Difficulties are what show men's character. Therefore, when a difficult crisis meets you, remember that you are as the raw youth with whom God the trainer is wrestling.
“To what end?” the hearer asks.
That you may win at Olympia: and that cannot be done without sweating for it.
To my mind no man's difficulties ever gave him a finer trial than yours, if only you will use them for exercise, as the athlete wrestles with the young man.
Even now we are sending you to Rome to spy out the land: and no one sends a coward as a spy, for that means that if he but hears a noise or sees a shadow anywhere, he will come running in confusion and saying that the enemy are close at hand.
So now if you come and tell us “The doings in Rome are fearful, death is terrible, exile is terrible, evil-speaking is terrible, poverty is terrible: fly sirs, the enemy is at hand,” we shall say to you, “Begone, prophesy to yourself, the only mistake we made was in sending a man like you to spy out the land.”
—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.24
The opening lines to this chapter are often cited as an inspiration for grappling with hardships, and rightly so. Even though I never managed to be a stellar athlete, I will still turn to this image as representative of any call to courage, where preparation and practice will help me to make it through the struggle.
Yet I rarely find anyone addressing the rest of the argument, and I didn’t bother to pay close enough attention until the third or fourth time I read it. That’s a shame, because the point here isn’t just that we should be brave, but also how we must approach our circumstances in order to be brave. It ends up being a far greater challenge than I could ever have anticipated, and yet it offers far greater rewards than I could ever have imagined.
A bit of context is useful for best understanding the chapter. Like so many other bosses who think they can force people to conform by discouraging them from thinking for themselves, the Emperor Domitian had banished all philosophers from Rome. This included the humble Epictetus, hardly a danger to anyone at all, and he lived out the rest of his days in Nicopolis.
Here the exiled philosopher is discussing how his school is sending “spies” back to Rome, to learn how things are faring in the capital. With what sort of report will the students return? If one of them describes the many horrors of the city, is he not simply passing on what he has observed? Why would Epictetus be so quick to condemn the man as a coward?
The insight offered here is that the act of looking is always filtered through the act of estimation. On any given day I will see deceit, betrayal, and cruelty—now what do I make of it? To acknowledge it is one thing, to run away from it is quite another.
It is certainly evil for men to do such things, so at least the student is getting it right in this regard; he takes a misstep, however, when he advises flight as the solution. If there are bad folks in Rome, should the good folks hide in fear? No number of popular vices can deter the convictions of character, as long as they are sincerely and deeply held.
“A man like you?” A man may well look sharply with his eyes, even as he judges poorly with his mind. It gets even better, however, in the following passages, where Epictetus explains why the threat is never from the outside at all. Stay tuned! . . .
—Reflection written in 3/2001
IMAGE: Emperor Domitian
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