قاعة القراءة

Discourses (as reported by Arrian)

Epictetus

Four surviving books (of the eight Photius knew) containing ninety-five talks given by Epictetus at his school in Nicopolis, preceded by Arrian's letter to Lucius Gellius. They are not treatises but lively conversations in which the master challenges pupils and visitors, invents dialogues, draws on examples from daily life—the bath, the sea voyage, the dinner, the gymnasium—and offers Socrates, Diogenes and Zeno as models. The theme running through them all is the distinction between what is up to us (our judgements, desires, impulses: prohairesis) and what is not (body, goods, reputation, office), and the freedom that comes from applying it. They deal with providence and man's kinship with God, friendship and family, illness, exile and death, the true Cynic and the false philosopher. They are preserved by an eleventh- or twelfth-century Bodleian manuscript on which all other copies depend.