The Enchiridion of Epictetus: Text Book, #7

Nearly nineteen hundred years ago, a former slave who became one of Rome's most respected philosophers dictated a short handbook on how to live well. It has never gone out of print. David Tuffley's Enchiridion of Epictetus brings that handbook into plain modern English, chapter by short chapter, with a commentary alongside each one that shows exactly how a piece of ancient Stoic advice applies to a life lived now.

The Enchiridion, Greek for handbook, was compiled from Epictetus's lecture notes by his student Arrian shortly after the philosopher's death in 135 AD. Epictetus himself began life enslaved in the household of one of Nero's secretaries, and it was as a young man in Rome that he was given leave to study philosophy, eventually becoming one of the most respected Stoic teachers of his age. That biography matters, because the Enchiridion was never written as abstract theory. It is advice from someone who had genuinely tested it against a hard life.

Its central insight is deceptively simple: some things are within our control, our opinions, our choices, our responses, and everything else is not. Nearly every chapter is a variation on that one theme, worked out in concrete, often startling detail. Epictetus tells us to rehearse in advance what a difficult outing might bring, so that bad behaviour from others cannot catch us off guard. He compares life to a stage play in which we did not choose our part but are nonetheless responsible for playing it well. He reminds the owner of a fine horse that the horse's beauty was never his own achievement, a small joke with a large point about vanity and borrowed pride.

Tuffley, who lectures in philosophy at Griffith University and has been living with this text since the 1970s, does not simply modernise Epictetus's language, based here on Elizabeth Carter's celebrated eighteenth century translation. After every chapter he adds his own commentary, drawing out what the passage means, where it sits uneasily with modern sensibilities, and where it turns out to be more relevant to a life of social media, rolling news and constant comparison than anyone in the second century could have anticipated. He is honest about the places where Stoic philosophy cuts against the grain of contemporary values, and lets the tension sit rather than explaining it away.

What emerges across all fifty-two short chapters is not a dry academic translation but a working manual, exactly what Epictetus intended it to be. It covers grief and attachment, anger and blame, ambition and reputation, superstition and fate, closing with three ancient quotations on accepting whatever life brings with grace rather than resistance.

For anyone who has sensed that a great deal of modern anxiety comes from trying to control things that were never ours to control, this is a short, clear, endlessly re-readable book, the kind that rewards being picked up again every few years as life changes around it.