The Book of Epictetus 3 · The daily drill. Written down by Arrian, from his lecture room
Epictetus, born at Hierapolis in Phrygia about the year 55, died at Nicopolis in Greece about 135. He was born a slave, belonging to a freedman of Nero’s household. While still a slave he was allowed to attend lectures, and was later freed. He was lame in one leg. About 93 the philosophers were expelled from Rome and he went to Greece, opened a school at Nicopolis, and stayed there for the rest of his life. The fence is already set in Covenant 5, and this book does not set it again. What this book says is where the fence runs: not around events, but around your judgement of them. He wrote nothing himself; what is here his student Arrian took down in the lecture room. (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.48)
3.1Every matter has two handles. By one it can be carried, by the other it cannot.
3.2Your brother has done you a wrong.
3.3One handle is: he wronged me.
3.4Take hold there and you cannot lift it. Lift it once and you are angry once; lift it for ten years and you are angry for ten years.
3.5The other handle is: he is my brother, we were brought up together.
3.6Take hold there and it lifts.
3.7Someone says: this is fooling yourself. He plainly did wrong me.
3.8I have not said he did not. The two handles are on the same matter, and both are true.
3.9I say only this: what is true is more than one thing, and you must always take hold of one of them.
3.10Which one you take is up to you. It is one of the very few things that are.
3.11I am not telling you to take a false handle. A false handle breaks, and when it breaks you fall harder.
3.12I am telling you to choose, among the handles that are all true, the one that will carry.
3.13It is not that most people have no other handle to choose. It is that it never occurred to them that there was another.
3.14From today, before anything else, count: how many handles has this matter? (cf. The Highest Covenant 2.5)
3.15In the moment you finish counting, you are already freer than you were.