Stockdale on Stoicism 36

My bedside table on the ship was stacked not with busywork to impress my boss, but with Stoic readings: the Discourses, Xenophon's Memorabilia, recollections of Socrates, and of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Epictetus expected his students to be familiar with Homer's plots. 

The Stoics were the ultimate warriors. The Roman Stoics coined the formula, Vivere Militare!—Life is being a soldier. Epictetus said in the Discourses: 

"Do you not know that life is a soldier's service? One must keep guard, another go out to reconnoiter, another take the field. If you neglect your responsibilities when some severe order is laid upon you, do you not understand to what a pitiful state you bring the army in so far as in you lies?" 

 in the Enchiridion:

"Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses—if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, see that you act it well. 

"For this is your business—to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to Another. . . . Every one of us, slave or free, has come into this world with innate conceptions as to good and bad, noble and shameful, becoming and unbecoming, happiness and unhappiness, fitting and inappropriate. . . . If you regard yourself as a man and as a part of some whole, it is fitting for you now to be sick and now to make a voyage and run risks, and not to be in want, and on occasion to die before your time. 

"Why, then, are you vexed? Would you have someone else be sick of a fever now, someone else go on a voyage, someone else die? For it is impossible in such a body as ours, that is, in this Universe that envelopes us, among these fellow creatures of ours, that such things should not happen, some to one man, some to another." 

—from James B. Stockdale, Master of My Fate: A Stoic Philosopher in a Hanoi Prison