Men Are Disturbed Not by Things

The story

Epictetus did not write the Enchiridion as a finished book. His student Arrian kept notes of the teaching and arranged this short handbook from them. Chapter 5 opens with the sentence above. Higginson’s 1890 English is the public-domain wording on this page.

The next sentences use a death everyone in the room would have known. Death is nothing terrible, Higginson has him say, or it would have appeared so to Socrates. The terror is in the notion that death is terrible. When you are hindered, disturbed, or grieved, do not put it on other people. Put it on your own views.

He then sorts people by what they do with that fact. An uninstructed person blames others for his misfortunes. Someone just starting the work blames himself. Someone fully instructed blames neither others nor himself. The line about “views” is the door. The chapter walks through it.

The same move shows up later in Marcus Aurelius, who had read this tradition and wrote a private version of it in Meditations 8.47. Epictetus was not an emperor taking notes on campaign. The ancient account is that he had been enslaved in Rome, was later freed, and was banished from the city under Domitian. He taught after that at Nicopolis. The handbook’s example is still Socrates, and the thing it asks you to inspect is the view, not the event.