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

In the vein of Socrates and Cato, Epictetus neglected to publish a single word in his lifetime. Yet his teachings traveled widely even in his own time. Marcus Aurelius would be loaned a copy of Epictetus’s lectures by his tutor Junius Rusticus. Hadrian had studied Epictetus and now his chosen protégé would drink deeply from that same source of wisdom.

If Epictetus declined to write, how did so many of his teachings survive? Because one student, Arrian—a biographer who would achieve a consulship under Hadrian—would publish eight volumes of notes from Epictetus’s lectures. But it’s Arrian’s choice of title of an abridged form of these volumes that best captures what Stoicism and Epictetus’s teachings were designed for. He called it Encheiridion, literally meaning “to have at hand.”

A. A. Long, a later translator of Epictetus, explains this word choice:

In its earliest usage encheiridion refers to a hand-knife or dagger. Arrian may have wished to suggest that connotation of the work’s defensive or protective function. It fits his admonition at the beginning and end of the text to keep Epictetus’s message “to hand” (procheiron). In obvious imitation, Erasmus in 1501 published a work in Latin with the title Enchiridion militis Christiani (A Christian soldier’s manual).

Shakespeare has Casca say in Julius Caesar that every slave holds the source of their freedom in their hand, and it is with that weapon that Brutus would free himself of Caesar’s reign in 44 BC. Epictetus, some four generations later, would be an actual slave and under much more serious tyranny. He would not need to resort to murder. He would not need a literal weapon.

Instead, he would create another kind of freedom, a deeper freedom—that Arrian graciously replicated—that could also be possessed in one’s hand.

And so it was that Toussaint Louverture would be in part inspired by Epictetus’s ferocious commitment to freedom—literal and otherwise—when he rose up and led his fellow Haitian slaves to freedom against Napoleon’s France. Just as it was that in 1965, as Colonel James Stockdale was shot down over Vietnam, knowing he would almost certainly be taken prisoner, he would arm himself with Epictetus’s teachings, which he had studied as a student at Stanford, and say to himself while he parachuted down, “I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

So two thousand years apart the same teachings were helping a man find freedom inside captivity and making him unbreakable despite the worst circumstances.

Which is the only way future generations can possibly thank or pay the proper homage to someone like Epictetus.

Forget everything but action. Don’t talk about it, be about it.

“Don’t explain your philosophy,” Epictetus said, “embody it.”

JUNIUS RUSTICUSTHE DUTIFUL (JUNE-ee-us ROOS-ti-cuss)

Origin: Rome

B. 100 AD

D. 170 AD

In 66 AD, as Thrasea faced an almost certain death sentence, Arulenus Rusticus had offered to dissent and save him. No, Thrasea had said, it is too late for me. But there was still time, he had said to that courageous young man trying to save him, to think about what kind of politician he would be.

Rusticus would go on to raise a son who in turn would have a son who by and large proved that faith to be well founded. He would also prove, it seems, how often history hinges on small events.

Junius Rusticus, the grandson of Arulenus, was born around 100 AD, less than a decade after the murder of his grandfather. He would become the tutor who introduced Marcus Aurelius to Stoicism and helped form, in so doing, the world’s first philosopher king—the kind of leader who was the opposite of the men Arulenus had bravely stood against.

It would have made sense for Junius to want to turn away from this violent world, to hide in his books and in theories. We are told by one ancient writer that there was a part of Junius that would have been content to be a “mere pen-and-ink philosopher,” that he would have liked to stay at home and compose his theories in peace. But the sense of duty—instilled by the example of his grandfather, as it had been for Cato—called him to higher things.

It’s an example that should challenge every talented and brilliant person: You owe it to yourself and to the world to actively engage with the brief moment you have on this planet. You cannot retreat exclusively into ideas. You must contribute.

Junius, for his part, became a soldier and a general. In his early thirties, he was a consul under Hadrian. At some point he met Arrian, who had studied under Epictetus. It’s perfectly possible, modern scholars like Donald Robertson speculate, that Junius himself attended Epictetus’s lectures and wrote his own notes of what the great sage taught to students.