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PREFACE. perhaps it is that I am in fault, perhaps it could not have been otherwise.

The style of the Discourses answers very well to the above account of their origin and purpose. They are brightly and vividly written, containing passages of great interest, but are, as a whole, wanting in unity and coherent development. Moreover, there is a great deal of this unsystematic record of Epictetus' daily conversation. The eight books must have made up a volume sufficiently bulky and expensive to prevent the slave-philosopher from being very widely read among the class for whom his teaching was intended. And it is particularly important to notice that it was by no means intended for aristocratic amateurs in Stoicism, but for men subject every day to the stress of life, workers, to whom a philosopher must