from “apathy”—a man is not to be emotionless “like a statue.” And a third passage confirming this view is to be found in Book I., ch. xi. (Schweighäuser), where the conduct of a man who was so afflicted by the illness of his little daughter that he ran away from the house, and would hear news of her only through messages, is condemned, not for the affection and anxiety it proved, but for its utter unreasonableness. “Would you,” asks Epictetus, “have her mother and her nurse and her pedagogue, who all love her too, also run away from her, and leave her to die in the hands of persons who neither love nor care for her at all?” There is a grief which is really a self-indulgence, a barren, absorbing, paralyzing grief, which, to the soul possessed by it, makes every other thing in heaven and earth seem strange and cold and trivial. From such grief alone Epictetus would deliver us, and I think he would have accepted Mr. Aubrey de Vere’s noble sonnet on _Sorrow_ as a thoroughly fit poetic statement of Stoic doctrine on this subject:— “Count each affliction, whether light or grave, God’s messenger sent down to thee; do thou With courtesy receive him; rise and bow; And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave Permission first his heavenly feet to lave; Then lay before him all thou hast, allow No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, Or mar thy hospitality; no wave Of mortal tumult to obliterate The soul’s marmoreal calmness: Grief should be Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate, Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free, Strong to consume small troubles; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end.” But the grief that shall do this is a grief that must be _felt_. And Epictetus assuredly never meant to offer the Stoic philosophy as a mere stupefying anodyne. Make the man a Stoic, and something yet remains to do—to make the Stoic a man. One of these purposes was not more the concern of Epictetus than the other. And he pursued both of them with a strength, sincerity, and sanity of thought, with a power of nourishing the heroic fiber in humanity, which, to my mind, make him the very chief of Pagan moralists.