Call another, the one over there with the cropped head, the dismal fellow from the Porch.

Quite right; at all events it looks as if the men who frequent the public square were waiting for him in great numbers.Lucian means that the Stoic philosophy was in high favour with statesmen, lawyers, and men of affairs generally. I sell virtue itself, the most perfect of philosophies. Who wants to be the only one to know everything?

What do you mean by that?

That he is the only wise man, the only handsome man, the only just man, brave man, king, orator, rich man, lawgiver, and everything else that there is.Compare Ad summam: sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives,Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum,Praecipue sanus,— nisi cum pituita molestast!Horace, Epp. 1, I 106 ff

Then he is the only cook,—yes and the only tanner or carpenter, and so forth?

Come here, my good fellow, and tell your buyer what you are like, and first of all whether you are not displeased with being sold and living in slavery?

Not at all, for these things are not in our control, and all that is not in our control is immaterial.

I don’t understand what you mean by this.

What, you do not understand that of such things some are “approved,” and some, to the contrary, “disapproved”’? Just as things "in our control” were divided into the good and the bad, so those "not in our control” were divided into the “approved” and the "disapproved,” according as they helped or hindered in the acquirement of virtue.

Even now I do not understand.

Of course not, for you are not familiar with our vocabulary and have not the faculty of forming concepts; but a scholar who has mastered the science of logic knows not only this, but what predicaments and bye-predicaments are, and how they differ from each other.The hair-splitting Stoics distinguished four forms of predication according to the case of the (logical) subject and the logical completeness of the predicate: the direct, complete predicate, or σύμβαμα (predicament), i.e. Σωκράτης βαδίζει; the indirect, complete predicate, or παρασύμβαμα (bye-predicament), i.e. Σωκράτει μεταμέλει; the direct, incomplete predicate, e.g. Σωκράτης φιλεῖ, and the indirect, incomplete predicate, i.e. Σωκράτει μέλει.

In the name of wisdom, don’t begrudge telling me at least what predicaments and bye-predicaments are; for I am somehow impressed by the rhythm of the terms.

Indeed, I do not begrudge it at all. If a man who is lame dashes his lame foot against a stone and receives an unlooked-for injury, he was already in a predicament, of course, with his lameness, and with his injury he gets into a bye-predicament too.