Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 1 Oldfather 1925.djvu/319

 huge a burden! It is as though a man who was unable to raise ten pounds wanted to lift the stone of Aias. 



who you are. To begin with, a Man; that is, one who has no quality more sovereign than moral choice, but keeps everything else subordinate to it, and this moral choice itself free from slavery and subjection. Consider, therefore, what those things are from which you are separated by virtue of the faculty of reason. You are separated from wild beasts, you are separated from sheep. In addition to this you are a citizen of the world, and a part of it, not one of the parts destined for service, but one of primary importance; for you possess the faculty of understanding the divine administration of the world, and of reasoning upon the consequences thereof. What, then, is the profession of a citizen? To treat nothing as a matter of private profit, not to plan about anything as though he were a detached unit, but to act like the foot or the hand, which, if they had the faculty of reason and understood the constitution of nature, would never exercise choice or desire in any other way but by reference to the whole. Hence the philosophers well say that if the good and excellent man knew what was going to happen, he would help on the processes of disease and death and maiming, because he would realize that this allotment comes from the orderly 275