Epictetus

Epictetus was born into slavery in Phrygia and owned in Rome by a secretary of Nero's. He was permitted to study under Musonius Rufus while still enslaved. He was lame, by one ancient account because his leg was broken by his owner, and he mentioned it only as an example of something outside his control.

Freed, he taught in Rome until Domitian expelled the philosophers, then founded a school at Nicopolis in western Greece. He wrote nothing at all. Everything we have was recorded by a student, Arrian, who insisted he had taken it down verbatim, and it reads like it: interruptions, sarcasm, and the sound of a man refusing to let a room off the hook.