Who Was Epictetus? The Slave Who Became a Stoic Teacher (and Did He Know Seneca?)

Essay · By Stephen Pasquini

Epictetus is the Stoic most people meet second, right after Marcus Aurelius. He was born a slave, taught in a small school on the Greek coast, never wrote a word himself, and still became the teacher an emperor learned from. So did he ever meet Seneca? Was he Seneca’s student? Here’s the short answer, the long story, and where Epictetus fits on the Stoic timeline.

Did Epictetus know Seneca?

No. They never met, and Epictetus was not Seneca’s student. Seneca died in AD 65. Epictetus was born around AD 50, so when Seneca died he was a boy of perhaps fifteen, and he was enslaved. Nothing in the ancient sources puts the two in the same room, and in the lectures we have from Epictetus he never once mentions Seneca by name.

Epictetus’s real teacher was Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic who was a younger contemporary of Seneca. Musonius is the bridge between them: he was active in Seneca’s Rome, he was banished in the purge that followed the plot against Nero in AD 65, and he later taught the young Epictetus. So Epictetus is something like Seneca’s philosophical nephew, not his student.

Epictetus or Epicurus?

First, a common mix-up. Epictetus is easy to confuse with Epicurus, the philosopher Seneca quotes so often in his early letters. They’re two different people, about four hundred years apart, from rival schools:

An easy way to remember: Epicurus gave us the word epicure (a person with refined taste in food and drink, a gourmet), even though he himself lived on bread and water. Epictetus is the one with the Stoic teacher in his name: he spent his life teaching Stoicism.

The strange thread that ties them together

There is one real link, and it’s a dark one. Epictetus’s owner was a man named Epaphroditus, a former slave himself who became Nero’s secretary. In AD 65, when a freedman discovered the conspiracy to kill Nero, it was Epaphroditus who brought the informer to the emperor. That conspiracy is the one Nero used as his excuse to order Seneca’s death. (The full story is in How Did Seneca Die?)

Historians aren’t sure whether the young Epictetus was already living in Epaphroditus’s household in Rome that year. But the boy who would become the most famous Stoic teacher of the next generation probably grew up inside the same palace machinery that destroyed the most famous Stoic of his own time. Epaphroditus stayed with Nero to the very end in AD 68, and years afterward the emperor Domitian had him put to death for it.

Who was Epictetus?

A slave named “Acquired”

Epictetus was born around AD 50 in Hierapolis, a town in Phrygia (in today’s western Turkey). We don’t know his birth name. “Epictetus” is simply Greek for “acquired,” the kind of name you’d give property. He was lame in one leg. Later writers told different stories about why: one said a cruel master twisted it until it broke, another said it was an illness. We honestly don’t know.

Freedom, then exile

His master let him study with Musonius Rufus, and at some point after Nero’s death Epictetus was freed. He began teaching philosophy in Rome. Then, around AD 93, the emperor Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome and Italy. Epictetus moved across the Adriatic to Nicopolis, on the northwest coast of Greece, and opened a school. He taught there for the rest of his long life and died around AD 135.

The man who never wrote a book

Like Socrates, Epictetus wrote nothing. Everything we have comes from Arrian, a student who later became a Roman governor and historian. Arrian took notes on the lectures, and those notes became the Discourses (four books survive, out of probably eight) and a short handbook of the core ideas, the Enchiridion. Arrian said he tried to keep the teacher’s own words, and you can hear it: Epictetus scolds, jokes, mocks his students and argues with imaginary critics.

He lived simply, and one late source says that in old age he took in a child whose parents were going to abandon it.

What Epictetus taught

1. What’s up to us, and what isn’t

The Enchiridion opens with the idea everything else rests on. In George Long’s 1890 translation: “Of things some are in our power, and others are not.” Our judgments, choices, desires and aversions are ours. Our body, property, reputation and position are not. Peace comes from caring fully about the first list and holding the second loosely.

2. It’s not the event, it’s the opinion

His most quoted line, again in Long’s version: “Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.” Death isn’t terrible, he says, or Socrates would have thought so. What’s terrible is our judgment that death is terrible.

3. Philosophy is practice, not reading

Epictetus had little patience for students who could explain Chrysippus but still lost their temper at dinner. Sheep don’t show the shepherd how much they’ve eaten by bringing the grass back up, he told them; they digest it and grow wool and milk. Show your philosophy the same way, by how you act. Seneca makes the same point in his own way in Letter 6:

“Cleanthes could never have become the very image of Zeno if he had only heard his lectures.”

— Seneca, Letter 6

Seneca vs. Epictetus: same school, different voices

Both men were Stoics, and on the big things they agree: virtue is the only true good, fortune can’t touch what’s really ours, and a philosophy is worthless unless you live it. The differences are in who they were and who they were talking to.

Seneca also borrowed freely from Epicurus, a rival school Epictetus attacked by name. (See Who Was Epicurus?)

How Epictetus reached Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius was born in AD 121, so he never sat in Epictetus’s classroom either. But in the first book of the Meditations he thanks his tutor Rusticus for lending him a copy of Epictetus’s lectures, almost certainly Arrian’s notes. You can hear Epictetus all through the Meditations. So the chain runs: Musonius taught Epictetus, Arrian wrote him down, and Marcus read him, roughly a century after Seneca died.

If you’re deciding where to start among the three great Roman Stoics, see Which Stoic Should You Read First? And for the whole family tree, from the first Stoic to today, see Where Did Stoicism Come From?

Frequently asked questions

Did Epictetus and Seneca ever meet?

There’s no evidence they did. Seneca died in AD 65, when Epictetus was a teenage slave, and Epictetus never mentions Seneca in his surviving lectures.

What’s the difference between Epicurus and Epictetus?

They’re two different philosophers who lived about 400 years apart. Epicurus (341–270 BC) founded the Epicurean school, which taught that pleasure, understood as peace of mind, is the goal of life. Epictetus (c. AD 50–135) was a Stoic who was born enslaved and taught that we should focus only on what’s up to us.

Was Epictetus a student of Seneca?

No. His teacher was Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic of Seneca’s generation.

Who came first, Seneca, Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius?

Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65), then Epictetus (c. AD 50–135), then Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180).

Did Epictetus write a book?

No. His student Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and summarized the main ideas in the Enchiridion, or Handbook.

What was Epictetus’s main teaching?

That some things are up to us and some are not, and that we’re disturbed not by events but by our judgments about them.

Go deeper

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus

Seneca was born in the year 4 B.C., a time of great opportunity, at Corduba, in Spain, son of the talented rhetorician, Annaeus Seneca. We gather that the family moved to Rome during the boyhood of Lucius, that he was educated for the bar, and that he was soon attracted by the Stoic philosophy, . The last two years of Seneca's life were spent in travelling about southern Italy, composing essays on natural history and relieving his burdened soul by correspondence with his friend Lucilius. These letters are all addressed to Lucilius. The native country of this Lucilius was Campania, and his native city Pompeii or Naples. He was a Roman knight, having gained that position, as Seneca tells us, by sheer industry. Prominent in the civil service, he had filled many important positions and was, at the time when the Letters were written, procurator in Sicily. It may be safely said that the years 63-65 constitute the period of the Letters. There were 124 Letters in all. They ring as true today as they did 1,949 years ago!

See Full Bio