Discourses - Book III   

day and night, and lying on the ground, and eating only what is
absolutely necessary they approach near to the impossibility of dying.
Cannot you write? Cannot you teach children? Cannot you be a
watchman at another person's door? "But it is shameful to come to such
necessity." Learn, then, first what are the things which are shameful,
and then tell us that you are a philosopher: but at present do not,
even if any other man call you so, allow it.
Is that shameful to you which is not your own act, that of which you
are not the cause, that which has come to you by accident, as a
headache, as a fever? If your parents were poor, and left their
property to others, and if while they live, they do not help you at
all, is this shameful to you? Is this what you learned with the
philosophers? Did you never hear that the thing which is shameful
ought to be blamed, and that which is blamable is worthy of blame?
Whom do you blame for an act which is not his own, which he did not do
himself? Did you, then, make your father such as he is, or is it in
your power to improve him? Is this power given to you? Well then,
ought you to wish the things which are not given to you, or to be
ashamed if you do not obtain them? And have you also been accustomed
while you were studying philosophy to look to others and to hope for
nothing from yourself? Lament then and groan and eat with fear that
you may not have food to-morrow. Tremble about your poor slaves lest
they steal, lest they run away, lest they die. So live, and continue
to live, you who in name only have approached philosophy and have
disgraced its theorems as far as you can by showing them to be useless
and unprofitable to those who take them up; you who have never
sought constancy, freedom from perturbation, and from passions: you
who have not sought any person for the sake of this object, but many
for the sake of syllogisms; you who have never thoroughly examined any
of these appearances by yourself, "Am I able to bear, or am I not able
to bear? What remains for me to do?" But as if all your affairs were
well and secure, you have been resting on the third topic, that of
things being unchanged, in order that you may possess unchanged- what?
cowardice, mean spirit, the admiration of the rich, desire without
attaining any end, and avoidance which fails in the attempt? About
security in these things you have been anxious.
Ought you not to have gained something in addition from reason
and, then, to have protected this with security? And whom did you ever
see building a battlement all round and not encircling it with a wall?
And what doorkeeper is placed with no door to watch? But you
practice in order to be able to prove- what? You practice that you may
not be tossed as on the sea through sophisms, and tossed about from
what? Show me first what you hold, what you measure, or what you
weigh; and show me the scales or the medimnus; or how long will you go
on measuring the dust? Ought you not to demonstrate those things which
make men happy, which make things go on for them in the way as they
wish, and why we ought to blame no man, accuse no man, and acquiesce
in the administration of the universe? Show me these. "See, I show
them: I will resolve syllogisms for you." This is the measure,
slave; but it is not the thing measured. Therefore you are now