"Epictetus - Letter to Menoeceus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Epictetus)

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Copyright 1996, James Fieser ([email protected]). See end note for
details on copyright and editing conventions. Epicurus's "Letter to
Menoeceus" is preserved in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent
Philosophers. The following is from Robert Drew Hicks's 1925
translation. This is a working draft; please report errors.[1 ]

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Greeting.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary
in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too
early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that
the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that
it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for
happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore,
both old and young ought to seek wisdom, the former in order
that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things
because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order
that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old,
because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we
must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness,
since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be
absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.

Those things which without ceasing I have declared to you,
those do, and exercise yourself in those, holding them to be
the elements of right life. First believe that God is a living
being immortal and happy, according to the notion of a god
indicated by the common sense of humankind; and so of him
anything that is at agrees not with about him whatever may
uphold both his happyness and his immortality. For truly there
are gods, and knowledge of them is evident; but they are not
such as the multitude believe, seeing that people do not
steadfastly maintain the notions they form respecting them.
Not the person who denies the gods worshipped by the
multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude
believes about them is truly impious. For the utterances of
the multitude about the gods are not true preconceptions but
false assumptions; hence it is that the greatest evils happen
to the wicked and the greatest blessings happen to the good
from the hand of the gods, seeing that they are always
favorable to their own good qualities and take pleasure in
people like to themselves, but reject as alien whatever is not
of their kind.