Epictetus 愛比克泰德 · Ἐπίκτητος

🔊He was lame. One ancient account says that the leg was broken by his master, who was twisting it as a punishment. Epictetus is supposed to have said calmly, “You will break it,” and when it broke, “Did I not tell you so?” Another source says that he was lame from rheumatism, and the story may have been invented to fit the philosophy. While still a slave he was allowed to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus, the leading Stoic of the day, who taught that women should study philosophy as men do and that a master has no right to do as he likes with a slave.

他是跛的。有一則古代的記載說，他的腿是被主人弄斷的；主人為了懲罰他，正在扭他的腿。據說愛比克泰德平靜地說：「你會把它弄斷的。」腿斷了的時候，他說：「我不是告訴過你了嗎？」另一個來源說他是因為風濕而跛的；那個故事也許是為了配合這套哲學而編出來的。還是奴隸的時候，他就獲准去聽穆索尼烏斯・魯弗斯的課；那是當時首屈一指的斯多噶學者，他教導女性應該像男性一樣研習哲學，並且說主人沒有權利對奴隸為所欲為。

🔊At some point he was freed, and he began to teach in Rome. Around the year 93 the emperor Domitian, who distrusted philosophers as a source of opposition, expelled them all from Italy. Epictetus crossed the Adriatic and settled at Nicopolis, a port on the western coast of Greece where ships between Rome and the East put in. He opened a school and taught there for some forty years. Young men from the best Roman families came to hear him, and tradition says that the emperor Hadrian visited.

他在某個時候獲得了自由，並且開始在羅馬教學。大約在西元 93 年，皇帝圖密善（他不信任哲學家，把他們看成反對勢力的來源）把他們全部逐出了義大利。愛比克泰德渡過亞得里亞海，在尼科波利斯定居下來；那是希臘西岸的一個港口，往來於羅馬與東方之間的船隻在那裡靠岸。他辦了一所學校，在那裡教了大約四十年。最好的羅馬家族的年輕人前來聽他講課；傳說皇帝哈德良也來拜訪過。

🔊He lived with great simplicity. His house is said to have contained a straw mat, a pallet, and an earthenware lamp, which he used after an iron one was stolen. He remarked that the thief had paid a high price for the lamp, since to get it he had become a thief. He did not marry. Late in life he took in a child whose parents were about to abandon it, and brought a woman into the house to help him raise it.

他過著極為簡樸的生活。據說他家裡只有一張草蓆、一張鋪蓋，以及一盞陶燈；那是在一盞鐵燈被偷走之後才改用的。他說，那個小偷為那盞燈付了很高的代價，因為為了得到它，他把自己變成了一個賊。他沒有結婚。晚年他收養了一個父母正打算遺棄的孩子，並且請了一位婦人到家裡來幫他把孩子養大。

🔊Like Socrates, whom he took as his model, Epictetus wrote nothing. That we can read him is due to one student. Arrian of Nicomedia, who later governed a Roman province and wrote the best surviving history of Alexander, attended the school as a young man around 108 and took down what he heard, he says, word for word as far as he could, to preserve for himself a memorial of the teacher’s thought and frankness of speech. The notes were copied and circulated without his consent, and he then published them as the Discourses, in eight books of which four survive. From these he drew the short Handbook.

跟他奉為典範的蘇格拉底一樣，愛比克泰德什麼也沒寫。我們今天讀得到他，要歸功於一位學生。尼科米底亞的阿里安（他後來治理過羅馬的一個行省，並且寫了現存最好的亞歷山大史），大約在西元 108 年，年輕的他到這所學校聽課，並且把聽到的記了下來；他說，他盡可能逐字記錄，為的是替自己保存一份對老師的思想與直言的紀念。這些筆記未經他同意就被傳抄、流通；於是他把它們出版為《語錄》，共八卷，現存四卷。他又從中摘編出那本簡短的《手冊》。

🔊The Handbook had a long afterlife. Marcus Aurelius thanks a teacher for lending him a copy of Epictetus. Christian monks adapted it as a rule of life, replacing the name of Socrates with that of Paul. It was translated into Chinese by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci in 1605, as The Book of Twenty-Five Sayings, to show Confucian scholars that Western ethics was respectable. And in 1965 a copy went into a prison camp in Hanoi in the memory of an American pilot.

《手冊》身後的生命很長。馬可・奧理略感謝一位老師借給他一本愛比克泰德。基督教的修士把它改編成生活的規條，把蘇格拉底的名字換成了保羅。1605 年，耶穌會士利瑪竇把它譯成了中文，題為《二十五言》，要讓儒家的士人看到西方的倫理是體面的。而在 1965 年，有一本存在一位美國飛行員的記憶裡，進了河內的一座戰俘營。