Discourses and Selected Writings Read Free

audience.
    Epictetus’ Stoicism is distinctive in other ways too. Because his interest is in ethics primarily, he does not engage with certain theoretical issues that were debated by the original Stoics and their rivals. The controversy over whether there was a place for free will within their deterministic system is nowhere engaged directly. To be sure, he emphasizes repeatedly that our thoughts and actions have immediate and inescapable consequences: ‘You have only to doze for a moment, and all is lost. For ruin and salvation both have their source inside you’ (IV 9, 16). ‘Very little is needed for everything to be upset and ruined, only a slight lapse in reason’ (IV 3, 4). Or, to quote Tacitus again, ‘Once the choice is made… the subsequent sequence of events cannot be altered.’ But, as noted above, humans do have freedom to shape mental events – Epictetus is equally adamant about that. And in this area, as he says more than once, ‘not even God has the power of coercion over us’.
    Other paradoxes, or points of controversy, such as whether there was a moral state intermediate between perfect virtue and utter depravity (the old Stoics denied it), are tacitly deprecated. No one reading deeply in Epictetus can doubt that he believes humans are capable of moral progress, and that it makes senseto distinguish between degrees of virtue and vice. Indeed, nearly every reference to the Discourses , from antiquity to the present, assumes that they have no other goal than moral improvement. The Discourses are primarily Stoic documents, but since Stoicism along with the other philosophical sects closed up shop in the sixth century ad, over the centuries many more non-Stoics than Stoics have read them with appreciation. If they continue to speak to the contemporary reader it is because they are grounded in common experience and common sense.

EPICTETUS’ INFLUENCE
    Epictetus’ influence has been enormous. We only have space to pass a few highlights in review. His outreach programme was evidently successful, to judge by the long commentary devoted to the Enchiridion by the neo-Platonist philosopher Simplicius (sixth century ad), otherwise known mainly for writing commentaries on Aristotle. In the Preface, Simplicius explains that Epictetus’ maxims are beneficial to those who want their bodies and desires to be ruled by rationality.
    Marcus Aurelius, in the acknowledgements at the head of his Meditations , mentions the discovery of a copy of the Discourses as a crucial event in his own intellectual development. The Meditations in fact abound in quotations and paraphrases of the Discourses . That a Greek slave should be the acknowledged maître à penser of a Roman emperor illustrates in a most literal way the famous line of the poet Horace: ‘captive Greece captured her uncivilized captor [i.e. Rome]’.
    Of decisive importance for his currency during the Middle Ages (and no doubt one reason his writings survived antiquity) is that he was among a handful of pagan authors approved for reading in the early Church. Epictetus himself was esteemed an anima naturaliter Christiana , by reason of the supposed consistency between his principles and practice. Besides giving incidental proof of his own reading of Epictetus at many points in his work, the Christian apologist Origen reports that by the third century his fame exceeded even Plato’s: ‘Plato,’ he writes,‘is only found in the hands of those reputed to be philologists. By contrast, Epictetus is admired by ordinary people who have the desire to be benefited and who perceive improvement from his writings’ ( Contra Celsum VI, 2). With a few minor editorial changes (such as the regular replacement of Socrates’ name with that of St Paul), the Enchiridion was adapted to monastic use and in its Christian habit served the monks of the Eastern Orthodox Church for centuries as an ascetic rulebook.
    Through Syriac Christian scholars Epictetus’ thought became well