Robert Dobbin was born in New York City in 1958. He received a PhD in Classics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, and taught history and classics at college level for years. He is the author of Epictetus Discourses: Book One (1998), as well as articles on Virgil, Plato and Pythagoras. He has also translated Epictetus's Discourses and Selected Writings (2008) for Penguin Classics. Currently he works as a book editor in northern California.