Epictetus: The Slave Who Was Free
He was born a slave.
We do not know exactly when, sometime around 50 CE, in Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey. We do not know his original name. Epictetus is Greek for “acquired”, a slave’s name, given by an owner, meaning simply: obtained property.
He was owned by Epaphroditus, a freedman who had risen to become one of Nero’s most powerful secretaries.
According to one account, disputed and possibly legendary, Epaphroditus once twisted Epictetus’s leg, apparently to demonstrate something, or simply because he could.
Epictetus said, calmly: “You are going to break it.”
Epaphroditus continued.
The leg broke.
Epictetus said: “Did I not tell you that you would break it?”
This story may not be true. But it is the most Epictetan story ever told, because it captures the one thing that Epictetus believed with absolute, unshakeable conviction:
Your leg can be broken. You cannot.
I. What We Know and Don’t Know
Epictetus wrote nothing.
Everything we have comes from his student Arrian of Nicomedia, who transcribed his lectures in eight books called the Discourses, of which four survive, and condensed his essential teachings into a short handbook called the Enchiridion (Greek: encheiridion, “what fits in the hand”).
Epictetus was eventually freed (we don’t know when or how) and established a school in Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece.
Students came from across the empire. The young Marcus Aurelius did not study with him directly. Epictetus died around 135 CE, before Marcus came to power, but Marcus read him obsessively. The Meditations are saturated with Epictetan ideas.
Epictetus lived simply. A small house. A straw mat. A lamp. He adopted a child he found abandoned when no one else would take it.
He had been a slave who owned nothing. As a free man, he continued to own almost nothing, by choice.
He had learned that ownership is a trap.
II. The Dichotomy of Control
The whole of Epictetan philosophy rests on a single distinction.
The Enchiridion opens with it:
“Of things, some are in our power and some are not. In our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing. Not in our power are our body, our reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”
This is the dichotomy of control, the foundational move of Stoic ethics.
Everything in existence falls into one of two categories:
Up to us (eph’ hēmin): our judgments, desires, aversions, impulses. The inner life: how we interpret events, what we want, what we refuse, what we intend.
Not up to us (ouk eph’ hēmin): everything else. Our body. Our reputation. Our wealth. Other people’s opinions and actions. The weather. The government. Death.
The Stoic prescription: concern yourself only with what is up to you. Be indifferent, in the technical sense, to everything else.
Not indifferent in the sense of not caring about outcomes. Indifferent in the sense of not making your wellbeing dependent on outcomes you cannot control.
This sounds simple. It is the hardest thing in the world.
Because we are constituted, almost entirely, by concern for what is not up to us.
We want good health: not up to us. We want to be loved: not up to us. We want to succeed: not up to us. We want to be respected: not up to us. We want our children to be safe: not up to us.
Every one of these wants is a vulnerability, a place where reality can hurt us, a hostage we have given to fortune.
Epictetus is not saying: don’t have children. Don’t love. Don’t want anything for others.
He is saying: love your child while knowing that your child is mortal, that you do not control their fate, that the love itself, the caring, the choosing, is up to you, but the outcome is not.
“Never say about anything, ‘I have lost it’; but ‘I have returned it.’ Is your child dead? It has been returned. Is your wife dead? She has been returned.” (I cannot read this sentence and breathe at the same time! I am not there. I am not sure I want to be!)
This sounds cold. It is the most radical form of love: love without possession, without the demand that the beloved remain.
III. The Slave’s Philosophy
It is impossible to read Epictetus without thinking about slavery.
The dichotomy of control is not an abstract philosophical position. It is a survival strategy, worked out, experientially, by a man who had no control over almost anything that most people consider essential to a life.
He could not choose where he lived. He could not choose his work. He could not own property. He could be sold, beaten, killed.
And he found, or he built, a space that could not be taken.
The inner life.
“You can chain my leg, but even Zeus himself cannot overcome my will.”
This is not bravado. It is phenomenology. The leg can be chained. The will cannot be, not because the will is metaphysically free in some grand sense, but because the will is the one thing that requires your own participation to be corrupted.
You can be forced to act against your will. You cannot be forced to assent to acting against your will. The judgment, the evaluation of what is happening, remains yours.
Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, arrived at the same insight in the Nazi concentration camps:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl had not read Epictetus. Or perhaps he had. It does not matter. The insight is the same because the conditions that produce it are the same: total external control, and the discovery of what external control cannot reach.
IV. Role Ethics
Epictetus developed what philosophers now call role ethics: an account of moral obligation structured around the roles we occupy.
We are all, simultaneously, many things: a child, a parent, a citizen, a friend, a professional. Each role carries obligations. The good life is the life that fulfills the obligations of each role well.
“Remember that you are an actor in a play, the character of which is determined by the author: if short, a short one; if long, a long one. If he wishes you to act a poor man, act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a lame man, or a ruler, or a plain man. For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to choose that part belongs to another.”
The play metaphor is central.
You did not choose to be born when and where you were born. You did not choose your body, your family, your initial circumstances. These were assigned.
What you choose is how to play the part.
And playing the part well, fulfilling the obligations of your specific role, in your specific situation, with whatever has been given to you, this is virtue.
Not the achievement of ideal outcomes. Not the realization of an ideal self. The faithful performance of what you are.
V. The Discipline of Desire
Epictetus organized Stoic ethics around three disciplines:
The discipline of desire (orexis): Desire only what is up to you. Avoid only what is up to you. Everything else: prefer or disprefer, but do not desire or avoid with your whole self.
The discipline of action (hormē): Act always with reservation, hupexhairesis, the mental note that your intention is subject to circumstances. “I will do this, if nothing prevents me.” Never act with the assumption that the outcome is guaranteed.
The discipline of assent (sunkatathesis): Examine every impression before assenting to it. Don’t be carried away by appearances. Ask: is this up to me or not? Is this actually as it appears?
These three disciplines are not sequential. They are simultaneous, applied to every situation, every moment, every choice.
This is why Stoicism is a practice, not a doctrine. It must be exercised, repeatedly, until it becomes habitual, until the examination of impressions becomes as automatic as breathing.
VI. What Epictetus Says About Education
Epictetus was a teacher. The Discourses are lectures, sometimes to individual students, sometimes to groups, often in dialogue.
His pedagogy is unusual.
He is not gentle.
When students come to him with impressive philosophical arguments, showing off their knowledge of Chrysippus, demonstrating their mastery of Stoic logic, he redirects them, often harshly. What progress have they actually made? When they see someone beautiful, do they not still feel desire? When they hear themselves spoken ill of, are they not still troubled? When they aren’t invited to dinner, do they not still feel overlooked? (Reading this I feel personally attacked. :) Which is the point?!)
Philosophy is not the accumulation of arguments. It is the transformation of character. Right? :)
The test of philosophical progress is not what you can say. It is what you can bear.
“Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.”
This sentence, perhaps the most concentrated statement of Stoic practice, is either the most liberating thing you have ever read, or the most infuriating.
Your response tells you something important about where you are.
VII. The Limits of Epictetus
Epictetus is not the last word.
His philosophy is a philosophy of endurance, worked out under conditions of radical powerlessness, oriented toward surviving intact in a world you cannot change.
But most of us are not slaves. Most of us have some power to change the conditions of our lives and the lives of others.
A philosophy that counsels pure inner transformation, that locates freedom entirely in the attitude rather than in the action, can become a rationalization for passivity.
The position, taken to its strongest form, runs something like this: it is not up to me whether I am enslaved, only how I respond to being enslaved. True. And also: it is possible to fight slavery. It is possible to change unjust conditions. Stoic equanimity, taken too far, becomes accommodation to injustice.
Epictetus himself was eventually freed. He did not argue that his freedom was unimportant, only that his inner freedom had never been taken.
The distinction matters.
The inner freedom is real and important. The outer freedom is also real and important. Epictetus’s philosophy addresses the first and is relatively silent on the second.
For the second, we need other tools.
VIII. The Lamp
When Epictetus died, someone purchased his clay lamp at auction for three thousand drachmas.
This is reported as a joke: the lamp of the philosopher who had taught that possessions are worthless, now worth an enormous sum because of its association with him. (Three thousand drachmas for the lamp of the man who taught you not to want it. Of course we did! Ahahah!)
The lamp didn’t teach anyone anything. Epictetus taught people things.
But the lamp, ordinary, clay, functional, is the right symbol.
He lit it. He read by it. He lectured by it. He did the philosophical work.
When he died, the lamp remained. The work remained.
That was the teaching, in one sentence: make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
He did.
IX. Epictetus and Us
We are not slaves.
But we live under conditions that Epictetus would recognize immediately:
The constant pressure of other people’s opinions, the metrics, the followers, the ratings, the performance of a self for an audience that is always watching.
The anxiety about outcomes we cannot control, the career, the relationship, the health, the news cycle that brings new catastrophes every morning.
The confusion of what is ours with what we have borrowed from circumstance, the identity built on job titles and social status that evaporates when the job disappears.
Epictetus’s question is still the right question:
What is actually up to you?
Not what can you influence. Not what would you like.
What is actually, genuinely, undeniably yours, regardless of what anyone else does, regardless of what fortune brings, regardless of the leg that might be broken?
That! Just that!
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”
Read the Enchiridion first. It takes an hour and will stay with you for years.
Then the Discourses, longer, rougher, more human.
Sharon Lebell’s adaptation, The Art of Living, is the most readable introduction.
For the philosophical argument:
A.A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (2002)
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