Epictetus
50–135 28 entries
Biography
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher who was born a slave. He came from Hierapolis in Phrygia, in today’s Turkey, and was brought to Rome, where he belonged to Epaphroditus, a freedman and secretary of the emperor Nero. His master allowed him to study with the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, and after Nero’s death he was freed and began to teach philosophy himself. He was lame all his life, according to one story because a master had broken his leg.
When the emperor Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome around 93, Epictetus moved to Nicopolis in western Greece, where he founded a school and taught until his death around 135. He wrote nothing himself; his pupil Arrian took down his lessons in the Discourses and gathered their essence in a short Handbook, the Enchiridion. Its central teaching is to tell apart what is up to us, our judgments, wishes and actions, from what is not, and to seek freedom and peace only in the first. The emperor Marcus Aurelius was among his readers and quotes him in the Meditations.
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