Be a Stoic like Epictetus

The sage from Hierapolis has much to teach us about the life worth living

Epictetus, image from quotes.thefamouspeople.com.

It is no secret that my guiding light ever since I have started practicing Stoicism has been Epictetus. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Marcus Aurelius’s loftiness and brooding melancholy, and I love Seneca’s style and depth of thought. But every single book I have written so far about Stoicism has Epictetus as its protagonist or inspiration.

There are many reasons for this. At a human level, it’s harder to sympathize with an emperor (Marcus) or a senator who was the second most powerful man in the empire (Seneca). But a slave who becomes a freedman and eventually achieves the status of most sought after teacher in the entire Mediterranean area is something else entirely.

In terms of his persona—though what we have from him was actually transcribed by his brilliant student, Arrian of Nicomedia—Epictetus comes across as direct, no-nonsense, and even occasionally sarcastic and (gently) abusive toward his students. According to my friend Brian Johnson, author of the excellent The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Ordinary Life, we should imagine the sage from Hierapolis as an ancient Greek version of Rocky Balboa’s trainer. As an example, here is an exchange in which Epictetus chastises one of his students—calling him a slave (to his passions)—because the student spends too much time on theory and too little on practice:

“‘Get the treatise On Inclination and you’ll see how thoroughly I’ve read it.’ That’s not what I’m trying to find out, slave! What I want to know is how you manage your inclinations and disinclinations, and your desires and aversions; how purposeful, intentioned, and prepared you are; whether or not you’re in harmony with nature.” (Discourses 1, 4.14)

But the main reason to love Epictetus is because his version of Stoicism is both highly coherent and innovative, and most importantly, extremely practical. Though in some sense he arches back to the early Stoa of the logician Chrysippus, the way he presents philosophy to his students is anything but stuffy and academic. In fact, he accuses them of reading Chrysippus himself as if they were scholars interested in the minutiae of logic, rather than human beings trying to improve themselves ethically:

“If what I prize is just the interpreting itself, haven’t I ended up as a literary critic rather than a philosopher, with the only difference being that I explicate Chrysippus rather than Homer?” (Enchiridion 49)

View of the theater at Hierapolis, modern day Pamukkale in Turkey, where Epictetus was born. Photo by the Author.