A freed slave's handbook for a steady mind: some things are up to us, and some are not.
Chapter 1 of the Enchiridion is live in full, with chapters 5, 8 and 17, in the Greek Arrian took down: English under every word, with notes on the Stoic terms. The rest of the 53 chapters follow in order.
❦ Read the Enchiridion now, freeA taste of the format. Open the reader above to read all of Enchiridion word by word.
A pocket handbook from a teacher who had been a slave. It opens with one sentence, some things are up to us and some are not, and spends fifty-three short chapters teaching you to tell them apart.
Epictetus was born around AD 50 in Hierapolis in Phrygia and grew up a slave in Rome, owned by Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero. Once free he taught philosophy, until the emperor Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome around AD 93. He crossed to Nicopolis in western Greece and taught there for the rest of his life. He wrote nothing. A student, Arrian of Nicomedia, took down his lectures and boiled the core of them into this Handbook.
Ἐγχειρίδιον, enkheiridion, means ‘the thing held in the hand’: a handbook, and also a hand-knife. The advice is short and practical. If you kiss your child, tell yourself you are kissing a human being, so that if the child dies you will not be undone. Marcus Aurelius thanks his teacher Rusticus for lending him Epictetus's lectures, and quotes them in his own notebook.
Word by word, the famous sayings slow down into instructions you can follow: what to notice, what to say to yourself, and what to let go of.
The words that carry the book. Learn these and most of the text opens up; each links, in the reader, to its full entry. Counts are how often the word appears.
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