Among stoics: Seneca was a millionaire. Marcus Aurelius was an emperor. Epictetus was a slave—and he is the one who tells us how to be free.

Born into servitude and left lame by a master's cruelty, owning nothing that a Roman court would have recognized as property, Epictetus arrived at a conclusion the rich and the powerful could only glimpse: that the self worth keeping is not the body, not the bank account, not the name on the door, but a single faculty no one else can reach—the power to judge, to refuse, to give or withhold agreement. Everything else, he taught, is on loan and can be repossessed without notice. Once you know which is which, a tyrant has nothing left to threaten you with.

This is the story of the only major philosopher of the ancient world who began as someone else's possession, and of the bracing freedom he assembled out of having nothing. It follows him from the slave market to a celebrated school where a former captive trained the sons of senators, asks why he never wrote a single word himself, and considers what his philosophy of the dispossessed has to say to an age in which our attention is owned, our movements are tracked, and our days are increasingly run by systems we did not choose and cannot see.

Clear, witty, and entirely free of jargon, this book recovers Epictetus not as a marble bust on a library shelf but as perhaps the most useful philosopher alive for anyone who has ever suspected that the terms of their life were being set by someone else.