Kitap 2
19
Speak to me about good and evil. Listen: The wind from Ilium to Ciconian shores Brought me.speak to me, etc. may be supposed to be said to Epictetus, who has been ridiculing logical subtleties and the grammarians’ learning. When he is told to speak of good and evil, he takes a verse of the Odyssey, the first which occurs to him, and says, Listen. There is nothing to listen to, but it is as good for the hearer as any thing else. Then he utters some philosophical principles, and being asked where he learned them, he says, from Hellanicus, who was an historian, not a philosopher. He is bantering the hearer: it makes no matter from what author I learned them; it is all the same. The real question is, have you examined what Good and Evil are, and have you formed an opinion yourself?—Odyssey, ix. 39.
