Manual ; Fragmentos

Epictetus is one of the capital names in Stoic philosophy. Born around AD 50. C., during part of his life he was a slave, although it is not known if from his birth or later. He lived in Rome and later founded his own school in Nicopolis. Like Socrates, he never put his ideas in writing, but fortunately he had Arriano, an gifted student, who took care to take notes on his lessons. With them he contributed to the remarkable presence of Stoicism in the cultural tradition of the West. The Manual, a compendium of the philosophy of New Stoa, is a book of undeniable modernity, thanks to its clear and direct language, and to some brilliant and lapidary sentences that show the way to reach the happy tranquility. In this text, as well as in other fragments collected in this volume, Epictetus exposes principles that go beyond academic exercise and that prove to be useful and applicable to daily life, compared to other proposals based on desires and fears that generate dissatisfaction.