Latest / The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism / Ep. 15: Lame from an Early Age

Transcript

Ep. 15: Lame from an Early Age · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Good morning.
• 0:02
  Let's start with a street in Rome, in the years when Nero ruled.
• 0:08
  I imagine the usual press of it: litters carried on the shoulders of slaves,
• 0:13
  shopkeepers calling out, a freedman's household moving through the crowd in a loose
• 0:19
  line.
• 0:20
  And somewhere in that line, a young man who walks with a limp.
• 0:26
  I imagine him setting his own pace, and the people around him learning to adjust to
• 0:31
  it.
• 0:32
  That is as much of the scene as I can give you, and I'm marking it as imagined.
• 0:38
  What we actually have is thinner and more interesting.
• 0:42
  We have a name, a town, a master, and a disagreement about a leg.
• 0:48
  The name is Epictetus.
• 0:51
  This morning begins a new thread in our series.
• 0:54
  We've spent time with Zeno, with Cleanthes, with Chrysippus,
• 0:58
  and with Seneca moving carefully through Nero's court.
• 1:02
  Last time we looked at how Roman Stoics kept returning to Cato,
• 1:06
  and what that example cost.
• 1:08
  Epictetus is another life under that same emperor, but seen from the opposite end of
• 1:13
  the household.
• 1:15
  Seneca advised the palace.
• 1:17
  Epictetus belonged to someone who did.
• 1:20
  Our guide this morning is George Long, the nineteenth century translator,
• 1:25
  who prefaced his selection of the Discourses and the Encheiridion with a short
• 1:29
  biographical note.
• 1:31
  It's available free through Project Gutenberg, number 10661.
• 1:37
  Long is careful in that note, and he's careful in exactly the place where it would
• 1:40
  be tempting not to be.
• 1:43
  Epictetus was born in Hierapolis, in Phrygia.
• 1:47
  Long places the town between the Maeander and one of its branches,
• 1:51
  the river Lycus.
• 1:53
  That is inland Asia Minor, a long way from the Roman forum,
• 1:58
  and we don't know how or when the boy made the journey to the capital.
• 2:02
  What Long records is the outcome: Epictetus was a slave in Rome.
• 2:08
  His master was Epaphroditus.
• 2:11
  Long describes him as a freedman of Nero and an officer of the emperor's guard.
• 2:16
  And he calls him a profligate, a man who lived loosely and spent freely at the
• 2:22
  center of a court that was known for both.
• 2:25
  I want you to hold that picture, because it matters.
• 2:28
  The philosopher who would later teach about inner freedom began as the property of a
• 2:33
  man whose whole world was appetite and favor.
• 2:37
  And yet Epictetus got an education.
• 2:40
  Long tells us that he attended the lectures of Musonius Rufus,
• 2:44
  a Stoic teacher of real reputation.
• 2:48
  So a slave in the household of a profligate freedman was sitting in the lecture room
• 2:52
  of one of the great Stoic teachers of the day.
• 2:56
  Why would Epaphroditus allow that?
• 2:59
  Long gives us a hint from a French writer, Garnier, and the answer isn't flattering.
• 3:06
  Wealthy Romans collected educated slaves the way they collected fine libraries.
• 3:12
  A household might own a grammarian, a rhetorician, a philosopher,
• 3:17
  and the owner earned a little prestige from each.
• 3:21
  On that reading, the master was not drawn to Stoicism at all.
• 3:26
  He was furnishing a house.
• 3:28
  That is Garnier's explanation, relayed by Long, and I find it believable.
• 3:34
  But notice what it implies.
• 3:36
  Someone treated as an ornament took the opportunity seriously.
• 3:41
  There's one more fact about Epaphroditus, and I'll keep it brief.
• 3:46
  Long says he fled with Nero at the end, and helped the emperor in his death.
• 3:51
  Years later, the emperor Domitian had him put to death for that.
• 3:56
  So the master who owned Epictetus came to a hard end, and Epictetus,
• 4:01
  the lame slave, outlived him by a long stretch of years.
• 4:05
  Now the leg.
• 4:07
  If you've ever come across a short biography of Epictetus, you've probably met the
• 4:11
  story.
• 4:12
  His master twisted the leg, or tortured him, and the bone broke.
• 4:17
  In the popular retelling, Epictetus calmly smiles through it,
• 4:22
  a Stoic proving his philosophy at the worst possible moment.
• 4:27
  It's a vivid story.
• 4:29
  It has a villain, a victim, and a moment of perfect composure,
• 4:34
  and it fits a slave philosopher like a key in a lock.
• 4:39
  Long knew it, and here is exactly what he writes.
• 4:41
  "There is a story that the master broke his slave's leg by torturing him; but it is
• 4:48
  better to trust to the evidence of Simplicius, the commentator on the Encheiridion,
• 4:53
  or Manual, who says that Epictetus was weak in body and lame from an early age."
• 5:00
  Look at how that sentence is built.
• 5:02
  It says there is a story.
• 5:04
  It doesn't say the story is false, and I won't claim more than Long does.
• 5:09
  It says it's better to trust Simplicius.
• 5:12
  And Simplicius is not a distant rumor mill.
• 5:14
  He's a commentator on the Manual, writing in the sixth century,
• 5:18
  someone who sat down to explain Epictetus's own text to his readers.
• 5:23
  His account is quiet.
• 5:25
  Weak in body.
• 5:26
  Lame from an early age.
• 5:28
  No master, no torture, no scene.
• 5:31
  So we have two accounts of one limp.
• 5:35
  One is a drama about cruelty and composure.
• 5:38
  The other is a plain note about a frail body and a childhood condition.
• 5:44
  I'll call the first one a contested rumor, and I'll say that the second is the
• 5:48
  better evidence, because that is what the source I'm reading says.
• 5:53
  And this is the part that is my own interpretation: the quiet version may be harder
• 5:58
  to love, but it's the one that has a witness.
• 6:01
  Why do we prefer the other?
• 6:04
  I think because suffering feels more meaningful when someone caused it,
• 6:10
  and courage looks bigger when it's tested by a villain.
• 6:15
  A weak body from early childhood has no villain.
• 6:18
  It just happened, the way weather happens.
• 6:22
  It offers no scene to admire.
• 6:24
  It offers only a life to live.
• 6:27
  And I'd suggest that is the more Stoic reading, not the less.
• 6:32
  Imagine how a legend like the broken leg works on us.
• 6:36
  It turns a philosopher into a spectacle of endurance.
• 6:40
  Epictetus himself, as we'll hear in the weeks to come, kept pointing his students at
• 6:45
  something less theatrical: how a person judges what happens to them,
• 6:50
  ordinary day after ordinary day.
• 6:53
  Let me draw one connection, and I'll mark it as mine.
• 6:57
  The Stoics sorted the world into what belongs to us and what doesn't.
• 7:02
  The body is on the second list.
• 7:04
  It can be strong or frail, whole or broken, free or owned.
• 7:11
  Epictetus had a body that was weak and lame, and a legal status that made even that
• 7:17
  body someone else's property.
• 7:19
  By any ordinary count, he had been handed very little.
• 7:23
  But what he did with the little that was his is what the later world remembered.
• 7:29
  His judgments, his attention, his character: those no master could hold.
• 7:36
  The exact way he'd put it comes soon, and I'd rather not hurry it.
• 7:41
  We'll get to that soon, in the passage that opens his Manual.
• 7:45
  Notice, too, what the careful version of the story asks of us.
• 7:51
  It asks us not to improve a life with a better plot.
• 7:57
  Epictetus doesn't need the broken bone to be admirable.
• 8:01
  He was a frail, lame man, owned by a man of appetite in the court of Nero,
• 8:08
  who somehow found his way into a lecture room and stayed there.
• 8:14
  That's enough.
• 8:16
  If anything, it's more remarkable without the embroidery, because nobody arranged it
• 8:21
  for him.
• 8:22
  The rest of his path, we'll walk in pieces.
• 8:26
  Long says he eventually obtained his freedom, though how that came about is not
• 8:31
  recorded, and I won't guess.
• 8:34
  He taught in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers,
• 8:37
  around A.D.
• 8:39
  89 by Long's dating, though others place it in the 90s.
• 8:43
  After that he went to Nicopolis, in Epirus, and taught there until he was an old
• 8:48
  man.
• 8:49
  We'll get to that soon, in its own morning.
• 8:52
  For now, carry this with you into the day.
• 8:56
  When a story about someone's hardship arrives with a villain and a perfect line,
• 9:02
  it may be worth asking where it came from, and what the plainer record says.
• 9:07
  And when your own body, or your own circumstances, turn out to be less than you'd
• 9:12
  have chosen, there's a lame man from Hierapolis who, I think,
• 9:16
  would not have told you it was a tragedy to fix.
• 9:19
  He'd have asked what you intend to do next.
• 9:23
  Our source today was George Long's biographical note, in his selection from the
• 9:28
  Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion, Project Gutenberg number 10661.
• 9:37
  Thank you for starting your morning here.
• 9:40
  Go gently.