Stoics and Nietzsche

 One of the reasons I returned to Nietzsche was something like this quote:

Very few of us are clearly aware of the fact that when we adopt the standpoint of aspiration, when we say ‘it should be thus’, or even ‘it should have been thus’, we commit ourselves to a condemnation of the whole course of events. For nothing in it is entirely isolated: the least thing has a bearing on the whole; the whole structure of the future arises out of your petty wrongs; when the least thing is met with critique, the whole is condemned.

The reason is that I thought more or less similarly.

Now, there is no obvious or even inherent link to this quote of Epictetus and that's not why I mentioned stoics, but I've just come across to this:

The Iliad consists of nothing but people’s impressions and their use of impressions. Abducting Menelaus’s wife seemed a good idea to Paris, and going away with Paris seemed a good idea to Helen. So if an impression had led Menelaus to feel that he was better off without such an unfaithful wife, what would have happened? We’d have lost not only the Iliad but the Odyssey as well!”

And I say: What if instead of going to Troy he had gone to Paris?