The Enchiridion

It means something kept ready in the hand — a handbook — and the same Greek word also names a dagger. Both senses suit the book: it is a manual to keep about you and use, and a compact weapon for the mind against fear and disturbance. Arrian gave the title to his boiling-down of Epictetus's teaching into some fifty short rules a person could carry and practise.

Desire reaches for what we want; aversion turns from what we dislike. The handbook's core drill is to confine both to what is up to us: desire only your own right judgment and action, and be averse only to what lies in your power to avoid. Misery comes from desiring or fearing externals, which the world controls. Retraining these two impulses is the practical heart of the whole manual.

Because the Enchiridion is doctrine stripped to what a beginner can practise on the next ordinary day. Rather than argue the theory, it drills conduct in concrete moments — how to lose a cup or a child, take an insult, go to the baths, behave at a dinner. Starting with trivial losses trains the same acceptance a person will need for grave ones, which is why its practicality carried it further than the fuller Discourses ever went.

Epictetus compares life to a play in which the author — not you — chooses your role and its length; your only task is to act well whatever part is assigned. It concentrates the handbook's teaching: you do not control your circumstances, station or lifespan, but the manner of playing them is wholly yours. Dignity lies in performing the given role well, not in wishing for a different one.

An unlikely range. Monks rewrote it with God in the Stoic's place and kept it as a rule; Simplicius wrote a long commentary in the sixth century; Renaissance and later readers made it a manual of composure. It has been in print since Poliziano's Latin version of 1497. In the twentieth century the captured pilot James Stockdale lived by it through seven years as a prisoner of war.