Courage is not the enemy of prudence, tranquility, how nobility and diligence coexist, indifference, the essence of goodness, the beginning of philosophy, dialectics, anxiety, external stimuli, friendship, and more.
Epictetus, from Hierapolis in Phrygia, lived from around 50 to 120 AD. A child of slaves, he was himself a slave in Rome during Nero's time, and later, at an advanced age, he became free. He embraced Stoic philosophy, which he first taught in the capital of the Empire and later, after the expulsion of philosophers by Domitian (90 AD), in Nicopolis of Epirus, where he lived in great poverty and asceticism.
He himself did not write; the written recording of his ideas is due to his student Flavius Arrian, who collected, based on his notes from the lectures, the main points of Epictetus' teaching in two works titled 'Discourses of Epictetus' and 'Enchiridion'. Epictetus is regarded, along with Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, as one of the foremost figures of the so-called New Stoa, the third period of Stoic philosophy.
[Excerpt from a publisher's or edition's presentation text]
