The historical facts which we know of this man are slight.

He was one of the four who accompanied the tragic and despicable flight of Nero from Rome in the year 69, and when, after many waverings of cowardice, Nero at last, under imminent peril of being captured and executed, put the dagger to his breast, it was Epaphroditus who helped the tyrant to drive it home into his heart, for which he was subsequently banished, and finally executed by the Emperor Domitian.
Epictetus was accustomed to tell one or two anecdotes which, although given without comment, show the narrowness and vulgarity of the man.
Among his slaves was a certain worthless cobbler named Felicio; as the cobbler was quite useless, Epaphroditus sold him, and by some chance he was bought by some one of Caesar's household, and made Caesar's cobbler.
Instantly Epaphroditus began to pay him the profoundest respect, and to address him in the most endearing terms, so that if any one asked what Epaphroditus was doing, the answer, as likely as not, would be, "He is holding an important consultation with Felicio." On one occasion, some one came to him bewailing, and weeping, and embracing his knees in a paroxysm of grief, because of all his fortune little more than 50,000_l_.

was left! "What did Epaphroditus do ?" asks Epictetus; "did he laugh at the man as we did?
Not at all; on the contrary, he exclaimed, in a tone of commiseration and surprise, 'Poor fellow! how could you possibly keep silence and endure such a misfortune ?'" How brutally he could behave, and how little respect he inspired, we may see in the following anecdote.

When Plautius Lateranus, the brave nobleman whose execution during Piso's conspiracy we have already related, had received on his neck an ineffectual blow of the tribune's sword, Epaphroditus, even at that dread moment, could not abstain from pressing him with questions.

The only reply which he received from the dying man was the contemptuous remark, "Should I wish to say anything, I will say it (not to a slave like you, but) to _your master_." Under a man of this calibre it is hardly likely that a lame Phrygian boy would experience much kindness.