Kitap 2
23
While you have such a business before you, will you be so pleased with a pretty form of expression, or a few theorems, as to choose to stay and live with them, forgetful of your home, and say, They are fine things! Why, who says they are not fine things? But only as a means; as an inn. For what hinders one speaking like Demosthenes from being miserable? What hinders a logician equal to Chrysippus from being wretched, sorrowful, envious, vexed, unhappy? Nothing. You see, then, that these are merely unimportant inns, and what concerns you is quite another thing. When I talk thus to some, they suppose that I am setting aside all care about eloquence and about theorems; but I do not object to that, only the dwelling on these things incessantly, and placing our hopes there. If any one, by maintaining this, hurts his hearers, place me amongst those hurtful people; for I cannot, when I see one thing to be the principal and most excellent, call another so to please you.
Concerning a person whom he treated with disregard.
24
When a certain person said to him, I have often come to you with a desire of hearing you, and you have never given me any answer; but now, if possible, I entreat you to say something to me,—Do you think, replied Epictetus, that as in other things, so in speaking, there is an art by which he who understands it speaks skilfully, and he who does not unskilfully?
24
I do think so.
24
He, then, who by speaking both benefits himself, and is able to benefit others, must speak skilfully; but he who injures and is injured, must be unskilful in this art. For you may find some speakers injured, and others benefited. And are all hearers benefited by what they hear? Or will you find some benefited, and some hurt?
24
Both.
24
Then those who hear skilfully are benefited, and those who hear unskilfully, hurt.
24
Granted.
24
Is there any art of hearing, then, as well as of speaking?
24
It seems so.
24
If you please, consider it thus. To whom think you that the practice of music belongs?
24
To a musician.
