Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion

Summary

The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing. His student Arrian of Nicomedia, later a Roman senator, consul and historian of Alexander, took down his lectures in plain conversational Greek, and also gathered their core into a short handbook, the Encheiridion (literally, something held in the hand). Of the eight books of Discourses known in antiquity, four survive. The library text is George Long's 1877 translation in a selected form: a biographical note by Long, about seventy chapters chosen from all four books of the Discourses, and the complete Encheiridion in fifty-two numbered chapters. The Discourses are lively and often combative. Epictetus questions an imagined pupil, mocks vanity, tells anecdotes and answers objections. The selection opens with the chapter on the things that are in our power and not in our power: of all our faculties only reason examines itself, and what belongs to us is our own judgment and will, while body, property, reputation and office belong to others. A man may chain the leg, Epictetus says, but not the will. Other chapters treat God as the father of men, progress in virtue, contentment, how to behave toward tyrants, how to struggle with circumstances, friendship, anxiety, the duties that can be read from names such as son, brother and citizen, how to bear sickness, solitude, freedom from fear, and attention. Socrates, Diogenes the Cynic and the senator Paconius Agrippinus, who went to dinner after learning he had been banished, are his recurring examples. The Encheiridion compresses this teaching into maxims. It begins by dividing all things into those in our power (opinion, impulse, desire, aversion) and those not in our power, and teaches that people are disturbed not by events but by their opinions about events. It counsels the student to call a broken jug a broken jug, to say of a lost child or possession that it has been given back, to wish for things to happen as they do happen, and to play well the part in the drama that the author of the play assigns. Later chapters give rules for speech, laughter, banquets, oaths, the reading of omens, the study of logic and the conduct of a beginner who is mocked for philosophizing. It closes with lines from the Stoic Cleanthes asking Zeus and Destiny to lead, and with Socrates' saying that Anytus and Meletus can kill him but cannot harm him. The Encheiridion was paraphrased for Christian monks in late antiquity, commented on by the Neoplatonist Simplicius, and read widely from the Renaissance onward.

Top Lessons

• The great division

  Epictetus sorts everything into what is in our power, our judgments, impulses, desires and aversions, and what is not, such as body, property, reputation and office. Trouble comes from treating the second kind as if it were the first. The division is meant to be practiced on every harsh appearance, not merely believed.

• Opinion and disturbance

  Encheiridion V teaches that we are disturbed by our opinions about events, not by the events; death would have seemed terrible to Socrates if it were so. Epictetus traces three stages of moral education, from blaming others, to blaming oneself, to blaming no one.

• Playing the part well

  In Encheiridion XVII the student is an actor whose part, short or long, poor or powerful, is chosen by the author of the play. Duty lies in acting the part well, not in choosing it. The Discourses apply the same idea to the names of son, brother and citizen.

• Freedom under a tyrant

  In the discourses on tyrants and on freedom from fear, the tyrant's guards and swords frighten only those who value what the tyrant can take. A man who has learned what is truly his own can approach the tyrant without fear, as Agrippinus went to dinner after his sentence.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Ancient Stoics described philosophy as a therapy of the passions, and Epictetus repeatedly compares his school to a place of healing and his teaching to a physician's regimen. His claim that disturbance comes from opinions about events, not events themselves, is often cited as an ancient forerunner of cognitive therapy: Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck both named Stoic philosophy, and Epictetus in particular, among their influences. The resemblance is real but partial, since Epictetus's aim is virtue and agreement with a providential order, not symptom relief. The chapter on sickness gives a patient's ethic for fever, thirst and the physician's verdict; the chapter on anxiety analyzes stage fright as desire for what is not in one's power; and Epictetus's own lameness, which Long attributes to early infirmity rather than the later story of a master's cruelty, lies behind his remark that lameness hinders the leg but not the will. The Encheiridion's counsel on grief (saying a dead child has been restored) represents the Stoic ideal of freedom from passion and has been debated since antiquity; it is best read as a training discipline for the student, not a clinical recommendation.

• Discourses, "In What Manner We Ought to Bear Sickness" (III.10)

  How a student should bear fever, thirst and hunger, and how he should regard the physician's good or bad report.

• Discourses, "On Anxiety (Solicitude)" (II.13)

  Epictetus diagnoses the anxious man, pale before an audience, as wanting something not in his power.

• Encheiridion, ch. V

  Disturbance arises from opinions about things; the stages of blaming others, oneself and no one.

• Encheiridion, chs. IX and XI

  Disease and lameness as impediments to the body but not the will; the discipline of saying of the dead that they have been restored.

• Long's biographical note

  Long weighs the story that Epictetus was lamed by his master against Simplicius's report that he was weak and lame from early life.