 Zeus’s power is limited in that he cannot do what it is logically impossible to do. He could not cause a person to be born before his parents (1.12.28–29), and he could not have made volition execute any choices but its own (1.1.23, 1.17.27). For the same kind of reason, he could not, for all his benevolence, cause a person’s body to be unimpeded in the way volition is unimpeded (4.1.100). Our bodies do not in fact belong to us, since we cannot always decide what will happen to them. There is therefore a clear contrast in status between body and mind or soul. Epictetus repeatedly uses language belittling the body or representing it as a mere instrument of the mind: it is “pathetic little flesh,” “cleverly molded clay,” a “little donkey” (1.1.10, 1.3.5, 4.1.79). At least once he speaks of the body and possessions together as “fetters” upon the mind (1.9.11), language that recalls the image in Plato’s Phaedo 82d-83b of the body as prison house.