Stoicism reached first-century Rome as the creed of men with everything to lose. The senator Thrasea Paetus was ordered to open his veins in 66; his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was executed under Vespasian; in 89 Domitian expelled the philosophers from Italy outright. The doctrine steadied aristocrats facing confiscation and the knife — and then it was taken up by a man who had never owned anything, himself included.
He belonged to Epaphroditus, a secretary at Nero's court. His own name is lost; epiktetos is simply the Greek for "acquired", a slave's label he kept. With his owner's permission he attended the lectures of Musonius Rufus, the most demanding Stoic teacher in Rome. He was lame for most of his life, and the record splits on why: Celsus reports that his master twisted the leg until it broke, the Byzantine Suda blames rheumatism, Simplicius says only that he had been disabled since childhood. Nobody has settled it, and the ancient sources are all there is.
The distinction Epictetus built everything on takes an afternoon to state and a lifetime to practise. Some things answer to us — what we judge, what we go after, what we agree is true. Everything else does not: property, reputation, other people, the body, the leg. Distress therefore arrives not from events but from the verdicts passed on them, which is to say it arrives from the one department a person actually governs. This is not consolation but an audit of ownership, and the man conducting it had been listed as property.
Freed after Nero's death, he taught in Rome until Domitian's edict, then set up a school at Nicopolis on the Greek coast, on the crossing that carried traffic to Italy. Roman families sent their sons for a season of philosophy before public life, expecting polish and syllogisms. He gave them a clinic. The work fell into three disciplines — training desire, training action, training assent to impressions — with the logical showpieces last, on the grounds that a student who could refute a fallacy and still lose his temper over a broken cup had learned nothing. Origen, writing a century and a half later, observed that ordinary readers were by then taking up Epictetus more than Plato.
He wrote nothing himself. Arrian, a student who would go on to govern Cappadocia and write the standard history of Alexander, took the classes down and insisted he was preserving the words rather than composing them. Whether that claim holds, or whether Arrian shaped far more than he admitted, is still argued. Four books of at least eight survive, along with the Enchiridion, the handbook drawn from them.
The transmission is the strangest part. Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the empire, worked from those lecture notes and built the Meditations on them. Simplicius wrote a commentary in the sixth century; from the tenth, Christian monks circulated paraphrases of the Enchiridion as a monastic rule, the pagan gods quietly replaced. In 1955 Albert Ellis founded rational emotive behaviour therapy on the proposition that beliefs about events, not events, produce the disturbance — and named Epictetus as his source; every cognitive therapy since descends from that line. James Stockdale, seven years a prisoner in Hanoi and four of them in solitary, credited the handbook with getting him through.