The Enchiridion · 10 of 10

Edition and Source Notes

About this reading edition

The translation is Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s, based on Elizabeth Carter’s. The wording follows the Liberal Arts Press second edition (1955), as transcribed in Project Gutenberg ebook 45109, with corrections checked against the older collected translation. The nine main reading groups are editorial divisions. The source numbers its main sections I–LI and then gives unnumbered closing maxims; all are included here. Different editions divide the closing material differently.

The source’s eleven explanatory footnotes follow below. “Ed.” identifies an editor’s note and “Tr.” a translator’s note. Albert Salomon’s modern introduction, the selected bibliography, and the publisher’s book list are outside this reading edition.

Editorial corrections remove the repeated “of” in section 3, restore “but” in section 18, change “how it is” to “how is it” in section 24 and “affected” to “effected” in section 31, and restore the dash placement in section 50. The unusual wording about honor being lost or won through failure in section 50 also appears in the older translation; it is retained rather than silently retranslated. Paragraph divisions and the closing verse lines have been restored for reading.

Source footnotes

1.Section 27. Happiness, the effect of virtue, is the mark which God has set up for us to aim at. Our missing it is no work of His; nor so properly anything real, as a mere negative and failure of our own.

2.Section 29. Chapter XV of the third book of the Discourses, which, with the exception of some very trifling differences, is the same as chapter XXIX of the Enchiridion.—Ed.

3.Section 29. Euphrates was a philosopher of Syria, whose character is described, with the highest encomiums, by Pliny the Younger, Letters I. 10.

4.Section 31. The two inimical sons of Oedipus, who killed each other in battle.—Ed.

5.Section 32. This refers to an anecdote given in full by Simplicius, in his commentary on this passage, of a man assaulted and killed on his way to consult the oracle, while his companion, deserting him, took refuge in the temple till cast out by the Deity.—Tr.

6.Section 33. Reference is to Zeno of Cyprus (335–263 B.C.), the founder of the Stoic school.—Ed.

7.Section 49. Chrysippus (c. 280–207 B.C.) was a Stoic philosopher who became head of the Stoa after Cleanthes. His works, which are lost, were most influential and were generally accepted as the authoritative interpretation of orthodox Stoic philosophy.—Ed.

8.Closing maxims. Cleanthes, in Diogenes Laertius, quoted also by Seneca, Epistle 107.

9.Closing maxims. Euripides, Fragments.

10.Closing maxims. Plato, Crito, Chap. XVII.

11.Closing maxims. Plato, Apology, Chap. XVIII.