“Lead me, O Zeus, and thou O Destiny,
The way that I am bid by you to go:
To follow I am ready. If I choose not,
I make myself a wretch, and still must follow.”
—Epictetus, Encheir. lii. (Long’s translation.) Epictetus, indeed, and Seneca, late comers in the history of Stoicism, have undoubtedly attained to a clear recognition of the personality of God.
[375] See the “De cohibenda ira,” “de cupiditate divitiarum,” “de invidia et odio,” “de adulatore et amico.”
[376] “De garrulitate,” “de vitioso pudore,” “de vitando aere alieno,” “de curiositate.”
[377] “De amicorum multitudine,” and “de adulatore et amico”; “de fraterno amore,” “de amore prolis”; “conjugalia præcepta,” “de exilio,” “consolatio ad uxorem,” “consolatio ad Apollonium.” (“I can easily believe,” says Emerson, “that an anxious soul may find in Plutarch’s ‘Letter to his Wife Timoxena,’ a more sweet and reassuring argument on the immortality than in the Phædo of Plato.”)
[378] Zeller says that “the most characteristic mark of the Plutarchian Ethics is their connexion with religion.”—(Greek Philosophy, translated by Alleyne and Abbott.)
[379] De Virtute Morali, 440 E.