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Ep. 20: The Iron Lamp · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Good morning.
• 0:01
  Picture a house at night, after the oil has burned low and the street has gone
• 0:07
  quiet.
• 0:09
  Somewhere near the door, a small sound.
• 0:13
  A scrape, maybe.
• 0:15
  A foot on stone.
• 0:17
  A man upstairs hears it and gets up.
• 0:20
  I imagine the stairs are steep and the dark is nearly complete,
• 0:25
  and that he takes them quickly.
• 0:27
  That part is my own picture, and I'll mark my guesses as we go.
• 0:31
  What we do know is that the man is Epictetus, and what he found at the bottom of the
• 0:37
  stairs, he told his students himself.
• 0:40
  Yesterday we followed a senator named Agrippinus, who kept his exercise hour while
• 0:45
  his trial went on in the Senate.
• 0:47
  That was a story about a man facing the full weight of Nero's Rome and refusing to
• 0:53
  be rushed.
• 0:54
  Today the stakes are smaller.
• 0:56
  No emperor, no verdict, no exile.
• 1:00
  Just a lamp.
• 1:02
  And I think that's exactly why this story is worth a morning.
• 1:05
  First, a reminder of who is talking.
• 1:08
  Epictetus was born a slave, in Phrygia, and he came to Rome as the slave of
• 1:13
  Epaphroditus, a freedman of the emperor Nero.
• 1:17
  George Long, whose translation we're using, tells us the master may have indulged a
• 1:21
  fashion of the age, owning clever slaves the way rich men later owned libraries.
• 1:26
  Epictetus was allowed to attend the lectures of the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus.
• 1:31
  There is a famous story that his master broke his leg, but Long tells us it's better
• 1:35
  to trust Simplicius, who says Epictetus was lame from an early age.
• 1:40
  We looked at that back in Ep.
• 1:42
  15.
• 1:43
  Somehow he gained his freedom.
• 1:46
  Long says we must conclude it, though no document survives.
• 1:51
  Later, when Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, around A.D.
• 1:56
  89 by Long's dating, Epictetus went to Nicopolis in Epirus and opened a school.
• 2:02
  He taught there until he was an old man.
• 2:05
  And here's the part that matters this morning.
• 2:08
  Epictetus wrote nothing.
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  Everything we have under his name comes from a student, Arrian,
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  who wrote down what the teacher said.
• 2:18
  Long notes that these talks were probably spoken on the spot,
• 2:21
  one thought tumbling after another.
• 2:24
  So when the lamp appears, we are not reading a polished essay.
• 2:28
  We are overhearing a teacher in the middle of a lecture, reaching for an example
• 2:33
  from his own house.