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Ep. 17: Of Things Some Are in Our Power · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

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  Picture a lecture room in the early light, a bare room with benches and not much
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  else.
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  A teacher sits and talks, and he talks the way a man talks when he expects to be
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  interrupted.
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  He asks questions and answers them.
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  He pokes at his students' excuses.
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  And somewhere along the wall, a young man is writing down as much as he can.
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  That teacher is Epictetus, and he never wrote a word of it himself.
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  George Long, whose translation we're using this morning, says it plainly in his
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  biographical note: Epictetus wrote nothing, and everything we have under his name
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  was written down by someone else.
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  The someone else we know best is Arrian, a student who went on to become a Roman
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  magistrate and a historian.
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  By the tradition we have, Arrian preserved the long talks we call the Discourses.
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  And the short handbook that grew out of that teaching is the Encheiridion,
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  which simply means the Manual, the thing that fits in the hand.
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  Today we're reading its first sentences.
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  Before we do, I want you to know who is speaking, because I think it changes how the
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  words land.
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  Very little is known about the life of Epictetus.
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  Long tells us he was said to be a native of Hierapolis in Phrygia.
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  The date of his birth is unknown.
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  The only recorded fact of his early life is that he was a slave in Rome,
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  and that his master was Epaphroditus, a profligate freedman of the emperor Nero.
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  That is Long's word, profligate.
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  A man of loose and wasteful habits, who stood close to the throne.
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  There's a darker story attached to him, that the master broke his slave's leg by
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  torturing him.
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  Long himself advises against leaning on it.
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  He says it is better to trust Simplicius, a later commentator on the Manual,
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  who reports that Epictetus was weak in body and lame from an early age.
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  So I'll keep to the plainer account.
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  A lame man, a slave, living in the household of someone close to Nero.
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  The records also tell us something that surprises people.
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  Epaphroditus sent or permitted this young man to attend the lectures of Musonius
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  Rufus, an eminent Stoic.
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  Long finds it strange too, and quotes another scholar's guess that wealthy Romans of
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  the time liked to collect educated slaves, grammarians, poets,
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  philosophers, the way later rich men collected libraries.
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  That's a guess about motives, and I'll leave it as a guess.
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  But the picture it gives is hard to forget.
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  A man's mind being trained in a house that owned the rest of him.
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  Later, Long writes, Epictetus in some way obtained his freedom,
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  taught in Rome, and then, after Domitian expelled the philosophers around A.D.
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  89 by Long's dating, he retired to Nicopolis in Epirus.
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  There he opened a school and taught until he was an old man.
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  Now, the passage.
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  Here is the opening of the Manual, in George Long's translation.
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  One note first: Long's version carries a few Greek glosses in brackets,
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  and I'm leaving those out, so what you'll hear is lightly trimmed.
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  The English is exactly his.
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  Of things some are in our power, and others are not.
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  In our power are opinion, movement towards a thing, desire,
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  aversion, turning from a thing; and in a word, whatever are our acts.
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  Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices
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  (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.
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  Read it once more in your head if you like.
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  It's a very short paragraph for the weight it carries.
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  Look at the first list.
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  Opinion.
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  Movement towards a thing.
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  Desire.
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  Aversion.
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  Turning from a thing.
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  Long sums it up as whatever are our acts.
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  These are not outward events.
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  They are things the mind and will do.
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  Reaching, wanting, refusing, judging.
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  Then the second list, and it is a startling one.
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  The body.
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  Property.
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  Reputation.
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  Offices, and Long adds in brackets, magisterial power.
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  Everything a Roman of rank might count as his own, and a good deal that anyone
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  might.
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  Epictetus files all of it under not in our power.
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  Here is my own reading, and I'll mark it as mine.
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  I imagine this list didn't begin as an idea at all.
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  I imagine it began as a description of a life.
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  Think about what the law gave an enslaved person in Rome.
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  No title to his own body, which could be sold, struck, or put to work at another's
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  order.
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  No property that was truly his.
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  No public honor to speak of, and no office, no seat in the magistrates' circle.
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  Body, property, reputation, office.
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  Those are the four things the list says we don't own, and they are very nearly the
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  four things a slave was legally denied.
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  So when a man like that says these things are not ours, it may not be a clever claim
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  from a comfortable chair.
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  It may be closer to a report from the ground.
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  I can't prove that this is how Epictetus came to the list.
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  It's an inference.
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  But it fits the life, and it makes the paragraph sound less like a theory and more
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  like a survival manual, which, after all, is what the title promises.
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  Now, why does opinion come first?
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  Of all the things Epictetus could have put at the head of the list,
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  he puts opinion.
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  I think it's because opinion is the hinge.
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  Another passage of his teaching, which we'll get to soon, says in effect that it
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  isn't events themselves that trouble people, but their judgments about those events.
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  I'm paraphrasing that on purpose, and I won't put it in quotation marks this
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  morning.
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  But hold it next to the opening list and the logic shows.
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  If a thing happens to your body, or your money, or your good name,
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  the happening is one matter.
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  What you decide it means is another.
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  And the deciding is the part Epictetus says belongs to you.
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  Listeners in Ep.
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  16 will remember the sentence from the Discourses that I find hard to forget.
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  You may fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower.
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  It has a lameness inside it, if you know the life.
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  The leg is the part of him the world could reach.
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  The will is the part he says it could not.
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  The Manual's opening simply turns that scene into a rule.
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  Here is the territory that can be taken.
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  Here is the territory that cannot.
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  And the rest of the Manual's argument, as I follow it, is about what goes wrong when
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  we blur the border.
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  If I treat my reputation as if it were mine to command, then every whisper about me
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  becomes an injury, and I've handed my peace to whoever is talking.
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  If I treat my office or my property as mine, then losing them feels like losing
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  myself.
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  Grief follows, and blame, and a kind of inner slavery, in which my mood belongs to
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  the people and events that control what I've mistaken for my own.
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  Epictetus's freedom starts by shrinking the claim.
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  Own only what you actually do.
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  Judging, wanting, refusing.
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  Everything else, you may care for, you may work at, but you do not possess.
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  I want to be honest about how hard this is to hear.
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  The list says the body is not ours, and for a man who knew the chain,
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  that sentence has an edge to it.
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  It doesn't say cruelty is fine.
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  It doesn't say a stolen life is nothing.
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  It says something narrower and, I think, more stubborn: that even where nearly
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  everything outward is taken, there is still a small room in which a person judges
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  and chooses, and no master holds that key.
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  Whether that is enough, each reader has to decide.
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  Long himself says at the end of his note that every man must judge for himself
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  whether a book like this is worth the trouble.
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  And there's a modest thing worth noticing about the man who said all this.
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  Epictetus never claimed that he stood above Socrates.
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  In the Discourses, Long's translation has him say that if he is not inferior,
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  that is enough for him, and he adds that he'll never be a Milo,
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  a famous athlete, and yet does not neglect his body.
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  He's not asking for perfection.
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  He's asking for attention to where the line falls.
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  So here is the picture I'd leave with you.
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  A lecture room, a lame man talking, a student writing it down so that it would
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  survive.
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  Arrian had no way of knowing who would be reading those lines in a morning kitchen
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  all these centuries later.
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  But the first sentence he wrote is still the sharpest one.
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  Some things are in our power, and some are not.
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  Opinion comes first on the list, not because it is the largest thing we have,
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  but because it may be the last thing anyone can take.
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  That's the morning's story.
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  Let the day be what it will be.
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  Take your time getting up.