Epictetus was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia about A.D. 50, a slave woman’s son, and therefore himself a slave. He had little chance of education, for he was passed from one owner and city to another, until he found himself the property of Epaphroditus, a powerful freedman in Nero’s court. He was of feeble health and lame, apparently through the brutality of one of his masters, but he lived the normal threescore years and ten. Epaphroditus allowed him to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus and later freed him. Epictetus must himself have set up as a teacher in Rome, for when Domitian banished the philosophers Epictetus was among those who fled. He settled in Nicopolis and drew to his lectures there students from many parts. One was Arrian of Nicomedia, later governor of Cappadocia; Arrian took down the words of Epictetus, probably in shorthand, and published them as Diatribai—“rubbings” or copies—now on all lists of the world’s best books as the Discourses.I It is no dull formal treatise, but a classic of simple speech and bluff humor, intimately expressing a modest and kindly, yet sharp and vigorous character. Epictetus applied his lusty sarcasms to himself and others impartially, and gaily mocked his rough-and-tumble style. He made no complaint when Demonax, hearing that the old bachelor counseled marriage, sarcastically petitioned for his daughter’s hand; he excused himself on the ground that teaching wisdom is as great a service as begetting “two or three pug-nosed children.”24 In later years he took a wife to help him care for an infant that he had rescued from exposure. In those years his fame compassed the Empire, and Hadrian counted him among his friends.
Epictetus, resembling Socrates in this as in so many other ways, cared too little about physics or metaphysics to construct a system of thought; his one subject and passion was the good life. “What do I care,” he asks, “whether all existing things are composed of atoms … or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to learn the true nature of good and evil?”25 Philosophy does not mean reading books about wisdom, it means training oneself in the practice of wisdom. The essence of the matter is that a man should so mold his life and conduct that his happiness shall depend as little as possible upon external things. This does not require a hermit’s solitude; on the contrary, “Epicureans and blackguards” are to be condemned for detaching men from public service; the good man will take his part in civic affairs. But he will accept with equanimity all vicissitudes of fortune—poverty, bereavement, humiliation, pain, slavery, imprisonment, or death; he will know how to “endure and renounce.”
Never say about anything, “I have lost it,” but only “I have given it back.” Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your wife dead? She has been returned. “I have had my farm taken away.” Very well; this, too, has been given back. So long as God gives it to you take care of it as something not your own. . . . “Alas, that I should be lame in one leg!” Slave! do you then, because of one paltry leg, blame the universe? Will you not make a free gift of it to the whole? … I must go into exile: does anyone keep me from going with a smile, serene? … “I will throw you into prison.” It is only my body you imprison. I must die; must I then die complaining? . . . These are the lessons that philosophy ought to rehearse, and write down daily, and practice. … A platform or a prison are places, one high, the other low; but your moral purpose can be kept the same in either place.27
The slave can be spiritually free, like Diogenes; the prisoner can be free, like Socrates; the emperor can be a slave, like Nero.28 Even death is a minor incident in the good man’s life; he may advance its coming if he finds that evil too heavily outweighs good;29 in any case he will receive it calmly as part of the secret wisdom of Nature.
If heads of grain had feeling, ought they to pray that they should never be harvested? … I would have you know that it is a curse never to die. . . . The ship goes down. What, then, am I to do? Whatever I can … I drown without fear, neither shrinking nor crying out against God, but recognizing that what is born must also perish. For I am a part of the whole, as an hour is part of a day. I must come on as the hour, and like an hour pass away.30 . . . Regard yourself as but a single thread of all that go to make up the garment.31 . . . Seek not that the things which happen to you should happen as you wish, but wish the things that happen to be as they are, and you will find tranquillity.32
Though he often speaks of Nature as an impersonal force, Epictetus as frequently infuses his conception with personality, intelligence, and love. The atmosphere of religion pervading his age warms his philosophy to a self-surrendering piety akin to that of the Stoic emperor who would soon read him and echo his thought. He speaks with a fine eloquence of the majestic order prevailing in time and space, and the evidences of design in nature, but he proceeds to explain that “God has created some animals to be eaten, others to serve in farming, others to produce cheese.”33 The human mind itself, he thinks, is so marvelous an instrument that only a divine creator could have brought it into being; indeed, so far as we possess reason we are parts of the World Reason. If we could trace our ancestry back to the first man we should find him begotten by God; God is therefore literally the father of us all, and all men are brothers.34
He who has once observed with understanding the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and most comprehensive community is the system [systema, standing together] of men and God, and that from God came the seeds whence all things, and especially rational beings, spring—why should not that man call himself a citizen of the world . . . nay, a son of God? … If a man could only subscribe heart and soul to this doctrine … I think he would entertain no mean or ignoble thought in himself. . . . Bear in mind, then, when you eat, who you are that eat, and whom you are nourishing; when you cohabit with women, who you are that do this. . . . You are bearing God about with you, you poor wretch, and know it not!35
In a passage that Saint Paul might have written, Epictetus exhorts his students not only to submit their wills trustingly to God’s, but to be the apostles of God among mankind:
God says, “Go and bear witness for me.”36 . . . Think what it is to be able to say, “God has sent me into the world to be his soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and fears are vain, that to a good man no evil can befall, whether he live or die. God sends me at one time here, at another time there; he disciplines me by poverty and imprisonment, that I may be the better witness to him among men. With such a ministry committed to me, can I any longer care in what place I am, or who my companions are, or what they say about me? Nay, rather, does not my whole nature strain after God, his laws and commandments?”37
As for himself, he is filled with awe and gratitude by the mystery and splendor of things, and he intones to the Creator a pagan Magnificat that is one of the supreme passages in the history of religion:
What language is adequate to praise all the works of Providence? … If we had sense, ought we to be doing anything else, publicly or privately, than hymning and praising the Deity, and rehearsing his benefits? Ought we not, as we dig and plow and eat, to sing a hymn of praise to God? . . . What then?—since most of you have become blind, ought there not to be someone to fulfill this office for you, and in behalf of all sing hymns of praise to God? 38
Though we have here no word for immortality, and can trace all these ideas back to the Stoics and the Cynics, we find in these pages remarkable parallels to many attitudes of early Christianity. Epictetus, indeed, sometimes advances beyond Christianity: he denounces slavery, condemns capital punishment, and wishes to have criminals treated as sick men.39 He advocates a daily examination of conscience 40 and announces a kind of Golden Rule: “What you shun to suffer, do not make others suffer”;41 and he adds: “If a man is reported to have spoken ill of you, make no defense, but say, “He did not know the rest of my faults, else he would not have mentioned only these.”42 He advises men to return good for evil,43 and to “submit when reviled”;44 to fast now and then and “abstain from the things you desire.”45 Sometimes he speaks of the body with the blasphemous contempt of an unscoured anchorite: “The body is of all things the most unpleasant and most foul. … It is astonishing that we should love a thing to which we perform such strange services every day. I fill this bag, and then I empty it; what is more troublesome?”46 There are passages that breathe the piety of Augustine and the eloquence of Newman: “Use me henceforward, O God, as thou wilt; I am of one mind with thee. I am thine. I ask exemption from nothing that seems good in thy sight. Where thou wilt, lead me; in what raiment thou wilt, clothe me.”47 And like Jesus he bids his disciples take no care of the morrow:
To have God as our maker, father, and guardian—shall not this suffice to keep us from grief and fear? And wherewithal shall I be fed, asks one, if I have nothing? But what shall we say of . . . the animals, every one of which is sufficient to itself, and lacks neither its own proper food nor that way of life which is appropriate to it, and in harmony with nature? 48
Is it any wonder that Christians like Saint John Chrysostom and Augustine lauded him, and that his Encheiridion was adopted, with minor changes, as a rule and guide for the monastic life?49 Who knows but that Epictetus had read in some form the sayings of Jesus and was, without knowing it, a convert to Christianity?