The Book of Epictetus 4 · 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)
4.1Never say of anything, I have lost it. Say, I have given it back.
4.2Your child has died. He is given back.
4.3Your field was seized. That too is given back.
4.4Someone says: the man who seized my field is a wicked man.
4.5I say: that is his affair. Whose hands it passes through is not yours to settle.
4.6What is yours is to hold it, while you hold it, as you would hold another man’s property.
4.7As a traveller holds the pillow at the inn: he uses it, he does not carve his name in it, and he does not take it away.
4.8Someone says: is that not a cold way to live?
4.9I say: kiss your child and say inwardly, tomorrow you may be gone — and you will kiss him more slowly.
4.10This is not telling you to weep in advance. Weeping in advance pays twice for one thing. (cf. The Book of Seneca 4.10)
4.11It is telling you to know, while you are holding it, that you are holding it.
4.12The heaviest grief is not losing. It is losing after never once thinking you might.
4.13That man loses two things: the thing itself, and his whole account of the world.