BOOK I. IV. 10-15
work of virtue, that he may learn where to look for his progress?" Look for it there, wretch, where your work lies. And where is your work? In desire and aversion, that you may not miss what you desire and encounter what you would avoid; in choice and in refusal, that you may commit no fault therein; in giving and withholding assent of judgement, that you may not be deceived.[1] But first come the first and most necessary points. Yet if you are in a state of fear and grief when you seek to be proof against encountering what you would avoid, how, pray, are you making progress?
Do you yourself show me, therefore, your own progress in matters like the following. Suppose, for example, that in talking to an athlete I said, "Show me your shoulders," and then he answered, "Look at my jumping-weights."[2] Go to, you and your jumping-weights! What I want to see is the effect of the jumping-weights. "Take the treatise Upon Choice[3] and see how I have mastered it." It is not that I am looking into, you slave, but how you act in your choices and refusals, your desires and aversions, how you go at things, and apply yourself to them, and prepare yourself, whether you are acting in harmony with nature therein, or out of harmony with it. 15For if you are acting in harmony, show me that, and I will tell you that you are making progress; but if out of harmony, begone, and do not confine yourself to expounding your books, but go and write
- ↑ These are the three spheres or fields (τόποι) of human activity, inclination, choice, and intellectual assent, upon which the Stoics laid great stress. For a fuller discussion see below III 2, 1 ff.
- ↑ Broad-jumpers in antiquity carried weights which on being thrust backwards while the jumper was in mid-air seem to have added materially to the distance covered. These same weights were also used like our dumb-bells for the development of the arm and trunk muscles, as is apparently the case here.
- ↑ The title, apparently, of a short work by Chrysippus, but known only from this passage. Zeno and Cleanthes wrote also on the subject.
