Kitap 1
4
If any of you, withdrawing himself from externals, turns to his own will, to train, and perfect, and render it conformable to nature,—noble, free, unrestrained, unhindered, faithful, humble;—if he has learned, too, that whoever desires or shuns things beyond his own power can neither be faithful nor free, but must necessarily take his chance with them, must necessarily too be subject to others, to such as can procure or prevent what he desires or shuns; if, rising in the morning, he observes and keeps to these rules; bathes regularly, eats frugally, and to every subject of action applies the same fixed principles,—if a racer to racing, if an orator to oratory,—this is he who truly makes progress; this is he who has not labored in vain. But if he is wholly intent on reading books, and has labored that point only, and travelled for that, I bid him go home immediately and do his daily duties; since that which he sought is nothing.
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The only real thing is to study how to rid life of lamentation, and complaint, and Alas! and I am undone, and misfortune, and failure; and to learn what death, what exile, what a prison, what poison is; that he may be able to say in a prison, like Socrates, My dear Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be; and not, Wretched old man, have I kept my gray hairs for this! [Do you ask] who speaks thus? Do you think I quote some mean and despicable person? Is it not Priam who says it? Is it not Oedipus? Nay, how many kings say it? For what else is tragedy but the dramatized sufferings of men, bewildered by an admiration of externals? If one were to be taught by fictions that things beyond our will are nothing to us, I should rejoice in such a fiction, by which I might live prosperous and serene. But what your own aims are, it is your business to consider.
4
Of what service, then, is Chrysippus to us?
