 Any effort to come to grips with Epictetus’s thought must proceed from an awareness of his chosen objectives. The philosopher we meet in the Discourses seeks above all to foster ethical development in others, keeping his personal intellectual satisfaction strictly subordinate. Consequently we possess no point-by-point exposition of his views. The themes he regards as most difficult for students to internalize appear repeatedly and are developed and expanded in many different ways. Other issues he either treats sporadically—even if passing references suggest he has knowledge of them—or omits altogether, if he regards them as inessential to moral development. His apparent inclination to hold back some of his thinking, as well as the incomplete condition in which the Discourses have been transmitted to us, make it quite unsafe to draw any assumption about his views from silences or gaps in the account we have. On the other hand, the recursive manner of presentation makes it unlikely that the non-extant volumes broached any entirely new themes.