A student should practise how to expunge from his life sighs and sorrow, grief and disappointment, exclamations like ‘poor me’ and ‘alas’; he should learn what death is, as well as exile, jail and hemlock, so at the end of the day he can say, like Socrates in prison, ‘Dear Crito, if it pleases the gods, so be it…’
Epictetus, the Discourses