Epictetus' Discourses Vol. 2 (Books 3-4) & Encheiridion

ARRIAN'S DISCOURSES OF EPICTETUS

...you will achieve; but as long as you neglect these things, you must necessarily be ugly, even if you employ every trick to make yourself appear beautiful.

10 From this point on, I no longer know what to say to you. For if I say what I truly think, I will annoy you, and you will perhaps leave and never come back again. But if I do not speak, consider what I shall be doing: you come to me to be helped, but I will help you not at all; and you come to me as if to a philosopher, but I will say nothing to you like a philosopher.

11 Besides, is it not also cruel toward you for me to overlook you and leave you uncorrected? If you ever 12 come to your senses later on, you will quite rightly blame me: “What did Epictetus see in me, that when he saw me entering his presence in such a shameful state, he overlooked it and never said even a single word? 13 Did he despair of me so completely? Was I not young? Was I not capable of listening to reason? How many other young men at that age make many such mistakes? 14 I hear that a certain Polemonoriginal: Polemōna; a wealthy and dissolute Athenian youth who famously reformed his life after hearing a lecture on temperance underwent such a total transformation from a most decadent young man. original: "Once when drunk he burst in upon Xenocrates, but was converted by him and eventually succeeded him in the headship of the school." Polemon became the head of the Platonic Academy after his conversion. Granted, Epictetus did not think I would become another Polemon; yet he could have corrected my hairstyle, he could have stripped off my ornamentsoriginal: periammata; objects hung around the neck, such as amulets, charms, or decorative jewelry, he could have made me stop plucking my hairoriginal: psiloumenon; the practice of removing body hair to appear more effeminate, which the Stoics viewed as a violation of the natural order; but instead, seeing me in such a—what shall I call it?—guise, he remained silent.” 15 I do not say what kind of guise this is; you will say it for yourself.

The translator notes that in the Greek text (footnote 1), some editors suggest "ge" instead of "se." Footnotes 2, 3, and 4 represent minor textual corrections by scholars like Oldfather, Koraes, and Schweighäuser (s) to ensure the grammar of the original Greek remains clear.