[3.] Some texts add “such as Good or Evil.”
Chapter VII.
[1.] Apparently a proverb, which maybe paralleled in its present application by Luther’s “Pecca fortiter.”
[2.] A complex or conjunctive proposition is one which contains several assertions so united as to form a single statement which will be false if any one of its parts is false—e.g., “Brutus was the lover and destroyer both of Cæsar and of his country.” The disjunctive is when alternative propositions are made, as “Pleasure is either good or bad, or neither good nor bad.”
[3.] I have followed Lord Shaftesbury’s explanation of this passage, which the other commentators have given up as corrupt. It seems clear that whether the passage can stand exactly in the form in which we have it, or not, Lord Shaftesbury’s rendering represents what Epictetus originally conveyed.
[4.] According to the usual reading, a scornful exclamation—“Thou exhort them!” I have followed the reading recommended by Schw. in his notes, although he does not adopt it in his text.
Chapter VIII.
[1.] The founder of the Cynic school was Antisthenes, who taught in the gymnasium named the Cynosarges, at Athens; whence the name of his school. Zeller takes this striking chapter to exhibit Epictetus’s “philosophisches Ideal,” the Cynic being the “wahrer Philosoph,” or perfect Stoic. (Phil. d. Gr. iii. S. 752.) This view seems to me no more true than that the missionary or monk is to be considered the ideal Christian. Epictetus takes pains to make it clear that the Cynic is a Stoic with a special and separate vocation, which all Stoics are by no means called upon to take up. Like Thoreau, that modern Stoic, when he went to live at Walden, the Cynic tries the extreme of abnegation in order to demonstrate practically that man has resources within himself which make him equal to any fate that circumstances can inflict.
[2.] τριβώνιον, a coarse garment especially affected by the Cynics, as also by the early Christian ascetics.
[3.] “Nor pity.” Upton, in a note on Diss. i. 18. 3. (Schw.), refers to various passages in Epictetus where pity and envy are mentioned together as though they were related emotions, and aptly quotes Virgil (Georg. ii. 499):—