As to women, a few quotations will show his detachment. He seems hardly to have known a good woman. "Do not admire your wife's beauty, and you are not angry with the adulterer. Learn that a thief and an adulterer have no place among the things that are yours, but among those which are not yours and not in your power,"[60] and he illustrates his philosophy with an anecdote of an iron lamp stolen from him, which he replaced with an earthenware one. From fourteen years old, he says, women think of nothing and aim at nothing {52} but lying with men.[61] Roman women liked Plato's Republic for the licence they wrongly supposed it gave.[62] He constantly speaks of women as a temptation, nearly always using a diminutive _korasion_, _korasidion_--little girls--and as a temptation hardly to be resisted by young men. He speaks of their "softer voices."[63] A young philosopher is no match for a "pretty girl"; let him fly temptation.[64] "As to pleasure with women, abstain as far as you can, before marriage; but if you do indulge in it, do it in the way conformable to custom. Do not, however, be disagreeable to those who take such pleasures, nor apt to rebuke them or to say often that you do not."[65] All this may be taken as the impression left by Rome and the household of Epaphroditus upon a slave's mind. It may be observed that he makes nothing like Dio Chrysostom's condemnation of prostitution--an utterance unexampled in pagan antiquity. It is pleasanter to turn to other features of Epictetus. He has a very striking lecture on personal cleanliness.[66] In proportion as men draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body. Nature has given men hands and nostrils; so, if a man does not use a handkerchief, "I say, he is not fulfilling the function of a man." Nature has provided water. "It is impossible that some impurity should not remain in the teeth after eating. 'So wash your teeth,' says Nature. Why? 'That you may be a man and not a beast--a pig.'" If a man would not bathe and use the strigil and have his clothes washed--"either go into a desert where you deserve to go, or live alone and smell yourself." He cannot bear a dirty man,--"who does not get out of his way?" It gives philosophy a bad name, he says; but it is quite clear that that was not his chief reason. He would sooner a young man came to him with his hair carefully trimmed than with it dirty and rough; such care implied "some conception of the beautiful," which it was only necessary to direct towards the things of the mind; "but if a man comes to me filthy and dirty, with a moustache down to his knees--what _can_ I say to him?" "But whence am I to get a fine cloak? Man! you have water; wash it!" {53} [Sidenote: Fame of Epictetus]