Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/491

Rh E P H E P I 471 translated out of the original Syriac, 1847; Angelo Faggi and Fausto Lasinio, Inni funebri di S. Efrem Siro, Florence, 1851 ; Burgess, Select Metrical Hymns and Homilies of Ephracm Syrus, 1853, and The. Repentance of Nineveh, 1853; Aisle ben, Das Lebcn dcs H. Ephram, Berlin, 1853; Rodiger, &quot;Ephram Syrus,&quot; in Herzog s Real- Encyclop. fur Protest. Tlwol., 1855; R. P. Smith, Catalogue of the Syrian Manuscripts in the Bodleian, 1864; Overbeck, Ephraemi Syri aliorumque opera selecta (Syrian text), Oxford, 1865 ; Bickell, S. Ephraemi Syri Carmina Nisibena (Latin transl.), Leipsic, 1866; Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, part ii. p. 406-416; Benin, Tradition of the Syriac Church, 1871. EPHRAIM, the younger son of Joseph, who received the precedence over the elder (Manasseh) by the blessing of Jacob, on the occasion when he adopted both into the number of his sons in place of Joseph their father. Both, accordingly, were the founders of tribes which bore their names, the intention of Jacob being that Joseph should by this means have double the honour accorded to his brethren. At the exodus from Egypt, the tribe of Ephraim, of which he was the founder, numbered 40,500, while that of Manasseh numbered only 32,200 (N&quot;umb. i. 32-35), but in their wanderings the number of the former was diminished by 8000. Their possessions in the very centre of Palestine included most of what was afterwards called Samaria. The proud and ambitious character of the tribe is indicated in their demands as narrated in Josh. xvii. 14, Judges viii. 1-3, xii. 1, and they were long jealous of the regal honours of Judah ; but after the dismemberment of the tribes, their rivalry was merged in that subsisting between the two kingdoms. EPICHARMUS (540-450 B.C.), a celebrated poet of the old comedy, was born in the island of Cos, where his father Elothales was a physician, of the race of the Ascle- piads. According to Diogenes Laertius, he was brought to Megara, in Sicily, when only three months old ; but it is more probable that he migrated thither, as Suidas asserts, of his own accord at a later period. After the destruction of Megara he removed to Syracuse, where at the court of Hiero he spent the remainder of his days, dying, it is said, at ninety years of age. From his protracted residence in the island he is generally known in antiquity as a Sicilian (Hor. Ej&amp;gt;. ii. 1. 58). Epicharmus studied philosophy, it is said, under Pythagoras, for it is now generally admitted that Epicharmus the Pythagorean, and Epicharmus the father of the old comedy are identical. It was only after his residence in Megara, a colony from the Isthmian Megara, which disputed with Athens the invention of comedy, that he turned his attention to that branch of dramatic literature. His principal merit in this department seems to have consisted in the exclusion of that vulgar buffoonery which disgraced all previous comedies, and in the introduc tion of a regular plot in which the comns, or band of revellers, sustained the dialogue, with which maxims drawn from the Pythagorean ethics were liberally inter spersed. &quot; The subjects of the plays of Epicharmus,&quot; says Miiller (Dorians, iv. 7, 2) &quot;were mostly mythological, i.e., parodies or travesties of mythology, nearly in the style of the satyrical drama of Athens. Thus in the comedy of Busiris Hercules was represented in the most ludicrous light as a voracious glutton ; and he was again exhibited in the same character (with a mixture perhaps of satirical remarks on the luxury of the times) in The Marriage of Hebe, in which an astonishing number of dishes was mentioned. He also, like Aristophanes, handled political subjects, and invented comic characters like the later Athenian poets. The piece called The Plundcrings, which described the devastation of Sicily in his time, had a political meaning ; and this was perhaps also the case with The Islands ; at least it was mentioned in this play that Hieron had prevented Anaxilas from destroying Locri.&quot; Of his comedies, which are generally written in trochaic tetrameters, thirty-five titles and a few fragments are still extant. The excellence of his dramatic style is proved by the high estimation in which he is held by Plato (Tkeaet. p. 152, e), EPICTETUS (the word means &quot;acquired, 1 but no other name has been handed down for him) was, according to the received account, born at Hierapolis, a town in the south west quarter of Phrygia. His life extends between a date slightly anterior and a date slightly posterior to the second half of the 1st century A.r&amp;gt;. While young, he was one of the slaves of Epaphroditus, a freedinan and courtier of the emperor Nero ; and while in that position, he managed to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus, an important and esteemed teacher of the Stoical system during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian. Epictetus was lame whether from birth or in consequence of an accident or of his owner s cruelty is unknown ; he was also of weakly health. That he was a free man in the later part of his life is evident, but the means by which his liberty was obtained are unrecorded. In the days of Domitian he was one of the recognised votaries and perhaps professors of philo sophy ; and in the year 90, when that emperor, irritated by the support and encouragement which the opposition to his tyranny found amongst the adherents of Stoicism, issued an edict to all philosophers to quit Rome, Epictetus was amongst those who withdrew into the provinces. For the rest of his life he settled at Nicopolis, a town of southern Epirus, not far from the scene of the battle of Actium. There for several years he lived, and taught by close earnest personal address and conversation. Accord ing to some authorities he lived into the time of Hadrian ; he himself mentions the coinage of the emperor Trajan. His contemporaries and the next generation held his charac ter and teaching in high honour. According to Lucian ; the earthenware lamp which had belonged to the sage was bought by an enthusiastic relic-hunter for 3000 drachmas. He was never married. He wrote nothing ; but much of his teaching was taken down with affectionate care by his pupil Flavius Arrianus, the historian of Alexander the Great ; and is preserved in two treatises, of the larger of which, called the Discourses of Epictetus ( ETJ-IKT^TOU Aicnyu- /?ai), four books are still extant. The other treatise is a shorter and has been a more popular work, the Manual or Ey^etpi Siov. It contains in an aphoristic form the main doctrines of the longer work. There exists a tolerably extensive commentary on the Manual by Simplicius. The philosophy of Epictetus is stamped with an intensely practical character, and exhibits a high idealistic type of morality. He is an earnest, sometimes stern and some times pathetic preacher of righteousness, who despises the mere graces of a literary and rhetorical lecturer and the subtleties of an abstruse logic. He has no patience with mere antiquarian study of the Stoical writers. The problem of how life is to be carried out well is the one question which throws all other inquiries into the shade. &quot; When you enter the school of the philosopher, ye enter the room of a surgeon ; and as ye are not whole when ye come in, ye cannot leave it with a smile, but with pain.&quot; True education lies in learning to wish things to be as they actually are : it lies in learning to distinguish what is our own from what does not belong to us. But there is only one thing which is fully our own, that is, our will or purpose. God, acting as a good king and a true father, has given us a will which cannot be restrained, compelled, or thwarted ; he has r put it wholly in our own power, so that even he himself has no power to check or control it. Nothing external, neither death nor exile nor pain nor any such thing, is ever the cause of our acting or not acting ; the sole true cause lies in our opinions and judgments. Nothing can ever force us to act against our will ; if we are conquered, it is because we have willed to be conquered. And thus, although we are not responsible for the ideas that present themselves to our consciousness, we are abso- , lutely and without any modification responsible for the