The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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46 THE STOIC CREED
of the school was to sit loose to the mere linguistic
clothing of thought. Substance, not form, was to them
the main thing ;
and it little mattered should the
grammar be defective or the expression faulty, if the
meaning were intelligible. Take Marcus Aurelius s
writing, and you find that it is bald and unimpassioned ;
and we have already seen that Rusticus, his teacher,
encouraged him to that. This lack of sympathy with
style, however, did not prevent Epictetus from rising
occasionally to heights of real eloquence ;
but that,
the fire and energy of his
perhaps, was owing more to
nature and to the intensity of his convictions than to
any conscious effort at effect. For though in his most
generous mood he can admit that the man who denies
that there is a faculty of expression or an art of literary
form is both impious and cowardly, impious,
holds in disesteem the gifts that come from God
cowardly,
"for he
"for such a one seems to me to be afraid
lest, if there be any faculty of this kind, we shall not
be able to
despise it
(Diss. ii. 23), nevertheless he
utters, at other times, a note of warning, lest eloquence
puff up the uninstructed and feeble, and sophistry lead
them astray. For by what means now could any one
persuade a young man who excels in these matters that
he ought not to become an appendage to them, but
should make them an appendage to himself? Does he
not trample all such reasons under foot, and strut before
us elated and inflated, not suffering that any man should
reprove him and remind him of what he has neglected
and from what he has turned aside?" (Diss. i. 8).
Under any circumstances, rhetoric was always to be
taken as a subsidiary study, useful only as subservient
;