Discourses, Epictetus [the beginning after the end read novel TXT] 📗

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The word is εὐσταθῶ. The corresponding noun is εὐστάθεια, which is the title of this chapter. ↩

John Upton supposes that Epictetus is alluding to the verse of Aristophanes (Acharnians 531), where it is said of Pericles:

He flashed, he thundered, and confounded Hellas.

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He calls the uninstructed and ignorant by the Greek word “Idiotae,” “idiots,” which we now use in a peculiar sense. An Idiota was a private individual as opposed to one who filled some public office; and thence it had generally the sense of one who was ignorant of any particular art, as, for instance, one who had not studied philosophy. ↩

Compare the Phaedon of Plato (p. 116). The children of Socrates were brought in to see him before he took the poison by which he died; and also the wives of the friends of Socrates who attended him to his death. Socrates had ordered his wife Xanthippe to be led home before he had his last conversation with his friends, and she was taken away lamenting and bewailing. ↩

The reader may understand why Epictetus gave such a lesson as this, if he will remember the tyranny under which men at that time lived. ↩

It was the fashion of hunters to frighten deer by displaying feathers of various colors on ropes or strings and thus frightening them towards the nets. Virgil, Georgics iii 372:

Puniceaeve agitant pavidos formidine pennae.

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Euripides, fragments. ↩

In the Phaedon, chapter 24, or p. 78. ↩

It was the opinion of some philosophers that the soul was a portion of the divinity sent down into human bodies. ↩

This was a doctrine of Heraclitus and of Zeno. Zeno (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives vii 137) speaks of God as “in certain periods or revolutions of time exhausting into himself the universal substance (οὐσία) and again generating it out of himself.” Marcus Aurelius (Meditations xi 1) speaks of the periodical renovation of all things. For man, whose existence is so short, the doctrine of all existing things perishing in the course of time and then being renewed is of no practical value. The present is enough for most men. But for the few who are able to embrace in thought the past, the present, and the future, the contemplation of the perishable nature of all existing things may have a certain value by elevating their minds above the paltry things which others prize above their worth. ↩

See note 70. Johann Schweighäuser says that he does not quite see what is the meaning of “ought to be open”; and he suggests that Epictetus intended to say “we ought to consider that the door is open for all occasions”; but the occasions, he says, ought to be when things are such that a man can in no way bear them or cannot honorably endure them, and such occasions the wise man considers to be the voice of God giving to him the sign to retire. ↩

This is an allusion to one of the Roman modes of manumitting a slave before the praetor. Compare, Persius, Satires V 75:

—Heu steriles veri, qulbus una Quiritem
Vertigo facit;

and again

Verterit hunc dominus, momento turbinis exit
Marcus Dama.

The sum paid on manumission was a tax of five percent, established in 356 BC (Livy, History of Rome vii 16), and paid by the slave. Epictetus here speaks of the tax being paid by the master; but in book III chapter XXVI, he speaks of it as paid by the enfranchised slave. See Dureau de la Malle, Economie Politique des Romains i 290, ii 169. ↩

These are the words of some pupil who is boasting of what he has written. ↩

The word is περιόδια. I am not sure about the exact meaning of περιόδια: see the notes of Hieronymus Wolf and Johann Schweighäuser ↩

No other author speaks of Socrates having written anything. It is therefore very difficult to explain this passage in which Arrian, who took down the words of Epictetus, represents him as saying that Socrates wrote so much. Socrates talked much, and Epictetus may have spoken of talking as if it were writing; for he must have known that Socrates was not a writer. See Johann Schweighäuser’s note. ↩

The word is ὑπὸ ἀταραξίας. Elizabeth Carter thinks that the true reading is ὑπὸ ἀπραξίας, “through idleness” or “having nothing to do”; and she remarks that “freedom from perturbations” is the very thing that Epictetus had been recommending through the whole chapter and is the subject of the next chapter, and therefore cannot be well supposed to be the true reading in a place where it is mentioned with contempt. It is probable that Carter is right. John Upton thinks that Epictetus is alluding to the Sophists, and that we should understand him as speaking ironically: and this may also be right. Johann Schweighäuser attempts to explain the passage by taking “free from perturbations” in the ordinary simple sense; but I doubt if he has succeeded. ↩

ἐμπερπερεύσῃ. Epictetus (book III chapter II at 14) uses the adjective πέρπερος to signify a vain man. Marcus Aurelius (Meditations v. 5) uses the verb περπέρευεσθαι: and Paul (1 Corinthians 13:4), where our version is, “charity (love) vaunteth not itself.” Cicero (Epistulae ad Atticum i 14, 4) uses ἐνεπερπερευσάμην, to express a rhetorical display. ↩

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