The Stoic canon is an accident of survival. Nothing complete remains from Zeno, Cleanthes or Chrysippus, who wrote hundreds of books between them; what we read instead are three Roman-era texts that were never meant to be a canon. Epictetus wrote nothing at all — the Discourses and the Enchiridion are his student Arrian's transcripts, and Arrian insisted he had merely written down what he heard. That the working scripture of Stoicism is a slave's spoken lessons, a courtier's letters and an emperor's private notebook is the most Stoic fact about it.