Enchiridion

Enchiridion

In the autumn of 65 CE, a young slave in Rome watched his master, Epaphroditus -- a secretary to the emperor Nero -- grip his leg and begin to twist. Epaphroditus was making a point. The slave's name was Epictetus. He said, calmly, "You are going to break it." Epaphroditus kept twisting. The bone snapped. Epictetus looked at his master and said, "Did I not tell you that you would break it?"

That story, preserved through generations of Stoic tradition, may be embellished. But the portrait it paints is not. Epictetus walked with a permanent limp for the remaining seventy years of his life. He never owned property. He was expelled from Rome by imperial decree. He lived in a rented house in a provincial Greek port town and taught philosophy to anyone who came to listen. He wrote nothing himself -- every word we have from him was taken down by students and published after the fact. He died around 135 CE without wealth, without political influence, without a body that fully worked.

He is also the most direct ancestor of modern cognitive behavioral therapy. He shaped the inner life of Marcus Aurelius. Frederick the Great of Prussia carried a copy of his handbook on military campaigns. Admiral James Stockdale memorized his words before being shot down over North Vietnam in 1965, and credited them -- literally -- with keeping him sane through seven and a half years of torture and solitary confinement in the Hoa Lo Prison.

The book that did all of that is not long. The Enchiridion -- the word means "small thing to have in hand," a handbook -- runs to roughly 50 short chapters. A slow reader finishes it in two hours. Arrian, a wealthy young Roman student who would later become consul and governor of Cappadocia, compiled it from notes he took in Epictetus's lecture hall in Nicopolis, Greece, around 125 CE. He also compiled a longer set of notes called the Discourses, but the Enchiridion is the distillation. The portable version. The thing you could copy onto a few sheets of papyrus and carry in a saddlebag.