Epictetus was the sort of figure that only the Roman Empire could have produced. He was born in the Phrygian hills of Anatolia in the middle of the first century. Enslaved and brought to the capital, he served in the household of the freedman Epaphroditos. Epaphroditos, in turn, was in the direct employ of the emperors. Epictetus has told us nothing about his circumstances in these years, but he must have had a close-up view of the swarm of peoples and ideas that passed through the corridors of power. We do not know whether Epictetus noticed, or cared, when in a.d. 64 the emperor Nero fastened blame for the Great Fire on a tiny band of religious eccentrics known as “the people of the anointed one.” We do know that he met the Roman aristocrat and Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus and fell under the master’s spell. Epictetus earned his freedom and lived out his days, many of them in exile, as a Stoic sage. The former slave from Phrygia was a sensational teacher, sought out by the sons of the gentry from across the empire; he shaped the best minds of a generation.
Epictetus sought to attain the Stoic ideal of “apathy,” a majestic indifference to all things without moral value, including pain and death. For the Stoic, the lover of virtue does his duty—to family, to city—without concern for wealth or status. True freedom, taught the ex-slave, is not a legal condition, but a kind of moral Zen achieved by emancipation from the passions, including the pangs of sexual desire. Musonius Rufus seems to have gone so far as to advise against all sex for the purpose of pleasure, even within marriage. Epictetus, too, reckoned the conquest of physical desire an integral part of the philosopher’s task. But sexual desire claimed no special place of distinction in the wide array of the world’s enticements. “Learn to use wine with refinement,” Epictetus said, “and to hold back from some little lass or a little flatcake.” The precise tone of Stoic advice in sexual matters is nowhere clearer than in his Stoic Handbook. “Remain as pure as you can before marriage with regard to sexual pleasures, and insofar as they are engaged in, let them be lawful. Yet do not become oppressive or reproachful toward those who do indulge, and do not hold forth all the time on your own restraint.”
Of course, when it comes to sex in the ancient world, the moral decency of the imperial Stoics is not what immediately leaps to mind. We are more apt to imagine modern scenes of Roman debauchery (“I’d like a sit-down orgy for forty”) and the naughty pictures on lamps and living room walls dug up in places like Pompeii. But the tame austerity of the philosophers and the ebullient eroticism of the streets coexisted in easy proximity. In fact, they shared a hidden premise. Both presumed that sex was just sex, one instinctual need among others, to be channeled in certain fundamental ways.