The Works of Epictetus: Discourses, Enchiridion, and Fragments

Indeed, it is a favorite suggestion of his that no man should ever profess to be a philosopher, but that each should leave this character to be inferred from his actions.

"It is not reasonings that are wanted now," he says, "for there are books stuffed full of Stoic reasonings. What is wanted, then? The man who shall apply them; whose actions may bear testimony to his doctrines. Assume this character for me, so that we may no longer make use in the schools of the examples of the ancients, but may have some examples of our own" (I. 104).

So far as the scanty records go, and the testimony of contemporaries, Epictetus was himself such a man. He was probably born at Hierapolis in Phrygia and lived at Rome in the first century of our era, as the slave of Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero. Origen preserves an anecdote of Epictetus: when his master once put his leg in the torture, his philosophic slave quietly remarked, "You will break my leg;" and when this presently happened, he added, in the same tone, "Did I not tell you so?" He afterwards became free and lived very frugally at Rome, teaching philosophy. Simplicius says that the whole furniture of his house consisted of a bed, a cooking vessel, and an earthen lamp.