Volume 1 - Discourses - Books I - II - College of Stoic Philosophers

INTRODUCTIONabove Plato. His Manual, with a few simplechanges, principallyin the proper names, wasadapted by two different Christian ascetics as a ruleand guide of monastic life. 1In modern times his vogue started rather slowlywith translations by Perotti and Politian, but vernacularversions began to appear in the sixteenthcentury, and at the end of that century and thefirst part of the subsequent one, Epictetus was oneof the most powerful forces in the movement ofN co-Stoicism, especially under the protagonistsJustus Lipsius and Bishop Guillaume Du Vair. 2 Hiswork and the essays of Montaigne were the principalsecular readings of Pascal, and it was with Epictetusand his disciple Marcus Aurelius that the Earlof Shaftesbury "was most thoroughly conversant." 3Men as different as Touissant L'Ouverture andLandor, Frederick the Great and Leopardi, havebeen among his admirers. The number of editionsand new printings of his works, or of portions ortranslations of the same, averages considerablymore than one for each year since the inventionof printing.In the twentieth century, throughthe inclusion of Crossley's Golden Sayings ofEpictetusin Charles William Eliot's Harvard Scriesof Classics, and of the Manual in Carl Hilty's Gliick,of which two works upwards of three hundred and1The same was done again in the seventeenth century forthe Carthusians by Matthias Mittner (1032), who took thefirst 35 of his 50 precepts Ad conservandam anzmi paceinfrom the jEncheiridion. 8ee Ada JErudtt. 1720, 264.2See Zanta's elaborate work upon the share taken bythese men in the movement.3B. Rand : The Life, etc., of Anthony, Earl of Shfffteslury(author of the Characteristics}^ (1900), p.XXVlllxi.