you must be covered with sand, sometimes dislocate a hand, sprain an ankle, swallow a quantity of dust, be scourged with the whip; and after undergoing all this, you must sometimes be conquered.  After reckoning all these things, if you have still an inclination, go to the athletic practice.  If you do not reckon them, observe you will behave like children who at one time play as wrestlers, then as gladiators, then blow a trumpet, then act a tragedy, when they have seen and admired such things.  So you also do:  you are at one time a wrestler (athlete), then a gladiator, then a philosopher, then a rhetorician; but with your whole soul you are nothing:  like the ape you imitate all that you see; and always one thing after another pleases you, but that which becomes familiar displeases you.  For you have never undertaken anything after consideration, nor after having explored the whole matter and put it to a strict examination; but you have undertaken it at hazard and with a cold desire.  Thus some persons having seen a philosopher and having heard one speak like Euphrates—­and yet who can speak like him?—­wish to be philosophers themselves.

Man, consider first what the matter is (which you propose to do), then your own nature also, what it is able to bear.  If you are a wrestler, look at your shoulders, your thighs, your loins:  for different men are naturally formed for different things.  Do you think that, if you do (what you are doing daily), you can be a philosopher?  Do you think that you can eat as you do now, drink as you do now, and in the same way be angry and out of humor?  You must watch, labor, conquer certain desires, you must depart from your kinsmen, be despised by your slaves, laughed at by those who meet you, in everything you must be in an inferior condition, as to magisterial office, in honors, in courts of justice.  When you have considered all these things completely, then, if you think proper, approach to philosophy, if you would gain in exchange for these things freedom from perturbations, liberty, tranquillity.  If you have not considered these things, do not approach philosophy:  do not act like children, at one time a philosopher, then a tax collector, then a rhetorician, then a procurator (officer) of Caesar.  These things are not consistent.  You must be one man either good or bad; you must either labor at your own ruling faculty or at external things; you must either labor at things within or at external things; that is, you must either occupy the place of a philosopher or that of one of the vulgar.

A person said to Rufus when Galba was murdered:  Is the world now governed by Providence?  But Rufus replied:  Did I ever incidentally form an argument from Galba that the world is governed by Providence?

* * * * *