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Erlend Macgillivray on the Life and Times of Epictetus (Episode 112)
737 Plays11 months ago
In this conversation, Michael Tremblay and Erlend MacGillivray take a deep dive into Stoic history and the life of Epictetus.
It’s an excellent discussion for anyone looking to enrich their knowledge of ancient history and situate the Stoics in their time.
https://schoolofepictetus.substack.com/
(01:20) Getting Into Stoicism
(05:33) Epictetus
(10:26) Epictetus's World
(13:34) Philosophy in Rome
(20:51) Epictetus's Students
(45:40) Stoics and Lay People
(01:03:30) Popularization vs Elitism
(01:10:08) What's Next
***
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Transcript
Misconceptions from Poor Introductions
00:00:00
Speaker
And me as a specialist, I'm very acutely aware that no, something is not better than nothing. Because if you, if you take out one of these, that is, if you take a bad introductory class, which you have no ability to tell the difference about, because you're a beginner, or you, you take the wrong thing from the introductory class, then you end up in this kind of Socratic issue where you think you have knowledge where you don't have knowledge.
Introduction to Stoa Conversations
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. In this podcast, Caleb Ontiveros and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism.
00:00:29
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Erlan McGilvray. Dr. McGilvray received his PhD from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland in New Testament and Greco-Roman history. He is a historian by training and studies what we can learn about stoicism from history and what stoicism can teach us about the ancient world as well.
Erlan McGilvray's Historical Approach to Stoicism
00:00:48
Speaker
His first book is titled Epictetus and Lay People, A Stoic Stance Towards Non-Stoics and covers how historical stoics treated those that were not philosophers.
00:00:59
Speaker
In this conversation, we cover the life, time, and place of Epictetus. This conversation was a real treat for me, and it's perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the relationship between the ancient world and Epictetus as a person. I
McGilvray's Journey into Stoicism
00:01:13
Speaker
hope you enjoy. Hi, Erlen. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you so much. How are you? Yeah, I'm doing great. Looking forward to talking with you today.
00:01:24
Speaker
This is really exciting because I love talking about Epictetus, as anybody who listens to this show will know. So it's great to do a deep dive into Epictetus with you. And we've chatted before in the past, we've talked about Epictetus and I thought it would be a great opportunity to bring you on the show and dive into some of
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, Epictetus's philosophy, but also questions around his history, his pedagogy, really, um, the reception and role of his school and him as an educator, really all of these things that, that you're an expert on.
Stoicism's Role in Managing Anxiety and Integrity
00:02:00
Speaker
But before we kick things off, for those listening, I was wondering if you could provide an overview of how you got into stoicism. What really attracted you to stoicism in the first place? Sure. Well.
00:02:13
Speaker
Really, by background, I'm a historian in particular of the classical world, so the early first and second centuries. And I was reading a book by Rodney Stark as a historian. And he had a little aside in one of his books where he mentioned how important ancient philosophy was.
00:02:36
Speaker
But how when scholars sit out to study ancient philosophy, they, of course, they tend to be philosophers and they tend to not so much recognize that ancient philosophers were, of course, in their own historical context and their little philosophical bubbles that needs to be explored just as you would with any other historical group to understand them. And I just find that a fascinating idea, particularly if you're someone who likes research, you're always looking for
00:03:04
Speaker
something that hasn't been fully researched. And it just has a fascinating area. So that took me into that. Initially, I was attracted to materialism as a historical movement. And I did a master's by research thesis on that, which seemed to go quite well.
00:03:22
Speaker
And then I thought, right, I'll carry this on to PhD level and I'll choose a different group. And I chose stoicism for various reasons. And I'm glad I did. I mean, also, I know your listeners, but I'm sure, no, it's a very...
00:03:42
Speaker
helpful philosophy for life, just as it was back then, as it is now.
Epictetus: Life and Education
00:03:47
Speaker
So I get the advantage of studying a historical movement, getting the joy from that, and also learning from its wisdom, which is great, as opposed to some of my friends were exploring the ancient Sadducees, or looking at ancient cellars of
00:04:04
Speaker
various treated dudes around the Roman Republic and stuff like that which is interesting but it doesn't particularly add to your daily life that much. So in a short or in a nutshell that's how I got into it.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yes, you get to double-dip a bit, which is also why I feel like getting to study stoicism. I feel the same way. How are some of the ways that stoicism has affected your life, or I guess that philosophy as a way of life aspect has changed the way you viewed things as you've gotten more into it? Well, it's helped with anxiety. I think all of us do have anxiety to different degrees and at different moments in our lives. Of course, it's very handy to have these
00:04:47
Speaker
these sayings and teachings in the back of your mind to pull upon. And I think so from, you know, personal integrity, again, we'll all face moments where we, you know, we can act against our integrity or we can feel that. Well, this does very much believe in having role models. That was part of their therapeutic exercises, which I've tried to remember and, you know, think, well,
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, what would Epithetus, Oarchus Rheus, et cetera, do?
Epictetus's Path from Slavery to Philosophy
00:05:21
Speaker
And so I find that support, you know, morally speaking. So it's, yeah, dealing with anxiety and then reminding like, no, that isn't the person I am and I'm not going to act. And even if no one knows that I'm going to act in that way, I'm not going to do it. Yeah, that's great.
00:05:35
Speaker
So switching now to Epictetus, I think you nailed it on the head, and I think I'm guilty of this, frankly. You can look at Epictetus and once there's this mind in a vacuum, you study it as like it's this abstract thing that hasn't developed from its time and place, that its language isn't referring to particular things, that it's not responding to a particular cultural context or historical environment. And I know that that's part of, I would say,
00:06:04
Speaker
one of the limitations of a philosophy education. Really excited to talk about the history of Epictetus here with you. To start us off, could you provide an overview of the life of Epictetus or at least what we know about it? Because I know there's some problems with sources and confidence in that regard.
The Discourses and Handbook of Epictetus
00:06:23
Speaker
So we know he was born in what is now modern-day Turkey, but back then was Asia Minor, particularly in the region of Phrygia. He was born or became a slave in his youth and he ended up in Rome in the House of Aphrodites, who himself had been enslaved, but he was a freedman of the Emperor Clodius, and then
00:06:46
Speaker
also have a very prominent place in history of Epaphroditus, being basically the Emperor Nero's main kind of confidant. In fact, he was the one who he entrusted to stab him to death, and I think there's a group of just about three of them surrounding the Emperor Nero and his death, and he was one of them. And Epitetus ended up in his household, which he, there's a wonderful article by
00:07:13
Speaker
like Miller Ferguson, Epitetus in the Imperial Court, and he just scours through the discourses looking for little anecdotes that Epitetus makes from his time in the household of Epaphroditus. And so that's fascinating. We know that Epitetus attended the lectures of Mosonius Rufus, who was a Roman philosopher of Stoicism.
00:07:38
Speaker
Which was unusual, we're almost not actually a seat of great philosophical teaching. The tenders to philosophers tended to go round about the Greek East for reasons I'll probably get into later on. But anyway, Missonius Rufus was there. He seemed to be quite a popular philosopher and Epitetus for reasons we don't know, but he was basically a student of Missonius Rufus. He then became freed at some point.
00:08:05
Speaker
and Eppity to set up his own school. We know that while he was in Rome, he did recount at one time in the discourses, he would go around trying to proffer people with philosophical advice, and he said he actually thought that didn't tend to work very well. But he ended up crossing the Adriatic, going to the fairly new city of Nicopolis, actually its name means new city. He set up a school there. He's pretty much one of the only philosophers we know who actually was there. It's quite a
00:08:36
Speaker
Quite an old choice.
00:08:38
Speaker
to base himself there and he lived and communicated his philosophy there and thankfully he had a student Arian who then became famous for writing all kinds of writings, particularly Alexander the Great etc and he studied there and wrote up his lecture notes and he says in the introduction to it he thinks the lecture these are private lecture notes that somehow got into the public which actually happened quite a lot in antiquity lots of writers complained about that
00:09:10
Speaker
And we have about half of these remaining, and these are the discourses of Epitetus, and then we have the Handbook, or the Enchiridion as well, and that was round about 110 to 115 AD.
Philosophy's Mixed Reception in Rome
00:09:22
Speaker
So we have the lecture notes from that time, and we can date it pretty closely actually from contemporary references Epitetus makes to various contemporary wars and things that we're having at that time. And
00:09:36
Speaker
After that, you're relying on things such as, I think it's in the Suda, it mentions that Epitetus adopted the child of his own age and broke him up. I don't know if it's true, but that he was potentially visited by the Emperor Hadrian, that would be after the time of the discourses. And we know he was visited by lots of people at the discourses themselves.
00:09:58
Speaker
show us that. He became something of a kind of minor celebrity in his day for people who were interested in philosophy and there were statues placed about him in various places. And then his school, at this time philosophical schools didn't actually tend to put down roots as they did in ancient Greece. It tended to be once the leader of it passed away, that's it.
00:10:22
Speaker
kind of gone, so he didn't pass it on to anyone else. Yeah, that was well done. That was a lot to capture in a short amount. I want to dig deep dive into parts of that. My first question was about
00:10:38
Speaker
where Epictetus was born, what is now modern-day Turkey, what's the historical context there of the area that he's from, and how might he have made it to Rome?
Students of Epictetus and Roman Educational Norms
00:10:53
Speaker
What would that process look like? He was born to Rome. Rome is an Asian minor, but he's born in a region called Phrygia, which is a fascinating
00:11:05
Speaker
area of Asia Minor. So it's a heavily Hellenized area, so it's very Greek. I thought the Phrygians have their own kind of proud history. It's, I'm asking how he, you know, his slavery and him as a slave. Phrygia was actually famous for its slaves and it's
00:11:27
Speaker
In the Roman world, you had stereotypes about where your slave is from, you expect different things from them. And so from Phrygia, they were actually quite highly prized, actually, particularly young boys for some reason, I don't know, handsome or talented and things like this.
00:11:42
Speaker
So it's not surprising to me that Epitetus was probably either enslaved as a boy, I think the suit actually says was born enslaved, but he was certainly enslaved as a youngster, if not from birth. So he was from there.
00:11:57
Speaker
It was particularly religious area. We know it was heavily known for lots of sacrifices a lot and Epictetus actually constantly references sacrifices. It might be something he's very familiar with from his childhood. So that's Virginia. The main city in it is Hierapolis, which the pseudo says Epictetus. It doesn't actually say who's born there. It says of Hierapolis, which is intriguing.
00:12:27
Speaker
I think it's plausible, anyway, that he might not have actually been born there, and actually his name is actually an ethnem, which means that Epictetus is actually potentially referencing the area he's from, because just not too far from Hierapolis is the region of
00:12:42
Speaker
Epitetus. And slave names were often, actually, ethnums, which meant that you would get called after where you're from. So it could be that Epitetus actually, you'll often have it said and do it because it means acquired. So it's a reference to his enslaved status. Here's my new acquired slave, which it could be. And I do have a catalogue somewhere of different slave names of
00:13:12
Speaker
and the name Ephetetus, et cetera. But it could very well be that he's actually from the region of Ephetetus, which, as I say, was very close to Pyropolis. That is within Phrygia. So, he was
00:13:26
Speaker
raised there, he would have almost certainly have spoken
Roman Elites' Ambivalence Towards Philosophy
00:13:29
Speaker
Greek from youth. That's what age he went to Rome, we're not sure. Great. I might just get us to go back through the summary just in more detail because I mean, I'm finding this absolutely fascinating. In terms of philosophy in Rome,
00:13:44
Speaker
You said it was not really known for its philosophical strength at the time, so it's surprising that Epictetus received an education from Missonius Rufus there, but can you speak more, I guess, to the reception of philosophy or the treatment of philosophy at the time or anything we know about Epictetus's relationship with Missonius Rufus?
00:14:05
Speaker
So, as for his relationship with Messonnier-Srouf, I mean, he's obviously very fond of him. He references him quite a lot, always approvingly, including times when Rufus, you know, would really have changed his mind about things or had a witty response. So, he was obviously deeply attached to Messonnier-Sroufus, or was intellectually, certainly. Yeah, as for Rome, I mean, actually, Epictetus has a great antidote within the
00:14:34
Speaker
The discourses, was it Italicus? I'm maybe remembering the precise name because he's not actually that well known today. He said this was a man who was reputed to be the best of the Roman philosophers at the time. And to paraphrase, Titis has a scenario where Italicus basically points his, you know, almost stabs his finger at him and basically is saying, like, you care about philosophy too much. And he's kind of, you know, getting really angry and jabbing his finger at him.
00:15:03
Speaker
And he says, this is meant to be the best philosopher in Rome, you know, this is and he's, you know, he's, you know, the Romans had a, and it changes over time. But I mean, so in his youth, it's still somewhat youngish in or still not its infancy, but possibly still kind of embedding itself. So the Romans tended to be a bit
00:15:27
Speaker
lukewarm with philosophy. I mean, some of them have it on their gravestones. I died at 60 and I'd never met a philosopher as like a kind of statement, great success for some reason. So some of them loved it. Others of them just really detested it. They thought it was competing with traditional Roman attributes and traditions. They had the Malzmalum, which was basically looked to the ancestors, looked to the Roman stories.
00:15:56
Speaker
philosophy just seemed to be this kind of foreign computing idea, so this kind of clash of culture kind of ideas. But for most of them, they tended to
00:16:08
Speaker
greatly value it. They wanted to be around philosophers. They would often have, if you were rich anyway, it wasn't uncommon to have like a household philosopher that would just live in your house and, you know, reclaim them philosophy, you know, collect them. And it was seen as a way of showing your educators and your urbane and civilized and many, many, many
00:16:29
Speaker
Roman politicians and senators were associated in different ways with philosophy. But it tended to, they got very suspicious if it became too deep. And there's a trope within ancient writings about angry fathers who've sent their sons off to study with philosophers. And they stay, you know, more than four years or five years. And it looks like actually, they're wanting to become philosophers rather than being
00:16:59
Speaker
you know, senators or, you know, running the great political estates. And the fathers start to get, they threaten all kinds of things to do with disinheritance and this kind of stuff. There's at least four or five references to that happening. It became something of a trope. So in general, Romans were okay with philosophy.
00:17:22
Speaker
But it wasn't to get too deep. You have to keep it into perspective, and it shouldn't cross over into becoming like an obsession. He also references a room basically doing that, going up to his students and saying, now listen, it's fine to be there for a few years when you're young, but let it go. It's kind of, I don't know, today, like sometimes academics get it. It's okay going to university doing your undergraduate degree,
00:17:51
Speaker
Do you really need to stay on and do your PhD? I mean, really, you're just kind of dossing around. You get a real job. You know, I had that from people like, why are you still there? Why are you still studying this? I mean, this is no longer, you know, you need to enter the
Genuine vs. Superficial Philosophical Engagement
00:18:06
Speaker
world of work now. It's kind of, to draw a parallel, that would be kind of what was happening.
00:18:13
Speaker
I think it's a really compelling parallel. Anybody who studied at least philosophy, I'm sure the same thing with history, any humanities degree, you're getting that very, very quickly.
00:18:29
Speaker
Is there a sense that it's a practical issue or your head is just up in the clouds? You just sit around talking about ideas while Romans do? What is the aversion or is it that you're only affording to go and study with Epictetus if you're from a very rich family? There's these familial obligations. I guess where is the resentment coming from if they're also the people that will have a philosopher in the house?
00:19:00
Speaker
In the late Republic Early Empire, and if you're looking to people like Seneca, the Roman elites would never call themselves philosophers. And he points out several times where Seneca basically almost goes right to the line and says, I'm a philosopher but has to step back. And so it's seen as okay to be knowledgeable and to dabble in it.
00:19:24
Speaker
even to kind of specialise in it, but you're not a philosopher. And it's kind of stated, but I mean, for elite Romans, they're very status aware. And so, you know, it was
00:19:41
Speaker
Outside of farming and being engaged in that, you couldn't really make your money elsewhere. Often, you would. You'd have freedmen who do it for you. But it's just not appropriate to be dabbling in wine merchants and stuff, or trading wine. They have a quite restrictive idea of the world. I don't know, going back a couple of centuries ago to that, I'm thinking of the British aristocracy. This is appropriate, that is not appropriate. It's just a very clear-cut sense of what you should be doing.
00:20:11
Speaker
And so there was a sense in which to be a philosopher as like a vocation is a Greek thing. It's for the Greeks. And we can learn from it, we can be interested in it. We can even support it and we can even fund it, like the making of books, but we don't actually become a philosopher like ourselves. It's a step too far, it's crossing the line. So that seems to be where it's kind of coming from.
00:20:37
Speaker
We do know that some of Epictetus's students expressed a desire to start their own schools, and he keeps telling them not to, but the reason is because he says, you're not ready yet. As for whether that would have caused tension with the families. Yeah, this is great because that's exactly what I was thinking, it's cutting both ways. It's the environment that Epictetus is discovering philosophy in, but it's also the environment and the culture that is informing who he's teaching. This Roman reception of philosophy is
00:21:05
Speaker
It's both Epictetus' experience, but also the context that he's teaching in. Let's talk a bit about what his students would be like or their thoughts about philosophy. The ones we're aware of, they all seem to be Greek. He references once, maybe twice.
00:21:26
Speaker
Like this might be problematic for you because what we're reading, what we're talking about here is in Latin. Or he references just like you have trouble dealing with Latin.
00:21:37
Speaker
Which, by the way, is fascinating just within the scholarship of Nicopolis, because this is a sub-debate, but there's a big debate amongst historians about, was Nicopolis more of a Greek city or a Roman city, and what language did they speak? But we won't get into that. But this is a really interesting thing for the scholars of Nicopolis, who sometimes overlook Epitetus. He says, at least the students, anyway, that they are very much speaking Greek. They actually struggle with Latin. And it's been argued before Constantine founded
00:22:05
Speaker
or change Byzantium into Constantinople. A lot of the Eastern Romans, so the Empire is kind of divided into half, the Eastern part of the Empire is going to be speaking in Greek. And they could kind of get by with not speaking Latin that much, or you know, just to a passing level. And so Epitetus's students seem to, he references it just as, you know, just as you guys struggle with Latin. So he seems to be coming from, from Greek-speaking areas. And
00:22:33
Speaker
And any cities where he implies they're from, for example, we know one of his students, he basically says he's from Thebes and things like this. And if he talks about the places they know, it's all Greek places.
Nicopolis: A Hub for Philosophical Study
00:22:44
Speaker
And a few times, at least once, he references their fear of going to Rome, like being settled in Rome.
00:22:54
Speaker
and their fear as well. He says one student has a fear that he won't become a senator and another student has a fear that he will as in the pressure of it. A good deal of them anyway would seem to be actually aged 16 to 20 and they've been sent by their parents and they've been sent to get the kind of the highest level of education they can
00:23:20
Speaker
and their parents are hoping that they then go to Rome and fulfill various functions there. That seems to be the, and there will be exceptions to that, but that seems to be the kind of the general kind of reason that the students are there. We know that philosophy, the earliest we kind of really hear about it is age 16.
00:23:41
Speaker
But it tends to be people who were around about 1820. I think Cicero was quite late. He was 25. That was repeated to be quite late age to go off and study philosophy. So you're dealing with young men. You're dealing with quite affluent men. If not right at the top of society, you're talking about kind of, you know, getting up there.
00:24:02
Speaker
So in Discourses 3, he says, so the nearest parallel is students who have just gone off, you know, in our own day, gone to a foreign city or foreign country to study. And you can kind of see this nice parallel. He says, his students say, but of having no one to cook for you, and no serving to do the shopping, no other serving to put your shoes on, and no one to dress you, no one to give you a massage, and no others to follow after you, etc, etc.
00:24:29
Speaker
You know, he's basically, these are students of the elite and they've gone abroad. And for many of them, they're without all the white coterie, the wide range of family servants that are surrounding them, booting their clothes on, helping them bathe, that kind of stuff. And he's saying, you're coming to class and you're worried about this, right? You know, you've just left home, they're 16 to 20 year old, you know, young men. And they're without all the comfort of home.
00:24:55
Speaker
Although at least in one passage he does reference some of his students who actually have brought some slaves with them. So there are some students with their own slaves, but for some of them they're away without slaves and they find that terribly hard.
00:25:09
Speaker
And the default when he's talking to them is this is someone who's talking to people from great financial backgrounds. The default is remember when your nurses would school you or actually school the rock that you hit and be like bad rock and things like that.
00:25:30
Speaker
to the—when they were children. There's just this presumption that, you know, they—or the awareness that they've come from that kind of setting where, you know, they've had their own nurse following them around the place, or nanny, as we would more often say. They have their own slaves. They're used to comfort, and they're
00:25:49
Speaker
away from home for the first time, and he warns one of them as well, don't put your fancy clothes out in the window because, you know, you're not living in such, your neighbour opposite, he hasn't got as much money, he's going to steal it. And so he's also kind of having to kind of, kind of daddy them in a bit as well, it kind of occasionally will slip into lecture notes in amongst the, you know,
00:26:09
Speaker
at giving an exposition of philosophy. You get these, these might don't, you know, don't be your clue up there. They'll get stolen. And yes, I know it's tough without your family slaves around you, but you know, here's the philosophical perspective. So, so these are our young, ambitious students. We know that many of them, and this was the case in ancient, in the ancient Roman Empire. There's lots and lots of descriptions of fathers touring around the schools. So they would go with their sons,
00:26:37
Speaker
around the schools and to check out which one they wanted to go to and you see that in the discourses you have and Epitetus gets very angry at him because he thinks the father is a bit of a philosophical oaf but he there's a father touring the school and he can't you know he just walks into that room to see if okay well i send my son here and that's that's very common that tended to be the way it would would be it's a very important decision where you send your your son for four or five years
00:27:03
Speaker
and kind of like a university tour today so you know the parents go along or the father goes along and susses it out and then you send your son there. They would be coming from around the eastern
00:27:19
Speaker
overwhelmingly becoming from the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.
Epictetus's Strategic Choice of Nicopolis
00:27:23
Speaker
We know that as well from Richard Gully, who catalogued, it's an amazing, I wish I could have done it. Since the 1980s, I don't know if you're familiar with Richard Gully's work, but since the 1980s, he's collected every epigraphical, so that means anything written in stone, which is often where you have references to philosophers. Every time a philosopher in antiquity was mentioned in stone, and I think also in texts,
00:27:45
Speaker
He added it to his dictionary of ancient philosophers, which is in French. But since the 1980s until about 10 years ago, so it took decades for him to do it. And then he was able to do statistical analysis.
00:28:01
Speaker
and overwhelmingly when you look at where these people who say I'm a philosopher and where they studied, overwhelmingly it's from the east part of the Mediterranean and they tend to travel, so they don't tend to stay in their home cities, so it's very much kind of international.
00:28:16
Speaker
within the Roman Empire, but traveling from all over. So an Epitetus twice has to do with homesickness. He says you're missing your home, you're missing your home city, you're missing the familiar baths that you go to. You don't think the baths are as nice as your ones in home. These are young, ambitious men away from home for the first time and they're missing their surroundings. For many of them, they're missing having quite the same level of comfort.
00:28:45
Speaker
This is just fascinating to me. I'm absolutely loving this.
00:28:51
Speaker
What do we know about the city of Nicopolis? If the boys are not from the city, what might they be coming into? What are they finding themselves in? You talked about this might be a place where people will steal your nice clothes. Is this a place where there's a tension with Epictetus' school or integration with Epictetus' school? I'm just curious if you could paint a picture of the city itself.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really fascinating place. I had a, I was meant to go there just before COVID hit. I booked a hotel room and I was going to walk around the Capolis, but then COVID hit, so I couldn't. And then just various reasons haven't been able to go back. It's one of the largest archaeological sites in Greece, but it gets overlooked because it's not Athens. It's not, you know, I don't know, Mount Olympus or something. And unless you're really into Roman history or you're into Stoicism, but again,
00:29:47
Speaker
And it's understandable, but if you're into stoicism and philosophy, you kind of don't think of them as historical characters so much. You're interested in the philosophy, obviously. But so it tends to get overlooked, but the...
00:29:57
Speaker
It was built across the Adriatic from Rome. It was connected to Rome. It would often be, depending on the sailing routes, it would be your last stop before you get into Rome. And by the way, the ancient seafaring is quite an interesting way. Epictetus talks about it a lot. When you understand the ancient seafaring, you know why he does. Anyway.
00:30:18
Speaker
So you have a lot of people, there's about three or five visitors who come to Epitetus at school. They say they're just stopping by. And when you stop by, you're there for a couple of days, you go see the famous philosopher. So they step into the school just to see him.
00:30:32
Speaker
But it was founded by the Emperor Augustus, and it's a Greek idea actually, but it's a victory city. And if you think about the most famous victory city, which still existed, it still has its name Alexandria in Egypt, named after Alexander. I think there's about 40 or 50 of these Alexanders, and we've still got one.
00:30:54
Speaker
Basically, if you have a famous victory, you create a city nearby it or on it, the site, and you name it after yourself or something to do with the victory. And Nicopolis is named after one of the greatest battles in antiquity, certainly in Roman history, which is the Battle of Axiom, and that brought to the end
00:31:14
Speaker
the rebellions after Julius Caesar, you know, crossing the Rubicon, and then all the configuration between the senators and the piece of the Pulitzer protein, Julius Caesar, and then Octavian slash Augustus, and then Octavian versus Mark Antony, et cetera. And so that just, you know, for decades, this was
00:31:37
Speaker
convulsing the Roman world and the Battle of Axiom which was a sea battle brought it to an end and then you have the Pax Romana existing for hundreds of years and it's the Battle of Axiom so it's a kind of it's a kind of d-day or whatever kind of you know well-known battle we might think about today it has that resonance
00:31:57
Speaker
And Nicopolis is a city built to commemorate it. And it was a huge tourist site. You can actually go there today. You can go to the top of the hill where Augustus had his tents looking out to the, what would be the, the Adriatic, the Battle of Acts the night before. And they had, they captured these huge ores from Mark Antony's fleet. And they had that they built this basically like a museum. So you can go up and you can look around it. So it was, it was a victory city and it was,
00:32:26
Speaker
Built largely actually in a, it's a fusion of Greek and Roman. And you can see it in like the Roman baths, but then it has a Greek shaped theater, which still exists. I mean, it's heavily degraded, but you can walk amongst it. It's actually quite.
00:32:43
Speaker
well preserved, actually. And by the way, Epictetus references it, and he references events that happened in there, and he references the crowd getting angry at the ruler of Epirius, which is the region Nicopolis was in, because he'd committed adultery and things like that. So Epictetus is, you know, this is part of the city that Epictetus knows, he knows this theatre, he
00:33:03
Speaker
the events that go on there. He references his students, you know, walking up after their class and they go into the, we can walk there today, we can go. And so, Nickopause is remarkably well preserved.
00:33:15
Speaker
It's probable that the house, well, we don't have to start in the house, probably the house of Codratis, that's what he says. So he talks in the house, it probably still exists. I mean, it's probably just like, you know, an outline of bricks, but it's probably somewhere there, you know, it's there. And so you can visit it.
00:33:35
Speaker
Nicopolis was reasonably prosperous and it was small, forget the population size now, a few tens of thousands but that would be reasonably large for about then.
Historical Insights from Epictetus
00:33:47
Speaker
And because it was the emperor city, I guess it's a city, you have Herod. Herod sent money, he actually contributed to the, I think it was the baths.
00:34:00
Speaker
It might be in the theatre. He sent lots of money from Judea, went up there to help build Nicopolis, because you're trying to show that you're loyal to Augustus and his regime. So it was quite a well-known city, actually, at that time, and people would have very much known about it. But it is on this kind of boundary, this liminal zone between the Roman world and the Greek world.
00:34:25
Speaker
Which is actually, I suppose, a good place to be if you're a philosopher, which is like Epictetus, kind of this divide between Greece and Rome. So it's a pretty good place to be. And you're very close to Rome. And he constantly references people bringing news from Rome and people just about to cross over to Rome. So you're a step away. And we hadn't actually said he was exiled. He was exiled by the mission.
00:34:50
Speaker
And so you're just across from Rome, but he also says, and I think this explains, some people said, why didn't he go back to Rome? We know that there were many philosophers to go back to Rome. Why didn't he? He didn't want to, from what I can see. And I think he actually tells us why, and I've hardly ever seen anyone
00:35:09
Speaker
references. He says, in Rome, the disturbing pleasures are, you know, so much. It occludes, it gets in the way of our philosophical principles. There's so many, you know, great baths and theatres and all this everywhere. It's harmful. So I think he wanted to say in Nicopolis, because it was, it was a respectable, fairly prosperous place. There were, it was a theatre with baths and things in it. But it wasn't,
00:35:39
Speaker
you know, it's not like trying to be a student and you're in like downtown Manhattan or something, and there's just stage plays everywhere and all that, you know, nightlife or whatever. So I think that's why I think you didn't want to go back to Rome, because it just wasn't just wasn't where you do philosophy, not philosophical school. I think you can do a
00:36:01
Speaker
a kind of guide to Nicopolis, but just with the writings of the discourses, because he mentions a lot of these buildings, actually the baths and the theatres and the streets. And, you know, he mentions, you can see in some of the walls how it's been from the oil lamp has turned to black. He references it, you know, you can really feel like
00:36:23
Speaker
you're walking in his world, and a lot of the things he references. And you can see in the museum, they have a museum there in the cupolas, which I've only been able to see online, but they have like childhood games and things like this that they found. Some of these games he actually references. He said, you know, when you're outside and you see them playing this game with nuts, they have some of these things in the museum. So it's fascinating. You really feel like you could be, well, you are, you're in his world. He's referencing as he's looking around to his students.
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'm getting shivers hearing about that. This is so cool. I'm planning my trip as you're talking. I think it's really interesting that we're really lucky that that's preserved and that it still exists. I think the other thing that you flagged there
00:37:10
Speaker
just about it being this, this liminal space between the Greek and the Roman cultures, which is something we've hit on about Greek being associated with philosophy and Romans respecting it, but kind of keeping it at arm's distance. Maybe it's this kind of thing you go and do for a bit, but you shouldn't engage in for too long. And that kind of geographical location almost supports that project. I also was thinking about how
00:37:35
Speaker
similar we are, even back then, right? This would be maybe either a private high school education or university education, whatever the analogy is, you send your child away for that, but they come back and they reintegrate. I think of
00:37:53
Speaker
I did my PhD in a relatively small town and I think of these cities like Oxford or Cambridge where you're close to London, but you don't have, as you said, the distractions of the theater. It's more of a focus on the life of the mind while you're there. That function has always existed or at least existed back then of these cities that are more
00:38:18
Speaker
more aptly designed for study. One thing, Erlen, I know that you've written a lot about that I think is really interesting is Epictetus' approach to non-philosophers or to lay people. I wanted to move on to that, but before we did, just conscious, is there anything interesting in that history or background that we didn't hit on yet that you think is worth digging into?
Epictetus's Journey from Slave to Philosopher
00:38:39
Speaker
I have a folder of notes about every time he mentions just something to do with daily life. And there's lots actually. There was, I think it was for a Miller Ferguson who said, he said that he's unjustly ignored by historians as a historical source himself. He just turned it by philosophers. So yeah, you know, dress, children's games, the institution of slavery, he says a lot about, which is a really interesting thing because he
00:39:10
Speaker
depending on what angle you kind of want to go in that, he kind of says lots of different things actually about that. So just as a resource for historians, he tends to get ignored, which is a shame. I think one thing to do with which people are always interested in is his status as a slave. So he's obviously, it's unusual to be a slave and end up becoming a widely regarded historian, having emperors potentially visit you and the children of the elite sitting at your feet.
00:39:39
Speaker
So on the one, you know, certainly that's it. And I'm not, I don't want to take away from that. It is, he's a remarkable figure from that. And of course, people always, you know, talk about, you know, the floss, it brings together a slave and a Roman emperor, you know, Epictetus Marcus. And that's true. So in terms of how he became a floss for, it's an interesting move to make. And there's different reasons that we can maybe put together how that came about.
00:40:10
Speaker
One, we know that many people would sense educated slaves to listen to philosophers. You know, Galen had, there was a range of slaves just sitting around taking notes on wax and they would take it back to their master, you know, stuff like that. So it could be that Epaphroditus sent him to the Sonius Rufus and then he just excelled. We know that there were many, there was actually a training school in Rome for the slaves of the elite, particularly the Roman, the imperial household. I forget the name of it.
00:40:39
Speaker
But it turned out, you know, dozens and dozens, you know, every year really educated slaves, they would be sent there to start, particularly from a Greek background, because they associated learning with Greek slaves, and so he's from Phrygia, Hellen I's Greek area. So, it came, he was maybe at this school, which taught them, you know, really, really in-depth.
00:40:58
Speaker
So it could be that that's where he's gaining the, you know, awareness of literacy and education. Though if you if you look at the the literary references he makes, they tend to be fairly kind of mundane, you know, to like Homer and that kind of stuff. Not too much more than that. But anyway, that's it. It's of interest to me to try and fit together of how did he move from he was
00:41:22
Speaker
a slave of you know you're talking someone right at the top you know just almost just removed from the emperor so he wasn't a fairly elite kind of well household and status but how did he make that move so it's probably it's probably along that along that lines or we know the the elite you would have
00:41:41
Speaker
far too many slaves than they needed and they complained about or there were complaints about you know hundreds of slaves just roaming around the theatres because there's nothing for them to do but it's just like a status symbol so you say you know I've got a thousand slaves I don't know what to do with them. So it can't be he just naturally just ended up in a so-and-so without direction from a pathologist we don't really know
00:42:07
Speaker
Well, let's just, let's follow up on that real quick. Do you know anything about the process of being freed from slavery or the process of your slavery ending? As far as we know, it was estimated that probably the majority of slaves were freed in their lifetime. A lot of that would be sometimes cynically, so it could actually be when they're getting quite old and it can do very much. So well.
00:42:30
Speaker
you know, congratulations, you're six years old, here's your freedom, which is not very good. Because then, of course, you don't need to support them really. But for many of them, it was a way of just basically thanks. And it was expected that you would kind of do it. The Romans had a, we don't get it too much, because then we'll take, you know, half an hour in Roman slavery. But the Romans had a, it could be a tremendously humiliating experience being a Roman slave,
00:43:00
Speaker
It could also not be quite as bad. The Romans in their foundation story, Rominus and Remus, was that it was actually a collection of criminals and slaves who joined them, and they had that in their kind of their background. And they had a few laws and customs that maybe sometimes surprised people in how they
00:43:23
Speaker
treated their slaves, although again they could treat them horribly. But if you enter it with a good master, it was perfectly acceptable, expected even, you know, you get a reward for 10 years good service and they free you. That was not uncommon. That would separate it from other forms of slavery.
00:43:43
Speaker
you know, we were aware of more in the more recent, you know, past where you were, if you were a slave, you were basically a slave, and that was it. So we don't know why he was freed. None of our sources really talk about that.
Dissemination and Access in Ancient Philosophy
00:43:58
Speaker
Just one of them, I think it's maybe
00:44:01
Speaker
apocryphal that he was freed because of Paphroditus, made him lame and felt guilty. I'm not sure of it. But anyway, we're not really sure that's true. So we don't know, but he was freed. But as I say, Paphroditus was a slave as well. His master was a slave and he was freed and then came on, you know, the next thing and kind of ranked the Roman hero or his close confidant rather. And that was actually quite common. Freed slaves were actually
00:44:32
Speaker
right at the top of their own empire under the emperor and the reason was they could trust them because if they freed them they were bound due to you know loyal to them the other reason was if you were a freed slave you could actually advance quite a lot in the Roman world there was a lot of the richest people in Rome you could still see a huge tomb in Rome it's in the shape of a Roman oven now this guy basically had the
00:44:57
Speaker
a chain of bakeries. To the UK audience, I would say it was like the owned Greggs, which is a huge bakery chain. He's a free slave, so you could become quite rich.
00:45:10
Speaker
There was some stigma, so you couldn't marry into a sanatorial family for the first generation, that kind of stuff. But the emperors trusted them because they were free slaves and they could not become the emperors. So they knew that they would have absolutely nothing to gain by assassinating them, unless they were very annoyed at them. But certainly not to advance their own, you know, cause to the throne. They couldn't because they're free slaves. So that's why Epaphroditus, he became very trusted by New York, of course, was tremendously paranoid. He's a free slave, so that's fine.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah, fascinating. There's this familiarity with the upper court, but a kind of limit on your power, but perhaps only short-term and only in some regards. Really, just a very interesting context, and as you said, quite different from the, I would say, at least being from Canada, we associate with the North American or the America slave trade.
00:46:08
Speaker
Yeah, so let's jump into Epictetus and non-philosophers. We talked a lot about how he approaches the students in his school or the context of the students in his school, but one thing that you're a specialist in is that kind of reception and treatment of non-philosophers, whatever lay people. Could you write an overview on that? Yeah.
00:46:33
Speaker
I was, so when I started my doctorate, I was going to do Stoicism and how they propagated themselves and just to what level was Stoicism known? Because scholars are very interested in Stoicism and to understand like ancient thought. And so I wanted to know how far had it seemed into like, you know, the ancient mindset? Was this something that
00:47:01
Speaker
you know, 10% of the population were signed up for 5%, 20%, you know, how to diffuse the knowledge of stoicism.
Resisting Popularization of Stoicism
00:47:09
Speaker
And were they concerned about that? And I started this probably just after or as stoicism was kind of gaining in popularity online and in the real world. And you see a great deal of popularizing efforts to kind of reach people and spread the message, which I think is good.
00:47:30
Speaker
In the back of my mind, I also wondered, was this something ancient Stoics were doing as well? Was Anisso privately doing that? And so I then realized it was far too big to look at just the Stoics, so I narrowed it down to Epitetus for various reasons. As for, well, if I start with popularization, the worm means you could popularize a philosophy
00:47:53
Speaker
in antiquity. And the Epicureans were very adept at that. They could do that quite well. They produced epitome, which are basically, okay, here's this big, chunky philosophical text. We're going to condense it into like a kind of cliff notes version. And you can read that. And it's just, it's a nice, simplified version of it.
00:48:11
Speaker
You can create letters as well. Epicurus did that. So basically simplifying the texts. So you keep the complex text, but then you simplify it down, popularized introductory material, basically. You could also produce nomologies, which are essentially
00:48:30
Speaker
collections of witty sayings, and you could spread that around. And there was a brilliant master's thesis in Oxford by a student a few years ago. She partly looked at how many epigraphs in the Roman Empire had little epicorean sayings, and from some quite lowly people, like gladiators actually particularly, had these epicorean sayings. And you could also communicate to a mass audience as well, which
00:48:59
Speaker
inside huge lecture halls or these kind of places. So those were the means which you could propagate a philosophy widely. As within the philosophy of the stoa, you did have Joanne Tomer, a lecturer in classics from South Africa, he argued the Tim to Zeus by Cleanthes might fall into one of these categories.
00:49:27
Speaker
But aside from that, we don't have any epitomies. And actually, we have, we know Seneca, Lucilius, if we're, again, we, we're not sure if that is a genuine literary exchange or if it's a kind of theoretical exercise of what one might look like. He asked Seneca for extracts. Basically, he's saying, hey, can I get one of these shortened
00:49:50
Speaker
things to help me understand this. And Seneca says, no, you don't do that. We read the whole thing because you lose out on so much. So, sorry, you just got to read the whole thing. And we don't have epitomies from the school. So, they seem to be against that. You do have some indications of some stoics, not preaching, evangelizing, trying to communicate in lectures.
00:50:18
Speaker
But that would really be Dieter Zostom, who actually Epictetus criticizes and basically mocks for, look how big your audience is and all these people who don't understand what you're saying, basically. And he basically says, you're not a philosopher, we don't do that. And so Dieter Zostom is this kind of between this kind of part cynic, part stoic, and certainly Epictetus does not agree with his approach in that.
00:50:48
Speaker
I think we have records of, you know, the sonious rufus going before troops, Roman troops before some rebellion and trying to talk them down. It isn't really, hey, I want you to come philosophers. It's, we're at a dangerous moment. I'm going to go out and try and persuade you about, you know, to not sign up this rebellion or something like that. So we don't have the public lectures either. And again, you actually have criticism of it. The other which I didn't mention, you could just go up to people in the street.
00:51:17
Speaker
people who, it looks like they might need philosophical advice. And Epictetus says he used to do that. He said he used to do that in Rome. He would go up to people and he would try and engage them at the philosophy he was learning. And he says, but I quite quickly realized that isn't profitable. And he tells the students, don't do that.
00:51:36
Speaker
So, there doesn't seem to have been any kind of attempt to broadly popularize or engage people just generally. There isn't any evidence of
Philosophy as Elite Status and Intellectual Rigor
00:51:47
Speaker
that. And you can go back to the early part of the school itself. I mean, Zeno, it was repeatedly chose the stoer because it was not very well attended. It was the site of a massacre.
00:51:58
Speaker
and people just didn't want to go there. And it said, you know, if there were crowds galling around them, neither basically pushed them away. That's in that Diogenes Laertes, or the History of philosophy. There's about three times he describes the tactics, then we'll have to push people away. The only one we know was Chrysippus, so he did teach in the Lyceum.
00:52:20
Speaker
But apart from that, and I did catalogue it, you know, Epictetus, Perseus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, every time they describe how they're teaching philosophy, it's in a house.
00:52:33
Speaker
And usually the images of about 10 to 20 people gathered around them within a house setting. So that's by far the dominant one. And Seneca as well, he references going into his learning philosophy in a house. So that's the setting. So they weren't trying to popularize the philosophy. Now, as for why that is, I think that's where you have to understand the historical context.
00:53:03
Speaker
The only other person I know, he's addressed that was Julia Anas about 15 years ago, she wrote on that, just in passing. And she says, if you understand the historical context of ancient education, it makes sense why they have that approach. And people today who think stoicism has something to say to everyone, shouldn't necessarily be bound by that. There's nothing inherent in the philosophy that should necessarily prevent popularizing.
00:53:33
Speaker
I think there is a message there which is basically don't dumb it down and change it into something it's not. And the Stoics were actually very, very much against that. And I think that is a challenge to some popularizing works, which are out there. An Epictetus actually continually tells the students not to do that. They get quite enthused and they're like, this is great, everyone should know. And he's like, no, just
00:53:59
Speaker
Make sure you have it straight. You're not ready yet, and that isn't really the way to do it. This is a serious thing, and you need to take this, you know, using the proper kind of, you know, understanding of what it's like. So, as for, would you like me to speak about what historical context Ryan and Julianus was? Yeah, let's do that. So, in the ancient world, education was,
00:54:29
Speaker
It would demark you as basically being the lead. And the Greeks hold up idea. And it was, they jealously guarded it. So in the Greek world, to gain access to the gymnasium, where you would have, where you'd be educated, often in various things, it was restricted, unusually actually familiarly. So you would, you know, have to be your father had to have gone there and that kind of stuff.
00:54:53
Speaker
And even the Romans, they would call, if you read juvenile, he's just scathing of these people who come into money and then they gather books and try and gain learning. It's seeing kind of satire against people who try and having not been born into riches, try and obtain education and kind of gain entrance into the Roman world or the elite world.
00:55:18
Speaker
It was actually something they guarded access to education. It was not something they thought, they certainly didn't have the idea, we need to spread this around to everyone, everyone should be educated. Because it actually signaled, I mean, they, the Romans thought you could tell he was educated by the way they walked. They thought there was a certain even walk in the way in which you would, you would have from an educated person, and the way in which you would talk. Just like your cadence would be trained and things like this.
00:55:47
Speaker
It was a defining attribute of your status to be educated. And if you tried to spread that around, the sophist tried to do this. It was just seen as kind of degrading, and also it wouldn't really work. I think Juliana said, you know, you are living in a world where most people weren't educated, you know, most people couldn't read or write.
00:56:17
Speaker
And how can you how can you accurately try and spread complex philosophy to them? There's some good there was it was a clown thieves was a slave and he drew water and things like that. And there are two examples and epigraphs of Friedman who became philosophers like Epitetus. So we lose sight of that if we forget that, because of course, we're used to society where everyone I don't know what the illiteracy rate is, but it must be just negligible. And, you know, try and
00:56:44
Speaker
try and teach complex philosophy to people who have had just almost no exposure to education, of course it's going to be futile. So that's going on too, we live in a world where almost everyone can read. So of course you would say stop, stop trying to do this, stop trying to, you know, spread, you know, spread it around or stop trying to, you know, produce these simplified texts.
00:57:09
Speaker
because for many people, and the Epicurean school, which was open to this, they really were very critical of some of their school members, they tried to do it. And they say, stop trying to spread it around all these kind of rustic rural people. They just can't get it. So that's partly going on, or that's the cultural context within it.
00:57:34
Speaker
As soon as you try and engage a large body of people with it, you become a kind of diocrosophism figure and you become a sophist, which of course had been mocked all the way back from beginning with Socrates and Plato, et cetera. And you're divesting philosophy of its true core because you're having to compromise so much to make it understandable that you're actually harming it and so stop it. And I do think, and I,
00:58:01
Speaker
So, I have a bouquet of titties, so many people.
00:58:06
Speaker
Within it, I think you do see signs that he actually said, you know, philosophy draws people to itself. It's not for you. And the people who are equipped for it, in terms of education, but also just mentally to actually genuinely want to learn it, they will find it.
Balancing Integrity and Popularization
00:58:22
Speaker
And it isn't our role to go out and find them. We just basically, he compares it to the red of a toga or the senator. It's my job to be that red, narrow stripe that shines out.
00:58:35
Speaker
And again, unless you know the context, you don't know what he's talking about, which means a red line and a toga. He's saying, I'm like a senatorial toga that has this purple line down it. And people will be drawn to it if they're of the right mindset and they will notice it. But it's not my job to go out and, you know, try and engage them with it. So that's the mindset. I think that explains why they're doing it. So on the one hand, I think there is a message there, which is,
00:59:04
Speaker
you you of course will have people because stoicism is popular now you try and um and i i don't know because i haven't read any of these works but i don't know like a hundred ways stoicism can help you cheat on your taxes or something like that like no it's it's it's it's not going to do that like and that's not what it's for like no um so stop stop trying to make it popular into things that people like you know would would
00:59:31
Speaker
or bring it into things that it isn't saying about but you think it might sell books. People try to do that in antiquity too and the source were against it and said stop it, don't do it. So I think there is a lesson there. But on the other hand, like a lesson in our age is people are just more educated and are more acceptable to it. So I think some of that restrictions and some of that worries aren't quite as appropriate. Though again, I think there is a lesson in that you do need to keep the
01:00:00
Speaker
you do need to keep the intellectual core there. You can't just change this into whatever just because you think someone can reach me. Because even with the example of Seneca, talking to the Silius, that's somebody who's educated and there's still that idea of, no, I won't simplify it for you. Even to the Silius, yeah, absolutely.
01:00:27
Speaker
And as I say, we don't have the simplified text. They just don't exist and there's no reference to them, like we say for the Epicurean school. So it just seems they just like Seneca. That seemed to be the, apart from maybe the hymn of Cleanthes, which is maybe the only potential one, but they just didn't seem to do it. They thought it wasn't done. There is the exception with the Enchiridion, the handbook.
01:00:55
Speaker
Now that's an interesting thing, because what scholars seem to think that is, it's basically like a memoir for Arian, or maybe also kind of his own kind of slight composition of him working through the philosophy and doing that. So it almost, and it's actually a very complex book to fully understand, but you can read it in a simplified way, but you're not really
01:01:21
Speaker
digging into it in the proper way it's meant to do. But there is, because I then, I did set out to see, in antiquity, what texts, can we get any idea of texts that were popular amongst common people? And the Epicurean epitomies, yes, they were. To extend Epicureanism was popular, particularly the first century BC, first century AD. But Origen is an early church father in the second, third centuries.
01:01:51
Speaker
He says, because there's a pagan critic, he says, the gospels are everywhere, you even have slaves and women reading it. This is so embarrassing. And Origen says, well, yeah, well, because philosophy is just for the elite and the educated and you only gather, you know,
01:02:09
Speaker
It's tiny numbers. And the critic of Christianity, Kelsus, thought that was really good. Like, see, see how elite we are? We have a tiny amount of people who read our work. See, you can tell it's good because of that. And Origen says, basically says, yeah, that's right. Not very many people read it. He says, apart from Epictetus's handbook,
01:02:33
Speaker
which is a really fascinating throwaway. In the second, third century, there it is. It says the handbook is in the hands of the common people, because it isn't an epitome, but it almost looks like an epitome. And so people were drawn to it, apparently, and it was going around the place. I don't know what hepatitis would have made of that.
01:02:58
Speaker
um but it's it's it's fast so there was a kind of thirst for these these simplified texts but so it's kind of pushed back again and said no we're not doing it and the one that did get out there was of course the handbook the enteridian which i don't think i don't think he'd have liked he just said no you have to read the whole you know go through the whole discourses or you know find a you know
01:03:21
Speaker
a full story lecture if you want to get into it. Anyway, it's a fascinating fact of history that has ended up doing that. There's so much great stuff there that you just said, there's so much to dive into. I mean, one aspect
01:03:38
Speaker
There's almost like this funnel argument, which is to say, well, popularization or introduction, you want people to be exposed to it so they can know if they're drawn to it or not. I didn't know what philosophy was in my own journey until I was already in university, already taking a psychology degree, and then I took a philosophy class and I was like, wow, this is amazing. Nobody's ever done philosophy with me before. There's some value to popularization there.
01:04:02
Speaker
I also think that I at least have this tendency. My other thought is like I want to kind of push back against elitism. I need to accept elitism if that was the case. But when I hear this idea of, you know, the Stoics being like, oh, no, you know, don't try to teach this to rural people. They just won't get it.
01:04:20
Speaker
It makes me feel a bit icky. But maybe, as you said, I need to accept my
Modern Relevance of Epictetus's Teachings
01:04:25
Speaker
time and place. Maybe it makes me feel a bit icky because today, people that are rural are still literate and you have access to the internet. It's an entirely different time and place. But then I think the third thought I was having was being more charitable.
01:04:40
Speaker
If we think about philosophy as a craft, the thing other than philosophy that I'm very good at is martial arts. And you can sometimes see these like one hour, two hour self-defense classes and they really scare me. And I think non-martial artists would say, well, something's better than nothing, right? And me as a specialist, I'm very acutely aware that no, something is not better than nothing. Because if you take out one of these that is
01:05:05
Speaker
If you take a bad introductory class, which you have no ability to tell the difference about because you're a beginner or you take the wrong thing from the introductory class, then you end up in this kind of Socratic issue where you think you have knowledge, where you don't have knowledge, you don't know that you don't know.
01:05:24
Speaker
almost recommend against these kind of two-hour self-defense seminars they teach in high schools in Canada or people will sign up for because I think it almost makes you overconfident in a skill you don't have. It makes you feel like you've learned something that's a craft that takes years to master, and that overconfidence is more dangerous than an awareness of your inability. That, I think, is maybe the most charitable comparison I could make. What do you think about that?
01:05:52
Speaker
I think that's fascinating. I'll cite you, but I might use that analogy in future if I were talking about it. I think that's probably a key part of their concern. There is a constant awareness and a constant critique of
01:06:13
Speaker
And there's even a stoic who says, I wish there could be a law brought in against it. People setting themselves up to be philosophers and talking about it, and they don't know what they're saying. And people go along, and they listen to them, and they think they understood it. So I think that's a fascinating comparison you've made. I think that's a key thing. They are worried. And, you know, well, they compare it to an egg, right? The stoicism. You can't separate it. No, you can't just pick and choose, and you can't just get, like, it is a kind of comprehensive thing as they understand it.
01:06:43
Speaker
There's this, I should say, and this would also maybe give context to it. As I said, the Romans were very interested actually in showing the new about philosophy without getting overly devoted to it, but that's a problem, right? I think this is probably actually the warning after he just gives the students the most actually, is he says, I think some of you are here just to learn some witty things to say at a banquet with a senator.
01:07:12
Speaker
Or I think you're just here to show off. So when you go back home, people say, wow, he knows everything. And you don't. And you have you have absolutely you're just here to learn intellectual knowledge, without it changing anything about you, you just want to look smart. And you say, this isn't what it is doing. So the because education was this kind of mark of elite status, you actually had lots of people chasing it. But without wanting to really do the actual work.
01:07:41
Speaker
So it was so desirable, because it was this kind of axis into elite status, people search for it without truly actually searching for it. And several of the people who visit Epictetus's school, he basically almost thrills them out, or basically says, I'm not, actually, there's one, Arian says, there's a student who keeps coming along and sitting in his school, and Epictetus just ignores him.
01:08:11
Speaker
And then finally, the student says, or the person who's missing says, why aren't you talking to me? And the student says, because I know you're not really interested. Like, you know, go home. So I think that's also playing a part of it as well. So that, why they're being so select and why they're so worried, because there is a great thirst for, just give me the cliff notes, I'm going to go home, I'm going to look smart, but I'm not really going to do the actual work.
01:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you see that in martial arts. I won't turn this into a martial arts episode, but there is a there's kind of fake black belts. There is we were talking about the the toga, you know, the the that that red coloring, you know, in
01:08:53
Speaker
Jiu-Jitsu martial arts, we have belts, right? And people want to badly be the black belt, so they will buy one without having it been given to them. There's this interest in getting the symbolism without the effort required to get there. And I think anybody can recognize that in any craft or interest that they have.
01:09:14
Speaker
Erland, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I've really, really enjoyed it. And it's something that I'm trying to do. I know our listeners will really enjoy it. It's something I'm trying to do is round out my philosophical understanding with the historical, just because there's that goal of better understanding stoicism in its time and place so that it can influence whatever we're doing now, this kind of modern stoicism, whether that is living it or just understanding it or appreciating it.
01:09:42
Speaker
it's better grounded by a more thorough history. I really appreciate the work that you're doing to push that and to provide that deeper understanding. For those that have really enjoyed this conversation or have listened to this point, do you want to maybe speak a bit about what you're doing now, your book, any of your future projects where they can find more information about you?
01:10:10
Speaker
My next goal, which I've gathered all the research for, is to write an introduction to the first, second century world.
01:10:20
Speaker
from the vantage point of Epitetus so basically guiding people through that world and saying like what was it like to be a child in the Roman Empire and it's wonderful because Epitetus mentions the games they play he mentions them play acting you know like I'm the gladiator no I'm the you know and stuff like this and again you can go to the Museum of Necropolis and they have
01:10:44
Speaker
childhood games from that time in the museum and things like that. So I have all the notes on that and that's my goal at some point is to bring that out. So an introduction to the first century world and actually particularly Nicopolis because it
01:10:59
Speaker
Because of the grandeur of ancient Greece, it gets overlooked, but it's tremendously worth what I'm doing about Lycopolis. So that's what I'm doing. That will probably be quite a while before that site. I don't know that site. I do frequent different groups and occasionally I pop up. I do have a sub-stack, which is Epictetus and his world, which I haven't written on for quite a while because I've been so busy.
01:11:25
Speaker
They can find me there. And if I do put up some material about Epitetus and his world, they can find a few blog posts. But I've written on Epitetus and the education of Roman slaves, law and crime. So you'll see in the discourses, prison, right? We're getting an idea in a head of prison. It wasn't like what we need by prison. And dress and appearance. He's very concerned about that. There's reasons for that when you get into it. So the book and the sub-stack.
01:11:56
Speaker
Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Yeah. And I really love the analogies. I think that's actually helped you grasp the point they're making as well. So thank you so much. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to Stowe Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. Until next time.