"Discourses" - читать интересную книгу автора (Epictetus)

have died in the hands of those who neither loved her nor cared for
her? "Certainly not." Now this is unfair and unreasonable, not to
allow those who have equal affection with yourself to do what you
think to be proper for yourself to do because you have affection. It
is absurd. Come then, if you were sick, would you wish your
relations to be so affectionate, and all the rest, children and
wife, as to leave you alone and deserted? "By no means." And would you
wish to be so loved by your own that through their excessive affection
you would always be left alone in sickness? or for this reason would
you rather pray, if it were possible, to be loved by your enemies
and deserted by them? But if this is so, it results that your behavior
was not at all an affectionate act.

Well then, was it nothing which moved you and induced you to
desert your child? and how is that possible? But it might be something
of the kind which moved a man at Rome to wrap up his head while a
horse was running which he favoured; and when contrary to
expectation the horse won, he required sponges to recover from his
fainting fit. What then is the thing which moved? The exact discussion
of this does not belong to the present occasion perhaps; but it is
enough to be convinced of this, if what the philosophers say is
true, that we must not look for it anywhere without, but in all
cases it is one and the same thing which is the cause of our doing
or not doing something, of saying or not saying something, of being
elated or depressed, of avoiding anything or pursuing: the very
thing which is now the cause to me and to you, to you of coming to
me and sitting and hearing, and to me of saying what I do say. And
what is this? Is it any other than our will to do so? "No other."
But if we had willed otherwise, what else should we have been doing
than that which we willed to do? This, then, was the cause of
Achilles' lamentation, not the death of Patroclus; for another man
does not behave thus on the death of his companion; but it was because
he chose to do so. And to you this was the very cause of your then
running away, that you chose to do so; and on the other side, if you
should stay with her, the reason will be the same. And now you are
going to Rome because you choose; and if you should change your
mind, you will not go thither. And in a word, neither death nor
exile nor pain nor anything of the kind is the cause of our doing
anything or not doing; but our own opinions and our wills.

Do I convince you of this or not? "You do convince me." Such,
then, as the causes are in each case, such also are the effects. When,
then, we are doing anything not rightly, from this day we shall impute
it to nothing else than to the will from which we have done it: and it
is that which we shall endeavour to take away and to extirpate more
than the tumours and abscesses out of the body. And in like manner
we shall give the same account of the cause of the things which we
do right; and we shall no longer allege as causes of any evil to us,
either slave or neighbour, or wife or children, being persuaded
that, if we do not think things to he what we do think them to be,