The Art of Living

The Art of Living — summary

The slave who taught Rome how to be free

A young boy is dragged off in chains. He has no name worth remembering, no parents listed in any record, and no way out. He is sold into slavery in Rome around the year 55, and his owner, a brutal man named Epaphroditus, decides one day to twist the boy's leg in a piece of equipment to see what happens. The boy looks up calmly and says, "If you keep going, you will break it." His master keeps going. The leg snaps. The boy says, "I told you so."

That boy, the one with the broken leg and the unnervingly steady eyes, grew up to become Epictetus, one of the most quoted teachers in human history. Marcus Aurelius read him obsessively. Roman senators sat at his feet. Two thousand years later, a Navy pilot named James Stockdale survived seven and a half years in a Vietnamese prison camp by reciting his lessons in his head, and credited Epictetus directly with keeping him sane. When Stockdale ejected from his plane over North Vietnam in 1965, he later said he was leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He arrived in that camp with broken bones and left seven years later with his inner life essentially intact. That is a field test of the philosophy most writers never have to face.

What is strange is that Epictetus never wrote a word. Everything we have comes from a student named Arrian who took notes during his lectures. Sharon Lebell, the modern interpreter whose version we are reading, took those scattered teachings and arranged them into ninety-three short, blunt instructions on how to live. She calls it The Art of Living, and the title is exact. This is not a book of philosophy in the dusty academic sense. It is a manual. It tells you, with the bedside manner of a slightly stern grandfather, how to stop torturing yourself with the things you cannot change, and how to actually enjoy the brief life you have been given.