Discourses
Long’s selection: chapters under their own titles, without book or chapter numbers
The Discourses are the lessons of Epictetus as his pupil Arrian took them down at Nicopolis: conversations with pupils and visitors, in which a question, a complaint or a piece of news gives the starting point. Of the eight books Arrian compiled, four survive. The Manual was drawn from them.
The English text here is George Long’s selection, published in 1877 alongside his Enchiridion: a choice of chapters printed under Long’s own titles — “Of the things which are in our power and not in our power”, “How we should struggle with circumstances” — without book or chapter numbers. An extract from it is therefore cited by the title of its chapter and the line of the file, never by a number Long did not print. This site gives no page for single chapters of the Discourses; the work is described on the page of Epictetus, and the extracts below are from Long’s text.
In the edition of George Long, 1877
What is the product of virtue? Tranquillity. Who then makes improvement? Is it he who has read many books of Chrysippus?
Nothing great, said Epictetus, is produced suddenly, since not even the grape or the fig is.
It is circumstances (difficulties) which show what men are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man.
For, to speak plainly, whatever the external thing may be, the value which we set upon it places us in subjection to others.
Today I choose to play. Well then, ought you not to play with attention? I choose to sing. What then hinders you from doing so with attention? Is there any part of life excepted, to which attention does not extend?
Who then chooses to live in error? No man. Who chooses to live deceived, liable to mistake, unjust, unrestrained, discontented, mean? No man.
In Stoic+: 12 passages of this work, each with its reference.
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Seneca and Epictetus are in Stoic+: 12 passages of this work in the app, each with its reference.