Handbook (Enchiridion)

A short manual of Stoic practice, compiled by Epictetus's student Arrian from the teaching recorded at greater length in the Discourses. Epictetus, born a slave, taught at Nicopolis in Greece after philosophers were expelled from Rome. The Handbook opens with its central distinction: some things are up to us, namely our judgements, impulses, desires and aversions, and everything else, including body, property, reputation and office, is not. Distress comes from treating what is not up to us as if it were. In some fifty short chapters it applies this to grief, insult, ambition, illness and the roles we play, advising us to remember what kind of thing we love, to behave in life as at a banquet, taking only what is passed to us, and to see that what upsets people is not events but their judgements about events.

It is the most compact and practical statement of Stoic ethics, and its distinction between what is and is not up to us has shaped everything from early Christian spirituality to cognitive behavioural therapy.