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Epictetus and the wand of Hermes
Did you know that Stoicism confers a special kind of magical power?
Stoicism is a powerful practical philosophy aiming not only at personal self-improvement, but at the betterment of the entire cosmopolis, the ideal universal city of human beings. And Epictetus of Hierapolis is, in my mind, the foremost exponent of such philosophy, the one that literally changed my life once I started reading his Discourses and began to digest his Enchiridion.
But did you know that Stoicism, especially in the version of Epictetus, actually gives you superpowers? To find out how, let’s take a deep dive into a short section of the Discourses, 3.20, tantalizingly entitled “That it is possible to turn every external circumstance to good account.”
As it often the case in the Discourses — a collection put together by his most famous pupil, Arrian of Nicomedia — Epictetus is talking to a group of students in his school in Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece, where he moved after being exiled by the emperor Domitian for being a member of the informal “Stoic opposition.” Epictetus begins the discussion by reminding his audience of a fundamental distinction:
“At a theoretical level, hardly anyone disputes the fact that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are in us, not in external things. No one describes the…
