Around the year 90, an order went out from the emperor Domitian. The philosophers were to leave Rome.
One of the men it reached was in his thirties. He walked with a limp; the ancient sources disagree about why. He'd been born a slave in Hierapolis, in what is now south-western Turkey, and had come to Rome young, the property of Epaphroditus, a powerful freedman who had served Nero. Even the name history remembers him by is a Greek word that means "acquired".
He'd listened, while still a slave, to the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. At some point he was freed. He began to teach. And now the city where he'd begun was closing its doors to him.
Count what that man had never been allowed to call his own, or had already lost. His freedom, for years. The country he was born in. A sound leg. And now his city, and the place where he'd begun to teach. Almost every outside thing a person usually leans on had been out of his hands at one time or another.
He went to Nicopolis, on the coast of north-western Greece, opened a school there, and taught until he was old. He never wrote a line himself. A student called Arrian wrote his teaching down, and part of it became a short handbook, the Enchiridion. In Thomas Wentworth Higginson's translation, its first sentence reads: "There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power."
A man who had owned almost nothing left behind a map, as clear as any I know, of what can't be taken.
What is the Epictetus dichotomy of control?
It's the idea that opens Epictetus's Enchiridion. Some things are within our power and some aren't. Our opinions, aims, desires and aversions are ours. Body, property, reputation and office aren't. Suffering, he taught, comes from treating what isn't ours as if it were, and freedom from letting it go.
In Higginson's words: "Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own."
Why would a slave be the one to see it?
Perhaps because so much else had already been taken from him.
Most of us spend our lives adding. More security, more standing, more certainty that things will go our way. We stack it up and stand on it, and we call that stack who we are. Epictetus never had the chance to build that stack. The world kept taking it apart. His body, his liberty and later his city were all, at one time or another, in someone else's hands.
What he found wasn't a new possession. It was what was left when the possessions went. A part of him that no owner, no injury and no emperor's order could reach.
One line in the Enchiridion carries his own life inside it: "Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will."
That's the turn, and it's a subtraction. He didn't become free by gaining anything. He saw through the idea that he'd ever been made of the things that could be taken. I'd put it in the words I use for the people I work with. You are not broken. You are buried. Under the losses, under the labels, under the name that meant "acquired", someone was there the whole time.
If you'd like to sit with that question in your own life, the free Who Am I? masterclass is ninety minutes built around it. Or read on.
Doesn't this just mean giving up?
No. It means putting your hands where they can actually do something.
As I read him, Epictetus wasn't asking anyone to stop caring about their children, their work or their health. He was asking them to stop staking their peace on outcomes they don't govern. Your effort is yours. Your words are yours. Whether the deal closes, whether your teenager calls, whether the scan comes back clear, isn't.
There's a sentence in section XIX that sounds almost modern. Higginson renders it: "do not desire to be a general, or a senator, or a consul, but to be free." In Dubai the titles are different. Director. Partner. Founder. The trap is the same: a self built on something another person can hand you, and take back.
I've written about the grip from the other side, in why do I need to control everything. That piece is about the guard who holds every loose end. This one is about the man who found out which ends were never his to hold.
Why doesn't knowing it stop me from gripping?
Because the grip isn't an opinion.
Epictetus put it plainly in section V: "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things." That's true, and I find it one of the most useful sentences I know. But anyone who's tried it knows the catch. You can sort your life perfectly on paper, this column mine, that column not, and still feel your stomach drop when the email doesn't come.
That's because some views aren't held like opinions. They're held like reflexes. Every pattern like that is a thought fused to a charge, a memory with weight the body put on it. The thought says "if this goes wrong, I'm not safe". The charge is the alarm that fires before you've had time to think. Understanding argues with the thought. It never touches the charge, which is why you can know a thought is false and still believe it.
Epictetus drew the line between what's yours and what isn't with rare clarity. Living from that line is a different matter, because the hand that keeps reaching across it is moved by weight from long ago. When that weight comes off, something simple happens. The memory stays. The weight goes. You still know what happened. It just stops pulling your hand across the line. The freedom is in the removal. I've unpacked that line in a piece of its own.
The Who Am I? masterclass is built for exactly that turn: not another idea about who you are, but a direct look at who's there underneath. It's free with the code GIFT26, and you can start it here.
What can I try tonight?
Try an evening sort. It takes ten minutes, a pen and a page, and it works best on a night when something is weighing on you.
- Write down the three things weighing on you most tonight. One line each. Be specific. "The client hasn't replied." "My son's exam results." "What they'll think of the presentation."
- Draw a line down the page, and sort each one. On one side, the part within your power: your effort, your words, your next action. On the other, the part that isn't: other people's choices, results, opinions, the market, time. Most items split in two.
- Look only at the side that isn't yours, and ask: "If this goes badly, what will it say about me?" Take the first answer that arrives. "That I'm not good enough." "That I failed them."
- Notice where that answer lands in your body. Chest, throat, stomach. Don't fix it. Just notice how much weight it carries.
- Ask one more question, slowly: "Who was I before I needed this to say anything about me?" Sit with it for a full minute. You don't need an answer in words.
- Do one small thing from the side that's yours, tonight. Then close the page.
The sort won't remove the charge. But it shows you, plainly, which column your peace has been living in. And step 5 is where Epictetus's line stops being philosophy and becomes a question about you.
Who were you before the world told you who to be?
That's where this story was always going.
For years the world treated Epictetus as property. Even the name it remembers him by means "acquired". Later it treated his teaching as a danger and sent him away from his city. None of it reached the part of him that taught, in the words Arrian kept, that the things within our power are "by nature free".
You've been told who to be as well. Maybe not as brutally. Maybe by a parent's disappointment, a school report, a job title, a city that asks "what do you do?" before it asks your name. Those labels became the stack you stand on. And like every stack, they can be taken apart.
What can't be taken is whoever was there before them. I learned that in my own life, when I came home to who I was before the world, and the war, and the failure told me who to be. I did not add anything to become this. I removed what was never mine. That's the heart of the RS Method. Epictetus found the part of himself that no one could reach. The question now is about yours.
So here it is, the way I'd ask it if you were sitting across from me. Underneath the role, the title and the name, who was there first?
If you'd like ninety minutes with that question, the Who Am I? masterclass is the place to start. It's a written guide, my narrated video with slides, and a guided session at the end that moves you from understanding the question into experiencing the answer. It's normally USD 297, and it's currently free with the code GIFT26 at checkout. No card needed.
Here's that question, answered in someone else's words. Marko Mladenovic, three years on: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?"
Start the Who Am I? masterclass
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Tonight, something outside your power will probably take up more of your evening than it deserves. Before the week is out, give ninety minutes to the part of you it can't reach. Start the masterclass.