Lecture 1: There Is No Need of Many Proofs for One Point
Once, when the talk turned to proofs, the kind that young people ought to hear from philosophers if they are to get a firm grip on what they're learning, Musonius said that what we should look for on each point is not a great many proofs but proofs that work and are clear. A doctor doesn't earn our praise, he said, by giving his patients a great many drugs, but by doing them real good with the few he gives; and a philosopher doesn't earn it by teaching his listeners through a great many proofs, but by bringing them with a few to the conclusion he wants. And the more intelligent the listener, the fewer proofs he'll need, and the sooner he'll agree with the main point of the argument, provided the argument is sound. A man who wants proof everywhere, even where the facts are plain, or who wants a long demonstration of what can be shown in a few steps, is simply absurd, and very slow to learn.
The gods, presumably, need no proof of anything, because nothing is unclear or hidden from them, and only what is unclear needs a proof. We human beings, though, have no choice but to work out what is not evident or known at first sight by way of what is evident and obvious, and that is what a proof does. Take the claim that pleasure is not a good. It doesn't look true at first sight, since in actual experience pleasure beckons to us as though it were a good. But if we take one premise that everyone grants, that every good is worth choosing, and add a second that everyone also grants, that some pleasures are not worth choosing, we prove that pleasure is not a good: the unknown, by way of the known. Or take the claim that hardship is not an evil. At first sight it isn't convincing; the opposite, that hardship is an evil, seems far more convincing. But lay down an evident premise, that everything evil is to be avoided, and add to it one more evident still, that many hardships are not to be avoided, and the conclusion follows that hardship is not an evil.
That is what a proof is. Now, some people are quicker and some are duller, some have been raised in better habits and some in worse, and those whose character or nature is worse will need more proofs and more work before they accept these views and are shaped by them, just as a body in poor condition, I suppose, needs a great deal of care if it is ever to be well. But young people who are more gifted and have had a better upbringing will agree with what is rightly said, and follow it, more easily and more quickly, with only a few proofs. That this is so we can see at once if we imagine two boys, or two young men. One has been brought up in every kind of luxury, his body made soft as a woman's and his spirit gone slack under habits that lead to softness, and he is sluggish and slow to learn by nature besides. The other has been brought up more or less the Spartan way, hard: he isn't used to luxury, he has practiced endurance, and he listens readily to what is rightly said. Now set these two to hear a philosopher talk about death, hardship, poverty and the like, and explain that they are not evils, and then about life, pleasure, wealth and things of that kind, and explain that they are not goods. Will the two take the words in alike, and will each be persuaded to the same degree? Nobody could say so. The duller one may come round in the end, with difficulty and slowly, levered up as if with a crowbar by countless arguments, and nod. The other will take in what is said quickly and readily, as something that belongs to him and suits him, without needing many proofs or much work.
Wasn't that Spartan boy just such a one, the boy who asked the philosopher Cleanthes whether hardship is a good? He seems to have been so well made by nature and so well raised for virtue that he thought hardship nearer to the nature of the good than to the nature of the bad. He took it as agreed that hardship was not an evil, and asked only whether it might actually be a good. No wonder Cleanthes, who succeeded Zeno as head of the Stoics, was delighted with the boy and answered him in the words Menelaus speaks to young Telemachus in the Odyssey:
Good blood runs in you, dear child, to judge by what you say. — Odyssey 4.611.
How could a boy like that fail to be easily persuaded to fear neither poverty nor death nor anything else that seems frightening, and on the other hand not to chase after wealth or life or pleasure?
But to come back to where I began: I say that a teacher of philosophy should not try to run through a mass of arguments and proofs with his students. He should speak to the point on each subject and reach the mind of the person listening, saying things that are persuasive and not easily overturned, and above all he should win his listeners by speaking about the things that matter most and by showing himself acting in agreement with what he says. The student, for his part, should give the lessons his full attention and take care that nothing false slips past him and is accepted unnoticed; as for what is true, he should not, by Zeus, demand to hear many proofs of it, only clear ones. And whatever advice he is persuaded is true and meant for him, he should follow in his life. That is the only way anyone will ever be helped by philosophy: if he makes his actions agree with the sound teaching he has taken in.1
Lecture 2: That We Are All Born for Virtue
All of us, he said, are made by nature to live without going wrong, and to live well: not some of us and not others, but all of us. A strong sign of this is that lawgivers lay down for everyone alike what must be done and forbid what must not, and exempt no one who disobeys or does wrong from punishment, not the young, not the old, not the strong, not the weak, nobody at all. Yet if the whole business of virtue came into us from outside, and we had no share in it by nature, then just as in the work of the other arts nobody who hasn't learned the art is required never to go wrong, so in the business of living nobody would be required to live without going wrong unless he had learned virtue, since virtue is the only thing that keeps us from going wrong in life. As it is, in caring for the sick we expect no one but the doctor never to go wrong, in playing the lyre no one but the musician, in handling a ship's steering oars no one but the helmsman. But in life we no longer expect only the philosopher never to go wrong, though he would seem to be the only one who makes virtue his concern; we expect it of everyone alike, even of those who have never given virtue a moment's care. Clearly, then, there is no other explanation for this than that a human being is born for virtue.
Here is another strong sign that we have a share in virtue by nature: everyone talks about himself as though he had virtue and were good. Ask any ordinary person whether he is foolish or wise, and he will never admit to being foolish; ask him whether he is unjust or just, and he won't tell you he is unjust. In the same way, if you ask him whether he is self-controlled or self-indulgent, he answers that he is self-controlled. And in short, if you ask anyone whether he is a good man or a bad one, he will say good, though he can't name any teacher who taught him nobility of character, or any study or training in virtue that he has gone through. What is that a sign of, if not that the human soul has a natural leaning toward nobility of character, and that a seed of virtue is in each one of us? And because being good is so entirely what befits us, some of us fool ourselves into thinking that we really are good, and the rest of us are too embarrassed to own that we aren't.
Why else, by the gods, does nobody who hasn't learned reading and writing, or music, or wrestling, claim to know them or pretend to have those skills, when he can't even name a teacher he went to, while everyone lays claim to virtue? Because human beings have no share in any of those skills by nature, and nobody comes into life with a natural leaning toward them.2
Lecture 3: That Women Too Should Study Philosophy
Asked once whether women too should study philosophy, he set about showing that they should, in something like these words.
Women, he said, have received from the gods the same reason as men: the reason we use in dealing with one another, and with which we think out, about each thing, whether it is good or bad, honorable or shameful. In the same way, women have just the senses men have: sight, hearing, smell and the rest. The two have the same parts of the body, and neither has anything more than the other. Then too, a longing for virtue and a natural kinship with it are born not in men alone but in women as well. Women are made by nature no less than men to be pleased by fine and just actions and to reject their opposites. And if all this is so, why on earth would it be fitting for men to seek out and consider how they are to live well, which is exactly what doing philosophy means, and not fitting for women? Is it because men ought to be good, and women ought not?
Let's look, one by one, at what a woman needs if she is to be a good woman, because it will turn out that each of those things would come to her from philosophy more than from anything else. To begin with, a woman has to be able to run a household: to work out what is good for the house and to direct the household slaves. These, I say, are the very things a woman who studies philosophy would have most of all. Every one of these belongs to living, and the knowledge of how to live is nothing other than philosophy, and the philosopher, as Socrates used to say, quoting the Odyssey, spends his whole time looking into
whatever is done in your halls, of evil and of good. — Odyssey 4.392.
But a woman also has to have self-control. That means she keeps herself clean of unlawful sex, and clean of any lack of control over the other pleasures; she is not a slave to her desires, not quarrelsome, not extravagant, not vain about her looks. Those are the works of a self-controlled woman, and there are more besides: to master her anger, not to be mastered by grief, and to be stronger than every passion. This is what the teaching of philosophy lays down, and anyone who has learned it and trained himself in it seems to me to become as decent a person as there can be, whether a man or a woman.
Enough on that. But wouldn't a woman who studies philosophy be just? Wouldn't she be a blameless partner in life, a good worker for harmony in the home, a devoted guardian of her husband and children, and wholly free of greed and grasping? And who could be more like that than a woman trained in philosophy? If she is truly a philosopher she cannot help thinking that doing wrong is worse than suffering it, worse by as much as it is more shameful, and that taking less than your share is better than taking more, and she will love her children more than her own life. What woman could be more just than a woman like that?
Then again, an educated woman ought to be braver than an uneducated one, and a woman who has studied philosophy braver than one who hasn't, so that neither fear of death nor reluctance to face hardship will make her submit to anything shameful, and she will not cower before anyone because he is well born, or powerful, or rich, or even, by Zeus, because he is a tyrant. She has trained herself to be high-minded, to hold that death is not an evil and life is not a good, and in the same way not to shrink from hardship and never to seek a life without hardship at any price. It's natural, then, that such a woman should do her own work and put up with discomfort. She will nurse the children she bears at her own breast, wait on her husband with her own hands, and do without hesitation the jobs some people think fit only for slaves. Wouldn't a woman like that be a great asset to the man who married her, an honor to her family, and a good example to the women who know her?
"Yes, but," some people say, "women who spend their time with philosophers are bound, most of them, to turn headstrong and bold, when they give up keeping house, go about among men, practice speeches, argue like sophists and pick syllogisms apart, when they should be at home, seated at the wool-basket."
I wouldn't expect the women who study philosophy, or the men either for that matter, to give up the work that is properly theirs and busy themselves with talk alone. Whatever discussions they take up, I say, they should take up for the sake of action. A doctor's theories are no use unless they lead to the health of a human body, and in the same way whatever theory a philosopher holds or teaches is no use unless it leads to virtue in a human soul. Above all, we have to look at the teaching that we expect women who study philosophy to follow. Can a teaching that declares a sense of shame the greatest good make them bold? Can a teaching that prescribes the utmost restraint get them used to living brazenly? Does a teaching that shows self-indulgence to be the worst of evils fail to teach self-control? Does a teaching that presents good management of a household as a virtue fail to urge them to manage theirs? And the teaching of the philosophers urges a woman to be content ... and to do her own work herself.3
Lecture 4: Should Daughters Be Educated the Same as Sons?
Once, when the question came up whether sons and daughters should be given the same education, he said that people who train horses and people who train hunting dogs make no distinction between male and female when they train them. Female hounds learn hunting exactly as the males do, and if you want mares to do a horse's work well, you can see them taught no differently from stallions. With human beings, then, are the males to get something special in their education and upbringing that the females don't, as though the same virtues did not have to come to both, to man and woman alike, or as though it were possible to reach the same virtues by a different education rather than the same one?
That a man's virtues and a woman's are not different is easy to see. To begin with, a man has to have practical wisdom, and so does a woman: what use would a foolish man or a foolish woman be? Next, each has to live justly, no less than the other. A man could not be a good citizen if he were unjust, and a woman could not run her household well unless she ran it justly; if she is unjust she will wrong her own husband, as they say Eriphyle did when she took a bribe of a golden necklace to send her husband off to die in the war against Thebes. Self-control, again, is a fine thing in a woman, and just as fine in a man; the laws, at any rate, punish the man who commits adultery and the woman who commits it with him alike. And gluttony, drunkenness and the other vices of that kind, which are forms of self-indulgence and bring deep disgrace on those caught up in them, show that self-control is most necessary to every human being, female and male, because only through self-control do we escape self-indulgence, and by no other way at all.
Someone might say, perhaps, that courage belongs to men alone. That isn't so either. A woman too, at least the best kind of woman, has to be brave and free of cowardice, so that neither hardship nor fear can bend her. Otherwise, how will she still be self-controlled, if anyone can force her into submitting to something shameful, by frightening her or putting her through hardship? Women also need to be able to defend themselves, unless, by Zeus, they mean to show themselves worse than hens and the other female birds, which fight animals far larger than themselves to protect their chicks. How, then, could women not need courage? And that they have a share in prowess at arms as well was shown by the race of the Amazons, who conquered many peoples by force of arms. If other women fall short in this, then, it is for want of training rather than because nature did not make them for it.4
... the virtues of a man and of a woman, it follows of necessity that the same upbringing and the same education suit them both. For every animal and every plant, the care given to it, if it is given rightly, has to produce the virtue proper to that creature. If a man and a woman both had to be able to play the pipes equally well, and each of them needed the skill to make a living, we would teach both of them the piper's art to the same standard, and if each of them had to play the lyre ...5
But if both have to become good in the virtue proper to a human being, and both have to be equally able to show practical wisdom and self-control and to have their share of courage and of justice, neither of them less than the other, won't we educate the two alike, and teach both equally the art from which a human being becomes good? We must do just that, and nothing else.
"What's this?" someone may say. "Do you think men ought to learn spinning wool just as women do, and women ought to take up gymnastics just as men do?"
No, that I won't ask for. What I say is that since in the human race the nature of the male is the stronger and the nature of the female the weaker, each nature should be given the work that suits it best, the heavier work going to the stronger and the lighter to the weaker. That is why spinning would suit women better than men, as would keeping the house, and gymnastics would suit men better than women, as would working out of doors. Sometimes, though, some men might reasonably take on some of the lighter jobs, the ones thought of as women's work, and women in turn might do some of the harder ones that seem to belong more to men, when their bodily strength, or need, or the occasion calls for it. All human work, perhaps, lies open to both, shared between men and women, and none of it is reserved of necessity for one or the other; but some jobs are better suited to the one nature and some to the other, which is why some are called men's work and some women's. Whatever has to do with virtue, though, one could rightly say suits both natures equally, if we really do say that the virtues belong no more to the one than to the other.
That is why I think it reasonable that whatever bears on virtue should be taught alike to female and male. They should be taught right from infancy that this is good and that is bad, and that good and bad are the same for both of them; that this helps and that harms; that this is to be done and that is not. From these lessons practical wisdom grows in those who learn them, girls and boys alike, in the one no differently than in the other. Next, a sense of shame has to be instilled in them toward everything shameful, and once these two are present in them, man and woman alike are bound to be self-controlled. Then again, whoever is being rightly educated, male or female, has to be accustomed to endure hardship, accustomed not to fear death, and accustomed not to be brought low by any misfortune, for these are what make a person brave; and it was shown a little earlier that women too must have courage. Further, to shun greed, to honor fair shares, and, being a human being, to want to do good to human beings and not to want to do them harm, is the finest lesson there is, and it makes those who learn it just. Why should a man need to have learned this any more than a woman? If, by Zeus, it is right for women to be just, then both must have learned the same things, at least the most important and the greatest. If one of them knows some small thing that the other doesn't, he knowing it and she not, or she knowing it and he not, something that belongs to a particular craft, that does not yet make their educations different. Only let neither of them have learned anything different from the other about the greatest things; let them have learned the same.
And if anyone asks me what body of knowledge presides over this education, I'll tell him that without philosophy no man could be rightly educated, and no woman either. I don't mean that women need fluency in argument or some extraordinary cleverness, if they are to study philosophy as women; I don't think much of that even in men. I mean that women have to acquire a good character and, in the way they live, nobility of character, the Greek kalokagathia, the quality of being at once fine and good. Philosophy, after all, is the practice of nobility of character and nothing else.
Lecture 5: Which Is Stronger, Practice or Theory?
Another time the question came up among us whether practice or theory does more toward getting virtue, taking theory to mean the teaching of what we rightly ought to do, and practice the habit people form when they are trained to act according to that teaching. Musonius thought practice did more, and to make the case for his view he put a question to one of those present.
"Suppose there are two doctors," he said. "One can talk about medicine as expertly as anyone alive, but has had no practice at all in treating the sick; the other can't talk about it, but is used to treating patients according to medical theory. Which of the two would you rather have at your side when you're ill?"
The man answered that he would have the one who was used to treating patients.
"Well then," said Musonius, "take two men. One has sailed often and has already steered a good many ships; the other has sailed only a few times and has never steered at all. If the one who has never steered can explain most ably how a ship ought to be steered, while the other explains it badly and quite feebly, which of them would you take as your helmsman on a voyage?"
He said, the one who had steered often.
Musonius asked again: "Now take two musicians. One has mastered the theory of music and explains it most persuasively, but can't sing, or play either the concert lyre or the ordinary one; the other is weaker in theory, but plays both kinds of lyre well and sings besides. Which of them would you trust with a piece of musical work, and which would you want as a music teacher for a child who knows nothing of it?"
He answered, the one who could do the actual work.
"Very well," said Musonius. "That is how these cases stand. And when it comes to self-control and self-restraint, isn't it far better to become self-restrained and self-controlled in everything one does than merely to be able to say what should be done?"
The young man granted this as well: talking ably about self-control is a lesser and poorer thing than being self-controlled in fact.
Then Musonius, drawing it together with what had been said before, went on: "After all that, how could knowing the theory of each thing be better than being trained by habit to do the thing as the theory directs? Practice leads to being able to act, and knowing the theory of a thing leads to being able to talk about it. Theory does work alongside action, of course, by teaching how one ought to act, and in order it comes before practice, since nobody can be trained into anything good except by training according to theory. In power, though, practice comes first, because it has more force than theory in bringing a person to act."
Lecture 6: On Training
He was always urging his students, and urging them hard, to train, and he used arguments something like these.6
Virtue, he said, is not just knowledge in theory but knowledge in practice as well, like medicine and music. Just as the doctor and the musician must each not only have mastered the principles of his art but also have drilled himself to act on them, so a man who means to be good must not only learn thoroughly the lessons that lead to virtue but also drill himself in them, eagerly and without sparing effort. How could anyone become self-controlled straight off, if all he knew was that he mustn't be beaten by pleasures, and he had never been drilled in holding out against them? How could anyone become just, having learned that he ought to love what is fair, if he had never practiced shunning greed? How could we come by courage, if we had grasped that the things most people think dreadful are not to be feared, but had never practiced being fearless in the face of them? How could we gain practical wisdom, if we had come to know which things are really good and which bad, but had never been drilled in despising the things that only seem good? That is why training must always follow on the learning of the lessons proper to each virtue, if the learning itself is to do us any good.
And a man who aspires to study philosophy has to train more than one who sets his heart on medicine or some similar art, by as much as philosophy is a greater thing, and harder to bring off, than any other pursuit. People who go in for the other arts come to them without their souls having been corrupted beforehand, and without having learned the opposite of what they are about to be taught; but those who take up philosophy have lived a long time in a great deal of corruption, and are full of vice when they set out after virtue, so that on this count too they need more training.
How, then, and in what way, should they train? A human being is neither soul alone nor body alone but a kind of compound of the two, and so whoever is in training has to take care of both: more of the better part, the soul, as is right, but of the other as well, if no part of the human being is to fall short. The philosopher's body too has to be well prepared for the body's work, because the virtues often make use of it as a necessary tool for the business of life. Of training, then, one kind may rightly be called the soul's alone, and the other shared by the soul and the body. We will be training both together when we accustom ourselves to cold and heat, to thirst and hunger, to plain food and a hard bed, to going without pleasures and to putting up with hardships. Through these things and others like them the body grows strong, hard to hurt, solid and fit for any work, and the soul grows strong too, drilled toward courage by putting up with hardships and toward self-control by going without pleasures. The training proper to the soul alone consists, first, in keeping the proofs ready to hand that the things that seem good are not good, and that the things that seem bad are not bad, and in getting used to recognizing what is really good and telling it apart from what is not; and next, in practicing not to run from anything that only seems bad and not to chase anything that only seems good, but to turn away from what is really bad by every means, and to go after what is really good in every way.
That, in outline, is what each kind of training is like. All the same, I'll try to say in detail how each thing is to be done, no longer separating and dividing the practices the soul shares with the body from those that belong to the soul alone, but going through what belongs to each part as they come. All of us who have taken part in a philosopher's teaching have heard and accepted that neither hardship nor death nor poverty is in any way an evil, nor anything else that is free of vice, and again that wealth, life and pleasure are not goods, nor anything else that has no share in virtue. And yet, though we have accepted all this, because of the corruption that set in from our earliest childhood, and the bad habits that corruption bred in us, we take hardship, when it comes, for an evil come upon us, and pleasure, when it arrives, for a good; we shudder at death as the worst of disasters and cling to life as the greatest of goods; when we give money away we are pained as though we had been hurt, and when we receive it we are glad as though we had been helped; and in a great many other things we deal with what happens to us in the same way, not in keeping with our right beliefs but following our bad habit instead. Since, then, I say that this is how things stand, the man in training has to try to get the better of himself, so that he does not welcome pleasure or turn away from hardship, does not cling to being alive or fear death, and, where money is concerned, does not prize taking above giving.
Lecture 7: That We Should Make Light of Hardship
To take on more easily and more willingly the hardships we may have to bear for the sake of virtue and nobility of character, it helps to reckon up how much some people toil for wicked desires, like men in the grip of a self-indulgent passion; how much others put up with for the sake of profit; and how much, again, some suffer in the hunt for glory. And every one of them takes on every sort of misery of his own free choice. Isn't it monstrous, then, that they should put up with all this for nothing fine at all, while we, for the sake of nobility of character, to escape the vice that ruins our life and to win virtue, the giver of every good thing, are not ready to take on every hardship?
And yet no one could put into words how much better it is to toil at schooling your own desires than to toil at getting another man's wife; to train yourself to need little than to wear yourself out over money; to take trouble not to be a glory-hunter than to take trouble over glory; to look for ways to envy no one than to look for ways to harm the person you envy; to suffer hardship to gain true friends than to slave, as flatterers do, for people called friends. In general, since hardship is unavoidable for all human beings, for those who reach for better things and those who reach for worse alike, it is the height of absurdity that people pursuing better things should not be far more eager to toil than those whose toil holds only small hopes.
Street performers take on such hard feats and stake their very lives on them, some somersaulting among upturned swords, some walking aloft on a rope, some flying through the air like birds, where one slip means death; and they do it all for a small fee. Won't we put up with misery for the sake of complete happiness? Becoming good has no other end than being happy and living a blessed life from then on.
We might reasonably think too about what some animals are like, since that can well shame us into a love of hardship. Quails and fighting cocks, at any rate, understand nothing of virtue as a human being does, know nothing of what is fine and just, and toil for nothing of the sort; yet they fight each other, and even maimed they hold on and endure to the death, so that neither gives in to the other. How much more fitting it is, then, for us to hold on and endure when we know we are suffering for something fine: to help our friends, or to do our city some good, or to fight for our wives and children, and, greatest and most important of all, to be good and just and self-controlled, which comes to no one without hardship. And that is why I am moved to say that a man who won't take on hardship all but condemns himself as unworthy of anything good, since every good thing we have, we gain by hardship.
That, and more like it, is what he said that day, rousing those who were there and urging them to make light of hardship.
Lecture 8: That Kings Too Should Study Philosophy
Once one of the kings from Syria came to see him, for in those days there were still kings in Syria who were subjects of the Romans, and among much else that he said to the man he said this.
Don't imagine, he said, that studying philosophy suits anyone better than it suits you, or that you have any better reason for it than the fact that you happen to be a king. A king, surely, has to be able to protect people and do them good. And whoever is going to protect people and do them good has to know what is good for a human being and what is bad, what helps and what harms, what is to his advantage and what is not, since it is those who fall into bad things who are ruined and those who meet with good things who are saved, and those granted what helps them and serves them who are done good, while those thrown into what harms them and works against them are done harm. But telling good from bad, advantage from disadvantage, help from harm, is the business of no one but the philosopher, who spends his whole life working at precisely this, so that none of these things escapes him, and whose art is knowing what leads to a human being's happiness or unhappiness. It looks, then, as if a king has to study philosophy.
What is more, a king ought, or rather is bound, to deal out justice to his subjects, so that no one gets more or less than he deserves, and honor and punishment both go to those who have earned them. How could anyone manage that without being just? And how could anyone be just without knowing what justice is? Here again, then, a king has to study philosophy, because it is plain he could not come to know justice and what is just in any other way than by studying philosophy. No one can deny that the man who has learned what is just will know it better than the man who hasn't, or that everyone who has never studied philosophy is ignorant of such things. They quarrel, at any rate, and even go to war with each other over what is just, some claiming this is more just and others that. Yet about the things people do know, they don't disagree. Nobody quarrels over black and white, hot and cold, hard and soft; on these everyone thinks and speaks alike. They would agree in much the same way about what is just, then, if they knew what it was; and where they don't agree, they show that they don't know. You yourself are not outside this ignorance either, as I see it, and for that reason you, more than anyone else, ought to take trouble over this knowledge, and all the more so, by just as much as it is more shameful for a king than for a private man to be ignorant of justice.
Again, a king has to be self-controlled himself and has to make his subjects self-controlled, so that he rules with self-control and they are ruled with good order, and neither of them lives in luxury, since luxury is the ruin of a ruler and of every private citizen alike. But how could anyone be self-controlled himself without practicing mastery over his desires, or make other people self-controlled when he is self-indulgent himself? And no one can name any body of knowledge that leads to self-control except philosophy. Philosophy teaches a man to rise above pleasure; it teaches him to rise above greed; it teaches him to love plain living and to shun extravagance; it gets him used to having a sense of shame and used to mastering his tongue; it brings him order, good discipline and a seemly bearing, and in general what is fitting in the way he moves and holds himself. When a human being has these things, they make him dignified and self-controlled, and a king who has them would be, more than anyone, godlike and worthy of respect.
Fearlessness, again, and being unshakable and bold, are the work of courage. And how could a human being come by them better than by gaining a firm conviction that death and hardship are not evils? For it is death and hardship that throw people into a panic and frighten them, whenever they are persuaded that these are evils; and that they are not evils, philosophy alone teaches. If kings, then, have to acquire courage, and they have to acquire it more than anyone else at all, they must take trouble to study philosophy, since they could not become brave in any other way.
Then too, it is kingly, if anything is, never to be beaten in argument, and to be able to overcome those who argue with you by words as you overcome those who fight you by arms. If kings are weak in this, they are bound to be led around again and again, and forced to accept false things as true, which is the work of folly and of the most extreme ignorance. And I know of nothing that philosophy is more fitted by nature to give those who pursue it than this: the power to get the better of their neighbors in argument, to sort false from true, refuting the one and confirming the other. The orators, at any rate, whenever they meet the philosophers and argue things out with them, can be seen tripped up, stuck for an answer, and forced to contradict themselves. And when the orators, who have made the practice of argument their life's work, are caught out as weaker in argument than the philosophers, what are we to suppose about the rest of mankind? If any king, then, has a desire for mastery in argument, he must study philosophy, so that here too he need fear no one getting the better of him, since a king ought to be fearless, bold and unbeaten everywhere.
In general, the good king must of absolute necessity never go wrong in word or deed, and must be perfect, if he is to be, as the ancients thought, a living law, bringing about good government and harmony, keeping lawlessness and civil strife away, an imitator of Zeus and, like Zeus, a father to those he rules. How could anyone be a man like that without a nature out of the ordinary, the best education, and every virtue that belongs to a human being? Now, if there were some other body of knowledge that guided human nature toward virtue and taught it to train itself in what is fine and pursue it, we would have to set it beside philosophy and weigh the two, to see whether that one or philosophy were the better and more able to make a good king; and the king, if he wants to be good, would naturally make use of the better. But no other art so much as promises to hand down and teach virtue. Some deal only with the human body and what is useful to it, and those that touch the soul look into everything rather than how it is to become self-controlled; philosophy alone looks into this and contrives this, how a human being might escape vice and acquire virtue. If that is how things stand, what could be more important for a king who wants to be good than to study philosophy? Or rather, how and in what way could anyone rule as a king well, or live well, without studying philosophy? I think the good king is from the start, of necessity, a philosopher as well, and the philosopher is from the start a kingly man.
Let's look first at the first of these claims. Is there any way a man could be a good king without being a good man? None that anyone can name. And if a man is good, wouldn't he be a philosopher too? Yes, by Zeus, if studying philosophy is the practice of nobility of character. The good king, then, turns out of necessity to be from the start a philosopher as well.
As for the philosopher's being in every way a kingly man too, you could learn it like this. What makes a man kingly, surely, is that he can govern peoples and cities well and is worthy to rule over human beings. And who could be better fitted to lead a city, or more worthy to rule over human beings, than the philosopher? It belongs to him, if he really is a philosopher, to be wise, self-controlled and high-minded, able to judge what is just and what is fitting, able to carry out what he has thought through, able to endure hardships. Beyond that he would be bold and fearless, ready to face whatever seems terrible, and besides that good, ready to do good, and kind to human beings. Who could be found more suited to rule than such a man, or more able? No one. And if he doesn't have many people who obey him and do as he says, that does not yet rob him of being kingly. It is enough for him to rule over the friends he has, or his wife and children, or even, by Zeus, over himself alone. A doctor with few patients is no less a doctor than one with many, if he has the doctor's experience; and a musician with few pupils is as much a musician as one with many, if he has the musician's art; and a horseman who works with one horse or two is just as much a horseman as one who works with many, if he has the knowledge of horsemanship. In the same way, a man who has one or two people who obey him is as kingly as one who owns many subjects. Only let him have the experience of ruling as a king, and he will be kingly too. That, I think, is why Socrates called philosophy the art of the statesman and of the king, because whoever takes it up is from that moment a statesman.
When Musonius had said this and more like it, the king, delighted with what he had heard, told him how grateful he was for all that had been said to him. "In return for it," he said, "ask me for whatever you want, for I will refuse you nothing."
"Then I ask you," said Musonius, "to keep in step with the words you praise and follow them. That way you will please me most, and you will do yourself more good than in any other way."
Lecture 9: That Exile Is Not an Evil
When an exile was lamenting that he had been banished, Musonius comforted him in something like this way.7
How could anyone who isn't a fool be weighed down by exile? he said. Exile does not shut us off in any way from water and earth and air, or from the sun and the other stars; it does not even shut us off from the company of human beings, since we can share in all of these everywhere and in every direction. If we are deprived of some part of the earth and the company of some people, what is so terrible in that? Even when we were at home we didn't make use of the whole earth, or keep company with every human being. Our friends, at least, we can be with even now, the true ones, the ones worth taking any account of, for they would never betray or abandon us; and if some are false friends and not true ones, it is better to be rid of them than to be with them.
What's more, isn't the world the common fatherland of all human beings, as Socrates held? It follows that you should not think yourself really exiled from your fatherland if you leave the place where you were born and raised; you have only been deprived of a particular city, especially if you claim to be a decent person. A man like that neither honors nor despises any spot on earth as the cause of happiness or unhappiness. He places everything in himself, and he thinks of himself as a citizen of the city of Zeus, which is made up of men and gods. The same thought is in Euripides, in the lines where he writes:
All the air lies open to the eagle's wing, and all the earth is fatherland to a noble man. — Euripides, from a lost play.
Suppose, then, a man who still lived at home in his own country, only not in the house where he was born, made a great grievance of it and lamented: he would be silly and ridiculous. In just the same way, a man who lives in a different city from the one he happens to have been born in, and counts it a disaster, might reasonably be thought senseless and a fool.
And how could exile stand in the way of a man's care for himself, or of his acquiring virtue, when it shuts no one off from learning or from training in what he should? Why shouldn't exile actually help toward something of the kind, by giving him leisure and freedom to learn what is fine and to do it, more than before? He is no longer dragged off into public duties by what passed for his fatherland, or pestered by people who passed for his friends and relatives, who are good at getting in the way and pulling a man back from his drive toward better things.
For some people exile has been an outright blessing, as it was for Diogenes, who left Sinope on the Black Sea a private man and became a philosopher by going into exile. Instead of sitting around in Sinope he spent his time in Greece, and in the training that leads to virtue he outdid the other philosophers. For others, whose bodies were in poor shape from softness and luxury, exile has given them strength, by forcing them to live in a more manly way. We know of some people freed in exile from chronic illnesses, like Spartiaticus here, the Spartan, who for a long time had a bad chest and was often ill because of luxury, and who stopped being ill when he stopped living in luxury. Others, people who lived soft lives, are said to have been freed of gout, though they were badly racked by that affliction before; exile got them used to living harder, and by that very means made them healthy. In this way, by putting them in better condition than they were before, in body and in soul, exile works with them rather than against them.
Nor is it the lot of exiles to be wholly without the necessities of life. Those who are idle and helpless and unable to act like men are, as a rule, without means and at a loss even in their own country; but the noble, the hardworking and the intelligent do well and live without want wherever they may go. We don't need much, after all, unless we want to live in luxury:
What do mortals need but two things only, Demeter's grain and a drink of water, which are at hand and made by nature to feed us? — Euripides, from a lost play.
I say that men worth talking about would not only easily find the barest necessities of life when they were away from home, but would often acquire a good deal of wealth besides. Odysseus, at any rate, was in a more wretched state than any exile, you might say, alone, naked and shipwrecked; yet when he came among strangers, the Phaeacians, he was able to come away rich. When Themistocles, the victor of Salamis, was banished from home, he went not only to people who were no friends of his but to enemies and foreigners, the Persians, and was given three cities as a gift, Myus, Magnesia and Lampsacus, to live on. Dion of Syracuse was stripped of all his property by Dionysius the tyrant when he was driven out of his country, and yet in exile he grew so well off that he raised an army of mercenaries, sailed against Sicily with it, and freed it from the tyrant. Who in his right mind, looking at all this, would still suppose that exile is the cause of want for everyone who is exiled?
Nor do those who have been exiled necessarily have to fall into disrepute because of it, since everyone knows that many lawsuits are badly judged, that many people are driven from their country unjustly, and that some good men have been banished by their fellow citizens before now: Aristides the Just from Athens, and Hermodorus from Ephesus, whose banishment made Heraclitus tell the Ephesians that every grown man among them ought to go and hang himself. Some have even become most famous while in exile, like Diogenes of Sinope, and Clearchus the Spartan, who marched with Cyrus against Artaxerxes; and anyone who wanted could name many more. Yet how could something be a cause of disrepute when some people have become more famous in it than they were before?
"Yes, by Zeus," someone may say, "but Euripides says exiles are deprived of freedom, since they are deprived of freedom of speech."
In the Phoenician Women he has Jocasta ask her son Polynices what is hard for an exile, and he answers:
One thing above all: he has no freedom of speech. — Euripides, Phoenician Women.
And she says to him in turn:
That is a slave's lot, not to say what one thinks. — Euripides, Phoenician Women.
But I would say to Euripides: Euripides, you are right to suppose that it is a slave's lot to keep back what one thinks when one ought to speak it, since we shouldn't say what we think always and everywhere and to anyone at all. But I don't think you were right in saying that exiles have no share in freedom of speech, if by freedom of speech you mean not keeping silent about what a man happens to think. It isn't exiles who shrink from saying what they think; it is people who are afraid that saying it will bring them hardship, or death, or a fine, or something else of that kind. And this fear, by Zeus, is not created by exile. Plenty of people still in their own countries, or rather most of them, are afraid of things that seem terrible. The brave man, on the other hand, faces all such things boldly, no less as an exile than at home; and that is why, when he happens to be in exile, he says what he thinks just as boldly as when he isn't.
That much one might say to Euripides. But you, my friend, tell me this. When Diogenes was living in exile at Athens, or when he had been sold by brigands and came to Corinth, did any other man, Athenian or Corinthian, show more freedom of speech than Diogenes did? Was anyone else among the people of that time more free than Diogenes? Why, he even lorded it over Xeniades, the man who bought him, as a master over his slave. But why talk of the old days? Don't I seem to you to be an exile? Have I been robbed of freedom of speech, then? Have I been stripped of the power to say what I think? Has anyone, you or another, ever seen me cringe before someone because I am an exile, or think that I am worse off now than before? You would not say, by Zeus, that you had seen me grieving or downhearted because of exile, either. Even if someone has taken away my fatherland, he has not taken away my ability to bear exile.
The reasonings I use with myself so as not to be troubled by exile I'll tell you too. It seems to me that exile does not altogether deprive a man even of the things most people think are good, as I was showing a moment ago. But even if it did deprive him of some or all of them, it does not deprive him of the things that are good in truth. The exile is not prevented from having courage or justice because he is in exile, nor self-control or practical wisdom, nor any other virtue at all; and these, when they are present, are made by nature to adorn and help a human being and show him worthy of praise and good repute, and when they are absent, to harm and disgrace him, showing him bad and of no repute. If this is how things stand, and you are a good man and have the virtues, exile could not harm you or bring you low, since the things that can help you and lift you up the most are with you. And if you happen to be bad, it is your vice that harms you, not exile, and it is your vice that brings you grief, not exile; that is why you should hurry to be freed from it, rather than from exile.
That is what I always used to say to myself, and what I say to you now. And you, if you have any sense, will not think exile terrible, since others bear it easily, but vice, which makes wretched everyone who has it in him. Then too, one of two things must be true: you are in exile either unjustly or justly. If justly, how can it ever be right or fitting to be troubled at what is just? And if unjustly, the evil would belong to those who drove you out, not to us, if, by Zeus, doing wrong is what the gods hate most, and that has fallen to them, while being wronged, which has fallen to us, is held by gods and decent people alike to deserve help, not hatred.
Lecture 10: Will a Philosopher Take Anyone to Court for Insult?
He said that he himself would never bring a suit for insult against anyone, and would never advise anyone else who claimed to be a philosopher to do so either. None of the things people suffer and think of as insults, he said, is an insult or a disgrace to those who suffer them: being abused, for instance, or struck, or spat on, of which the hardest to bear is a beating. That these things carry nothing shameful or insulting is shown by the Spartan boys, who are whipped in public and glory in it. And if a philosopher could not despise blows or abuse, what use would he be, when he ought to be seen despising even death?
"Yes, by Zeus," someone says, "but the intention of the man who does these things is what's terrible: to slap someone, or abuse him, or do something else of the kind, with a sneer and meaning it as an insult. Demosthenes, at any rate, thinks that people insult others even with a look, and that such things are unbearable, and that they drive a man out of his mind, one way or another."
Those who say this, though, have no idea what is really fine and what is shameful, and they gape after other people's opinion; they themselves think they are insulted if someone looks at them too sharply, or laughs at them, or hits them, or abuses them. A man who thinks well and has sense, as a philosopher ought to, is troubled by none of these things, and does not think that suffering them is shameful, but rather doing them. For what wrong does the man who suffers them do? The man who does wrong is in disgrace at once; but the man who suffers, since he does no wrong insofar as he suffers, falls into nothing shameful either. That is why the man of sense would not go to law or bring charges, since he would not think he had been insulted at all. Besides, it is petty to be indignant or worked up over such things. He will bear what has happened mildly and quietly, since that is fitting for anyone who wants to be high-minded.
Socrates, at any rate, plainly took things this way. When Aristophanes abused him in public, in the Clouds, so far from being indignant, he even asked him, when he ran into him, whether he would like to make use of him for anything else of the kind. A man who did not resent being abused in the theater would hardly have lost his temper over abuse in front of a few people. Phocion the Good, the Athenian general, when his wife had been insulted by someone, was so far from bringing a charge against the man who did it that when the man came to him in fear and begged Phocion's pardon, saying he hadn't known it was his wife he was offending, Phocion said, "My wife hasn't suffered anything at your hands, but some other woman perhaps has. You have no need to apologize to me."
I could name many other men too who have met with insult, some wronged by others with the tongue, some with their hands, so that their bodies were abused; and they are not seen to have hit back at the men who wronged them, or gone after them in any other way, but to have borne their wrongdoing very mildly. To work out how to bite back at the one who bit you and do harm in return to the one who started it belongs to a wild beast, not a human being, as if you could not even reckon that most of the wrongs people do, they do out of ignorance and lack of understanding, and that whoever is taught better stops at once. But to take wrongs without savagery, not to be implacable to those who have offended, but to give them reason for good hope, belongs to a character that is gentle and kind to human beings.
How much better it is for a philosopher to be seen in this frame of mind, ready to grant pardon if anyone offends against him, than to seem to be defending himself by going to court and bringing charges, while in truth he disgraces himself by acting against his own teaching. For he says that a good man could never be wronged by a bad one; and then he brings charges as though he had been wronged by wicked people, while claiming to be a good man himself.
Lecture 11: What Livelihood Suits a Philosopher
There is another livelihood too, no worse than this one, and perhaps not unreasonably thought better, at least for a man with a strong body: the one that comes from the land, whether or not he has land of his own. Many people who farm someone else's land, public or private, are able to feed themselves and their wives and children too, and some, by working with their own hands and taking on hard work, even grow very well off from it. For the earth repays those who take care of her most handsomely and most justly. She gives back many times what she receives, and supplies everything needed for life in abundance to anyone willing to work, and does it with dignity and with no disgrace at all.8
No human being, unless he is pampered and soft, would say that any of the work of farming is shameful or unsuited to a good man. How could planting not be honorable? Or plowing, or tending vines? Sowing, reaping, threshing: aren't all of these work for a free man, fitting for good men? Being a shepherd did not disgrace Hesiod, whom the Muses found herding his sheep, or keep him from being dear to the gods and a poet; and it would not hold anyone else back either. Of all the work of farming, this is the one I like best, because it gives the soul more leisure to think things over and to look into something that has to do with education. Work that strains and bends the body hard forces the soul as well to attend to it alone, or mostly, straining along with the body; but work that lets the body go without too much strain does not keep the soul from reasoning out something of the better kind and growing wiser through such reasonings, which is what every philosopher aims at above all. That is why I welcome shepherding most of all. But if a man farms and studies philosophy at the same time, I would not compare any other life with his, or prefer any other way of earning a living.
How could it not be more in line with nature to get our food from the earth, which is our nurse and mother, than from anything else? How could living in the country not be more manly than sitting about in a city as the sophists do? How could living out of doors not be healthier than a life spent in the shade? And is it more fitting for a free man to provide himself with what he needs, or to take it from others? Plainly, it is far more dignified not to need anyone else for your own wants than to need someone. Living from farming, then, is so fine a thing, so conducive to happiness and so dear to the gods, provided a man does not neglect nobility of character, that the god at Delphi proclaimed Myson of Chen wise and named Aglaus of Psophis happy, though each of them lived a country life, working with his own hands and keeping away from life in town. Isn't it right, then, to admire these men and imitate them, and to take up farming in earnest?
"What?" someone might say. "Isn't it monstrous for a man able to educate, a man who can lead young people on into philosophy, to work the land and toil with his body like a farmhand?"
Yes, that really would be monstrous, if working the land kept a man from studying philosophy or from helping others toward it. As it is, I think the young would be helped more if they did not spend their time with their teacher in the city, or listen to him speak in the lecture room, but saw him at work on the farm, showing in action what his teaching lays down, that a man should toil and take hardship on his own body rather than need someone else to feed him. And what is to stop the student from listening to his teacher speak, while they are working together, about self-control, or justice, or endurance? Those who mean to study philosophy well don't need many arguments, and the young don't have to take in the whole mob of doctrines we see the sophists so puffed up about; there are enough of these, in fact, to use up a man's whole life. The most necessary and most useful things are not impossible to learn even while doing farm work, especially since they will not be working all the time but will take rests.
I know very well that few will be willing to learn in this way. But it is better that most of the young men who say they want to study philosophy should not come near the philosopher at all, the ones who are rotten and soft, whose approach covers philosophy with stains. Of those who truly love philosophy, every one would be willing to live in the country with a good man, even if the place happened to be very harsh, since he would get great benefit from that way of life: from being with his teacher night and day; from being far from the city's evils, which stand in the way of studying philosophy; and from being unable to hide it when he does something well or badly, which is the greatest benefit to those being educated. Eating and drinking and sleeping under the eye of a good man is a great benefit too.
What would come of necessity from living together in the country is praised by Theognis as well, in the lines where he says:
Drink and eat with them, and sit beside them, and please them, those whose power is great. — Theognis 33-34.
That he means no one but good men as having great power to help human beings, if you eat and drink and sit with them, he has made plain like this:
Learn from the good, and good is what you'll learn; but mix with the bad, and you'll lose even the wits you have. — Theognis 35-36.
Let no one say, then, that farming gets in the way of learning or teaching what we should. That doesn't seem to be so, since it is in this way above all, and for the longest time, that the learner is with his teacher and the teacher has the learner at hand. And since that is how things are, a livelihood from farming looks to be the most fitting for a philosopher.
Lecture 12: On Sex
Not the smallest part of luxury lies in sex, because people who live in luxury want a variety of lovers, not only lawful ones but unlawful ones too, not only women but males as well. They hunt one beloved after another; they are not content with those within easy reach but crave the rare ones; and they go looking for indecent couplings. All of these are serious charges against a human being.
Those who do not live in luxury, or are not wicked, ought to consider that the only sex that is right is sex within marriage, carried out for the begetting of children, because that is also lawful. Sex that hunts after mere pleasure is wrong and unlawful, even within marriage. Of the other couplings, those that come by adultery are the most unlawful, and those of males with males are no more tolerable, because the outrage is against nature. And all intercourse with women outside adultery that lacks the sanction of law is shameful too, every bit of it, since it is done out of self-indulgence. A man with self-control would not bring himself to go to bed with a courtesan, or with a free woman outside marriage, or even, by Zeus, with his own slave woman. What is unlawful and indecent in these unions brings disgrace and great reproach on those who hunt after them. That is why no one can bear to do any such thing openly, if he can still blush even a little; those who are not wholly depraved dare to do these things only under cover and in secret. And yet trying to hide what you are doing is the mark of a man who admits he is doing wrong.
"Yes, by Zeus," someone says, "but the man who sleeps with a courtesan, or, by Zeus, with a woman who has no husband, doesn't wrong anyone, not in the way the adulterer wrongs the husband of the woman he has corrupted. He doesn't destroy anyone's hope of children."
For my part, I won't press the point that everyone who does wrong at once commits an injustice, if not against any of the people around him, then certainly against himself, by showing himself worse and less worthy of honor; for the wrongdoer, to the extent that he does wrong, is worse and less worthy of honor. But let me leave the injustice aside. Self-indulgence, at least, must of absolute necessity belong to the man who gives in to shameful pleasure and enjoys wallowing in filth, like pigs. And such a man, as much as any, is the master who goes to bed with his own slave woman, a thing some people think is just about the most blameless of all, since every master is supposed to have full power to use his own slave however he likes.
To this my answer is simple. If anyone sees nothing shameful or improper in a master's going to bed with his own slave woman, especially if she happens to have no husband, let him reckon how it would look to him if a mistress went to bed with a male slave. Wouldn't it seem intolerable, not only if a woman with a lawful husband took a slave to her bed, but even if she did it with no husband at all? And yet surely no one will expect men to be worse than women, or less able to school their own desires, the stronger in judgment less able than the weaker, the rulers than the ruled. Men ought to be far better than women, if they expect to be set over women. But if they turn out to have less self-control ... and worse as well.9
That it is the work of lack of self-control, and of nothing else, for a master to go to bed with a slave woman, what need is there even to say? Everyone knows it.
Lecture 13: What Marriage Is For
The heart of marriage, he said, is a partnership in living and in having children. The man who marries and the woman he marries ought to come together, each with the other, for this purpose: to live with one another and to have children together, and to count everything they have as shared and nothing as their own, not even their bodies. The birth of a human being, which this union brings about, is a great thing. But that alone is not yet enough for a husband, since it could happen without marriage too, if people coupled some other way, as the animals couple. In marriage there must above all be a life lived together, and a husband and wife caring for each other, in health and in sickness and at every moment, since each of them comes to marriage wanting that care just as they want children. Where this care is complete, and the two who live together give it to each other completely, each trying to outdo the other, that marriage is as it ought to be and worth envying, for a partnership like that is a fine thing. But where each looks only to his own interest and neglects the other, or, by Zeus, where just one of them is like that, living in the same house but with his mind on things outside it, unwilling to pull in the same direction as the one he is yoked to and to be of one heart with her, there the partnership is bound to fall apart, and things go badly for the two who share the house. Either they separate for good, or they stay together on terms worse than living alone.
That is why people who marry should not look at family, to see whether the other comes from the best people, or at money, to see whether they have a great deal, or at bodies, to see whether they are beautiful. Wealth, beauty and good birth do nothing by their nature to strengthen a partnership, or to bring the two into harmony either, and they don't make for better children. As for bodies, the ones good enough for marriage are those that are healthy, middling in looks, and able to do their own work with their own hands. Bodies like these would be less exposed to the designs of the self-indulgent, would do more of the work a body does, and would not fall short in bearing children. And the souls one should think best suited to marriage are those with the best natural gift for self-control and justice, and for virtue in general. What marriage is a good one without harmony? What partnership is worth anything? And how could two people who are bad be in harmony with each other? Or how could a good person be in harmony with a bad one? No better than a warped plank would join a straight one, or two warped planks join each other. The warped will not fit its like, the warped, and fits its opposite, the straight, worse still. In the same way the bad man is no friend to the bad and is not in harmony with him, and far less with the good.
Lecture 14: Is Marriage an Obstacle to Philosophy?
When someone else said that marriage, and life with a wife, seemed to him an obstacle to studying philosophy, Musonius said: It was no obstacle to Pythagoras, or to Socrates, or to Crates the Cynic, and each of them lived with a wife; and nobody could name others who did philosophy better than they did. Crates, what's more, had no house, no furniture and no property at all, and still he married; and then, not having so much as a roof of his own, he spent his days and his nights with his wife in the public colonnades of Athens. And we, who set out each day from a house of our own, some of us with household slaves to wait on us, still dare to say that marriage is an obstacle to philosophy?
Again, the philosopher is surely the teacher and the guide of human beings in everything that belongs to a human being in line with nature; and marriage, if anything is, is plainly in line with nature. Why else did the maker of mankind first cut our race in two, and then give it two kinds of sexual parts, one female and one male, and then plant in each a strong desire for the company and partnership of the other, and blend into both a strong longing for each other, male for female and female for male? Isn't it obvious, then, that he wanted the two to be together and live together, to work out between them the means of living, and to bring children into the world and raise them together, so that our race might go on forever?
Tell me, then: is it fitting for each person to look after his neighbors' affairs as well, and to see that there are households in his city, that the city is not left empty, and that the community does well? If you say that each person should look out only for himself, you are declaring that a human being is no different from a wolf, or from any of the wildest beasts, which live by nature on violence and greed, sparing nothing from which they can get some pleasure, and having no share in partnership, no share in working with one another, no share in justice of any kind. But suppose you agree that human nature is most like the bee, which cannot live alone, since it dies when it is cut off by itself, but which is bent on the one common work of its kind and acts and labors together with those around it. If that is how things are, and if besides this we have come to take injustice, savagery and indifference to a neighbor in trouble as a human being's vice, and kindness to others, goodness, justice, and being ready to do good and to take care of one's neighbor as a human being's virtue, then each of us must take thought for his own city as well, and build a household for it. And the building of a household begins with marriage. It follows that the man who takes marriage away from mankind takes away the household, takes away the city, and takes away the whole human race. It could not go on if no children were born, and no children would be born, justly and lawfully at least, if there were no marriage.
That a household or a city is made up neither of women alone nor of men alone, but of the partnership of the two, is clear. And you could find no partnership more necessary than that of men and women, or more dear. What comrade is as pleasing to his comrade as a wife after her husband's heart is to the man who married her? What brother to his brother? What son to his parents? Who is missed as much when away as a husband by his wife and a wife by her husband? Whose company would better lighten grief, or add to joy, or set right a misfortune? For whom else is it the custom that everything should be shared, bodies, souls and money, except husband and wife? That is why all people consider the love of husband and wife the oldest and most honored of all; and no mother or father who has any sense thinks it right to be dearer to their own child than the one joined to that child in marriage. And the old story seems to show how far a wife's love for her husband goes beyond parents' love for their children. Admetus received this gift from the gods: if he could provide someone to die in his place, he would live twice the time allotted to him. His parents would not agree to die for him, old as they were; but his wedded wife Alcestis, who was still quite young, readily accepted death in her husband's place.
That marriage is a great thing and worth taking seriously is clear from this as well: great gods watch over it, as people count gods great. First comes Hera, which is why we call her Hera of the Yoke; then Eros; then Aphrodite. We assume that all of these have made it their work to bring man and woman together to have children. Where could Eros more rightly be present than at the lawful union of husband and wife? Where Hera? Where Aphrodite? When could anyone pray to these gods more fittingly than when going to be married? And what has a better claim to be called Aphrodite's work than the union of a wife with the man who married her? Why, then, would anyone say that gods so great look after and watch over marriage and the having of children, and yet that these things are not fitting for a human being? And why fitting for a human being, but not for a philosopher? Is it because the philosopher ought to be worse than other men? Surely not: he ought to be better, and more just, and of nobler character. Or is it that the man who cares nothing for his city is not a worse and more unjust man than the one who cares for it, and the man who looks only to himself than the one who looks to the common good? Or is it that the man who chooses a solitary life loves his city more, is kinder to human beings, and is more devoted to the community, than the man who runs a household, raises children, and makes his own city larger, which is just what the married man does?
That it is fitting for the philosopher to concern himself with marriage and children, then, is clear. And if this is fitting, how could that argument you were making just now be right, young man, that marriage is an obstacle to the philosopher? Doing philosophy is plainly nothing other than searching out by reason what is proper and fitting and putting it into practice in deed.
That, at least, was the kind of thing he said on that occasion.
Lecture 15: Should Every Child That Is Born Be Raised?
And the lawgivers, whose whole task it was to search out and consider what is good for a city and what is bad, what helps the community and what harms it: didn't all of them, too, think it most advantageous for cities that the citizens' households should multiply, and most harmful that they should dwindle? Didn't they hold that for citizens to have no children, or few, was a loss, and that to have children, and by Zeus to have many, was a gain? That is why they forbade women to procure abortions and laid a penalty on those who disobeyed; why they forbade them to resort to contraceptives or otherwise to prevent pregnancy; and why they set rewards for large families, for husband and wife alike, and made childlessness liable to a penalty. How, then, could we not be doing what is unjust and against the law if we act against the will of the lawgivers, men who were godlike and dear to the gods, whom it is thought both right and to our advantage to follow? And we would be acting against it if we stopped ourselves from having many children. And how would we not be sinning, too, against our ancestral gods, and against Zeus, the god of kinship, by doing this? Just as the man who wrongs strangers sins against Zeus, the god of strangers, and the man who wrongs his friends sins against Zeus, the god of friendship, so whoever wrongs his own kin sins against his ancestral gods and against Zeus, the god of kinship, who watches over the wrongs done within families; and the man who sins against the gods is impious.
That raising many children is a fine thing and a profitable one, besides, anyone could learn by reckoning how honored a man with many children is in his city, how much respect he commands from his neighbors, and how much more power he has than all his equals, unless they are as well supplied with children as he is. Just as a man with many friends, I think, is more powerful than a man without friends, so the man with many children is more powerful, and by far, than the man who has none or only a few, and by as much more as a son is closer to each of us than a friend. It is worth thinking, too, what a sight it is: a father of many children, or a mother, seen with all their children around them. You could not watch a procession to the gods so beautiful, or a chorus dancing in good order at a festival so well worth seeing, as a chorus of many children going ahead of their father or their mother through the city, leading their parents by the hand or looking after them in some other way with care. What is finer than that sight? Who is more to be envied than parents like these, especially if they are decent people? For whom else would anyone so gladly join in praying to the gods for good things, or so gladly help in whatever they needed?
"Yes, by Zeus," someone says, "but if I'm poor and short of money and have a lot of children, where would I get the means to feed them all?"
And where do these little birds, far poorer than you, the swallows and the nightingales, the larks and the blackbirds, get the means to feed their own young? Homer speaks of them like this:
As a bird brings every morsel she catches to her unfledged chicks, though it goes hard with her. — Iliad 9.323-324.
Are these creatures ahead of a human being in intelligence? You couldn't say so. In strength and might, then? Still far less. Well, do they lay up food and store it? ...10
What seems to me most terrible of all is that some people who cannot even plead poverty, who are well off and some of them even rich, still dare to refuse to raise the children born later and to expose them, so that the ones born earlier may be better off. They contrive prosperity for their children by an unholy act, doing away with those children's own brothers so that they may have a larger share of their father's estate; and they little know how much better many brothers are than much money. Money stirs up plots among one's neighbors; brothers keep the plotters off. Money itself needs protecting; brothers are the strongest protectors there are. No friend can be set beside a brother as a good thing, and no help from other people, however like and equal to us, can be set beside the help that comes from brothers. What good thing could anyone compare with a brother's goodwill when it comes to keeping safe? Whom could anyone find a kinder partner in his good fortune than a decent brother? Whose presence would anyone long for more in misfortune than such a brother's? For my part, I think the man most to be envied is the one who lives among many brothers who are of one mind, and I believe that man is dearest to the gods, since he has his good things at home. That is why I think each of us should try to leave his children brothers rather than money, since he will be leaving them greater means to good things.
Lecture 16: Must We Obey Our Parents in Everything?
A young man who wanted to study philosophy, and whose father was stopping him, put a question to him in something like these words: "Musonius, must we obey our parents in everything, or are there some things in which we may refuse to listen to them?"
And Musonius said: That each of us should obey his own mother or father seems a fine thing, and I for one approve of it. But let us look at what obeying is; or rather, let us first find out what disobeying is like, and who the disobedient person is, and then we'll see better what obeying is.
Come, then. Suppose a father who is no doctor and knows nothing of what makes for health and what for sickness ordered his sick son to take something as good for him, and it was in fact harmful and bad for him, and the sick son knew it. In not doing what he was ordered, would the son be disobeying, would he be a disobedient son? It doesn't seem so. Or suppose a father who was ill himself asked for wine or food at the wrong time, which would make his illness worse if he got it, and his son, knowing this, did not give it to him: is he disobeying his father? You can't say so. And far less still, I think, would anyone call that son disobedient who has a greedy father, is told by him to steal, or to keep back money left with him in trust, and does not carry out the order. Or don't you think there are fathers who give their own children orders like these? I know of one so wicked that, having a son in the bloom of his youth, he sold the boy's bloom for money. Now if that boy who was sold, when his father sent him off to his disgrace, had refused and not gone, would we have said the boy was disobedient, or that he was being self-controlled? Or isn't this even worth asking? "Disobeying" and "disobedient" are words of abuse and reproach; but not doing what one ought not to do is no reproach at all, it is praise. When someone does not carry out the order of a father, or of a magistrate, or even, by Zeus, of a master, because what he orders is bad or unjust or shameful, he is in no way disobeying, just as he does no wrong and makes no mistake. The only person who disobeys is the one who ignores and pays no heed to orders that are good and right and to his own advantage.
That, then, is what the disobedient man is like. The obedient man is his opposite in every way: he is the one who listens to whoever advises him to do what is fitting, and follows that advice of his own free will. A person obeys his parents, then, when, if they advise what is good, he does it willingly. I go further, though: I say that a person who does what he ought and what is good for him is obeying his parents even if his parents have not advised it. And see that I'm right, like this. The man who does what his father wants, and follows his father's will, obeys his father, I think; and the man who does what he ought and what is better follows his father's will. How so? Because all parents surely wish their children well, and wishing them well, they want them to do what they ought and what is good for them. Whoever does what is fitting, then, and good for him does what his parents want, and in doing it he obeys his parents, even if they have not told him in so many words to do it. This, then, is the one thing anyone who wants to obey his parents needs to consider, in every single thing he does: whether what he is about to do is right and good for him, and nothing else. If it is, then it follows at once that in doing it he is obeying his parents.
Don't you be afraid, then, young man, that you will be disobeying your father if, when he tells you to do what you ought not to do, you keep from doing it, or, when he forbids what you ought to do, you do it anyway. And don't let your father be your excuse for doing wrong, whether he orders something that isn't right or forbids something that is. You are under no necessity to carry out orders that are not good; and I don't think you are unaware of that yourself. You wouldn't defer to your father in music, if he, knowing nothing about music, ordered you to strike the lyre unmusically; or if you knew your letters and he didn't, and he told you to write and read not as you were taught but some other way; nor, if you knew how to steer a ship and he was no helmsman, and he told you to move the steering oar the wrong way, would you pay attention to him.
Well, then? Those cases are clear. But if your father stops you from studying philosophy when you know, and have heard, what philosophy is, and he himself does not, should you listen to him, or should you rather teach him better, since the advice he gives you is not good? I think you should teach him. Perhaps someone could even persuade his own father, by argument alone, to think about philosophy as he should, unless his father is altogether hard by nature. But if the father is not persuaded by argument and will not follow it, then the son's deeds, at least, will certainly win him over, if the son is really studying philosophy. As a philosopher he will be more eager than anyone to serve his father in every kind of service; he will be the most orderly and gentle of sons, in company the least quarrelsome or selfish, not rash, not troublesome, not quick to anger. He will have self-restraint, besides, over his tongue, his belly and sex, and will stand firm against terrors and hardships; he will be the ablest of all at seeing what is right, and will never go against what he sees to be right. That is why he will give up every pleasure to his father of his own free will, and take the hardships on himself before his father has to. Who would not pray to the gods for a son like that? And who that had one would not love him, a son who makes his father envied and called blessed by every sensible person?
But suppose, young man, that even being such a son, as you certainly will be if you are really studying philosophy, you do not win your father over or persuade him to allow you to do this and leave you to it. Then reckon it up like this. Your father forbids you to study philosophy; but Zeus, the father all men and gods share, commands you to and urges you on. His command and his law is that a human being be just, good, ready to do good, self-controlled, high-minded, above hardships, above pleasures, and clean of all envy and all scheming; to put it in a word, the law of Zeus commands a human being to be good. And being good is the same thing as being a philosopher. If, then, by obeying your father you will be following a man, and by studying philosophy you will be following Zeus, it is clear that you must study philosophy rather than not.
But, by Zeus, your father will shut you in and keep you locked up, just to stop you studying philosophy. He may well do that; but he won't keep you from studying philosophy if you don't want him to. We do philosophy not with a hand or a foot or the rest of the body, but with the soul, and with a small part of it, the part we call the mind. And this the god has set in the safest of places, where it cannot be seen or seized, free of all compulsion and its own master. Above all if your mind is a good one, your father will not be able to stop you from using it, or from thinking what you ought to think, or from delighting in what is fine and taking no delight in what is shameful, or from choosing the one and turning away from the other. In doing these things you would be studying philosophy at once; and you will not need at all to wear the philosopher's rough cloak, or go about without a tunic, or grow your hair long, or set yourself apart from ordinary people. These things are becoming in philosophers, it is true; but philosophy does not consist in them. It consists in thinking what one ought to think and reasoning as one ought to reason.
Lecture 17: What Is the Best Provision for Old Age?
Again, when an old man asked him what the best provision for old age would be, he said: The same as for youth, to live by a settled method and in line with nature. You would understand best what this means if you considered that human nature was not made for pleasure. Not even a horse, or a dog, or an ox, all of them creatures of far less worth than a human being, was made for pleasure. Nobody would think a horse had reached its proper end if it ate and drank and mated without restraint and did none of the things that belong to a horse; or a dog, if it enjoyed every pleasure, as the horse did, and did none of the things that make dogs count as good dogs; or any other animal at all, if it were deprived of the work proper to it and stuffed full of pleasures. No creature, then, could be said to live in line with nature in that way; the one that does is the one that most plainly shows its virtue through what it does according to its own nature. Each creature's nature leads it toward that creature's own virtue, and so it is reasonable to think that a human being, too, lives in line with nature not when he lives in pleasure but when he lives in virtue. Then he could rightly be praised, and think well of himself, and be hopeful and confident; and these are bound to bring gladness and a joy that lasts.
To put it generally, man alone of all the creatures on earth is an image of God, and his virtues are close to God's own, since even among the gods we can imagine nothing better than practical wisdom and justice, and courage and self-control. Just as God, through the presence of these virtues, is unconquered by pleasure and unconquered by greed, above desire, above envy and jealousy, high-minded, ready to do good and kind to human beings (for that is how we think of God), so we must think that man, his image, when he is in line with nature, is like him, and that being like him he is to be envied; and being someone to be envied, he would be happy at once, since we envy nobody but the happy. And it is not impossible for a human being to become like this. We could not have arrived at the idea of these virtues from anywhere but human nature itself, from having met certain men of this kind, whom people used to call divine and godlike.
Now suppose a man happened, while he was still young, to have taken care to get a right education, learning well enough all that belongs to good studies and training thoroughly in everything that is learned by training. In old age he would draw on the resources he carries within him and live in line with nature. He would bear the loss of the pleasures of his youth without distress, and the weakness that has come on his body without distress, and he would not be put out at being looked down on by his neighbors or neglected by his family and friends, since against all of this he has a fine remedy in his own mind: the education he already has. But suppose a man has had less of an education, yet shows an eagerness for better things and is able to be persuaded by what is well said. He would do well to seek out and listen to practical advice from those who have made it their work to know what is harmful to human beings and what is beneficial, how one might escape the one and gain the other, and how one might calmly accept, when they come, the things that are not bad but seem so. If he listens to these teachers and heeds them (for listening without heeding is the most profitless thing there is), he would order his old age well, and above all he would be rid of the fear of death, which more than anything troubles and oppresses the old, as though they had forgotten that every mortal owes a death.
And what makes life most miserable for the old is exactly this, the fear of death, as the orator Isocrates, at any rate, admitted. They say that when someone asked him how he was getting on, he said: as you would expect of a man who is ninety years old and thinks death the very worst of evils. How, though, could he have had any share of education, or any knowledge of what is really good or bad, when he took for an evil the thing that of necessity follows the best life? For if the best life is the good man's, death is the end of that life too. As I was saying, then, if a man acquired this one thing in old age, the ability to await death without fear and with confidence, he would have gained no small part of living without distress and in line with nature. And he could acquire it by spending time with those who are philosophers in fact and not merely in name, if he is willing to heed them.
I say, then, that the best provision for old age is the one I named at the start: to live in line with nature, doing and thinking as one ought. That is how an old man would be most cheerful and most deserving of praise, and with these he would live a fortunate and honored life. If anyone thinks wealth is the greatest comfort for the old, and that it gives them a life without distress, he thinks wrong. Wealth can supply people with pleasures, the pleasures of food and drink and sex and the like, but it could never give its owner cheerfulness or freedom from distress. Many of the rich are witnesses to this, distressed and dejected and counting themselves wretched. That is why wealth would not be a fine support for old age either.
Lecture 18: On Food
Food was a subject he returned to often, and he spoke of it with great intensity, as a matter of no small importance and one whose consequences were not small either, since he held that self-restraint in food and drink was the beginning and the foundation of self-control. Once, though, he set aside the arguments he went through every time and said something like this. Just as we should prefer plain food to extravagant food, and food that is easy to get to food that is hard to get, so we should prefer food that is natural to human beings to food that is not. What is natural to us is food from the things that grow out of the earth, both the grains and the other plants that can nourish a human being well enough, and food from animals that are not killed but are of use to us in other ways. Of these foods the most suitable are the ones we can use straight away, without fire, since they are also the readiest to hand: fruit in season, some vegetables, milk, cheese and honeycomb. Those that need fire, whether grains or vegetables, are not unsuitable either; all of them are natural to human beings.
Meat, on the other hand, he declared to be a more savage kind of food, better suited to wild beasts. He said it was heavier, too, and a hindrance to thinking and understanding, because the vapor that rises from it is murkier and darkens the soul; which is why those who eat a good deal of it are plainly slower of mind. A human being, he said, is of all the creatures on earth the nearest kin to the gods, and so he should also be nourished in the way most like the gods. They are content with the vapors that rise up from earth and water; and the food most like theirs that we can take, he would say, is the lightest and purest. In this way our soul too would be pure and dry, and a soul of that kind would be the best and the wisest, as Heraclitus thought when he said, "The dry soul is a beam of light, wisest and best."
As it is, he said, we feed ourselves far worse than the animals that lack reason. However hard they are driven toward their food by appetite, as if by a whip, they are still free of trickery and fuss over what they eat; they are content with whatever comes their way and seek only to be full, nothing beyond that. We, though, think up arts and contrivances of every kind to sweeten the eating of our food and flatter the swallowing of it all the more. We have gone so far in greed and gourmandizing that some people have written books on cookery, as others have on music and medicine, books that do a great deal to increase the pleasure in the throat and ruin the health. You can see, at any rate, that people who live in luxury over their food are in far worse shape in their bodies, and some of them are just like pregnant women with their cravings: like those women, they turn up their noses at the most ordinary foods and have ruined stomachs. Poor iron keeps needing a fresh edge put on it, and in the same way their stomachs keep wanting an edge put on them while they eat, with wine unmixed with water, or vinegar, or some sharp relish.
Not so the Spartan. He saw a man who had been served a fat and expensive little bird refuse to eat it, out of luxury, saying he couldn't. "Well, I could eat a vulture," the Spartan said, "or a buzzard." And Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoics, did not think he should take more delicate food even when he was ill. When the doctor who was treating him told him to eat a young pigeon, he would not stand for it. "Treat me as you would Manes," he said, Manes being a common name for a slave. He thought, I suppose, that he should get nothing softer in his treatment than any slave would get when he was ill; if they can be cured without being given more expensive food, so can we. A good man should never be softer than any slave. That is why Zeno was right to think we should be on our guard against extravagance in food and not give way to it even a little, since a man who gives way once is likely to go a very long way, pleasure having great power to grow in drink and food.
These, then, were the things he said about food on that occasion, and they struck us as newer than what he used to say every time.
Gluttony and gourmandizing are most shameful, he said; no one will deny it. Yet I have noticed very few people taking thought how to escape them. Most, I see, crave such foods when they are absent, cannot keep away from them when they are present, and when they do have them, use them unsparingly, to the point of harming the body. And yet what could gluttony be but lack of self-control about food, which makes people put what tastes pleasant ahead of what does them good? And gourmandizing is nothing other than want of measure in the use of delicacies. Want of measure is bad everywhere, but here above all it shows its own nature, making gourmands like pigs or dogs in their greed, instead of human beings, unable to behave decently with their hands, with their eyes, or in their swallowing: so far does the desire for the pleasure in delicacies put them beside themselves.
That it is most shameful to be like this about food is plain, since in it we become like senseless animals rather than sensible human beings. And since this is most shameful, its opposite would be the finest thing: to eat in an orderly and seemly way, and to show self-control here first. That is not easy; it takes a great deal of care and training. Why so? Because, of the many pleasures that entice a human being to go wrong and force him to give in to them against his own advantage, the pleasure of food may well be the hardest of all to fight. The other pleasures we meet more rarely, and some of them we can keep away from for months and whole years; this one we have to face every single day, and usually twice a day, since a human being cannot live any other way. The more often we encounter the pleasure of eating, then, the more dangers there are in it.
What's more, at every meal there is not one danger of going wrong but several. The man who eats more than he should goes wrong, and no less the man who bolts his food, and the man who gets himself messier with the delicacies than he should, and the man who chooses sweeter foods over healthier ones, and the man who does not share equally with those eating with him. There is yet another wrong about food, when we take it at the wrong time, and drop something else we ought to be doing in order to eat. With so many wrongs about food, and others besides, anyone who means to be self-controlled has to keep clean of them all and be guilty of none. And he will keep clean and never go wrong if he trains and accustoms himself to choose his food not for pleasure but for nourishment, not to smooth his swallowing but to strengthen his body. The throat was made to be a passage for food, not an instrument of pleasure, and the stomach exists for the same purpose as the root in every plant. The root feeds the plant by drawing in nourishment from outside, and in the same way the stomach nourishes the animal from the food and drink brought into it. And as plants are nourished in order to stay alive and not for pleasure, so too for us food is the medicine that keeps us alive. That is why we ought to eat so as to live, not for the pleasure of it, if we mean to follow that excellent saying of Socrates, who said that most people live in order to eat, but he ate in order to live. Surely no human being who wants to be decent will think it right to be like the many and live for eating, as they do, hunting down the pleasure that comes from food wherever it can be found.
That God, who made human beings, provided food and drink for them for their preservation and not for their pleasure, you could learn best from this. When food is doing its own work most of all, in digestion and in spreading through the body, it gives a person no pleasure whatever. We are nourished and strengthened by it then, but we feel no pleasure at all, though that time is longer than the time we spend eating. Yet if God had devised food for us for the sake of pleasure, we ought to have been pleased by it during that longer time, and not during the briefest moment, while we swallow. All the same, for the sake of that briefest moment of pleasure, countless delicacies are prepared, the sea is sailed to its farthest ends, cooks are more sought after than farmers, and some people set out dinners that cost the price of whole estates; and all this though the body gets no benefit at all from the extravagance of the food.
Quite the contrary: those who eat the plainest food are the strongest. You can see that household slaves, as a rule, are sturdier than their masters, country people than city people, and the poor than the rich; they are better able to toil, less worn out by their work, less often ill, and readier to bear cold, heat, going without sleep and everything of that kind. And even if extravagant food and plain food strengthened the body equally, plain food would still be the one to choose, because it goes better with self-control and better befits a good man; just as, for decent people, food that is easy to get is more fitting than food that is hard to get, food that gives no trouble than food that brings trouble with it, and food that is ready than food that is not.
To sum up everything about food, I say that its aim should be health and strength, since these are the only reasons to eat, and they need no extravagance at all; and that while eating we should take care of seemliness and fitting measure, and of being, as far as we can, clean and unhurried.
Lecture 19: On Clothing and Shelter
That is what he said about food. He held, too, that in sheltering the body we should look for what self-control allows, not for what is extravagant and superfluous. Clothing and footwear, he said, should be used in just the way we use armor: to protect the body, not for show. The finest weapons are the strongest, the ones best able to protect the man who uses them, not the ones that catch the eye and glitter; and in the same way the best clothing and shoes are those most useful to the body, not those that can turn the heads of fools. For shelter ought to make what it shelters better and stronger than it was, not weaker and worse. Those who use their coverings to make their flesh smooth and soft make their bodies worse, since a pampered, soft body is far worse than a body that is hard and seasoned by hardship; and those who toughen and firm their bodies by what they wear are the only ones who do any good to what they cover.
That is why it is not good at all to bundle the body up in a lot of clothes, or wind it round with bands of cloth, or soften the hands and feet by wrapping them in felt or some other fabric, at least for those who aren't ill. Nor is it good to have no taste at all of cold and heat. We should be a little cold in winter, take the sun in summer, and keep to the shade as little as we can. To wear one tunic is better than to need two, and better than wearing one is wearing none, only a cloak. Going barefoot, too, is better than wearing shoes, for anyone who can manage it; for to have your feet bound into shoes is very nearly to have them in bonds, while going barefoot gives the feet a great deal of freedom and ease of movement, once they are trained to it. That is why you can see the couriers who run long distances not wearing shoes on the road, and the runners among athletes would not be able to keep their speed if they had to run in shoes.
And since it is for shelter that we build houses too, I say that these as well should be built for what our needs require: to keep off the cold, to keep off the worst of the heat, and to be a protection from sun and wind for those who need one. In general, whatever a natural cave would give us, with moderate room for a human being to creep into, a house ought to give us, with this much more at most: a suitable place to store human food. What are courtyards ringed with columns for? What are colored plasters for, and gilded ceilings? What is the extravagance of stones for, some fitted together on the floor, some set into the walls, some brought from very far away at enormous cost? Aren't all these things superfluous and unnecessary? We can live and be healthy without them; they bring endless trouble, and they cost a great deal of money, with which a man could have done good to many people, publicly and privately. And how much more glorious is it to do good to many than to live extravagantly? How much more in keeping with nobility of character is it to spend on human beings than to spend on wood and stone? How much more useful than to have a great house around you is it to have many friends, which is what the man who eagerly does good comes to have? What benefit could anyone get from the size and beauty of a house as great as the benefit of giving to his city and his fellow citizens out of his own means?
Lecture 20: On Furnishings
The extravagance of household furnishings, too, plainly goes along with the extravagance of houses and is close kin to it: couches, tables, bedclothes, cups and the like, all of them going far beyond use and well past what is necessary. Couches of ivory and silver, or, by Zeus, of gold; tables of the same materials; coverlets of sea purple and of other colors hard to come by; cups made of gold and silver, and others of stone, or of materials like stone, that rival the silver and gold ones in extravagance. And all this is pursued with zeal, though a plain cot gives us no worse a place to lie down than a silver or an ivory couch, and a coarse goat's-hair blanket is quite good enough to spread under us, with no need of a purple or a scarlet one. We can eat without any harm from a wooden table, without longing in the least for a silver one; and we can drink, by Zeus, from earthenware cups, which quench thirst just as well as golden ones by nature, do not spoil the wine poured into them, and give it a sweeter smell than gold or silver does.
In general, the merit and the fault of furnishings could rightly be judged by three things: getting them, using them, and keeping them. Those that are hard to get, or unsuited to use, or not easy to keep are worse; those we get without difficulty, are pleased with when we use them with ease, and keep easily, are better. That is why earthenware and iron things and everything of that kind are far better than silver and gold ones. They are easier to get, being cheaper; their use is greater, since we can put them on the fire without a second thought, and we can't do that with the others; and they need less guarding, since cheap things are less schemed against than expensive ones. Cleaning, too, which is a part of keeping them, is more work with expensive things. A horse bought for a small price that does a great deal of work is preferable to one that does little and cost a lot; and in the same way plainer furnishings that serve many uses are better than the opposite kind.
Why, then, are rare and expensive things pursued rather than ordinary and cheap ones? Because people do not know what is fine and good, and among fools what seems is sought in place of what is, just as madmen often think black things are white; and folly is the closest kin of madness. Among lawgivers, at any rate, we would find the best of them, and Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, first of all, driving extravagance out of Sparta and bringing in plain living in its place, preferring a sparse way of life to an excessive one for the sake of courage, rejecting luxury as a ruin, and asking that a willingness to take on hardship be prized as what keeps men safe. The proof of this is the endurance of the young men there, who were trained to bear hunger and thirst, and cold besides, and blows and other hardships ...11
... raised on austere customs, the Spartans of old both were and were thought to be the best of the Greeks, and they made their own poverty more enviable than the wealth of the King of Persia.
I, for my part, would rather be ill than live in luxury. Illness harms only the body, but luxury ruins both, soul and body, producing weakness and feebleness in the body and self-indulgence and unmanliness in the soul. What's more, luxury breeds injustice, because it breeds greed as well. A man who lives in luxury cannot help being extravagant; an extravagant man cannot want to spend little; wanting to spend much, he cannot help trying to get much; and trying to get much, he cannot help being greedy and unjust, since no one could get much by just means. There is another way, too, in which the man who lives in luxury is bound to be unjust. He would shrink from undergoing the hardships he owes his own city, or he would no longer be living in luxury; and if he had to suffer for his friends or relatives, he would not put up with it, since his luxury will not let him. Then again, there are times when a man who wants to be just toward the gods has to take on hardship for their sake, to perform sacrifices or rites of initiation or some other service to the gods, and here too the man who lives in luxury will fall short. He is bound to be unjust in every way, then, to his city, to his friends and to the gods, since he does not do what he ought to do. Luxury, then, as a cause of injustice too, is to be shunned by every means.
Lecture 21: On Cutting the Hair
He said that a man should give his head a haircut in much the same way as we give a vine its pruning, only for the sake of removing what is useless ...12
... nor the beard from the chin, since this too is a kind of shelter that nature has provided for us. The beard, besides, is the mark of the male, as the comb is for the rooster and the mane for the lion. Of the hair on the head, then, we should take away whatever is a nuisance, but of the beard nothing. Nor is the beard a nuisance at all, as long as the body is healthy, or isn't suffering from the sort of illness that would call for removing the hair on the chin.
Zeno's saying is well put, he said: that we should cut our hair for the same reason that we let it grow, for the sake of what is in line with nature, so that we are not weighed down by it or hampered by it in anything we do. Nature plainly takes more care against too little than against too much, in plants and in animals alike, because taking away an excess is much easier and simpler than adding what is lacking. Human reason ought to help nature both ways, filling up what is lacking as far as it can be filled, and reducing and taking away what is excessive. That is why we should cut our hair only to take away the excess, and not for adornment, as some people think they should, who shave their chins smooth, imitating the beardless, or, by Zeus, boys whose beards are just coming in, and do not cut the hair of their heads evenly, but the front differently from the back.
This, though it passes for adornment, is a great disfigurement, and it differs in no way from the prettifying women do. Women plait some parts of their hair, let other parts hang loose, and arrange others in yet another way, to look more beautiful; and men who cut their hair like this plainly do it out of a desire to look handsome to those they want to please, removing some of their hair altogether and arranging the rest so that it looks as attractive as possible to the women and the boys whose admiration they need. Some even cut their hair and shave their chins because the hair weighs them down; and these men have plainly been broken by luxury and unmanned altogether, since they put up with being seen as half-men, neither men nor women, and womanish, which they ought to avoid at all costs, if they really were men. How can hair be a burden to human beings? Unless, by Zeus, someone would say that feathers are a burden to birds too.
Fragments and Sayings
Fragment 22
From Musonius.
You cannot live the present day well unless you set it before you as your last.
Fragment 23
From Musonius.
Why do we hold tyrants up to blame, when we ourselves are far worse than they are? We have the same impulses they have; it is only our fortunes that differ.
Fragment 24
From Musonius.
If what we like is to be measured by pleasure, nothing is more pleasant than self-control; if what we shun is to be measured by hardship, nothing brings more hardship than lack of self-control.
Fragment 25
From Musonius.
Musonius used to say that it was the height of shamelessness to remember the weakness of the body when it comes to enduring hardships, and to forget it when it comes to pleasures.
Fragment 26
From Musonius.
The beginning of not shrinking from doing shameful things is not shrinking from saying them.
Fragment 27
From Musonius.
If it is your will to hold above all to what is to your advantage, don't chafe at your circumstances. Think how many things in your life have already turned out not as you wanted but as was to your advantage.
Fragment 28
From Musonius.
Seize the chance to die well while it is open to you, or before long death will be at hand and dying well no longer within your power.
Fragment 29
By the same.
A man whose life is of benefit to many cannot die as is fitting unless his death is of benefit to more.
Fragment 30
From Musonius.
You will be worthy of respect from everyone if you first begin by respecting yourself.
Fragment 31
From Musonius.
Rulers who have trained themselves to say to their subjects, about whatever they do, not "It is fitting for me" but "I am allowed to," do not last long.
Fragment 32
By the same.
Don't try to demand what is fitting from people who forgive you for doing what is not.
Fragment 33
By the same.
A ruler should try to be seen by his subjects as awe-inspiring rather than as frightening, since dignity goes with the one and harshness with the other.
Fragment 34
From Musonius.
We will condemn the treasures of Croesus of Lydia and Cinyras of Cyprus as the depths of poverty, and believe one man alone to be rich: the man who has been able to make himself free of need everywhere.
Fragment 35
From Musonius.
Since death is spun out by the Fates for all alike, it is not a late death that is blessed but a conspicuous one.
Fragment 36
Plutarch, On Controlling Anger.
And indeed, Sulla, one of the fine sayings of Musonius that we remember is this: that those who mean to stay well must live their whole lives under treatment. Reason, I think, should not be like hellebore, the purge that is carried out of the body together with the illness it cures; we should let it stay in the soul, holding our judgments together and guarding them. Its power is like that not of drugs but of wholesome food, which, joined with health, produces a good condition in those who grow used to it. Exhortations and warnings brought against passions at their height and swollen, on the other hand, work slowly and barely succeed, and they are no different from the strong scents held under the nose of an epileptic, which bring him round when he falls but do not rid him of the disease.13
Fragment 37
Plutarch, That We Ought Not to Borrow.
The famous Rutilius once came up to Musonius in Rome and said, "Musonius, Zeus the Savior, whom you imitate and try to be like, doesn't borrow money."
And Musonius smiled and said, "He doesn't lend it, either."
For Rutilius, who was a moneylender himself, was reproaching Musonius for borrowing.
Fragment 38
Rufus, from Epictetus' On Friendship.
Of the things that exist, God has put some up to us and some not up to us. Up to us he has put the finest and most important thing, the very thing by which he himself is happy: the use of impressions. When this is done rightly it is freedom, a smooth life, cheerfulness, steadiness; it is also justice and law and self-control and the whole of virtue. All the rest he did not make up to us. We too, then, ought to cast our vote with God, and, dividing things up in this way, lay claim in every way to the things that are up to us, and entrust the things not up to us to the universe, and whether it asks for our children, or our country, or our body, or anything at all, gladly give them up.14
Fragment 39
Rufus, from Epictetus' On Friendship.
Which of us does not admire what Lycurgus the Spartan did? One of his fellow citizens had blinded him in one eye, and the people handed the young man over to him to punish however he wished. Lycurgus refrained from that; instead he educated him, made a good man of him, and brought him into the theater. And when the Spartans were amazed, he said, "This man I received from you violent and insolent; I give him back to you decent and a good citizen."
Fragment 40
Rufus, from Epictetus' On Friendship.
But above all, this is the work of nature: to bind and fit our impulse to act to the impression of what is appropriate and useful.
Fragment 41
By the same.
To think that we will be despised by others unless we do every kind of harm to our chief enemies is the mark of very mean-spirited and foolish people. We do say that a man is thought contemptible because he is unable to do harm; but he is thought contemptible much more because he is unable to do good.
Fragment 42
Rufus, from Epictetus' On Friendship.
The nature of the universe was, is and will be such as it is, and things cannot happen otherwise than as they do now. Not only human beings and the other living things on earth have their share in this turning and changing, but divine things too, and, by Zeus, the four elements themselves turn and change up and down: earth becomes water and water air, and air changes again into the upper air, the aether, and the same manner of change runs from above downward. If a man tries to turn his mind toward these things, and to persuade himself to accept what must be of his own free will, he will live his life with great moderation and in harmony.
Fragment 43
Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.
Thrasea used to say, "I'd rather be killed today than banished tomorrow." And what did Rufus say to him? "If you're choosing death as the harder of the two, what a stupid choice. If you're choosing it as the easier, who gave you the choice? Why not practice being content with what you've been given?"15
Fragment 44
Epictetus, Discourses 1.7.
Why are we still lazy and easygoing and sluggish, and why do we look for excuses not to work hard and stay up at night perfecting our own reason?
"If I slip up on these things, have I killed my father?"
Slave, where was there a father here for you to kill? What have you done, then? You've made the one mistake there was to make in this area. That's exactly what I said to Rufus myself, when he scolded me for not finding the one missing step in some syllogism.
"Well, it's not as if I'd burned down the Capitol," I said.
"Slave," he said, "the missing step here is the Capitol."
Or are these the only mistakes there are, burning the Capitol and killing your father? And to use your impressions carelessly, pointlessly, any old way, and not follow an argument or a proof or a sophism, and in short not see what's on your side in question and answer and what isn't: is none of that a mistake?
Fragment 45
Epictetus, Discourses 1.9.
Rufus, too, used to test me by saying, "Your master is going to do such and such to you."
And when I answered him, "That's the human lot," he'd say, "Then why should I go and plead with him, when I can get the same thing from you? Really, if a man already has something from himself, it's pointless and silly to get it from somebody else."
Fragment 46
Epictetus, Discourses 3.6.
It isn't easy to win over young men who are soft. You can't catch a cheese with a hook. But the gifted ones hold on to reason even harder if you try to put them off. That's why Rufus would usually try to talk people out of it, using that as his test of who had the gift and who didn't. He used to say: "A stone, even if you throw it up in the air, will fall back down to earth, because that's how it's made. In the same way, the more you push a gifted man away, the more he leans toward what he was made for."
Fragment 47
Epictetus, Discourses 3.15.
When the emperor Galba had been murdered, someone said to Rufus, "Is the world run by Providence now?"
And he said, "Did I ever, even in passing, build my case that the world is run by Providence on Galba?"
Fragment 48
Epictetus, Discourses 3.23.
Rufus used to say, "If you have time to praise me, I'm saying nothing." And he spoke in such a way that each of us, sitting there, thought someone had told on him; he went straight to what was going on in us, and he put each man's faults before his eyes.
Fragment 49
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 5.1.
We have heard that Musonius the philosopher used to say this. "When a philosopher," he said, "is exhorting, warning, persuading, rebuking, or discussing any other part of his teaching, and his hearers pour out trite and commonplace praise from a shallow and careless heart, if they shout as well, if they gesticulate, if they are stirred, worked up and carried away by the charm of his phrases, the rhythms of his words, and what you might call the refrains of his style, then you may be sure that speaker and hearers alike are wasting their time, and that this is not a philosopher speaking but a piper playing. The mind of someone listening to a philosopher," he said, "while what is being said is useful and wholesome and brings remedies for error and vice, has no time or leisure for long and lavish praise. Whoever the listener is, unless he is altogether lost, he cannot help shuddering during the philosopher's speech itself, and feeling silent shame, and regret, and joy, and wonder, and showing changing looks and shifting feelings, according as the philosopher's handling of him has touched him and his awareness of the parts of his mind that are sound and the parts that are sick."
He used to say, besides, that great praise is not far from wonder, but that wonder at its greatest gives birth not to words but to silence. That is why, he said, Homer, the wisest of poets, does not make those who heard Odysseus telling of his labors so splendidly leap up, when he had finished speaking, or make a din or shout; he says they all fell silent, as if thunderstruck and stunned, the enchantment in their ears having flowed down to the very springs of their voices:
So he spoke, and they all fell hushed in silence, held by the spell throughout the shadowy halls. — Odyssey 13.1-2.
Fragment 50
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 9.2.
"Musonius," said Herodes, "once ordered a thousand sesterces to be given to a cadger of this sort who was making a show of being a philosopher. And when most of those present said the fellow was a worthless rogue, wicked and malicious and deserving of nothing good, Musonius, they say, smiled and said, 'Then money is just what he deserves.'"16
Fragment 51
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 16.1.
When we were still young men at school, we used to hear that this little Greek maxim, which I have set down here, had been said by Musonius the philosopher; and because it was said with truth and brilliance, and bound up in words that are brief and well rounded, we were very glad to remember it: "If you do something fine with hardship, the hardship passes, but the fine thing remains; if you do something shameful with pleasure, the pleasure passes, but the shameful thing remains."
Later we read this very thought set down in a speech of Cato's, the one he delivered to the cavalry at Numantia. And although it is put in words somewhat looser and longer than that Greek saying I mentioned, still, since it is earlier in time and older, it ought to seem the more venerable. These are the words of the speech: "Think it over in your minds. If you have done anything rightly through toil, that toil will soon leave you, but the good deed will not leave you as long as you live; but if you have done anything wickedly for pleasure, the pleasure will soon be gone, and that wicked deed will stay with you forever."17
Fragment 52
Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 18.2.
"To let the mind go slack," says Musonius, "is very nearly to let it go."
Fragment 53
Aelius Aristides.
Someone who was urging me to take heart went over a saying of Musonius with me. "Musonius," he said, "wanting to rouse a man who was ill and had given up, spoke to him something like this, taking him sharply to task: 'What are you waiting for? Where are you looking? Until the god himself comes and stands beside you and speaks aloud? Cut away what is dead in your soul, and you will know the god.'" That is what he told me Musonius said.