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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
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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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