Epictetus · c. 50 – c. 135 CE
Enchiridion 14 — Epictetus
Translation by George Long (1877)
Epictetus, Enchiridion 14
If you would have your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, you are silly; for you would have the things which are not in your power to be in your power, and the things which belong to others to be yours. So if you would have your slave to be free from faults, you are a fool; for you would have badness not to be badness, but something else. But if you wish not to fail in your desires, you are able to do that. Practise then this which you are able to do. He is the master of every man who has the power over the things, which another person wishes or does not wish, the power to confer them on him or to take them away. Whoever then wishes to be free, let him neither wish for anything nor avoid anything which depends on others: if he does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.
Cite this passage
Epictetus, Enchiridion 14, tr. George Long (1877)
https://whatwouldstoicsdo.com/passage/enchiridion/14
Epictetus, Enchiridion and Fragments, tr. George Long (1877). Text: Standard Ebooks (CC0). Sources and licences
In plain English
AI-written notesWishing that your family and friends will live forever, or that other people will have no faults, means wanting things outside your power to be in your power. The one thing you can succeed at is not being frustrated in your own desires, and whoever controls what you want or fear is your master, so freedom means wanting and avoiding nothing that depends on others.
Themes and situations
- What is in our control
- Desire and craving
- Freedom
- Grief and mourning
- Acceptance and fate
- Bereavement
- Anxiety about the future
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