Chapter 29*

Consider what comes before each task, and what comes after it, and only then take it up. Otherwise you will start out eagerly, because you never thought through what comes next – and later, when the difficulties show up, you will quit in disgrace.

You want to win at the Olympics? So do I, by the gods – it’s a fine thing. But consider what comes before it and what comes after it, and then take up the work. You must submit to discipline, follow a strict diet, keep away from pastries, train under orders at a set hour, in heat and in cold; drink no cold water, and no wine just when you feel like it – in short, hand yourself over to your trainer as you would to a doctor. Then, in the contest itself: dig in beside your opponent, sometimes dislocate a wrist, twist an ankle, swallow mouthfuls of sand, sometimes take a whipping – and after all that, still lose.

Think it over, and if you still want it, go be an athlete. Otherwise you will behave like children, who play wrestlers one minute, gladiators the next, then blow trumpets, then act out tragedies. That’s you: now an athlete, now a gladiator, then an orator, then a philosopher – and with your whole soul, nothing. Like a monkey, you imitate every spectacle you see, and one thing after another catches your fancy. For you never approached anything with reflection, never examined it all the way around – only at random, on a lukewarm desire.

That is how some people, having watched a philosopher and heard someone speaking the way Euphrates speaks (though who can speak like him?), want to be philosophers themselves.

Man, first consider what kind of undertaking this is. Then study your own nature and ask whether you can carry it. You want to be a pentathlete, or a wrestler? Look at your arms, your thighs; study your hips.

Different people are built for different things. Do you think you can do all this and keep eating the same way, drinking the same way, desiring and disliking the same way? You must stay up late, work hard, leave your own people, be looked down on by a slave boy, be laughed at by everyone you meet, come off worse in everything – in honor, in office, in the courts, in every little affair.

Think all this over – and decide whether you want to trade it for equanimity, freedom, and tranquility. If not, don’t come near it. Don’t be like a child: now a philosopher, later a tax collector, then an orator, then one of Caesar’s administrators. These don’t go together. You must be one person, good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling mind or externals – apply your craft either to what is inside or to what is outside. That is: hold the position of a philosopher, or of a layman.