What It Really Means To Be A Slave

Epictetus was born a slave. Quite literally, his name means, in Greek, acquired. Ultimately, he came to be the property of a man named Epaphroditus, who kept Epictetus chained up long enough that he became disabled by it and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

His body and his time and his labor were controlled by someone else. That’s what slavery is. But what’s remarkable is that even in this state, Epictetus retained freedom in one important sense, and it would be this that his teachings would later revolve around: People could do whatever they wanted to his body, but his mind always remained his to control. No one had the power to make him bitter, to make him lose his desire for life, to take away his power to choose to think a certain way. (You may recall the Hurricane Carter story in The Obstacle is the Way, along similar lines)

Compare that to say, Seneca, who was perfectly free to live and do whatever he wished from the day he was born yet was driven by his own ambition willingly into the arms of Nero...an embrace that only death was able to sever. Or more dramatically, look at the rich and powerful Romans mocked by Seneca and Marcus and Epictetus alike who were free on paper but in truth were wrapped around the finger of a mistress or wine or a desire for fame. Or more ordinarily, the regular people who are enslaved to their anxieties, insecurities, or false impressions.

It was this, AA Long writes, that is really the core of Epictetus’s understanding of Stoicism: “You can be externally free and internally a slave...conversely you could be externally obstructed or even in literal bondage but internally free from frustration and disharmony.”

It’s really a remarkable insight and one we must think of always. Yes, every person is entitled to physical freedom. No one, thankfully, is legally enslaved basically anywhere in the civilized world anymore. And yet plenty of us are not truly free, not nearly as free as Epictetus was when he was still in chains.

And that is a real crime against humanity.

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