Epictetus Was a Slave When He Taught Stoicism

Epictetus was born around 50 AD in Hierapolis, in what is now western Turkey, as a slave. His owner, Epaphroditus, was a freedman who served as secretary to the Emperor Nero, which placed Epictetus near the top of Roman power while being its legal property.

The story that Epaphroditus once twisted Epictetus's leg to demonstrate the slave's indifference to pain appears in ancient sources, though its reliability is contested. What is not contested is that Epictetus was eventually freed, moved to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, and spent the rest of his life teaching Stoic philosophy to students who traveled from across the Roman world to hear him.

He never wrote anything down. His student Arrian, who would later become a historian, transcribed his lectures as the Discourses and condensed the core principles into the Enchiridion — a handbook you can read in an afternoon.

The central doctrine was the dichotomy of control: some things are up to us (our judgments, desires, intentions), and some things are not (our bodies, reputations, other people's actions). Suffering comes from treating the second category as if it belonged to the first. A slave who grasps this is freer than an emperor who does not.

This was not an abstract claim for Epictetus. He taught it from inside a condition that most people would consider the clearest possible refutation of it. Marcus Aurelius, who was an emperor, studied Epictetus with what amounts to reverence, citing him in the private notebooks we call the Meditations more than any other thinker.