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Ep. 21: Domitian's Ban, Nicopolis · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  Picture a lecture room in Rome, early in the day.
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  A lame man sits while a few students lean in to hear him.
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  I imagine a lamp, a bench, the noise of the street coming faintly through the door.
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  Then a notice is posted, and the room has to empty.
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  That's where today's story begins.
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  Welcome to The Morning Stoic.
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  I'm Julian Vale, and this is Episode 21.
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  A short while ago we left Epictetus with the stolen iron lamp.
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  Today we follow him out of Rome.
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  First, what we know about the man himself.
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  George Long, in the biographical note that opens his translation,
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  says very little is known of Epictetus's life.
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  He came from Hierapolis in Phrygia.
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  He was a slave in Rome, and his master was Epaphroditus, a freedman of the Emperor
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  Nero.
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  Long also tells us, quoting the commentator Simplicius, that Epictetus was weak in
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  body and lame from an early age.
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  And Long says his master sent or permitted him to attend the lectures of the Stoic
• 1:09
  philosopher Musonius Rufus.
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  Then comes a gap.
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  Long writes, and I'll read it plainly: "We may conclude that Epictetus in some way
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  obtained his freedom, and that he began to teach at Rome."
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  Notice the wording.
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  We may conclude.
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  Long doesn't claim to have a document.
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  He is reasoning toward it, and so should we.
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  By the time the story picks up, Epictetus is a free man and a teacher in the
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  capital.
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  Now the emperor.
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  Domitian ruled Rome in those years, and he did not like philosophers.
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  Long gives us the line that matters for today: "after the expulsion of the
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  philosophers from Rome by Domitian, A.D.
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  89, he retired to Nicopolis in Epirus."
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  A caution about that date.
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  A.D.
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  89 is Long's dating.
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  Other historians place the banishment of philosophers later,
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  in the 90s, and some argue for a wider range.
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  So I'll say around A.D.
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  89 by Long's reckoning, and leave the exact year open.
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  What isn't in dispute in Long's note is the shape of it: the philosophers were told
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  to go, and Epictetus went.
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  Think about what that decree meant for a man like him.
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  He owned, as far as we can tell, almost nothing.
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  His teaching was his work.
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  Rome was where his students were.
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  And an order from the emperor's side of the city was not something you argued with.
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  I imagine him packing very little.
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  A cloak, perhaps a few things he'd been given.
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  I imagine the road west and south, and a slow, uneven walk,
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  because of the leg.
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  That's my picture, not the record.
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  The record gives us only the destination.
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  The destination was Nicopolis, in Epirus, on the northwestern coast of Greece.
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  The name means City of Victory.
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  Long tells us Augustus built it to commemorate the victory at Actium,
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  the sea battle that made Augustus master of the Roman world.
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  So Epictetus, banished by one emperor, settled in a city that was a monument to the
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  first one.
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  There's an irony in that, and I'll leave it as an irony, without claiming he thought
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  about it.
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  It was a Roman colony, a busy place with traffic by sea and road.
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  It was far enough from the capital to be out of the emperor's sight,
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  yet not a backwater at the edge of the world.
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  That detail comes from the wider background, not from Long,
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  but it helps explain what happened next.
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  Because here is the sentence I find quietly remarkable.
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  Long writes: "Epictetus opened a school or lecture room at Nicopolis,
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  where he taught till he was an old man."
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  He didn't wait for the ban to be lifted.
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  He didn't write bitter letters.
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  He opened a room and began again.
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  And the school grew.
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  Students came to him from across the Roman world, and one of them,
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  a young man named Arrian, wrote down what he heard.
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  Long reminds us that Epictetus wrote nothing himself.
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  Everything we have under his name was written by someone who sat in that room.
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  So the ban that was meant to silence him is, in a roundabout way,
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  the reason we can hear him at all.
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  I say that as my own reflection, not as something the sources claim.
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  Long adds a few small details about the man's later life, and they're worth keeping.
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  He was never married.
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  Long cites Lucian for a story in which Epictetus urged another philosopher,
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  Demonax, to take a wife and have children, and Demonax answered,
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  "Give me then, Epictetus, one of your own daughters."
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  It's a sharp little joke, and Long gives it as a report, not as something we can
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  verify.
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  Simplicius adds that Epictetus lived alone for a long time.
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  At last, Long says, he took a woman into his house as a nurse for a child.
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  A friend of his was going to expose the baby because of poverty,
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  and Epictetus took the child and brought it up.
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  That is the whole story as Long gives it.
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  No speeches, no flourish.
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  A man in his later years, in a plain house, making room for a child who would
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  otherwise have been left.
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  Long says the date of his death is unknown.
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  So we don't get a final scene.
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  We get a teacher who taught until he was an old man, and then the record simply goes
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  quiet.
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  Here is what the life and the passage seem to say together,
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  and this is my reading.
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  Earlier in these same discourses, Epictetus has a student ask about exile.
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  Does anyone hinder me from going into exile with cheerfulness and contentment?
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  He says that before he ever had to leave Rome, and then he left.
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  Whether the words came before or after the decree, we can't know.
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  But the life and the teaching line up without strain.
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  The emperor could choose where Epictetus lived.
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  He couldn't choose what Epictetus did with the place he was sent.
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  A bench, a room, a few students, and a door that opened again each morning.
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  That was enough to build a school that outlasted the man who banished him.
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  Thank you for starting the day with me.
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  Next time, we'll turn to a different voice, an emperor writing at dawn.
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  Until then, go gently.