This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 This discussion is with a young philosopher who, intending to return from Nicopolis to Rome, feared the tyranny of Domitian, who was particularly severe towards philosophers. See also the note on i. 24. 3. Schweig. Compare Plin. Epp. i. 12, and the expression of Corellius Rufus about the detestable villain, the emperor Domitian. The title 'of Indifference' means 'of the indifference of things;' of the things which are neither good nor bad.
2 τὸ συνημμένον, p. 93.
3 Sec. ii. 5, 24.
4 Epictetus alludes to the verses from the Hypsipyle of Euripides.
Compare Antoninus (vii. 40): 'Life must be reaped like the ripe ears
of corn: one man is born; another dies.' Cicero (Teuscul. Disp. iii. 25)
has translated six verses from Euripides, and among them are
these two:
turn vita omnibus
Metenda ut fruges; sic jubet necessitas.
5 The story is in Xenophon's Cyropaedia (IV. near the beginning) where Cyrus says that he called Chrysantas by name. Epictetus, as Upton remarks, quotes from memory.
6 So Anaxagoras said that the road to the other world (ad inferos) is the same from all places. (Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 43). What follows is one of the examples of extravagant assertion in Epictetus. A tyrant may kill by a slow death as a fever does. I suppose that Epictetus would have some answer to that. Except to a Stoic the ways to death are not indifferent: some ways of dying are painful, and even he who can endure with fortitude, would prefer an easy death.
7 The text has ἐπὶ Καίσαρος; but ἐπὶ perhaps ought to be ὑπό or ἀπό.
8 See i. 25, note 4.
9 Diogenes Laertius reports in his life of Socrates that he wrote in prison a Paean, and he gives the first line which contains an address to Apollo and Artemis.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.