Epictetus opens with a shame check. If someone delivered up your body to a passer-by, you would be angry. Do you feel no shame delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded? You guard the body more carefully than the mind. The reviler gets inside without the fight you would give a stranger touching your skin.
The teaching then widens into a cost ledger. In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it. Begin without that reckoning and you start with spirit, then shamefully desist when consequences arrive. Olympic victory is the test case: rules, diet, stated hours in heat and cold, no cold water, sometimes no wine, give yourself to the trainer as to a physician. Then ditch, dislocated arm, turned ankle, dust, stripes, and maybe loss anyway. Reckon all that; if inclination still holds, set about the combat. Otherwise you play like children who mimic wrestlers, gladiators, trumpets, tragedies after one show. Now philosopher, now orator, nothing in earnest. An ape mimics; halfway zeal never surveys the whole matter.
The closing names the philosopher's price and the fork. Hear a speaker like Euphrates and want philosophy? Consider what your nature can bear. You cannot eat, drink, be angry, and be discontented as now and also be a philosopher. Watch, labor, master appetites, quit acquaintances, be despised and laughed at, come off worse in offices and honors. If you will purchase serenity, freedom, and tranquillity by parting with that, approach. If not, do not come hither. Do not be now philosopher, now publican, now orator, now officer. Be one man. Cultivate reason or externals. Be either a philosopher or one of the mob.
Coming Up in Chapter 29
Duties are measured by relations. Is a man your father? Care for him, submit, bear reproaches patiently. The same rule extends through brother, citizen, and every bond before you answer with resentment or walk away.
