Epictetus

Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher who was born a slave and became one of the most admired teachers of the Roman world. He wrote nothing himself, but his pupil Arrian recorded his lectures in the Discourses and condensed them into a short manual, the Enchiridion. His central lesson, that we should distinguish sharply between what is in our power and what is not, has been read by emperors, monks, soldiers and psychotherapists for almost two thousand years.

Epictetus was born around 50 CE in Hierapolis, a Greek city in Phrygia, in the west of modern Turkey, near today's Pamukkale. His real name is unknown; Epiktetos simply means "acquired" in Greek, a common name for a slave. As a young man he was owned by Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman who served as secretary to the emperor Nero in Rome. He was lame, perhaps from birth or illness, though a later story claims his master broke his leg.

Epaphroditus allowed him to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus, the leading Stoic teacher in Rome, and Epictetus became his devoted student. At some point, probably after Nero's death in 68, he was freed and began teaching philosophy himself.

Around 93 CE the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome and from Italy, suspicious of their influence on senatorial opponents. Epictetus moved to Nicopolis, a city founded by Augustus on the coast of Epirus, in north-western Greece. There he opened a school that attracted students from across the Roman Empire, many of them young men from well-to-do families preparing for public careers. According to some ancient reports the emperor Hadrian visited him, though this may be a later embellishment.

He lived very simply, with few possessions, and late in life adopted a child whose parents could not keep it, taking in a woman to help raise it. He died around 135 CE, though the date is uncertain.

One of his students was Arrian of Nicomedia, later a senator, consul and historian of Alexander the Great. Arrian took notes of Epictetus's informal talks and published them as the Discourses, in eight books, of which four survive. They are lively, colloquial and often sharp, full of imagined dialogues with students and examples from everyday life. Arrian also compiled the Enchiridion, or Handbook, a short collection of the main teachings. A few further fragments survive in later anthologies.

At the centre of Epictetus's teaching is a single distinction. Some things are up to us: our judgements, our desires and aversions, our choices, in short whatever is our own doing. Everything else is not up to us: our bodies, property, reputation, office, the actions of others and the course of events. He called the faculty that is truly ours prohairesis, usually translated as moral choice or volition. This faculty alone cannot be taken away, even by a tyrant, and it is the only place where good and evil are found.

From this he drew practical conclusions. People are disturbed, he argued, not by things themselves but by their judgements about things. Death is not terrible in itself; what is terrible is the opinion that it is terrible. If we attach our happiness to things outside our control, we become slaves of anyone who can give or take them away. If we place our good in our own choices and judgements, we become free, whatever our outward condition. For a former slave, the point carried special force.

Epictetus organised the student's training into three areas. The first concerns desire and aversion: learning to want only what is in our power and to accept everything else. The second concerns action: fulfilling our duties as children, parents, citizens and human beings. The third concerns assent: testing every impression before accepting it, so that we are not carried away by false judgements. He insisted that philosophy was not about reading books or arguing cleverly but about changing how one lives, and he often held up Socrates and Diogenes of Sinope as models.

His thought also had a strong religious side. He spoke of god as the rational power that orders the universe, and of human beings as fragments of god, citizens of the world and children of Zeus, a view in the tradition of Zeno of Citium. Accepting what happens is, for him, a form of gratitude to the divine order.

Epictetus was famous in his own lifetime and long after. Marcus Aurelius was given a copy of his lectures by his teacher Junius Rusticus, and quotes him in the Meditations more than any other philosopher. Christian writers admired his moral teaching, and versions of the Enchiridion were adapted for use in Byzantine monasteries. In the Renaissance the Handbook was translated into Latin and many vernacular languages, and Blaise Pascal discussed him as the philosopher who best understood human duty, while warning against his pride.

In the twentieth century his ideas found new audiences. The American naval officer James Stockdale credited the Enchiridion with helping him survive seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and the founders of cognitive behavioural therapy, notably Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, cited his claim that our judgements, not events, cause our distress. He remains a central figure in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy and in the modern revival of Stoicism.