- Length
- 320 pagesHard, Oxford World's Classics, 2014
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Discourses and Enchiridion
A former slave lecturing the sons of the Roman governing class on the one thing they cannot be given: control over their own judgements. Epictetus wrote nothing. What survives is a student's record of the classroom, and it is the most practical and least systematic of the major Stoic texts, which is exactly why it has outlasted the systematic ones.
- Date
- c. 108
- Attributed to
- Epictetus, recorded by Arrian
- Region
- Nicopolis, western Greece
- Language
- Koine Greek
- 1567 English, James Sandford Early English Enchiridion, from a French version Consensus
- 1758 English, Elizabeth Carter The first complete English Discourses, and long the standard; public domain Attested
- 2014 English, Robin Hard Current standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Lectures
- Method
- Dialogue — Argument staged between speakers
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
Four of the original eight books survive, together with the Enchiridion, which has never been out of circulation.
What the book says
The record of a working philosophy school, taken down by a student. Epictetus is not lecturing on doctrine so much as handling the people in front of him - young Romans on their way to public careers, who want the prestige of philosophy without the inconvenience - and much of the book is him refusing to let them get away with it. The single idea he returns to on every page is the division: some things are up to us and some are not. Our judgements, desires and responses are up to us. Our body, reputation, property, office and the behaviour of other people are not. Nearly all human distress comes from treating the second group as if it were the first. From that follows the rest: that you are not disturbed by events but by your opinions about events; that if you want your child never to die you are wishing for something impossible, whereas if you want your judgements to be sound that is entirely in your power; that a role assigned to you is to be played well, and the choice of role is not yours. The tone is direct and often abrasive. The Enchiridion, a short handbook Arrian compiled from the same material, states the same positions without the classroom around them.
What it argues
That freedom is not a legal or political condition but a relation to one's own responses, and that it is available to anyone at any time because the only things that can be taken from you are things that were never yours. The argument is not that external goods do not matter but that they are not up to us, and that arranging one's happiness around them is the error from which all the others follow. What follows practically is a discipline: examine the impression before assenting to it, ask whether the thing distressing you is within your power, and if it is not, drop it - not by suppressing feeling, but by revising the judgement that produced it.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
By interrogation. The Discourses are full of interruptions, imagined objections, sarcasm and people being sent away. Epictetus asks a student what he would do in a specific situation, takes the answer apart, and asks again. There is no exposition of Stoic physics or logic; he assumes it and gets on with the application, occasionally saying outright that a student who can analyse syllogisms and cannot control his temper has wasted his time. The form is a working transcript, and its unevenness is the reason it reads as speech.
The moment
Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia and belonged to a freedman of Nero's court; he was permitted to study philosophy, was freed, and was teaching in Rome when Domitian expelled the philosophers around AD 93. He moved to Nicopolis in western Greece and taught there for the rest of his life, lame, poor, and by every account uninterested in changing either. His audience were men who could be exiled or executed at an emperor's word, and the doctrine that nothing outside your own mind can be secured was not an abstraction for them.
How it travelled
Continuously, and in two streams. The Discourses survived in four books of an original eight and were read steadily in the Greek East. The Enchiridion travelled further and faster, being short: it was adapted for Christian monastic use with the pagan names replaced, which is how a pagan handbook came to be copied in monasteries for centuries. Simplicius, the same scholar who preserved Parmenides, wrote a commentary on it. In the modern period it has been continuously in print, and its influence on cognitive behavioural therapy - which acknowledges the debt explicitly - is the clearest case of an ancient philosophical text feeding directly into a clinical practice.
The strongest objection
That the division does more work than it can bear. Very little is cleanly up to us or not up to us: whether I keep my job depends partly on my effort and partly on the market, and being told to categorise it as external is not obviously good advice. The sharper form of the objection is political. A doctrine that locates freedom entirely inside the mind can be, and has been, a counsel of acquiescence - Epictetus was a slave and does not argue that slavery should end, only that a slave can be free in the sense that matters. Whether that is profound or an accommodation is a question the text does not take up.
Why read it
Because it is the most usable philosophy book ever written and it is not difficult. There is no system to learn and no vocabulary to acquire; you can open it anywhere. The Enchiridion takes half an hour and contains most of it. Read the Discourses for the classroom - the impatience, the humour, and the sound of somebody actually trying to change how his students live rather than what they believe.
- First printed
- 1535
- First in English
- 1567
- Digitised
- Yes
Schenkl's edition of 1916 is the scholarly text. The Enchiridion circulated independently through the Middle Ages, including in Christianised versions with the pagan references replaced.
Elizabeth Carter's 1758 translation and Long's 1877 are public domain. Hard, Dobbin and Waterfield are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived, and more widely read now than at any point since antiquity. The revival is popular rather than academic, and the academic study of Stoicism has expanded alongside it rather than driving it.
The passage
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.
Enchiridion 5, in George Long's translation of 1877. Public domain.
Contested
How much of the text is Epictetus and how much Arrian is unresolved: Arrian's prefatory claim to have written down the words as spoken is taken by some as accurate and by others as a convention of the genre. Four of the eight books are lost and nothing is known of their contents. The relation of Epictetus' teaching to earlier Stoicism is debated, particularly whether the emphasis on what is up to us represents a development or a recovery. And the extent of his influence on Marcus Aurelius, who names him, is easier to assert than to measure.