Cicero vs Epictetus?

Dear John,

You raise a number of interesting questions concerning which I have a few thoughts to share. The general issue underlying your letter is what might constitute the best initial approach to Stoicism to be offered to a generally curious member of the public. This is of the highest interest to me as an educator as well as a practitioner of Stoicism. So let’s go through your main points carefully.

You begin with the so-called “dichotomy of control,” which I agree is a very unfortunate term to render the famous “up / not up to us” passage at the beginning of Enchiridion. I think you are right in tracking it down to Bill Irvine’s 2009 book, and Bill made it even worse by proceeding to suggest that the dichotomy ought to be replaced with a more commonsensical “trichotomy”: things that are under our control, things that are not under our control, and everything in between. As Don Robertson and I have pointed out to Bill, this both misunderstands and destroys Epictetus’s insight. There is no in-between: everything we “influence” can in turn be broken down into two components, which again reduce to what is up to us (meaning, what we are reasonably responsible for) and what is not up to us (meaning, what is attributable to other people and assorted causal factors). As you know, it turns out that the first group reduces to just one thing: our judgments, which is the profound and eminently practical insight Epictetus is justly famous for (though other versions of the same idea predate him in Stoicism and are found in other traditions, such as Buddhism).

[I say just one factor because the other three he mentions at the onset of the Enchiridion: decisions to act/not to act, values (i.e., “desires”) and disvalues (i.e., things one is averse to), are themselves either forms or the result of judgments.]

I have made a habit never to use “dichotomy of control” because it immediately lends itself to misunderstandings and endless discussions about the meaning and limits of “control.” Instead, I use the term Hadot decided to adopt: the fundamental rule, or simply, as Epictetus himself calls it, the rule.

I would go further and suggest that a common mistake is to approach Stoicism by reading the Enchiridion, because it’s short and sweet. But as we know, it was meant by Arrian to be a handy summary of Epictetus’s teachings aimed at advanced students, not beginners. So I agree that it’s a really bad starting point. If anything, one should begin with the Discourses, though even there, quite a bit of preliminary work has to be done in order not to misunderstand what’s going on.

I find myself most certainly in agreement with you when you say that the common notions that Stoics are emotional robots and political quietists are both unwarranted. Epictetus himself explicitly tells his students not to be “unfeeling like statues” (3.2.4). The issue of political involvement is complicated, since as you know even scholars like David Sedley have argued that the Stoics never developed a proper political philosophy. That, perhaps, ought to be the topic of a different exchange, but I’m puzzled by Sedley’s casual discarding of the many examples, from Cato the Younger to Gaius Blossius to the famous “Stoic opposition” to Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian.

Now, in your analysis you make the surprising (and welcome!) suggestion that perhaps we should instead introduce people to Stoicism via Cicero, and in particular his delightful On Duties, which is, after all, based on a now lost book by the middle Stoic Panaetius.

I just finished writing a book on Cicero’s practical philosophy (due out in 2026 by Penguin), so I am most definitely tempted to agree. But I also have some reservations. The first one, of course, is that Cicero himself was not a Stoic, though he was very sympathetic to Stoicism, especially when it comes to ethics. He was, as you know, an Academic Skeptic, and he criticizes the Stoics in various writings, perhaps chiefly in book IV of De Finibus and in the whole of De Divinatione.

It strikes me, therefore, as a bit strange to introduce people to Stoicism by way of someone who is a more than occasional critic of the philosophy. Not that I don’t appreciate critical thinking, but to begin there seems to me to be problematic, as it immediately sends the message that one shouldn’t really trust the philosophy one is about to approach.

Moreover, it is true that De Officiis beautifully tackles a central problem in ethical and political philosophy, that of the distinction, if any, between what is expedient and what is virtuous. But that hardly constitutes a good overview of Stoicism as a whole. And while I personally appreciate Cicero’s writing style, especially in Latin, he comes across as a bit too much of a polished orator and public advocate (which, of course, he was!), in contrast to Epictetus’s down to earth, no-nonsense, provocative approach. There is a reason I fell in love with Stoicism by reading Epictetus, a good number of years ago.

So, why I very much admire both Epictetus and Cicero, what might be other possibilities to consider as a first introduction to Stoicism? The obvious choice might be Marcus’s Meditations, but I don’t think so. Even though I just published a full course with the Teaching Company on that very book, it was not meant to be written for a public at all, it is not an exposition of Stoic doctrines, and it is both preachy (to himself) and redundant (as any diary or personal journal would be).

Instead, my proposal is Seneca’s Letters, if not the full collection (check out the superb Chicago Press translation) at least a sampler. In her The Ethics of the Family in Seneca, classicist Liz Gloyn goes so far as to suggest that the Letters were actually meant as a friendly, informal curriculum in Stoicism. Whether she is correct or not, they certainly can be seen and used that way. The early letters are short and cover a wide range of subjects, occasionally even borrowing from non-Stoic authors, mostly Epicurus. Later on, they become longer and some of the same topics are revisited in more depth while new ones are introduced. Most of the Letters deal with Stoic ethics, which is what a beginner interested in the philosophy would want anyway, but there are some that tackle aspects of Stoic metaphysics, and Seneca even adds some comments on the use (and misuse) of logic. Moreover, Seneca writes splendidly, using a captivating style punctuated by more than occasionally brilliant turns of phrase.

Perhaps it is appropriate for me to end this letter with one of many, many quotes that I love from Seneca, from the very first epistle, On Saving Time:

Quem mihi dabis qui aliquod pretium tempori ponat, qui diem aestimet, qui intellegat se cotidie mori?

“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?”

Vale,
Massimo