may be objected, Why, what is more agreeable than this [which I am
doing]?--But is not this the very reason why pleasure deceives us? And
consider if magnanimity, freedom, simplicity, equanimity, piety, are not
more agreeable. For what is more agreeable than wisdom itself, when thou
thinkest of the security and the happy course of all things which depend
on the faculty of understanding and knowledge?

10. Things are in such a kind of envelopment that they have seemed to
philosophers, not a few nor those common philosophers, altogether
unintelligible; nay even to the Stoics themselves they seem difficult to
understand. And all our assent is changeable; for where is the man who
never changes? Carry thy thoughts then to the objects themselves, and
consider how short-lived they are and worthless, and that they may be in
the possession of a filthy wretch or a robber. Then turn to the morals of
those who live with thee, and it is hardly possible to endure even the
most agreeable of them, to say nothing of a man being hardly able to
endure himself. In such darkness then and dirt, and in so constant a flux
both of substance and of time, and of motion and of things moved, what
there is worth being highly prized, or even an object of serious pursuit,
I cannot imagine. But on the contrary it is a man's duty to comfort
himself, and to wait for the natural dissolution, and not to be vexed at
the delay, but to rest in these principles only: the one, that nothing
will happen to me which is not conformable to the nature of the universe;
and the other, that it is in my power never to act contrary to my god and
daemon: for there is no man who will compel me to this.

11. About what am I now employing my own soul? On every occasion I must
ask myself this question, and inquire, What have I now in this part of me
which they call the ruling principle? and whose soul have I now,--that of
a child, or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, or of a