5 Attachments EPICTETUS Teaches You To Let Go Of.

Epictetus was born around the year 50 in Hierapolis, a city in Phrygia in what is now Turkey.

His name wasn't even really a name.

In Greek, it means acquired, bought.

That's what slaves were called, for what they were to their master, not for what they were to themselves.

While still very young, he was taken to Rome.

His owner was called Epaphroditus, and he was no ordinary master.

He had once been a slave himself, had won his freedom, and had risen to become one of the secretaries of the Emperor Nero, a man who handled petitions, favors, and secrets at the very heart of power.

In his house, Epictetus saw at close quarters how those who had everything lived, and he saw something few people ever see, how frightened they were.

Epaphroditus allowed him something unusual.

He let him attend the classes of Musonius Rufus, the great Stoic teacher in Rome, and there that young slave, lame with no money and no future, found what nobody could buy him or take from him, a way of looking at life.

Musonius was not a gentle teacher.

Epictetus remembered that he spoke in such a way that every student felt someone had told him all about his faults as if the master could see right inside him, and he demanded an enormous amount.

Once the young Epictetus overlooked a flaw in a piece of reasoning, an apparent trifle.

Musonius rebuked him severely.

Epictetus, irritated, told him it wasn't that serious, that he hadn't burned down the capital, and Musonius replied, "This slip is like burning down the capital." He was teaching him that in the way we think, there are no small errors because that's where all the others come from, and he taught with his life as much as with his words.

Nero banished him to Gyaros, a rocky, almost deserted island in the Aegean, a place where Rome sent those it wanted to see disappear.

Musonius didn't crumble.

He carried on teaching whoever came looking for him.

Some ancient writers even say he found a spring on the island that nobody had known about.

Be that as it may, he came out of that exile with an idea he would later repeat.

"Exile takes from no one anything that truly belongs to him." Epictetus learned from a man who had already lost almost everything and was still free.

Then everything changed around him.

Nero fell, and his secretary was beside him in his final hours.

Rome lived through a year of chaos with several emperors.

At some point in those years, Epictetus was given his freedom.