Enchiridion

What It Is

Fifty-three short chapters, some of them three lines long, compiled around AD 125 by Arrian, a pupil who went on to become a Roman governor and the best historian of Alexander. Epictetus wrote nothing. What we have is what Arrian took down and arranged: the Discourses, in four surviving books, and this, the distillation of them.

Encheiridion means something kept close at hand. The same Greek word could be used of a dagger, and the book behaves like one. There is no argument here in the philosophical sense, no proofs, no system laid out for inspection. There are instructions, delivered flat, by a man who does not appear to care whether you take them.

Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia, was lame, was freed, and set up a school in Nicopolis after Domitian threw the philosophers out of Rome. Roman senators travelled to Greece to be shouted at by him. It reads as though he expected them to.

Why It Matters

This is Stoicism at full strength, with none of Seneca's charm and none of Marcus Aurelius's melancholy. Everything the modern revival is built on is here in its original and far less comfortable form, set out in the opening chapters and then pressed, without mercy, all the way to its conclusions.

Its afterlife is extraordinary for a book you can read in an hour. Marcus Aurelius kept the Discourses by him and thanks the man who lent them to him. Christian monks rewrote the Handbook for the monastery, swapping the name of God in for the philosophy and changing almost nothing else. James Stockdale, shot down over Vietnam, said it was what he had in his head for seven years in a prison cell, and wrote afterwards about which parts of it held. Albert Ellis took the sentence about judgments and built cognitive therapy on it.

Modern Stoicism has sanded Epictetus into a productivity system. The real text is harsher: he follows his logic all the way to conclusions about grief and loss that most readers refuse, and you will feel yourself refuse them. That flinch is the beginning of the argument, and the argument is the reason to read him.

Before You Read

An hour to read. Do not read it in an hour.

It was designed to be memorised and lived with, not consumed. Take it a few chapters at a time over a fortnight, then read it straight through again; it is short enough that the second pass costs nothing and changes everything.

Read some of the Discourses alongside it. The Handbook is the summary, and stripped of the classroom it can sound like a man barking orders. In the Discourses you hear Epictetus teaching, joking, losing patience with a student who has just said something stupid. The Handbook lands better once you have heard the voice behind it.

Which Edition to Read

• Robin Hard, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford World's Classics, 2014) — recommended. Everything Epictetus left, in one cheap paperback, accurately and unfussily translated, with an introduction and notes by Christopher Gill that explain the Stoic system without burying you in it. Since the Handbook alone is not really enough, this is the obvious purchase. The cost: Hard is exact rather than memorable, and a four-hundred-page volume looks intimidating for what is a fifty-page core. View on Amazon →
• A. A. Long, How to Be Free (Princeton University Press, 2018). The Handbook with the Greek on the facing page and an introduction by the finest living scholar of Hellenistic philosophy. Long translates thought for thought, in modern idiom, and it is the best-sounding Epictetus in English. The cost: a small hardback at hardback prices, and it gives you only the Handbook plus selections.
• Nicholas White, The Handbook of Epictetus (Hackett, 1983). A precise, well-annotated, very cheap standalone, and the classroom standard for good reason. The cost: dry, and it leaves you without the Discourses.

Take Hard for all of Epictetus at once. Take Long if you want the Handbook alone and want it to sing. One warning: Sharon Lebell's popular version is a paraphrase, freely reworded and reordered, and it is not a translation of this book.

Getting the Most From This Book

Copy out the passages that annoy you. Epictetus is at his most useful exactly where he is least agreeable, and the chapters you want to argue with are the ones doing the work.

Do not read it as advice. Read it as a challenge from someone who has thought this through further than you have and will not soften it, then decide honestly how much of it you are prepared to accept. That decision, not the reading, is the book.

Read the introduction first. Gill explains what the Stoics meant by nature, assent and the good, which will save you from mistaking Epictetus for a man recommending indifference. He is recommending the opposite.