Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/235

 the time being, no one prevents us from struggling again, and we do not have to wait another four-year period for another Olympic festival to come around, but the moment a man has picked himself up, and recovered himself, and exhibits the same eagerness, he is allowed to contest; and if you give in again, you can enter again; and if once you win a victory, you are as though you had never given in at all. Only don't begin cheerfully to do the same thing over again out of sheer habit, and end up as a bad athlete, going the whole circuit of the games, and getting beaten all the time, like quails that have once run away. "I am overcome by the impression of a pretty maid. Well, what of it? Wasn't I overcome just the other day?" "I feel strongly inclined to censure somebody, for didn't I censure somebody just the other day?" You talk thus to us as though you had come off scot-free; just as if a man should say to his physician who was forbidding him to bathe, "Why, but didn't I bathe just the other day?" If, then, the physician is able to say to him, "Very well, after you had bathed, then, how did you feel? Didn't you have a fever? Didn't your head ache?" So, too, when you censured somebody the other day, didn't you act like an ugly-spirited man, like a silly babbler? Didn't you feed this habit by citing the example of your own previous acts? And when you were overcome by the maid, did you escape scot-free? Why, then, do you talk about what you were doing just the other day? In my opinion, you ought to have remembered, as slaves remember their blows, and to have kept away from the same mistakes. But one case is not like the other; for with slaves it is 225