Sometimes he used 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,
      That waft the breath of grace divine
      To hearts in sloth and ease. 
      So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
        So near is God to man,
      When Duty whispers low, ‘THOU MUST,’
        The youth replies, ‘I CAN.’”

One more trait of the character of Musonius will show how deeply Epictetus respected him, and how much good he derived from him.  In his Discourse on Ostentation, Epictetus says that Rufus was in the habit of remarking to his pupils, “If you have leisure to praise me, I can have done you no good.”  “He used indeed so to address us that each one of us, sitting there, thought that some one had been privately telling tales against him in particular, so completely did Rufus seize hold of his characteristics, so vividly did he portray our individual faults.”