Review: Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life

Abstract

Index of Passages 291 General Index 303 end p.vii Preface The idea of writing this book began to crystallize while I was teaching a graduate seminar on Epictetus at Berkeley in the spring of 1999. My students were far more responsive to his Stoic discourses than I had dared to hope, and by the end of the semester I myself was thinking about little else. By a happy coincidence, I was about to begin a sabbatical year of research leave, generously assisted by grants from my university. My official project for this leave had not been a study of Epictetus, but now I knew that this was what I wanted to write, and so I set to work. Although the idea of this book arose only recently, Epictetus has been on or near my desk for more years than I care to recall. I have been fascinated by him ever since I began to work on Hellenistic philosophy, and I have incorporated him in much that I have previously published. But I had never devoted a whole course to Epictetus before, and I had never immersed myself in him completely. Like many others, I tended to read him piecemeal, concentrating on passages that bore on my general interests in Stoicism rather than trying to engage with his singular mind and arresting style for their own sake. Now, instead, I read him through in entirety several times. In doing so, I became especially interested in his educational strategies and his devotion to Socrates, and I also found myself increasingly impressed by the distinctive stamp of his Stoicism and by his remarkable personality. Quite coincidentally, excerpts of Epictetus were beginning to reach a large public through Tom Wolfe's brilliant novel A Man in Full. Reactions to that book in newspapers had shown that Epictetus' text, just by itself, was capable of touching modern nerves. Yet, there was no up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to Epictetus. All the more reason, I thought, to write a book that would offer a sufficiently end p.ix in-depth treatment in a manner that could attract new readers to him as well as those to whom he needs no introduction. That is what I have tried to do, with the strong encouragement of Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press and his anonymous advisers, for whose advice at the planning and later stages I am most grateful. I do not presume any prior knowledge of Epictetus or Stoic philosophy, and I have liberally included my own translations of numerous passages, using these as the basis for all my detailed discussions. These excerpts are the most important part of the book, because its main purpose is to provide sufficient background and analysis to enable Epictetus to speak for himself. What he says, however, often stands in need of clarification and interpretation. Research on Epictetus has a long way to go. I hope I have contributed a number of fresh ideas, but it would defeat the purpose of this book if I defended them in the main text with a barrage of scholarship. At the end of chapters I append bibliographical details and provide guidelines on various details and points of controversy. My wa...