Interpretive portrait
Epictetus
c. 50–135 CE
PhilosophyEthicsRomanStoic
Born enslaved, later a teacher whose lessons were written down by a student.
Interpretive portrait. No likeness survives; this portrait is interpretive.
Why they still matter
He reduced Stoicism to a single working distinction: what is up to you and what is not.
The world they thought in
Rome and then Nicopolis after philosophers were expelled from the city.
What they wrote
The questions they worked on
Fate and control
What is up to you?
Where the thinking travelled
Each link says what kind of link it is. A documented influence and a much later echo are not the same claim, and are never presented as one.
Zeno of CitiumIntellectual lineage
Stoicism as taught in the school Zeno founded four centuries earlier.
A tradition carried the ideas forward over generations.
Take this further
Ponderers is the historical layer. A rabbit hole brings the same question into what people are arguing about now.