Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/215

 slave and miserable, it does not profit you to be affectionate. And what keeps you from loving a person as one subject to death, as one who may leave you? Did not Socrates love his own children? But in a free spirit, as one who remembers that it was his first duty to be a friend to the gods. That is why he succeeded in everything that becomes a good man, both in making his defence, and in assessing his own penalty, and before that time in his services as senator or soldier. But we abound in all manner of excuses for being ignoble; with some it is a child, with others a mother, and then again it is brothers. But it is not becoming for us to be unhappy on any person's account, but to be happy because of all, and above all others because of God, who has made us for this end. Come, was there anybody that Diogenes did not love, a man who was so gentle and kind-hearted that he gladly took upon himself all those troubles and physical hardships for the sake of the common weal? But what was the manner of his loving? As became a servant of Zeus, caring for men indeed, but at the same time subject unto God. That is why for him alone the whole world, and no special place, was his fatherland; and when he had been taken prisoner he did not hanker for Athens nor his acquaintances and friends there, but he got on good terms with the pirates and tried to reform them. And later, when he was sold into slavery at Corinth he kept on living there just as he had formerly lived at Athens; yes, and if he had gone off to the Perrhaebians he would have acted in quite the same way. That is how 205