Latest / The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism / Ep. 16: Fetter My Leg

Transcript

Ep. 16: Fetter My Leg · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Picture a household in Rome, in the years when Nero was emperor.
• 0:05
  I imagine a courtyard at first light, a doorkeeper already at his post,
• 0:10
  and a boy crossing the stones with an uneven step.
• 0:14
  He favors one leg.
• 0:16
  Nobody in the house gives it a second thought.
• 0:19
  He is property, and property doesn't get looked at twice.
• 0:24
  That boy grew up to be Epictetus.
• 0:27
  Good morning, and welcome to The Morning Stoic.
• 0:30
  I'm Julian Vale.
• 0:31
  Here is what we actually know about him, and it isn't much.
• 0:35
  He was said to be a native of Hierapolis in Phrygia, a town in what is now western
• 0:40
  Turkey.
• 0:42
  The date of his birth is unknown.
• 0:44
  The one recorded fact of his early life is that he was a slave in Rome,
• 0:48
  and that his master was Epaphroditus, a freedman of the Emperor Nero.
• 0:53
  That comes from George Long, who translated Epictetus in the nineteenth century and
• 0:58
  opened his book with a short biographical note.
• 1:01
  Long is candid about how thin the record is.
• 1:04
  He says very little is known of the life.
• 1:08
  There's a darker story attached to him, and it deserves a careful word.
• 1:13
  One tradition says his master broke the boy's leg by torturing him.
• 1:18
  Long mentions it, then steers away from it.
• 1:22
  He says it is better to trust Simplicius, a later commentator on the Manual,
• 1:26
  who says only that Epictetus was weak in body and lame from an early age.
• 1:32
  So the torture story is contested.
• 1:35
  What's solid is the lameness, and the fact that he was owned.
• 1:39
  There's one more strange fact.
• 1:42
  Long thinks the young slave must have shown intelligence, because his master sent
• 1:46
  him, or allowed him, to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus,
• 1:50
  a respected Stoic teacher.
• 1:53
  Long quotes another writer who explains why such a master might do it.
• 1:58
  Wealthy Romans of that age liked to count philosophers among their slaves,
• 2:02
  the way a rich man might collect a library.
• 2:05
  So picture the scene.
• 2:07
  A man who owns a philosopher as a kind of ornament, and a philosopher who is
• 2:12
  learning, in lecture rooms, that nobody can own him.
• 2:16
  Hold that picture, because it matters for the passage.
• 2:20
  Epictetus wrote nothing himself.
• 2:23
  What we have of his teaching was written down by a student,
• 2:27
  Arrian, from his lectures, years later, when Epictetus was a free man teaching in a
• 2:33
  lecture room.
• 2:34
  So when we hear him speak, we're hearing a former slave talking to young men who,
• 2:40
  for the most part, have never worn a fetter in their lives.
• 2:44
  The talk comes near the start of the Discourses, in the selection Long translated.
• 2:50
  He has been explaining that of all our faculties, only reason can look at itself and
• 2:56
  judge what it's doing.
• 2:58
  Then he asks a practical question.
• 3:00
  What should a person have ready when trouble comes?
• 3:04
  And he answers it with a little drama.
• 3:06
  He plays both parts, the man who is threatened and the one doing the threatening.
• 3:13
  Here it is, in Long's words.
• 3:15
  "What then should a man have in readiness in such circumstances?
• 3:21
  What else than this?
• 3:24
  What is mine, and what is not mine; and what is permitted to me,
• 3:30
  and what is not permitted to me.
• 3:33
  I must die.
• 3:36
  Must I then die lamenting?
• 3:39
  I must be put in chains.
• 3:41
  Must I then also lament?
• 3:44
  I must go into exile.
• 3:47
  Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
• 3:54
  Tell me the secret which you possess.
• 3:57
  I will not, for this is in my power.
• 4:01
  But I will put you in chains.
• 4:04
  Man, what are you talking about?
• 4:06
  Me, in chains?
• 4:09
  You may fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower.
• 4:15
  I will throw you into prison.
• 4:18
  My poor body, you mean.
• 4:20
  I will cut your head off.
• 4:23
  When then have I told you that my head alone cannot be cut off?
• 4:27
  These are the things which philosophers should meditate on,
• 4:31
  which they should write daily, in which they should exercise themselves."
• 4:36
  Let's slow down inside that, because it moves quickly.
• 4:41
  Notice first who is asking for something.
• 4:44
  The tyrant says, tell me the secret which you possess.
• 4:49
  He suspects this man has something he can't get at.
• 4:53
  The man answers, I will not, for this is in my power.
• 4:58
  He doesn't refuse out of stubbornness, exactly.
• 5:01
  He's pointing at the one thing that stays his, even in a room where everything else
• 5:06
  belongs to the other person.
• 5:08
  Then the threats come, one after another, and each is answered by a small
• 5:13
  correction.
• 5:15
  Chains?
• 5:16
  You may fetter my leg.
• 5:18
  Not me, my leg.
• 5:21
  Prison?
• 5:22
  My poor body, you mean.
• 5:24
  The word poor is almost gentle.
• 5:27
  And then the blade.
• 5:28
  I will cut your head off.
• 5:30
  The answer is a question, and a strange one.
• 5:34
  When then have I told you that my head alone cannot be cut off?
• 5:38
  That line is easy to misread as a boast.
• 5:41
  It isn't.
• 5:42
  He's not claiming his head is safe.
• 5:45
  He's saying he never said it was.
• 5:47
  The head, the leg, the body, all of that can be taken, and he has already counted it
• 5:53
  as not his.
• 5:54
  What he keeps is the will, the part of him that agrees or refuses,
• 5:59
  that chooses how to meet what happens.
• 6:02
  And that, he says, not even Zeus himself can overpower.
• 6:06
  Think about the weight of that name.
• 6:09
  Zeus is the king of the gods, the one with the thunderbolt.
• 6:14
  Epictetus reaches for the largest power he can name and says even that power can't
• 6:19
  reach inside.
• 6:21
  It's a bold sentence, and it's meant to be.
• 6:24
  Now, a careful word about what we don't know.
• 6:27
  Nothing in this passage says Epictetus himself was ever put in chains.
• 6:32
  Long's note doesn't say it either.
• 6:34
  What we have is a lameness reported by Simplicius, a slave's status in Rome,
• 6:39
  and a famous story of cruelty that Long himself sets aside as less reliable.
• 6:45
  So I won't tell you the line is a memory of a particular dungeon.
• 6:49
  That would be me filling in a gap.
• 6:51
  What I can say, as my own reading, is this.
• 6:55
  Epictetus knew exactly how the world worked for a person in his position.
• 7:00
  A slave's body could be bound, beaten, sold, or punished at someone else's pleasure.
• 7:07
  When he builds that imaginary confrontation, with the chains and the prison and the
• 7:11
  blade, he isn't sketching a puzzle for a classroom.
• 7:15
  I imagine he's describing a set of possibilities that, for people in his old
• 7:19
  condition, were simply how things were.
• 7:23
  The threats in his little drama are ordinary Roman threats.
• 7:27
  And that's what makes the answer so striking.
• 7:30
  Many teachers speak about inner freedom from a comfortable chair.
• 7:35
  Here is a man who once belonged to someone, and who says, in effect,
• 7:39
  that he has found the place the owner never could reach.
• 7:43
  Whether he found it in the lecture rooms of Musonius Rufus,
• 7:46
  or later, or all along, we can't tell.
• 7:50
  But the line has the sound of someone who has tested it against something real.
• 7:55
  There's a quiet honesty in the way he frames it, too.
• 7:58
  He doesn't say the chains won't hurt.
• 8:01
  He doesn't say the blade is nothing.
• 8:03
  The man in the little drama even calls his body poor, with a sort of tenderness.
• 8:09
  What he refuses is to let the threat do the second job, to make him lament,
• 8:14
  to make him hand over his judgment along with his leg.
• 8:17
  Notice the questions he asks himself.
• 8:20
  Must I then die lamenting?
• 8:22
  Must I then also lament?
• 8:25
  He's not pretending he won't die or be bound.
• 8:28
  He's asking whether the lamenting is required.
• 8:31
  And look at the last sentence of the passage, because it's easy to skip.
• 8:35
  These are the things which philosophers should meditate on,
• 8:38
  which they should write daily, in which they should exercise themselves.
• 8:43
  He isn't offering a comforting thought for a bad day.
• 8:46
  He's describing practice, the kind you do before the threat arrives,
• 8:51
  so that the answer is already in your mouth when someone says,
• 8:55
  I will put you in chains.
• 8:57
  He also gets to be a little funny, in his dry way.
• 9:01
  Man, what are you talking about?
• 9:04
  Me, in chains?
• 9:07
  You can almost hear the tyrant's confidence slip, because the threat he came with
• 9:12
  has landed on a part of the person that was never the point.
• 9:16
  There's a life behind that as well, one that we're only partly able to see.
• 9:22
  A lame slave in Nero's Rome.
• 9:25
  A teacher who, in Long's account, was never married, who lived alone for a long
• 9:30
  time, and who finally took in a child that a friend was going to abandon because of
• 9:34
  poverty.
• 9:36
  Long tells us Epictetus took the child and brought it up.
• 9:40
  Much later he taught in the city of Nicopolis, after philosophers were driven out of
• 9:45
  Rome, and we'll get to that soon.
• 9:47
  For now, it's enough to notice that the man who said you may fetter my leg lived,
• 9:52
  by every account we have, plainly and without grandeur.
• 9:57
  So what do the passage and the life say when we hold them together?
• 10:02
  To me they say that the famous division between what is ours and what is not wasn't
• 10:09
  invented in comfort.
• 10:11
  It was spoken by someone who understood, better than most of his listeners,
• 10:15
  how much can be taken.
• 10:17
  His answer wasn't that nothing can be taken.
• 10:20
  It was that one thing can't be, and that the one thing is the one that decides who
• 10:26
  you are while everything else is happening.
• 10:29
  That's his claim, anyway, and he put his name on it, in a room full of people who
• 10:34
  could have laughed.
• 10:35
  Whether it holds in every circumstance is a question he leaves for us to wrestle
• 10:39
  with.
• 10:40
  But it's worth noticing the voice it comes in.
• 10:43
  Not a general giving orders.
• 10:46
  A man with a limp, who once belonged to someone, speaking calmly about leg,
• 10:52
  body, and head, and about the small, stubborn thing no one could fetter.
• 10:57
  That's where we'll leave it this morning.
• 10:59
  Take the day gently.
• 11:01
  I'll see you tomorrow.