Epictetus: The Slave Who Taught Emperors How to Live
Two men, born decades apart, could hardly have stood further apart in the Roman world. One came into it as a slave and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. The other ruled the empire. Yet the emperor Marcus Aurelius built his private philosophy on the words of the former slave. The slave was Epictetus, and the strange durability of his teaching is the whole point.
His ideas survive in two books he never actually wrote: the Enchiridion (a short “handbook”) and the longer Discourses, both set down by his student Arrian. What they preserve is Stoicism stripped back to its working core.
Born “acquired”
We don’t know his birth name. “Epictetus” comes from the Greek epiktētos, meaning “acquired” the ordinary word for a piece of property. Born around AD 55 in Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey, he spent his youth enslaved in Rome to Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman in the emperor Nero’s circle. At some point he was left permanently lame; one ancient account blames a master’s cruelty, though the cause is uncertain.
With his owner’s permission, he studied under the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. Once freed, he taught philosophy in Rome until the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from the city around AD 93. Epictetus moved to Nicopolis, in north-western Greece, and founded a school that drew students from across the empire. He wrote nothing down. We have him only because Arrian took notes.
The one idea that outlived him: the dichotomy of control
The Handbook opens with the sentence the rest of his philosophy hangs on:
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 1 (trans. Elizabeth Carter)
Later teachers would call this the dichotomy of control. The move is simple and ruthless: sort every worry into two bins what you actually govern (your judgments, choices and actions) and what you don’t (other people, outcomes, your reputation, your body’s fortunes) and pour yourself into the first only. Everything else you hold lightly, “as travelers view a hotel.”
“Men are disturbed not by things”
From that split comes his most-quoted line:
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5 (trans. Elizabeth Carter)
It isn’t the traffic, the rude email or the lost deal that wrecks your afternoon it’s the verdict you pass on them. This is the same point the Stoics make about emotion in general: the event is neutral until your judgment colours it. Change the judgment and the disturbance has nowhere left to live.
A doctrine that fit a slave — and an emperor
Here is why Epictetus travels so well up and down the social ladder. A philosophy built by a man who owned nothing — not even the use of his own leg turned out to be exactly what a man who owned everything needed. To the lame teacher, his own body was simply Exhibit A:
Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to your ability to choose, unless that is your choice. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to your ability to choose.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 9 (trans. Elizabeth Carter)
He pictured a human life as a role in a play: “act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.” Whether you are handed the part of a slave or a governor, the work is identical play it with integrity. Decades later that idea reached the desk of Marcus Aurelius, who thanks his teacher Rusticus, in the first book of the Meditations, for handing him Epictetus to read. The most powerful man in the world chose, as his guide, the handbook of a former slave.
Where to start
Start with the Enchiridion. It’s short — you can read the whole thing in under an hour and it was built as a manual, not a treatise: something to keep at hand and put to use. Don’t try to swallow it whole. Take one worry that’s gnawing at you today and run it through the control test: is this mine to govern, or not? Then act only on the part that is. That single sorting move is the entire engine of Stoic calm and it’s the gift of a man the Romans once listed as property.
Related reading
- Stoicism for Burnout: A Field Guide
- Stoicism vs Buddhism
- Stoicism Is Not About Suppressing Emotion
- Zeno of Citium: The Merchant Who Founded Stoicism
Sources
- Epictetus, Enchiridion, trans. Elizabeth Carter (public domain) Internet Classics Archive (MIT).
- Epictetus, Discourses (recorded by Arrian) Standard Ebooks.
- “Epictetus” Encyclopaedia Britannica; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Marcus Aurelius on reading Epictetus Meditations, Book I (trans. George Long, public domain), Standard Ebooks.
