Wealth & Money Quote by Epictetus

Epictetus aims his warning straight at the Roman parent’s soft spot: legacy. In a world where status could be inherited but character couldn’t, he flips the usual calculus. Wealth looks like security, but it’s also a moral sedative. Instruction, by contrast, is portable. It travels with you when luck turns, markets wobble, patrons disappear, or the state changes its mind. That’s not a sentimental plug for “learning”; it’s Stoic risk management.

The line’s engine is the contrast between “hopes” and “wealth.” Money is treated as an external, fundamentally unstable thing - what Stoics call an indifferent - while “hopes of the instructed” signals an inner resource: the trained ability to judge, endure, and choose well. Epictetus isn’t promising that educated sons will get rich; he’s saying their expectations will be sturdier, less hostage to circumstance. The ignorant rich man is one crisis away from panic because he lacks the mental architecture to interpret loss without collapsing into grievance or fear.

Context sharpens the edge. Epictetus was born enslaved and became a teacher of freedom understood as self-command. He’s allergic to the fantasy that comfort equals safety. Under the Roman Empire, fortunes were real and fragile; exile and confiscation were tools of politics. Instruction, for him, is not polishing a résumé but building the only inheritance that can’t be taken: disciplined perception, ethical reflexes, and a sense of what actually belongs to you. The subtext to parents is blunt: if you love your children, don’t buy them ease. Teach them competence in adversity.