Stoicism for the twenty-first century

This is a translation of a short story on the stoic slave / philosopher Epictetus. It was originally written and published in Dutch. Please forgive me my clumsy English. The text is intended to be an introduction to a blog I’ll try to write the coming year. I intend to give you each week a translation of one of the chapters of Epictetus' 'Handbook'. Coincidentally, the 'Encheiridion', as this booklet is also called, consists of exactly 52 short chapters. I will provide my translation with a brief personal explanation. You should not expect too much. My grammar Greek is, to put it mildly, rusty and the translations nor the comments do have any scientific pretention. Still, I hope that my stories will be of some use and especially that you will enjoy them. Let's start with the simple, but not unimportant question: who was Epictetus and what is his book about? We start this story immediately with a disappointment, about the life of our hero almost nothing is...

For the Stoics, there is no contradiction between the 'memento mori' advocated by Christianity and the more cheerful 'carpe diem'. 'Memento mori' or 'remembering to die' is mainly used in Christianity as a call to prepare for one's own death and the hereafter. The more hedonistic 'carpe diem', 'pluck the day', stands for pleasure in the here and now. The ancient Stoics paid a lot of attention to death, but they saw it primarily as an incentive to enjoy life more. They saw death as something inevitable that you can and must prepare for. Seneca even considered it to be the ultimate touchstone for life. In a letter to his friend Lucilius he said it like this: "Every day we die a bit, because every day a new part of our life is snapped off. As we age, our lives are continuously becoming a bit shorter. We already have lost our infancy, our childhood and also our youth has long been gone. Even the moment we live now, we must ...