This exact English line is W. A. Oldfather’s 1928 Loeb translation of a Greek maxim — Οὐδεὶς ἐλεύθερος ἑαυτοῦ μὴ κρατῶν — that survives only as Fragment 35 in the ‘doubtful and spurious’ section of Epictetus’s fragments. These are sayings gathered centuries later by the anthologist Stobaeus, not passages from the Discourses or Handbook that Arrian actually recorded. Its authenticity as Epictetus’s own words is not established; in Stobaeus the same maxim is elsewhere attached to Pythagoras, and Oldfather judged its style alien to Epictetus. The confident “Epictetus said this” you see everywhere overstates a fragment his own modern editor flagged as doubtful.
“No man is free who is not master of himself” No man is free who is not master of himself. —Epictetus (Fragments, no. 35, trans. W. A. Oldfather, Loeb 1928; classed among the doubtful and spurious fragments, preserved via Stobaeus)
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Provenance
The source
Credited to
Epictetus (c. 50 – c. 135 AD)
Work
Fragments, no. 35 — ‘Doubtful and Spurious’
Translation
W. A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, 1928
Ancient source
Preserved by Stobaeus, Anthology (Florilegium)
Οὐδεὶς ἐλεύθερος ἑαυτοῦ μὴ κρατῶν. — “No man is free who is not master of himself.”
The exact English is W. A. Oldfather’s 1928 Loeb rendering; the Greek maxim survives only through Stobaeus and is classed among the ‘doubtful and spurious’ fragments.
These maxims were gathered centuries after Epictetus by the anthologist Stobaeus — a provenance and authenticity discussed at Neologikon.
✓Public domain
The ancient Greek maxim is public domain, and the exact English wording shown is W. A. Oldfather’s translation first published in the Loeb Classical Library in 1928 — before 1931, so the translation is also public domain in the United States. (Later translators render the fragment in different words.)
Fact-check
Attribution check
The line circulates as settled Epictetus. It is really a maxim from the doubtful margins of his fragment corpus, in a specific modern translator’s words.
✕
The sourceNot the Discourses or Handbook Wrong location
The exact English one-liner is Oldfather’s Loeb rendering of Οὐδεὶς ἐλεύθερος ἑαυτοῦ μὴ κρατῶν; Wikiquote lists it as his translation. Epictetus taught in Greek, not English.
✕
The certaintyQuote databases Overstated
Sites present it as firmly Epictetus, but his own modern editor grouped it with fragments of doubtful authenticity, and in Stobaeus the same maxim is elsewhere credited to Pythagoras.
✓It is a genuinely Epictetan idea — freedom as self-mastery runs through the Discourses — but this exact sentence survives only as a doubtful, possibly spurious fragment in Oldfather’s 1928 translation, not a securely attested quotation.
Context
Why the idea still reads as Epictetus
The thought lands because it is Stoic to the core. For Epictetus, freedom is not political or physical but internal: a person is free only insofar as they master their own judgments, desires and aversions — the things “up to us” — rather than being ruled by them. Whole stretches of the Discourses argue exactly this, that the enslaved can be free and the powerful can be slaves to their own passions.
So the one-liner distills real Epictetan doctrine. What it cannot claim is a secure textual pedigree: it comes not from Arrian’s record of Epictetus’s lectures but from the later, unreliable anthology tradition, where sayings drifted between authors and where this maxim is grouped with the doubtful and spurious.
Freedom as self-mastery is pure Epictetus — this exact sentence is not securely his.
Read the full story
Epictetus’s fragments were preserved mainly in the Anthology of Stobaeus, a late-antique compiler. Modern editors (Schenkl, Oldfather) separated a small set of plausibly genuine fragments from a larger body of doubtful and spurious ones; this line falls in the latter group.
Fragment numbering varies by edition — it is no. 35 in Oldfather’s book but appears under a different number in the Perseus text — which is one reason the same saying can look more ‘canonical’ than its authenticity warrants.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
c. 50 – c. 135 AD · Greek Stoic philosopher, born enslaved
Epictetus was a Stoic philosopher born into slavery at Hierapolis (in modern Turkey) around 50 AD; freed as an adult, he taught in Rome and later at Nicopolis in Greece. He wrote nothing himself — his teaching survives because his pupil Arrian transcribed it as the Discourses and the Enchiridion (Handbook). A cluster of shorter maxims, of very uneven authenticity, was later gathered under his name by the anthologist Stobaeus; the line quoted here belongs to that doubtful outer layer, not to the works Arrian recorded.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Fragments, no. 35 (Oldfather, Loeb 1928)
Epictetus. “Fragments,” no. 35, in The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments. Translated by W. A. Oldfather. Loeb Classical Library 218. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928. Classed among the ‘Doubtful and Spurious Fragments.’
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘No man is free who is not master of himself’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/no-man-is-free-who-is-not-master-of-himself