Hellenistic/Roman
Epictetus
50–135 AD
“What then is the fruit of these opinions? ... release from perturbation, release from fear, freedom. For in these matters we must not believe the many, who say that free persons only ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers, who say that the educated only are free.”
Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia and taught Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis after gaining his freedom. His student Arrian recorded the and the brief . The teaching turns on a single division: some things are up to us (judgment, desire, choice), and the rest are not. Body, reputation, and fortune lie outside the rational faculty. Happiness, he holds, depends only on what that faculty can govern. Marcus Aurelius inherits this framework. Later moralists who treat freedom as an inward discipline answer to the same distinction.
In the Conversation
13 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Good and Evil
Good and evil lie only in our own judgments, never in external things.
Virtue and Vice
Virtue is the right use of impressions: living in accordance with nature and reason.
Happiness
Happiness is freedom, and freedom is wanting only what is in your power.
Courage
True courage requires distinguishing what lies within our power from what does not, meeting the former with caution and the latter with confident acceptance.
Duty
Duty is holding fast to the ruling principle of reason; the Stoic fulfills his station's obligations without disturbance.
Pleasure and Pain
Pleasure and pain are indifferent; what matters is the use we make of impressions, not the sensations themselves.
Habit
The discipline of assent is a practice: training oneself to respond to impressions correctly until correct response becomes second nature.
Temperance
True temperance is freedom through non-attachment — the Stoic does not moderate desire but refuses to depend on its objects.