Why does Epictetus tell aspiring philosophers to expect ridicule?

Epictetus is realistic, not cynical, about what happens when someone visibly starts trying to live differently. People notice a change in manner and mock it. He tells the beginner to expect this from the outset, because expecting it is what keeps you from being thrown by it.

The setting matters. In Handbook 22, Epictetus is not describing hecklers in a lecture hall. He is describing friends, family, and acquaintances who watch someone start caring about their opinions, desires, and actions instead of the usual things: reputation, money, status. They see the outward signs first, a different bearing, a different set of priorities, and they reach for the easiest explanation. He puts words in their mouths: "He is returned to us a philosopher all at once," and "Whence this supercilious look?" (Handbook 22). The mockery is not really about philosophy. It is about a person suddenly measuring things differently than the crowd does.

The common misreading is to hear this as a warning to brace for insult, the way you might brace for cold water. Toughen up, expect to be mocked, move on. That reading treats ridicule as an obstacle to survive. Epictetus is after something sharper. He tells the beginner not to adopt a supercilious look either. The temptation, once you have started caring about your own judgments and actions rather than externals, is to look down on the people still absorbed in reputation and status. Epictetus rules that out directly: don't have a supercilious look, but keep steadily to those things which appear best to you (Handbook 22). The discipline is not just enduring mockery. It is refusing both of the easy postures available to you, contempt for the mockers or defeat by them.

This connects to the line the rest of the Handbook works out. Some things are in our control and others not: opinion, pursuit, desire, and aversion are ours, while body, property, reputation, and command are not (Handbook 1). Ridicule targets exactly the externals you are learning to stop overvaluing, your reputation and how you appear to onlookers. If you flinch at mockery, you are proving you still think reputation belongs to you rather than to the opinions of others. Epictetus makes the stakes explicit: those very persons who at first ridiculed will afterwards admire you, if you adhere to the same point, but if you are conquered by them, you incur a double ridicule (Handbook 22). The second ridicule is worse because it shows the first one worked. You changed your behavior to match what mockers expected, which means you handed them control over the one thing that was supposed to be yours: your faculty of choice.

Epictetus roots this faculty in his account of what has actually been given to us. In the Discourses, he has Zeus explain that body and property could not be made free from hindrance, but the faculty of pursuing and avoiding, desiring and being averse to things, was given to us whole, so that if you take care of it and consider it your only possession, you will never be hindered (Discourses 1.1). Ridicule cannot touch that faculty unless you let it. It can only touch your reputation, which was never yours to begin with.

What changes for someone who takes this seriously is not their tolerance for insult but their diagnosis of it. Mockery becomes information about the mocker's priorities, not a verdict on your choice. A concrete way to apply this: the next time you notice yourself softening a change in how you live because someone might raise an eyebrow, ask what exactly you are protecting. If the answer is your appearance in someone else's eyes, you already have Epictetus's answer for what that is worth.