Should a Stoic comply with unjust authority or resist it?

Epictetus does not give a single rule that settles every case of unjust authority in advance. He gives a method: separate what is up to you from what is not, then decide each case on its merits, because reason itself looks different depending on what is actually at stake for the person involved.

This is the point of his blunt example about holding a chamber pot for another man (Discourses I 2). One person finds this bearable, since the alternative is losing food and being beaten. Another finds it intolerable, not just for himself but even to watch someone else submit to it. Epictetus refuses to hand down a verdict. He says plainly that if you measure your interests only by food and stripes, then go and hold the pot. But he immediately lets the objection stand: "this, you say, would not be worthy of me." Compliance can be rational for one person and beneath another, because what counts as rational depends on what each person has judged worth protecting.

The common misreading is that Stoicism counsels passive submission to whatever power demands, since externals do not matter and resistance risks the body for no Stoic gain. Epictetus cuts against this directly. In Discourses I 29 he imagines a tyrant's threats answered one by one: chains threaten the hands and feet, execution threatens the head, prison threatens the body, exile threatens nothing more than a change of place. None of these touch the one thing that is actually his, his faculty of choice (prohairesis), his will. The tyrant can seize property and even life, but "If you would have any thing good, receive it from yourself." Submission out of fear of pain is not required, because pain is not the evil Stoicism is built to avoid. Bad judgment is.

This reframes the question. It is: what have you decided your good consists in? In Discourses I 19, Epictetus strips the tyrant's power down to what it is: the tyrant cannot give you desire free of hindrance, cannot guarantee you avoid what you want to avoid, cannot steer your choices better than you can steer them yourself. "All men pay respect to me," the tyrant boasts, and Epictetus simply asks what that buys him over your will. In Discourses IV 7, he goes further: a person who has stopped overvaluing property, family, and even the body approaches the tyrant without fear, not from recklessness but from having correctly priced what is actually his to lose. What makes guards and swords formidable is only the fear of losing externals. Take that fear away through right judgment, and "what tyrant is then formidable to him or what guards or what swords?"

So the Stoic answer is not a flat command to defy power, nor a flat command to obey it. It is a standard: act according to what your judgment, examined honestly, says a person of your character should do, and do not let fear of consequences that are not up to you distort that judgment. Sometimes this looks like calm compliance, holding the pot, paying the fine, accepting exile. Sometimes it looks like refusal even at the cost of the body, as with the man in Discourses IV 7 who no longer values survival above everything else. Epictetus will not tell you in advance which one is yours to choose. What he insists on is that the choice be made by you, from your own judgment of what is worthy, and not handed over to the tyrant's threats as though they decided the question for you.

The usable move is this: before deciding to comply or resist, ask what the authority can actually take from you. If the honest answer is only body, property, or reputation, you are free to decide the practical question on its own terms, without fear distorting it. If complying would require you to call something good that you know is bad, that is a different matter entirely, and no threat changes what is worthy of you.