to reject (see chart). It appears eight times in noun form and twenty-one times in verb form in
Epictetus: 3.2.1–3a, 3.8.4, and 4.11.6–7.
Technê (τέχνη): craft, art in the sense of profession or vocation. Marcus says our technê is to be a
good human being (11.5). Epictetus uses the analogies of crafts and trades quite often, particularly in
drawing focus to the proper material of our work as human beings.
Telos (τέλος): the end goal or objective of life.
Theôrêma (θεώρημα): general principle or perception, a truth of science; used interchangeably
with dogmata in discussing the mind’s store of judgments.
Theos (θεός): god; the divine, creative power that orders the universe and gives human beings
their reason and freedom of choice. As far as theology goes, despite reflecting the polytheism of
their culture and making references to gods of all stripes, the late Stoics were monists and pantheists:
God = nature. Further, they were materialists, so even the divine spark in us—and the soul—are
corporeal. Epictetus was a Phrygian by birth and had a very vivid, personalistic view of God. He
referred to God as a kindly father (see particularly Discourses 1.6, 3.24). A. A. Long, the foremost
scholar of Epictetus, put it this way: “Whether [Epictetus] speaks of Zeus or God or Nature or the
gods, he is completely committed to the belief that the world is providentially organized by a divine
power whose creative agency reaches its highest manifestation in human beings” (Epictetus: A Stoic
and Socratic Guide to Life, p. 134). Long thinks Epictetus was reviving Cleanthes’s (successor to
Zeno) strong religious sense. There is no transcendent god for any of the Stoics—a key difference
from Christianity. Epictetus says we must seek to bind up our choice with the will of God
(Discourses 4.1.89). Marcus tends to refer to the divine in a looser, often more polytheistic way (see
9.1.1), but he shares Epictetus’s views, especially when he says, “hold sacred your capacity for
understanding,” a gift from God requiring obedience to God (3.9). Seneca, too, speaks often of the
divine in plural, but all three are agreed that we must accept fate and seek to correct our own faults
rather than blame others or the gods (Moral Letters 107.12).
Tonos (τόνος): tension, a principle in Stoic physics accounting for attraction and repulsion; a
way of seeing what gives rise to virtue and vice in the soul.