The Enchiridion

The trouble it addresses

Epictetus was born a slave, around 50 CE, in Hierapolis in what is now Turkey. His name means “acquired”. He was owned in Rome by Epaphroditus, a powerful freedman in the service of the emperor Nero, and was allowed to study with the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. At some point he was freed and began to teach philosophy himself. When the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from Rome, around 93 CE, Epictetus moved to Nicopolis in western Greece and opened a school that drew students from across the empire. He walked with a limp. He wrote nothing.

What survives comes from one of his students, Arrian, who recorded his teaching in the Discourses and condensed its essentials into a short handbook, the Enchiridion, a word meaning something held in the hand, like a dagger or a manual. It is the kind of book meant to be carried and reread.

The trouble it addresses is the one Epictetus knew best: how to live with dignity when one’s body, circumstances and even freedom are in the hands of others. His answer is radical. He says that the only real harm is the harm we do to ourselves through our own judgements, and that this part of us no one can take.

The exercises

Sort everything into two piles. The handbook opens with its central distinction. “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power.” Within our power, it goes on, are “opinion, aim, desire, aversion”, our own inner acts. Outside it are body, property, reputation and office. The first exercise is to apply this sorting constantly. Before reacting to anything, ask which pile it belongs to. If it is outside your control, it is, as Epictetus puts it, nothing to you, and you should be ready to say so.

Catch the judgement. “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things,” says the fifth chapter. Death is not terrible in itself, he adds, or Socrates would have found it so. The terror is in our notion of it. When disturbed, the exercise is to blame neither others nor oneself but to look for the judgement that has caused the disturbance and test it.

Want what happens. “Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.” This is the hardest exercise. It does not mean passivity; Epictetus expects action. It means aligning one’s desire with reality, so that one is never fighting what has already occurred.

Practise on small things. Epictetus advises beginning with minor losses: spilled oil, stolen wine. Tell yourself that this is the price of tranquillity, and that nothing is got for nothing. Only once the habit has been built on small things will it hold in large ones.

Think of losses as returns. “Never say of anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but, ‘I have restored it.’” Everything we have, including the people we love, has been lent to us. Holding them in that spirit does not lessen love. It lessens the sense of having been robbed when they go.

Play your part well. In chapter seventeen Epictetus compares life to a play whose author chooses the roles. Whether one is cast as a poor man or a ruler, the task is to act the part well. One’s own choice is how to play the role, not which role to be given.

The picture of a life behind them

The handbook can sound cold at first, as if it asked people to care about nothing. That reading misses its centre. Epictetus is a Stoic, and for the Stoics the only true good is a good character: wisdom, justice, courage and self-control. Health, wealth and status are “indifferents”, preferred where possible but never the source of a good life. The person who understands this is free, because no one can take their goodness away; the person who does not is a slave, however rich, because their happiness can be taken by anyone with power over their possessions.

Epictetus’s own life gives that claim its force. He had known slavery from the inside. His insistence that the inner life belongs to the person alone is not a theory spun in comfort; it is a claim about what remains when almost everything else has been taken.

The claim has had remarkable reach. James Stockdale, an American naval aviator shot down over Vietnam in 1965, spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war and later wrote that his knowledge of Epictetus helped him survive. The psychologist Albert Ellis, who founded rational emotive behaviour therapy in the 1950s, cited Epictetus’s line about views of things as a summary of his own approach, and cognitive behavioural therapy, developed by Aaron Beck, rests on a similar idea: that distress is shaped by the interpretations people place on events, and that those interpretations can be examined and changed.

Carrying it into ordinary work

Work is full of things outside anyone’s control: market shifts, decisions by others, reorganisations, other people’s moods. The sorting exercise is immediately practical. When something goes wrong, write two lists, what I can control and what I cannot, and give all your planning to the first.

The judgement exercise is useful in conflict. When a colleague’s remark upsets you, separate what was actually said from the meaning you attached to it. Often the second is the larger part of the hurt, and the more open to question.

For leaders, the play image carries a quieter lesson. A role, whether as manager, founder or expert, is given by circumstance, and it can be taken away. What remains in one’s power is how well and how justly it is played.