"Day by day you must keep before your eyes death and exile and everything else that seems frightening, but most especially death; and then you’ll never harbour any mean thought, nor will you desire anything beyond due measure."

- Epictetus, Enchiridion

Stay poor, friends. This has been your daily reminder to embrace poverty

"They say that Diogenes always carried a wooden cup around with him in his knapsack, to enable him to scoop up water to drink, but when, as he was once crossing over a stream, he saw someone scooping up water in his hands and drinking from them, he hurled his cup into the stream, saying that he no longer had need of it because his hands would serve the purpose."

- Simplicius, Commentary on the ‘Encheiridion’ of Epictetus 32

"So, my dear Lucilius, start following these men's practice and appoint certain days on which to give up everything and make yourself at home with next to nothing. Start cultivating a relationship with poverty:

Dear guest, be bold enough to pay no heed
To riches, and so make yourself like him.
Worthy of a god.*

For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches."

- Seneca the Younger, LETTER XVIII

*Virgil, Aeneid, Vlll: 364-s.

"All human beings seek the happy life, but many confuse the means—for example, wealth and status—with that life itself. This misguided focus on the means to a good life makes people get further from the happy life. The really worthwhile things are the virtuous activities that make up the happy life, not the external means that may seem to produce it."

Epictetus, Discourses.

Stay poor, friends. This has been your daily reminder to embrace poverty

How Crates of Thabes Disposed of his Property:

"This Crates, who was a wealthy man, threw all his money into the sea to pursue philosophy, saying as he threw it, ‘Crates of Thebes sets Crates free!’"
- Codex Ottobonianus Graecus

"Abandoning his land to sheep-pasture, he climbed on to an altar and cried, ‘Crates frees Crates of Thebes from slavery!’"
- Suda s.v. Crates

"They say that he presented all his property to the people of Thebes, saying, ‘Crates on this day sets Crates free!’"
- Origen, Commentary on Matthew

Stay poor, friends. This has been your daily reminder to embrace poverty. For, as Crates said, "destitution is the beginning of freedom" (Epiphanius, Against Heresies).

"the Although he had only a knapsack and a rough cloak, Crates spent his whole life laughing and joking as though he were at a festival."
- Plutarch, On Tranquillity of Mind

Bion of Borysthenes in Teles’ Discourse on Self-Sufficiency

"Just as a good actor must play to the best of his ability whatever role is assigned to him by the dramatist, so also must the man of worth play whatever role he is assigned by Fortune. For like a poetess, says Bion, she assigns now a leading role, now a secondary one, and sometimes the role of a king, and sometimes that of a beggar. So if you have a secondary role, do not aspire to a leading one; for otherwise you will be acting discordantly. You fulfil your role well as a ruler, and I as someone who is ruled, he says; you have many people to command, and I just one, having become a pedagogue; and you, being wealthy, can dispense liberally, while I for my part accept it from you with confidence, without grovelling, or abasing myself, or complaining of my lot. You make good use of a multitude of things, and I of just a few; for it would be wrong to suppose, he says, that what is expensive nourishes and can be used with benefit, whereas, on the other hand, one cannot make use of slight and inexpensive resources, if one is temperate and free of pretension. So if things could speak with a human voice like us, says Bion, and could plead their cause, would not Poverty, he says, be the first to say, ‘Why do you attack me, man?’, like a slave who pleads his cause with his master after having taken refuge at an altar, ‘Why are you attacking me? Have I stolen anything from you? Don’t I fulfil your every order? Don’t I regularly bring you my earnings?’ Could not Poverty say to her accuser, ‘Why are you attacking me? Have you ever been deprived of anything of value because of me? Such as moral wisdom? Justice? Courage? Surely you do not lack anything that you really need? Aren’t the roadsides full of wild vegetables, and the springs full of water? And don’t I offer you as many beds as there are places on earth? And leaves for your bedclothes? Is it impossible for you to live happily in my company? Don’t you see old women chattering merrily away as they eat a barley-cake? Don’t I provide you with hunger as a cheap and excellent seasoning for your food? Isn’t it the case that those who are hungry eat with the most pleasure and have the least need of appetizers? And those who are thirsty drink with most pleasure and yearn the least for drink that does not lie at hand? Who is it, then, who hungers for cakes or thirsts for fine Chian wine? Isn’t it true that people seek for such things through sheer self-indulgence? Don’t I provide you with housing at no expense, the baths in winter, the temples in summer? And what finer house could you have in summer, says Diogenes, than the Parthenon that I have, so well-aired and so magnificent? ‘If Poverty were to speak like this, what could you say in response? I think for my part that I would be left speechless. But we always blame anything other than our own perversity and bad nature, accusing old age, poverty, circumstances, the day, the hour, the place; and Diogenes thus claimed to have heard the voice of Vice accusing herself and saying, ‘No one other than I myself are to blame for all these ills.’ Most people, however, are lacking in sense and ascribe the blame not to themselves but to things outside. It is like the bite that one can get when one takes hold of a wild beast, says Bion; if you grasp a snake by its middle, you will get bitten, but if you seize it by the head, nothing bad will happen to you. And likewise, he says, the pain that you may suffer as a result of things outside yourself depends on how you apprehend them, and if you apprehend them in the same way as Socrates, you will feel no pain, but if you take them in any other way, you will suffer, not on account of the things themselves, but of your own character and false opinions."

Mostly just wanted to share that today, but to earn my worth, here's a couple other bits from Bion:

"Slaves who are of good character are free men, while free men who are of bad character are slaves to many a desire."

"As long as a person is insatiable, niggardly, slavish, and full of false pretences, he is bound to remain in want and need.—But how can people be in want of what they already have?—And how, says Bion, can money-changers be in want of riches which they already have beneath their hands? Plainly because what they have does not really belong to them; and likewise with those other people [the insatiable and miserly]."

"Bion used to say that just as shabby purses, even if they are of no value in themselves, are held to be of value in so far as they have money in them, so likewise, wealthy men who are of no worth are held to be of worth for what they possess."

Stay poor, friends. This has been your daily reminder to embrace poverty