The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments

By Epictetus and Robin Waterfield

The complete surviving works of Epictetus, the most influential Stoic philosopher from antiquity.

“Some things are up to us and some are not.”
 
Epictetus was born into slavery around the year 50 CE, and, upon being granted his freedom, he set himself up as a philosophy teacher. After being expelled from Rome, he spent the rest of his life living and teaching in Greece. He is now considered the most important exponent of Stoicism, and his surviving work comprises a series of impassioned discourses, delivered live and recorded by his student Arrian, and the Handbook, Arrian’s own take on the heart of Epictetus’s teaching.
 
In Discourses, Epictetus argues that happiness depends on knowing what is in our power to affect and what is not. Our internal states and our responses to events are up to us, but the events themselves are assigned to us by the benevolent deity, and we should treat them—along with our bodies, possessions, and families—as matters of indifference, simply making the best use of them we can. Together, the Discourses and Handbook constitute a practical guide to moral self-improvement, as Epictetus explains the work and exercises aspirants need to do to enrich and deepen their lives. Edited and translated by renowned scholar Robin Waterfield, this book collects the complete works of Epictetus, bringing to modern readers his insights on how to cope with death, exile, the people around us, the whims of the emperor, fear, illness, and much more.

CUSTOMER NOTE: THE HARDCOVER IS FOR LIBRARIES AND HAS NO JACKET.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226769509

Epictetus

Epictetus (circa 55-135 ce) taught in Rome until the year 94 ce, when Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from the city. In exile, he established a school of philosophy where his distinguished students included Marcus Aurelius, author of Meditations. Some 1,863 years after Epictetus's death, Tom Wolfe revived his philosophy in the bestselling novel A Man in Full.

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by Robin Waterfield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76933-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76947-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76950-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226769509.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Epictetus, author. | Waterfield, Robin, 1952–, editor, translator.

Title: The complete works : handbook, discourses, and fragments / Epictetus ; edited and translated with introduction and notes by Robin Waterfield.

Other titles: Works. English. 2022

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022008960 | ISBN 9780226769332 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226769479 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226769509 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Ancient—Early works to 1800.

Classification: LCC B560.E5 W38 2022 | DDC 180—dc23/eng/20220304

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008960

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

EPICTETUS

The Complete Works

HANDBOOK, DISCOURSES, AND FRAGMENTS

Edited and translated with introduction and notes by ROBIN WATERFIELD

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

A medieval illustration of a fictitious work, written sometime between the third and ninth centuries, entitled The Dialogue between the Emperor Hadrian and the Philosopher Epictetus. Note the philosopher’s typically unkempt appearance.

Photo © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

In memoriam WGD

Contents

PREFACE

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

MAP

INTRODUCTION

Handbook

Discourses

PREFACE

1.1: What is and is not up to us

1.2: How to preserve conformity with one’s role in every situation

1.3: How one may proceed from the fact that God is the father of humankind to its consequences

1.4: On progress

1.5: Against the Academics

1.6: On providence

1.7: On the use of changing arguments, hypothetical arguments, and the like

1.8: That our faculties are not without danger for uneducated people

1.9: How one may proceed from the fact of our kinship with God to its consequences

1.10: To those who are intent on advancement at Rome

1.11: On family affection

1.12: On contentment

1.13: How to do whatever we do in a way that pleases the gods

1.14: That the Deity watches over us all

1.15: The prospect held out by philosophy

1.16: On providence

1.17: On the indispensability of logic

1.18: That one should not get angry with people for their mistakes

1.19: The proper attitude to have toward tyrants

1.20: On reason and its ability to examine itself

1.21: To those who want to be admired

1.22: On preconceptions

1.23: Against Epicurus

1.24: How to combat difficult circumstances

1.25: The same topic

1.26: What is the law of life?

1.27: How many ways are there for impressions to arise, and what resources should we make sure we have at hand to help us with them?

1.28: That we ought not to get angry with people, and what is trivial or important in human life

1.29: On self-possession

1.30: What we should have at hand in difficult circumstances

2.1: That confidence and caution are not incompatible

2.2: On tranquility

2.3: To those who recommend people to philosophers

2.4: To a man who had once been caught in adultery

2.5: How are greatness of mind and carefulness compatible?

2.6: On indifference

2.7: The correct way to go about divination

2.8: The essence of goodness

2.9: That despite our inability to fulfill our potential as human beings, we assume the mantle of philosophy as well

2.10: How the names that a person bears reveal what behavior is appropriate for him

2.11: The starting point of philosophy

2.12: On argument

2.13: On anxiety

2.14: To Naso

2.15: To those who cling obstinately to certain of their decisions

2.16: That in practice we fail to apply our judgments about what is good and bad

2.17: How to apply preconceptions to particular cases

2.18: How to combat impressions

2.19: To those who take up philosophy just to enhance their conversation

2.20: Against the Epicureans and Academics

2.21: On inconsistency

2.22: On friendship

2.23: On rhetoric

2.24: To someone who Epictetus thought did not have what it takes

2.25: On the indispensability of logic

2.26: What is it that makes a mistake a mistake?

3.1: On personal adornment

3.2: The training a person needs if he is to progress, and that we neglect what is most important

3.3: What the material is that a good person works with, and what the primary orientation of one’s training should be

3.4: To someone who expressed immoderate support in the theater

3.5: To those who quit school because of illness

3.6: A miscellany

3.7: To the Corrector responsible for the free Greek cities, who was an Epicurean

3.8: How we should train ourselves to deal with impressions

3.9: To an orator who was on his way to Rome for a lawsuit

3.10: How to bear illness

3.11: A miscellany

3.12: On training

3.13: What loneliness is and the kind of person who is lonely

3.14: A miscellany

3.15: That we should approach everything with circumspection

3.16: That venturing into company requires caution

3.17: On providence

3.18: That there is no need for news to worry us

3.19: How a non-philosopher’s stance differs from that of a philosopher

3.20: That it is possible to turn every external circumstance to good account

3.21: To people who too readily set out to become lecturers

3.22: On Cynicism

3.23: To those who give readings and lectures just to be admired

3.24: On the necessity of not being attached to things that are not up to us

3.25: To those who fail to see their projects through to completion

3.26: To those who fear destitution

4.1: On freedom

4.2: On social intercourse

4.3: What should be exchanged for what

4.4: To those who are intent on living a quiet life

4.5: Against those who are pugnacious and fierce

4.6: To those who find the pity of others distressful

4.7: On freedom from fear

4.8: To those who rush to assume the guise of philosophers

4.9: To someone who had lapsed into shamelessness

4.10: What we should treat as unimportant and what should matter to us

4.11: On cleanliness

4.12: On paying attention

4.13: On those who too readily share personal information

Fragments

NOTES

TEXTUAL NOTES

RECOMMENDED READING

INDEX

Preface

It has been a great pleasure to work once again with Susan Bielstein and James Whitman Toftness (and then Dylan Montanari) at the University of Chicago Press, and it was also a pleasure to have the typescript assigned to a skillful copy editor, Lori Meek Schuldt. I received useful advice and suggestions from the readers who assessed the book proposal and the finished draft. Tony Long, the doyen of Epictetus studies and even of Stoic studies as a whole, was kind enough to act as one of the final readers, and I am particularly grateful to him for making me focus on the issue I address in the Note on the Translation. Charles Brittain also read the final draft of the book and gave me an extremely helpful and detailed report. Many improvements were made in the light of his comments.

This book was written under covid-19 restrictions. It is in any case my usual practice when writing a book to ask friends and colleagues to send me offprints of articles of theirs that are unavailable in the online archives, but, denied access to libraries, it was especially important this time. I am particularly grateful to those—Brad Inwood, John Sellars, Ron Polansky—who sent me copies from their collections of articles written by others who were unavailable. William Stephens supplied a whole book (his translation of Bonhöffer’s 1894 Die Ethik des stoikers Epictet), and I should also thank the publisher, Peter Lang, for letting me see an advance copy of the 2021 revised edition of the book. Alexander Meeus’s generosity extended to making material available to me from his university library at Mannheim. In the process of translating, I consulted Radcliffe G. Edmonds III on incantations, David Martinez on puzzling ethical datives, and Bill Murray on how to capsize a boat; I thank them for their help.

Note on the Translation

I have translated the following texts. For the Handbook: G. Boter, Epictetus: Encheiridion (Teubner, 2007); for Discourses: J. Souilhé and A. Jagu, Épictète, Entretiens, 4 vols. (Budé, 1945, 1949, 1963, 1965); for the fragments: W. Oldfather, Epictetus: The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, The Manual, and Fragments, 2 vols. (Loeb, 1928). These are the most recent available editions, but for Discourses I have also had on hand H. Schenkl’s ground-breaking, but out-of-print Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano Digestae, 2nd ed. (Teubner, 1916). However, there are many places where I differ from the readings of these editors; they are marked in the translations by an obelisk, or dagger (†), which points to a note in the Textual Notes (pp. 431–433). An asterisk in the text indicates that there is a note on that passage in the explanatory Notes (pp. 367–430). The notes (and the introduction) are designed more for students and lay readers than professionals in ancient philosophy.

The translation that I consulted most is the one by R. Hard: Epictetus: Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, with introduction and notes by C. Gill (Oxford University Press, 2014).

My policy, as in all my translations, has been to try to combine accuracy with current English fluency and readability. In one important respect, however, I have not followed current English practice: I have not gender-neutralized Epictetus’s pronouns. Epictetus often talks about or addresses an anonymous he, who is either a fictional person acting as a foil or one of his visitors or students, who appear to have all been male. To neutralize this person would have misrepresented Epictetus and his world. He was writing two thousand years ago, at a time when male dominance was simply assumed. Nor was it possible in ancient Greek to write about people (as opposed to things) in a gender-neutral way; in fact, to neutralize their gender in some linguistic fashion was often an insult.

In any case, it is clear that the anonymous he that Epictetus talks about or addresses is meant to be masculine, because the people and creatures to whom he is likened are always masculine. It is not just that he is likened to Heracles and Theseus, for instance, but to people with professions or occupations that in the ancient world were exclusively masculine: wrestlers and other athletes, actors (there were actresses in Rome but not in Greece, and Epictetus assumes Greek culture), orators, soldiers. At one point he is likened to a fighting cock. He can be waylaid by sexual attraction to girls. He can be called a son of God. He goes to the male bathhouse. He stands for office in Rome. So I have largely preserved Epictetus’s usage in this respect.

Map of Greece by András Bereznay

Introduction

Four great expositors of Stoicism emerged in Rome in the first and second centuries CE: Seneca the Younger, Gaius Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—an imperial courtier, a member of the equestrian order, an ex-slave, and an emperor. Despite being men of their time, their voices reach us clearly across the centuries because they speak always to our common humanity and our best aspirations. Since the work of earlier Stoics exists only in fragments, the surviving writings of these men constitute for us by far the most detailed record of Stoic philosophy.¹

Seneca focused on writing, and his books, plays, and letters were widely disseminated in his lifetime. Musonius Rufus was a popular teacher, and some of his lectures were transcribed by students and published. Marcus wrote for himself, and his private notebooks, known to us as Meditations, did not become widely available until after the tenth century. Epictetus focused on teaching; he wrote nothing himself, but some of his lectures were transcribed or summarized and quickly became well known. Within fifty years of his death, he was praised at length in a rock-cut inscription from Pisidia (southern Turkey), and anecdotes about him were cropping up in other works of literature.² Within a hundred years, one writer asserted that Epictetus was more widely read than Plato.³ The fundamental question that his teaching was designed to address is: How must we live if our lives are to be subjectively fulfilling and objectively worthwhile?⁴ And his answer was: Get ever closer to yourself, your true self.

At the heart of his teaching is an easily understood and insightful distinction. Some things are not up to us—they are external to us and just happen to us—but our minds are our own, and we can control our internal states and our responses to events: our desires, inclinations, choices, judgments, and intentions; in short, all the things that make up our characters. These things are up to us and cannot be thwarted by anyone or anything else. We need to learn to accept experiences and events over which we have no control, to recognize them as indifferent (neither good nor bad, and with no contribution to make to our happiness or misery) and to use them as the materials on which to practice virtue and appropriate action; we need to see them as gifts of the providential God who steers and arranges everything in the universe, great and small. In this way, fated events become opportunities, not constraints.

If we understand that our happiness does not depend on our bodies and possessions and careers, but on the mental faculties that are up to us, we will free ourselves of negative emotions (those that are not supportive of our natural potential for goodness), and our rational faculty, the distinctive part of a human being, will begin to work better, now that it is uncluttered by unnecessary reactions. It will begin to judge things correctly, and since everything bad that happens to us is the result of our own wrong judgments, we will start to live well. It is a fact of our human nature that we have all the resources we need to achieve happiness and a smoothly flowing life. No one empowers or disempowers us except ourselves. Moment by moment, we need to assess our mental condition to make sure that we are focusing only on things that are up to us and not letting externals worry us. That way we can take control of our lives.

This focus on what is up to us increasingly aligns us with the Reason that guides the universe, which is God. For the human soul, in its rational aspect, is a fragment of God. Rationality is our birthright and an inalienable human capacity. When our rational faculty is working well, we can act freely as independent and responsible moral agents, perpetuating the divine plan for the world by always acting virtuously. And virtue, which is the proper functioning of the soul in accord with its nature under the guidance of reason, always fulfills and benefits us and those around us, so that virtue is the essential prerequisite of happiness and peace of mind. If we are virtuous, nothing external to our minds can make the slightest difference to our happiness—not poverty or ill health, or even the imminent prospect of violent death. We therefore need to safeguard what is ours, our mental faculties, and turn away from everything else.

Since it is our nature’s goal to be rational and to act virtuously, it is the job of philosophy to help us realize this potential by curing us of attachment to everything about us that is not conducive to this end. By relying on reason and focusing only on what is up to us, we will be fulfilling our nature as human beings, which is happiness, and there is no one in the world who does not want to be happy.⁵ It will take hard work and total commitment, and no one should undertake the work unless they are prepared to change. A teacher such as Epictetus can show the way, but he cannot do the work for us. Theory, information, and advice from others are useless unless they are acted on and put into practice by the student.

EPICTETUS’S LIFE

Little is known of Epictetus’s life beyond what we can read in his discourses. He lived from c. 50 to c. 130 CE. He was born a slave in the city of Hierapolis in what is now southwestern Turkey. Hierapolis (Sacred City) was famous for its hot springs and its temple of Cybele, the great Mother Goddess of Anatolia. How and when Epictetus came to Rome is unknown, but he worked there in the household of a powerful man, Tiberius Claudius Epaphroditus, perhaps as a kind of personal assistant to his master. Epictetus was a Greek, a Mediterranean person, and he was enslaved to another Mediterranean person; although slavery might be based on race in the ancient world (and so-called inferior races were despised as such), most ancient slavery was different from the modern version in this respect, that it was far less likely to be based on race. Generally, people were either born into slavery, as Epictetus was, or became slaves after defeat in warfare.

Epaphroditus was himself a freedman, a former slave, who had risen to be one of the emperor Nero’s secretaries, responsible for receiving and sifting petitions. Epictetus mentions an Epaphroditus three times in Discourses. One of these mentions is indifferent (1.1.20), but the other two come with a sneer (1.19.19–21, 1.26.11–12). The Epaphroditus of 1.19 is certainly Epictetus’s master, but the other two might be different men: the name was not uncommon. Epictetus comments caustically on life in the imperial court, but it is unlikely that he experienced it directly.⁶ He arrived in Rome after Nero’s suicide in 68, and Epaphroditus was probably not employed by any emperors after Nero. Epaphroditus played a role in Nero’s suicide by holding the emperor steady as he thrust the dagger into his own throat.⁷ For this, he was condemned to death many years later by the emperor Domitian, sometime around 95.⁸

Epictetus’s experience of slavery marked him for life. More than any other ancient philosopher, he insisted that, however else one describes the goal of life, it must be a state of freedom, where everything that happens to a person is in accord with his will and no one is able to impede him (1.12.9). Slavery most frequently occurs in the discourses in this metaphorical sense, but Epictetus reflected on literal slavery as well. At 1.13, he claims that the institution of slavery is not natural but a matter of human convention; by nature, all human beings, whatever their status, are equal just because they all possess reason. Despite this claim, however, Epictetus seems to accept slavery as an institution (e.g., 1.18.19, 2.20.29–31, 2.23.24, Handbook 14a). If he was no active abolitionist, that was presumably because, for a Stoic, one’s station in life is a matter of little or no relevance to one’s moral progress or ultimate happiness.⁹

Even while enslaved, Epictetus was permitted to attend the lectures of the foremost Stoic in Rome, Musonius Rufus (1.9.29), but otherwise, as a slave, his education may have been rather sketchy. We should probably think of him as self-taught to a great extent—or even as contemptuous of much learning: his speech in the discourses has few of the flourishes that embellish the work of educated orators and writers; his cultural allusions are limited largely to myth, Homer, and popular drama; and his references to writers such as Plato and Xenophon are largely limited to paraphrases of popular passages that had already featured in other Stoic writers. The few historical figures to whom he alludes were household names.

Given that Musonius Rufus was often away from Rome (exiled first by Nero and then by Vespasian), it was not until the reign of Titus, which began in 79, that we can safely say that he was back in Rome and that Epictetus could have been attending his lectures. Musonius Rufus wrote nothing, but we have transcripts of a few of his discourses by a student and a collection of shorter fragments. He seems to have specialized in offering Stoically tinged advice on every day topics such as marriage, family life, and self-presentation. Of particular interest is the fact that he treated women as equal to men, in the sense that they have the same capacity for rationality. They are just as capable as men of striving for and attaining virtue, and marriage and raising children are not incompatible with a life devoted to philosophy.¹⁰

Epictetus may have agreed with his teacher on this, but it is not a topic on which he touches in the extant discourses, and there is only one hint, at 4.11.35, that any of his students might be female. His attitude toward women appears to have been conventional—that women’s roles are of lesser importance than men’s (Handbook 40, Discourses 2.4.9, 3.7.20). But Epictetus was a true follower of his teacher in that both were popularizers of Stoicism. Epictetus talks not just of how to cope with tyrants and banishment but about family life, friendship, clothing, cleanliness, and dinner table manners. Nothing, however trivial, lies beyond the reach of his teaching. A true Stoic puts his philosophy into practice whatever he is doing.

Sometime after he was given his freedom by Epaphroditus (in 80 or thereabouts), Epictetus set himself up as a philosophy teacher under Rufus’s patronage. But, probably in 93, Domitian ordered all philosophers out of Rome, suspecting them of republican sympathies.¹¹ Epictetus, who was by then a successful teacher, moved to the west coast of Greece, easy to reach from Italy, where his main client base was, and set up his school in Nicopolis, the largest city in western Greece and the capital of the Roman province of Epirus.¹² Athens was the traditional center of learning in Greece, but Epictetus chose Nicopolis because it was closer to Italy. A secondary reason might have been that he did not want his students to be distracted by the fabled beauties of Athens, of which he thought little (2.16.32–33, 3.24.73).¹³

Epictetus thought little of Rome either. In the discourses Rome comes across as a place of false values and loose morals (1.10, 1.26.10, 2.12.17, 3.23.27, Fragment 15), where flattery rather than ability is the best way to get promoted (e.g., 3.17.2, Handbook 25.4); a place where people are constantly in danger of being executed or sent into exile (e.g., 1.1.22–24, 1.1.30, 1.2.21, 1.10.2, 1.25.20, 2.1.38, 2.6.20–22, 2.7.8); a place therefore that is seething with hostility toward the emperor (3.4.7–8), and where secret policemen entrap people into treason (4.13.5, and see 3.4.8); and above all a place dominated by the emperor, who is often called a tyrant (especially in 1.19 and 4.7).¹⁴

After Domitian’s death in 96, Epictetus probably could have returned to Rome, and passages such as 1.29.37–39 might imply that he made the occasional voyage back (though, with Epictetus, it is often difficult to separate fact from one of his flights of fancy). But essentially Nicopolis remained his home for the last thirty-five or so years of his life. He was less well off than he had been as a teacher in Rome (3.5.9, 3.26.31), but he seems to have attracted enough students to make a living. In keeping with his teaching, he probably lived frugally.¹⁵ When he was elderly (by which time, we happen to know, he was lame: 1.8.14, 1.16.20),¹⁶ he retired from teaching and took up a family life by adopting a child and taking in a female housekeeper to look after himself and the child.¹⁷

ARRIAN AND EPICTETUS’S DISCOURSES

Epictetus, like his hero Socrates and his teacher Musonius Rufus, wrote nothing and confined himself to live teaching. But students took notes, and one of them turned his notes into Discourses and then prepared a digest of his mentor’s ideas, which is the Handbook or Manual. This student’s name was Lucius Flavius Arrianus, or Arrian to us, and he is also famous for other books, including what is widely regarded as the most authoritative account of the eastern conquests of Alexander the Great. Arrian considered himself a second Xenophon. Not only did he call his Alexander book The Anabasis of Alexander (Alexander’s Eastern Expedition) in homage to Xenophon’s most famous historical work, The Anabasis of Cyrus, but he also wrote a supplement to Xenophon’s treatise on hunting and, like Xenophon, wrote a book On Cavalry Command. In writing up Epictetus’s lectures, he was performing the same service as Xenophon in his Memoirs of Socrates (Memorabilia). Later writers sometimes refer to Discourses as Memorabilia.¹⁸

We have four books of discourses, but we know that originally there were more. Other writers, including Marcus Aurelius, preserve a few fragments from the missing books, and a Byzantine encyclopedist tells us there were originally eight books.¹⁹ Moreover, the Handbook, which is supposed to consist of extracts or summaries of entries in Discourses, contains quite a few entries that correspond to nothing in the extant discourses. Simplicius of Cilicia, the Platonist scholar who wrote a commentary on the Handbook in the sixth century, says, "Practically all the material [in the Handbook] can be found in the same words at various points in Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus" (On Epictetus’s Handbook 192). He does not seem to have had a copy of Discourses on hand as he was writing his commentary, so there may be some exaggeration in his in the same words, but he still corroborates the evidence that there was originally more to Discourses.

In the preface to Discourses, Arrian claimed that they are verbatim records of his master’s voice. There is no reason to suspect him of being disingenuous: stenography had been practiced in Rome since the first century BCE.²⁰ Without stenography, the task would have been impossible. It is plain from the lectures that Epictetus’s delivery could be rapid. Even if Arrian had checked his memory against that of his fellow students, and even consulted Epictetus himself, it would have been impossible to get it all down—to recover, to a satisfactory degree of accuracy, what would originally have been more than 250,000 extemporized words. However, some of Epictetus’s talks might already have been transcribed (see 2.17.30), creating a certain stock for Arrian to draw on.²¹ And a final reason for confidence that we are hearing Epictetus’s voice is that the style of Discourses is unique in Arrian’s corpus. The rest of his works are written in literary Greek—he wrote in the dialect that Xenophon had used hundreds of years earlier—whereas Discourses is written in Koine, the supraregional dialect of Greek that everyone spoke at the time.²²

Nevertheless, Arrian must have introduced some differences. His main contributions were probably a bit of scene setting (e.g., the beginning of 2.4, 2.14, 3.9), the titles of the discourses,²³ and the order of the discourses.²⁴ He might have undertaken some amalgamation too. That is, if he found discourses delivered by Epictetus on different days but on the same topic, he might have put them together; there are some awkward transitions in the talks that could be explained in this way (e.g., 2.23.16, 4.6.25), and three of the discourses are perhaps too long to have been delivered comfortably in a single session (3.22, 3.24, 4.1). But otherwise he did not organize the material by topic; there is no overall plan to the order of the talks.²⁵ However, the fact that each of the four books is about the same length suggests that Arrian might have arranged the discourses to reach this satisfying result. His playing around with the order makes no difference because, as any reader will quickly learn, Epictetus typically circles around the same topics, the central insights that I summarized at the start of this introduction and will develop subsequently.

THE HANDBOOK

We know from Simplicius (On Epictetus’s Handbook 192) that there was originally a letter prefacing the Handbook, as there still is for Discourses. Arrian addressed the letter to someone called Messalenus, and in it he said that he had selected from Epictetus’s talks the principal and most necessary elements of his thought—those that are most likely to move the souls of readers. If Arrian interfered little in the discourses, then, the same cannot be said for the Handbook. As well as selecting what to include, he must have paraphrased, abridged, and rewritten much of the material. Although we are missing four books of the discourses, it is remarkable how little direct correspondence there is between the content of the Handbook and the discourses. This again suggests that Arrian did more than just excerpt bits of the discourses. On some occasions he may have lifted phrases and ideas from different discourses and put them together as a Handbook entry. So Handbook 47, for instance, if it is not a report of a lost discourse, seems to consist of several snatches from Discourses 3.12, but with elements of 3.14 and possibly 4.5. The philosophy of the Handbook is Epictetus’s, but the way it is told is due to Arrian.

The Handbook, then, is Arrian’s distillation of the essence of Epictetus’s teaching, with an emphasis on practice rather than theory. It is a handbook in the sense that it contains reminders that Epictetus wanted his students to have at hand—a repeated phrase in both the Handbook and Discourses. In Discourses, Epictetus often illustrates his point with anecdotes; almost all of these were omitted from the Handbook. Whereas the discourses were addressed to Epictetus’s students, the Handbook addresses the reader, so Arrian omitted the teacherly aspects of the discourses, especially those many occasions when Epictetus reprimands and criticizes his students. No one can deny that Arrian did a good job in composing the Handbook. It serves its introductory purpose well, but it is thinner fare than Discourses.

The Handbook became very popular. The usual way books were published in medieval times was that a customer approached a monastery to commission a scribe to make a copy of the book he wanted. We have almost sixty manuscripts of the Handbook, with many more lost than surviving. The earliest of the survivors date from the fourteenth century, but they stand at the end of a long, invisible tradition, demonstrating considerable demand for the work. Passages were included in the fifth-century anthology of John of Stobi (commonly known as Stobaeus), and in the sixth century the Platonist Simplicius, the most learned scholar of the time, wrote a commentary on it. Perhaps in the seventh century the first of the extant Christian adaptations of the Handbook was written. At least two others followed over the centuries, written as guides for monks and nuns. They Christianized Epictetus’s work by, for instance, substituting Paul for Socrates and God for the gods; they undertook some judicious rewriting, omitting words, phrases, and sentiments that they found distasteful.²⁶

Did Arrian also impose structure on the entries of the Handbook? In his On Epictetus’s Handbook, Simplicius thought he could detect structure, and even that each entry developed material left unfinished by earlier entries, but this notion seems fanciful. More recently, a number of scholars have been attracted by the idea that the book is structured by the three domains—the three areas of life where training is needed to perfect oneself (more on this later). But this idea does not work either. The first domain is that of desire and aversion, the second that of inclinations and appropriate (that is, ethical) behavior, and the third that of logic and rational thinking. Given that the thrust of the Handbook is practical, there can be little doubt that the three domains underlie much of its content, but it would be more realistic to see them scattered throughout the book, and they certainly do not occur in blocks.²⁷ Even casual reading disproves this idea. The impression of randomness that one gets on reading the book is correct.

So there is no fine structure to the Handbook, but it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The first two entries are programmatic, laying out the objectives and the means of attaining those objectives, and introducing and explaining the technical terms that are employed. Then almost all the rest of the entries illustrate the practical applications of this theoretical model. Themes are treated at random or in a kaleidoscopic fashion throughout the book, with the final entries, 48a–53, forming an epilogue, covering the philosophical life and providing some essential maxims for students to remember as they set out to cope with the real world. Each entry makes its point clearly and simply, avoiding theoretical technicalities.

If the Handbook gives an overview of the practical work a would-be Stoic philosopher needed to undertake, it was probably written for both beginners and more advanced students. Beginners would glimpse the kind of work to which they would be committing themselves and the goals for which they would aim, and more advanced students, such as Arrian, would be reminded of what they should be doing. It could be read, then, either before or after Discourses. Since I think Arrian intended the primary audience to be beginners (see Handbook 1.4), those who had heard of Epictetus and were curious about what he demanded of a student, I have placed it first in this book, before the discourses and the surviving fragments of the lost books.

EPICTETUS’S SCHOOL

It is clear that the discourses constitute only a fraction of the teaching that went on in Epictetus’s school in Nicopolis. They are his extracurricular talks, delivered in the afternoon,²⁸ when he addressed his students’ personal issues, rather than the impersonal, systematic teaching that made up the core curriculum. They were probably not a regular feature of the school, and the letter with which Arrian prefaced the discourses suggests that they were impromptu, as does the whole tenor of the talks. Nevertheless, there are hints in the discourses that allow us to discern the regular curriculum at least in outline.

The Stoics divided philosophy into three major fields: logic, physics, and ethics. Logic covered not only the rules of correct argumentation and thinking but also grammar, linguistics, rhetorical theory, epistemology, and all the tools that might be needed to discover the truth of any matter. Physics was concerned with the nature of the world and the laws that govern it, and so it included ontology and theology as well as what we would recognize as physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Ethics was concerned with how to achieve happiness, or the conditions for living a fulfilled and flourishing life as a human being. As a teacher of Stoicism, Epictetus taught all three subjects at his school.

There are plenty of references to logic throughout the discourses (see the index under argument). They show that Epictetus’s students received a substantial grounding in the subject. He expected his students to understand and be proficient at definition, and at syllogisms (formally valid arguments) and their analysis. They were to be familiar with various modes of argumentation, which Epictetus calls changing arguments, hypothetical arguments, and arguments that proceed by question and answer.²⁹ And they studied various specific arguments, such as the Master Argument and other sophisms, where the point was to be able to spot invalid argumentation. As for epistemology, they would have examined human rationality, to discover what its constituent parts are, and how they’re related and interconnected (4.7.38). That is, they learned to distinguish knowledge and belief, what impressions are and how they affect the soul, and the mechanics of how we gain reliable knowledge of the world. And they would have come to know the elements of reason: what each of them is, how they fit together, and what their consequences are (4.8.12).

There is no such abundance of references when it comes to physics, but we can be certain that the subject formed part of the school curriculum. In Fragment 1, Epictetus asks whether there is any point to studying physics, and by the end of the fragment it is clear that he expects the answer Yes, it is worthwhile—but don’t get lost in the details. The whole of Epictetus’s teaching is founded on assumptions that fell within the province of Stoic physics, and in his formal lectures he would not have left those assumptions unexamined or poorly understood (3.12.15). He assumes, for instance, that the world is perfect and is run by a providential God (1.6, 1.10.10, 1.12, 1.14, 1.16, 2.14.11, 3.17, Fragment 23), and he discusses theological issues (1.12.1–6, 2.8.1–2, 2.14.11, Handbook 31). He makes claims about the human constitution—that we are rational beings and that we are fragments of the Reason that guides the universe (1.14, 1.17.27, 2.8.11). He claims that we are made up of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), and that these elements are constantly being recycled into new forms of matter (2.1.18, 3.13.14–15, 3.24.10, 4.7.15, Fragment 8). He talks of a human being as a part of the universe (1.12.26, 2.5.13, 2.5.25–26, 2.10.2, 4.7.7) and assumes a scala naturae (great chain of being; 1.16.2) and familiarity with the doctrine of eternal recurrence (3.13.4). These are all issues that would have been included in a general course on Stoic physics, along with broader topics that are not touched on in the extant discourses, such as the corporeality of all things, causation, and cosmology (mentioned at 1.10.10).

Along with logic and physics, the systematic study of ethics and moral psychology would have formed the final part of the curriculum. The students would have learned, above all, why virtue is the only good and vice the only thing that is bad, how all actions follow from what the Stoics called inclinations (hormai), why passions are misleading, and what it is appropriate or proper for us, as human beings, to do.

So logic, physics, and ethics were all represented in the school curriculum. The chief means of acquainting students with these fields was the study of classic Stoic texts, especially those of Chrysippus. A student would be set a chunk of one of these texts to study, and the next day it would be read out either by him or by Epictetus, and then one or both of them would explain the text, answer questions, and defend the content against the theories of rival philosophical schools (1.10.8, 1.26.1, 2.1.30, 2.14.1, 2.21.11, 3.21.6–7), or it might be opened up for general discussion (2.16.20). As well as this oral work, written work was required (2.6.23, 2.17.35, 4.4.17).

But even if all three parts of philosophy formed the curriculum that was taught in the school in the mornings, the basic thrust of the discourses, delivered in the afternoons, is ethical. In the discourses, Epictetus assumes and argues that logic and physics, and theory in general, are not goals in themselves, but they help aspirants gain the conviction that they should live life rationally and in accord with nature. Some Stoics held that all three branches of philosophy were equally important, but others contended that logic and physics were subordinate to ethics.³⁰ It looks as though Epictetus—or at least the Epictetus of Discourses—belonged to this latter group (see 1.8.5–6 and Handbook 52). The core curriculum consisted of all three branches equally, but in the discourses Epictetus asserts time and again that the work is pointless unless it changes a student’s character and behavior. And this, he insists, is not something theory alone can do: it must be put into practice. Theory alone cannot bring ataraxia (peace of mind, tranquility, serenity); theory is not dispensable, but it alone does not make a philosopher.

His most forceful assertions along these lines concern logic and the study of Chrysippus’s treatises. Quite a few passages give the impression that he dismissed logic and theoretical work in general as useless.³¹ But he clearly did not think logic useless, otherwise it would not have constituted a third of the regular curriculum of his school. And so there are also passages, such as 1.7.12 and 1.17.8, where he argues for its usefulness and importance. This apparent contradiction can easily be resolved. What Epictetus is saying is that theoretical studies are useless on their own (1.29.35, 2.9.13–17, 2.16.20–21, Fragment 10). Meaning must be given to them by putting the ideas into practice, so that they take root and change your life, rather than just being clever bits of information that enable you to show off at dinner parties (e.g., 1.26.9, 2.19.8, 2.21.17). Theory is merely the preliminary to practice (1.26.3–4, 2.9.13–22, 2.23.46, 4.4.11, 4.4.30); hence throughout the discourses Epictetus offers advice about how to cope with the real world, and he talks in this context even about apparent trivia, such as how to eat or bathe properly. Practice enables one to digest theory and put it to work (2.9.18, Handbook 46.2, Fragment 16), while undigested theory is nothing but vomit (1.26.16, 3.21.1–6). If you didn’t learn the theory so as to be able to put it into practice, what was the point? (1.29.35).

Transformation of character and behavior was the ultimate goal of Epictetus’s teaching, then, not the mere imparting of information. It isn’t arguments that we’re short of these days; books written by Stoics are full of them. What’s missing is someone to put them to practical use, someone who testifies to the arguments by his actions (1.29.56). Logic is not an end in itself; it is a tool, a measuring instrument (1.17, 3.26.19). The point of reading texts is to learn how to judge things correctly, and then to apply those judgments in real-life situations (1.4.18–24, 2.9.13–14, 2.17.29–33, 2.19.21–24, 3.21.23, 4.4.11–18).

So once in a while, after the regular classes were over, Epictetus tried to hammer home the importance of grounding and realizing the theory in daily practice. The audience for these impromptu talks, the discourses, were mainly students who were enrolled at the school, but there were more casual visitors as well (1.10, 1.11, 1.15, 1.19.26–29, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6.20, 2.14, 2.24, 3.1, 3.4, 3.7, 3.9, 3.24).³² Some came with sincere questions, but Epictetus’s fame had also made him something of a tourist attraction (3.9.14). Most of the students were rounding off their education by attending a school of philosophy, but some intended to become professional philosophers themselves (3.21).

On applying to the school, a prospective student was assessed by Epictetus (2.24, 3.1, 3.6.9–10). For the application to be accepted, the student had to be open-minded and willing to change (3.15.8–13, 4.2.2, Handbook 29.7). Epictetus would present the starting point of philosophy in perfectly general terms, not specifically Stoic (2.11). Any student who was accepted was first entrusted, at least in part, to the care of an older student (1.26.13), perhaps one of those who intended to make a career out of philosophy. The students would mostly have been in their late teens or early twenties, but some of the visitors were older. Epictetus may even have been visited by the emperor Hadrian in 125 or thereabouts; at any rate, the emperor certainly passed through Nicopolis and, given his love of all things Greek, it is hard to imagine that he did not visit the most famous contemporary teacher of Greek philosophy. Some of the talks were clearly delivered in some kind of classroom, and those would have been exclusively for students, but some were delivered in the open air,³³ and that is when Epictetus became available to casual visitors.

The students we meet in the discourses are all male. Only young men from the elite strata of society had the time and money for higher education in rhetoric and philosophy, so it is no surprise to find that Epictetus’s students were generally well off. They assume the existence of enslaved people to wait on them (1.13.3, 1.18.19, 2.21.11, 3.19.4–5, 3.26.21–22); they have enough leisure time to travel as sightseers (1.6.23); they receive allowances from their parents (2.21.12–14); they frequent gymnasia, baths, and the elite dinner parties known as symposia (1.26.9, 2.4.8, 2.16.27–29, 2.21.14, 3.16.1, 3.16.14); when they leave the school, they expect to engage in the affairs of their city (2.10.10), to move in senatorial circles in Rome (1.30, 3.3.15, 4.1.55), and even to hold high office and be close to the imperial court (1.25.26, 2.6.20, 2.23.38, 3.5.3, 3.14.11, 4.1.60, 4.1.94–95, 4.1.149, 4.1.173, 4.4.47, 4.7.23, 4.10.11, 4.10.18–21). The number of times in the discourses that Epictetus advises his students how to think of exile or execution suggests that they were the kind of people who might find themselves condemned by the emperor for political crimes (e.g., 2.19.17). Humankind had to wait many centuries for the ideal of universal access to education; in Epictetus’s time it was almost entirely for the rich.

EPICTETUS AS A TEACHER

In Epictetus’s day, there was no Stoic school as such—no particular person recognized as the head of the school or particular city where one went to study this brand of philosophy—so you became a teacher without official accreditation and made a living at it only if you became recognized as good at it. To claim that you were a teacher of Stoicism, you based your teaching firmly on the early Stoics and, above all, on the works of Chrysippus, the third head of the school in the third century BCE, who was its primary and most important theoretician. This is exactly what Epictetus did. Chrysippus is mentioned many times in the discourses, and his written work formed the basis of the curriculum.

Philosophy in Epictetus’s time differed in certain respects from its modern counterpart. Modern philosophy is pursued in classrooms, seminars, and the written word, and much of it consists of analyzing abstract concepts and arguments, but much ancient philosophy, especially in the postclassical centuries, was philosophy to live by and practice daily. It was supposed to purge you from your base attachments and make you a better person. It was supposed to help you cope with difficulties you encountered and things that might disturb your equanimity, and so over the decades before Epictetus, certain topics—old age, death, anger, poverty, exile—were regularly discussed and analyzed, with a view to finding out how to cope with them. This therapeutic and consolatory philosophy is what Epictetus taught in the afternoons. Throughout Discourses, we find him encouraging his listeners to regard illness, death, and so on as indifferents—as things that should not trouble us or contribute in any way toward our happiness or misery.³⁴ His framework was Stoicism, and he was teaching in rivalry to Epicureans, Skeptics, and Cynics. He explicitly attacks Epicureanism and Skepticism (1.5, 1.23, 1.27.15, 2.20, 2.22.21, 2.23.20–22, 3.7), but along with many other Stoics, he thought highly of Cynicism, the most ascetic and radical of the philosophical traditions (3.22). All the schools agreed on the therapeutic aim of philosophy, so a student would attach himself to Stoicism not just because it was advertising its therapeutic effectiveness but because of what distinguished it from the other schools, its entire worldview. Moreover, unlike its chief rival, Epicureanism, Stoicism encouraged participation in public life,³⁵ and that would have been attractive to some students.

Over the centuries before Epictetus’s time, then, philosophy had gone in two directions. High philosophy, as we may call it, was the impersonal presentation of often very subtle ideas and arguments; some of the work of the Stoics, for instance, on logic and epistemology is as challenging as philosophical work of any era. Low philosophy, on the other hand, was the attempt to make philosophy practical and accessible to the common man and woman. Both high and low philosophy were taught at Epictetus’s school, as we have seen, but only his discourses remain, and in these Epictetus was focused entirely on therapeutic or low philosophy: on his students’ ethical development, or in other words, on curing the erroneous judgments that were causing their attachment to the external world. His students were sick, and his teaching held the cure (2.21.15–22, 3.23.30–32); Epictetus is liberal with his analogies, but those based on the field of medicine are among the most striking.

Since Epictetus believed that everyone has the natural capacity to develop and perfect reason, which is the route to happiness, his teaching methods are designed to elicit that realization in his students and then to put it to work. He is always concerned to encourage students, or to eradicate their false beliefs, or to get them to accept advice. To these ends he naturally used argument, especially of a Socratic kind (question and answer), but also less rational and more rhetorical methods.³⁶ Most strikingly, he employed the shock tactics of reproof and abuse. He could be merciless even with some of the casual visitors (2.4, 2.14, 2.24, 3.7). He tears into members of his audience, serious students and laymen alike, exposing their pretensions, pricking the bubbles of their conceit and complacency, grounding them in reality. He addresses them as slaves or wretches and calls them blind.³⁷ He makes it clear to his students that none of them is the ideal student that he would like to have (2.16.17, 2.17.29–30, 2.19.20–28, 3.6.4).

This abrasiveness is justified at 3.1.10–15: it is a philosopher’s duty to make a potential student see the disgraceful state he is in. Epictetus wanted to upset his students. If a philosopher’s words fail to produce [the realization that the listener is in a bad way], they’re lifeless, and the speaker’s a corpse too (3.23.28). One should leave the doctor’s office in pain (3.23.30–32). The effective teacher is one like Musonius Rufus, who enables people to see their flaws (3.23.29). A good talk is one that makes a student worried about himself and determined to change his ways (3.23.37). Epictetus believed that every human being has an innate sense of self-respect (aidōs), close to our notion of a conscience, and tried to use that as a trigger to get his students to correct their lives. He also believed that all of us, whatever our circumstances, are innately programmed to form certain moral conceptions that give us, among other things, the ability to distinguish good from bad (see especially 1.22). These two beliefs meant that he placed the burden of the work on his students themselves. It was his job in the discourses to arouse in them the desire to undertake the work that was required for them to correct themselves. Work on oneself must take place not only in a school environment but, more importantly, at every moment of every day.

Epictetus comes across as a forceful personality, and the discourses are intense and fast-paced—so fast, occasionally, that it is hard to follow the train of thought. Sentences are short, even staccato. His Greek is colloquial (see the ironic comment at 3.9.14), conversational, and often powerfully expressive and metaphorical. Analogies abound from the natural world, and, like his hero Socrates, he employs homely examples to illustrate his points: the arts and crafts, games and sports, cracked jars, chamber pots, runny noses, ears of wheat, dinner parties, hunted deer. Anecdotes concerning famous people from the past demonstrate that people with political power are not as powerful as they think, and characters from myth and legend demonstrate that the events of their lives were due to faulty judgments. Socratic-like dialogue, often rapid-fire, is a common idiom, as he answers his own questions or puts objections into the mouths of imaginary interlocutors and refutes them.³⁸

His tone of voice frequently changes, and we have to remember that originally these were live talks, some even delivered while strolling in the open air. The talks would have been accompanied by gestures, pauses, facial expressions, and other body language. Epictetus uses irony a lot, and without hearing him in person, it is sometimes hard to know whether or not a given passage is ironic. He argues logically less than he makes use of parallels, so the validity of many of his points depends on the validity of the parallels. The anecdotes, quotations, and examples leaven the serious subject matter, as do occasional flashes of humor (which can be quite acerbic: 2.20.29–30), but there are also considerable stretches of argument.

His constant and somewhat heavy-handed employment of imperatives and pointed rhetorical questions, peppered with insults, frequently makes him sound like a street preacher and turns his talks into harangues. His listeners must sometimes have felt pummeled by his relentless questioning and driving home of consequences, and his repetition of key points. But Epictetus was not claiming to be perfect himself. He is merely God’s mouthpiece (3.1.36). He is capable of laziness (1.10.8, 12) and weakness (2.8.24), he has not achieved freedom (4.1.151), he does not altogether put theory into practice (Handbook 49), and in general there is still work to do (4.8.43, 4.10.13). Sometimes, when he is pointing out faults, he includes himself along with his students by saying we (e.g., 2.9.21, 2.16.2, 3.23.10, 4.5.36). All in all, the discourses bear the marks of a passionate and effective teacher.

STOICISM: A SKETCH

Epictetus was an orthodox Stoic. He introduced a few innovations, but they are changes in emphasis or terminology rather than substantial changes in doctrine.³⁹ To say that he was orthodox is to say that he looked back to the first founders of Stoicism in the third century BCE, especially Chrysippus. Sometimes he offered his audiences plain, commonsensical advice (this was also the specialty of his teacher, Musonius Rufus), for which no knowledge of Stoicism was needed (e.g., 2.11, Handbook 25, 33). But generally speaking, he is not fully understandable without some knowledge of Stoicism. Given the ethical thrust of Discourses, in what follows I shall focus on Stoic ethics and moral psychology, rather than on logic and physics.

The fundamental Stoic ethical tenet is that the only thing that is good and beneficial is moral virtue or human excellence, and the only thing that is bad and truly harmful is moral vice or imperfection. Everything else falls into the class of indifferents, and it is careless talk to describe an indifferent as good or bad (as, for instance, Epictetus’s interlocutors do from time to time [e.g., 1.22.12, 1.28.26–27, Handbook 24]). This is a radical thought, since it accuses almost all of us, along with our laws and institutions, of being misguided in our judgment of what is good and bad.

However, we cannot be completely indifferent to the external world. In the first place, it provides us with what Epictetus calls the materials on which we can practice living appropriately and virtuously. Virtue is a kind of craft knowledge, knowledge of the art of living (1.15.2–3, 1.26.7, 4.1.118), and consists in making skillful use of one’s experiences, which are the raw material of virtue, as leather is a cobbler’s raw material (e.g.1.4.20, 1.15.2, 1.29.2). In the second place, many indifferents can be rated on a scale of value, even if they cannot be rated as good or bad.⁴⁰ Their value depends on whether they are in accord with nature and aid an aspirant’s progress toward virtue, and so consideration of the value of things allows us to draw distinctions within the infinite class of indifferents, such that some of them are preferred indifferents, while others are dispreferred.⁴¹

For example, health is neither good nor bad, since it is neither virtue nor vice; we can be happy whether we are healthy or unhealthy. But health is still to be preferred to sickness because it is natural to us as human beings, or in other words, it is the bodily condition that God established for human beings. Since happiness depends on our being in harmony with nature in all respects, and since health is our natural condition, it is a preferred indifferent. By the same token, moderate wealth and some degree of status in society are also preferred indifferents; not surprisingly, since they reflect our nature as human beings, Stoic preferred indifferents coincide to a considerable degree with the ordinary values of society. There may be