THE HANDBOOK OF
EPICTETUS
R.P.
Bazemore
Introduction
p.3
Greek text p.6
Notes on the text p.29
Translation p.66
Philosophical terms p.92
Appendix I p.96
Appendix II p.98
Appendix III p.101
Notes p. 104
Bibliography p. 105
With
special thanks to an extraordinarily gifted teacher
and
scholar of the Greek language, Professor S.R. Todd.
Introduction
Epictetus
was born in 50 AD in Hierapolis, a city of Phrygia 100 miles due east of
Ephesus by Roman road. His mother was a
slave and he became a slave to an administrator in the court of Nero in Rome,
Epaphrodotus, who eventually freed him and even before that allowed him to
study under the greatest Stoic teacher of the time, Musonius Rufus. With freedom came teaching the philosophy he
studied and the personal life of an ascetic.
He remained unmarried and his simple home in Rome was never locked and
was furnished only with a pallet and a rush mat. An epigram from the Greek Anthology1
tells the story (Irus is the beggar in Odyssey 18).
Δοῦλος Επίκτητος γενόμην καὶ σῶμ’ ἀνάπηρος καὶ πενίην Ἶρος καὶ φίλος ἀθανάτοις.
A slave, I was Epictetus,
crippled in body and poor as Irus and I was a friend to the Gods.
That Epictetus was a recognized
working philosopher is confirmed by the fact that he was required to leave Rome
when, by an edict of Domitian, all philosophers were banned from the Italian
peninsula in 89 AD. He moved to
Nicopolis in Epirus which had become a large active city after being founded by
Augustus to commemorate his victory at Actium just to the south. Epictetus continued to teach and lecture and
to live most simply in his house in Nicopolis where he used, it is said, a clay
lamp after his iron one was stolen. Many
of his students were young men from well off families who were setting out into
the world in search of further education.
Late in life he adopted an infant who was about to be exposed by its
parents, friends of Epictetus’, as they were too poor to care for it. He also took a woman companion to help with
raising the child. He is known to have
travelled to Athens once and he died in Nicopolis in 135 AD.
The
work of Epictetus that we have was written down by one of his students, Arrian
of Nicomedia, perhaps from lecture notes, and consists of the four books of his
Discourses and the Enchiridion. The language is koine but it is full of
philosophical terminology and is often elliptical and compact making it hard to
understand, and the meaning may remain hard to understand even after one has
worked out quite clearly what the text says. As one persists in the study of
Epictetus' work and time passes, however, his teaching begins to sink into
one’s thinking the energy and intelligence of it and its huge importance begin
to become evident. What he teaches has
little to do with philosophic theory. There
is no system. It is Socratic. Asking Socrates’ question, How shall we live?
it deals with universal experiences of
human existence and especially those of human distress. How shall we live when we are sick or
grief-stricken, when we have lost a child or our spouse or our living, when we
are dying, or when we are simply disregarded, ignored or ridiculed.
This
is the world of Epictetus spoken of by Admiral James Stockdale2 who
was held prisoner in North Viet Nam for eight years and had the fortitude to
endure and survive in part because of his memory of the teachings of
Epictetus. His story is of initial
irritation and disinterest and later understanding. As a junior officer in the Navy, Stockdale
had been sent to Stanford to study political science. He met the philosopher Philip Rhinelander who
became, as he recounts, a great influence in his life. When he was ready to go back to flying Navy
fighter planes, Rhinelander gave him a small gift. “He handed it to me, and I bade him good-bye
with great emotion. I took the book home
and that night started to read it. It
was the Enchiridion of the
philosopher Epictetus…. As I began to
read, I thought to myself in disbelief, ‘Does Rhinelander think I’m going to
draw lessons for my life from this thing?
I’m a fighter pilot. I’m a
technical man. I’m a test pilot. I know how to get people to do technical
work. I play golf. I drink martinis. I know how to get ahead in my
profession. And what does he hand
me? A book that says in part, “It’s
better to die in hunger exempt from guilt and fear, than to live in affluence
and with perturbation.”’ I remembered
this later in prison because perturbation was what I was living with. When I ejected from the airplane on that
September morn in 1965, I had left the land of technology. I had entered the world of Epictetus, and
it’s a world that few of us, whether we know it or not, are ever far away
from.”
What Epictetus teaches is an alloy of
Stoicism and Socratic Platonism.
Socrates is mentioned often by Epictetus and with the greatest respect
and veneration, and Socratic ideas and attitudes surface repeatedly in the
Enchiridion and some are pointed out in the notes. For Epictetus a fully human life is
free. Free from subservience to other
people, to the needs of the body, to circumstances. This sort of freedom has to reside in the
mind and Epictetus’ philosophy is his practical guide to finding such of that
freedom as each person can. He knows
that freedom is universally desired but that human servitude is
everywhere. For Epictetus freedom is
reached through the right use of volition or προαίρεσις, prohairesis, and volition depends on the use of
judgment, motivation, desire and aversion to identify those things in life
which are under our control, which are within the scope of our volition. True freedom then is attending to the proper
objects of our volition and excluding all else from our concern. The force of Epictetus’ philosophy, what
makes it stay in one’s mind and begin to grow in meaning in time, is in the
concrete application of it in his teaching.
Abstract and apparently impractical principles are expanded and
illuminated by the vividness, concreteness, humanity and irony of his writing.
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