Enchiridion

Overview

The Enchiridion (the Handbook) is the most famous manual of Stoic practice ever written, and one of the most influential books of the ancient world. It is a short collection of fifty-three maxims, compiled from the teaching of Epictetus by his pupil Arrian in the early second century CE, and it distills the whole of Stoic ethics into a practical handbook for the conduct of life. The book opens with the most famous sentence in Stoicism — "Some things are up to us and some are not" — and it proceeds through the disciplines of desire, action, and assent: how to respond to loss, to insult, to misfortune, to death; how to deal with the opinions of others; how to live in accordance with nature. The Enchiridion is not a treatise but a manual: it is meant to be memorized, practiced, and applied, one maxim at a time, to the situations of daily life.

Author

Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE) was born a slave in Hierapolis, in Phrygia. Freed by his master Epaphroditus, he studied philosophy in Rome under Musonius Rufus, the most practical of the Stoic teachers, and after the expulsion of the philosophers from Rome in 89 CE he founded a school at Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he taught until his death. He wrote nothing himself; his teaching was recorded by his pupil Arrian, who compiled the four books of the Discourses and distilled them into the Enchiridion. The manual preserves the voice of the man as the tradition remembers him: plain, direct, sometimes harsh, and absolutely uncompromising in his demand that philosophy be lived.

Historical Background

The Enchiridion belongs to the tradition of the "handbooks" of practical ethics that flourished in the Hellenistic and Roman periods — short manuals designed for the moral training of the reader rather than for the advancement of theory. Arrian compiled it, as he tells us in his letter to his friend, as a selection of the most practical and effective of Epictetus's teachings, "such things as are most suitable for moving the soul to what is best." The book circulated widely in the ancient world — the Christian writers of the late empire knew it and adapted it — and it was one of the first Greek philosophical works to be translated into Latin. In the modern period it became the most widely read of all Stoic texts: it was the favorite book of the founders of the American republic and of generations of soldiers, statesmen, and ordinary readers who found in its fifty-three chapters a complete philosophy of life.

Key Ideas

The Enchiridion is organized around the dichotomy of control, stated in the first chapter: some things are up to us — our judgments, choices, desires, and aversions — and some are not — our bodies, possessions, reputations, and fortunes. The entire book is the working out of this distinction in the situations of life. Chapter by chapter, Epictetus applies it: to desire ("Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but want them to happen as they do happen"); to loss ("Never say about anything, 'I have lost it,' but only 'I have given it back'"); to insult ("Remember that it is not the one who reviles you who insults you, but your judgment that you are insulted"); to death ("When the hour comes, depart quietly").

The manual also teaches the three disciplines of the Stoic life. The discipline of desire trains us to want only what is up to us. The discipline of action trains us to act well in the world, doing "what the situation calls for" without attachment to the outcome. The discipline of assent trains us to examine our impressions before we accept them — the practice of prosoche, attention. The final chapter of the book, the celebrated chapter 53, summarizes the whole: "Upon every occasion we must have these maxims ready to hand — Lead me, O Zeus, and thou, O Destiny... and I will follow without hesitation."

Important Passages

The most famous passages of the Enchiridion are its opening and its closing. The opening chapter states the foundation: "Some things are up to us and some are not. Up to us are opinion, impulse, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is our own doing; not up to us are body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not our own doing." Chapter 8 teaches the Stoic response to loss: "Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will be serene." And the final chapter quotes the formula of the willing acceptance of fate. Between these poles, the manual develops the disciplines of the philosophical life with a directness that has kept it in print for two thousand years.

Influence

The influence of the Enchiridion is difficult to overstate. In the ancient world, it was the standard textbook of Stoic ethics, read by pagans and Christians alike; the early Christian ascetics found in it a model of spiritual discipline, and the monastic tradition adapted its maxims. In the Renaissance, the translation of the manual by Angelo Poliziano (1493) made it one of the most widely read books in Europe, and it shaped the humanist ideal of self-cultivation. The Stoic revival of the modern age has returned to it constantly: the Enchiridion is the source of the most quoted Stoic sayings, the foundation of the modern practice of Stoicism, and the book that has done more than any other to make the Stoic discipline of the inner life available to the general reader.

Sources

• Epictetus. Enchiridion. Trans. N.P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Epictetus" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/epictetus)
• Long, A.A. Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.