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[p. 11] between these: wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, pain. 1 —'How do you know this?'—Hellanicus says so in his Egyptian Histoy. For what difference does it make whether you say that, or that it was Diogenes in his Ethics or Chrysippus or Cleanthes? Have you then investigated any of these matters and formed an opinion of your own? Let me see how you are accustomed to act in a storm at sea. Do you recall this classification when the sail cracks and you cry aloud? If some idle fellow should stand beside you and say: 'Tell me, for Heaven's sake, what you told me before. It isn't a vice to suffer shipwreck, is it? It doesn't partake of vice, does it?' Would you not hurl a stick of wood at him and cry: 'What have we to do with you, fellow? We perish and you come and crack jokes.' But if Caesar should summon you to answer an accusation. . .”

On hearing these words, that most arrogant of youths was mute, just as if the whole diatribe had been pronounced, not by Epictetus against others, but against himself by Herodes.


III

[3arg] The difficult decision which the Lacedaemonian Chilo made to save a friend; and that one should consider scrupulously and anxiously whether one ought ever to do wrong in the interest of friends, with notes and quotations on that subject from the writings of Theophrastus and Marcus Cicero.


OF Chilo the Lacedaemonian, one of that famous group of sages, 2 it is written in the books of those

1 Some assign this speech— “Of all existing things . . . pain” to Epictetus, quoting the pseudo-Stoic jargon; others to the pseudo-philosopher. The former seems to fit best with what follows.

2 The names of these are variously given. They generally include, in addition to Chilo: Cleobulus of Lindus in Rhodes, Periander of Corinth, Pittacus of Mitylene, Bias of Priene, Thales of Miletus, and Solon of Athens. Plato, Protag. p. 343 A, gives Myson of Chen in place of Periander.

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