Book: Discourses

Overview
Epictetus’s Discourses, recorded by his student Arrian in the early second century, present a direct, practical Stoicism aimed at reforming the will rather than ornamenting the mind. Set in the teacher’s school at Nicopolis, the conversations move from abstract principles to sharp rebukes, vignettes, and thought experiments, always returning to the central claim that a person’s good and bad lie only in the proper use of the faculty of choice. Everything else, health, wealth, reputation, office, even death, is material for virtue, neither worthy to be pursued at any cost nor feared as an evil.

The Core Doctrine: What Is Up to Us
The organizing idea is the distinction between what depends on us and what does not. Our judgments, impulses, desires, and aversions are our own; the body, possessions, social standing, and the actions of others are not. Emotional disturbance arises not from events themselves but from the judgments we lay upon them. Epictetus trains students to pause at the moment of impression and withhold assent until reason examines what appears. Right assent aligns the will with nature’s order and secures inner freedom; false assent binds us to externals and makes us slaves to fortune and to other people.

Training and Daily Practice
The Discourses insist on vigilant attention. Students are told to rehearse losses in thought, to greet setbacks as tests, and to carry ready-to-hand rules that convert shock into clarity. Desire must be reined in to what is within one’s power; aversion should target only moral error, never external events. Speech and action are to be modest and purposeful, avoiding display. Epictetus praises Socrates and Diogenes as exemplars and sketches the Cynic vocation as a sacred office requiring purity of intention and resilience. He warns that philosophy is not an accessory to polite life but a craft of living that demands discipline, endurance, and consistency when no one is watching.

Roles, Duties, and Community
Though externals are indifferent as to value, they matter as the field in which duty is performed. Epictetus develops the idea of appropriate action: a person must play assigned roles, child, parent, citizen, guest, with integrity, without craving applause or fearing blame. He urges gratitude to the gods and acceptance of providence, framing human beings as parts within a larger rational order. Cosmopolitan in spirit, he treats all as kin under Zeus, yet he is unsentimental about reputation and office: honor is to be found in the governance of the will, not in titles.

Freedom, Fate, and Adversity
Freedom is redefined as wanting things to happen as they do happen, because one’s will is aligned with reason and nature. A tyrant can threaten body and property, but not the faculty of choice unless we surrender it. Poverty, illness, and exile are occasions to prove one’s art; death is a natural event, not a catastrophe. He counsels tenderness without attachment: love those close to you while remembering their mortality, so that loss calls forth gratitude rather than despair. If a situation makes virtue impossible, the way out remains open, but courage consists chiefly in staying and acting nobly.

Method and Tone
The style is colloquial, urgent, and therapeutic. Epictetus mocks vanity, punctures sophistry, and treats logic as a tool for securing right assent rather than an end in itself. He contrasts students who collect arguments with those who reform character, insisting that progress is seen in steady desires, stable aversions, and uncomplaining endurance. The Discourses return to the same touchstones, impressions, assent, roles, and readiness, until their maxims become reflexes.

Shape and Influence
Four books survive from a larger corpus; their companion is the shorter Enchiridion, a distilled handbook of the same teaching. Together they offer a program for moral freedom: protect the citadel of choice, accept the order of things, and let each event be material for virtue.