To get my message today, you have only to have a general understanding of the message of one man: the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the outstanding pagan moralist of the Roman Empire. I’ll do my best to give you that understanding in a couple of 50-minute talks with a break in between. And for the remaining time, mainly through questions and answers, we’ll discuss the worthiness of what I’ll call Epictetus’s “Code of Conduct” to be part of us as warriors. Code of Conduct? You thought Stoicism was a whole philosophy with a certain cosmology, a unique logic, a physics, a theory of knowledge, and all the rest? If so, you are right, it has all the accoutrements of a philosophy; it’s just that Old Man Epictetus ignored everything about it except what it had to say about personal conduct, how the good man should think, and behave. “What do I care,” Epictetus asked, “whether all existing things are composed of atoms, or of indivisibles, or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to learn the true nature of the good and the evil?”

The first principle of Stoicism is to live in harmony with nature- human nature and physical nature. My geneticist friend at Harvard, E. O. Wilson, tells me that the difference between men and animals is not reason, but human nature. Human nature is mostly genetically driven passions, passions designed to give us the capacity to survive and reproduce. It was David Hume who said, “Reason not only is but ought to be the slave of passions.” Physical nature, the other half, is the physical universe and all its interactions. To the Stoic, physical nature is God’s body. Have a look at yourself and see where you fit into the natural scheme of things. And play the part well.

Epictetus was impatient with unmanliness and loose living. He had a sarcasm that stripped affection bare. He had a fiery earnestness, which robbed his rude strokes of their cruelty. His message: “A man must think hard and live simply to do well.”

I met old Epictetus back in graduate school in 1962. It was my great luck; in fact, it was a fluke that put us together. My favorite (philosophy) professor gave me one of Epictetus’s books as a farewell present as I left to go back to sea. He had never mentioned him in class. Phil Rhinelander just thought Epictetus and I would make a good pair, and he was certainly right. I had never heard of Epictetus: in fact, today his name recognition is in about the
third tier of philosophers. But his mind is first tier.

Everything I know about Epictetus I’ve developed myself over the years. It’s been a one-on-one relationship. He’s been in combat with me, leg irons with me, spent month long stretches in blindfolds with me, has been in the ropes with me, has taught me that my true business is maintaining control over my moral purpose, in fact that my moral purpose is who I am. He taught me that I am totally responsible for everything I do and say; and that it is I who decides on and controls my own destruction and own deliverance. Not even God will intercede if He sees me throwing my life away. He wants me to be autonomous. He put me in charge of me. “It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

Don’t be disturbed about my occasional references to the way the Stoics see God. He’s the closest thing to a Christian God there is, according to Paul Tillich, a renowned Protestant theologian. Epictetus had heard of Christians, but he never knew any, nor were the Christians and the Stoics in competition in his lifetime. It was not until the latter part of the second century A.D. that a coherent Christian creed was beginning to emerge. Before that, nobody could state a cause for Christianity that would be intelligible to the pagan intellectual. The Stoics practiced a monotheistic religion from which Christianity borrowed much-a fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man were well established Stoic concepts before Christ was born; the Holy Ghost was a Stoic idea before Christ was born.

A quick thumbnail sketch of Epictetus’s life goes like this: He was born to a Greek-speaking slave woman in a little town in Asia Minor, up in the hills behind Ephesus about a hundred miles. At the time he was born, 50 A.D., that part of the world was a Roman colony with garrisoned troops. His mother’s town, Hieopolos, was then and still is renowned for its natural hot springs and baths, and I think of it as probably an R and R spot for Roman troops. ( I’ve visited there, of course). Born to a slave, Epictetus was automatically a slave; he had a tough life. Crippled by a cruel master, he had a bad leg just like mine-left leg at the knee. When he was about fifteen, he was chained up and carried away in a slave caravan bound for Rome. He was bought at auction by a former slave, a “freedman” named Epaphroditus,
Secretary to the Emperor of Rome, the young (27 year-old) squirt Nero. Nero was bad and getting worse by the time young Epictetus moved into the Roman “White House”. By the time Nero was 30, he had killed his half brother, his first wife, second wife, and mother. And he was letting the Empire run itself. The Roman Senate declared him a public enemy, and Epaphroditus was at Nero’s side as the army was breaking down the door to arrest the Emperor. Nero tried to cut his own throat, muffed it, and Epaphroditus finished the job. Epaphroditus forever thereafter lived under a cloud, and Epictetus just took to the streets of Rome. A high-minded, intelligent, Greek-speaking, young man, he started attending philosophy lectures given in the public parks. And in those days in Rome, “philosophy” was synonymous with Stoicism.

The turning point in his life was his adoption by Musonius Rufus, the very best teacher of philosophy in first-century Rome. Though Epictetus was still technically a slave, Rufus, an Etruscan knight, took him as a student. Rufus was as fluent in Greek as he was in Latin, and he and Epictetus got on well. In one passage, Epictetus tells of his tutor’s mastery of seminar instruction: “Rufus spoke in such a way that each of us, as we sat there, fancied someone had gone to him and told him of our faults; so effective was his grasp of what men actually do and think. So vividly did he set before each man’s eyes his particular weakness.”

Epictetus’s tutelage ran for at least 10 years, and then Rufus launched him on a career as a bonafide philosopher of Rome. Epictetus, like all philosophers in Rome, was exiled by Emperor Domitian in the year 89 A.D., and he picked out a little town of Nicopolis (where I’ve also been), on the Adriatic coast of Greece, as a place to found a school. My favorite authorities set the date of his death at 138 A.D., at age 88. I’ve come across nothing about his “retirement,” so I think of him as starting his school in about 90 A.D. at age 40, and teaching there for another 40 or 50 years. This little book like the one I got from my professor in 1962 is called The Enchiridion, meaning in Greek “ready at hand.” It is only selected excerpts from eight volumes of Epictetus’s lectures and conversations given, we think, in the year 108 A.D. He was talking to basically rich, young men from formidable families, mostly from Athens and Rome. It was the Socrates scene all over again, 500 years later-the same students, same age mid-20s, the same type of dialogue.