The right book at the right time is a powerful thing.
In fact, it can change the whole course of your life.
Some time around the year 141 CE, the philosopher Junius Rusticus gave a young Marcus Aurelius a book from his own library: the lectures of a former slave named Epictetus. Marcus would remember the gift gratefully decades later, thanking Rusticus in Meditations “for introducing me to Epictetus’s lectures—and loaning me his own copy.”
Nearly two thousand years later, before the Vietnam War, James Stockdale had almost that exact experience as Marcus when he was given a copy of Epictetus by one of his professors at Stanford, Philip Rhinelander.
Neither Rusticus nor Rhinelander could have known just how consequential those recommendations would become. Marcus would rely on Epictetus as he became the most powerful man in the world. Stockdale would rely on him after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam and he spent seven and a half years as a prisoner of war.
There’s another impressionable young person whose life was changed by someone recommending Epictetus.
Who?
Me!
When I was 19 years old, I was invited to a small, private summit of college journalists that Dr. Drew, then the host of Loveline, was hosting. After it ended, he was standing in the corner and I cautiously made my way over to nervously ask if he had any book recommendations. He said he’d been reading a book called Discourses by a Stoic philosopher named Epictetus and that I should check it out.
I did. And nearly twenty years later, I’m still reading him, quoting him, writing about him, and coming back to his ideas.
What I love about Discourses is that it is not some dense academic philosophy book filled with abstract arguments that have very little to do with real life. It’s the opposite. Epictetus never wrote anything down. Discourses comes to us from one of his students, who tells us that “whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression.” So what we have is essentially a collection of conversations—Epictetus going back and forth in real time with his students.
It’s an unusual book, to be sure. And as powerful as Epictetus is, he’s not the easiest to get through. He did not suffer fools easily. He wasn’t afraid to call his students foolish for not understanding him or for missing the point. I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t immediately take to Epictetus, and I know it’s why many people over the years have been turned off by him. He’s blunt, meanders a bit at times, and can be a bit of a struggle to understand at first. (FYI: That’s why we made the Daily Stoic How To Read Epictetus Guide—a digital companion to Discourses that gives you the context and guidance to better understand—and learn from—this incredible teacher).
But the pursuit of wisdom isn’t supposed to be painless. “The philosopher’s lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you weren’t well when you entered.” This from a guy uniquely equipped to speak about how to handle hardship. Unlike so many philosophers who spoke about hardship and struggle from positions of wealth and privilege, Epictetus experienced difficulties few of us can even imagine.
He was born into slavery in a Greek province of the Roman Empire in what is now modern-day Turkey. His name—Epiktetos—means “acquired one.” And even by Roman standards, his master was cruel and violent, at one point twisting Epictetus’s leg with all his might. As a punishment? As a sick pleasure? Trying to get a disobedient young kid to follow instructions? We don’t know. All we know is that Epictetus calmly warned him about taking it too far. When the leg snapped, Epictetus made no sound, he uttered no tears. He smiled and looked at his master and said, “Didn’t I warn you?”
For the rest of his life, Epictetus walked with a limp. But he remained unbroken by the incident. “Lameness is an impediment to the leg,” he would later say, “but not to the will.” He would choose to see his disability as only a physical impairment, and in fact it was that idea of choice that defined the core of his philosophical beliefs. He called it our “first job” in life. It was simply this:“to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control.”
Our judgments. Our attitudes. Our wants. Our desires. Our opinions about what has happened to us. Our choices about how we respond to what has happened to us. Those are up to us.
Life was like a play, he liked to say, and if it was the playwright’s “pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.”
One of my personal favorites is Epictetus’s idea that every situation has two handles—“one by which it can be carried, and one by which it can’t.” When bad news comes, do I grab the handle of despair or the handle of action? When I’m slighted, grievance or grace? When things feel uncertain, fear or preparation?
There is another wonderful line from Epictetus that I think of every time I see someone get terribly offended or outraged about something—and that I try to think about when I get upset myself. “If someone succeeds in provoking you,” he said, “realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.” Whatever the other person did is on them. Whatever your reaction is, that’s on you.
The Discourses are full of passages like this, little arguments and anecdotes that force a shift in perspective. Epictetus never actually wrote any of them down. They come from one of his students, Arrian, who tells us that “whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could, as a record for later use of his thought and frank expression.”
Stoicism as a philosophy was made to be kept in hand, always at the ready. And it is the title of Epictetus’s Enchiridion (a kind of “greatest hits” of his teachings collected at the back of many editions of Discourses) that best shows this. It comes from a Greek word meaning “held in hand” or “have at hand,” and at the time, it often referred to a hand-knife or dagger. Arrian’s idea in choosing the title was that Epictetus’s teaching worked the same way. They were something you could keep at hand and reach for in difficult moments.
“If you didn’t learn these things to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?” Epictetus pointedly asked.
Stockdale had spent those years before the war with his Epictetus books on his bedside table, several hours each week buried in them. Then on September 9, 1965, his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam. “Five years down there, at least,” Stockdale said after ejecting from his plane. “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
It turned out to be seven and a half years in a brutal Vietnamese prison, where Stockdale was repeatedly tortured and spent long stretches in isolation. He would later credit Epictetus—and all those hours spent buried in his books—with helping him survive it.
Stockdale wasn’t alone to test Epictetus’s ideas in “the laboratory of human behavior,” as he liked to put it.
Frederick the Great carried Epictetus with him into battle. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was reading him as he raised and led one of the first black regiments for the Union in the Civil War. Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, studied him too as he rose up against Napoleon. And Theodore Roosevelt took a copy of Epictetus with him on his brutal “River of Doubt” expedition in the Amazon.
“Lent to me by my friend Major James A. Shipton and carried by me through my South American journey, including the exploration of the River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt, Feb 8th 1915”
I like to say that Epictetus is your favorite philosopher’s favorite philosopher. Like the way we sometimes talk about “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper” or “your favorite comedian’s favorite comedian”—someone who isn’t necessarily the biggest name, but who is revered by those in the know.
Epictetus is like that. Someone who should be much more widely known and read—because when he is, he changes lives.
He changed Marcus’s.
He changed Stockdale’s.
He changed mine.
And he can change yours.
P.S. As I mentioned briefly above, if you do decide to read Discourses (you can pick up my favorite translation here), we put together the Daily Stoic How To Read Epictetus Guide to help you best navigate it, and it will be 30% off with your purchase of the book this month. It’s 14 in-depth modules that distill all of my reading, rereading, and rabbit-holing of Epictetus into a kind of roadmap designed to help you get out of the book in a few weeks what took me nearly twenty years.
August has been Epictetus Month over at Daily Stoic, where thousands of us have been reading and discussing Epictetus together. And on August 27th, I’m hosting a live Epictetus Q&A, where I’ll take your questions.
Just get the guide before August 26th to receive your invite to the Q&A.
I hope to see you there!