The Enchiridion
Epictetus, 125
A pocket-sized Stoic manual of about fifty short rules for staying steady when people, luck and your own desires push you around. Every page can be tried on a bad day.
Epictetus
55–135
Epictetus writes like a freed slave who has watched power change hands and knows what it costs to keep your own mind. The «Enchiridion» is about fifty short rules for staying steady when people, luck and your own desires push you around, and every page can be tried on a bad day. Start there if you want something pocket-sized; reach for «Short Works» when you want the same sharpness about staying free inside yourself, written for anyone whose peace depends on other people.
Feels like freedom, defiance and longing.
Start with The Enchiridion.
Born into slavery in Phrygia, Epictetus wrote nothing himself; his student Arrian took down his lectures and distilled the Enchiridion from them. The Greek title means both 'handbook' and 'something held in the hand'.
What if the terror was never in the thing itself?
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves—that is, to our own views. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself. Books by Epictetus
Short Works
Epictetus, 125
A freed slave's short, sharp rules for staying free inside your own mind—written for anyone whose peace depends on other people.
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