Introduction

Sometime around the year 55, in the Phrygian city of Hierapolis, a boy was born into slavery. We do not know what his parents named him. The name history remembers him by, Epiktetos, is simply the Greek word for “acquired” – property, purchased. That a man labeled bought would become antiquity’s greatest teacher of freedom is the kind of irony he himself would have appreciated, and it is the key to everything in this book. Epictetus worked out his philosophy far from any library, in a life where his body, his time, his location, and his legal existence belonged to someone else – and where, he discovered, one thing did not.

The Life

Epictetus was brought to Rome as the slave of Epaphroditus, a rich and powerful freedman who served as a secretary to the emperor Nero. He was lame in one leg. A later hostile source claimed the lameness came from a master’s brutality – the story goes that as his leg was being twisted, Epictetus said calmly, “You will break it,” and when it broke, added only, “Didn’t I tell you?” Other ancient writers say the leg was simply crippled by disease. The first version may be legend, but it became legend because it captured something true: this was a man who treated his own body as an external, one more thing that could be taken.

Remarkably, while still enslaved, Epictetus was permitted to study under Musonius Rufus, the most respected Stoic teacher in Rome – a man sometimes called the Roman Socrates. At some point after Nero’s death in 68, Epictetus gained his freedom and began teaching philosophy himself. When the emperor Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome in the early 90s, Epictetus moved to Nicopolis, the “city of victory” that Augustus had founded on the western coast of Greece, and opened a school there. He never returned.

The school made him famous. Students traveled from across the empire to hear him; Roman officials stopped at Nicopolis on their way to and from the East. The emperor Hadrian is said to have known and admired him. Yet Epictetus lived like a poor man by choice – a rented room, a rush mat, a lamp. When his iron lamp was stolen, he replaced it with a clay one, remarking that the thief had paid a high price for it: he had made himself a thief to get it. (After Epictetus’s death, an admirer reportedly bought the clay lamp for three thousand drachmas, hoping wisdom could be acquired with the hardware. Epictetus would have had something to say about that.) Late in life, this lifelong bachelor took in an infant who was about to be abandoned to die, and raised the child with the help of a woman in his household. He died around the year 135, an old man, still teaching that death is nothing terrible.

The Making of This Book

Epictetus, like Socrates, wrote nothing. What we have, we owe to a star student: Flavius Arrianus – Arrian – a young Greek aristocrat who studied at Nicopolis around the year 108 and went on to a spectacular Roman career as consul, provincial governor, and historian; his account of Alexander the Great is still our best ancient source on the subject. Arrian recorded his teacher’s classroom talk in eight books of Discourses, of which four survive, insisting that he had tried to preserve the master’s actual words – blunt, colloquial, funny, relentless.

Then he did something more. He distilled the whole of it into the short book you are holding. Its Greek title, Encheiridion, means “the thing in the hand” – a handbook. But the same word could name a small hand-weapon, a dagger, and the double meaning fits. It is a blade to be carried, more than a treatise to be studied. Its fifty-three short chapters are drills rather than arguments – the Discourses argue; the Handbook commands. One word echoes through it: procheiron, “ready at hand.” Have this ready. Keep this ready. The book’s entire theory of itself is in that word. It assumes you will be ambushed – by an insult, a shipwreck, a death – and that in the moment of ambush you will not have time to reason your way to the right response. You will only have what you have rehearsed.

The Philosophy

Epictetus was a Stoic, heir to a school founded four centuries earlier by Zeno of Citium, who taught under a painted colonnade – a stoa – in Athens. The Stoics held that the universe is a single, rational, living order; that a divine intelligence pervades it; that everything that happens is woven into its web of cause; and that a human being is, uniquely, a fragment of that rational order capable of understanding it. From this they drew a stark ethical conclusion: the only genuine good is virtue – a rational will in harmony with nature – and the only genuine evil is vice. Everything else people chase and flee – money, health, reputation, power, pleasure, pain, even life and death – is, in the technical Stoic sense, indifferent: raw material for virtue, but neither good nor bad in itself.

Epictetus took this inheritance and compressed it into a single opening move, the most consequential sentence in Stoic literature: Some things are up to us, and some things are not up to us. Your judgments, desires, aversions, and impulses are yours, fully and by nature free. Your body, your property, your reputation, and your position are not – they can be taken, and therefore they were never truly yours. Every human misery, Epictetus argues, comes from filing things in the wrong column: treating what is not up to us as if it were ours, and then grieving, raging, and blaming when the world reclaims its property. Every human freedom comes from filing correctly. The whole Handbook is an extended training program in this one act of sorting.

Three of his working terms are worth meeting before you begin, because this translation keeps each of them constant throughout. An impression (phantasia) is whatever appears to you – the raw report of the senses and the mind, complete with its instant editorial spin: that man insulted me; this is a catastrophe. Epictetus’s most repeated command is to stop and interrogate the impression before you sign your name to it: “You are an impression, and not at all the thing you appear to be.” Your judgment (dogma) is what you decide about the impression – and it is judgments, not things, that disturb us (chapter 5), the single sentence from which an entire branch of modern psychotherapy descends. And your will (prohairesis) is the faculty doing the judging: the choosing, evaluating core of you. It is Epictetus’s name for the self. Sickness can stop your leg, he says, but not your will, unless the will consents. In his moral universe the self is the will – neither body, nor career, nor story – and the will cannot be conscripted.

Two more features of his teaching keep this austerity from curdling into detachment. First, Epictetus is a philosopher of roles. You are not an isolated will floating free of the world; you are a son or daughter, a parent, a neighbor, a citizen – an actor handed a part in a play you did not write (chapter 17). Your duties flow from your relationships (chapter 30), and the fact that your father is a bad father does not release you from being a good son. Stoicism is often mistaken for a philosophy of withdrawal; Epictetus taught it as a philosophy of showing up – calm, reliable, and useless to bribe. Second, he is merciless about the gap between talking philosophy and living it. Do not tell people how to eat, he says; eat as one ought (chapter 46). Sheep do not vomit up their grass to show the shepherd how much they have eaten; they digest it and produce wool and milk. The final chapters of the Handbook are a sustained attack on his own profession – on scholars who can interpret Chrysippus but cannot govern their tempers, and on students who lie fluently while keeping ready at hand the proof that lying is wrong.

Modern readers should know that Epictetus’s world is a governed world. When he speaks of god, of Zeus, of the gods, he means the rational providence of Stoic physics – an intelligence that administers the whole well and justly (chapter 31) – rather than the distant deities of myth. Piety, for him, is above all an attitude: willing assent to what happens, on the conviction that it is brought about by the best of minds. You do not need to share this theology to use this book; generations of readers have translated “what god sends” into “what the world sends” without losing the practical force. But the theology carries real weight in his argument, and the serenity he promises rests on it. It is a conclusion he has drawn about the nature of things, and about your place among them.

The Afterlife of a Handbook

Few small books have traveled so far. Within two generations, the most powerful man alive was reading Epictetus: Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, thanks a friend in the Meditations for lending him the discourses of the lame ex-slave, and quotes him repeatedly – the emperor apprenticed to the slave. In the sixth century the philosopher Simplicius wrote a massive commentary on the Handbook; in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, Christian editors adapted it for monks, quietly swapping Socrates’ name for Saint Paul’s. In 1758 Elizabeth Carter, one of the most formidable classical scholars of her century, produced the first complete English translation of Epictetus – a landmark of women’s scholarship that remained standard for over a hundred years and is among the sources consulted for this edition.

The book’s modern history is just as vivid. When the American pilot James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965, he whispered to himself as he ejected that he was leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. Through seven and a half years as a prisoner of war – torture, leg irons, four years of solitary confinement – he held to the Handbook he had studied years before, and credited it with his survival and his sanity. In the same era, the psychologist Albert Ellis built rational emotive behavior therapy, a forerunner of cognitive behavioral therapy, explicitly on chapter 5’s principle that it is not events but our judgments about events that disturb us. Every time a therapist helps a patient examine an automatic thought before accepting it, Epictetus’s drill – stop, test the impression, ask what is up to you – is being run, twenty centuries on.

Reading Epictetus Honestly

A faithful translation owes you the rough edges, and this book has them. Epictetus lived in a slave society, and – though he had been property himself – he addresses students who own human beings, telling them to expect their slaves to fail and to keep their own tempers when they do. His one chapter on women (chapter 40) diagnoses, in two sentences, how his society trained girls to stake everything on their appearance – sympathetic in its way for its era, and plainly a product of it. His counsel on grief can sound cold: kiss your child, he says, and tell yourself you are kissing a mortal. I have not sanded any of this down. Softening a text’s offenses is just another way of lying about the past, and Epictetus deserves better – his whole teaching is a war on comfortable illusion. Read him as he was: a man two thousand years old, wrong where his world was wrong, and piercing where it counted.

A practical suggestion: do not read this book straight through, or not only that. It was built for the pocket, not the shelf. Its chapters are meant to be taken one or two at a time, turned over, and tested against the day – the spilled oil, the traffic, the insult, the diagnosis. Epictetus tells his students to start with a broken jug before working up to exile and death, and the advice applies to reading him. Small doses, frequently repeated, against live ammunition.

About This Translation

My aim in this translation is a version of maximum fidelity that is also genuinely alive in modern English. I have tried to preserve Epictetus’s manner along with his meaning: his sentence rhythms, his repetitions, his abrupt questions, his street-level bluntness, the diminutives he uses to shrink what we inflate (“my little body, my little property, my little reputation”). Where he is harsh, I have stayed harsh; where he lands a line built to be memorized, I have tried to give English a line worth memorizing. Every technical term is rendered by one consistent English anchor from the first chapter to the last, so that a reader can track each concept through the book – and, with the subsection numbers keyed to Schenkl’s Greek text, follow this translation line by line against the original. The result is meant to serve three readers at once: the student of Greek, who can use it as a transparent map of the original; the student of Stoicism, who can trust that the concepts have not been blurred; and the general reader, who deserves to meet Epictetus as his first students did – direct, bracing, and impossible to forget.

The conventions and term anchors are set out in the Translator’s Note that follows.