Epictetus
Golden Sayings
CIV
You would fain be victor at the Olympic games, you say. Yes,
but weigh the conditions, weigh the consequences; then and then
only, lay to your hand--if it be for your profit. You must live
by rule, submit to diet, abstain from dainty meats, exercise your
body perforce at stated hours, in heat or in cold; drink no cold
water, nor, it may be, wine. In a word, you must surrender
yourself wholly to your trainer, as though to a physician.
Then in the hour of contest, you will have to delve the
ground, it may chance dislocate an arm, sprain an ankle, gulp
down abundance of yellow sand, be scourge with the whip--and with
all this sometimes lose the victory. Count the cost--and then, if
your desire still holds, try the wrestler's life. Else let me
tell you that you will be behaving like a pack of children
playing now at wrestlers, now at gladiators; presently falling to
trumpeting and anon to stage-playing, when the fancy takes them
for what they have seen. And you are even the same: wrestler,
gladiator, philosopher, orator all by turns and none of them with
your whole soul. Like an ape, you mimic what you see, to one
thing constant never; the thing that is familiar charms no more.
This is because you never undertook aught with due consideration,
nor after strictly testing and viewing it from every side; no,
your choice was thoughtless; the glow of your desire had waxed
cold . . . .
Friend, bethink you first what it is that you would do, and then
what your own nature is able to bear. Would you be a wrestler,
consider your shoulders, your thighs, your loins--not all men are
formed to the same end. Think you to be a philosopher while
acting as you do? think you to go on thus eating, thus drinking,
giving way in like manner to wrath and to displeasure? Nay, you
must watch, you must labour; overcome certain desires; quit your
familiar friends, submit to be despised by your slave, to be held
in derision by them that meet you, to take the lower place in all
things, in office, in positions of authority, in courts of law.
Weigh these things fully, and then, if you will, lay to your
hand; if as the price of these things you would gain Freedom,
Tranquillity, and passionless Serenity.
Public domain translation
