Epictetus

Epictetus was born around 50 at Hierapolis in Phrygia and died around 135 at Nicopolis in Epirus. He came to Rome as the slave of Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero, was allowed to attend the lessons of Musonius Rufus, and was later freed. He taught in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers from the city, then settled at Nicopolis, where his school drew pupils from Rome and Greece. He was lame, and lived poor by choice.

He wrote nothing. What we have was taken down by his pupil Arrian, later a historian of Alexander: the Discourses, of which four books out of eight survive, and the Enchiridion, or Manual, a short digest of the teaching in some fifty chapters. The first chapter of the Manual states the distinction on which everything else rests, between what is in our power and what is not. Marcus Aurelius read him: Book I of the Meditations records that Junius Rusticus lent the emperor his copy of the Discourses.

The English texts on this site are Elizabeth Carter’s translation of the Enchiridion, published in 1758, the first complete English Epictetus, and George Long’s selection from the Discourses of 1877. Carter numbers the chapters of the Manual from I to LII; her numbering runs with the modern one as far as chapter L, which takes in what modern editions number 50 and 51, so her last two numbers, LI and LII, are the modern LII and LIII. An extract is cited as Enchiridion, V in her numbering. Long’s selection prints no book or chapter numbers, only his chapter titles, so extracts from it are cited by that title. The corresponding French pages rest on Jean-Marie Guyau’s Manuel of 1875 and Victor Courdaveaux’s Entretiens of 1862. The passages of Epictetus in the app belong to Stoic+; this page shows only what the editions say, with the file and line of each extract, and the sentences attributed to him are checked in Quote check.