Page:Encheiridion of Epictetus - Rolleston 1881.pdf/12

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PREFACE.

tion.[1] Arrian also wrote a Life of Epictetus, now unfortunately lost. The few facts about him which we know with any approach to certainty are-that he was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia; that he became (how is unknown) slave to Epaphroditus, a freedman and favourite of Nero; that while in his master's service he attended the philosophic lectures[2] of a Stoic, C. Musonius Rufus; that he somehow obtained his freedom, and was banished from Rome about the year 90 A.D., when the tyrant Domitian, by a public edict, 'cleared Rome of what most shamed him,' the teachers of philosophy; that he then settled in Nicopolis, a city of Epirus, where he taught publicly for

  1. Besides the Encheiridion and the Discourses we have also of Epictetus a large number of sayings and maxims, preserved for us in certain philosophic anthologies compiled by monks in the sixth to the ninth centuries. A selection from these will be found translated in this book at the end of the Encheiridion.
  2. It appears to have been considered fashionable, among Roman nobles of the time, to possess philosophers and men of culture as slaves. A curious modern illustration of this whim will be found in About Some Fellows, by an Eton Boy, p. 179.
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