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

“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.