Review: Discourses and Selected Writings

Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's a section of Discourses titled "On the Treatment of Slaves". I understand there is a nuanced difference between the slaves of Ancient Greece and the brutality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but having a class of people with no rights is still not a good thing. Still, there seems to be a lack of self-awareness on Epictetus' part where he rants on and on about freedom but seems to be okay with a slave cleaning his house. I point this out to explain the overall tone of this work, a journal of sporadically good advice mixed in heavily with outdated thinking.

I could probably write a companion work to Discourses highlighting every ounce of the archaic, but I would mostly be repeating myself throughout most of it. As the one example I'll give, Epictetus makes several points about how illness can't hurt you because your body is meaningless when compared to the mind. While I won't dispute the overall point, the thing is, in Epictetus' time, if you got sick and didn't get well on your own, you probably just died. Sure they had doctors, but their solution to everything was leeches. I don't oppose the mindset of Stoic thought, if I did I wouldn't be reading Discourses, but with Epictetus there always felt there was a lack of flexibility.

There's also an underlying religious element to Discourses along with a strong believer in fate. When shit happens, I've always been a 'it is what it is' kind of person, but Epictetus leans heavily into it being 'God's will'. On a practical level, those mindsets aren't that different as both allow you to accept whatever happens with resolve, but how you frame it does matter. The way Epictetus frames his thoughts allows him to drift, occasionally, into self-righteousness. Example: There's a bit about how he thinks you should avoid sex until marriage. While I could argue that sex is a skill like any other that needs to be practiced (Queening, tickling the pearl, etc.), honestly, Epictetus comes off as believing this not because of Stoic thought, but because he's just a prude.

The phrasing is also entirely intended for cis-gendered males of a certain class while the translation is so obviously done by a British person(s) that I felt myself colonized just by purchasing it. But I won't even bother unpacking all of that.

Discourses is basically a couple hundred pages of a guy arguing with himself. However, despite certain outdated aspects, there is good to be had here once you cut through all the stuffiness. He hits upon several gems of wisdom but also suffers from not being able to recognize when he's wrong about something. As a stoic tome, I would say it's required reading. As anything else, I would describe it as an extra-long opinion article in the New York Times. Something intelligent and well-written, but you'll end up turning up your nose to it more than once.

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