DISCOURSES AND HANDBOOK OF EPICTETUS. When Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome, in 94 A.D., one of the exiles was Epictetus, a former slave from Phrygia, now a professor of the Stoic philoso phy. He removed his school to Nicopolis, a town of Epirus, and there, among other pupils, received a certain Greek author named Arrian, who has left memorials of the master's teach ing in four books of and in a summary called the or 'Hand book.) If these records tell the whole story, Epictetus paid little attention to the encyclo paedic training of the sect, but drove straight at its ethical kernel. His lectures were pointed, sometimes extremely personal, alternating with exposition and satire and exhortation. In es sence the Stoicism of the (Discourses) is an outgrowth of the Socratic doctrine. Epictetus was fond of quoting these two dicta, adapted re spectively from the (Crito) and the (Apology) of Plato. 'But, 0 Crito, if so it is pleasing to the gods, so let it be; and, UAnytus and Meletus are able to kill me, but not to harm me? These two sentences are given at the end of the with two others from the poets, as the procheira, or rules of conduct to be kept in hand for all the circumstances of life. The other two may be rendered in prose as follows: "Lead thou me, 0 Zeus, and thou, Destiny, whithersoever my place has been set by you; for ungrudgingly I shall follow; and if, being evil, I am unwilling, none the less I shall followp— and, ((He is the wise man among us and knows the divine, who has yielded nobly to Fate? There is in these saying a cu rious medley of fatalism and free-will. Stoic ism was deeply influenced by science, and its universe is a mechanical system of causes and effects, God himself being only the finest form of material substance, interpenetrating and dominating the whole. In such a world there should seem to be no place for the moralist's distinction between the spirit and the body of man, no place for a free will; there should seem to be no meaning in the words good and evil, if man has no power of self-determination. But this ethical consequence of their physical theory Epictetus and the other orthodox Sto ics did not draw. They asserted valiantly and vehemently that one thing was left free to man, his opinions. Caesar, they said, can do what he
will with my body, and circumstances may dis pose of my life as they will, but neither Caesar nor brute circumstance has any control over my opinions. It ought to follow that he is the free man who holds what general opinion of the world it pleases him to hold; but to this de duction Epictetus would not quite consent. The world is necessarily what it is; not what we think it —one great homogeneous effect of one cause—and therefore contains no real evil. It follows, then, that he alone is in the way of truth and freedom who resolutely, no matter what befalls him, holds to the opinion that this chain of events in which our life is bound is right and good — as certainly it is inevitable; yet practically no philosophers dwelt more than the Stoics on the inherent worthlessness of life. There is in such a doctrine a deep-lying para dox, an optimism overlaid upon a radical pessi mism. Epictetus is at bottom a sad teacher, only less sad than his royal compeer, Marcus Aure lius; and this Stoic paradox, with its concealed melancholy, has come down from them, through the English Deists and the French philosopher, to the present day, tincturing the whole of mod ern life. To the student of the history of philosophy Epictetus is particularly interesting as representing the transition from Pagan Greek thought to Christianity. Though Epic tetus, speaking as a physicist, would explain the Deity as fire, or the energy of matter, yet emo tionally his attitude toward the first great cause is a fascinating link between the impersonal and philosophical theory of Plato and the religious and vehemently personal faith of a Clement of Alexandria or a Saint Augustine. A com pendious way to present this distinction would be to set side by side the prayer of Socrates at the end of the the prayer of Epic tetus in the 10th chapter of the fourth book of the (Discourses,) and the prayer of the Publi can in the 18th chapter of Saint Luke. There are several English translations of the 'Dis courses> and the (Handbook); perhaps the best is that by P. E. Matheson (Oxford 1916).