gia of poor parents, was
indebted apparently for the advantages of a good education to the whim,
which was common at the end of the Republic and under the first
emperors, among the great of Rome to reckon among their numerous slaves
grammarians, poets, rhetoricians, and philosophers, in the same way as
rich financiers in these later ages have been led to form at a great
cost rich and numerous libraries. This supposition is the only one which
can explain to us how a wretched child, born as poor as Irus, had
received a good education, and how a rigid Stoic was the slave of
Epaphroditus, one of the officers of the imperial guard. For we cannot
suspect that it was through predilection for the Stoic doctrine, and for
his own use, that the confidant and the minister of the debaucheries of
Nero would have desired to possess such a slave."

Some writers assume that Epictetus was manumitted by his master, but I
can find no evidence for this statement. Epaphroditus accompanied Nero
when he fled from Rome before his enemies, and he aided the miserable
tyrant in killing himself. Domitian (Sueton., Domit. 14), afterwards put
Epaphroditus to death for this service to Nero. We may conclude that
Epictetus in some way obtained his freedom, and that he began to teach
at Rome; but after the expulsion of the philosophers from Rome by
Domitian, A.D. 89, he retired to Nicopolis in Epirus, a city built by
Augustus to commemorate the victory at Actium. Epictetus opened a school
or lecture room at Nicopolis, where he taught till he was an old man.
The time of his death is unknown. Epictetus was never married, as we
learn from Lucian (Demonax, c. 55, torn, ii., ed. Hemsterh., p. 393).
When Epictetus was finding fault with Demonax, and advising him to take
a wife and beget children, for this also, as Epictetus said, was a
philosopher's duty, to leave in place of himself another in the
universe, Demonax refuted the doctrine by answering: Give me then,
Epictetus, one of your own daughters. Simplicius says (Comment., c. 46,
p. 432, ed. Schweigh.) that Epictetus lived alone a long time. At last
he took a woman into his house as a nurse for a child, which one of
Epictetus' friends was going to expose on account of his poverty, but
Epictetus took the child and brought it up.

Epictetus wrote nothing; and all that we have under his name was written
by an affectionate pupil, Arrian, afterwards the historian of Alexander
the Great, who, as he tells us, t