Fifty-three short chapters. About 9,000 words in Greek, maybe thirty pages. You can read it in an hour, and the point is that you do not read it once.

The Enchiridion is Epictetus' practical teaching compressed into something portable — encheiridion means a thing held in the hand, and was also the word for a dagger. It was compiled by his student Arrian from the same lectures that produced the longer Discourses.

What it is for

The first line contains most of the book:

> Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.

Everything after develops the consequences. The argument behind it belongs to Epictetus and is on his page; what the handbook adds is the application, chapter by chapter, to specific situations a person actually meets.

The chapters group loosely. The opening ones establish the dichotomy and what follows from it. A middle run deals with other people — grief, insult, the behavior of those around you. A later run covers the conduct of a person in training: when to speak, how to eat, what to do when someone praises you. The closing chapters are about persistence.

The compression is the design. This is a book meant to be carried, opened at any page, and reread until the responses it describes become available under pressure rather than only in reflection.

Key chapters

  • 1 — some things are up to us, others are not. The whole book in a sentence.
  • 5 — people are disturbed not by events but by their judgments about events.
  • 8 — do not seek to have things happen as you wish; wish them to happen as they do, and your life will go well.
  • 11 — never say of anything that you have lost it, only that you have given it back.
  • 17 — you are an actor in a play whose part is chosen by someone else; your business is to act it well.
  • 33 — the detailed prescription for daily conduct.
  • 43 — everything has two handles, one by which it can be carried and one by which it cannot.
  • 48 — the difference between the person making progress and the layman.

Which one to read

The Enchiridion gives you the instructions without the reasoning. The Discourses give you Epictetus arguing, interrupting and mocking, which is better company and four times the length.

Start here if you want the practice. Go to the Discourses when the instructions stop being obvious and you want to know why he thinks they hold — which happens quickly, because the handbook asserts a great deal it does not defend.

The full text is hosted here, in T. W. Higginson's translation, at the Reading Room.