"Wealth is not among the number of good things; extravagance is among the number of evils, sober-mindedness of good things. Now sober-mindedness invites us to frugality and the acquisition of real advantages; but wealth to extravagance, and it drags us away from sober-mindedness. It is a hard matter, therefore, being rich to be sober-minded, or being sober-minded to be rich."
The last sentence will forcibly remind the reader of our Lord's own words, "How hardly shall they that have riches (or as the parallel passage less startlingly expresses it, 'Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to') enter into the kingdom of God."
But this is a favourite subject with the ancient philosopher, and Epictetus continues:--
"Had you been born in Persia, you would not have been eager to live in Greece, but to stay where you were, and be happy; and, being born in poverty, why are you eager to be rich, and not rather to abide in poverty, and so be happy?"
"As it is better to be in good health, being hard-pressed on a little truckle-bed, than to roll, and to be ill in some broad couch; so too it is better in a small competence to enjoy the calm of moderate desires, than in the midst of superfluities to be discontented."
This, too, is a thought which many have expressed. "Gentle sleep," says Horace, "despises not the humble cottages of rustics, nor the shaded banks, nor valleys whose foliage waves with the western wind;" and every reader will recall the magnificent words of our own great Shakespeare--
"Why rather, Sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull'd with sounds of sweetest melody?"
To the subject of freedom, and to the power which man possesses to make himself entirely independent of all surrounding circumstances, Epictetus incessantly recurs. With the possibility of banishment to an ergastulum perpetually before his eyes, he defines a prison as being any situation in which a man is placed against his will; to Socrates for instance the prison was no prison, for he was there willingly, and no man need be in prison, against his will if he has learnt, as one of his primary duties, a cheerful acquiescence in the inevitable. By the expression of such sentiments Epictetus had anticipated by fifteen hundred years the immortal truth so sweetly expressed by Lovelace:
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."
Situated as he was, we can hardly wonder that thoughts like these occupied a large share of the mind of Epictetus, or that he had taught himself to lay hold of them with the firmest possible grasp. When asked, "Who among men is rich?" he replied, "He who suffices for himself;" an expression which contains the germ of the truth so forcibly expressed in the Book of Proverbs, "The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways, and a good man shall be satisfied from himself". Similarly, when asked, "Who is free?" he replies, "The man who masters his own self," with much the same tone of expressions as that of Solomon, "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." Socrates was one of the great models whom Epictetus constantly seats before him, and this is one of the anecdotes which he relates about him with admiration. When Archelaus sent a message to express the intention of making him rich, Socrates bade the messenger inform him that at Athens four quarts of meal might be bought for three halfpence, and the fountains flow with water. "If then my existing possessions are insufficient for me, at any rate I am sufficient for them, and so they too are sufficient for me. Do you not see that Polus acted the part of Oedipus in his royal state with no less beauty of voice than that of Oedipus in Colonos, a wanderer and beggar? Shall then a noble man appear inferior to Polus, so as not to act well every character imposed upon him by Divine Providence; and shall he not imitate Ulysses, who even in rags was no less conspicuous than in the curled nap of his purple cloak?"