Enchiridion 17: an actor in a play

The chapter

Epictetus ran a school at Nicopolis, in Epirus, and his student Arrian condensed its ethical teaching into the Enchiridion, or Handbook. Chapter 17 takes only a few lines: an image, a list of parts and a division of labor. Here it is complete, in George Long’s 1877 translation.

What it means

“The teacher (author).” Long’s double rendering reflects the Greek word, didaskalos, which ordinarily means a teacher. In the Athenian theater it was also the word for the person who trained the chorus and produced the play (Liddell and Scott, at Perseus (opens in a new tab)). So the image is a theater company in which someone else stages the play and hands out the parts. Epictetus doesn’t say here who that is. In Discourses 2.10 he agrees with the philosophers who say that even a good person’s sickness and death are assigned by the arrangement of the whole.

The length of the run. “If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one” (Enchiridion 17). How long you live is not up to you either. Marcus Aurelius closes the Meditations with a related image: an actor dismissed after three acts of five is told that in life three acts are the whole play (Meditations 12.36; see quotes about death).

The parts. A poor man, a lame man, a magistrate and a private person line up with three items on chapter 1’s list of things not in our power: property, the body and office. The lame man was close to home. Epictetus had been enslaved, and he was lame; accounts differ on whether illness or abuse during his slavery was the cause (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

“Act the part naturally.” Long’s “naturally” renders the Greek adverb euphuōs, which the standard lexicon glosses as cleverly or skillfully (Liddell and Scott, at Perseus (opens in a new tab)). The instruction is to play even the poor man’s part with skill. That rules out two bad performances: the actor cast as a beggar who plays him like a king, and the one who sulks through the scene because he wanted the king. The modern versions are ordinary. You didn’t choose to inherit a team that wanted someone else as its manager, to be the child your parents call when they argue, or to start work in a recession. Playing those parts well looks like running the team fairly, listening without taking sides, and doing the job that exists while you look for a better one.

“To select the part, belongs to another.” This is chapter 1’s division applied to a whole life: the casting is not up to you, and the performance is. The Greek word for “part” is prosōpon, a face or a stage mask, the Greek counterpart of the Latin persona, from which English gets “person.” Epictetus uses the same word in chapter 37, where Long translates it “character.”

So some parts you do take on yourself: a job, a promise, a cause. Chapter 37 asks you to take on only what you can carry. Nor does chapter 17 forbid trying to change a part. Health, money and position are what the Stoics called preferred indifferents: reasonable to pursue, not worth staking your peace on. What chapter 17 asks is that you play the part you have now well, including the parts no effort will change.

In the Discourses

The Handbook gives the image. Arrian’s longer record of the lectures, the Discourses, shows what playing a part well involves. In Discourses 2.10, Epictetus tells a listener to consider who he is: a human being, a citizen of the world, a son, a brother, perhaps a senator, young or old. Examine any of those names, he says, and it tells you your duties. The opening of that discourse appears on principles, under roles and duties. Then he turns to what happens when someone forgets the name.

Here the comparison is a craft rather than the stage, but the point is the one chapter 17 makes: a name is a part, and it can be played badly. A smith who swings the hammer wrongly still has the title, but in that moment he has “forgotten the smith.” Epictetus’s charge against someone who blames his brother is the same: “You have forgotten who you are and what is your name” (Discourses 2.10). Later in the discourse he says what such a person loses: modesty, moderation and gentleness. Money, he adds, is lost through causes outside the will; those three are lost through our own fault. In chapter 17’s terms, the casting can cost you money or health, but only a bad performance costs you something of yourself.

Chapter 30 of the Handbook brings the same idea into the family: duties follow from relationships, so a brother who wrongs you is still your brother, and what you owe him is set by that relationship, not by his conduct (Stoicism and difficult people).

Using it

Two questions do most of the work: what part have I been given here, and what would a good performance of it require? The first is a sorting job, and the free Outside My Control exercise walks you through it when you’re upset about something you can’t change. The second is about conduct. The four virtues give it a shape: what would wisdom, courage, justice and temperance ask of someone in this part?

At night, the Evening Examination asks what went well and what you would do better, a review of the day’s performance rather than the day’s luck. For the parts you play at a job, see Stoicism at work.

Before and after chapter 17

• Previous: chapter 16. When someone is weeping over a loss, show sympathy and even lament with them in words, but don’t lament inwardly.
• Next: chapter 18. When a raven croaks an unlucky omen, remember that it can only concern your body, property, reputation or family, and that you can draw benefit from whatever happens.