in forcing me to “feel, for the moment, precisely what he felt”—how often did I recognise the exact truth of this phrase of Arrian’s!—made me begin to distrust myself. And from distrust of myself sprang distrust of his teaching, too, when I found the feeling fade away (time after time) upon leaving the lecturer’s presence. When I sat down in my rooms to write out my notes, asking myself, “Can I honestly say I hope to be ever able to do this or that?” how often was I obliged to answer, “No!”
I could not trust his judgment about what we should be able to do, because I could not trust his insight into what we were. Two causes seemed to keep him out of sympathy with us. One was his own singular power of bearing physical pain—almost as though he were a stone and not flesh and blood. He thought that we had the same, or ought to have it. Another cause was his absorption in something that was not human, in a conception of God, whom (on some evidence clear to him but not made clear by him to us, or at all events not to me) he knew (not trusted or believed, but knew) to have bestowed on him, Epictetus, the power of being at once—not in the future, but at once, here on earth, at all times, and in all circumstances—perfectly blessed. Having his eyes fixed on this Supreme Giver of Peace, our Master often seemed to me hardly able to bring himself to look down to us, except when he was chiding our weakness.
Passing over several of the lectures that left me in the condition I have endeavoured to describe, I will now come to the one in which Epictetus alluded to Christians. “Jews” he called them. But he defined them in such a way as to convince Arrian that he meant Christians. Even if he did not, the impression produced on me was the same as if he had actually mentioned them by name. The lecture began with the subject of “steadfastness.” “A practical subject, this,” I said to myself, “for one in training to be a second Artemidorus.” But the “steadfastness” was not of the sort demanded in camps and battlefields. The essence of good, said the lecturer, is right choice, and that of evil a wrong choice. External things are not in our power, internal things are: “This Law God has laid down, If thou wilt have good, take it from thyself.” Then followed one of the now familiar dialogues, of which I was beginning to be a little tired, between a tyrant threatening a philosopher, who points out that he cannot possibly be threatened. The tyrant stares and says, “I will put you in chains.” The wise man replies, “It is my hands and feet that you threaten.” “I will cut off your head,” shouts the tyrant. “It is my head that you threaten,” replies the philosopher. After a good deal more of this, a pupil is supposed to ask, “Does not the tyrant threaten you then?” To this the lecturer replies, “Yes, if I fear these things. But if I have a feeling and conviction that these things are nothing to me, then I am not threatened.” Then he appealed to us, “Of whom do I stand in fear? What things must he be master of to make me afraid? Do you say, ‘The master of things that are in your power’? I reply, ‘There is no such master.’ As for things not in my power, what are they to me?”
Epictetus had a sort of rule or canon for us beginners, by which we were to take the measure of the so-called evils of life: “Make a habit of saying at once to every harsh-looking apparition of this sort, ‘You are an apparition and not at all the thing you appear to be. Are you of the number of the things in my power, or are you not? If not, you are nothing to me.’ ” Applying this to a concrete instance, our Master now dramatized a dialogue between himself and Agamemnon, who is supposed to be passing a sleepless night in anxiety for the Greeks, lest the Trojans should destroy them on the morrow.
“Epict. What! Tearing your hair! And you say your heart leaps in terror! And all for what? What is amiss with you? Money-matters?
“Ag. No.
“Epict. Health?
“Ag. No.
“Epict. No indeed! You have gold and silver to spare. What then is amiss with you? That part of you has been neglected and utterly corrupted, wherewith we desire etc. etc.”
Here Epictetus—after some customary technicalities—turned to us like a showman, to explain the royal puppet’s condition: “ ‘How neglected?’ you ask. He does not know the essence of the Good for which he has been created by nature, nor the essence of evil. He cries out, ‘Woe is me, the Greeks are in peril’ because he has not learned to distinguish what is really his own etc. etc.” After this apostrophe, which I have condensed, he resumed the dialogue:
“Ag. They are all dead men. The Trojans will exterminate them.
“Epict. And if the Trojans do not kill them, they are never, never to die, I suppose!!
“Ag. O, yes, they’ll die. But not at one blow, not to a man, like this.
“Epict. What difference does it make? If dying is an evil, then, surely, whether they die all together or one by one, it is equally an evil. And do you really think that dying will be anything more than the separating of the paltry body from the soul?
“Ag. Nothing more.
“Epict. And you, when the Greeks are in the act of perishing, is the door of escape shut for you? Is it not open to you to die?
“Ag. It is.
“Epict. Why then bewail? Bah! You, a king! And with the sceptre of Zeus, too! A king is never unfortunate, any more than God is unfortunate. What then are you? A shepherd in truth! For you weep, like the shepherds—when a wolf carries off one of their sheep. And these Greeks are fine sheep to submit to being ruled over by you. Why did you ever begin this Trojan business? Was your desire imperilled etc. etc.?” [Here I omit more technicalities.]
“Ag. No, but my brother’s darling wife was carried away.
“Epict. And was not that a great blessing, to be deprived of a ‘darling wife’ who was an adulteress?
“Ag. Were we then to submit to be trampled on by the Trojans?
“Epict. Trojans? What are the Trojans? Wise or foolish? If wise, why make war against them? If foolish, why care for them?”
I doubt whether Epictetus quite carried his class with him on this occasion. He certainly did not carry me, though he went on consistently pouring out various statements of his theory. For the first time in my experience of his lectures, I began to feel that his reiterations were really tedious. My thoughts strayed. I found myself questioning whether my model soldier and philosopher, Artemidorus, could possibly accept this teaching. Would Trajan, I asked, have been so sure of beating Decebalus, if he had considered the disgrace of Rome a matter “independent of choice,” and therefore “nothing to him,” “neither good nor evil”?
From this reverie I was roused by a sudden transition—to a picture of a well-trained youth going forth to a conflict worthy of his mettle. And now, I thought, we shall have something more like the ideal of my first lecture, a Hercules or Diogenes, going about to help and heal. But perhaps Epictetus drew a distinction between a Diogenes and mere well-trained youths, mere beginners in philosophy. At all events, what followed was only a kind of catechism to prepare us against adversity, and especially against official oppression. “Whenever,” said he, “you are in the act of going into the judgment hall of one in authority, remember that there is also Another from above, taking note of what is going on, and that you must please Him rather than the authority on earth.” This catechism he threw into the form of a dialogue between the youth and God—whom he called “Another.”
“Another. Exile, prison, bonds, death, and disgrace—what used you to call these things in the Schools?
“Pupil.
