BOOK IV. V. 14-17
ness, and his faithfulness? 15This is the kind of person for whom "men should come together and mourn, because of all the evils into which he has come"; not, by Zeus, "the one who is born," or "the one who has died,"[1] but the man whose misfortune it has been while he still lives to lose what is his own; not his patrimony, his paltry farm, and paltry dwelling, and his tavern, and his poor slaves (for none of these things is a man's own possession, but they all belong to others, are subservient and subject, given by their masters[2] now to one person and now to another); but the qualities which make him a human being, the imprints which he brought with him in his mind, such as we look for also upon coins, and, if we find them, we accept the coins, but if we do not find them, we throw the coins away. "Whose imprint does this sestertius bear? Trajan's? Give it to me. Nero's? Throw it out, it will not pass, it is rotten."[3] So also in the moral life. What imprint do his
- ↑ The quotations (slightly modified) are from a famous passage in Euripides, Cresphontes, frag. 449, Nauck²: "For we ought rather to come together to mourn for the one who is born, because of all the evils into which he is coming; but, on the other hand, the one who has died, we ought with joy and words of gladness to send forth from his former abode."
- ↑ The gods.
- ↑ This reference is most obscure, for the coins of Nero still preserved are numerous and excellent, and there was a great systematic reform of coinage in A.D. 64, which became "the most complete monetary system of ancient times" (Mattingly and Sydenham, The Roman Imperial Coinage (1923), I, 138). After the death of Caligula, indeed, the senate ordered all his bronze coinage to be melted down (Dio, LX. 22, 3), but nothing of the sort is recorded, so far as I know, for Nero. There was, of course, a slight reduction in weight for the aureus and the denarius, and "the amount of alloy in the silver was increased from 5 to about 10 per cent.," changes which have been regarded as the first step in the process of debasement that reached its climax in the third century. See E. A. Sydenham, Num. Chron., ser. 4, vol. 16 (1916), 19. Nero's particular system of brass and copper coinage was also discontinued after his death (ibid. p. 28). Yet it is scarcely credible that Epictetus can have had any trifles like these in mind.—Of course the moral point here, which Dr. Page wishes to have emphasized, is that Trajan was the typically good man (felicior Augusto, melior Traiano was an acclamation in the Roman Senate for centuries after his death—Eutropius, 8, 5), and Nero the opposite. But the difficulty in the passage is to understand how it ever occurred to Epictetus to imply that people actually refused to take coins of Nero, simply because they bore the imprint of a morally bad man, when, as a matter of fact, it is extremely doubtful if any human being, except perhaps some hopeless fanatic, ever really did so refuse. A note by T. O. Mabbott, "Epictetus and Nero's Coinage", CP 36 (1941) 398–9, explains this perfectly.
