Free in chains?
On the axis: Political liberty · inner freedom
If freedom is won within, a clear-eyed person can be free even under a tyrant. Is that inner refuge the one thing no power can confiscate, or a consolation that teaches the oppressed to put up with their chains?
Justification
A former slave, Epictetus relocates the whole question of freedom outside chains and masters: my body may be fettered, I may be jailed or exiled, but no one, not even Zeus, can compel my . Real freedom lodges in the one place nothing external can reach, the , the faculty of judging and willing. Hence a sharp stance: the course of the world obeys fate, yet the use I make of my impressions stays inalienably mine. Against the common notion that measures freedom by the absence of obstacles, he holds that a man in chains can be free and a tyrant a slave to his desires.
Discourses, I.1 · Discourses, I.17
Anchors: Epictetus · Berlin
leads to: Freedom of the will (Inner freedom or outer freedom?)