Library › Greek: Philosophy › Gnomology (Books 1-2)
Maxims and short excerpts drawn from the Stoic teaching of Epictetus make up this Gnomology, here in the portion corresponding to Books 1–2. Epictetus, who taught in Greek at Nicopolis in the early second century AD, wrote nothing himself; besides Arrian’s Discourses, his sayings were gathered into collections of this kind and handed down through later anthologies.
Such gnomologies show how ancient readers actually used philosophy: as portable wisdom, copied and recopied for moral guidance. Compact and pointed, these Ancient Greek sentences distill the school’s central counsel — concern yourself with what is yours to control — and they document the long afterlife of Stoic teaching in late antiquity and beyond.
About this edition. The Greek text is that of the Perseus Digital Library. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).