Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living From Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

There are the Stoics who talked about what it means to be free, and then there is Epictetus.

For nearly half a millennium, from Zeno to Thrasea, these philosophers had written about freedom. They had resisted tyrannical governments and they had faced the prospect of exile. Yet one cannot help but feel the privilege dripping from most of their writings.

Most of these men were rich. They were famous. They were powerful.

Cato was. Zeno had been. Posidonius and Panaetius never had to work a day in their lives.

So when each spoke about freedom, they meant it abstractly. They were not literally in chains. While Seneca would speak, with surprising relatability, about slave owners who became owned themselves by the responsibility and management of their slaves, or other Stoics would congratulate themselves for their humane treatment of their human chattel, Epictetus actually was one.

Freedom was not a metaphor for this Stoic philosopher. It was his daily battle.

Born in 55 AD in Hierapolis, Epictetus knew slavery from birth. His name, in Greek, is quite literally “acquired one.” Somehow, despite this, his tenacity, his perspective, and his sheer self-sufficiency would make Epictetus—not just in his life, not just to the emperors he influenced, but in history and for all time—the ultimate symbol of the ability of human beings to find true freedom in the darkest of circumstances.

And they were dark circumstances. Epictetus was born the son of a slave woman in what is now modern Turkey, in a region that as part of the Roman Empire was subject to its brutal laws. One of those laws, Lex Aelia Sentia, made it impossible for slaves to be freed before their thirtieth birthday. It’s a disturbing irony that Augustus, then, who passed the law and was advised by not one but two Stoic philosophers, stole three decades from Epictetus’s life. As a young boy, Epictetus was purchased by a man named Epaphroditus—a former slave himself—who went on to become Nero’s secretary and served alongside Seneca. Two emperors, with three Stoic philosophers advising them, and apparently not so much as a question about whether it was right to own a human being.*

Hardly a shining moment of courage, justice, temperance, or wisdom . . .

Epictetus had little time to ponder the fairness of his fate. He was too busy being a slave. What he could do and couldn’t do was overtly controlled. The fruits of his labor were stolen, and his body abused—Rome was not known for treating its slaves gently. He was a vessel to be used up and then discarded, like a horse that was ridden into the ground and then put down.

That he even survived into adulthood is a surprise.

Even by Roman standards, Epictetus had a cruel master. Later Christian writers portray Epictetus’s master as violent and depraved, at one point twisting Epictetus’s leg with all his might. As a punishment? As a sick pleasure? Trying to get a disobedient young kid to follow instructions? We don’t know. All we hear is that Epictetus calmly warned him about taking it too far. When the leg snapped, Epictetus made no sound and cried no tears. He only smiled, looked at his master, and said, “Didn’t I warn you?”

Why does this make us shudder? Empathy or pain? A horror at the senselessness? Or is it at the sheer self-mastery?

With Epictetus it is all this and more.

All his life, Epictetus walked with a limp. We can’t be certain whether it came from this painful incident or another, but undoubtedly he was hobbled by slavery, yet somehow unbroken all the same. “Lameness is an impediment to the leg,” he would later say, “but not to the will.”

The Stoics believed we decided how we would react to what happened to us. Epictetus, as we each hold the power to do, chose to see his disability as only a physical impairment, and in fact it was that idea of choice, we shall see, that defined the core of his philosophical beliefs.

To Epictetus, no human was the full author of what happened in life. Instead, he said, it was as if we were in a play, and if it was the playwright’s “pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.”

And so he did.

In Nero’s court in the 60s AD, Epictetus would have seen all of the opulence, insanity, and contradictions of Rome at that time. He would later tell a story of witnessing a man come to Epaphroditus begging for help because he was down to his last million and a half sesterces (at least $3 million in today’s dollars). Was it with sarcasm or genuine bafflement that Epictetus’s rich owner replied, “Dear man, how did you keep silent, how could you possibly endure it?”

It must have also been revealing for Epictetus to watch Epaphroditus—this man who had incredible power over him—contorting himself to remain on Nero’s good side, down to flattering even the man’s cobbler in hope of winning favor. He saw aspiring candidates for the office of consul working themselves to the bone to earn the position. He saw the gifts that were expected, the spectacles that had to be put on, the chain of offices that needed to be held for years in order to get ahead. That’s freedom? he must have thought. “For the sake of these mighty and dignified offices and honors you kiss the hands of another man’s slaves,” he wrote, “and are thus the slaves of men who are not free themselves.”

The rich in Rome were no different than the rich today: Despite all their wealth, ambition turns even a powerful person into a supplicant in the hope of gaining more.

“Freedom is the prize we are working for: not being a slave to anything—not to compulsion, not to chance events,” Seneca had written. What would Epictetus have thought watching Seneca in the flesh—whose works would have been featured in the home of a well-read man like Epaphroditus—working for such a deranged boss? As a writer, Seneca may well have been the person who introduced Epictetus to Stoicism, but by his example he clearly influenced Epictetus even more: Freedom is more than a legal status. It’s a state of mind, a way of living.

Seneca, unable to walk away from Nero’s service, ultimately forced to submit to suicide, was not trapped in the same slavery as Epictetus, but he was not free all the same.

What we know is that Epictetus was horrified by what he saw in the palaces and imperial offices of Rome, and resolved to live differently. “It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind,” he would say, “than to live anxiously amidst abundance.” Seeing someone like Agrippinus—whom Epictetus likely also met—would have been a powerful counterexample, reminding him that those who marched to their own beat could be free despite the tyranny that surrounded them. “For no man is a slave who is free in his will,” Epictetus would later say, sounding much more like Agrippinus in practice than Seneca on the page.

At some point, Epictetus came formally to philosophy, though we are not sure when. By 78 AD, though, when Musonius Rufus returned from his third exile, Epictetus was there to study under him. Did he sneak off to his lectures? Did Epictetus’s master let him attend out of guilt?

We don’t know, but clearly Epictetus found a way. He would not be stopped, not even by Musonius, who was a difficult teacher. Musonius said that silence was a sign of attentive students, but Epictetus, who would have been in his twenties by the time he met Rufus, would later recount that Rufus also believed that if a student praised him, it meant they had utterly missed the challenge his lectures had aimed at them.

This was not a general challenge either. Like the best teachers, Musonius made each of his students feel like he truly understood them at their core. Musonius had said a good teacher should “seek to penetrate to the very intellect of his hearer,” and that’s what clearly happened with Epictetus.

Epictetus would describe a teaching style that was so pointed and so personal that it felt as if another student had whispered all of your weaknesses in the teacher’s ear. Once, after making an error, Epictetus tried to make an excuse. “It is not as bad as if I had set fire to the Capitol,” he said. Musonius shook his head and called him a fool. “In this case,” he said, “the thing you missed is the Capitol.” This was a teacher who demanded the absolute best from his students. To make a mistake, to use weak logic, to fail to spot your own inconsistency was to fail philosophy entirely. And to then try to minimize it? To Musonius, that was as bad as burning Rome and dancing on the ashes.

It was from this kind of teacher that Epictetus came to understand philosophy not as some fun diversion but as something deadly serious. “The philosopher’s lecture-hall is a hospital,” he would later say to his own students. “You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it.”

Although Musonius Rufus was not a slave, he and Epictetus had long conversations about the human condition. Both, clearly, had experienced the worst of what men could do to each other—Musonius with his repeated exiles, and Epictetus living through bondage. Yet instead of taking bitterness from this, instead of losing their sense of agency over their lives, they were both pushed by these painful events toward realizing that the only power they actually had was over their mind and their character. “If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious,” Epictetus said, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way.

Which of these forms of slavery is more shameful? Which of these can we stop right now?

At some point, in his thirties, Epictetus was made free by fact and law as well as spirit. Now life presented him with new choices, the same choices each of us gets when we enter the world as adults: What would he do for a living? How would he spend his freedom? What would he do with his life?

Epictetus chose to dedicate himself fully to philosophy. Unlike the other Stoics, who had been senators and generals, advisors and wealthy heirs—professions that were influenced by their philosophy—Epictetus was one of the first to choose what today we might call the academic route.

It would be a life closer to Cleanthes’s or Zeno’s than Athenodorus’s or Cato’s.

Almost immediately, Epictetus gained a large following. His school and his standing were enough that by 93 AD, when Domitian banned philosophers from Rome, Epictetus was one who was driven to exile. In a way, it was fitting that he chose Greece—a city called Nicopolis—because this idea of returning to teaching philosophy was a return to the Greek Stoicism that Zeno and Cleanthes had helped pioneer. Epictetus’s life was no soft affair and he could expect no tenure, but in choosing to teach, he was explicitly turning away from the Stoicism of the imperial court.

He would not be complicit in some deranged emperor’s plans. He would not suffer vainly to rein in their worst impulses. He would not be a cog in the enormous imperial hegemon. He would instead pursue truth where it could be found.

This hardly meant he was fleeing the responsibilities or the reality of the world—he just had no interest in political machinations or acquiring wealth. It was wisdom he was after: how to get it, how to apply it, how to pass it on to others. “If we philosophers,” he said, “apply ourselves to our own work as zealously as the old men at Rome have applied themselves to the matters on which they have set their hearts, perhaps we too could accomplish something.”

Epictetus’s most powerful insight as a teacher derives directly from his experiences as a slave. Although all humans are introduced at some point to the laws of the universe, almost from the moment he was born, Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had, even of his own person. As he came to study and understand Stoicism, he adopted this lesson into what he described as our “chief task in life.” It was, he said, simply “to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” Or, in his language, what is up to us and what is not up to us (ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin).

Once we have organized our understanding of the world into this stark categorization, what remains—what was so central to Epictetus’s survival as a slave—is to focus on what is up to us. Our attitudes. Our emotions. Our wants. Our desires. Our opinions about what has happened to us. Epictetus believed that as powerless as humans were over their external conditions, they always retained the ability to choose how they responded. “You can bind up my leg,” he would say—indeed, his leg really had been bound and broken—“but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.”

“Every situation has two handles,” Epictetus taught. One of these handles was weak and one of them was strong. No matter our condition, no matter how undesirable the situation, we retain the ability to choose which one we will grab. Are we going to choose to see that our brother is a selfish jerk? Or are we going to remember that we share the same mother, that he’s not this way on purpose, that we love him, that we have our own bad impulses too?*

This decision—which handle we grab, day in and day out, with anyone and everyone we deal with—determines what kind of life we have. And what kind of person we will be.

While it should not surprise us that in times as tough and cruel as Rome in the first century AD, students would flock to hear the insights of a man who had triumphed over so much adversity, it is interesting how affluent and powerful Epictetus’s audiences became, even as he taught more than five hundred miles from Rome. From all over the empire, parents sent their children to be schooled about life by a man who in the hustle and bustle of the court they would have dismissed as a mere slave.

Even the powerful themselves came to sit at his feet. At some point a young Hadrian, the future emperor, passed through Nicopolis and met Epictetus. How many lectures he sat in on, what kind of questions he asked, we do not know, but the historical record shows us that he admired this Stoic, and when he became all-powerful, he tacitly endorsed him (the Historia Augusta tells us that Hadrian was known for dismissing unfit philosophers from the profession entirely). Soon enough, Epictetus’s lectures would make their way to a young Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian’s adopted grandson and future king.

Epictetus’s focus on powerlessness was not only an insight about the power structures of his time. He was looking at what makes us fundamentally human. So much is out of our hands. And yet so much remains within our grasp, provided that we decline to relinquish it.

If a person wants to be happy, wants to feel fairly treated, wants to be rich, according to Epictetus, they don’t need life to be easy, people to be nice, and money to flow freely. They need to look at the world right. “It’s not things that upset us,” he would say, “it’s our judgment about things.” Our opinions determine the reality we experience. Epictetus didn’t believe it was possible to be offended or frustrated, not without anyone’s consent. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed,” he said. “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”

It’s a message that everyone ought to learn as a kid . . . or before they become king.

And what of the situations that are outside our control? How is one supposed to deal with that?

Exactly as Epictetus did while he was a slave—with endurance and equanimity. It is from Aulus Gellius that one of Epictetus’s most famous sayings is preserved:

[Epictetus] used to say that there were two faults which were by far the worst and most disgusting of all, lack of endurance and lack of self-restraint, when we cannot put up with or bear the wrongs which we ought to endure, or cannot restrain ourselves from actions or pleasures from which we ought to refrain. “Therefore,” he said, “if anyone would take these two words to heart and use them for his own guidance and regulation, he will be almost without sin and will lead a very peaceful life. These two words,” he said, “are ἀνέχου (persist) and ἀπέχου (resist).”

Persist and resist.

The ingredients of freedom, whatever one’s condition.

For every rich student Epictetus taught, he would have seen others who had been as impoverished and disadvantaged as he was. He would have seen men—and if he listened to Musonius, as we expect he did, he taught women too—who had been kicked around by fate. His message to them was the same as it was for emperors and future senators: Figure out how to make the most of the hand you have been dealt, play the role assigned to you with the brilliance of a character actor.

The ability to accept life on life’s terms, the need to not need things to be different, this was power to Epictetus. “Remember,” he said, “that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning. It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another. . . . Where our heart is set, there our impediment lies.”

For Epictetus, then, ambition should not be focused on externals but on internals. A Stoic’s greatest, most impressive triumph, he said, is not over other people or enemy armies but over oneself—over our limitations, our tempers, our egos, our petty desires. We all have these impulses; what sets us apart is if we rise above them. What makes us impressive is what we are able to make of this crooked material we were born with.

How rare but glorious the man or woman who manages to do so. How much better are the lives of those who try to rise above than those of the masses, who complain and whine, who sink to the level of their basest instincts. “From now on, then,” Epictetus said, “resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.”

It was the experience of having been deprived of so much that formed Epictetus’s detachment from worldly possessions. It was as if he said to himself, “No one will ever take anything from me again.”

We know that one evening a thief entered Epictetus’s home and stole an iron lamp that he kept burning in a shrine in his front hallway. While he felt a flash of disappointment and anger, he knew that a Stoic was not to trust these strong emotions. Pausing, checking with himself, he found a different way through the experience of being robbed. “Tomorrow, my friend,” he said to himself, “you will find an earthenware lamp; for a man can only lose what he has.”

You can only lose what you have. You don’t control your possessions, so don’t ascribe more value to them than they deserve. And whenever we forget this, life finds a way to painfully call it back to our attention.

It says something about the fame of this frugal teacher that after his death, an admirer—who clearly didn’t mind having something that could be taken from him—would purchase Epictetus’s earthen lamp for three thousand drachmas.

Yet even with this rejection of materialism, Epictetus was cautious not to let his self-discipline become a vice, to become some sort of contest with other people. “When you have accustomed your body to a frugal regime,” he said, “don’t put on airs about it, and if you only drink water, don’t broadcast the fact all the time. And if you ever want to go in for endurance training, do it for yourself and not for the world to see.” Progress is wonderful. Self-improvement is a worthy endeavor. But it should be done for its own sake—not for congratulations or recognition.

Epictetus never had children, but we know he adopted a young orphan and raised him to adulthood. It is haunting then, to imagine him practicing steeling himself against the loss even of the joy being a father brought him. As we learn from Marcus Aurelius, who himself would lose seven children in his lifetime:

As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

It cannot have been easy for Epictetus to think these thoughts about a boy he loved, but he knew from experience that life was cruel. He wished to remind himself that his precious son was not his possession, nor were his friends or his students or his health. The fate of these things remained, for the most part, outside his control. Which for a Stoic means only one thing: Cherish them while we have them, but accept that they belong to us only in trust, that they can depart at any moment. Because they can. And so can we.

This was what Epictetus practiced philosophy for. A man who had seen life in real and hard terms had no room or time for dialectics or for sophistry. He wanted strategies for getting better, for dealing with what was likely to happen to a person in the course of a day or in an empire ruled, far too often, by tyrants.

If this practical bent put him at odds with other Stoics, so be it. “What is the work of virtue?” he asked. “A well-flowing life. Who, then, is making progress? The person who has read the many works of Chrysippus? What, is virtue nothing more than that? To have attained a great knowledge of Chrysippus?”

Action was what mattered. Not reading. Not memorization. Not even publishing impressive writing of your own. Only working toward being a better person, a better thinker, a better citizen. “I can’t call a person a hard worker just because I hear they read and write,” Epictetus said, “even if working at it all night. Until I know what a person is working for, I can’t deem them industrious. . . . I can, if the end they work for is their own ruling principle, having it be and remain in constant harmony with Nature.”

As a thinker and a teacher, Epictetus preached humility. “It’s impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks they already know,” he said. In Zen, there is a parable of a master and a student who sit down to tea. The master fills up the cup until it overfills. This cup is like your mind, he says. If it is full, it cannot accept anything more. “It’s this whole conceit of knowing something useful that we ought to cast aside before we come to philosophy,” Epictetus would say, “. . . otherwise we will never come near to making any progress, even if we plow through all the primers and treatises of Chrysippus with those of Antipater and Archedemus thrown in.”

So each morning Epictetus had a dialogue with himself, checking his progress, evaluating whether he had properly steeled himself for what may come. It was then that he journaled or recited philosophy to himself. “Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand,” he advised, “write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.”

While other Romans were getting up early to pay obeisance to some patron or to further their careers, Epictetus wanted to look in the mirror, to hold himself accountable, to focus on where he was falling short. “What do I lack in order to achieve tranquility? What to achieve calm?” he would ask. “‘Where did I go wrong?’ in matters conducive to serenity? ‘What did I do’ that was unfriendly, or unsocial, or unfeeling? ‘What to be done was left undone’ in regard to these matters?”

Epictetus would die around 135 AD. Although he had been born into anonymity and slavery and would die of causes and in circumstances not known to us, it was never in doubt that his legacy would survive.

In the vein of Socrates and Cato, Epictetus neglected to publish a single word in his lifetime. Yet his teachings traveled widely even in his own time. Marcus Aurelius would be loaned a copy of Epictetus’s lectures by his tutor Junius Rusticus. Hadrian had studied Epictetus and now his chosen protégé would drink deeply from that same source of wisdom.

If Epictetus declined to write, how did so many of his teachings survive? Because one student, Arrian—a biographer who would achieve a consulship under Hadrian—would publish eight volumes of notes from Epictetus’s lectures. But it’s Arrian’s choice of title of an abridged form of these volumes that best captures what Stoicism and Epictetus’s teachings were designed for. He called it Encheiridion, literally meaning “to have at hand.”

A. A. Long, a later translator of Epictetus, explains this word choice:

In its earliest usage encheiridion refers to a hand-knife or dagger. Arrian may have wished to suggest that connotation of the work’s defensive or protective function. It fits his admonition at the beginning and end of the text to keep Epictetus’s message “to hand” (procheiron). In obvious imitation, Erasmus in 1501 published a work in Latin with the title Enchiridion militis Christiani (A Christian soldier’s manual).

Shakespeare has Casca say in Julius Caesar that every slave holds the source of their freedom in their hand, and it is with that weapon that Brutus would free himself of Caesar’s reign in 44 BC. Epictetus, some four generations later, would be an actual slave and under much more serious tyranny. He would not need to resort to murder. He would not need a literal weapon.

Instead, he would create another kind of freedom, a deeper freedom—that Arrian graciously replicated—that could also be possessed in one’s hand.

And so it was that Toussaint Louverture would be in part inspired by Epictetus’s ferocious commitment to freedom—literal and otherwise—when he rose up and led his fellow Haitian slaves to freedom against Napoleon’s France. Just as it was that in 1965, as Colonel James Stockdale was shot down over Vietnam, knowing he would almost certainly be taken prisoner, he would arm himself with Epictetus’s teachings, which he had studied as a student at Stanford, and say to himself while he parachuted down, “I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

So two thousand years apart the same teachings were helping a man find freedom inside captivity and making him unbreakable despite the worst circumstances.

Which is the only way future generations can possibly thank or pay the proper homage to someone like Epictetus.

Forget everything but action. Don’t talk about it, be about it.

“Don’t explain your philosophy,” Epictetus said, “embody it.”