Every named figure in the book.
A freed slave who became the most practical philosopher of the Roman imperial period. Born in Hierapolis around 55 CE, enslaved in Rome, permitted to study Stoic philosophy, freed after Nero's death. His school at Nicopolis in western Greece attracted students from across the empire. He wrote nothing — the Manual exists only because Arrian took notes. Every section of the book is his voice, recorded at one remove.
Roman officer, historian, and student of Epictetus. Born around 86 CE in Nicomedia, arrived at the school in Nicopolis as a young man. His decision to record the lectures verbatim — rather than producing a polished treatise — preserved something rare: the actual rhythms of a teacher at work. Later became governor of Cappadocia and wrote the most detailed surviving account of Alexander the Great's campaigns. The Manual outlasted all of it.
The Stoic philosopher who taught Epictetus while he was still enslaved in Rome. One of the most important figures of first-century Stoicism, exiled twice — by Nero and Vespasian — for his refusal to flatter the powerful. Surviving lecture fragments show his characteristic directness, including his unusual argument that women should receive the same philosophical education as men. The line of transmission — Musonius to Epictetus, Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius — is one of philosophy's cleanest chains.
Quoted, alluded to, and finally named in the closing sections as the figure the reader should imitate. Not because his circumstances were like ours — they were not — but because he lived his principles all the way to their end, refused to flatter, and died without abandoning the life he had chosen. Section 51 makes the comparison explicit: Epictetus had one master, and then another, and Socrates had his tyrants, and still he spoke as he did. That is the model.
Not a figure in the text — a figure in its history. Marcus read Epictetus since youth (his teacher Junius Rusticus gave him the Discourses) and worked through the Manual's precepts in his private notebook for forty years while running the Roman Empire. The Meditations is, in many passages, an emperor applying a slave's philosophy to the problems of a throne. The pairing is one of the strangest and most affecting in the philosophical tradition.