Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

If a person wants to be happy, wants to feel fairly treated, wants to be rich, according to Epictetus, they don’t need life to be easy, people to be nice, and money to flow freely. They need to look at the world right. “It’s not things that upset us,” he would say, “it’s our judgment about things.” Our opinions determine the reality we experience. Epictetus didn’t believe it was possible to be offended or frustrated, not without anyone’s consent. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed,” he said. “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”

It’s a message that everyone ought to learn as a kid . . . or before they become king.

And what of the situations that are outside our control? How is one supposed to deal with that?

Exactly as Epictetus did while he was a slave—with endurance and equanimity. It is from Aulus Gellius that one of Epictetus’s most famous sayings is preserved:

[Epictetus] used to say that there were two faults which were by far the worst and most disgusting of all, lack of endurance and lack of self-restraint, when we cannot put up with or bear the wrongs which we ought to endure, or cannot restrain ourselves from actions or pleasures from which we ought to refrain. “Therefore,” he said, “if anyone would take these two words to heart and use them for his own guidance and regulation, he will be almost without sin and will lead a very peaceful life. These two words,” he said, “are ἀνέχου (persist) and ἀπέχου (resist).”

Persist and resist.

The ingredients of freedom, whatever one’s condition.

For every rich student Epictetus taught, he would have seen others who had been as impoverished and disadvantaged as he was. He would have seen men—and if he listened to Musonius, as we expect he did, he taught women too—who had been kicked around by fate. His message to them was the same as it was for emperors and future senators: Figure out how to make the most of the hand you have been dealt, play the role assigned to you with the brilliance of a character actor.

The ability to accept life on life’s terms, the need to not need things to be different, this was power to Epictetus. “Remember,” he said, “that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning. It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another. . . . Where our heart is set, there our impediment lies.”

For Epictetus, then, ambition should not be focused on externals but on internals. A Stoic’s greatest, most impressive triumph, he said, is not over other people or enemy armies but over oneself—over our limitations, our tempers, our egos, our petty desires. We all have these impulses; what sets us apart is if we rise above them. What makes us impressive is what we are able to make of this crooked material we were born with.

How rare but glorious the man or woman who manages to do so. How much better are the lives of those who try to rise above than those of the masses, who complain and whine, who sink to the level of their basest instincts. “From now on, then,” Epictetus said, “resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.”

It was the experience of having been deprived of so much that formed Epictetus’s detachment from worldly possessions. It was as if he said to himself, “No one will ever take anything from me again.”

We know that one evening a thief entered Epictetus’s home and stole an iron lamp that he kept burning in a shrine in his front hallway. While he felt a flash of disappointment and anger, he knew that a Stoic was not to trust these strong emotions. Pausing, checking with himself, he found a different way through the experience of being robbed. “Tomorrow, my friend,” he said to himself, “you will find an earthenware lamp; for a man can only lose what he has.”

You can only lose what you have. You don’t control your possessions, so don’t ascribe more value to them than they deserve. And whenever we forget this, life finds a way to painfully call it back to our attention.