Epictetus, a bachelor until his very late years when he took a wife his age to help him care for an infant he rescued from death by “exposure” was a “natural,” extraordinarily gifted teacher. He was gregarious---- never missed the Olympic games which were conducted only about 50 miles from his school. He talks about the Olympics of those years in Enchiridion [29]:

In every affair, consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit, indeed, careless of the consequences, and when these are developed, you will shamefully desist. I would conquer at the Olympic Games. But consider what precedes and what follows, and then, if it be for your advantage, engage in the affair. You must conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, and sometimes no wine. In a word, you must give yourself up to your trainer as to a physician. Then, in the combat, you may be thrown into a ditch, dislocate your arm, turn your ankle, swallow an abundance of dust, receive stripes [for negligence], and after all, lose the victory. When you have reckoned up all this, if your inclination still holds, set about the combat.

The religious possibilities of Stoicism were developed further by Epictetus than by any of his Stoic predecessors over the previous 400 years. But his manner of speaking was not that of a prissy moralist. He often phrased his pithy remarks in the athletic metaphor: “Difficulties are what show men’s character. Therefore, when a difficult crisis meets you, remember that you are as the raw youth, with whom God-the-trainer is wrestling.” And in a prayer to God, he uses the military metaphor: “If Thou sendest me to a place where men have no means of living in accordance with nature, I shall depart this life, not in disobedience to Thee, but as though Thou were sounding for me the recall.” The Stoics accepted suicide, under certain conditions.

And he was funny. Funny, even as he played the part of shock psychologist!
He asks and answers the question: What do you do for friends as you ascend the ladder of intellectual sophistication? Do you hang in with your old pals, or concentrate on intellectual peers? “If you do not drink with old friends as you used to drink with them, you cannot be loved by them as much. So choose whether you want to be a boozer and likeable to them, or sober and not likeable.” Then he makes it clear that in his mind, satisfaction and self-respect are best served by escalating friendships apace with your education. “But if that does not please you, turn about the whole of you, to the opposite; become one of the addicts to unnatural vice, one of the adulterers, and act in corresponding fashion. Yes, and jump up and shout your applause to the dancer!”

To the painfully shy and reticent student:

As the good chorus singers do not render solos, but sing perfectly well with a number of other voices, so some men cannot walk around by themselves. Man, if you are anybody, both walk around by yourself, and talk to yourself, and don’t hide yourself in the chorus. Let yourself be laughed at sometimes, look about you, shake yourself up, so as to at least find out who you actually are!



Now neither these eight volumes of Epictetus “lectures,” hallway talk, and private conversations, nor their “executive summary,” The Enchiridion, were compiled by Epictetus. He couldn’t have cared less about being in print. They were taken down in some kind of frantic shorthand by a 23-year-old student, a remarkable man, Flavius Arrianus, usually known as just Arrian. He was an aristocratic Greek born in a Black Sea province of Asia Minor. You can’t help but imagine what it took for him to improvise this shorthand and follow the old man around and take down all that material. After getting a load of Epictetus and his “living” speech, he must have said something like: “Wow, we’ve got to get this guy down on papyrus!” In his dedication of his final manuscript to a friend, he writes: “Whatever I heard him say, I used to write down, word for word, as best I could, endeavouring to preserve it as a memorial, for my own future use, of his way of thinking and the frankness of his speech. Let those who read these words be assured of this: that when Epictetus spoke them, the hearer could not help but feel exactly what Epictetus wanted him to feel.”

That is the mark of a good teacher!

Arrian was a writer throughout his life. His last and largest book was his definitive text on Alexander the Great’s expedition to the east: The Anabasis of Alexander. Some time after his death, four of his eight volumes of Epictetus disappeared. During the Middle Ages the four remaining were bound under the title Epictetus’s Discourses. As I said, The Enchiridion was tidbits from all eight volumes, so you’ll find things in The Enchiridion that are not in Discourses.

History gives us snapshots of Arrian’s other activities in his illustrious career. After leaving Epictetus’s school, and a term as a successful Roman army officer, we find him lecturing in Athens in about 120A.D., and there meeting Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was about to start a five-year tour of the Empire following his investiture in 117 A.D. Epictetus figured into two fallouts of Arrian’s presence in Athens in the years following. Hadrian, in 130 A.D., appointed Arrian consul for a year, followed by six years as governor of the large province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor. Arrian introduced Epictetus to Emperor Hadrian and they became lifetime friends. Secondly, when Arrian vacated his lectureship in Athens for politics, he was relieved by a Q. Janius Rusticus, who later became the tutor to the young Marcus Aurelius. Later, in his book Meditations, a book on Stoicism, Emperor Marcus Aurelius acknowledged his debt to Epictetus for the wisdom he gained from studying his eight volumes as a youth. (Rusticus had some copies Arrian left him and gave one to his student, young Aurelius.)

So this slave boy who became a school master, gained fame as a respected scholar in the highest circles of the only superpower of the ancient world. And those were important years in world history. They are the years the English historian Edward Gibbon was talking about in the famous statement in his book, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Marcus Aurelius.” That comes to a period of 84 years, from 96 A.D. to 180 A.D. “Their united reigns are possibly the only period in history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”