A Note on the Text

Epictetus lived from about 55 to 135 AD. He taught in Greek, first in Rome and then in a small Greek town called Nicopolis. He never wrote down a single word of his teaching. Everything we have from him comes from one of his students, a man named Arrian, who took careful notes in the classroom and in private conversation. The two works that survive are the Enchiridion, or Handbook, and the longer Discourses. Both come to us through Arrian, and both stand as the closest thing we have to hearing Epictetus speak.

This book is an adaptation, not a translation.

That distinction matters. A translation renders the words of the original as closely as the target language allows. An adaptation keeps the arguments, the structure, and the core claims, but rewrites the language for a different kind of reader.

This volume has two parts, and each part draws on a different source.

Part I adapts Elizabeth Carter's 1758 English translation of the Enchiridion, first published in London. Carter was an English poet and classical scholar. Her rendering of Epictetus was the first complete English version of his surviving work. For more than a century it was the version every English reader met. It is careful, scholarly, and in the public domain.

Part II adapts P. E. Matheson's 1916 English translation of the Discourses, published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford. Matheson's version has been praised from the start as a graceful and readable English. It is also in the public domain.

Both of these translations are good. Both are also written in the long, winding sentences of the English of their day, which most young readers find slow going.

That is the gap this edition is trying to close.

Every argument Epictetus makes in Carter and in Matheson is in this adaptation. Every key claim is present. The order of the arguments is kept. Where the original uses difficult vocabulary, we have used plain everyday words. Where the original uses one long sentence with several clauses, we have broken it into two or three short sentences a student can read without stopping.

What we have not done is add claims Epictetus did not make, or put feelings into his voice that the source does not support. Where extra context is needed, we have added it in italic editor's notes at the start and close of each chapter in Part I, and at the start of each lecture in Part II. Those italic notes are the editor's words. The plain text is an adaptation of Epictetus. Italic voice and plain voice never mix inside one paragraph, so you can always tell who is speaking.

Readers who want the literal text should read Carter or Matheson directly. Carter's translation is freely available online at the Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu. Matheson's translation is freely available at sacred-texts.com and on Wikisource.

This edition is for everyone else. For the student who has never read philosophy. For the young person standing at the beginning of their life. For anyone who takes seriously the question of how to live.

That was always who Epictetus was talking to.