Epictetus

Epictetus was born into slavery at Hierapolis in Phrygia and was brought as a boy to Rome, where he belonged to Epaphroditus, a freedman of the emperor Nero. His master allowed him to attend the lectures of the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, and Epictetus was later set free.

When the emperor Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome, Epictetus settled at Nicopolis in Epirus, in north-western Greece, and taught Stoic philosophy there for the rest of his life. His central doctrine is that we are free only in what is in our own power, our judgments and desires, and must treat everything else as outside our control.

Epictetus wrote nothing himself. His pupil Arrian, later a Roman governor and historian, took down his lectures: four books of the Discourses survive, with the short Encheiridion, or Handbook, drawn from them, and a collection of fragments. They are given here in George Long’s English translation.