Epictetus
c. 50–135 CE, Hierapolis, Rome and Nicopolis
Roman Stoicism
Freedom is knowing exactly what is and isn't up to you.
“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
The life
Epictetus was born a slave in Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey. His name is not a name: it means "acquired". He was owned by Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman who served as a secretary to Nero, which placed him close to the centre of imperial power while owning nothing.
He was lame in one leg. One tradition says his master broke it; another says it was disease. While still enslaved he was permitted to study with the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus.
Freed after Nero's death, he taught in Rome until Domitian expelled philosophers from Italy around 93 CE. He moved to Nicopolis in north-western Greece and ran a school there for the rest of his life, living very simply. Like Socrates, he wrote nothing: his pupil Arrian recorded the lectures.
What shaped the ideas
Roman Stoicism was practical where the early Greek Stoics had been systematic. Under emperors who could exile or execute on a whim, its central question became urgent and concrete: what remains yours when everything external can be taken?
Epictetus answered it from the strongest possible position, having actually been property. That biography is why his version is the least sentimental and the hardest to dismiss as privilege.
Core arguments
- 01
The dichotomy of control
Some things are up to us and some are not, and almost all suffering comes from confusing them.
Your judgements, intentions and responses are yours. Your body, reputation, property and other people are not. Treating what is not yours as though it were guarantees frustration, because you have staked your peace on something you cannot deliver.
- 02
Judgements, not events
Events are not disturbing in themselves; our verdicts about them are.
Death cannot be inherently terrible, or it would strike everyone the same way, and Socrates would have feared it. People respond to identical events completely differently, so the disturbance is being supplied by the person, in the form of a judgement that can be examined and changed.
- 03
The three disciplines
Training has three parts: desire, action and assent.
Discipline desire so you want only what is up to you. Discipline action so you meet your obligations to others. Discipline assent so you stop agreeing automatically with the impressions that arrive. The order matters: you cannot judge clearly while your wants are still hostage to circumstance.
- 04
Role ethics
You are handed a part; your only job is playing it well.
You did not choose to be born, or into which family, or with which body. Casting is not up to you. Performance is. This reframes fortune from an injustice into the material of the task.
Commonly got wrong
- Stoicism is not emotional suppression. The aim is to revise the judgement that generates a destructive emotion, so it does not arise, rather than to feel it and hide it.
- "Control" is a lossy translation. The Greek is closer to "up to us" or "in our power", which is narrower and more honest than the self-help version.
- The dichotomy is not an excuse for passivity. Epictetus insists on duty to family, city and strangers; what you drop is the demand that your efforts succeed.
Works
Discourses c. 108 CE
Recorded by his student Arrian. Four of the original eight books survive.
Enchiridion (Handbook) c. 125 CE
A short digest of the Discourses, and the most widely read Stoic text after Meditations.
The Enchiridion. It is about twenty pages and the first sentence contains the whole system.
Why they still get taught
The Enchiridion is the direct ancestor of cognitive behavioural therapy, which rests on the same claim: change the appraisal and the feeling changes. He is also the reason Stoicism reads as a practice rather than a doctrine.
Chapters
- The Dichotomy of Control · The Art of Living