Discourses and Selected Writings

Discourses — summary

In September 1965 an American fighter pilot was falling toward North Vietnam. His plane had been hit, he had ejected, and as he drifted under the canopy toward a village below, one thought went through his head. He was leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.

The pilot's name was James Stockdale. He spent seven years as a prisoner of war, four of them in solitary confinement. He was beaten, put in irons, tortured, and he survived. When he wrote years later about what kept him whole, he did not talk about training, patriotism or prayer. He talked about the classes of a Greek slave who had died two thousand years earlier.

That slave was called Epictetus. He was born around AD 55 and belonged to a man named Epaphroditus, who had himself risen from slavery to become a secretary in Nero's court. That gave Epictetus a view of the empire's highest circles from the inside, and from the lowest possible position. He limped for the rest of his life, owned nothing, and kept a single iron lamp at home, which was eventually stolen too. He is the man a prisoner of war, a Roman emperor and an American psychotherapist have each called their teacher.

The book we are talking about was not written by Epictetus. A student of his, Arrian, took down his classes almost word for word, as they were spoken. That is why reading it feels like sitting in a room where someone is thinking out loud, interrupting himself, teasing you, and occasionally telling you to stop being an idiot. The whole thing is built around three questions: what is actually yours, why you suffer over things that never happened, and how a man can be free while they are putting chains on his legs.