Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 2 Oldfather 1928.djvu/261

 A cheap little wench has made of me a perfect slave. Of me, though never a one among all my foemen might.

Sad wretch, to be the slave of a wench, and a cheap one at that! Why, then, do you call yourself free any longer? And why do you talk of your campaigns? Then he calls for a sword, and gets angry at the man who refuses out of good-will to give it to him, and sends presents to the girl who hates him, and begs, and weeps, and again, when he has had a little success, he is elated. And yet even then, so long as he had not learned to give up passionate desire or fear, could this man have been in possession of freedom?

Consider now, in the case of the animals, how we employ the concept of freedom. Men shut up tame lions in a cage, and bring them up, and feed them, and some take them around with them. And yet who will call such a lion free? Is it not true that the more softly the lion lives the more slavishly he lives? And what lion, were he to get sense and reason, would care to be one of these lions? Why, yes, and the birds yonder, when they are caught and brought up in cages, what do they suffer in their efforts to escape? And some of them starve to death rather than endure such a life, while even such as live, barely do so, and suffer and pine away, 251 VOL. II.