Discourses by Epictetus (good books to read for beginners txt) 📕

acuteness: “Mus syllaba est: syllaba autem caseum non rodit: mus ergo caseum non rodit.” One is as good as the other. We know that neither conclusion is true, and we see where the error is. Gilles Ménage says that though the Stoics particularly cultivated logic, some of them despised it, and he mentions Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. John Upton, however, observes that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius did not despise logic (he says nothing about Seneca), but employed it for their own purposes.

It has been observed that if a man is asked whether, if every A is B, every B is also A, he might answer that it is. But if you put the conversion in this material form: “Every goose is an animal,” he immediately perceives that he cannot say, “Every animal is a goose.” What does this show? It shows that the man’s comprehension of the proposition, every A is B, was not true, and that he took it to mean something different from what the person intended who put the question. He understood that A and B were coextensive. Whether we call this reasoning or something else, makes no matter. A man whose understanding is sound cannot in the nature of things reason wrong; but his understanding of the matter on which he reasons may be wrong somewhere, and he may not be able to discover where. A man who has been trained in the logical art may show him that his conclusion is just according to his understanding of the terms and the propositions employed, but yet it is not true. ↩

Rufus is Musonius Rufus (book I chapter I). To kill a father and to burn the Roman Capitol are mentioned as instances of the greatest crimes. Compare Horace, Epode iii; Cicero, De Amicitia, chapter 11; Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, chapter 20. ↩

The faculties, as Hieronymus Wolf says, are the faculties of speaking and arguing, which, as he also says, make men arrogant and careless who have no solid knowledge, according to Bion’s maxim, ἡ γὰρ οἴησις ἐγκοπὴ τῆς προκοπῆς ἐστιν, “arrogance (self-conceit) is a hindrance to improvement.” See viii 8. ↩

Things mean “propositions” and “terms.” See Aristotle, Prior Analytics i 39, δεῖ δὲ καὶ μεταλαμβάνειν, etc. Ἐπιχειρήματα are arguments of any kind with which we attack (ἐπιχειρεῖν) an adversary. ↩

The Enthymeme is defined by Aristotle: ἐνθύμημα μὲν οὖν ἐστι συλλογισμὸς ἐξ εἰκότων ἢ σημείων (Prior Analytics ii chapter 27). He has explained, in the first part of this chapter, what he means by εἰκός and σημεῖον. See also Augustus De Morgan’s Formal Logic, p. 237; and Penny Cyclopaedia: Organon, p. 6, note. ↩

A man, as Hieronymus Wolf explains it, should not make oratory, or the art of speaking, his chief excellence. He should use it to set off something which is superior. ↩

Plato was eloquent, and the adversary asks, if that is a reason for not allowing him to be a philosopher. To which the rejoinder is that Hippocrates was a physician, and eloquent too, but not as a physician. ↩

Epictetus was lame. ↩

In book I chapter XX at 15, Epictetus defines the being (οὐσία) or nature of good to be a proper use of appearances; and he also says, book I chapter XXIX at 1, that the nature of the good is a kind of will (προαίρεσις ποιά), and the nature of evil is a kind of will. But Johann Schweighäuser cannot understand how the “good of man” can be “a certain will with regard to appearances;” and he suggests that Arrian may have written, “a certain will which makes use of appearances.” ↩

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations v 37, has the same: “Socrates cum rogaretur, cujatem se esse diceret, Mundanum, inquit. Totius enim mundi se incolam et civem arbitrabatur.” —⁠John Upton ↩

It is the possession of reason, he says, by which man has communion with God; it is not by any external means, or religious ceremonial. A modern expositor of Epictetus says, “Through reason our souls are as closely connected and mixed up with the deity as though they were part of him” (book I chapter XIV at 6; book II chapter VIII at 11, 17, 33). In the Epistle named from Peter (2 Peter 2:1, 4) it is written: “Whereby are given to us exceeding great and precious promises that by these [see v. 3] ye might be partakers of the divine nature (γένησθε θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως), having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” Elizabeth Carter, Introduction, §31, has some remarks on this Stoic doctrine, which are not a true explanation of the principles of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. ↩

So Jesus said, “Our Father which art in heaven.” Cleanthes, in his hymn to Zeus, writes, ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γένος ἐσμέν. Compare Acts of the Apostles 17:28, where Paul quotes these words. It is not true then that the “conception of a parental deity,” as it has been asserted, was unknown before the teaching of Jesus, and, after the time of Jesus, unknown to those Greeks who were unacquainted with His teaching. ↩

In our present society there are thousands who rise in the morning and know not how they shall find something to eat. Some find their food by fraud and theft, some receive it as a gift from others, and some look out for any work that they can find and get their pittance by honest labor. You