Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/197

 deserve, to be more wretched than crows and ravens, which can fly away wherever they please, and change their nests, and cross the seas, without groaning or longing for their first home.—Yes, but they feel that way because they are irrational creatures.—Has, then, reason been given us by the gods for misfortune and misery, so that we may spend our lives in wretchedness and mourning? Or shall all men be immortal, and no one leave home, but shall we stay rooted in the ground like the plants? And if any one of our acquaintances leaves home, shall we sit down and wail, and then again, if he comes back, dance and clap our hands as the children do?

Shall we not wean ourselves at last, and call to mind what we have heard from the philosophers?—if, indeed, we did not listen to them as to enchanters—when they said that this universe is but a single state, and the substance out of which it has been fashioned is single, and it needs must be that there is a certain periodic change and a giving place of one thing to another, and that some things must be dissolved and others come into being, some things to remain in the same place and others to be moved. Further, that all things are full of friends, first gods, and then also men, who by nature have been made of one household with one another; and that some men must remain with each other, while others must depart, and that though we must rejoice in those who dwell with us, yet we must not grieve at those who depart. And man, in addition to being by nature high-minded and capable of despising all the things that are outside the sphere of his moral purpose, possesses also this further quality, that, namely, of not being rooted nor growing in the  187 VOL. II.