Epictetus
c. 50 – c. 135 CE · Hierapolis, Phrygia; Rome; Nicopolis
A former slave who became the most influential Stoic teacher, built around one distinction: what is up to us and what is not.
Key ideas
Epictetus begins his handbook with the dichotomy of control. Our judgements, desires and choices are up to us; our bodies, property, reputation and everything that happens to us are not. Distress comes from treating the second kind of thing as if it were the first. Freedom is learning to want only what is in your power, and to meet everything else with calm.
He insisted that it is not events that disturb us but our judgements about them. This idea passed directly into modern cognitive behavioural therapy, whose founders acknowledged the debt. It is the core of the Stoic dichotomy of control entry.
“Some things are in our power, and others are not.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion 1, trans. Elizabeth Carter (1758)
Life, briefly
Epictetus was born a slave and was owned by Epaphroditus, a freedman in Nero's court. He studied Stoicism under Musonius Rufus and was later freed. He had a lame leg, which one ancient story attributes to his master's cruelty.
When the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from Rome around 93 CE, he moved to Nicopolis in western Greece and opened a school there. He wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian recorded his lectures.
Major works
- Discourses (recorded by Arrian)
- Enchiridion, or Handbook (a summary by Arrian)
Schools of thought
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Epictetus
- WikipediaEpictetus