CHAPTER III.
LIFE AND VIEWS OF EPICTETUS (_continued._) Of the life of Epictetus, as distinct from his opinions, there is unfortunately little more to be told.

The life of "That halting slave, who in Nicopolis Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son Cleared Rome of what most shamed him," is not an eventful life, and the conditions which surrounded it are very circumscribed.

Great men, it has been observed, have often the shortest biographies; their real life is in their books.
At some period of his life, but how or when we do not know, Epictetus was manumitted by his master, and was henceforward regarded by the world as free.

Probably the change made little or no difference in his life.
If it saved him from a certain amount of brutality, if it gave him more uninterrupted leisure, it probably did not in the slightest degree modify the hardships of his existence, and may have caused him some little anxiety as to the means of procuring the necessaries of life.

He, of all men, would have attached the least importance to the external conditions under which he lived; he always regarded them as falling under the category of things which lay beyond the sphere of his own influence, and therefore as things with which he had nothing to do.