Philosophy as a way of life

In Marcus Aurelius' day, the greatest authority in questions of Stoicism was Epictetus. As the slave of Epaphroditus, one of Nero's freedmen, Epictetus had attended the classes of the Stoic Musonius Rufus. When Epictetus in turn was subsequently freed by Epaphroditus, he opened a philosophy school at Rome. In AD 93-4, Epictetus fell victim to the edict by which the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome and Italy, and he set himself up in Nicopolis in Epirus. There he opened another school, where one of his regular students was the future civil servant and historian Arrian of Nicomedia. It was Arrian who was responsible for transmitting what we know about Epictetus' teaching; for Epictetus, like many philosophers in antiquity, never wrote anything down.

What Arrian thus preserved for us was not the technical part of Epictetus'

philosophical instruction - his commentaries on Stoic authors such as Chrysippus, for example, or his more general explanations of doctrine.

Rather, what Arrian copied down was the discussions which, as was usual in ancient philosophical schools, took place after the technical part of the class.

In these discussions, the master would reply to questions from his audience, or enlarge upon particular points which were of importance for leading a philosophical life.75 It is important to emphasize this point, for it means that we must not expect to find technical, systematic expositions of every aspect of Stoic doctrines in Epictetus' Discourses. Instead, they deal with a rather limited number of problems, for the most part restricted to ethical matters.

This does not prove, of course, that Epictetus did not take up the whole of the Stoic system in the course of his theoretical teaching. Besides, only the first four books of Arrian's work have survived. We know from a passage in Aulus Gellius,76 who cites an extract from the fifth book of Epictetus'

Discourses, that a part of the work has been lost. For these two reasons, then, we must be wary of concluding, on the basis of these collections of Arrian's notes, that theoretical philosophical teaching gradually became impoverished in the course of later Stoicism.

What we can say is that Epictetus did insist very strongly upon a concept that was traditional in Stoicism:n the difference between discourse about philosophy and the practice of philosophy itself.

h is 11omc1 ime11 claimed that the Stoics recognized two parts of philosophy: on the cmc h111ul , t h�y di11tinguished :i t heoretical discursive part, comprising

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physics and logic; that is, the study of nature and of the rules of discourse.

On the other, there was the practical part of philosophy, corresponding to ethics. This is incorrect. Rather, both theoretical philosophical discourse and philosophy itself as it was lived and experienced were made up of three constituent parts.

In theoretical philosophical discourse, the three parts of philosophy were necessarily distinguished. They were made the object of separate explanations, developed according to a logical principle of succession, and they laid the foundations for and developed the basic principles of Stoic doctrine. On the level of theoretical discourse, then, the parts of philosophy were in a sense external to one another, in accordance with the requirements of didactic exposition. Philosophy itself, however, is the exercise of wisdom; it is a unique act, renewed at each instant, and it may be just as well described as the exercise of logic, physics, or ethics, according to the subject-matter on which it is exercised, without its unity being in any way diminished. On this level, we are no longer concerned with theoretical logical - that is, the theory of correct reasoning - rather, we are concerned not to let ourselves be deceived in our everyday lives by false representations. We arc no longer concerned with theoretical physics - the theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos

- we are concerned with being aware at every instant that we are parts of the cosmos, and that we must make our desires conform to this situation . We no longer do ethical theory - the definition and classification of virtues and duties - we simply act in an ethical way.