Sharing the Wisdom of Epictetus with Youth
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Welcome to Stoicism Today! This week we bring you a biographical piece by philosophy professor and children’s book author Claudia Mills. Mills describes her lifelong love of Epictetus and how she’s bringing his principles to life in through a fictional 12-year-old girl.
I was first drawn to the wisdom of Epictetus in adolescence. In mid-life I spent decades teaching Epictetus to college-aged youth as a professor of philosophy. Now, in later life, I have been working to find a way to share Epictetus with even younger seekers after wisdom, as a children’s book author. This is the story of that journey.
My Youthful Encounter with Epictetus
I may be unusual in remembering the very moment of the very day I fell in love with Epictetus.
It was at a Walden’s bookstore in a shopping mall in suburban New Jersey, eagerly browsing the discount table, that I pounced on a giant Modern Library edition of The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers. At fifteen, I already knew I loved big ideas and big, fancy words to describe them. Flipping through its pages, I came upon this passage in the stirring Matheson translation of the first chapter of the Discourses of Epictetus. The tyrant commands Epictetus, “Tell the secret!” Epictetus replies, “I refuse to tell, for this is in my power.” “But I will chain you.” “What say you, fellow? Chain me? My leg you will chain – yes, but my will – no, not even Zeus can conquer that” (1:22-23).
That was it. In that instant I gave myself entirely to Epictetus, slain by those calmly delivered but fiercely defiant words spoken against tyranny. If a tyrant ever threatened me, I was ready!
At home, as I read on, I was deeply affected by Epictetus’s commitment to setting himself apart from others by the higher standards to which he holds himself, “for different men sell at different prices” (2.11). And some are not for sale at all. “This is why Agrippinus, when Florus was considering whether he should go down to Nero’s shows, to perform some part in them, said to him, ‘Go down.’ And when he asked, ‘Why do you not go down yourself?’ said, ‘Because I do not even consider the question’” (2.12-13). Ooh!
Epictetus goes on to say that those willing to perform for Nero (because otherwise they will be beheaded, no trivial threat!) count themselves merely as ordinary threads in the tunic, “but I want to be the purple, that touch of brilliance which gives distinction and beauty to the rest. Why then do you say to me, ‘Make yourself like unto the many?’ If I do that, I shall no longer be the purple” (2.17-18). Convinced of my own uniqueness, and yes, with more than a touch of youthful self-aggrandizement, I saw myself as akin to Epictetus. I, too, would be “the purple thread,” destined to a life of lonely but lofty greatness. I had no idea what it would really mean to be that “purple thread,” what demands might be placed upon me that I would resist with noble indifference to consequences, but I yearned for it, anyway. All this just from the first two chapters of the Discourses!
Teaching Epictetus to First-Year College Students
I went off to college to major in philosophy and then on to graduate school in philosophy to earn my Ph.D. Although my specialty was ethics, nowhere in any of my coursework at any level was there any mention of Epictetus. As I immersed myself in ethical theory, I encountered no thinker who stirred me as deeply as Epictetus had that day in a New Jersey shopping mall.
When I became a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, at first I taught the same kinds of theory-focused courses I had taken as a student, as well as courses featuring discussion of the standard contemporary moral problems found in ethics textbooks: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment. But as I gained confidence, I designed my own Intro to Ethics course centered on the more personal question of how to live one’s life. I began the course by having the students read Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the story of a dying man reviewing his conventional and “correct” life and realizing its emptiness and falsity: “Everything you lived by and still live by is a lie, a deception that blinds you to the reality of life and death” (Ch. 11). Then I presented some of the greatest works in the history of ethical thought as “advice manuals” for how to live a better, richer, more deeply satisfying life than his: Aristotle, Epictetus, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, and Sartre.
Needless to say, my favorite part of the semester was the weeks I spent on Epictetus, now using the Everyman edition. Reading him again with much greater care, as a teacher, I was surprised how little attention my youthful self had given to some of the central principles underlying his Stoicism: some things are in our power, others are not, and wisdom is to concern oneself only with the former. I had been too busy elevating myself in my own importance as “the purple thread” and potential tyrant-defier to face this humbling (but also liberating) diminishing of my significance in the universe: the realization of how very little any of us (including me) can control. Our only power is “the power to deal rightly with our impressions” (Discourses, 1.7), and to choose and act accordingly. This was the central insight I needed to impart to my students now.
They did not fall in love with Epictetus as I had. I saw no swooning over his defiance of the tyrant. Rather, they rebelled against his calm contentment in the face of life’s inevitable storms. They didn’t want to be calm! They didn’t want to be contented! They told me they wanted to feel all the emotions, even the most painful and destructive ones (anger, envy, grief, despair) to the fullest. I remembered feeling that way myself at their age, though I hadn’t engaged with that aspect of Epictetus sufficiently for this to bother me in my reading. I tried to tell them, from the vantage point of my more advanced years, that those emotions lose their allure once enough of your life has been spent beating your head bloody in futile resistance against what you cannot change. But I sensed they would need more life experience before they were able to “get” this.
So instead, I focused on what I thought would be most valuable to them as they began their adult lives: Epictetus’s insistence on choice, owning your ability to make your own choices, even when these are made in circumstances you would never have chosen yourself. Defy the tyrant, or don’t defy the tyrant: the choice is yours. But don’t blame him for “making” you do whatever it is you decide to do. The choice is yours to make, and the consequences of that choice are yours to accept.
On the last day of the course, I would ask the students: “Which book that we read together this semester would you give to the youthful Ivan Ilyich so that his life would have gone better?” I have to admit that Epictetus did not emerge as the winner. Generally, they preferred the more capacious account of eudaimonia given by Aristotle, where virtue has a central role, but honor, pleasure, friendship, family, even a certain amount of worldly goods, are also recognized as genuinely valuable elements of a flourishing human life. But I was gratified that the mother of one of my students later told me that her son, who joined the military after graduation, wrote to her during basic training to ask her to send his copy of Epictetus. No one did that for Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics!
Writing a Book Starring Epictetus for Child Readers
While teaching philosophy at the university level, I also pursued a career as a children’s book author, publishing over sixty books for young readers. I would frequently give my characters some ethical dilemma to wrestle with, but I never introduced them specifically to philosophy. I yearned to find a way to craft a story in which one of my characters would fall as hard for Epictetus as I had, but I wasn’t sure how to do this in a book that would be complex and multi-layered rather than overly didactic or lesson driven. The story had to be key. There had to be a reason why my main character would want to learn about philosophy, why she would need to do this. The story would have to come first.
This was what led to Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom.
I created the character of Callie Clark, who renames herself Calliope Callisto Clark, a name to reflect the extraordinariness she sees in herself. At this point, she is very like my younger self, complete with both a conviction of her unique specialness and the emotional intensity that both my college students and I had prized for ourselves. Having lost her parents at a young age, Callie is being raised by her elderly grandparents who hardly know what to do with her; they get her a dog, hoping this will help even out her tumultuous emotions, but Archie proves to be as “difficult” as Callie herself. And at school, her strict, old-fashioned teacher has no patience for Callie’s constant questions and passionate opinions.
When a call home after a classroom “incident” leads Granny to trip over Archie in hastening to pick up the phone, resulting in a fractured wrist, her grandparents decide he will have to be rehomed if Callie can’t achieve better self-control. She needs to wise up – and fast. In the class study of ancient Greece, she learns that Athens was the birthplace of philosophy, a storehouse of wisdom about how to live one’s best life. So, she enlists the sympathetic school librarian to form a middle-school philosophy club, where she is exposed to a bit of Socrates and Plato, and – drum roll! – Epictetus.
Like younger me, Callie thrills to Epictetus’s defiance of the tyrant. Like younger me, Callie wants to be the purple thread. Indeed, the story builds to a climactic moment where Callie defies the tyrant: her teacher, who has made an unfair accusation of her best friend – doing this even though it will mean another phone call home – and the loss of Archie (for her, practically the equivalent of being beheaded!).
But now, I was able to let Callie internalize the key distinction between what is up to us and what is not up to us, what we can control and what we can’t. Callie can’t control her grandparents, she can’t control her teacher, she can’t control the friends who think she’s “weird.” And as I wrote her story, after so many years of walking with Epictetus, I had a clearer sense for the first time of the enormous relief that comes from letting go of what you can’t control.
Toward the end of the book, Callie is tormented by guilt over her grandfather’s stroke: was she, with her “difficult” nature, the one who caused it? Is this her fault? The club leader shares the passage in the Discourses where someone comes to Epictetus asking what he can do to prevent his brother from being angry with him. Epictetus answers, “Bring him to me, and I will tell him, but to you I have nothing to say about his anger” (15.5). Callie realizes that she didn’t make her grandfather angry and agitated about her childish misdeeds; he made himself this way. And although he is recovering from this stroke, she begins to face the possibility of a future stroke with a different outcome. Death – our own inevitable deaths and the deaths of those we love most – is perhaps the supreme example of what we cannot control, and so must somehow find a way to accept.
Conclusion
My personal journey with Epictetus, starting in my youth and continuing as I shared his wisdom with college-aged youth and now with young readers, has helped me bring together my youthful sense of my purple-thread importance with my later-life realization of – and appreciation for – my own small place in the universe: “For everything that happens in the universe one can readily find reason to praise providence, if one has within oneself these two qualities: the ability to see each particular event in the context of the whole, and a sense of gratitude” (Discourses, 6.1).
I’m not sure how young readers will respond to the book; it is too soon for me to know. How they do is yet another thing that is out of my control, and so not worth bothering about, as Epictetus reminds me in his brief, scathing commentary, “To Those Who Wish to Be Admired” (Discourses, 21). But I’m grateful that I had a chance to share my youthful love of Epictetus with youthful students and readers decades after I first encountered him. I’ll give the last words here to Callie herself (Chapter 43, “Epictetus and Me”): “Did Epictetus know how much better his words could make an eleven-year-old girl feel about her life two thousand years later?”
About the Author
Claudia Mills has written over sixty books for children, including The Lost Language, an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, a Charlotte Huck Recommended Book, A Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year, and A Bulletin for the Center of Children’s Books Blue Ribbon Book. The Last Apple Tree received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews. She is a recipient of the Kerlan Award for her contribution to children’s literature. She was a professor of philosophy for more than two decades at the University of Colorado. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.
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