how could they have occurred to him? but it was some kindly god or other speaking through him. For it would not have occurred to Epictetus to say these things, because he is not in the habit of speaking to anyone. Come then, let us obey God, that we rest not under His wrath.” Nay, hut if a raven gives you a sign by his croaking, it is not the raven that gives the sign, but God through the raven; whereas if He gives you a sign through a human voice, will you pretend that it is the man who is saying these things to you, so that you may remain ignorant of the power of the divinity, that He gives signs to some men in this way, and to others in that, but that in the greatest and most sovereign matters He gives His sign through His noblest messenger? What else does the poet mean when he says:
Since ourselves we did warn him,
Sending down Hermes, the messenger god, the slayer of Argus,
Neither to murder the husband himself, nor make love to his consort?
As Hermes descended to tell Aegisthus that, so now the gods tell you the same thing.
Sending down Hermes, the messenger god, the slayer of Argus,
not to distort utterly nor to take useless pains about that which is already right, but to leave the man a man, and the woman a woman, the beautiful person beautiful as a human being, the ugly ugly as a human being. Because you are not flesh, nor hair, but moral purpose; if you get that beautiful, then you will be beautiful. So far I do not have the courage to tell you that you are ugly, for it looks to me as though you would rather hear anything than that. But observe what Socrates says to Alcibiades, the most handsome and youthfully beautiful of men: “Try, then, to be beautiful.” What does he tell him? “Dress your locks and pluck the hairs out of your legs?” God forbid! No, he says, “Make beautiful your moral purpose, eradicate your worthless opinions.” How treat your paltry body, then? As its nature is. This is the concern of Another; leave it to Him. — What then? Does the body have to be left unclean? — God forbid! but the man that you are and were born to be, keep that man clean, a man to be clean as a man, a woman as a woman, a child as a child. No, but let’s pluck out also the lion’s mane, so that he may not iail to be “cleaned up,” and the cock’s comb, for he too ought to be “cleaned up”! Clean? Yes, but clean as a cock, and the other clean as a lion, and the hunting dog clean as a hunting dog!
CHAPTER II
The fields of study in which the man who expects to make progress will have to go into training; and that we neglect what is most important
There are three fields of study in which the man who is going to be good and excellent must first have been trained. The first has to do with desires and aversions, that he may never fail to get what he desires, nor fall into what he avoids; the second with cases of choice and of refusal, and, in general, with duty, that he may act in an orderly fashion, upon good reasons, and not carelessly; the third with the avoidance of error and rashness in judgement, and, in general, about cases of assent. Among these the most important and especially pressing is that which has to do with the stronger emotions; for a strong emotion does not arise except a desire fails to attain its object, or an aversion falls into what it would avoid. This is the field of study which introduces to us confusions, tumults, misfortunes and calamities; and sorrows, lamentations, envies; and makes us envious and jealous — passions which make it impossible for us even to listen to reason. The second field of study deals with duty; for I ought not to be unfeeling like a statue, but should maintain my relations, both natural and acquired, as a religious man, as a son, a brother, a father, a citizen.
The third belongs only to those who are already making progress; it has to do with the element of certainty in the matters which have just been mentioned, so that even in dreams, or drunkenness, or a state of melancholy-madness, a man may not be taken unawares by the appearance of an untested sense-impression. — This, says someone, is beyond us. — But philosophers nowadays pass by the first and second fields of study, and concentrate upon the third, upon arguments which involve equivocal premisses, which derive syllogisms by the process of interrogation, which involve hypothetical premisses, and sophisms like The Liar. — Of course, he says, even when a man is engaged in subjects of this kind he has to preserve his freedom from deception. — But what kind of a man ought to engage in them? — Only the one who is already good and excellent. — Do you, then, fall short in this? Have you already attained perfection in the other subjects? Are you proof against deception in handling small change? If you see a pretty wench, do you resist the sense-impression? If your neighbour receives an inheritance, do you not feel a twinge of envy? And is security of judgement now the only thing in which you fall short? Wretch, even while you are studying these very topics you tremble and are worried for fear someone despises you, and you ask whether anybody is saying anything about you. And if someone should come and say, “A discussion arising as to who was the best of the philosophers, someone who was there said that So-and-so was the only real philosopher,” immediately your poor little one-inch soul shoots up a yard high. But if another party to the discussion says, “Nonsense, it’s a waste of time to listen to So-and-so. Why, what does he know? He has the rudiments, but nothing else,” you are beside yourself, you grow pale, immediately you shout, “I’ll show him who I am, that I am a great philosopher!” Yet we
see what a man is by just such conduct. Why do you wish to show it by anything else? Do you not know that Diogenes showed one of the sophists thus, pointing out his middle finger at him, and then when the man was furious with rage, remarked, “That’s So-and-so; I’ve pointed him out to you.” For a man is not something like a stone or a stick of wood to be pointed out with a finger, but when one shows a man’s judgements, then one shows him as a man.
Let us take a look at your judgements too. Is it not evident that you set no value on your own moral purpose, but look beyond to the things that lie outside the province of the moral purpose, namely, what So-and-so will say, and what impression you will make, whether men will think you a scholar, or that you have read Chrysippus or Antipater? Why, if you have read them and Archedemus too, you have everything! Why are you any longer worried for fear you will not show us who you are? Do you wish me to tell you what kind of a man you have shown us that you are? A person who comes into our presence mean, hypercritical, quick-tempered, cowardly, finding fault with everything, blaming everybody, never quiet, vain-glorious; these are the qualities which you have exhibited to us. Go away now and read Archedemus; then if a mouse falls down and makes a noise, you are dead with fright. For the same kind of death awaits you that carried off — what’s his name? — oh, yes, Crinus. He, too, was proud of himself because he could understand Archedemus. Wretch, are you not willing to let alone those things that do not concern you? They are appropriate for those who can study them without disturbance of spirit, who have the right to say, “I do not yield to anger, or sorrow, or envy; I am not subject to restraint, or to compulsion. What do I yet lack? I enjoy leisure, I have peace of mind. Let us see how we ought to deal with equivocal premisses in arguments; let us see how a person may adopt an hypothesis and yet not be led to an absurd conclusion.” These things belong to men of that type. When men are prospering it is appropriate to light a fire, to take luncheon, and, if you will, even to sing and dance; but when the ship is already sinking you come up to me and start to hoist the topsails!