BOOK III. I. 41-II. 2
courage to tell you that you are ugly, for it looks to me as though you would rather hear anything than that. But observe what Socrates says to Alcibiades, the most handsome and youthfully beautiful of men: "Try, then, to be beautiful."[1] What does he tell him? "Dress your locks and pluck the hairs out of your legs?" God forbid! No, he says, "Make beautiful your moral purpose, eradicate your worthless opinions." How treat your paltry body, then? As its nature is. This is the concern of Another;[2] leave it to Him.—What then? Does the body have to be left unclean?—God forbid! but the man that you are and were born to be, keep that man clean, a man to be clean as a man, a woman as a woman, a child as a child. 45No, but let's pluck out also the lion's mane, so that he may not fail to be "cleaned up," and the cock's comb, for he too ought to be "cleaned up"![3] Clean? Yes, but clean as a cock, and the other clean as a lion, and the hunting dog clean as a hunting dog!
CHAPTER II
The fields of study in which the man who expects to make progress will have to go into training; and that we neglect what is most important
There are three fields of study[4] in which the man who is going to be good and excellent must first have been trained. The first has to do with desires and aversions, that he may never fail to get what he desires, nor fall into what he avoids; the second
- ↑ An inexact quotation of Plato, Alcib. I. 131 D.
- ↑ Compare I, 25, 13; 30, 1; II. 5, 22.
- ↑ The implication is that the interlocutor's conception of "cleanliness" has to do merely with things external.
- ↑ Compare II. 17, 15 ff. This triple division of philosophy is the one original element in the teaching of Epictetus, and even it is rather a pedagogical device than an innovation in thought. Compare Vol. I. p. xxi, and the literature there cited.
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