I must depart into exile; so can anyone prevent me from setting off with a smile, cheerfully and serenely? Stoicism thus refutes passivity, as it makes clear that the good citizen should be prepared to stand up for what is good and right, if necessary dying for it. Thus, instead of saying “Only worry about things within the sphere of choice,” it would be more accurate to say “Only worry about things insofar as your choices can affect them. All these works are collections of short sayings of miniature essays, and while each fragment is interesting, they have so much overlap that after reading ten of them, the repitition begins to bother me.

If a pretty girl is set against a young man who is just making a start on philosophy, that is no fair contest.If we take off these masks of fear and pain and suffering, what we can find is our own emancipation. Don’t ever speak of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘advantage’ or ‘harm’, and so on, of anything that is not your responsibility. The Stoic social ethos begins with the recognition of each man as “your own brother, who has Zeus as his ancestor and is a son born of the same seed as yourself, with the same high lineage. Desiring and detesting anything is problematic because it means that anyone who possesses those things gains power over you, so don't do it.

Surely it is more accurate to think of a scale, or a gradation, of things more or less within our power. It is obvious that Epictetus influenced early Christianity here, and sounded the death-knell for individualism, until it would be rediscovered after the Enlightenment. While I agree with him that the various things that can affect our body (ultimately resulting in death) may be out of our control, Epictetus falters in simplifying the realm of choice as a binary - you either have control over something, or you don’t, according to him.This power—the power to change our attitude towards the external world—Epictetus regards as the ultimate and quintessential human faculty.

Yet serving this master at the court of Nero gave Epictetus a window into the personal lives of men who occupied the highest echelons of Roman power; and the young slave seems to have wondered whether their respective stations in life were not the opposite of what they appeared to be. It's easy to strawman stoicism as advocating a petrified lifestyle in which one simply sits down and let's the world pass them by but I didn't find that here. Surrounded as we are by such people – so confused, so ignorant of what they’re saying and of whatever faults they may or may not have, where those faults came from and how to get rid of them – I think we too should make a habit of asking ourselves: Could it be that I’m one of them too? This means that human beings have to accept Nature's indifference towards them, and accept their fate. That's a problem for the Discourses, because the moral basis for enduring the difficulties of life is that life is how the gods want it to be, and the gods are good, therefore control what you can and endure all else and bow to the will of the gods.We have to expect and prepare ourselves for disappointment and remain indifferent to things that are not in our power and are beyond our control. The conclusion is certainly true, but Epictetus committed the fallacy of the undistributed middle premise. Diogenes the Cynic and Socrates are the two most often cited by Epictetus as good examples to follow, both men he describes as humble, ascetic, and unafraid to speak unwanted truths to power. But the observation ‘Things have gone badly for him’ is something that each person adds for himself.

Unlike Seneca, who gives at least some due credence to the imperfectness of this world and ourselves, Epictetus has this tone of “stop whining lol” (there’s really no more accurate way of saying this). If you retreat from the world into your own soul, and don't care what others do with your body because you know they can't reach you - the real you (your will) anyway - you are in effect rolling out the red carpet for immoral people to abduct, abuse and ultimately kill others, including yourself. The morality of Greek philosophers was the antithesis of our modern one: they believed we should eschew all material desires, not because of some dictate of the heavens, but because they can never be satisfied and come to tyrannise us rather than make us happy.When we care about what possession we have, what others think of us, what desires we want to pursue, we set ourselves on a course to unhappiness, since all these things, in ultimo, have no impact whatsoever on how we feel.