The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Monday, October 30, 2017

Epictetus, The Handbook 16: A Banquet Fit for the Gods



Remember that you must behave in life as you would at a banquet. A dish is handed round and comes to you; put out your hand and take it politely. It passes you; do not stop it. It has not reached you; do not be impatient to get it, but wait till your turn comes.

Bear yourself thus towards children, wife, office, wealth, and one day you will be worthy to banquet with the gods.

But if when they are set before you, you do not take them but despise them, then you shall not only share the gods’ banquet, but shall share their rule. For by so doing Diogenes and Heraclitus and men like them were called divine and deserved the name.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 15 (tr Matheson)

It took me many years to fully grasp how deeply obsessed our world is with acquisition and consumption. I had always seen greedy people, of course, and I had promised myself that I would never become like that, but I needed to be able to step outside of the whole set of social assumptions, to look at them from the another perspective, to recognize how thoroughly we define ourselves inside by what we conquer or achieve outside.

The grabbing and fighting over trinkets we see every year during the Thanksgiving shopping season may rightly seem barbaric to many of us, but I suggest it is just a rougher looking form of what we also see in business, politics, law, or advertising. Produce, compete, acquire, consume, and repeat.

Now I’ve observed some followers of Stoicism wonder if there can be some form of Stoic social teaching to alleviate such problems of greed, and I’ve been told by various Socialists, Marxists, Greens, Libertarians, or Anarchists that my insight means I’m well on my way to embracing their politics.

I can hardly deny others their solutions for a better world, but for myself, I have experienced Stoicism as a philosophy that is never built from the top down, but always from the bottom up. I have always thought it best to fix myself before I tell other people how to fix themselves, and I remain perhaps naïvely hopeful that if individuals chose to act with virtue, about the things within our power, the rest would rightly fall into place.

No, I can complain and protest about the greed and gluttony of a fast-food culture, which will produce nothing but resentment from everyone, or I can try to practice justice and temperance myself, day by day.

The image of our behavior at a banquet has long been helpful in keeping my own avarice under control. I was still raised to have good table manners, something I suspect has been skipped over almost entirely by the generation that followed mine, but my interest has nothing to do with the social niceties of how to sip my tea or use the silverware. My interest has to do with the relationship between what I want, what is offered to me, and what I then choose to take.

First, it is within my power to rightly know what I should or should not want, and I need never surrender that power to the pressures of others.

Second, I should never want anything that is beyond what I need, and Nature has made me such that I do not need to ask her to give me more than she offers.

Third, if it is always within my power to choose or not to choose, it is also in my power to take or not to take. The virtuous guest may thankfully accept what is offered, or he may even graciously decline. He may even rise above desire itself.

It is noble to say yes with self-control, nobler still to say no through absolute self-control. This, Epictetus says, is the true state of self-sufficiency of the Divine.

I was recently in awe of my teenage son, whom I expect to always be clamoring to buy and consume more things. We were standing in front of an elaborate sales display, and he calmly asked, “When was the last time anyone turned down a sale?”

“Whenever anyone refuses to be led by the nose,” was my reply, and I was pleased to see that he completely understood. He was perfectly content to buy nothing that day.

Written in 9/2016

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