The Teaching of Epictetus / Being the 'Encheiridion of Epictetus,' with Selections from the 'Dissertations' and 'Fragments'

The name Epictetus is pronounced ep’’ik-ti’tus—e as in get , first i as in habit , second i as in police , u as in but .


It is clear that the Dissertations were not regarded by Arrian as a satisfactory representation of the teaching of his master; that he published them, indeed, with much reluctance, and only when it appeared that unless he did so, certain imperfect versions of his records would be established as the sole sources of authoritative information about Epictetus. These circumstances are explained in a dedicatory letter to his friend Lucius Gellius, prefixed to the edition of the Dissertations which Arrian finally resolved to issue. I here translate this document in full:—
“Arrian to Lucius Gellius, hail.
The style of the Dissertations , as they have reached us, answers very well to the above account of their origin and purpose. They contain much that the world should be as little willing to neglect as anything that Greek philosophy has left us; but they contain also many repetitions, redundancies, incoherencies; and are absolutely devoid of any sort of order or system in their arrangement. Each chapter has generally something of a central theme, but beyond this all is chaos. The same theme will be dwelt on again and again in almost the same phrases; utterances of majestic wisdom are imbedded in pages of tedious argument, and any grouping of the chapters according to a progressive sequence of ideas will be looked for in vain.
Under these conditions it was evident that the teaching of Epictetus could never win half the influence which its essential qualities fitted it to exercise. And accordingly, as another and better vehicle for this influence, Arrian compiled and condensed from the Dissertations the small handbook of the Stoic philosophy known as the Encheiridion of Epictetus . This little work has made Epictetus known to very many whom the Dissertations would never have reached. It had the distinction—unparalleled in the case of any other Pagan writing, if we except the doubtful Sententiæ of Xystus—of being adopted as a religious work in the early Christian Church. Two paraphrases of it—still extant—one of which was specially designed for the use of monastic bodies, were produced about the sixth century a. d., in which very few changes were made in the text, beyond the alteration of Pagan names and allusions to Scriptural ones.