to test the Stoical endurance of his pupil by pointing
out the indignities and tortures which his master might at any moment
inflict upon him; and when Epictetus answered that, after all, such
treatment was what man _had_ borne, and therefore _could_ bear, he would
reply approvingly that every man's destiny was in his own hands; that he
need lack nothing from any one else; that, since he could derive from
himself magnanimity and nobility of soul, he might despise the notion of
receiving lands or money or office. "But," he continued, "when any one
is cowardly or mean, one ought obviously in writing letters about such a
person to speak of him as a corpse, and to say, 'Favour us with the
corpse and blood of So-and-so,' For? in fact, such a man _is_ a mere
corpse, and nothing more; for if he were anything more, he would have
perceived that no man ever suffers any real misfortunes by another's
means." I do not know whether Mr. Ruskin is a student of Epictetus, but
he, among others, has forcibly expressed the same truth. "My friends, do
you remember that old Scythian custom, when the head of a house died?
How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and
carried about to his friends' houses; and each of them placed him at his
table's head, and all feasted in his presence? Suppose it were offered
to you, in plain words, as it _is_ offered to you in dire facts, that
you should gain this Scythian honour gradually, while you yet thought
yourself alive.... Would you take the offer verbally made by the
death-angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet
practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure;
many of us grasp at it in the fulness of horror."

The way in which Musonius treated would-be pupils much resembled the
plan adopted by Socrates. "It is not easy," says Epictetus, "to train
effeminate youths, any more than it is easy to take up whey with a hook.
But those of fine nature, even if you discourage them, desire
instruction all the more. For which reason Rufus often discouraged
pupils, using this as a criterion of fine and of common natures; for he
used to say, that just as a stone, even if you fling it into the air,
will fall down to the earth by its own gravitating force, so also a
noble nature, in proportion as it is repulsed, in that proportion tends
more in its own natural direction." As Emerson says,--

"Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages