What were some of the supports and satisfactions which Stoicism offered serious men in the disordered political and social world of the early Empire? First of all, it laid stress on conduct and frankly proposed to give rules by which men could attain to the peace they sought. Both Seneca and Epictetus inculcated daily self-examination, and this practice was not the habit of their school alone. The eclectic Sextius, who belonged to the generation before Seneca, at the end of each day asked his soul: “What fault of yours have you cured today? What vice resisted? In what way are you a better man?” Seneca himself found the same practice helpful; he would say to himself: “In that discussion you spoke with too much warmth. Do not engage again with the ignorant, for they who have never learned do not wish to learn.”[276] Epictetus quoted from the “Golden Words” of Pythagoras and reminded his hearers that the verses were not for recitation but for use: “Never let sleep come to thy languid eyes e’er thou hast considered each act of the day. ‘Where have I slipped?’ ‘What done, what failed to do?’ Begin thus and go through all; and then chide thyself for thy shameful acts, rejoice over thy good.”[277] Such a searching of one’s daily acts Epictetus regarded as an essential exercise to prepare and train a man to meet the vicissitudes of life. In the discourse in which he quotes these Pythagorean verses, he continues with the question: “What is philosophy?” “Is it not a preparation against things which may happen to a man?” He argues that a man who throws away the patience which philosophy teaches him is like an athlete who because of the blows he receives wishes to withdraw from the pancratium—still worse than he, for the athlete may avoid his contest and escape the blows; but no man can escape the buffetings of life. Therefore the preacher says that to give up philosophy is to abandon the one resource against misfortune, the only source of happiness and courage.