Discourses and Selected Writings

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

EPICTETUS
(
c.
AD
55-135) was a teacher and Graeco-Roman philosopher. Originally a slave from Hierapolis in Anatolia (modern Turkey), he was owned for a time by a prominent freedman at the court of the emperor Nero. After gaining his freedom he moved to Nicopolis on the Adriatic coast of Greece and opened a school of philosophy there. His informal lectures (the
Discourses
) were transcribed and published by his student Arrian, who also composed a digest of Epictetus’ teaching known as the
Manual
(or
Enchiridion).
Late in life Epictetus retired from teaching, adopted an orphan child and lived out his remaining years in domestic obscurity. His thought owes most to Stoicism, but also reflects the influence of other philosophers, Plato and Socrates in particular. His influence has been deep and enduring, from Marcus Aurelius in his
Meditations
to the contemporary psychologist Albert Ellis, who has acknowledged his debt to Epictetus in devising the school of Rational-Emotive Behavioural Therapy.

ROBERT DOBBIN
was born in New York City in 1958. He received a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, and taught history and classics at the college level for years. He is the author of
Epictetus Discourses: Book One
(Oxford, 1998), as well as articles on Virgil, Plato and Pythagoras. Currently he works as a book editor in northern California.

Translated and edited by
ROBERT DOBBIN

PENGUIN BOOKS

At the beginning of the second century ad, in the reign of the emperor Trajan, a group of young men could be found studying philosophy at a boarding school in Nicopolis, a Roman colony in Epirus (north-west Greece). They were students of Epictetus. In a prefatory letter one such pupil, Arrian by name (
c.
AD
86-160), takes credit for committing a sizeable number of Epictetus’ lessons to print, thereby ensuring their survival. These are the
Discourses.
Arrian is also credited with preparing a digest of his master’s thought: the
Manual
or (in Greek)
Enchiridion.
A modest number of fragments attributed to Epictetus have also come down to us (some of them derived from Discourses otherwise lost, as only four books of the eight that Arrian originally published are extant).

Besides being an uncommonly diligent stenographer, Arrian was an author in his own right, best known for his biography of Alexander the Great. He was also a man of the world, a Roman consul and later legate to the Roman province of Cappadocia. Taking into account his own literary aspirations, and the formidable challenge posed by transcribing Epictetus’ lectures ‘live’, i.e. as they were being delivered, some have questioned whether his opening letter is completely trustworthy in characterizing the collection as nothing less than a verbatim record of what the philosopher said, inside and outside the classroom. Most students of the
Discourses
incline to the view that, in the process of effecting the transition of Epictetus’ lectures to print, Arrian probably permitted himself a few editorial changes. Establishing the dramatic context of the
Discourses,
in imitation of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, may be one
of his contributions. But any alterations or ‘improvements’ he made to the text are unlikely to have been extensive. The books of history and geography that Arrian wrote later are so unlike the
Discourses
in style and content that, even if we did not have his word for it, we would be unlikely to conclude that they were products of the same hand. Arrian published his edition of the
Discourses
soon after Epictetus died, and an unauthorized edition had already been in circulation; so other of Epictetus’ students were in a position to judge how faithful Arrian was to the actual words of the master; and we have no record of anyone impugning their essential honesty. On the contrary, Arrian’s collection was accepted immediately as an authentic and definitive record of Epictetus’ thought, and even though Arrian was responsible for actually writing the book, Epictetus is conventionally, and rightly, treated as their author. Even if we cannot be sure that Epictetus actually said everything attributed to him in the
Discourses
, or in those exact words, we have no reason to doubt that the bulk of the material does derive from what Arrian and others heard while seated at the master’s feet.

Details of Epictetus’ life are sketchy; the
Discourses
themselves are our richest source of information. We can only make an educated guess as to the year he was born and the year he died, but are not likely to be far wrong in giving his dates as
c.
AD
55–135. We know that he was born into slavery because he tells us so, and from an ancient inscription we learn that his mother had been a slave. The place of his birth was Hierapolis, a major Graeco-Roman city in what today is south-western Turkey. The native language there was Greek – the Koine or ‘common’ Greek that derived from the language of classical Athens, but became widely disseminated in a simplified form during the Hellenistic era. The
Discourses
are a principal source for our knowledge of Koine Greek (as is the Greek New Testament, to cite another example).

More than once Epictetus refers to himself as ‘a lame old man’, but nowhere elaborates on the cause of his disability. Two traditions independent of the
Discourses
give competing accounts. Early Christian authors report that a sadistic master was responsible for rendering him crippled for life. But others interpret ‘lame old man’ as almost a pleonastic phrase, which is to say that he may have suffered from rheumatism or arthritis as a natural consequence of advancing age. The latter explanation is in fact the more likely. We know who his owner was; his name was Epaphroditus, and Epictetus makes mention of him several times, not exactly in complimentary terms, but not with any hint of bitterness either. Epaphroditus is famous for more than just being Epictetus’ master. A former slave himself, after manumission he rose to the position of Nero’s secretary in charge of petitions; later he would serve Domitian in the same capacity. Descriptions of life at court frequently appear in the
Discourses,
in terms detailed and vivid enough to suggest that his service to Epaphroditus acquainted Epictetus at first hand with the manners, routines and attitudes of the emperor and his courtiers. We can go further and speculate that in this equivocal position – a slave on the one hand, but also a privileged member of the emperor’s inner circle – Epictetus came to appreciate in full the ambiguities of power, and learned to distinguish real freedom from counterfeit. This dialectic of freedom and slavery colours much of his presentation of Stoic thought.

That Epaphroditus allowed Epictetus considerable freedom of movement and association is implied by his attendance at the lectures of Musonius Rufus. Tacitus, a contemporary Roman historian (
c.
AD
56-
c.
117), describes Musonius as the foremost Stoic of his day. We are fortunate that a sample of his lectures was included in an anthology of morally edifying readings, known as the
Suda,
which still survives. Musonius gives lessons in practical ethics, on particular questions such as whether women should be allowed to study philosophy, and what relationship ideally obtains between a husband and wife. While he does not engage the same topics, Epictetus in his
Discourses
displays a similar focus and orientation. Both men concentrate
on ethics to the virtual exclusion of physics (cosmological speculation) and logic. Logic and physics feature in the
Discourses
, to be sure, but typically in an ancillary or illustrative role. And neither one gets caught up in ethical theorizing; they always treat ethics with a view to applying it in real life. Reading books and becoming fluent in the doctrines of philosophers are deprecated as ends in themselves. Even more than Musonius, Epictetus has a plain and practical agenda: he wants his students to make a clean break with received patterns of thinking and behaving, to reject popular morality and put conventional notions of good and bad behind them; in short, he aims to inspire in his readers something like a religious conversion, only not by appeal to any articles of faith or the promise of life in the hereafter (Stoics did not believe in the afterlife), but by appeal to reason alone.

Epaphroditus granted Epictetus his freedom – precisely when we don’t know – but from then on he devoted his life to the practice and preaching of philosophy. When Domitian, suspecting them of republican sympathies, in ad 95 ordered all the philosophers in Italy to pack up and leave, Epictetus turned this insult to account by moving to Greece and founding his school there (in a spot where he had probably little to fear in the way of competition). Nicopolis, the site he chose, was a Roman colony founded by the emperor Augustus to commemorate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra. It functioned as the
de facto
capital of the province of Epirus. The site had other advantages; it was on the Adriatic coast, making it easy of access for prospective students from Italy. The student body drew mainly from upper-class Roman families who admired Greek culture and were particularly keento taste of the accumulated wisdom of the Greek philosophers. We have no information as to how long students typically stayed at Nicopolis under Epictetus’ tutelage, but it was probably no more than a year or two. The school, in any case, was a success, and when its reputation attracted the attention of the emperor Hadrian (more kindly disposed toward philosophy than his predecessor), he honoured it, and its founder, with a personal visit.