Epictetus — a freed slave with a school in Nicopolis.
He taught that the man who owned his body never owned anything that mattered, and charged his students with proving it in ordinary life rather than in argument.
Epictetus was born into slavery in Phrygia around 50 CE and belonged to Epaphroditus, a freedman in Nero's administration; the ancient tradition attributes his lameness to an injury sustained in that household. Freed, he taught in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers, then set up a school at Nicopolis in western Greece which drew Roman senators' sons. Marcus Aurelius never met him but read Arrian's transcripts and quotes him throughout the Meditations. He is placed here as a teacher rather than a founder because Stoicism's founder, Zeno, survives only in summary, and the person who actually formed later Stoics is the one whose voice was written down.
He was a pupil of Crates, as stated above. Next they say he attended the lectures of Stilpo and Xenocrates for ten years.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VII.2, R. D. Hicks translationAttached here as the evidence for this page's descent from Cynicism: the Stoic doxography puts Crates the Cynic first in Zeno's teachers.
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