Discourses, How We May Discover the Duties of Life from Names

Epictetus — The Slave

What does it mean to be a good citizen? It means you don't consider only what benefits you personally. You don't make decisions as if you're separate from your community. Instead, you act like a hand or foot would act if it could think and understand how the body works. Your hand would never move or want anything unless it was good for the whole body. That's why philosophers say this: if a good person knew the future, he would willingly accept his own sickness, death, and injury. He would know these things happen according to the universal plan. He would know the whole is more important than any part, and the state is more important than any individual citizen. But we can't know the future. So our job is to stick with choices that are naturally better for us. After all, we were made for this kind of thinking.

Epictetus — The Slave Original

What then does the character of a citizen promise (profess)? To hold nothing as profitable to himself; to deliberate about nothing as if he were detached from the community, but to act as the hand or foot would do, if they had reason and understood the constitution of nature, for they would never put themselves in motion nor desire anything otherwise than with reference to the whole. Therefore, the philosophers say well, that if the good man had foreknowledge of what would happen, he would co-operate towards his own sickness and death and mutilation, since he knows that these things are assigned to him according to the universal arrangement, and that the whole is superior to the part, and the state to the citizen. But now because we do not know the future, it is our duty to stick to the things which are in their nature more suitable for our choice, for we were made among other things for this.