| |
The Four Lost Books
It is generally believed that Arrian compiled Discourses in eight volumes, only four of which survive. Given that we have lost about half of all Arrian’s compilations, one naturally wonders if we have lost something substantial with regard to Epictetus’ thinking. No one can provide a definitive answer to that question, of course.
However, when one looks at the structure of the Discourses, it becomes clear that, after the first few discourses, very few new ideas are introduced. Many discourses are an expansion of the earlier discourses, or they repeat the same ideas in different words, often using different examples. Occasionally, some later discourses repeat an earlier idea using the same words and examples. The redundancy is so pronounced that a modern translator (Robert Dobbin) of Discourses did not even care to translate two-thirds of books III and IV (18 out of 26 and 8 out of 13)
Again, in Enchiridion (which is essentially a summary of the essence of Epictetus’ teachings) we don’t find any new ideas not found in the first four books.
So while it is possible that we might have missed some of the rhetorical flourishes of Epictetus, it seems unlikely that the four lost books contained any new ideas not covered in the books that survived.
Appendix 3
