CHAPTER XXII.

1. "My friends, fly all culture," is an injunction reported of Epicurus (_Diog. L._ x. 6). However, neglect of form in literary style was a characteristic of philosophic writers of the Hellenistic period, which was by no means confined to the Epicureans.

2. This passage is corrupt. I follow the reading adopted by Schweighäuser (after Wolf); but it may be noted that Schweighäuser's translation follows another reading than that which he adopts in his text, viz.--[Greek: kinoumenou] (being moved), instead of [Greek: teinomenou] (being strained). The original, in all versions, is [Greek: ginomenou], which makes no sense at all.--See Preface, xxiii.

3. The writings enumerated are, of course, works of Epicurus. When dying, he wrote in a letter to a friend (_Diog. L._ x. 22) that he was spending a happy day, and his last.

4. Stoic [Greek: apatheia] was anything but insensibility. Chrysippus held that many things in the Kosmos were created for their beauty alone.--_Zeller_, 171.

5. There is another short chapter on the arts of ratiocination and expression (I. viii. _Schw._), which glances at the subject from a somewhat different point of view from that taken in the chapter which I have given. There Epictetus dwells chiefly on the danger that weak spirits should lose themselves in the fascination of these arts: "For, in general, in every faculty acquired by the uninstructed and feeble there is danger lest they be elated and puffed up through it. For how could one contrive to persuade a young man who excels in such things that he must not be an appendage to them, but make them an appendage to him?"