Discourses and Selected Writings
by Epictetus
Epictetus divides everything into what is within our control — judgement, intention, response — and what is not, and argues that all distress comes from treating the second category as though it were the first.
What it teaches
Born into slavery and teaching in exile, Epictetus wrote nothing himself; what survives was recorded by his student Arrian, which gives the Discourses the texture of a teacher working a room rather than a treatise. The organising distinction is the dichotomy of control. Our judgements, desires and responses are ours; reputation, health, wealth, other people's behaviour and the outcome of any undertaking are not, and can be taken away at any moment. He does not conclude that the second category is unimportant — only that staking your peace on it guarantees losing both. What follows is relentlessly practical: it is not events that disturb people but their opinions about events, so the work is done on the interpretation, the one thing fully in reach. He treats life as a role assigned rather than chosen, with the only question being how well it is played, and insists that philosophy is judged by conduct, not by doctrine recited. Marcus Aurelius, writing his private notebook a generation later, was reading him. The most usable of the Stoic texts, and deliberately the least consoling.
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