Epictetus Works (Discourses, Enchiridion, Fragments)

viii

...scrutinizes The text begins mid-word, likely "scrutinizes" or "analyzes.", and riddles through and through all pretenders to philosophy, all mere logicians or rhapsodists original: "rhapsodists"; in this context, it refers to people who merely recite or string together philosophical ideas without understanding or practicing them.; and brings all to the test of practical righteousness. Indeed, it is a favorite suggestion of his that no man should ever profess to be a philosopher, but that each should leave this character to be inferred from his actions.

“It is not theories that are wanted now,” he says, “for there are books stuffed full of Stoic reasonings. What is wanted, then? The man who shall apply them; whose actions may bear testimony to his doctrines. Assume this character for me, that we may no longer make use in the schools of the examples of the ancients, but may have some examples of our own.” (p. 90.)

So far as the scanty record goes, and the testimony of contemporaries, Epictetus was himself such a man. He was probably born at Hierapolis in Phrygia Hierapolis was an ancient Greek city in what is now Turkey; Phrygia was a kingdom in the west-central part of Anatolia., and he lived at Rome in the first century of our era as the slave of Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero. Origen Origen (c. 184 – c. 253 AD) was an early Christian scholar and theologian. preserves an anecdote of Epictetus: that when his master once put his leg in the torture, his philosophic slave quietly remarked, “You will break my leg”; and when this presently happened, he added, in the same tone, “Did I not tell you so?” He afterwards became free and lived very frugally at Rome, teaching philosophy. Simplicius Simplicius of Cilicia (c. 490 – c. 560 AD) was a philosopher who wrote a famous commentary on the works of Epictetus. says that the whole furniture of his house consisted of a bed, a cooking pot, and an earthen lamp; and Lucian Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 – after 180 AD) was a famous satirist and rhetorician. ridicules a man who bought the latter, after his death, in hopes to become a philosopher by using it.