Epictetus, the Stoic teacher of freedom

His life

Epictetus was born in the 50s CE (about 55, by some reckonings) in Hierapolis, a Greek city in Phrygia that is now Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey. His name is simply the Greek word for “acquired” (Britannica (opens in a new tab)).

As a boy he was a slave in Rome. His owner, Epaphroditus, was a rich freedman who held an important post at the court of Nero (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). While still enslaved, Epictetus studied with the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, whom he mentions several times in the Discourses (IEP (opens in a new tab)).

He walked with a limp, and ancient writers disagree about why. A story told by the second-century writer Celsus, and preserved by the Christian writer Origen, says his master twisted his leg until it broke, and that Epictetus calmly remarked that he had said it would. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia, puts it down to rheumatism (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Neither account can be checked.

At some point he was freed and began teaching in Rome. Around 89 or 90 CE the emperor Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, and Epictetus moved to Nicopolis in Epirus, a busy crossroads and administrative center on the west coast of Greece. He opened a school there and taught until his death around 135. Visitors came to talk with him, and several of the Discourses record those visits: an Epicurean administrator in 3.7, a man on his way to Rome over a lawsuit about his rank in 3.9. He never married, and late in life he adopted a child whose parents could not afford to raise it (SEP).

Among his students was Arrian of Nicomedia, who later held public office under the emperor Hadrian and became a respected historian (IEP). Arrian’s notes of the lectures are the reason we can read Epictetus at all.

What he taught

Epictetus taught Stoic ethics as a practice, the way a trainer teaches a sport. The central skill, in his terms, is the right use of impressions, which George Long’s 1877 translation calls “appearances” (Discourses 3.22). Things strike us as good or bad, insulting or frightening, and we decide whether to agree. The impressions arrive on their own. The agreeing, which the Stoics called assent, is ours. Three short texts carry most of the rest:

• What is up to us. The Enchiridion opens by dividing things into those in our power (opinion, impulse, desire, aversion) and those not in our power (the body, property, reputation, office). Discourses 1.1 makes the same division at length. The modern name for it is the dichotomy of control.
• Opinions, not things. Enchiridion 5 says people are disturbed not by things but by their opinions about things. See Enchiridion 5, explained.
• Signs of progress. Enchiridion 48 describes the student who is getting somewhere: he blames no one else, makes no claims for himself, and keeps watch on his own reactions. The Enchiridion guide sums it up in one line, along with the other 52 chapters.

Two more things belong in an honest summary. His model was Socrates, and like Plato’s Socrates he teaches by questioning, pressing his listeners on what they take for granted (SEP). And he was a religious thinker. He speaks constantly of God, or Zeus, as the one who orders the universe, and he holds that human reason is a share of God’s own mind, which makes us God’s kin (SEP). Readers who skip that side of him miss part of why he thought accepting events was reasonable. Is Stoicism a religion? takes up the question.

Prohairesis: the faculty of choice

Epictetus’s key word is prohairesis, the capacity to choose. It covers what you assent to, what you desire and avoid, and what you set out to do: everything that is your own doing rather than something that happens to you. Long translates it as “will,” and in Discourses 3.2 he prints the Greek word in parentheses after it, so readers can see what stands behind the English. Other translators use volition, choice or moral purpose (IEP).

Good and bad, on this view, are found in the will and nowhere else. Everything outside it, such as your salary, your health or what your sister thinks of you, is “materials for the will” (Discourses 1.29): the stuff it works on, as wood is the stuff a carpenter works on, to borrow his comparison from Discourses 1.15. A layoff is material. Whether you judge it a disaster or a hard turn to handle well is the work of the will, and that is where Epictetus locates success and failure.

The English word misleads in one way. Today “will” suggests willpower, gritting your teeth through a workout or a diet. Prohairesis is not a supply of effort. It is the faculty that judges and decides, and Epictetus holds that it is free by its nature: no one can make you assent to what is false (Discourses 4.1). On his view it is the real person, while your body and possessions are things you have (SEP). That is why the dichotomy of control puts judgments and choices, and only those, on the side of what is up to us.

The three areas of training

In Discourses 3.2 Epictetus sets out his school’s program in one paragraph: three areas in which anyone who wants to be good has to train.

In plain terms:

1. Desire and aversion. Learn to want what is up to you and to stop dreading what isn’t. Doing good work is in your hands; the promotion is not. Epictetus calls this area the most urgent, because frustrated desires and aversions are what bring sorrow, lamentation and envy, and in that state no one can even listen to reason (3.2).
2. Action. Act with care in your relationships and roles. In the same discourse he insists that training doesn’t turn you into a statue: he means to go on meeting his obligations as a son, a father and a citizen. Today that means calling your mother back, doing your share at work, and being fair to the colleague you don’t like.
3. Assent. Don’t agree to an impression before you have examined it. The thought she ignored me on purpose is an impression, and whether to accept it is up to you. Epictetus wants this so well trained that no unexamined impression slips past you even when you are asleep, drunk or low (3.2).

He adds a complaint that still sounds familiar. The philosophers of his day, he says, skipped the first two areas and spent their time on the third, on clever arguments and logic puzzles. Then he turns on a student who does the same while still anxious about what people are saying about him.

Marcus Aurelius copied into his notebook a saying of Epictetus that runs through all three areas in a single sentence:

The French scholar Pierre Hadot argued that these three areas also organize the thought of the Meditations, and he called them the disciplines of desire, action and assent (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Calling them disciplines is Hadot’s idea; Epictetus speaks of three topoi, “topics” or areas.

What he meant by freedom

Epictetus had been legally unfree, and he did not think that was the deepest kind of slavery. In Discourses 4.1 he tells his students not to ask whether a man was ever bought or sold. If he says “Master” to someone and means it, call him a slave, even if he is a consul with the twelve fasces carried before him. Freedom is a matter of what a person wants.

The last line is the surprising one. Freedom comes from “removing the desire” (Discourses 4.1), not from getting everything you want. Anyone whose peace depends on what other people decide, whether a boss’s approval, a partner’s mood or a buyer’s offer, can be hindered, and in Epictetus’s sense is not free. That doesn’t mean wanting nothing. It means moving your wanting to the things no one can block: your own judgments and choices.

In Discourses 1.29, right after he defines good as a kind of will, he applies the idea to a threat:

A threat works only through something you want or fear. The tyrant can reach the body; whether he reaches you depends on whether you value the body more than your judgment. “If I fear any of them, it is I whom he threatens” (Discourses 1.29). Smaller pressures work the same way: the manager who hints about your job, the relative who uses guilt. Their leverage is exactly as large as what you want from them. Socrates, whom Epictetus quotes at the end, is his evidence that a person can live like this.

In Discourses 4.7 the argument becomes a description of a life:

Epictetus had been banished from Rome himself, so the line about exile is not theoretical. His point is that he was never well off because of where he lived, so a change of place can’t take that away: it was “not because of the place that it was well with me” (Discourses 4.7).

None of this asks you to stop caring. The free person of Discourses 3.2 still keeps up his family and his duties. What he gives up is the demand that the people and things he loves be guaranteed to him (Enchiridion 3, Discourses 3.24). For how this gets misread as shutting feelings down, see toxic Stoicism.

Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius

There is no evidence that the two ever met, and Marcus was not his student. Marcus was born in Rome in 121. Epictetus was teaching at Nicopolis, across the sea in Greece, and died around 135, when Marcus was about fourteen. No ancient source says they met, and Marcus never says he heard him. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s summary is that Marcus was never his pupil but was so impressed by what he read that he counted himself a follower.

What Marcus does record is how the teaching reached him. In the first book of the Meditations, where he thanks the people who formed him, he credits his teacher Junius Rusticus:

So Marcus knew Epictetus as a reader, through a copy of the discourses that Rusticus lent him “out of his own collection” (Meditations 1.7). He read them closely. In the Meditations he quotes Epictetus by name: on a person as a little soul carrying a corpse (4.41), and in a run of sayings in Book 11 (11.33–38), some credited to him by name, including the one on assent, action and desire above. Another of Marcus’s teachers, the orator Herodes Atticus, considered Epictetus the greatest of the Stoics, according to the Roman writer Aulus Gellius (IEP (opens in a new tab)).

A former slave teaching in a provincial city and a future emperor in Rome make an unlikely pair, and the link between them is a borrowed book. For Marcus’s side of the story, see Marcus Aurelius.

His two books

As far as we know, Epictetus wrote nothing. Both books come from Arrian:

• The Discourses. Arrian’s record of the lectures and conversations at Nicopolis. There were at least eight books, and four survive. In a prefatory letter Arrian says he wrote down what he heard, as far as he could in Epictetus’s own words. Scholars doubt that they are a word-for-word record, because many discourses are too polished and some too long to be off-the-cuff talk (IEP). Their plain, everyday Greek, unlike Arrian’s other writing, still suggests that the thinking is Epictetus’s own, and a few scholars argue he wrote them himself (SEP).
• The Enchiridion. A handbook of 53 short chapters that Arrian drew from the Discourses. It is the place to start: our guide to the Enchiridion covers every chapter, which book to read first, and the translations.

Every Epictetus passage on this site comes from George Long’s 1877 translation, checked word for word against the public-domain text. His best-known lines, with their sources, are collected in Epictetus quotes. For a reading order across all the Stoics, see Stoicism books.