Discourses

Overview

The Discourses are three hundred and fifty pages in four books, and Epictetus did not write them. Arrian, a student who later became a Roman governor and wrote a history of Alexander, took notes at the school in Nicopolis and published them, saying in a prefatory letter that he wrote down what he heard as far as possible in the man’s own words, and that they were never meant for publication.

That accounts for everything unusual about the book. The register is spoken, not written. Epictetus addresses individuals in the room, answers questions we do not hear, breaks off, tells stories, and does imitations of his own students protesting. There are jokes, and there is a running note of exasperation.

Eight books existed and four survive. Arrian also produced the Encheiridion, a fifteen-page handbook of the essentials, which is the most read Stoic text and which people have carried in a pocket for eighteen centuries.

The life is not incidental. Epictetus was a slave in Rome, in the household of Epaphroditus, a freedman who had himself been Nero’s secretary. He was permitted to study philosophy. He was lame, and the ancient report that his master broke his leg may or may not be true. Freed after Nero’s death, he taught in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers around 93 CE, then moved to Nicopolis on the Greek coast and taught there for the rest of his life, in poverty, with a lamp and a rush mat.

The argument

The dichotomy of control. Everything begins here and the Encheiridion opens with it. Some things are up to us: our judgements, our impulses, our desires and aversions, in short our own acts. Some things are not: the body, property, reputation, office, in short everything that is not our own act.

The things in our power are by nature free and unhindered. The things not in our power are weak, slavish and belong to others. And the single source of misery is confusing the two. If you treat what belongs to others as your own you will be thwarted, grieved and disturbed and will blame gods and men; if you treat only what is yours as yours, no one will compel you, no one will hinder you, you will blame nobody, and nobody will harm you.

Epictetus is uncompromising about how far this goes. Your body is not yours. Your child is not yours; when you kiss a child, remind yourself that it is human and may be gone tomorrow. This is hard to read and he knows it, and he does not soften it.

Judgements, not events. The corollary is the sentence that founded a therapeutic tradition: people are disturbed not by things but by their opinions about things. Death is not terrible, since Socrates did not find it so; the terror lies in the judgement that it is terrible. The work of philosophy is therefore on the judgement, since the event is not available for revision.

Wanting what happens. The positive instruction follows. Do not seek that things should happen as you wish; wish that things should happen as they do, and your life will go smoothly. This is easily mistaken for passivity and Epictetus blocks that reading throughout: you act, you plan, you take the field, and you do not attach your peace of mind to the outcome. His image is the archer who aims with all his skill and does not control the wind.

Roles. You are an actor in a play whose length and casting are chosen by someone else. Your business is to play well the part you are given; to choose the part is another’s. It sounds fatalistic and functions as the opposite, because it moves all the attention onto performance.

The training. The most distinctive thing in the Discourses is how practical they are. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine to be recited but a discipline to be trained, in three fields: desire and aversion, so that you want only what is available; impulse to act, so that you fulfil your roles; and assent, so that you are not deceived by impressions. Epictetus keeps demanding evidence of progress. He asks what a student does when the lamp is stolen, when a ship is delayed, when a friend dies, when the emperor sends for him, and he says the sheep does not bring its fodder to the shepherd to show how much it has eaten but digests it and produces wool.

He is savage about students who treat the school as a finishing course. You have come here to learn to argue syllogisms, he says, and you cannot bear your brother’s temper. He compares a lecture room that leaves people pleased with themselves to a hospital where patients come out delighted.

Freedom. The theme a former slave returns to constantly. Freedom is not a legal status; it is not being able to be thwarted. Whoever can give you or take from you what you value is your master, so a man who wants nothing that another can control cannot be coerced. Chain my leg, he says, but not even Zeus can overcome my will. The tyrant may kill him and cannot compel him.

How to read it

Read the Encheiridion first, entire. It is fifteen pages, it takes thirty minutes, and it contains the system. Then go to the Discourses for the texture.

Then read selectively rather than straight through. Book I chapters 1, 6, 9, 11 and 29, and Book II chapters 5 and 18, and Book IV chapter 1, which is the great essay on freedom, will give you the range.

Read it as speech. Hearing the tone, which is frequently that of a man losing patience, changes the doctrine from a set of austere propositions into something closer to a coach shouting.

Take the hard passages at full strength before deciding about them. The instruction to remind yourself when you embrace your child that it is mortal is not softened anywhere, and readers who translate it into something gentler are reading a different book.

Test it against the obvious objection. Is it true that nothing outside our control matters? Epictetus is committed to saying that a man on the rack whose judgements are sound is doing well. Whether that is heroic, consoling or a description of a kind of numbness is the question, and it is the same question the Stoics faced in antiquity.

Read Marcus Aurelius afterwards. He was handed a copy of these by his teacher, quotes Epictetus more than anyone else, and the Meditations are what the doctrine looks like when someone with absolute power is trying to hold to it.

Questions it raises

• Is the dichotomy of control accurate? A great deal that matters, health, the safety of the people you love, lies in between.
• If only judgements are up to us, is anything outside genuinely bad, and what follows for someone responding to injustice?
• Epictetus says wish that things happen as they do. How is that compatible with trying to change anything?
• A former slave tells free men they are slaves. Is that a profound redefinition, or does it risk making actual slavery a matter of indifference?
• Philosophy is meant to hurt, like a hospital. Is discomfort a reliable sign that it is working?
• The consolation on offer requires detaching from outcomes, including the lives of your children. Is that wisdom, and is it available to anyone who has not lost the attachment already?