Epictetus

Epictetus (c. 50 - c. 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher born into slavery in Hierapolis, in Phrygia, in what is now western Turkey. He lived most of his active life in Rome and later in Nicopolis. He wrote nothing himself, but his teaching reached us through his pupil Arrian. He matters because he treated philosophy less as abstract theory and more as a way of living.

He was probably born around the year 50 and spent his youth in Rome as a slave of Epaphroditus, a freedman who had served as secretary to Nero. With his master's permission he studied under the Stoic Musonius Rufus, an education that raised his social standing. According to a tradition reported by Origen, his master broke his leg on purpose, though other sources simply say he was disabled from childhood without giving a cause. He gained his freedom after Nero's death and taught in Rome until around 93, when Domitian expelled the philosophers from the city. He settled in Nicopolis, in north-western Greece, and founded a school there.

Following the example of Socrates, whom he admired, he wrote nothing. His lessons were recorded by Arrian, who later became a respected historian. Four of the original eight books of his Discourses survive, and the Enchiridion, or Handbook, is a short digest of his key principles. These two works are our main source for his thought.

For Epictetus, self-knowledge is the starting point of philosophy, since we must first recognise how much we do not understand. He divided philosophy into three parts: the practical application of doctrine, which he saw as the most necessary; the reasons that support it; and logic, which examines what counts as a good reason. Logic has value, but it serves practical needs. His ethics rests on one basic distinction: some things depend on us, such as our judgements and actions, while others do not, such as our body, reputation or fortune. We should accept what lies beyond our control with calm and discipline what lies within it. Virtue means living in accordance with reason and accepting one's fate, which he understood as ordered by god, Zeus. Happiness, eudaimonia, follows from that.

His physics, of which little survives, pictured divine intelligence as something that penetrates matter and gives form to chaos. Humans share in that order and, thanks to their reason, take part in it consciously. Epictetus held up Socrates and Diogenes as models of the wise Stoic, figures he regarded as beyond his own reach and probably beyond that of his students.

His influence lasted a long time. Marcus Aurelius cites him in his Meditations, and a later dialogue presents him in conversation with the emperor Hadrian, who was reportedly friendly with him. French Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Diderot read the Enchiridion, and Pascal counted him among the philosophers who best understood human duties. His idea that we cannot control events but can control our response remains one of the most quoted ideas in Stoicism.