No doubt Epictetus is here describing conduct which he had often seen, and of which he had himself experienced the degradation.  But he had early acquired a loftiness of soul and an insight into truth which enabled him to distinguish the substance from the shadow, to separate the realities of life from its accidents, and so to turn his very misfortunes into fresh means of attaining to moral nobility.  In proof of this let us see some of his own opinions as to his state of life.

At the very beginning of his Discourses he draws a distinction between the things which the gods have and the things which they have not put in our own power, and he held (being deficient here in that light which Christianity might have furnished to him) that the blessings denied to us are denied not because the gods would not, but because they could not grant them to us.  And then he supposes that Jupiter addresses him:—­

“O Epictetus, had it been possible, I would have made both your little body and your little property free and unentangled; but now, do not be mistaken, it is not yours at all, but only clay finely kneaded.  Since, however, I could not do this, I gave you a portion of ourselves, namely, this power of pursuing and avoiding, of desiring and of declining, and generally the power of dealing with appearances:  and if you cultivate this power, and regard it as that which constitutes your real possession, you will never be hindered or impeded, nor will you groan or find fault with, or flatter any one.  Do these advantages then appear to you to be trifling?  Heaven forbid!  Be content therefore with these, and thank the gods.”

And again in one of his Fragments (viii. ix.):—­

“Freedom and slavery are but names, respectively, of virtue and of vice:  and both of them depend upon the will.  But neither of them have anything to do with those things in which the will has no share.  For no one is a slave whose will is free.”

“Fortune is an evil bond of the body, vice of the soul; for he is a slave whose body is free but whose soul is bound, and, on the contrary, he is free whose body is bound but whose soul is free.”

Who does not catch in these passages the very tone of St, Paul when he says, “He that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman:  likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant?”

Nor is his independence less clearly express when he speaks of his deformity.  Being but the deformity of a body which he despised, he spoke of himself as “an ethereal existence staggering under the burden of a corpse.”  In his admirable chapter on Contentment, he very forcibly lays down that topic of consolation which is derived from the sense that “the universe is not made for our individual satisfaction.” “Must my leg be lame?” he supposes some querulous objector to inquire.  “Slave!” he replies, “do you then