He wrote nothing. Not one line that we can hold in our hands and call his own composition. Everything the world knows about Epictetus comes through a student who sat in his classroom at Nicopolis, on the Adriatic coast of Greece, and took notes fast enough to keep up with an old man talking.

That student was Arrian of Nicomedia, later a consul and a historian of Alexander. He says plainly what he was doing:

But whatever I heard from his own mouth, that I tried to set down in the very same words, so far as possible

Arrian, Arrian to Lucius Gellius, preface to the Discourses (trans. T. W. Higginson, 1890)

The result is the Discourses, four books out of eight or more that once existed, and a short abridgment of them called the Manual, or Enchiridion. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Two thousand years later, one of the most quoted Stoics in the world is a man who never published a word, and whose voice survives only because somebody else was a good listener.

The boy from Hierapolis

He was born in Hierapolis, a Greek city in Phrygia, in the 50s of the first century, and he was born a slave. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the year at about 55; the Stanford Encyclopedia says only “sometime in the 50s.” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The World History Encyclopedia states the mechanics bluntly: his mother was a slave woman, and the child inherited her condition. (World History Encyclopedia) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is more cautious, saying only that he spent a portion of his life as the slave of Epaphroditus, an important administrator in the court of Nero, and that nobody knows when he was brought to Rome. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Epaphroditus is a name that rewards a pause. He had himself been Nero’s freedman, and the ancient accounts place him near the emperor at the very end, when the last of the Julio-Claudians was deciding how to die. A household like that was a strange place to raise a philosopher. It was also, by the standards of the first century, a lucky one: the boy was permitted to study, and the man who owned him apparently let him.

The name Epictetus means “acquired” or “bought.” He carried the label of a piece of property for the first decades of his life and then, at some point, was freed. The date is not recorded. The fact is.

The leg

He walked with a limp, and the sources give different reasons. The Stanford Encyclopedia says the limp is “attributed variously to arthritis or to physical abuse during his time of slavery,” and leaves the question open. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The vivid version is ancient: the author Celsus, quoted by Origen in the third century, reports that the master twisted his leg and that Epictetus, warning it would break, took the break with composure. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) George Long, translating him in 1877, repeats the story and then advises the reader to distrust it, preferring the testimony of Simplicius, the sixth-century commentator, who says Epictetus was lame from an early age. (Project Gutenberg, A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion) The story is attractive because it is dramatic, and it is exactly the kind of detail that gets repeated because it is attractive rather than because it is evidenced. What can be said with confidence is smaller and enough: the man was lame, he was a slave, and he never pretended either fact was an accident of somebody else’s life.

He did not treat the leg as a tragedy. He used it as a demonstration. The Stoic claim is that the body is not the self, and a lame man who teaches that claim has an argument no healthy man can make as convincingly:

Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the moral purpose.

Epictetus, Manual §9 (trans. W. A. Oldfather, 1928)

Read that sentence as biography and it turns cold. Read it as instruction and it is one of the hardest things in ancient literature to actually do.

Musonius, and the word freedom

At Rome he studied under Musonius Rufus, a Roman senator and Stoic philosopher who taught intermittently in the city, and the arrangement appears to have been his master’s idea: the Internet Encyclopedia says Epaphroditus recognized the boy’s ability and recommended him for it. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Freedom is the theme Epictetus returns to most often, and it is the one his biography makes unavoidable. He had been legally unfree, then legally free, and he insisted the second fact was the less important one:

He is free who lives as he wills, who is subject neither to compulsion, nor hindrance, nor force

Epictetus, Discourses 4.1 (trans. W. A. Oldfather, 1925)

By that definition a senator could be a slave and a slave could be free, and Epictetus said so in front of audiences that included both. It is a claim that costs nothing to make in a lecture hall and everything to make while limping.

The expulsion

He began lecturing on his own account after he was freed, and then the city expelled him. The Stanford Encyclopedia places the expulsion under an edict of Domitian banning philosophers from the Italian peninsula and dates it to 89, while noting the inference; other chronologies put it in 93. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The year is uncertain. The pattern is not: Rome periodically decided that philosophers were a public nuisance, and the philosophers left.

He went to Nicopolis in Epirus, a communications hub and administrative center on the coast, and he opened a school there. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) He stayed for the rest of his life. The teaching Arrian recorded belongs to that later period, around the year 108 by the dating the Stanford Encyclopedia cites, when Epictetus was an old man with a bad leg and a reputation.

Nicopolis is the answer to a question the Manual cannot answer. Why does this philosophy sound like it was written by somebody who had lost things? Because it was spoken by a man who had been owned, crippled, and run out of the only city that mattered, and who had discovered that none of it had touched the part of himself he valued.

What he taught

The core of the teaching is a distinction, stated at the opening of the Manual and repeated in a hundred forms across the Discourses:

Some things are under our control, while others are not under our control.

Epictetus, Manual §1 (trans. W. A. Oldfather, 1928)

Under our control: judgment, choice, desire, aversion. Not under our control: the body, property, reputation, office. The list is short on one side and endless on the other, and most human misery consists of treating the second list as though it belonged to the first.

From that distinction he derives a practice rather than a theory. The instruction is not to feel less but to check the judgment before agreeing with it. He gives the technique a picture:

Everything has two handles, by one of which it ought to be carried and by the other not.

Epictetus, Manual §43 (trans. W. A. Oldfather, 1928)

His example is a brother who has wronged you. You can pick the matter up by the handle of the wrong, which cannot be carried, or by the handle of the shared childhood, which can. Nothing about the facts changes. Everything about the carrying does.

And he is blunt about the purpose of the practice. The famous serenity is not a mood; it is the byproduct of wanting the world to be what it is:

Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.

Epictetus, Manual §8 (trans. W. A. Oldfather, 1928)

Modern readers often hear passivity in that sentence. Epictetus did not mean it that way, and the Discourses are full of a cranky, combative energy that the Manual flattens out. He argued with students, mocked vanity, and refused to soften the cost of the life he recommended. On death, the recommendation is not resignation but a kind of defiance:

I must die: must I, then, die groaning too?

Epictetus, Discourses 1.1 (trans. W. A. Oldfather, 1925)

The sentence continues into chains and exile, and the point of the sequence is that the event is fixed while the accompanying noise is optional.

The lamp

One detail survives from outside the schoolroom, and it is the best physical fact we have about him. Lucian, writing a satire about a rich man who buys books he cannot read, mentions as an aside that a collector had paid an absurd sum for a relic:

a man who paid three thousand drachmas for the earthenware lamp of Epictetus the Stoic

Lucian, The Ignorant Book-Collector §13 (trans. A. M. Harmon, 1921)

Two things follow from that sentence. The first is that the lamp was earthenware, which is the cheapest kind, the kind a poor man buys. Epictetus was not Seneca, who moved through palaces and lent money at interest, and the object he read by is the physical record of the difference. The second is that after his death the lamp became a relic worth a fortune to a man who wanted wisdom by proximity rather than by practice, which is precisely the error Lucian was mocking and precisely the error Epictetus spent his life correcting.

There is no better illustration of his philosophy than the market for his possessions.

The old man

He never married. Late in life, for reasons the Stanford Encyclopedia calls benevolence, he adopted a child whose parents could not support it, and brought the child up. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

That fact tends to get left out of the motivational-poster version of Stoicism, which presents the philosophy as a set of mental techniques for managing stress. A lame, childless old man of small means taking in an infant he had no obligation to take is not a technique. It is the doctrine of appropriate concern for others, performed at personal cost, by somebody with no surplus to spare.

He also had no illusions about his own authority. In the Discourses he repeatedly refuses the role of the sage, describing himself as a teacher working on the same material as his students, and he is contemptuous of anyone who mistakes talking about philosophy for making progress in it. The classroom at Nicopolis was, in his account, a hospital, and he was a patient with a slightly longer chart.

The notes

The Discourses read like speech because they were speech. Arrian’s preface admits the method and apologizes for the result: he did not compose these, he caught them, and they were not prepared for readers. The Stanford Encyclopedia confirms the diagnosis from the language itself. The Greek is the common dialect rather than the polished literary Greek of Arrian’s other books, and the brusque, elliptical manner is unlike anything else Arrian wrote, which is the strongest argument that we are hearing Epictetus and not his editor. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Manual is the problem. It is the book most people read, and the Stanford Encyclopedia is unusually severe about it, calling it “a much attenuated account which is of little independent value for the understanding of Epictetus’s thought and which at some points gives a misleading impression of his philosophical motivations.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Read the Manual alone and you get a rulebook. Read the Discourses and you get an argument, conducted by a man who is annoyed at you and wants you to be better, and the rules turn out to be the least interesting part.

The death, and the long afterlife of the notes

We do not know how he died. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives the date as around 135; the World History Encyclopedia says 130. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; World History Encyclopedia) The disagreement is a useful reminder that a philosopher of his century can have an unknown death, an uncertain birth year, and a limp with two competing explanations.

What happened afterwards is better recorded. Marcus Aurelius was never his pupil, but he read him and considered himself a follower. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Origen, in the third century, remarked that Epictetus was as popular with his contemporaries as Plato, and Simplicius wrote a long commentary on the Manual in the sixth. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Poliziano translated the Manual into Latin in 1497, and it became one of the most widely printed books in Europe, read in monasteries in a half-Christianized form. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The modern reception splits along a line that Epictetus himself would have recognized. Pascal admired him as a moralist and thought his central claim arrogant, because it makes the human soul a fragment of the divine and therefore perfectible by effort. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Descartes took over a recognizably Epictetan ethics for his own use. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Both readings are possible because the Discourses contain both a hard-headed realism about what a person can control and a metaphysical claim about what a person is.

How to read him now

Start with the Discourses, not the Manual. The Manual is an abridgment assembled for readers who wanted the conclusions without the arguments, and the Stanford Encyclopedia is right that it distorts the man who made the material. The Discourses are longer, repetitive, and occasionally difficult, and they are the only place where the voice comes through.

Use W. A. Oldfather’s Loeb translation, which is free on Wikisource and quoted throughout this essay. It keeps the colloquial snap of the Greek, including the rhetorical questions and the insults, and it does not smooth Epictetus into a Victorian essayist. Higginson’s 1890 rendering of Arrian’s preface, also free, is worth reading for the editor’s own embarrassment at having published his teacher’s private notes.

Read a chapter at a time rather than a book at a time. The chapters were lectures, delivered to be heard once, and they work better as a daily dose than as a course. Start with Book 1, Chapter 1, which is about what is and is not in our power, and then go to Book 4, Chapter 1, which is about freedom, and notice that the same argument has been running underneath both.

And keep the biography in view. This is a man who was born property, lamed for life, expelled from the city where he taught, and left with a clay lamp and an adopted child, and who then told his students that none of these things could reach the part of them that mattered. A reader is free to find that consoling or infuriating. What a reader cannot do is dismiss it as theory. He ran the experiment on himself for seventy or eighty years, and the notes are the lab record.

Sources

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