The story of Epictetus can be more briefly told, for there is very little to tell.[52] He was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia:--he was the slave of Nero's freedman Epaphroditus, and somehow managed to hear the lectures of the Stoic Musonius. Eventually he was set free, and when Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, he went to Nicopolis in Epirus,[53] where he lived and taught--lame, neat, poor and old. How {50} he taught is to be seen in the discourses which Arrian took down in the reign of Trajan,--"Whatever I heard him say, I tried to write down exactly, and in his very words as far as I could--to keep them as memorials for myself of his mind and of his outspokenness. So they are, as you would expect, very much what a man would say to another on the spur of the moment--not what he would write for others to read afterwards.... His sole aim in speaking was to move the minds of his hearers to the best things. If then these discourses should achieve this, they would have the effect which I think a philosopher's words should have. But if they do not, let my readers know that, when he spoke them, the hearer could not avoid being affected as Epictetus wished him to be. If the discourses do not achieve this, perhaps it will be my fault, or perhaps it may be inevitable. Farewell." [Sidenote: Epictetus on children and women] Such, save for a sentence or two omitted, is Arrian's preface,--thereafter no voice is heard but that of Epictetus. To place, time or persons present the barest allusions only are made. "Someone said ... And Epictetus spoke." The four books of Arrian give a strong impression of fidelity. We hear the tones of the old man, and can recognize "the mind and the outspokenness," which Arrian cherished in memory--we understand why, as we read. The high moral sense of the teacher, his bursts of eloquence, his shrewdness, his abrupt turns of speech, his apostrophes--"Slave!" he cries, as he addresses the weakling--his diminutives of derision, produce the most lively sense of a personality. There is wit, too, but like Stoic wit in general it is hard and not very sympathetic; it has nothing of the charm and delicacy of Plato's humour, nor of its kindliness.