Stockdale on Epictetus

In his inimitable, frank language, Epictetus explained that his curriculum was not about "revenues or income, or peace or war, but about happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, slavery and freedom." 

His model graduate was not a person "able to speak fluently about philosophic principles as an idle babbler, but about things that will do you good if your child dies, or your brother dies, or if you must die or be tortured." 

"Let others practice lawsuits, others study problems, others syllogisms; here you practice how to die, how to be enchained, how to be racked, how to be exiled." A man is responsible for his own "judgments, even in dreams, in drunkenness, and in melancholy madness." 

Each individual brings about his own good and his own evil, his good fortune, his ill fortune, his happiness, and his wretchedness. 

And to top all this off, he held that it is unthinkable that one man’s error could cause another’s suffering. Suffering, like everything else in Stoicism, was all down here—remorse at destroying yourself.

So what Epictetus was telling his students was that there can be no such thing as being the ‘victim’ of another. You can only be a ‘victim’ of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? 

"He who has authority over any of the things on which you have set your heart." 

"What is the result at which all virtue aims? Serenity."

 "Show me a man who though sick is happy, who though in danger is happy, who though in prison is happy, and I’ll show you a Stoic."

—from James B. Stockdale, Courage under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior