The Daily Stoic

In his short new edition of How To Be Free, A.A Long observes the relative ease he had translating Epictetus from ancient Greek into English. This is because, he says, Epictetus’s “conversational manner and short sentences suit our modern idiom.” According to Long, Epictetus avoids complex sentence structure and needless verbosity. Better still, he tended to use simple, direct metaphors and diction for which there are accessible everyday equivalents.This is high praise to both Epictetus and his dutiful scribe/student Arrian. If we were to flash forward two thousand years, it’s unlikely that many of today’s working philosophers would pass this test. They’re inscrutable and unreadable today—imagine how they’d read across the vast gulf of time.Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus, on the other hand, knew that clear writing was a reflection of clear thinking. Marcus was writing in Greek, to himself, and still managed to produce beautiful, inspiring words that endure to this day. Seneca was such a brilliant ep