Work · Epictetus
Discourses
c.108 · Lecture notes
A freed slave’s teaching, written down by a student: focus only on what is in your power.
4 of 8
Books surviving
c.108
Recorded
Nicopolis
Taught at
The dichotomy of control
The opening move of the Enchiridion, and the spine of the whole work: some things are in our power (judgments, desires, and choices, in a word our own actions) and most things are not (the body, property, reputation, other people, outcomes). Almost all suffering, Epictetus held, comes from staking peace on the second column.
The shape of the argument
Discourses I.1
What is and is not in our power: the one faculty fully ours is the right use of impressions.
Enchiridion 1
The dichotomy stated bare: ours are opinion, desire, and our own actions; not ours, the body, property, and reputation.
Enchiridion 5
People are disturbed not by things but by their judgments about things, so the cure is in the judgment, never the event.
Discourses I.1
The leg can be chained, but not the will: prohairesis (the faculty of choice) is the real self and cannot be compelled.
Discourses II
The three disciplines (desire, action, assent): training the will like an athlete until the rule becomes reflex.
Enchiridion 8
Wishing events to happen as they happen: the discipline of desire in one sentence.
Enchiridion 17
Life as a play: a person does not choose the role or its length, only how well the part is acted.
The cast
Epictetus — the lame former slave whose lectures these are; he wrote none of it down
Arrian — his pupil at Nicopolis; took down the talks in the teacher’s own voice and made the Enchiridion from them
The students — the visitors and pupils whose questions and failures set off each discourse
The famous bits
The dichotomy of controlEnchiridion 1
Some things are in our power and most are not: the line the rest of the work draws across every event in a life.
Disturbed by judgmentsEnchiridion 5
Not the loss but the verdict on the loss is what wounds, and the verdict is the one part that is ours.
You will fetter my legDiscourses I.1
Spoken to a tyrant: the body can be chained, the will cannot, not even by Jupiter himself.
The actor in the playEnchiridion 17
A poor man, a cripple, a governor: the role is assigned, and the only task is to act it well.