Translator’s Note

The text. This translation follows the Greek text of Heinrich Schenkl (1916), in the digital transcription of the Perseus Digital Library and Open Epictetus. Chapter and subsection numbers follow Schenkl’s standard 53-chapter division, so that any citation of the Encheiridion in the scholarly literature – “Ench. 33.4,” “Ench. 51.3” – can be located here, and this translation can be read line by line against any critical edition, including Gerard Boter’s (1999), which supersedes Schenkl on textual detail but preserves his numbering. Where the transmitted text is doubtful, I translate what Schenkl prints. Chapter 29, which is missing from part of the manuscript tradition and closely parallels Discourses 3.15, is marked with an asterisk; the Note on the Greek Text at the back records this and the other textual matters a curious reader might chase.

The governing principle. Stay as close to Epictetus’s own phrasing, sentence structure, and idiom as modern English allows, while producing a version that is genuinely readable, eloquent, and quotable. Where the Greek is blunt, the English is blunt. Where Epictetus asks a question, the English asks the same question. Where he repeats a word for force, the repetition stays. His signature contrastive syntax – ou … alla, “not this … but that” – is the engine of his teaching, and I have kept it wherever the Greek has it: “It is not things that disturb people, but their judgments about things.” Smoothing that construction away would smooth away the man.

One anchor per term. Every technical term is rendered by a single English word or phrase from the first chapter to the last, so a reader can track each concept through the book and back to the Greek. Consistency of this kind costs something – occasionally a livelier synonym must be passed over – and it buys something greater: the reader always knows when Epictetus is deploying a term of art and when he is simply talking. The anchors, and the reasoning behind the contested ones:

Ta eph’ hēmin – “what is up to us.” Older translations render this “what is in our power” (Carter, Long) or “what is in our control.” I follow the phrasing now standard in scholarship (White, Hard, and most recent work on Epictetus), because it is closest to the Greek idiom – literally “the things upon us” – and because “control” imports a modern engineering metaphor the Greek does not have. Epictetus’s claim is a claim about what depends on us, what is our doing; “up to us” says exactly that, in words a reader will actually repeat to himself, which is the whole point of the book.

Prohairesis – “will.” No English word covers this term, and translators have scattered: Oldfather’s Loeb has “moral purpose,” Long has “will,” Hard has “choice,” Dobbin argues for “volition.” The word names the faculty that evaluates impressions, forms judgments, and issues or withholds assent – the choosing core of a person, which Epictetus repeatedly identifies with the self. “Choice” suggests a single act rather than a standing faculty; “moral purpose” is a Victorian mouthful; “volition” belongs to the seminar room. “Will” has the right weight, the right tradition behind it, and the right grammar for sentences a reader must carry: sickness can stop your leg, but it cannot stop your will. One caution the reader should hold onto: Epictetus’s “will” is the faculty of judging and choosing, closer to “what you assent to” than to modern “willpower.”

Phantasia – “impression.” The standard scholarly rendering, and the right one. An impression is whatever appears to you, sense-report and instant interpretation bundled together, before you have said yes or no to it. “Appearance” and “perception” each capture half; “impression” has served English-language Stoicism from Long to the present, and I see no reason to disturb it.

Dogma and hypolēpsis – “judgment” and “assumption.” Epictetus uses two words for what we decide and believe, and this translation keeps them distinct. A dogma is a judgment you have made and hold – it is judgments, not things, that disturb us (chapter 5). A hypolēpsis is looser: the assumption already riding on an impression before you examine it (chapters 1 and 20). Collapsing the two into one English word, as many translations do, erases a distinction the opening chapter depends on.

Apatheia – “equanimity.” Literally “freedom from pathē,” the diseased passions. The transliteration “apathy” is a false friend – Epictetus is not recommending numbness, and he says so (chapter 16: sympathize, groan along with the grieving man, only do not groan inside). “Equanimity” names the achieved, settled state the word points to. It is admittedly an interpretive choice; readers who want the clinical term can track ἀπάθεια in the facing Greek, which is precisely what the facing Greek is for. Ataraxia, “untroubledness,” is rendered “tranquility” throughout, keeping the pair distinct.

Kathēkon – “duty.” The scholarly literature prefers “appropriate action” or “proper function,” which is more exact to Stoic theory and impossible in a sentence a human being would say. Epictetus’s own usage in this book is concrete and relational – the things owed to a father, a brother, a fellow citizen (chapter 30) – and “duty” carries that plainly. The reader of chapter 30 will see the term defined by its examples, which is how Epictetus taught it.

Idiōtēs – “layman.” The Greek means a private, untrained person – a non-expert, and in this book specifically a non-philosopher. “Layman” preserves the professional-versus-amateur edge of chapters 29, 33, 46, and 48. The English word’s ecclesiastical flavor is an accident of history the context corrects.

The diminutives. Epictetus mocks our attachments with diminutive forms – sōmation, ktēsidion, doxarion – and this translation keeps the mockery audible: “my little body, my little property, my little reputation” (chapter 18). Most translations drop these. They are half his tone.

Hard words kept hard. Epictetus says doulos, slave, and means it; he speaks to students who own human beings; his world’s assumptions about women and about household hierarchy stand in the text. I translate these words plainly – “slave,” never “servant” or “attendant” – for the reasons given in the introduction: softening a text’s offenses is a way of lying about the past. Likewise his second-person address assumes a male student, as his classroom did; I have not rewritten his grammar to modernize his audience.

Conventions. Bracketed numbers [2], [3] match the subsection numbers of Schenkl’s Greek text. The imagined objector speaks in single quotes; the phrases Epictetus tells you to say to yourself appear in double quotes, exactly as the Greek marks them with «». An asterisk on a chapter number flags a textual issue recorded in the Note on the Greek Text.