Epictetus as imagined in an engraving by Theodoor Galle (1605). Source · Public domain
About Epictetus
Epictetus (c. 50-c. 135 CE) was a Greek Stoic teacher born at Hierapolis in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, who spent his youth as a slave in Rome in the household of Epaphroditus, a freedman of the emperor Nero. He was lame, and while still a slave he attended the lectures of the Stoic Musonius Rufus. After gaining his freedom he taught philosophy in Rome until the emperor Domitian expelled the philosophers from the city, then opened a school at Nicopolis in Epirus, on the western coast of Greece, where he taught until old age. He wrote nothing himself; his pupil Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and condensed their teaching into the Encheiridion, or Handbook.
Frequently Cited
“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”
The Discourses and the Encheiridion preserve the teaching of Epictetus, a lame former slave who ran a school of Stoic philosophy at Nicopolis in western Greece in the early second century. Epictetus wrote nothing.
