The Works of Epictetus: Discourses, Enchiridion, and Fragments

Lucian ridicules a man who bought that lamp after his death, hoping to become a philosopher by using it.

When Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome, Epictetus retired to Nicopolis, a city of Epirus, where he taught as before. He still lived in the same frugal way, his only companions being a young child—whom he adopted in the later years of his life because its parents abandoned it—and a woman whom he employed as its nurse. He suffered from extreme lameness, and, according to his contemporary, Aulus Gellius, composed a couplet to proclaim his gratitude to the gods, in spite of these misfortunes: "Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, an Irus A notoriously poor beggar in Homer's Odyssey. in poverty, and favored by the Immortals." Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticæ, B. II. c. 18. Salmasius, however, doubts the genuineness of this passage. (Com., ed. 1640, p. 3.) The same epigram has been attributed to Leonidas of Tarentum. After Hadrian became Emperor (A.D. 117), Epictetus was treated with favor, but he probably did not return to Rome. In these later years of his life, his discourses were written down by his disciple Arrian, a man of the highest character, both as a philosopher and as a historian.