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“... The​ first-century Stoic philosopher and teacher Epictetus was an enslaved person who succeeded in getting an education and, eventually, his freedom. Images of freedom, slavery and self-belonging (oikoiesis) recur in his teaching. ‘A slave is always praying to be set free,’ he writes. He evokes the horrors of enslavement by describing the suffering of caged animals and birds that refuse to eat in captivity and starve to death, though he also occasionally repeats a conventional set of ideas about slavery, claiming, for example, that runaway slaves are ‘cowards’, and that none of them ever dies of hunger ...”

“... ran roughly from 300 BC to the 200s AD), by sketching in its major figures – Chrysippus and Epictetus loom largest – and emphasising the scarcity of written texts from those figures, he provides a short overview of Stoic ethical thinking. The remainder of the book is designed to fill out this overview. The first part covers the general Stoic theory of ...”

“... best-known prose-writers. But his survey is not complete. Philosophers will regret the absence of Epictetus (the most translated of ancient philosophers) and of Sextus Empiricus (who perfected philosophical prose). Others will properly lament the fact that Greek scientific prose – Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galen – is ignored. But Mr Levi ...”

“... mixed and drank some McLean’s Brand Stomach Powder, undressed, got into bed, and began to read Epictetus.’ This delicate sentence is characteristic of Naipaul’s early comic writing: there is the lovely syncromesh of registers, Stomach Powder ennobled by Epictetus (and how nicely the sentence docks at its ...”

“... features remained on coins already in circulation, of course, but, according to the philosopher Epictetus, they were avoided wherever possible; in fact, if someone noticed Nero’s head among coins offered in payment he would shout out: ‘Take it away! It’s decayed and rotten! It’s not acceptable!’ Considering the uses to which his memory would be ...”

“... Bleak House. On Sterne the author is himself brilliant from his opening on, quoting everybody from Epictetus to Derrida, of whom he somewhat disapproves. Finally there are David Copperfield and Great Expectations. The first words of Copperfield – the chapter-heading ‘I AM BORN’ – are examined with the help of Wittgenstein, Pinget and many others. Here ...”

“... Conrad Hensley a workout. But when, in a vile dungeon, the victim discovers the Stoic works of Epictetus, he suddenly rises to his full height as a man, or chap. Whereas, in The Jungle, the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus works in a packing plant for horrible meat, is cheated out of livelihood and home, is subjected to the grossest humiliations, exists ...”

“... and Hindus. In China, Matteo Ricci translated into Mandarin the Greek teachings of the Stoic Epictetus, because he saw that the Stoic advocacy of moderation in all things might appeal to Confucian bureaucrats; he omitted to translate passages in which Epictetus praised Stoics who kept their sexual exploits with teenage ...”

“... as a young woman, McCarthy tells us, was Elizabeth Carter’s translation of the slave-philosopher Epictetus, from which one lesson to be drawn was that superiority could come from smiling your way through bad trouble. When his cruel master tortured him, as Carter told the story in her introduction, Epictetus ‘with great ...”

“... a few hours in this Brando’s company, his references to Kafka and Kierkegaard, Baudelaire and Epictetus, seem thoroughly, unostentatiously appropriate. The man is widely read and witty on an impressive variety of topics. He is wise, charming, at ease with himself and with the world. Why shouldn’t he be? Shoe-horned into Grobel’s slightly breathless ...”

“... Priscus and Thrasea Paetus protested against imperial abuses and paid the price; the ex-slave Epictetus never had enough worldly power to present a hypocritical contrast to his writings. As to his actual position at court, Seneca notoriously writes absolutely nothing about it; Nero himself only crops up in one essay, On Clemency. In the writings of his ...”

“... its development within broader or more specific historical contexts. A.A. Long’s recent book on Epictetus, like the work of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji on ancient philosophical therapy, reminds us of something lost in the modern academy and not at all prominent in Kenny, but regarded by all major Greek and Roman thinkers from Socrates on as the ...”

“... indeed his embrace of it. Seneca takes the view that ‘hemlock made Socrates great’, while Epictetus found the memory of Socrates in death more useful to the world than the things that he did and said when alive. Much of Wilson’s book treats the subsequent reception of Socrates from late antiquity to the present. The church father Tertullian claimed ...”

“... for her Essay on Shakespear (1769). Elizabeth Carter produced a notably successful translation of Epictetus (1758) as well as several editions of her poems, and Hester Mulso Chapone pulled off something of a bestseller with her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). Yet for all their mental energy and ambition, the first generation of bluestockings ...”

“... to Greek or to early Roman Stoicism but to the later, more narrowly ethical version of Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. This was less a system of ideas than an attitude of mind: an attitude which, when spiced with a dash of Platonism, could be made to look almost identical to the Platonist interpretation of Christianity. Stoics thought that if ...”