It was from this kind of teacher that Epictetus came to understand philosophy not as some fun diversion but as something deadly serious. “The philosopher’s lecture-hall is a hospital,” he would later say to his own students. “You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it.”
Although Musonius Rufus was not a slave, he and Epictetus had long conversations about the human condition. Both, clearly, had experienced the worst of what men could do to each other—Musonius with his repeated exiles, and Epictetus living through bondage. Yet instead of taking bitterness from this, instead of losing their sense of agency over their lives, they were both pushed by these painful events toward realizing that the only power they actually had was over their mind and their character. “If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious,” Epictetus said, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way.
Which of these forms of slavery is more shameful? Which of these can we stop right now?
At some point, in his thirties, Epictetus was made free by fact and law as well as spirit. Now life presented him with new choices, the same choices each of us gets when we enter the world as adults: What would he do for a living? How would he spend his freedom? What would he do with his life?
Epictetus chose to dedicate himself fully to philosophy. Unlike the other Stoics, who had been senators and generals, advisors and wealthy heirs—professions that were influenced by their philosophy—Epictetus was one of the first to choose what today we might call the academic route.
It would be a life closer to Cleanthes’s or Zeno’s than Athenodorus’s or Cato’s.
Almost immediately, Epictetus gained a large following. His school and his standing were enough that by 93 AD, when Domitian banned philosophers from Rome, Epictetus was one who was driven to exile. In a way, it was fitting that he chose Greece—a city called Nicopolis—because this idea of returning to teaching philosophy was a return to the Greek Stoicism that Zeno and Cleanthes had helped pioneer. Epictetus’s life was no soft affair and he could expect no tenure, but in choosing to teach, he was explicitly turning away from the Stoicism of the imperial court.
He would not be complicit in some deranged emperor’s plans. He would not suffer vainly to rein in their worst impulses. He would not be a cog in the enormous imperial hegemon. He would instead pursue truth where it could be found.
This hardly meant he was fleeing the responsibilities or the reality of the world—he just had no interest in political machinations or acquiring wealth. It was wisdom he was after: how to get it, how to apply it, how to pass it on to others. “If we philosophers,” he said, “apply ourselves to our own work as zealously as the old men at Rome have applied themselves to the matters on which they have set their hearts, perhaps we too could accomplish something.”
Epictetus’s most powerful insight as a teacher derives directly from his experiences as a slave. Although all humans are introduced at some point to the laws of the universe, almost from the moment he was born, Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had, even of his own person. As he came to study and understand Stoicism, he adopted this lesson into what he described as our “chief task in life.” It was, he said, simply “to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” Or, in his language, what is up to us and what is not up to us (ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin).
Once we have organized our understanding of the world into this stark categorization, what remains—what was so central to Epictetus’s survival as a slave—is to focus on what is up to us. Our attitudes. Our emotions. Our wants. Our desires. Our opinions about what has happened to us. Epictetus believed that as powerless as humans were over their external conditions, they always retained the ability to choose how they responded. “You can bind up my leg,” he would say—indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken—“but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.”
“Every situation has two handles,” Epictetus taught. One of these handles was weak and one of them was strong. No matter our condition, no matter how undesirable the situation, we retain the ability to choose which one we will grab. Are we going to choose to see that our brother is a selfish jerk? Or are we going to remember that we share the same mother, that he’s not this way on purpose, that we love him, that we have our own bad impulses too?*
This decision—which handle we grab, day in and day out, with anyone and everyone we deal with—determines what kind of life we have. And what kind of person we will be.
While it should not surprise us that in times as tough and cruel as Rome in the first century AD, students would flock to hear the insights of a man who had triumphed over so much adversity, it is interesting how affluent and powerful Epictetus’s audiences became, even as he taught more than five hundred miles from Rome. From all over the empire, parents sent their children to be schooled about life by a man who in the hustle and bustle of the court they would have dismissed as a mere slave.
Even the powerful themselves came to sit at his feet. At some point a young Hadrian, the future emperor, passed through Nicopolis and met Epictetus. How many lectures he sat in on, what kind of questions he asked, we do not know, but the historical record shows us that he admired this Stoic, and when he became all-powerful, he tacitly endorsed him (the Historia Augusta tells us that Hadrian was known for dismissing unfit philosophers from the profession entirely). Soon enough, Epictetus’s lectures would make their way to a young Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian’s adopted grandson and future king.
Epictetus’s focus on powerlessness was not only an insight about the power structures of his time. He was looking at what makes us fundamentally human. So much is out of our hands. And yet so much remains within our grasp, provided that we decline to relinquish it.
If a person wants to be happy, wants to feel fairly treated, wants to be rich, according to Epictetus, they don’t need life to be easy, people to be nice, and money to flow freely. They need to look at the world right. “It’s not things that upset us,” he would say, “it’s our judgment about things.” Our opinions determine the reality we experience. Epictetus didn’t believe it was possible to be offended or frustrated, not without anyone’s consent. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed,” he said. “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”
It’s a message that everyone ought to learn as a kid . . . or before they become king.
And what of the situations that are outside our control? How is one supposed to deal with that?
Exactly as Epictetus did while he was a slave—with endurance and equanimity. It is from Aulus Gellius that one of Epictetus’s most famous sayings is preserved: