Men are not disturbed by events but by their opinions about them: for example, death is nothing terrible, because if it were, it would have seemed so to Socrates; for the opinion about death, that it is terrible, is the terrible thing.8 As you can see, Epictetus immediately applied this concept to what he considered the most pressing psychological issue we face. He refers to Socrates’s attitude toward death because, I presume, he is aware that this insight into the psychology of emotions did not originate with Stoicism but goes all the way back to Socrates himself.
