For this is the greatest proof of unhappiness and misfortune. I desire something, and it does not happen: and what could be more wretched than I? It was because she was unable to endure this that Medea came to murder her own children, the action of a noble spirit in this regard at least, that she had a proper impression of what it means to be disappointed in one's desire. "Thus," she says, "shall I take vengeance on one who has injured and wronged me. Yet what shall I gain from putting him into such miserable plight? How is this to be achieved? I will murder the children. But that will be punishing myself. And what do I care?" This is the error of a soul endued with great vigour. For she knew not where the power to do what we wish lies; that it is not to be acquired from outside ourselves, nor by altering or disarranging things. Do not desire the man for your husband, and nothing which you desire will fail to happen. Do not desire to keep him for yourself. Do not desire to stay at Corinth, and, in a word, have no will but the will of god; and who shall hinder you, who shall compel you? Nobody could do so, any more than he could for Zeus. When you have such a leader, and conform your will and desires to his, what fear could you still have of failing? Offer up your desire and aversion to riches, and poverty: you will fail to get what you desire, you will fall into what you would avoid. Offer them up to health and you will fall into misfortune, and likewise if you offer them up to position, honours, your country, friends, children, in short, to anything outside the sphere of choice. But offer them up to Zeus and the other gods. Hand them over to these, for them to govern, let your desire and aversion be ranged on the same side as these; and how thenceforth can you be unhappy? But if, poor wretch, you fall prey to envy, and pity, and are jealous, and timorous, and never cease a single day from bewailing yourself and the gods, why do you continue to prate about your education? What kind of education, man? The fact is that you have studied syllogisms and arguments with equivocal premises? Will you not consent to unlearn all this, if at all possible, and make a fresh start, in the realization that hitherto you have not even touched on the principal matter? And, thenceforth, beginning from this foundation, establish the next point, as to how nothing shall be that you do not wish, and that nothing that do you wish shall fail to be. Give me but one young man who has come to the school with this purpose in mind, who has become an athlete in this field of action, and says, "I for my part yield up all the rest: it suffices me, if I become able to pass my life free from hindrance and distress, and to hold up my head in the face of events like a free man, and to look up to heaven as the friend of god, fearing nothing that can happen." Let any one of you show himself to be such a person, so that I may say, "Enter, young man, into what is rightly your own, for you are destined to be an ornament to philosophy."
Epictetus, and Gill, Christopher, ed., and Hard, Robin, trans. The Discourses of Epictetus. London: Everyman: 1995, 117-118.
Italics mine.
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