‘Your will.’Īncient biographical traditions are not known for their factual accuracy, and some of the anecdotes about Epictetus’ life in slavery may be embellishments. ‘What can’t be chained or removed?’ Epictetus asked. Epictetus said calmly: ‘I told you you would break it.’ A tyrant can claim your leg, remove your head or kill your family. The enslaver continued to twist and the leg snapped. ‘Do you think I am in any way bound?’ In another story the enslaver twisted Epictetus’ leg so aggressively that he warned his tormentor that the bone might break. He quotes with admiration a line from Diogenes the Cynic, who was taken captive but still considered himself free, thanks to his philosophical teacher: ‘Slavery became a thing of the past for me after Antisthenes set me free.’ According to one story, Epictetus’ enslaver asked him if he wanted to be set free. His aim was to free others from the ‘tyrannic sway’ not of literal enslavers, but of the emotional disturbance caused by false belief.įor Epictetus, even an enslaved person can be ‘free’, through the alignment of their will with nature and the universe. He never suggests that those who claimed to own their fellow human beings were committing a moral evil. Like other ancient philosophers, he assumed that slavery was normal and would always exist. But Epictetus was not an abolitionist in a political sense. Slavery powered the Roman Empire in the first century CE, between 10 and 20 per cent of the population were enslaved at any one time. He evokes the horrors of enslavement by describing the suffering of caged animals and birds that refuse to eat in captivity and starve to death, though he also occasionally repeats a conventional set of ideas about slavery, claiming, for example, that runaway slaves are ‘cowards’, and that none of them ever dies of hunger. ‘A slave is always praying to be set free,’ he writes. Images of freedom, slavery and self-belonging ( oikoiesis) recur in his teaching. T he first-century Stoic philosopher and teacher Epictetus was an enslaved person who succeeded in getting an education and, eventually, his freedom.
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