Epictetus

Introduction

Epictetus is the most rigorous of the surviving Roman Stoics and the figure through whom the technical ethical doctrines of the Greek Stoa entered Roman intellectual life as a working practice. Born into slavery in Phrygia and freed in his thirties, he taught Stoic philosophy first at Rome and, after the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from the city around 93 CE, at a school in Nicopolis on the western coast of Greece. He wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian (later the historian of Alexander) transcribed his lectures, and these transcripts — the four surviving books of the Discourses and the short handbook called the Enchiridion — constitute the most extensive surviving statement of Stoic ethics applied to daily life.

Epictetus's influence runs through Marcus Aurelius (who repeatedly cites him by name in the Meditations), through the early Christian ascetic tradition (the Enchiridion was repurposed by Christian monks as a manual of spiritual discipline), through Renaissance and Enlightenment neo-Stoicism, and into the contemporary popular Stoic revival.

Life

Epictetus was born around 50 CE at Hierapolis in Phrygia (modern Pamukkale, Turkey), enslaved at a young age, and brought to Rome as the property of Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman and secretary in the imperial household under Nero. The name Epictetus (Greek Epiktētos) is itself a slave name meaning acquired. Under Epaphroditus's ownership he was permitted to study Stoic philosophy with Musonius Rufus, the leading Roman Stoic of the previous generation. His later teaching is full of references to Musonius's lessons.

He was lame in one leg — the surviving accounts disagree on whether the injury was inflicted in slavery or arose from a chronic condition — and reportedly accepted the disability with characteristic Stoic equanimity. He was freed sometime in the 70s or 80s CE and began teaching philosophy publicly in Rome. In approximately 93 CE the emperor Domitian, suspicious of philosophical schools as breeding grounds for opposition, banished all philosophers from Italy. Epictetus moved his school to Nicopolis, a Roman colony in western Greece, where he taught for the rest of his life. The school attracted students from across the empire, including young men from the senatorial and equestrian classes — the future administrators of the Roman world.

He lived in conspicuous simplicity (a small cottage, an earthenware lamp, almost no possessions) and apparently never married, though late in life he adopted and raised a friend's child. He died around 135 CE.

The problem he worked on

Epictetus's organizing problem was the translation of Stoic theoretical ethics into a working practice for living. The technical doctrines of the Greek Stoa — the unity of virtue, the dichotomy of preferred and dispreferred indifferents, the determinism of cosmic logos, the analysis of the passions — had been worked out by Chrysippus and the Greek masters in technical treatises now mostly lost. Epictetus's lectures take these doctrines as given and ask what it would actually be like to live according to them.

The answer he developed was structured around what is sometimes called the dichotomy of control: there are some things that are up to us (our judgments, our desires and aversions, our impulses to action, in short the activity of our own minds) and other things that are not up to us (our bodies, our reputations, our property, the actions of others, our circumstances). Wisdom begins with the recognition of which is which, and ethical practice consists in directing effort, attention, and emotional investment toward the first category while accepting whatever happens in the second.

Contributions

The dichotomy of control

The Enchiridion opens with the dichotomy: Some things are up to us, others are not up to us. The passage is the most quoted single sentence in the entire Stoic corpus. The doctrine is not original to Epictetus — it is implicit in Chrysippus and explicit in earlier Roman Stoic discussion — but Epictetus's formulation made it the central pedagogical move of practical Stoicism. The discipline of prohairesis (chosen action, the activity proper to the rational soul) consists in keeping attention on what is up to us and refusing to invest the wrong kind of effort in what is not.

The discipline of assent

Epictetus organizes practical philosophy around three topoi or fields of training: the discipline of desire (training the impulses so that we want what is in accordance with nature), the discipline of action (training the impulses to action so that we act in accordance with our role), and the discipline of assent (training the judgments so that we agree only to what is genuinely the case). The discipline of assent is the most distinctive: when an impression strikes the mind, the proper response is not to immediately assent or dissent but to examine the impression, ask what it actually represents, and assent only when warranted.

Role ethics

Drawing on Panaetius's earlier doctrine of personae, Epictetus develops an account of ethical action as the appropriate playing of one's roles. We are at once human beings, citizens, family members, holders of particular professions and offices, and so on. Each role brings with it a set of appropriate actions (kathēkonta). The discipline of action consists in identifying one's roles and performing each one with full attention to what it actually demands. The framework continues to be engaged in contemporary virtue ethics and in role-based accounts of professional ethics.

Freedom redefined

What is freedom? Not the absence of external constraint — a free man can be imprisoned without losing freedom in the deep sense, and a slave can be free in that sense without being released. Freedom is the right relation to one's own mind: the capacity to assent only to what is true, to desire only what is genuinely good (which is virtue), and to remain unmoved by what is not in one's power. The redefinition is perhaps Epictetus's most striking single move. A former slave teaching Roman senators that they were not yet free is one of the more remarkable rhetorical and conceptual achievements in the philosophical tradition.

Key works

Epictetus wrote nothing himself. The surviving works are transcripts and selections by his student Arrian of Nicomedia (c. 86–160 CE), a Roman provincial governor and historian who studied with Epictetus at Nicopolis and recorded the lectures with apparent fidelity.

• Discourses (Diatribai). Originally in eight books; four survive substantially complete. Each chapter records an extended lecture or conversation on a particular ethical question.
• Enchiridion (The Handbook). A short manual, perhaps 30 pages of Greek, distilling the practical ethics of the Discourses into 53 numbered chapters. The most-read Stoic text after Marcus Aurelius's Meditations.
• Fragments preserved in later sources (Aulus Gellius, Stobaeus, Marcus Aurelius).

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Musonius Rufus (his teacher), Chrysippus and the Greek Stoic tradition, Diogenes the Cynic (whom Epictetus repeatedly cites as a model of the philosophical life), Socrates (the dominant single figure in the Discourses, taken as the model of the philosopher who lived and died for his understanding).

Influenced: Marcus Aurelius (who learned of Epictetus through Junius Rusticus and quotes him repeatedly); the Christian ascetic tradition (the Enchiridion was Christianized as the Manual of St. Nilus and used in monastic education for centuries); the late ancient Neoplatonist commentators (Simplicius wrote a substantial commentary on the Enchiridion); the Renaissance and early modern neo-Stoics (Justus Lipsius, Du Vair); modern figures including James Stockdale (the U.S. Navy admiral whose use of Epictetus in captivity in Vietnam is documented in his Courage Under Fire), Albert Ellis (the founder of REBT), and the broader contemporary Stoic revival.

Reception

Epictetus was widely read in late antiquity — the surviving fragments quoted by Aulus Gellius and others indicate that the Discourses circulated as a major philosophical text. The Christianization of the Enchiridion by the desert father Nilus of Ancyra (c. 400 CE), with the explicit references to pagan gods replaced by Christian equivalents, ensured its survival through the medieval period; many medieval libraries had a Manual that was substantively Epictetus.

The direct reception of Epictetus as Epictetus was renewed in the Renaissance with the Greek printing of the Enchiridion and Discourses. The seventeenth-century neo-Stoic revival (Lipsius, du Vair, Guillaume du Vair, and through them Descartes and the broader early modern moral tradition) drew substantially on him. The most famous modern reception is Admiral James Stockdale's account of using Epictetus's doctrines as a survival framework during seven years in the Hanoi Hilton (1965–1973); the story has been widely cited as a kind of empirical test of Stoic ethics under extreme conditions.

Continuing engagement

Contemporary scholarship on Epictetus is anchored by A.A. Long's Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (2002), the most comprehensive recent treatment. Other significant work includes the studies of Tony Long, Brad Inwood, and Margaret Graver, the Robin Hard translation in the Oxford World's Classics series, and the new Loeb edition (Hard, 2014). The applied tradition is documented in William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life (2008), Massimo Pigliucci's How to Be a Stoic (2017), and the work of the Modern Stoicism organization. The Enchiridion is among the most frequently assigned ancient philosophical texts in undergraduate ethics courses worldwide.

Further reading

• Stoicism — the tradition
• Marcus Aurelius — the most consequential Roman successor
• Enchiridion — the handbook
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius's notebooks, repeatedly citing Epictetus
• Virtue — the central ethical concept
• Ataraxia — the closely related Stoic ideal of inner stability

The most rigorous of the surviving Roman Stoics. The model of practical Stoicism in continuous use for two millennia.