Thinker · Stoics
Epictetus
c.50 – 135 · Stoics · The Greeks · 1 works
A man born into slavery worked out the one teaching that a slave and a Roman emperor could both live by, because it does not depend on owning anything, being free, being healthy, or being safe. Some things are up to a person and most things are not, and almost all human misery comes from confusing the two. He wrote none of it down. A student took notes, and the notes outlasted the empire that owned him.
What changed
Before
Stoicism as a vast Greek system of physics, logic, and cosmic theory, argued in treatises
After
Stoicism stripped to a single usable rule and a daily drill anyone, slave or emperor, can run
Inside the walk-through
Property
The handbook nobody wrote
The line down the middle of a life
Training the will
The slave the emperor read
What it leaves out, and what it leaves
The works
