[4.] Stoic ἀπάθεια was anything but insensibility. Chrysippus held that many things in the Kosmos were created for their beauty alone.—Zeller, 171.
[5.] There is another short chapter on the arts of ratiocination and expression (I. viii. Schw.), which glances at the subject from a somewhat different point of view from that taken in the chapter which I have given. There Epictetus dwells chiefly on the danger that weak spirits should lose themselves in the fascination of these arts: “For, in general, in every faculty acquired by the uninstructed and feeble there is danger lest they be elated and puffed up through it. For how could one contrive to persuade a young man who excels in such things that he must not be an appendage to them, but make them an appendage to him?”
Chapter XXVI.
[1.] The first of these quotations is from the Stoic Cleanthes, the second from a lost play of Euripides; in the third Epictetus has joined together two sayings of Socrates, one from the Crito and one from the Apologia. Anytus and Meletus were the principal accusers of Socrates in the trial which ended in his sentence to death.
NOTES ON PRINCIPAL PHILOSOPHIC TERMS USED BY EPICTETUS.
[I give under this head only those terms the exact force of which may not be apparent to the reader in a mere translation.]
Αἰδήμων.—Pious, reverent, modest. The substantive is αἰδώς, the German Ehrfurcht (Wilhelm Meister, Wanderjahre, Bk. II. ch. ii.), a virtue in high regard with Epictetus, who generally mentions it in connection with that of “faithfulness,” πίστις. In Wordsworth’s poem, “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” the “natural piety” which he prays may abide with him in his old age seems to be just that moral sensitiveness or αἰδώς which passes into reverence and worship in the presence of certain things, and into shame and dread in that of others.
Ἀπάθεια.—Peace—that is, peace from passion, πάθη. Πάθος was any affection of the mind causing joy or grief. As it appears from Bk. II. iii. I., ἀπάθεια is not, in Epictetus, the state of absolute freedom from these passions, but that of being able to master them so that they shall not overwhelm the inner man.