Epictetus was born around the year 50 in Hierapolis in Phrygia, in present-day Turkey, and was the property of Epaphroditus, a freed slave who had risen to be secretary to the emperor Nero. His name is not a name but a description: epiktetos means acquired, purchased. Somewhere in those years he was lamed; one tradition points to mistreatment, another to illness.
After his manumission he taught in Rome, until the emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from Italy around the year 93. They counted as a political risk: people who asked questions where others kept quiet. Epictetus was then about forty, with a school, an audience and a life in the capital.
He did not resist and did not plead. He crossed to Nicopolis, on the west coast of Greece, and began again. He rented a plain lodging, put down a mattress and a rush mat, and taught.
What followed is the reverse of what the emperor intended. The school at Nicopolis became the best known in the empire. Roman senators sent their sons across the sea to be taught by a banished, lame former slave. One of them, the later consul and governor Arrian, wrote down his lectures; without those notes not one word of his would survive.
Epictetus lived in extreme simplicity and never married. Only in old age did he take in a child that would otherwise have been abandoned, bringing a woman into his household to raise it. Domitian was murdered in 96. Epictetus went on teaching for more than thirty years.
An emperor banishes you from the city where you built everything. You can fight, complain, or move and remain the same man.
The tempting sorting is that he considered the loss unimportant. He did not. His school, his audience and his city had value, and he did not pretend otherwise when they fell away.
What he did was more exact. The decree lay with Domitian and there was no version in which that changed; pleading would have cost him his character and not altered the decision. His craft lay with himself, and that an emperor cannot confiscate. So he got on the boat and taught.
Note what he did not do. He did not stay in Rome to make a point, and he did not leave embittered. Both would have chained him to another man's decision. He treated the banishment like the weather: something you take into account when setting your route, not something you negotiate with.
His whole teaching comes from here, and that is no accident. Someone born as another man's property learns early which part of him is not for sale.
It is easy to find this heroic from a distance of two thousand years. Banishment meant losing your network, your income and often your health, and most exiles did not land on their feet. Epictetus also had something most of them lacked: a craft he could practise anywhere, and a reputation that travelled with him. That does not make his choice worth less, but it does make it more feasible than the story suggests.
What do you call your foundation? And how much of it, honestly sorted, is actually on loan?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions