Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 1 Oldfather 1925.djvu/391

 destiny to adorn philosophy, yours are these possessions, yours these books, yours these discourses. Then, when he has worked his way through this first field of study and mastered it like an athlete, let him come to me again and say, "I want, it is true, to be tranquil and free from turmoil, but I want also, as a god-fearing man, a philosopher and a diligent student, to know what is my duty towards the gods, towards parents, towards brothers, towards my country, towards strangers." Advance now to the second field of study; this also is yours. "Yes, but I have already studied this second field. What I wanted was to be secure and unshaken, and that not merely in my waking hours, but also when asleep, and drunk, and melancholy-mad." Man, you are a god, great are the designs you cherish!

No, that is not the way it goes, but someone says, "I wish to know what Chrysippus means in his treatise on The Liar." If that is your design, go hang, you wretch! And what good will knowing that do you? With sorrow you will read the whole treatise, and with trembling you will talk about it to others. This is the way you also, my hearers, behave. You say: "Shall I read aloud to you, brother, and you to me?" "Man, you write wonderfully." And again, "You have a great gift for writing in the style of Xenophon," "You for that of Plato," "You for that of Antisthenes." And then, when you have told dreams to one another, you go back to the same things again; you have 347