Epictetus owned almost nothing. His household, by tradition, consisted of a mattress, a rush mat and a single iron lamp, which he kept burning by his household shrine. Of all his possessions, that lamp was the one object worth anything.
One night a thief climbed in and took it.
He tells the story twice himself in his lectures, and both times against himself. Not: see how calm I stayed. Rather: I had made the lamp more important than it was, and that is why someone could reach me through it. The thief had not simply taken something from him; he had shown him where he had been clinging.
The next day he bought an earthenware lamp. That one was worth nothing, so nobody would come for it.
What happened afterwards to that earthenware one was recorded mockingly by the satirist Lucian a century later. After Epictetus' death someone bought the lamp for three thousand drachmas, on the assumption that by its light he would become as wise as its owner.
Three thousand drachmas was a small fortune. The buyer had made precisely the error Epictetus had used that lamp to unlearn: he thought wisdom sat in an object.
It is the sharpest joke antiquity produced about this school, and it comes not from an adherent but from a mocker. Lucian did not care for philosophers, and here he was right.
Someone takes the one valuable thing you own. You can be angry at the thief, or look at why it reaches you.
The tempting sorting is that he did not miss the lamp. He says that nowhere; he says something more uncomfortable, namely that he had let himself be surprised by his own attachment.
The cut is sharp. The thief, the theft and the lamp lay outside him, and nothing could be done about them. But Epictetus does not stop there, and that is what sets this case apart. He asks further: why did it hurt? Because he had taken that object into what he called himself.
That is the second layer of the teaching. It is not enough to know that something lies beyond your power; you also have to notice when you have quietly counted it among your possessions anyway. The pain is the evidence. Where it stings, you have put something in the wrong box.
The earthenware replacement is the practical conclusion. He removed the temptation rather than promising himself he would be stronger next time.
It is a small story and it is easily made too large. A lamp is not a child, a house or your health, and the step from this example to real losses is bigger than the maxim suggests.
And there is a reading that makes the teaching unattractive: if you own only things worth nothing, nobody can take anything from you, but then you have loved nothing either. Epictetus himself is the counter-evidence, since the same man took in, in old age, a child that would otherwise have been abandoned. He was not asking for coldness. He was asking for accuracy about what you hold on loan.
At which small loss, a scratch, a stolen bicycle, a vanished object, do you routinely hand over your mood as well? And what would the earthenware lamp be in your life?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions