The Slave Who Taught Emperors

Around the year 55 AD, in a town called Hierapolis in what is now Türkiye, a child was born to a woman who was a slave. That made him a slave too.

His owners sent him to Rome.

He was sold to a rich and powerful man named Epaphroditus, who had once been a slave himself but had worked his way up to become secretary to the Emperor Nero. Epaphroditus gave the boy a name that matched his new life: Epictetus, which means "acquired" or "bought."

No one knows the boy's real name.

At some point during his time as a slave, his leg was broken. Some stories say his master twisted it until it snapped. Others say it was an old injury that never healed right. Either way, Epictetus walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He said almost nothing about it in his teaching, except to note that the body is not the part of us that matters most.

Epaphroditus let him study philosophy. In Rome in those years, that was almost as good as letting him go free. He sat under a Stoic teacher named Musonius Rufus and took in everything he could.

When he was finally given his freedom, he stayed in Rome and began teaching on his own.

Rome was not a safe place to be a teacher of philosophy. The Emperor Domitian, who did not like anyone who might get people to think for themselves, ordered all the philosophers out of the city around the year 93 AD. Epictetus was on the road again. He settled in a small Greek town called Nicopolis and opened a school there.

Students came from across the empire to hear him speak. He taught for the rest of his life, lived simply, owned almost nothing, never married, and, late in life, adopted a child whose parents had died. He died, they say, around the year 135 AD.

He never wrote anything down.

Everything we have from him comes from a student named Arrian, who took notes.

What you are about to read is in two parts.

Part I is the Handbook, which in Greek is called the Enchiridion. Arrian pulled it together from his notes as a short, portable summary of the teaching. Fifty-two chapters. Some are a single sentence. It was meant to be carried in a pocket and used.

Part II is a set of eight longer lectures from the Discourses, also written down by Arrian. The Discourses are not a neat summary. They are Epictetus in the room with his students, pushing back, telling stories, answering questions. They show how the ideas lived when spoken out loud.

Taken together, these two parts tell one story.

The story is about a man who began his life owned by someone else and ended it more free than the emperors. He spent the years in between teaching anyone who would listen how the same freedom could be theirs.

If you get one thing from this book, let it be this: the freedom Epictetus found did not come from his chains falling off. It came from somewhere deeper than any chain could reach. The question he leaves you with is whether you want to find that place in yourself, and whether you are willing to do the work to get there.

Daimon Classics