Your MIND Sabotages You Every Day And Epictetus Knew The FIX

He was born around the middle of the first century in Hierapolis, a city in Phrygia, in the interior of what is now Turkey, and he was born a slave.

Even his name wasn't quite a name.

In Greek, epiktetos means something like acquired or added on.

It's the sort of word you might use for a thing someone adds to their possessions.

As a young man, he ended up in Rome, in the household of Epaphroditus, a former slave of Nero's who had risen to become one of his most powerful secretaries.

It was the world of the imperial court at its murkiest.

Favors, fears, intrigues, men who gave the orders one day and fell from grace the next.

Epictetus saw it all from below, from the place of the one who waits at table and listens without anyone paying him the slightest attention.

Years later, he would tell his class about a scene from that house.

Epaphroditus owned a slave, a shoemaker, who was no use to him, so he sold him.

As chance would have it, the man ended up in the emperor's household and became Caesar's shoemaker.

And then Epictetus watched his master, the mighty Epaphroditus, treat with the utmost respect the very same shoemaker he had once looked down on, because now the man was close to power.

He told the story to teach something very specific.

Whoever lives waiting on what others can give him ends up on his knees before just about anybody.

a slave had seen, from the inside, that the masters were slaves too.

There are two versions of how he came to be lame.

A Christian writer, Origen, records a story told by a pagan philosopher called Celsus that his master was twisting his leg to hurt him, and that Epictetus, quite unruffled, warned him with a smile that he was going to break it.

And when the leg did break, he said with the same calm, Didn't I tell you? Another ancient source, Simplicius, says simply that he was in poor health and lame from a young age.

We don't know which is true.

What we do know is that in his own lessons he calls himself a lame old man, without a word of complaint, the way you might remark on the weather.

Something in that house changed his life.

His master, it seems, allowed him to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus, the most respected Stoic philosopher in Rome.

And Musonius was a demanding teacher.

Epictetus remembered that once, for letting a small flaw in an argument slip by, Musonius took him severely to task.

And when the young man protested that it was hardly a crime, that he hadn't set fire to the Capitol, his teacher replied that this lapse was, in its own sphere, every bit as serious as burning down the Capitol.