Epictetus' Enchiridion: The Pocket Dagger Monks Rewrote and Whitman Kept

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Enchiridion of Epictetus takes its name from a Greek word meaning in the hand or ready to hand, a term for a dagger kept on the belt. Epictetus, a Stoic teacher of the early second century, taught only orally, so around 125 CE his student Arrian compressed roughly half of the surviving Discourses, plus material from lectures now lost, into 53 short chapters. A sixth-century commentary preserves Arrian's stated aim: keep only the teachings most useful and most necessary for freeing the mind. The book opens with the line between things that depend on us and things that do not, and chapter five argues that people are upset not by events but by their judgments about them, using Socrates' calm before death as proof.

The manual then traveled far from its Stoic origins. The Neoplatonist Simplicius wrote a commentary more than ten times its length and used chapter 27 to refute Manichaeism. Greek Christian writers adapted it three times for monastic life, crossing out Socrates and writing in Paul, and these Christianized versions survive in 10th and 11th century manuscripts, while the oldest manuscripts of the original Greek date only to the 14th century. Printed by 1497, it peaked in popularity between 1550 and 1750, was translated into French by Guillaume du Vair in 1586, and passed through the hands of Matteo Ricci, John Harvard, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman.

• Epictetus told students to expect splashing, noise and clothes thieves at the public baths so the chaos would not upset them.
• Chapter 29, a near copy of a passage on grueling Olympic training, seemed so out of place that some early editions dropped it.
• Niccolò Perotti translated the text into Latin in 1450 and Poliziano did so again in 1479.
• In 1710 Mary Wortley Montagu, age 21, taught herself enough Latin to produce her own translation.
• Walt Whitman found the book at 16, kept it all his life, and late in life called it sacred and precious to him.