Epictetus

In the crowded world of the early Roman Empire, Epictetus learned philosophy from a place few philosophers began: slavery. Born around AD 50 at Hierapolis in Phrygia, in what is now Pamukkale in western Turkey, he spent his youth in Rome enslaved to Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman who had served as secretary to Nero. Even his name carries the mark of that condition. “Epictetus” comes from a Greek word meaning “gained” or “acquired,” a term that could refer to property added to a household.

His position was unusually complicated. As a slave, he stood near the bottom of Roman society; through his master’s connection to imperial power, he was also close to its center. Early in life he developed a passion for philosophy, and with his master’s permission he studied Stoicism under Musonius Rufus. At some point he became disabled. Ancient writers differed on the cause: Celsus, as quoted by Origen, said his leg had been deliberately broken by his master, while Simplicius wrote only that Epictetus had been disabled from childhood.

Epictetus gained his freedom sometime after Nero’s death in AD 68 and began teaching philosophy in Rome. Around AD 93, when Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from the city, he moved to Nicopolis in Epirus, in northwestern Greece. There he founded a school of philosophy and spent the rest of his life. His most famous pupil, Arrian, studied with him as a young man around AD 108 and later wrote down his teaching in the Discourses and the Enchiridion, or Handbook. No writings by Epictetus himself are known.

What Arrian preserved is not abstract speculation for its own sake. Epictetus taught that philosophy was a way of life, not merely a theoretical discipline. External events, he argued, are beyond our control and should be accepted calmly and without passion. What remains in our hands is how we act, judge, and discipline ourselves. He put self-knowledge at the foundation of philosophy, beginning with the recognition of our own ignorance and gullibility. Logic mattered to him, but only because it served the practical work of living rightly.

His manner of teaching seems to have been hard to forget. Arrian described him as a speaker able to make listeners feel exactly what he wanted them to feel. Eminent visitors sought him out, and Emperor Hadrian was friendly with him, possibly after hearing him teach at Nicopolis. Epictetus lived with great simplicity and few possessions. He lived alone for a long time, but in old age he adopted the child of a friend who otherwise would have been left to die, raising the child with the aid of a woman. He died around AD 135.

Through Arrian’s notes, Epictetus reached readers far beyond his own school. Marcus Aurelius cited him in the Meditations, and later thinkers including Pascal, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rabelais, and Samuel Johnson felt his influence. His appeal lies in the plain force of his counsel: stop blaming the world for what is not yours to command, and attend to the character you can form. As one saying attributed to him puts it, “Devote the rest of your life to making progress.”