Aiming, then, at such great things, remember that you must not take hold of them half-heartedly, but must let some things go entirely and postpone others for the present. But if you want these and also to hold office and to be rich, you may perhaps not get even the latter, just because you were reaching for the former too; and at any rate you will fail to get the things through which alone freedom and happiness come about.

After the soaring promises of 1.3, this is the cold print of the contract. Epictetus has just offered a freedom nothing can touch, and here he names its price: you cannot reach for it "half-moved." Some things have to be released completely, others shelved for now. The Stoic goal is not one more good item to add to an already full life; it asks you to change what you are reaching for. The warning is sharpened into a wager. Try to have both the inner freedom and the outward goods — office, wealth — and the likeliest outcome is that you get neither the freedom (for certain) nor even, perhaps, the externals, because a divided reach is a weak one. The phrase "through which alone" (δι' ὧν μόνων) is the knife: freedom and happiness have exactly one road, and it is not the road that also runs through the magistrate's chair and the counting-house. It is less a prohibition than a piece of hard arithmetic about where a single life's attention can go.