c. 65 AD 2026
This is an AI modernization of Moral Letters to Lucilius into contemporary English. The original is available from Wikisource. Also available as an epub.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in Spain around the end of the first century BC, made his career at Rome as a writer and a senator, was banished to Corsica by one emperor and recalled to tutor the next. That next one was Nero, and for the first years of the reign Seneca effectively ran the government with him. He withdrew from court around 62, having acquired one of the largest fortunes in the empire. Three years later Nero ordered him to kill himself on a charge of conspiracy, and he did.
The letters were written in those last years, to Lucilius, a friend who was governing Sicily. There are a hundred and twenty-four of them and this edition has all of them, where most editions print a selection of twenty or thirty. They amount to a course in Stoic practice delivered a letter at a time, and the form is the reason they are still readable. Each one starts from something that actually happened — the mail ships from Alexandria coming into the bay, a rented room over a public bathhouse where somebody is being plucked, a bad journey, an illness, a walk round a villa gone to seed — and then turns. The early ones close by handing Lucilius a quotation for the day, usually from Epicurus, whose school was the Stoics' rival, and Seneca keeps up a running joke about borrowing from the other side.
The obvious objection to the man is one he raises himself. Someone writing about the contempt of money while owning gardens, estates and a fortune is open to a charge, and he answers it directly: he is not a wise man yet, he is not setting up as a doctor while sick himself, and the two of them are lying in the same hospital ward and passing the medicine across. How well that answers is left to the reader here, as it was there.
Letter 47 is the one most often anthologised and deserves its place. Seneca tells Lucilius that the slaves at his table are men, that the master who cannot be spoken to freely by his own household is the one living in fear, and that fortune has the same power over both of them. He owned slaves. Letters 70 and 77 argue that a person may rightly choose the time of their own death, which was orthodox Stoic doctrine and which he acted on; they are given here as the argument he made, without comment.
Of the three Stoics whose work survives in quantity, one was born a slave, one was an emperor, and this one was a minister of state with a great deal to lose. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are both in this collection, and Seneca is the only one of the three writing to somebody else.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Keep doing what you're doing, my dear Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself. Gather up and guard your time — the time that until now was being taken from you, or stolen outright, or simply slipping through your fingers. Believe me when I tell you how it goes: some moments are torn from us, some are quietly lifted, and some just drift out of reach. But the most shameful loss of all is the loss that comes from carelessness. Look closely and you'll see that the largest part of life slips away from people while they're doing wrong, a good share while they're doing nothing, and the whole of it while they're doing what doesn't matter.
Show me the man who puts a real price on his time, who values each day, who understands that he is dying daily. Because that's our mistake — we see death as somewhere up ahead, when most of it is already behind us. Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands.
So do exactly what you tell me you're doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Get a grip on today and you'll depend that much less on tomorrow. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. Nature put us in possession of this one thing — this one fleeting, slippery thing — and anyone who feels like it can push us out of it. And how foolish people are! They'll let the cheapest trifles, things easily replaced, get charged to their account once received; but when they've been given someone's time, the most precious commodity there is, they never consider themselves in debt at all. And yet time is the one loan that even a grateful borrower can never repay.
You may want to know how I'm doing myself — I, who hand out this advice so freely. I'll confess frankly: my books balance the way you'd expect from a man who spends freely but keeps careful accounts. I can't claim I waste nothing. But I can tell you what I'm wasting, and how, and why; I can give you the full accounting of my poverty. My situation is like that of many people who've been reduced to little through no fault of their own: everyone forgives them, and no one comes to their rescue.
So where does that leave us? Here: I don't consider a man poor if the little he has left is enough for him. But you — hold on to what's really yours, and you can't start too early. As our ancestors used to say, it's too late to start saving when you're down to the dregs of the cask. What's left at the bottom isn't just the smallest part — it's the worst.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
From what you write, and from what I hear, I'm forming a good opinion of your future. You don't run around from place to place, unsettling yourself with every change of address — that kind of thrashing about is the sign of a disordered spirit. The first proof of a well-ordered mind, in my view, is the ability to stand still and keep your own company.
But be careful that all this reading — many authors, every kind of book — doesn't leave you scattered and unsteady. If you want ideas that will take root and hold, you have to stay awhile with a few master thinkers and digest their work. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their lives traveling end up with many acquaintances and no friends — and the same goes for anyone who never gets close to a single great author but skims them all at a run. Food does no good, and never becomes part of you, if it leaves the stomach as soon as it's eaten. Nothing blocks healing like constantly switching medicines. No wound closes while you're trying one salve after another. A plant that keeps getting moved never grows strong. Nothing is so useful that it can help you while it's in transit. And a crowd of books is a distraction.
So, since you can't read all the books you might own, it's enough to own only as many books as you can read. "But," you say, "I want to dip into this one first, then that one." Tasting a little from many dishes is the sign of a fussy appetite: when they're many and varied, they cloy but don't nourish. Read the proven authors, and when you crave a change, go back to the ones you read before. Every day, acquire something that will arm you against poverty, against death, against every other misfortune as well; and after ranging over many thoughts, pick out one to digest thoroughly that day.
That's my own practice: from the many things I've read, I claim some one part for myself. Today's comes from Epicurus — yes, I make a habit of crossing over into the enemy's camp. Not as a deserter, mind you; as a scout. He says: "Contented poverty is an honorable thing." Though really, if it's contented, it isn't poverty at all. It isn't the man who has too little who is poor — it's the man who craves more. What does it matter how much sits in a man's safe or his warehouses, how large his herds are or how fat his interest payments, if he's eyeing his neighbor's property and counting up not what he's gained but what he hopes to gain? You ask what the proper limit to wealth is? First, having what is necessary. Second, having what is enough.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You sent your letter by the hand of a "friend" — your word for him. And in your very next sentence you warn me not to discuss your affairs with him, since you don't make a habit of it yourself. In one and the same letter you've told me he is your friend and that he isn't. Now, if you were using the word loosely — the way we call every candidate for office "the honorable gentleman," or greet a man whose name escapes us as "my dear sir" — fine, so be it. But if you consider anyone a friend whom you don't trust as much as you trust yourself, you are badly mistaken, and you don't understand what real friendship means.
Talk everything over with a friend, by all means — but first, talk over the friend himself. Once friendship is settled, you must trust; before it's formed, you must judge. The people who get this backwards — who, breaking Theophrastus's rule, judge a man after making him a friend instead of making him a friend after judging him — have their duties exactly reversed. Take a long time deciding whether to admit someone into your friendship. But once you've decided to admit him, welcome him with your whole heart and soul, and speak with him as boldly as with yourself.
As for you yourself: live in such a way that you'd trust yourself with nothing you couldn't entrust even to your enemy. Still, since certain things are kept private by custom, share with your friend at least all your worries and all your plans. Treat him as loyal, and you will make him loyal. Some people, by fearing to be deceived, have taught men to deceive — their suspicion handed their friend the right to do wrong. Why should I hold back any word in my friend's presence? Why shouldn't I feel as alone in his company as I do by myself?
There's a class of people who will tell whoever happens to be nearest what should be told only to friends, unloading whatever's bothering them into any available ear. Others are afraid to confide even in those closest to them; if they could, they wouldn't trust even themselves, and they push every secret down deep inside. Do neither. It's equally a fault to trust everyone and to trust no one — though I'd say the first fault is the more innocent, the second the safer.
In the same way, there are two kinds of people who deserve a scolding: the ones who can never rest, and the ones who never do anything else. Because a love of bustle isn't industry — it's the restlessness of a hunted mind. And true rest doesn't mean writing off all motion as a nuisance; that kind of rest is slackness and inertia. So keep in mind a line I came across in Pomponius: "Some men shrink so far into dark corners that daylight itself looks dim to them." Mix the two: the resting man should act, and the acting man should rest. Take it up with Nature — she'll tell you she made both day and night.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Keep on as you've begun, and hurry all you can — the sooner you finish the work, the longer you'll get to enjoy a mind that is improved and at peace with itself. There's enjoyment in the improving too, of course; but the pleasure of contemplating a mind cleansed of every stain, a mind that shines, is something else entirely. You remember, surely, the joy you felt when you put away the clothes of boyhood, put on a man's toga, and were escorted down to the forum. Expect a greater joy still when you put away the boy's mind, and wisdom enrolls you among men. Because it isn't boyhood that stays with us — it's something worse: boyishness. And it's all the more serious because we carry the authority of age together with the follies of boyhood — of infancy, even. Boys fear trifles, small children fear shadows; we fear both.
All you need to do is keep advancing, and you'll come to understand that some things are less to be dreaded precisely because they frighten us so much. No evil is great if it is the last evil of all. Death arrives; it would be worth dreading if it could stay with you. But death must either never come at all, or come and be gone.
"It's hard, though," you say, "to bring the mind to the point where it can look down on life." But look at the trivial reasons that drive people to throw life away. One man hangs himself outside his mistress's door. Another throws himself off the roof to escape a bad-tempered master's taunts. A runaway drives a sword into his own belly rather than be dragged back. Don't you think virtue can manage what runaway terror manages so easily? No one can have a peaceful life who spends it scheming to prolong it, or who counts a long string of consulships among the great blessings. Rehearse this thought every day, so that you can leave life contentedly when the time comes. Plenty of men clutch and cling to life the way people swept down rapids clutch and cling at thorns and jagged rocks.
Most men toss miserably between the fear of death and the hardships of life: they don't want to live, and they don't know how to die. So make your whole life agreeable to yourself by giving up all anxiety about keeping it. No good thing makes its owner happy unless his mind is prepared for its loss — and nothing is lost more painlessly than the thing that can't be missed once it's gone. So encourage yourself, toughen yourself, against the blows that fall even on the most powerful. Pompey's fate was decided by a boy and a eunuch; Crassus's by a cruel and insolent Parthian. Gaius Caesar ordered Lepidus to bare his neck to the tribune Dexter's axe — and then offered his own throat to Chaerea. Fortune has never raised any man so high that she didn't threaten him with everything she had granted him. Don't trust her calm; in a moment the sea is churned to its depths. The very day the ships make their brave show at the games, they're swallowed.
Consider that a highwayman or an enemy could cut your throat at any time. And short of that, every slave holds the power of life and death over you, master or no master. I'll say it plainly: whoever holds his own life cheap is master of yours. Run through the men who have died by plots inside their own houses, killed openly or by trickery, and you'll see that slaves' anger has cut down as many as kings' anger has. So what does it matter how powerful the man you fear may be, when the thing you're afraid of is a power everyone has?
"But if you fall into enemy hands," you say, "the conqueror will order you led away —" yes, led to where you were already going. Why fool yourself, and act as if you've only just now been told the fate you've been under all along? Take my word for it: since the day you were born, you have been being led there. We must turn these thoughts, and thoughts like them, over in our minds if we want to be calm as we wait for that final hour — the one whose fear poisons all the hours before it.
But I need to end this letter. Here's the saying that pleased me today — picked, once again, from another man's Garden, Epicurus's: "Poverty brought into line with the law of nature is great wealth." Do you know what limits that law of nature sets for us? To keep off hunger, thirst, and cold — that's all. To banish hunger and thirst, you don't have to wait on the doorsteps of the purse-proud, or endure the hard frown, or the kindness that humiliates; you don't have to scour the seas or follow an army. What nature demands is close at hand and easy to get. It's the extras men sweat for — the extras that wear our togas threadbare, that keep us growing old in army camps, that fling us onto foreign shores. What is enough is within reach. Whoever has made a fair peace with poverty is rich.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I applaud you, and I'm delighted that you're sticking to your studies and — setting everything else aside — working at one thing every day: becoming a better man. I don't just urge you to keep it up; I'm begging you to. But let me give you a warning: don't act like the people who want to be conspicuous rather than to improve, doing things with their dress or their way of living that are designed to draw stares. Rough clothes, unkempt hair, a slovenly beard, loud contempt for silverware, a bed on the bare ground — avoid that whole perverse wardrobe of self-display. The very name "philosophy" attracts enough sneers even when it's pursued quietly; what happens if we start seceding from ordinary human customs altogether? Inside, let us be different in every respect; outside, let us fit in with everyone else. Don't wear too fine a toga — and don't wear a shabby one either. We don't need silver plate crusted with solid gold; but let's not imagine that doing without silver and gold proves the simple life. Let's aim at a way of life better than the crowd's, not opposed to it — otherwise we frighten off the very people we're trying to improve. We also make them unwilling to imitate us in anything, for fear they'd have to imitate us in everything.
The first thing philosophy promises is fellow-feeling with all mankind — sympathy, sociability. Being unlike other people breaks that promise. We have to make sure the things we do to win admiration aren't simply ridiculous and repellent. Our motto, as you know, is "live according to Nature" — and it is flatly against nature to torture your body, to hate easy elegance, to be dirty on purpose, to eat food that isn't just plain but foul and revolting. Hunting for delicacies is decadence; avoiding ordinary things you can buy for next to nothing is madness. Philosophy calls for plain living, not for penance — and plain can perfectly well be neat. This is the middle course I approve of: a life that strikes a happy balance between the ways of the wise man and the ways of the world; everyone should admire it, but everyone should recognize it too.
"So then, shall we do just as everyone else does? Shall there be no difference between us and them?" A very great difference — but one that people discover when they look closely. A visitor to our house should admire us, not our furnishings. He's a great man who uses clay dishes as if they were silver — and just as great a man who uses silver as if it were clay. Not being able to endure wealth is the mark of an unsteady mind.
But let me share today's profit with you as well. In our own Hecato — no raid on a rival camp needed this time — I find that limiting your desires helps cure your fears too. "Cease to hope," he says, "and you will cease to fear." "But how," you'll ask, "can two such different things travel together?" It's true, my dear Lucilius: they look opposed, but they're linked. The same chain binds the prisoner and the soldier who guards him — and hope and fear, unlike as they are, keep step together. Fear follows hope. And I'm not surprised they move that way. Both belong to a mind in suspense — a mind fretting over what comes next. The chief cause of both is that we don't fit ourselves to the present but send our thoughts far ahead. And so foresight, the noblest gift the human race has, gets twisted into a curse. Wild animals run from the dangers they can see, and once they've escaped, they're at ease; we torment ourselves over what's coming and what's past alike. Many of our blessings do us harm: memory replays the agony of fear, and foresight previews it. Nobody is made wretched by the present alone.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I feel, my dear Lucilius, that I am being not merely reformed but transformed. Not that I promise myself — or even let myself hope — that there's nothing left in me that needs changing. Of course there's plenty that should be tightened up, or thinned down, or built out. But this very thing is proof that my spirit has changed for the better: it can now see faults in itself it never noticed before. With some patients, it's cause for congratulation when they realize they're sick.
I wanted to share this sudden change in myself with you, because then I could begin to trust our friendship more surely — the true friendship that hope and fear and self-interest cannot break, the friendship in which, and for the sake of which, men are willing to die. I can show you plenty of men who have lacked not a friend but a friendship. That can never happen when two souls are drawn together into partnership by a shared desire for what is honorable. And why not? Because such men know they hold everything in common — especially their troubles.
You can't imagine how much progress I see each day bringing me. "Then send me a share of these gifts you've found so helpful," you'll say. Believe me, I want to pour all of it into you; part of my joy in learning anything is that I get to teach it. Nothing will ever please me — however excellent, however beneficial — if I have to keep the knowledge of it to myself. If wisdom were offered to me on one condition, that I keep it shut away and never speak of it, I would turn it down. No good thing is any pleasure to own without a friend to share it.
So I'll send you the books themselves — and, so you won't waste time hunting through them for the profitable parts, I'll mark the passages, so you can turn straight to what I approve and admire. But the living voice, and a life lived side by side, will help you more than any written word. You have to come and see for yourself — first, because people trust their eyes more than their ears, and second, because the road is long through precepts, but short and sure through examples. Cleanthes could not have become the very image of Zeno by merely hearing his lectures: he shared his life, saw into his private purposes, watched to see whether the man lived by his own rules. Plato and Aristotle and that whole crowd of sages who would each go his own way got more from Socrates's character than from his words. It wasn't Epicurus's classroom that made Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus into great men — it was living under the same roof with him. So I'm calling you here not only to gain something, but to add something; we can do each other a great deal of good.
Meanwhile, I owe you your little daily wage. Here's what pleased me today in Hecato: "You ask what progress I've made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." Real progress — a man like that will never be alone. And you may be sure of this: such a man is a friend to the whole human race.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You ask what you should avoid above all else? Crowds. You can't yet trust yourself in one safely. I'll confess my own weakness on this point: I never bring back home the same character that I took abroad with me. Something of the calm I've forced on myself gets shaken loose; some enemy I had driven off slips back in. Like an invalid who has been weak so long he can't be carried outdoors without a relapse — that's us, souls convalescing from a long illness. Mixing with the crowd does damage. Every single person in it will recommend some vice to us, or stamp one on us, or smear us with one before we've even noticed. And the bigger the mob we mingle with, the bigger the danger.
Nothing is as ruinous to good character as killing time at the games — that's where vice sneaks in through the open door of pleasure. What do I mean? I mean I come home greedier, more ambitious, more self-indulgent — crueler, in fact, and less human — because I've been among human beings. The other day I dropped in on the midday show, expecting some fun, some wit, a breather — the slot where the audience's eyes get a rest from human slaughter. It was the opposite. The morning's fights had been mercy itself by comparison. Now the fooling around is over, and it's butchery pure and simple. The men have nothing to defend themselves with. Every inch of them is open to the blow, and no blow ever misses. Plenty of people prefer this to the regular pairings and the special-request bouts. Of course they do — there's no helmet or shield to turn the blade. Why bother with armor? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death. In the morning men are thrown to the lions and the bears; at noon they're thrown to the spectators. The crowd orders each killer sent against the man who will kill him next, and keeps the latest winner in stock for another slaughter. The exit for every fighter is death, and fire and sword keep the show moving. And all this goes on while the arena stands practically empty.
"But he was a highway robber," you may say. "He killed a man!" So what? Granted he was a murderer and deserved the punishment — what crime did you commit, poor fellow, that you deserve to sit and watch it? All morning they scream: "Kill him! Whip him! Burn him! Why does he meet the sword like such a coward? Why does he strike so feebly? Why won't he die game? Lash him into his wounds! Make them trade blow for blow, chests bare, right into the stroke!" And when the show pauses for intermission, the announcement comes: "A little throat-cutting in the meantime, so there's still something going on!"
Come now — can't you see even this much, that a bad example comes back on the one who sets it? Thank the immortal gods that the man you're teaching cruelty to is one who can't learn it. A young character that can't yet keep its grip on the right has to be pulled out of the mob; it's too easy to go over to the majority. Even a Socrates, a Cato, a Laelius could have had their principles shaken by a crowd unlike them — that's how true it is that none of us, however hard we polish our nature, can stand the shock of vices marching in with a procession that size behind them. A single example of extravagance or greed does plenty of damage. A luxurious housemate softens and weakens us little by little; a rich neighbor keeps our envy stirred up; a spiteful companion rubs his rust off on us no matter how clean and honest we are. So what do you think happens to a character the whole world is assaulting? You will end up either imitating the world or loathing it.
Avoid both. Don't copy the bad because they're many, and don't hate the many because they're unlike you. Withdraw into yourself as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those you can make better yourself. It works both ways: men learn while they teach.
And don't let pride in advertising your talents lure you out before the public, reciting and lecturing. I'd tell you to go ahead if you had merchandise this mob wanted; as it is, not one of them can understand you. Maybe one or two individuals will drift your way, and even those you'll have to shape and train up to the point of understanding you. "Then who did I learn all this for?" Don't worry — nothing was wasted. You learned it for yourself.
But so that I won't have learned only for myself today, I'll share three excellent sayings that came my way, all circling the same point. One of them pays this letter's debt; the other two, accept as an advance. Democritus says: "One man means as much to me as a multitude, and a multitude as much as one man." And this was nobly said too, whoever said it (the author is disputed) — asked why he worked so hard at an art that would reach almost no one, he answered: "A few are enough for me; one is enough; none is enough." The third, and a fine one, is Epicurus, writing to a partner in his studies: "I write this not for the many but for you; each of us is audience enough for the other."
Take these to heart, Lucilius, and you'll learn to scorn the pleasure that comes from the applause of the majority. Many people praise you — but is that any reason to be pleased with yourself, if you're someone the many can understand? Let your good qualities face inward.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
"So you're telling me," you say, "to shun the crowd, withdraw from society, and settle for a clear conscience? What happened to your school's marching orders — die in the middle of active work?" Listen: the retreat I keep urging on you — my purpose in shutting myself away and locking the door is to help more people. I never spend a day in idleness; I claim part of the night for study too. I don't budget time for sleep — I surrender to it when I must, and when my eyes are worn out with waking and ready to fall shut, I hold them to the task. I've withdrawn not only from people but from business, and from my own business most of all. The work I'm doing is for later generations: writing down things that might help them. There are certain healthy counsels — think of them as recipes for useful medicines — that I'm putting into writing, because I've found them effective on my own sores, which may not be fully healed but have at least stopped spreading.
I point other men to the right road — the one I found late, worn out from wandering. I shout to them: "Avoid whatever the crowd loves, whatever Fortune tosses your way! Stop in doubt and fear before every windfall she brings — it's the dumb animals and the fish that get taken in by baited hopes. You call these things Fortune's gifts? They're traps. Anyone who wants a life of safety will steer as wide as he can of these sticky snares of her favor, which fool us — wretched in this too — into thinking we hold them, when they hold us. A career like that leads along cliff edges, and life on those heights ends in a fall. Once prosperity starts driving us off course, we can't even stand against her, or go down 'with the ship at least on her course,' or go down once and for all. Fortune doesn't capsize us — she drives the bow under and pounds us on the rocks.
"So hold fast to this sound and wholesome rule of life: indulge the body only as far as good health requires. Handle it a bit roughly, or it will stop obeying the mind. Eat to ease your hunger, drink to quench your thirst, dress to keep out the cold, and house yourself as shelter from discomfort — nothing more. Whether that house is built of turf or of colorful imported marble matters very little: understand that thatch covers a man just as well as a roof of gold. Despise everything that useless labor sets up as ornament and decoration. Keep in mind that nothing deserves wonder except the soul — and to a great soul, nothing else is great."
When I talk in these terms with myself and with future generations, don't you think I'm doing more good than when I show up as counsel in court, or press my seal into a will, or lend my voice and my hand in the senate to some candidate? Believe me, the people who seem to be doing nothing are doing the greater things: they're handling the mortal and the immortal at the same time.
But I must stop and pay the customary contribution that balances this letter. It won't come out of my own pocket — I'm still working through Epicurus. Today I read this sentence in him: "To enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy." The man who submits and surrenders himself to her isn't kept waiting; he's freed on the spot. For the very service of philosophy is freedom.
Now, you'll probably ask why I quote so many of Epicurus's fine sayings instead of our own school's. But why should you count them as Epicurus's property rather than common property? Think how many poets say things philosophers have said — or should say. I won't even touch the tragedians or our national drama (which has its serious side too, standing halfway between comedy and tragedy). What a stock of shrewd verse lies buried in the mime! How many of Publilius's lines deserve delivery from tragic actors, not just comedians in slippers! I'll quote one verse of his that touches philosophy — the very part of it we were just discussing — where he says that Fortune's gifts should never be counted as our own:
Whatever you have gained by coveting is still not yours.
I remember you put the same idea much better and tighter yourself:
What Fortune makes yours is not really yours.
And a third of yours, better still, shouldn't be left out:
The good that can be given can be taken away.
I won't charge these to the expense account — you got them from your own stock.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You want to know whether Epicurus is right when, in one of his letters, he criticizes those who say the wise man is self-sufficient and therefore has no need of friendship. That's the charge he brings against Stilbo and the others who hold that the supreme good is a soul beyond feeling.
We run straight into ambiguity if we try to compress the Greek term for "no feeling" into one quick word — it can be read as the opposite of what we mean. What we mean is a soul that refuses to register any evil; what people will hear is a soul that can't endure any. Consider whether it isn't better to say "a soul that cannot be harmed," or "a soul entirely beyond the reach of suffering." Here's the difference between us and that other school: our wise man feels his troubles but overcomes them; theirs doesn't even feel them. What we share with them is this: the wise man is self-sufficient. And yet, sufficient as he is unto himself, he still wants friends, neighbors, associates.
Notice just how self-sufficient he is: at need, he can be content with a part of himself. If disease or war costs him a hand, if some accident takes one eye or both, what's left will satisfy him; maimed and diminished, he'll be as glad in his body as he was when it was whole. But not mourning what's missing doesn't mean not preferring it intact. The wise man is self-sufficient in this sense: he can do without friends — not that he wants to. And by "can" I mean this: he bears the loss of a friend with a level spirit.
He'll never actually be short of friends, though, because it lies in his own power how quickly he replaces a loss. If Phidias loses a statue, he can carve another on the spot; just so, this master of the art of making friendships can fill the place of a friend he has lost. How do you make a friend quickly? I'll tell you — provided we agree that I may pay my debt right now and square this letter's account. Hecato says: "I can show you a love potion made without drugs, without herbs, without any witch's incantation: if you want to be loved, love." And there's great pleasure not only in keeping up old, established friendships but in starting and winning new ones. The difference between winning a friend and having won one is the difference between the farmer sowing and the farmer reaping. The philosopher Attalus used to say: "It's more pleasant to make a friend than to have one, just as it's more pleasant for the artist to paint than to have painted." While the work has you absorbed, the absorption itself is a deep delight; the pleasure dulls once you lift your hand from the finished masterpiece. From then on he enjoys the fruits of his art; while he was painting, he enjoyed the art itself. With our children, their grown years bear the more abundant fruit, but their infancy was sweeter.
Now back to the question. The wise man, I say, self-sufficient though he is, still wants friends — if for no other reason, then so that he may practice friendship, so that a virtue that size doesn't lie idle. Not for the purpose Epicurus names in that letter — "so there's someone to sit by his bed when he's sick, someone to help when he's imprisoned or poor" — but so that he may have someone whose sickbed he can sit beside, someone held prisoner by an enemy whom he can set free. Whoever looks only to himself and comes to friendship for that reason has it backwards. And the end will match the beginning: he made a friend to help him out of chains; at the first rattle of the chain, that friend is gone. These are the fair-weather friendships, as people call them. Choose a friend for his usefulness and he'll please you exactly as long as he's useful. That's why prosperous men are mobbed by troops of friends while ruined men stand in a vast emptiness, their friends fleeing the very crisis that would have tested their worth. That's why we see so many shameful desertions, so many betrayals out of fear. Beginnings and endings have to agree. The man who starts being your friend because it pays will stop because it pays. If anything in a friendship attracts him besides the friendship itself, some other payoff will attract him away.
"Then what do I make a friend for?" To have someone I can die for. Someone I can follow into exile, someone whose life I'll stake my own against — and pay up, too. What you're describing is a business deal, not a friendship: it courts advantage and looks to the return. No question, the feeling of a lover has something in it akin to friendship — you might call love a friendship gone mad. So then: does anyone fall in love for profit? For advancement? For fame? Love on its own, careless of everything else, sets the soul on fire with desire for the beautiful — not without hope, yes, of affection returned. What follows? Can a cause that is more honorable produce a passion that is corrupt?
"But we're not discussing whether friendship is worth pursuing for its own sake." On the contrary — that's exactly what most needs proving. Because if it is to be sought for its own sake, then the man who is enough for himself may still seek it. "And how does he seek it?" The way you seek any thing of great beauty: not pulled toward it by hope of profit, not scared off by Fortune's mood swings. Whoever seeks friendship for its convenient occasions strips it of all its nobility.
"The wise man is self-sufficient." Many people get this sentence wrong, my dear Lucilius: they banish the wise man from the world and shut him up inside his own skin. But we have to mark carefully what it means and how far it goes. The wise man is sufficient unto himself for living happily — not for merely living. For mere living he needs a great many supports; for living happily he needs only a sound and upright soul, one that looks down on Fortune.
I'd like to show you a distinction of Chrysippus's as well. He says the wise man lacks nothing, yet needs many things; "the fool, on the other hand, needs nothing — he doesn't know how to use anything — but he lacks everything." The wise man needs hands, eyes, and countless things for daily use, but he lacks nothing. Lack implies necessity, and nothing is necessary to the wise man. So although he's self-sufficient, he still has need of friends — and wants as many as possible — but not so that he may live happily. He'll live happily even without them. The supreme good never sends out for equipment: it's raised at home, and the whole of it grows from itself. Let the good beg any part of itself from outside, and it has started taking orders from Fortune.
"But what kind of existence will the wise man have if he's left friendless in prison, or stranded among strangers, or held up on a long voyage, or cast up on an empty shore?" The kind Jupiter has when the world dissolves — the gods run together into one, Nature pauses her work for a while, and he settles into himself, given over to his own thoughts. That's more or less what the sage does: he retreats into himself; he is his own company. Still, as long as he's free to arrange his affairs by his own judgment, he is self-sufficient — and marries a wife. Self-sufficient — and raises children. Self-sufficient — and yet could not live at all if it meant living with no other human being. What draws him into friendship is no personal advantage but a natural pull. Friendship has a built-in attraction for us, the way other things do. Just as we hate solitude and reach for company, just as nature bonds man to man, so here too there's a prod that makes us hungry for friendship. Even so — though he loves his friends dearly, ranking them with himself and often above himself — the sage will keep all his good within his own borders, and he'll say what Stilbo said, the very Stilbo Epicurus's letter attacks. Stilbo's city had been captured, his children lost, his wife lost; he walked out of the general wreckage alone — and yet happy. Demetrius, whose destructions had earned him the name Sacker of Cities, asked whether he had lost anything. "I have all my goods with me," Stilbo said. There's a brave, tough man for you! The enemy conquered his city; Stilbo conquered his conqueror. "I have lost nothing" — he forced Demetrius to wonder whether he'd really won at all. "My goods are all with me": in other words, nothing that can be taken away counts as a good.
We marvel at certain animals because they can pass through fire without harm. How much more marvelous is this man, who marched out through fire and sword and rubble unhurt and unrobbed! You see now how much easier it is to conquer a whole nation than to conquer one man? Stilbo's saying is common ground with Stoicism: the Stoic, too, carries his goods intact through cities burned to ash, for he is self-sufficient. That is the boundary he draws around his own happiness.
And don't imagine that our school alone produces noble words. Epicurus himself, Stilbo's scold, said something much the same — take it as a credit to me, though I've already cleared today's account. "Whoever does not think that what he has is ample wealth is unhappy, though he be master of the whole world." Or, if this strikes you as better put (since we should aim at the meaning, not the words): "A man may rule the world and still be miserable, if he doesn't feel supremely happy." And to show you that these feelings are universal — Nature herself prompts them — you'll find this line in one of the comic poets:
Unhappy is the man who thinks himself unhappy.
What does your condition matter, if it looks bad in your own eyes? "So then," you say, "take that man over there, rich by shameful means, or that one, master of many and slave of more — if they call themselves happy, does their own opinion make them happy?" What matters isn't what a man says but what he feels — and not what he feels on one particular day, but what he feels steadily. No need to fear this great prize falling into unworthy hands, though: only the wise man is pleased with what is his own. Folly is forever sick of itself.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
No, I haven't changed my mind: avoid the crowd, avoid the small circle, avoid even the single companion. There is no one I know of that I'd be willing to share you with. And notice what a compliment I'm paying you here — I trust you alone with yourself. Crates, they say, the student of that same Stilbo I mentioned in an earlier letter, once noticed a young man walking by himself and asked him what he was doing out there all alone. "I'm talking with myself," the young man answered. "Then be careful," said Crates. "Pay close attention — you're talking with a bad man."
When someone is grieving, or frightened about something, we make a point of keeping watch over them, so their solitude can't do them harm. No thoughtless person should ever be left alone. Alone, he only plots foolishness and piles up future dangers for himself or for others. Alone, his low desires come out to play; whatever fear or shame used to keep hidden, the mind now puts on display. Solitude sharpens his recklessness, stirs his lusts, and needles his temper. And the one real benefit solitude offers — no one to trust, no witnesses to fear — is completely wasted on a fool. He informs on himself.
So mark what my hopes are for you — no, mark what I am promising myself, since "hope" is just the name we give a blessing that isn't certain yet: I don't know anyone whose company I would rather you keep than your own. I remember the great-hearted way you flung out certain phrases, and how much strength was in them. I congratulated myself on the spot and said: "Those words didn't come from the edge of the lips. There's a foundation under what this man says. He's not one of the many; he has his eye on his real welfare." Speak that way, and live that way. See to it that nothing drags you down. As for your old prayers, you can release the gods from answering them — file new ones instead. Pray for a sound mind and for good health, of the soul first and then of the body. And pray for these things often, of course. Ask God boldly; you won't be asking him for anything that belongs to someone else.
But, as usual, I need to send a little gift along with this letter. Here's a true saying I found in Athenodorus: "Know that you are free of all desires when you have reached the point of asking God for nothing you couldn't ask for out loud." How foolish people are about this now! They whisper the filthiest prayers up to heaven, and the moment anyone is listening, they go silent. What they refuse to let other people hear, they tell God. So consider whether this might be the healthiest advice anyone could give you: Live among men as if God saw you; speak with God as if men were listening.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Your friend and I have had a talk. He's a man of real ability; his very first words showed what spirit and understanding he has, and how far he has already come. He gave me a foretaste of himself, and he won't fail to live up to it — because he wasn't speaking from a script. He was caught off guard, and when he tried to collect himself, he could barely shake off that flush of modesty — a good sign in a young man. The blush that spread over his face seemed to rise from somewhere deep. And I'm confident that habit of blushing will stay with him even after he has toughened his character, stripped off all his faults, and become wise. No amount of wisdom removes the body's natural weaknesses. What's planted in us at birth can be trained down, but never trained out. The steadiest public speaker often breaks into a sweat before a crowd, as if he'd worn himself out or overheated. Some men's knees shake when they stand up to speak. I know men whose teeth chatter, whose tongues stumble, whose lips tremble. Training and experience never fully shake this off; nature exerts her own power, and through a weakness like this she reminds even the strongest men that she exists. The blush, I'm sure, belongs to this family — it spreads suddenly across the faces of the most dignified men. It shows up more in the young, yes, because their blood is warmer and their faces more sensitive; but it touches veterans and old men too. Some men are at their most dangerous when they redden, as if their shame were draining out of them. Sulla was at his fiercest when the blood rushed to his cheeks. No one had a more sensitive face than Pompey; he blushed in front of every gathering, and especially at a public assembly. And I remember Fabianus reddening when he appeared as a witness before the senate — and the embarrassment suited him remarkably well. A habit like this doesn't come from weakness of mind but from the newness of a situation. An inexperienced man isn't necessarily rattled, but he's usually affected, because his body's natural bent slides him into it. Some men are simply full-blooded; others have quick, restless blood that rushes straight to the face.
As I said, wisdom can never cure this. If wisdom could erase all our flaws, she would be mistress of the universe. Whatever the terms of our birth and the mix of our constitution assign to us will stick to us, no matter how hard or how long the soul works at mastering itself. We can no more forbid these feelings than we can summon them. Actors in the theater, who imitate the emotions — who play fear and nervousness, who act out sorrow — imitate bashfulness by hanging their heads, lowering their voices, fixing their eyes on the ground. But a blush is the one thing they cannot produce. It can't be prevented, and it can't be performed. Wisdom offers no promise here and no help; the blush comes and goes on its own orders. It is a law unto itself.
But my letter is calling for its closing line. Hear this one and take it to heart, because it's useful and it's healthy: "Cherish some man of high character, and keep him always before your eyes — live as if he were watching you, and act in everything as if he saw it." That, my dear Lucilius, is Epicurus's advice, and it's exactly right: he has given us a guardian and an attendant. We would drop most of our sins if a witness stood beside us whenever we were about to go wrong. The soul should have someone it can revere — someone whose authority makes even its inner sanctuary more sacred. Happy is the man who improves other people not just when he's with them, but even when he's in their thoughts! And happy too is the man who can revere someone so deeply that merely remembering him calms and straightens him out. A man who can revere another like that will soon be worth revering himself. So choose yourself a Cato — or, if Cato seems too severe a model, choose a Laelius, a gentler spirit. Choose a master whose life, whose conversation, whose very face — the face that shows the soul — has won you over; keep him always in view, as your protector or your pattern. Because we truly do need someone to measure our characters against. You can never straighten what is crooked unless you use a ruler.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of how old I'm getting. I visited my country place recently and complained about the money being poured into that crumbling building. My caretaker insisted the flaws weren't his fault — "he was doing everything possible, but the house was old." And this is the house that went up under my own hands! What does the future hold for me, if stones my own age are already crumbling? Annoyed, I seized the next excuse to vent at him. "It's obvious," I said, "that these plane trees are being neglected. They have no leaves. Look how gnarled and shriveled the branches are, how rough and shabby the trunks! That wouldn't happen if someone loosened the soil around them and gave them water." He swore by my guardian spirit that "he was doing everything possible, he never let up — but those trees were old." Between you and me, I planted those trees myself. I saw their first leaves. Then I turned toward the door and asked, "Who is that broken-down wreck? Good thinking, posting him at the entrance — he's clearly on his way out. Where did you get him? What possessed you to steal another man's corpse for burial?" But the slave said, "Don't you know me, sir? I'm Felicio — you used to bring me little clay figures. My father was Philositus the steward. I'm your old pet." "The man is stark raving mad," I said. "Has my little pet become a little boy again? Well, it's entirely possible — his teeth are falling out."
I owe my country place this much: it showed me my old age wherever I looked. So let's embrace old age and love it. It's full of pleasure, if you know how to use it. Fruit is sweetest just before it spoils; youth is loveliest as it's ending; for the dedicated drinker it's the last drink that delights — the one that tops him off and crowns the drunkenness. Every pleasure saves its best for last. Life is most delightful on the downward slope — before the edge, but on the way there. And I honestly believe that even the years standing at the roof's very edge have pleasures of their own. Or else this itself replaces pleasure: not needing any. How comforting it is to have worn out your appetites and left them behind! "But," you say, "it's grim to have death staring you in the face." First, death should be stared at by young and old alike — we aren't called up in the order of the census list. Second, no one is so old that he can't decently hope for one more day. And one day, mind you, is a stage on life's journey.
Our whole span of life is built of parts — larger circles enclosing smaller ones. One circle wraps around and bounds all the rest: it runs from birth to our last day. Inside it, a second circle closes off the years of our youth. A third holds the whole of childhood in its circumference. Then there's the year, a class of its own, containing every division of time whose multiplication adds up to a life. The month is ringed by a narrower circle. The smallest circle of all is the day — but even a day has its beginning and its end, its sunrise and its sunset. That's why Heraclitus, whose murky style earned him his nickname, said: "One day is equal to every day." People take this different ways. Some say days are equal in hours, which is true enough — if a "day" means twenty-four hours, then all days are equal, since the night gains whatever the day loses. But others say that one day equals all days by resemblance: even the longest stretch of time contains nothing you won't find in a single day — light and darkness — and eternity just multiplies those alternations; it doesn't make them different, shorter here and longer there. So live each day as if it closed the series — as if it rounded off and completed your life.
Pacuvius, who held Syria so long he made it his own, used to stage a funeral sacrifice in his own honor — wine, the full funeral banquet — and then have himself carried from the dining room to his bedroom while eunuchs clapped and sang in Greek to music: "He has lived his life! He has lived his life!" Not a day passed without Pacuvius carrying himself out for burial. Let's do from a good motive what he did from a rotten one. Let's go to our sleep glad and cheerful, saying:
I have lived; the course that Fortune set me is finished.
And if God is pleased to add another day, let's welcome it with glad hearts. The happiest man, the most securely in possession of himself, is the one who can wait for tomorrow without anxiety. Whoever has said "I have lived" collects a bonus every morning he gets up.
But now I should close this letter. "What?" you say. "It's coming to me without any little present?" Don't worry — it carries something. More than something: a great deal. What could be nobler than the saying I'm handing it to deliver: "It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint." Of course not. On every side, short and simple roads to freedom lie open. Let's thank God that no one can be held prisoner in life. We are free to trample the constraints themselves. "Epicurus said that," you object. "What business do you have with someone else's property?" Whatever is true is my property. And I'm going to keep piling Epicurus on you, so that the people who swear by a name — who price the speaker instead of the words — may learn that the best ideas belong to everyone.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I know you have plenty of spirit. Even before you began equipping yourself with maxims — the wholesome kind, with real power over hardship — you took pride in your standing bout with Fortune; and that's truer now that you've actually grappled with her and tested your strength. Our powers can never give us solid confidence in ourselves until difficulties have crowded us from every side — until they've occasionally closed to grappling range. That is how the true spirit proves itself: the spirit that refuses to come under the jurisdiction of anything outside itself. That's its touchstone. No prizefighter can walk into the ring with high hopes if he's never been beaten black and blue. The only man who steps up with real confidence is the one who has seen his own blood, felt his teeth rattle under a fist, been tripped and taken the full weight of a charge — the one who has been knocked down in body but never in spirit, and who rises from every fall more defiant than before. So, to keep the metaphor going: Fortune has had you on the ground before, and you didn't surrender — you sprang back up and planted your feet more eagerly than ever. Courage grows when it's challenged. Still, if you'll let me, I'd like to offer a few extra defenses to fortify yourself with.
There are more things likely to frighten us, Lucilius, than there are to crush us. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. I'm not talking to you in the Stoic strain now, but in my milder style. Our Stoic custom is to dismiss everything that draws cries and groans as trivial, beneath notice — but let's you and I drop the grand language, true as it is, God knows. Here's my actual advice: don't be miserable ahead of the crisis. The dangers that made you go pale, as if they were bearing down on you, may never arrive. They certainly haven't arrived yet. Some things torment us more than they should; some torment us before they should; and some torment us when they shouldn't torment us at all. We exaggerate our suffering, or we invent it, or we borrow it early.
Set the first of those three aside for now — the matter is disputed and the case is still in court, so to speak. What I call trivial, you'll insist is deadly serious; and I'm well aware that some men laugh under the whip while others wince at a box on the ear. We'll consider later whether such evils get their power from their own strength or from our weakness.
Do me this favor: when people crowd around you working to convince you how unhappy you are, weigh not what you hear but what you actually feel. Consult your own feelings; put the question to yourself independently — you know your own affairs better than anyone. Ask: "Why exactly are these people condoling with me? Why are they nervous, why afraid of catching something from me, as if trouble were contagious? Is there any actual evil here, or just an evil reputation?" Ask yourself, voluntarily: "Am I tormenting myself without good reason? Am I gloomy over nothing? Am I converting something that isn't an evil into one?" You'll come back at me: "How am I supposed to know whether my sufferings are real or imaginary?" Here's the rule. We are tormented by the present, by the future, or by both. The present is an easy verdict: if your body is free and healthy and nothing external is injuring you, then today there is nothing wrong. "But something will happen!" First, examine whether your evidence of coming trouble is solid. Far more often, we're troubled by our own suspicions — we get played by that great mocker, rumour, which has been known to end wars and far more often ends individuals. Yes, my dear Lucilius: we sign on too quickly to whatever people say. We never put our fears to the test, never examine them. We go pale and retreat like soldiers abandoning camp over a dust-cloud kicked up by stampeding cattle, or panicked by some story nobody has verified. And somehow it's the empty report that rattles us most. Truth has fixed boundaries; whatever comes out of uncertainty is handed over to guesswork and to the runaway license of a frightened mind. That is why no fear is so ruinous, so impossible to rein in, as panic fear. Other fears are groundless; panic is witless.
So let's look at this carefully. It's likely some trouble will come to us; but it is not a present fact. How often the unexpected has happened! How often the expected has never shown up! And even if suffering is on its way, what do you gain by running out to meet it? You'll suffer soon enough when it arrives. In the meantime, count on better things. What does that buy you? Time. Plenty will happen in the interval to postpone your trials, or cancel them, or pass them along to someone else — even the ones nearby, even the ones on top of you. A fire has opened a road to escape. Disaster has set men down gently. The sword has been stopped at the very throat. Men have outlived their own executioners. Even bad fortune is fickle. Maybe it will come, maybe it won't; in the meantime, it is not. So count on better things.
Sometimes, with no sign anywhere pointing to trouble, the mind manufactures its own false shapes of evil. It wrings the worst possible meaning out of an ambiguous word. It decides some grudge against us is graver than it is — dwelling not on how angry the enemy actually is, but on how far he might go if he were. But life is not worth living, and there is no bottom to sorrow, if we give fear everything it asks for. Here, let prudence be your help: reject fear with a resolute spirit even when it's standing in plain sight. If you can't manage that, then fight one weakness with another — temper your fear with hope. Nothing we're afraid of is so certain as this: that what we dread comes to nothing, and what we hope for makes fools of us.
So weigh your hopes and your fears together, and whenever the whole question is in doubt, rule in your own favor: believe the version you'd prefer. And if fear carries the vote anyway, lean the other way regardless, and stop harassing your soul. Keep reminding yourself that most mortals work themselves into a froth even when no trouble is at hand and none is certainly coming. No one applies the brakes once he's been given a push; no one scales his alarm to the truth. No one says: "The man who started this story is a fool; the man who believes it is a fool; so is the man who made it up." We drift with every breeze. We panic at uncertainties as if they were certainties. We keep no sense of proportion — the slightest weight tips the scale and dumps us straight into panic.
But I'm embarrassed to be lecturing you sternly, or to be coaxing you along with remedies this mild. Let somebody else say, "Maybe the worst won't happen." You are the one who should say: "And what if it does? Let's see who wins. Maybe it will happen for my benefit — maybe a death like that will do my life credit." The hemlock is what made Socrates great. Wrench from Cato's hand that sword of his, liberty's defender, and you rob him of the greater part of his glory. But I've been exhorting you far too long, when what you need is a reminder, not a sermon. The path I'm leading you down is the same one your nature is already taking; you were born for the conduct I'm describing. All the more reason, then, to build up the good in you, and make it beautiful.
Now, to close this letter, I have only to press the usual seal into it — that is, to entrust it with one noble message for you: "The fool, among all his other faults, has this one too: he is always getting ready to live." Think about what that saying means, my excellent Lucilius, and you'll see how revolting it is — this fickleness of men who lay down fresh foundations for their lives every day, who start erecting new hopes at the very brink of the grave. Search your own memory for examples and you'll think of old men busy preparing, at that very hour, for a political career, or for travel, or for business. And what is more shameful than getting ready to live when you are already old? I wouldn't bother concealing the author's name, except that this saying is little known — it isn't one of Epicurus's greatest hits, the ones I've allowed myself to praise and appropriate.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I'll admit it: we are all born with an affection for our own body. I'll admit we've been made its guardians, and I'm not saying it should get no consideration at all. What I'm saying is that we must not be its slaves. A man who makes his body his master will have many masters — the man who is over-anxious on its behalf, who runs every decision through the body first. We should act not as if the body were the thing we live for, but as if it were the thing we can't live without. Loving it too much rattles us with fears, loads us with worries, and leaves us open to insults. Virtue comes cheap to the man who prices his body too high. Care for it, by all means, and carefully. But be ready, when reason, self-respect, or duty demands the sacrifice, to hand it over even to the flames.
Still, as far as we can, let's avoid discomfort as well as danger, and pull back onto safe ground by thinking constantly about how to keep the things we fear at a distance. Unless I'm mistaken, they come in three classes: we fear poverty, we fear sickness, and we fear what stronger men can do to us by violence. Of these, nothing shakes us like the threat that hangs over us from another man's power, because it arrives with shouting and uproar. The natural evils I mentioned — poverty and sickness — steal in silently; they bring no terror for the eye or the ear. The other kind of evil comes as a huge parade. It travels with an escort of swords and fire and chains, and a pack of beasts kept ready to be loosed on human flesh. Picture, under this heading, the prison, the cross, the rack, the hook, the stake driven through a man's body until it comes out at his throat. Think of limbs torn apart by chariots driven in opposite directions, of the shirt woven and smeared with pitch to burn on its wearer, and of every other device cruelty has invented besides. No wonder, then, that this fate is our greatest terror: it comes in so many shapes, and its equipment is terrifying. The torturer accomplishes more the more instruments he lays out — the display breaks men who could have withstood the pain itself. In the same way, of all the forces that grip and master our minds, the most effective are the ones with something to show. The other plagues are no less serious — I mean hunger, thirst, ulcers of the stomach, fever burning us up from within — but they are hidden. They have nothing to brandish and nothing to announce them. These others, like great armies, win by sheer display of force.
So let's make sure we give no offense. Sometimes it's the people we need to fear; sometimes, if the state is run so that most business goes through the Senate, its influential men; and sometimes individuals handed power by the people and used against the people. Keeping the friendship of all such men is heavy work; it's enough not to make enemies of them. So the wise man will never provoke the anger of those in power — no, he will steer clear of it, exactly as he'd steer clear of a storm at sea. When you traveled to Sicily, you crossed the Straits. The reckless pilot laughed off the blustering south wind — the wind that roughens the Sicilian sea and churns it into chop — and made not for the shore on the left but for the strand hard by the waters where Charybdis throws the sea into confusion. Your more careful pilot asks the locals about the tides and what the clouds mean, and holds his course far from that stretch infamous for its whirlpools. The wise man does the same. He avoids the powerful man who can hurt him — while making a point of not seeming to avoid him. A large part of staying safe is not visibly seeking safety; for what we avoid, we condemn.
Next, let's look around for ways to protect ourselves from the mob. First of all, want nothing they want; rivalry breeds fights. Second, own nothing that could be snatched from you at great profit to a schemer — carry as little loot on your person as possible. Nobody sheds human blood for its own sake, or almost nobody; more murderers calculate their profits than vent their hatred. If your hands are empty, the highwayman passes you by; even on an infested road, the poor travel in peace. Then remember the old rule and take special care to avoid three things: hatred, envy, and contempt. And only wisdom can show you how. The balance is hard to strike: in dodging envy we can slide into contempt, and while declining to trample others we can make them think we're safe to trample. The power to frighten has left many men frightened. So withdraw on every side — being scorned is as harmful as being admired.
That's why you must take refuge in philosophy. In the eyes of good people — and even of the moderately bad — this pursuit is a kind of sacred emblem. Courtroom eloquence, or anything else that plays to the crowd, makes enemies; philosophy is peaceful and minds her own business. She cannot be scorned; every profession honors her, down to the lowest. Evil will never grow so strong, and good character never be so conspired against, that the name of philosophy stops being holy.
Philosophy itself, though, should be practiced with calm and moderation. "Oh really?" you shoot back. "Do you call the philosophy of Marcus Cato moderate? Cato's voice tried to stop a civil war. Cato stepped between the swords of maddened warlords. When some attacked Pompey and others attacked Caesar, Cato took on both sides at once!" Fair enough — but you can question whether a wise man should have entered public life at all just then. "What are you doing, Marcus Cato? Freedom isn't the question anymore; freedom was wrecked long ago. The question is whether Caesar or Pompey owns the state — and what is that dispute to you? Neither side is yours. A tyrant is being chosen. What does it matter to you which man wins? The better man may win, but the winner is bound to be the worse man." I've cited Cato's final act; but even in earlier years the times didn't allow a wise man to step into that looting of the state. What could Cato do but raise his voice and speak words that went nowhere? One day he was "hustled" — mobbed, spat on, dragged from the forum, marked for exile; another day he was marched from the senate-house straight to prison.
Whether the wise man should give his attention to politics at all, we'll consider later. In the meantime, I ask you to consider those Stoics who, shut out of public life, withdrew into privacy — and there set about improving human existence and framing laws for the human race, without ever offending the men in power. The wise man won't upset the customs of the people, and he won't draw the crowd's eye by some novel way of living.
"So what? Is a man who follows this plan guaranteed to be safe?" I can no more guarantee that than I can guarantee health to a man who lives with moderation — though moderation does, in fact, produce health. Ships sometimes sink in the harbor; what do you think happens on the open sea? And how much more exposed would this man be, busy with many projects, when even his leisure isn't secure! Innocent people sometimes perish — who denies it? — but the guilty perish more often. A soldier's skill isn't disproved when the blow comes through his armor. And finally: the wise man weighs the reason for everything he does, not the results. The beginning is in our power; Fortune decides the outcome — but I do not grant her the right to pass sentence on me. "But she can inflict a measure of suffering and trouble." The highwayman who kills you isn't passing sentence.
Now you're stretching out your hand for the daily gift. Golden indeed is the gift I'll load you with today — and since we've mentioned gold, let me tell you how to get more use and joy out of it. "He who needs riches least, enjoys riches most." "Author's name, please!" you say. Just to show you how generous I am, I've made it my policy to praise the sayings of the other schools: this one belongs to Epicurus, or Metrodorus, or someone else from that workshop. But what difference does it make who said it? It was said for everyone. Whoever craves riches fears for them, and no one enjoys a blessing that keeps him anxious. He's always trying to add a little more; and while he puzzles over growing his wealth, he forgets how to use it. He collects on his accounts, wears out the pavement of the forum, flips through his ledger — he stops being the master and becomes the bookkeeper.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
The old Romans had a custom that survived into my own lifetime: they would open a letter with the words, "If you are well, it is well; I also am well." We would do better to write: "If you are studying philosophy, it is well." Because that is what being well actually means. Without philosophy the mind is sick — and the body, however powerful, is strong only the way a madman's is strong. So this is the health to cultivate first; the other kind comes second, and it will cost you little effort — if all you want is to be physically fit. For it is foolish, my dear Lucilius, and thoroughly unbecoming in an educated man, to spend your days building muscle, broadening your shoulders, and expanding your lungs. Even if the heavy feeding pays off and your bulk piles up, you will never match a first-class bull for strength or for weight. Meanwhile the load of food smothers the soul and slows it down. So ration the flesh as much as you can, and give the spirit free play. Devote yourself to that regimen and the inconveniences pile up. First come the workouts, where the effort drains your vital energy and leaves it unfit for the strain of serious study. Then heavy eating dulls the mind's edge. On top of that, you take orders from slaves of the worst stamp — men who divide their day between the oil-flask and the wine-jug, who count the day a success if they've worked up a good sweat and then poured in, to replace what they lost, huge drinks that sink in all the deeper on an empty stomach. Drinking and sweating — it's the life of a heartburn patient!
There are short, simple exercises that tire the body quickly and so save time — and time is something we ought to keep strict account of. Running; swinging weights; and jumping, high or long, or the kind I might politely call "the Priest's dance," or, less politely, "the laundryman's stomp." Pick any one of them and you'll find it plain and easy. But whatever you do, come back quickly from body to mind. The mind is the thing to exercise day and night: it feeds on moderate labor, and this workout is stopped by no cold weather, no hot weather, not even old age. Cultivate the good that improves with the years. I'm not ordering you to hang forever over your books and your writing tablets; the mind needs a break — but the kind of break that loosens it without unstringing it. Riding in a litter jostles the body and doesn't interrupt study: you can read, dictate, talk, or listen. Walking doesn't prevent any of these either.
Nor should you sneer at voice training — though I forbid you the drills, running your voice up and down through scales and set intonations. What next — lessons in walking? Let in the sort of coach that hunger has taught new tricks and you'll have someone regulating your stride, watching every mouthful you eat, and going exactly as far as your patience and your faith in him encourage his nerve to go. "So what, then?" you'll ask. "Is my voice supposed to start out shouting, straining my lungs to the limit?" No. The natural thing is for it to build by easy stages — even people quarreling start in ordinary conversational tones and work up to screaming at the top of their lungs. No speaker opens with "Citizens, help me!" So whenever your spirit prompts you, raise a racket, now louder, now softer, as your voice and your spirit suggest. Then, when you rein it in and call it back down, let it come down gently, not collapse; let it trail off in a middle register, not break off in the raw rustic way, straight down from its ranting. The point isn't for us to give the voice exercise; it's for the voice to give us exercise.
There — I've relieved you of no small nuisance. And I'll throw in one small bonus gift — Greek, this time. Here's the proverb, and it's an excellent one: "The fool's life is empty of gratitude and full of fears: its course lies wholly toward the future." "Who said that?" you ask. The same man as before. And what life do you suppose he means by the fool's life? That of Baba and Isio, the famous idiots? No — he means our own. Blind desire hurls us into ventures that will hurt us and will certainly never satisfy us; if anything could satisfy us, it would have done so long ago. We never stop to think how pleasant it is to ask for nothing, how noble it is to be content and not depend on Fortune. So keep reminding yourself, Lucilius, how many ambitions you have already attained. When you see how many people are ahead of you, count how many are behind. If you want to thank the gods and be grateful for your past life, contemplate how many men you have outrun. But what do the others have to do with it? You have outrun yourself.
Set a limit you wouldn't even want to pass, if you had the power. And then away with all these treacherous goods! They look better to the people hoping for them than to the people who have them. If there were anything solid in them, they would sooner or later fill you up; as it is, they only make the drinker thirstier. Away with the showpieces! As for what the future's uncertain lot has in store — why should I beg Fortune to give, rather than command myself not to crave? And why should I crave? Should I pile up winnings and forget how flimsy a man's lot is? What would I be toiling for? Look: today is the last day — and if not the last, then near it.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
It's clear to you by now, Lucilius, I'm sure, that no one can live a happy life — or even a bearable one — without the study of wisdom. You know, too, that the happy life arrives when our wisdom is brought to completion, but that life is at least endurable the moment wisdom is begun. Clear as this is, though, it has to be strengthened and driven deeper by daily reflection. Keeping the resolutions you've already made matters more than making noble new ones. You must persevere, adding strength by continuous study, until a good inclination becomes a good settled purpose. So you can spare me the long speeches and protestations: I know you've made great progress. I understand the feelings behind your words; they aren't faked or dressed up. Still, I'll tell you frankly what I think: I have hopes for you, but not yet full confidence. And I want you to take the same attitude toward yourself — there's no reason to trust yourself too quickly and easily. Examine yourself; scrutinize yourself; watch yourself from different angles. And check, before anything else, whether the progress you've made is in philosophy or merely in life. Philosophy is not a trick for the crowd; it isn't built for show. It's a matter of facts, not words. It isn't taken up so the day will pass amusingly, or so leisure won't bore us. It molds and builds the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what to do and what to leave undone; it sits at the helm and holds the course while we waver in the swells. Without it, no one can live fearless, no one can live at peace. Every hour, countless things happen that call for advice — and philosophy is where that advice must be sought.
Someone may say: "What good is philosophy to me if Fate exists? What good, if God rules the universe? What good, if Chance governs everything? What's already determined can't be changed, and what's undetermined can't be planned for: either God has forestalled my plans and decided what I'm to do, or Fortune leaves my plans no room to play." Whether the truth, Lucilius, lies in one of these views or in all of them, we must be philosophers. Whether Fate binds us with an unbreakable law, or God as arbiter of the universe has arranged everything, or Chance kicks human affairs around without method, philosophy must be our defense. She will encourage us to obey God cheerfully and Fortune defiantly; she will teach us to follow God and to endure Chance. But this isn't the moment to be pulled into the debate over what's in our own control — whether foreknowledge rules everything, or a chain of fated events drags us along in its grip, or the sudden and unexpected lord it over us like tyrants. I come back to my warning and my plea: don't let the impulse of your spirit weaken and grow cold. Hold onto it, and plant it firm, so that what is now an impulse becomes a habit of the mind.
If I know you at all, you've been scanning this letter from the first line to find out what little contribution it carries. Sift it and you'll find it. And don't marvel at any genius of mine — so far I'm lavish only with other men's property. Though why do I say "other men's"? Whatever anyone has said well is mine. This, too, is a saying of Epicurus: "If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich." Nature's wants are slight; opinion's demands are bottomless. Suppose the property of many millionaires were heaped in your lap. Suppose fortune carried you far beyond any private income — decked you with gold, dressed you in purple, and brought you to such a pitch of luxury and wealth that you could bury the earth under your marble floors: that you didn't merely own riches, but walked on them. Add statues, paintings, and whatever any art has devised to feed luxury. All these things will teach you is to crave still bigger ones.
Natural desires have a limit; desires born of false opinion have no stopping point — the false has no boundary. When you travel a road, there's an end somewhere; wander off it, and you can stray forever. So call your steps back from empty things, and when you want to know whether what you're chasing rests on natural desire or on a blind one, test whether it can stop anywhere. If you've gone far and there is always a farther goal in view, you can be sure the thing is contrary to nature.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Toss all of that aside if you're wise — no, toss it aside so that you can be wise. Race toward a sound mind at top speed and with everything you've got, and if any tie holds you back, loosen it or cut it. "But," you say, "my estate is holding me up. I want to arrange things so that it can support me when I've retired from work — so that poverty won't be a burden to me, and I won't be a burden to anyone else." When you talk like that, you don't seem to know the strength and power of the good you're considering. You do grasp the big thing — the great benefit philosophy confers — but you don't yet see its workings up close; you don't yet know how much help it gives us in everything, everywhere; how (to borrow Cicero's phrase) it doesn't just come to our rescue in the greatest matters but reaches down into the smallest. Take my advice: call wisdom in for a consultation. She'll advise you not to sit forever over your ledger. Obviously what you're after, with all this postponing of your studies, is to make sure you'll never have to fear poverty. But what if poverty is something to desire? Riches have blocked many a man's road to wisdom; poverty travels light and carefree. When the trumpet sounds, the poor man knows the attack isn't aimed at him. When someone shouts "Fire!" he looks for the way out, not for what he can carry. If he has to take a sea voyage, the harbor doesn't roar and the docks don't churn with one man's entourage. No mob of slaves surrounds him — slaves with mouths that force their master to covet the harvests of lands across the sea. It's easy to fill a few stomachs when they're well trained and want nothing except to be filled. Hunger is cheap; a picky appetite is expensive. Poverty is content once its pressing needs are met.
Why, then, should you refuse Philosophy as a companion? Even the rich man imitates her ways when he's in his right mind. If you want leisure for your mind, either be poor or live like a poor man. Study does no good unless you take the trouble to live simply — and living simply is voluntary poverty. So away with all the excuses: "I don't have enough yet; once I reach the amount I've set, then I'll give myself over to philosophy completely." And yet this very thing you keep postponing and placing behind everything else is what should come first — you should begin with it. "I just want enough to live on," you answer. Fine — but learn while you're earning it. If anything forbids you to live nobly, nothing forbids you to die nobly. There is no reason poverty should call us away from philosophy — no, not even outright want. When we're hurrying after wisdom, we must be willing to endure even hunger. Men have endured hunger in besieged towns, and what did all that endurance buy them except not falling into the conqueror's power? How much greater is what's promised here: lasting freedom, and the assurance that we need fear neither God nor man. Even starving, we must reach that goal. Armies have put up with every kind of want, have lived on roots, have fought off hunger with food too revolting to name — and all of it to win a kingdom, and (more astonishing still) a kingdom that would belong to somebody else. Will any man hesitate to endure poverty, if that's what it takes to free his mind from madness?
So there's no need to pile up riches first. You can make the journey to philosophy without travel money. Is that really the plan? After you've acquired everything else, then you'll want wisdom too — philosophy as life's last requirement, a sort of supplement? No. Be a philosopher now, whether you have anything or not — because if you have anything, how do you know you don't have too much already? — and if you have nothing, then seek understanding first, before you seek anything else. "But I'll lack the necessities of life," you say. In the first place, you can't lack them, because nature demands very little, and the wise man fits his needs to nature. But if the absolute pinch of need arrives, he'll simply take his leave of life and stop being a trouble to himself. And if his means are thin and scanty, he'll make the best of them, without fretting or worrying about anything beyond the bare essentials. He'll give his belly and his shoulders their due, and with a free and happy spirit he'll laugh at the scrambling of rich men and the panic of those chasing wealth, and say: "Why postpone your real life to some far-off date? Are you waiting for interest to come due, for a return on your merchandise, for a place in some rich old man's will — when you can be rich here and now? Wisdom pays out wealth in ready cash, and she pays it to exactly those people she has taught to find wealth unnecessary." But all that applies to other men; you stand nearer the rich class. Move yourself to a different age, and you have too much. And in every age, what is enough remains the same.
I might have closed the letter at this point, if I hadn't gotten you into bad habits. No one greets Parthian royalty without bringing a gift, and I can't say goodbye to you without paying up. So be it — I'll borrow from Epicurus: "For many men, the getting of riches has not been an end of troubles but a change of troubles." I'm not surprised. The fault was never in the wealth; it's in the mind itself. The same thing that made poverty heavy for us makes riches heavy too. It matters little whether you lay a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one — wherever you move him, he takes his disease along. In just the same way, it matters little whether a diseased mind is set down in riches or in poverty. The sickness follows the man.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
It's December, and the whole city is in a sweat over it. Merrymaking has been given official license. Everything echoes with enormous preparations — as if the Saturnalia were any different from an ordinary business day! The difference has shrunk so close to nothing that I think the man had it right who said: "Once December was a month; now it's a year."
If you were here with me, I'd love to talk it over and hear what you think we should do — keep our daily routine unchanged, or, so as not to seem out of step with everyone around us, dine more festively and shed the toga. As things stand, we Romans now change our dress for pleasure and holiday-making, though in the old days that happened only when the state was in trouble and the times were dark. If I know you, you'd have played the umpire and ruled that we should be neither exactly like the holiday crowd in their liberty-caps nor entirely unlike them — unless, that is, this is the very season when the soul should be given its orders: told to stand alone in abstaining from pleasure at the precise moment the whole mob has thrown itself into pleasure. Because that is the surest proof a man can get of his own steadiness — neither seeking out the things that seduce him and lure him toward indulgence, nor being dragged into them. It takes real courage to stay dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting; but it takes greater self-control not to withdraw at all — to do what the crowd does, only differently: neither making yourself conspicuous nor melting into the crowd. You can keep a holiday without going on a binge.
But I'm so determined to test the steadiness of your mind that I'm going to give you a lesson drawn from the teaching of great men: set aside a certain number of days during which you will be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough clothes, saying to yourself the whole time: "Is this the condition that I feared?" It's exactly when the soul is free of care that it should be toughening itself in advance for the times of stress; it's while Fortune is being kind that it should be fortifying itself against her violence. In peacetime the soldier runs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wears himself out with unnecessary labor so that he'll be equal to the necessary kind. If you don't want a man to flinch in the crisis, train him before it comes. That's the path followed by those men who, in their rehearsal of poverty, have come nearly to the point of actual want every month — so that they would never recoil from what they had practiced so often.
Don't imagine I mean "Timon's dinners," or "paupers' huts," or any of the other games bored millionaires play to kill the tedium of their lives. Let the cot be a real cot, the cloak a genuinely coarse one, the bread hard and grimy. Endure it for three or four days at a stretch, sometimes longer, so that it's a real test of yourself and not a hobby. Then, I promise you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when you're full on a penny's worth of food — and you'll understand that a man's peace of mind does not depend on Fortune. Even when she's angry, she grants enough for our needs.
Not that you should think you're doing anything great. You'll only be doing what thousands of slaves and thousands of poor men do every day of their lives. But you can credit yourself with this much: you'll be doing it freely, and it will be as easy for you to endure it forever as to try it now and then. Let's practice our strokes on the dummy. Let's get on intimate terms with poverty, so that Fortune can never catch us off guard. We'll be rich with that much less worry once we've learned how far poverty is from being a burden.
Even Epicurus, the teacher of pleasure, kept certain set days on which he fed his hunger grudgingly — he wanted to see whether that left him short of full and complete happiness, and if so, by how much, and whether the difference was worth buying at the price of great effort. At least, that's what he says in the famous letter to Polyaenus, written in the year Charinus held office. He actually brags that he fed himself for less than a penny, while Metrodorus, who hadn't come as far yet, needed a whole one. Do you think a man can be full on fare like that? Yes — and he can have pleasure too. Not that shifty, fleeting pleasure that needs a fresh jolt every so often, but a pleasure steady and sure. Water, barley-meal, and a crust of barley bread are not a cheerful diet, but it is the highest kind of pleasure to be able to take pleasure even in that — to have pared your needs down to the little that no unkindness of Fortune can snatch away. Prison rations are more generous than this; men held for execution aren't fed so meanly by the man who is going to execute them. What a great soul it takes, then, to descend of your own free will to a diet that even men under a death sentence have no reason to fear! That is forestalling Fortune's spear-thrusts.
So begin, my dear Lucilius, to follow these men's custom: set apart certain days on which you withdraw from your business and make yourself at home with the scantiest fare. Open an account with poverty.
Dare, my friend, to scorn the sight of wealth; shape yourself to kinship with your God.
For no one is in kinship with God except the man who has scorned wealth. I'm not forbidding you to own it, of course — I want to bring you to the point where you own it fearlessly. And there's only one way to get there: convince yourself that you can live happily without it as well as with it, and always look at riches as if they were about to fly away.
But now it's time to start folding up this letter. "Settle your debts first," you cry. Very well — here's a draft on Epicurus; he'll pay out the sum: "Ungoverned anger begets madness." You can't help knowing how true that is, since you've had not only slaves but enemies. This passion flares up against every kind of person; it springs from love as much as from hate, and it shows itself in the middle of games and jokes no less than in serious business. What matters isn't how big the provocation is, but what kind of mind it lands in. It's the same with fire: what counts isn't the size of the flame but what it falls on. Solid timber has withstood a raging blaze, while dry, combustible stuff nurses the smallest spark into a conflagration. So it is with anger, my dear Lucilius: the outcome of a mighty anger is madness. Avoid anger, then, not merely to escape excess but to keep a healthy mind.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I leap for joy whenever a letter arrives from you. Your letters fill me with hope — they're no longer mere promises about you, but guarantees. And I beg and pray you: keep on this course. What better thing could I ask of a friend than something asked for his own sake? If you can, pull yourself out of all the business you describe; if you can't, tear yourself out. We have squandered enough of our time already — let's begin, in old age, to pack our bags. Surely no one can begrudge us that. We have spent our lives on the high seas; let us die in harbor. Not that I'd have you make a name for yourself by your retirement; retirement is nothing to parade, and nothing to hide either. Nothing to hide, I say — I won't push you so far toward condemning all mankind as mad that I'd have you dig yourself a hole and vanish into oblivion. Just manage it so that your retirement is never conspicuous, though it should be plain to see. Second point: men whose choices are still open from the start can deliberate about whether they'd like to pass their lives in obscurity; you no longer have a free choice. Your ability and energy have thrust you into the world's work — that, and the charm of your writing, and your friendships with famous and distinguished men. Renown has already taken you by storm. You could sink into the deepest obscurity and bury yourself completely, and your earlier deeds would still point you out. You cannot keep lurking in the dark; wherever you run, much of the old gleam will follow you.
Peace, though, you can claim without anyone resenting you, without any sense of loss, without a single pang. What will you be leaving behind that you can imagine being sorry to leave? Your clients? None of those men courts you for yourself; they court something from you. Once men hunted friends; now they hunt loot. Let a lonely old man change his will, and by morning his caller has moved to another doorstep. Great things don't come cheap — so do the arithmetic: is it better to walk away from your own true self, or merely from some of your property? If only you'd had the luck to grow old in the modest circumstances you were born to, and fortune had never carried you so high! Your quick rise to prosperity swept you far out of sight of wholesome living — the province, the procuratorship, and everything such things promise. Next you'll take on greater duties, and after those, greater still. And where does it end? Why wait until there's nothing left for you to crave? That moment will never come. We Stoics say there's a chain of causes out of which fate is woven; believe me, there's a chain of desires too — each one begins where the last one ends. You have been dropped into a life that will never, on its own, put an end to your misery and your servitude. Pull your chafed neck out of the yoke; better that it be cut through once than galled forever. If you retreat into private life, everything will be on a smaller scale, but you will be satisfied to the full; as it is, plenty is heaped on you from every side, and none of it satisfies. Which would you rather be — poor and full, or rich and hungry? Prosperity is greedy itself, and it lies exposed to the greed of others. And as long as nothing is enough for you, you will never be enough for anyone else.
"But how can I take my leave?" you ask. Any way you can. Think of all the risks you've run for money, all the labor you've put in for a title — you have to dare something for leisure, too. Otherwise you'll grow old in the churn of procuratorships abroad and civil duties at home, in turmoil and ever-fresh floods of responsibility, which no man has ever escaped by keeping his head down or living quietly. What does your own wish for a secluded life have to do with it? Your position in the world wishes the opposite! And what if you let that position grow even greater now? Everything added to your success will be added to your fears. Here I want to quote you Maecenas, who told the truth from the very summit: "There's thunder even on the loftiest peaks." If you ask what book it's from: the one called Prometheus. He meant simply that the high peaks have their tops wrapped in thunderstorms. But is any power worth a price so high that you — a man like you — would ever adopt a style as debauched as his to get it? Maecenas was a gifted man, and he would have left a great model for Roman oratory to follow if success hadn't gone soft on him — hadn't, in fact, gutted the man in him. That end is waiting for you too, unless you shorten sail right now and, as Maecenas wouldn't do until it was too late, hug the shore.
That saying of Maecenas's might have squared my account with you — but knowing you, you'll file an injunction against me and refuse to accept payment of my debt in such crude, debased coin. However that stands, I'll draw on the account of Epicurus. He says: "Before you consider what you're going to eat and drink, consider whom you're going to eat and drink with — for a feast of meat without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf." You won't have that privilege unless you withdraw from the world; until then, your dinner guests will be whoever your secretary sorts out of the crowd of morning callers. But it's a mistake to pick out a friend in the reception hall, or to test him at the dinner table: a friend at your table is better made than found there. The worst misfortune of a busy man buried in his possessions is this — he believes men are his friends when he is no friend to them, and he assumes his favors are winning people over, when in fact, with certain men, the more they owe, the more they hate. A small loan makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him your enemy. "What," you say, "don't kindnesses create friendships?" They do — if you've had the freedom to choose who receives them, and if they're placed with judgment instead of scattered broadcast.
So while you're beginning to call your mind your own, apply in the meantime this maxim of the wise: what matters is not what a man receives, but who it is that receives it.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
If you're healthy — and if you think yourself worthy of finally becoming your own master — I'm glad. The credit will be mine, if I can pull you out of the flood you've been thrashing in with no hope of reaching shore. But here is what I ask of you, my dear Lucilius — what I beg of you: let wisdom sink all the way into your soul, and measure your progress not by what you say or write, but by the steadiness of your heart and the shrinking of your desires. Prove your words by your deeds.
The speechmakers chasing the approval of a packed hall have one aim; the men who charm the ears of the young and the idle with clever, fluent argument have another. Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak. It demands that every man live by his own standard — that his life not clash with his words, and that his inner life be all one color, in harmony with everything he does. This is the highest duty of wisdom, and its highest proof: that deed and word agree, that a man be equal to himself in every situation — always the one same self.
"But who can hold that standard?" you ask. Very few, granted; but some can. I won't pretend it's easy, and I don't say the philosopher can always keep the same pace — only that he can always keep the same road. So observe yourself. See whether your clothes and your house disagree with each other; whether you're lavish with yourself and stingy with your household; whether you eat frugal dinners and build luxurious houses. Settle, once and for all, on a single rule to live by, and square your whole life to it. Some people pinch pennies at home and strut in public; that kind of discord is a flaw — the mark of a wobbling mind that can't yet hold its balance. And I can tell you where the wobble comes from, this mismatch between actions and intentions: no one decides what he actually wants, and even if he does decide, he doesn't stay decided — he jumps the track. And he doesn't just change; he circles back and slides into the very conduct he'd renounced and sworn off. So let me skip the ancient definitions of wisdom and sum up the whole business of human life in one: What is wisdom? Always desiring the same things, and always refusing the same things. You can even skip the fine print — that what you desire should be right — because nothing but the right thing can satisfy a person the same way every day.
That's why people don't know what they want except in the moment of wanting it. No one ever decides, once and for all, what to desire and what to refuse. Judgment shifts from day to day, flips to its opposite, and turns many a man's life into a kind of game. So press on as you've begun. Perhaps you'll be led all the way to perfection — or at least to a point that you alone will recognize as still short of it.
"But what becomes of my crowded household," you say, "without a household income?" Once you stop feeding that crowd, it will feed itself. Or else poverty will teach you, as a favor, what your own favors never could. Poverty keeps your true and tested friends for you; it clears out everyone who came not for you but for what you have. Shouldn't you love poverty for this one service alone — that it shows you who really loves you? When will the day come when no one lies to you by way of compliment? So point your thoughts, your efforts, your desires at this: being content with yourself and with the goods that grow out of yourself. Every other prayer, leave in God's keeping. What happiness could be nearer at hand? Bring yourself down to a modest level, one you cannot be thrown down from — and to help you do it more willingly, this letter's little wage will speak to exactly that subject. I'll pay it right now.
Glare at me if you like, but Epicurus will once again be glad to settle my debt: "Believe me, your words will carry more weight if you sleep on a cot and wear rags. Then you won't just be saying them; you'll be proving them." I certainly listen in a different spirit to our friend Demetrius, now that I've seen him sleeping without so much as a cloak over him — without even a mat beneath him. He is not just a teacher of the truth; he is a witness to it. "But can't a man despise wealth while it's sitting right in his pocket?" Of course he can. He too is a great soul, the man who sees riches heaped around him, wonders long and deeply that they've come to him, and smiles — and hears rather than feels that they're his. It's no small thing not to be spoiled by living with wealth; the truly great man is the one who is poor in the midst of riches. "Yes, but I don't know," you say, "how that man will endure poverty if he falls into it suddenly." Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether your poor man will despise riches if he suddenly falls into those. So in both cases it's the mind that must be appraised: we have to ask whether your man is pleased with his poverty, and whether my man is displeased with his riches. Otherwise the cot and the rags prove very little about his good intentions — unless it's clear he endures them by preference, not necessity.
The mark of a noble spirit, though, is not to fling yourself into such things because they're better, but to rehearse them because they're easy to endure. And they are easy, Lucilius; come to them after long rehearsal, and they're even pleasant, because they carry a sense of freedom from worry — and without that, nothing is pleasant. So I hold it essential to do what I told you in an earlier letter great men have often done: set aside a few days to prepare for real poverty by practicing pretend poverty. We need this all the more because we've soaked so long in luxury that every duty looks hard and heavy. Better to shake the soul out of its sleep, prod it, and remind it how little nature has actually prescribed for us. No man is born rich. Every one of us, on first seeing daylight, is ordered to be content with milk and a scrap of cloth. That is how we start out — and then whole kingdoms are too small for us.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Do you really conclude that your trouble is with those men you wrote to me about? Your greatest trouble is with yourself: you are your own stumbling block. You don't know what you want. You're better at approving the right course than at following it. You see where true happiness lies, but you don't have the courage to go get it. Since you can't seem to see what's holding you back, let me tell you.
You think the life you're supposed to leave behind is an important one; and just as you've resolved on that calm state you hope to pass into, the glitter of your present life holds you back — as if leaving it meant stepping down into filth and darkness. That's a mistake, Lucilius. Going from your life into the other one is a promotion. The difference between the two is the difference between shine and light. Light has a definite source of its own inside it; shine is borrowed. Shine gleams by someone else's illumination — and anyone who steps between the source and the object throws the object into dense shadow. Light glows from within.
It's your own studies that will make you shine — that will make you eminent. Let me give you Epicurus's example. He was writing to Idomeneus, trying to call him back from a showy career to a sure and steadfast kind of fame. Idomeneus at the time was a minister of state, a man wielding real authority with important affairs in hand. "If it's fame that attracts you," Epicurus told him, "my letters will make you more renowned than all the things you cherish — all the things that make you cherished." Was he wrong? Who would ever have heard of Idomeneus if the philosopher hadn't engraved his name into those letters? All the grandees and satraps — even the king Idomeneus petitioned for his title — are sunk in deep oblivion. Cicero's letters are what keep the name of Atticus from perishing. It would have done Atticus no good to have Agrippa for a son-in-law, Tiberius for his granddaughter's husband, Drusus Caesar for a great-grandson. Among names that mighty, his would never be spoken at all if Cicero hadn't bound Atticus to himself. The deep flood of time will roll over us. A few great men will lift their heads above it, and though they too must sink at last into the same silence, they will battle oblivion and hold their ground a long while.
What Epicurus could promise his friend, I promise you, Lucilius. I will find favor with later generations; I can take names with me that will endure as long as my own. Our poet Vergil promised two heroes an everlasting name, and he is keeping his promise:
Fortunate pair! If my songs have any power, no day will ever erase you from the memory of time — not while Aeneas' line still keeps the Capitol, that rock immovable, and a Roman father holds the empire.
Whenever men are pushed forward by fortune — whenever they've become part and parcel of someone else's influence — they enjoy abundant favor and a crowded doorstep exactly as long as they keep their position. The moment they leave it, they slip out of everyone's memory. But the respect paid to native genius keeps growing; and the honor doesn't stop with the man himself — it attaches to whatever his memory touches, and gets passed along from hand to hand.
Now, Idomeneus shouldn't get into my letter free of charge, so he can pay the debt from his own account. It was to him that Epicurus addressed the famous saying urging him to make Pythocles rich — but not rich in the vulgar, double-edged way. "If you wish to make Pythocles rich," he said, "do not add to his money; subtract from his desires." The idea is too clear to need explanation and too well put to need reinforcement. I'll add only one warning: don't assume it applies to riches alone. Apply it anywhere you like; it holds the same value. "If you wish to make Pythocles honorable, do not add to his honors; subtract from his desires." "If you wish Pythocles to have pleasure that lasts, do not add to his pleasures; subtract from his desires." "If you wish to make Pythocles an old man whose life is filled to the full, do not add to his years; subtract from his desires." There's no reason to treat these words as Epicurus's private property; they are public property. I think we should do in philosophy what they do in the Senate: when someone makes a motion I partly approve of, I ask him to divide the motion, and I vote for the part I like. So I'm all the more glad to repeat Epicurus's distinguished words — because I want to prove something to the people who run to him with bad motives, thinking they'll find in him a screen for their own vices: whatever school you follow, you must live honorably.
Go to his Garden and read the motto carved there: "Stranger, here you will do well to linger; here our highest good is pleasure." The caretaker of that place, a kindly host, will be ready for you. He'll welcome you with barley meal and pour you water in abundance, and ask: "Haven't you been well entertained?" "This garden," he says, "does not whet your appetite; it quenches it. It doesn't make you thirstier with every drink; it slakes thirst with a natural cure — a cure that charges no fee. This is the 'pleasure' I have grown old in."
With you, though, I'm speaking of the desires that refuse all soothing — the ones that must be bribed to stop. Because as for the exceptional desires — the kind that can be postponed, disciplined, checked — I have just one thought to share: pleasure of that sort is in line with our nature, but not with our needs. You owe it nothing; whatever you spend on it is a free gift. The belly won't listen to advice: it demands, it pesters. Yet it isn't an expensive creditor. You can send it away at small cost — as long as you give it what you owe, not everything you're able to give.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
By now you understand that you must pull yourself out of these showy and corrupting pursuits; what you still want to know is how. Some things can only be pointed out by someone on the spot. A doctor can't prescribe by letter the right hour for eating or bathing; he has to feel the pulse. There's an old saying about gladiators: they plan the fight in the ring. Something in the opponent's glance, some movement of his hand, even a slight lean of his body — the watchful eye reads the warning there. What is usually done, or ought to be done — that we can put into general rules and write down; advice like that can be given not only to absent friends but to future generations. But the second question — when to make your move, and how — no one can settle at long range. You must take counsel with the situation itself, on the spot. And you must be not only present in body but alert in mind if you're going to catch the opportunity as it flies. So watch for it; and when you see it, seize it, and throw everything — all your energy, all your strength — into this one task: getting yourself free of those business duties.
Now listen carefully to the opinion I'm about to give you. It is this: withdraw from that kind of existence, or withdraw from existence altogether. But I also say: take the gentle path. Loosen the knot you've tied so badly rather than cut it — with this proviso, that if there turns out to be no other way to loosen it, you cut it after all. No man is such a coward that he'd rather hang in suspense forever than fall once and be done with it. In the meantime — and this comes first — don't tie yourself up any further. Be content with the business you've already lowered yourself into — or, as you'd rather have people think, tumbled into. Don't keep struggling on toward something bigger; if you do, you'll lose your whole excuse, and everyone will see it was no tumble. The usual defense men offer is a lie: "I was compelled to do it. Suppose it was against my will — I had to." No one is compelled to chase prosperity at a dead run. Even if you don't fight the current, it counts for something just to call a halt — to stand still instead of pressing eagerly after Fortune's favors.
And will you be put out with me if I don't just come to advise you myself, but call in others — wiser heads than mine, the men I lay every problem before when I'm pondering one? Read Epicurus's letter on this very question; it's addressed to Idomeneus. He begs him to escape as fast as he can, and beat his retreat before some stronger influence steps in and takes away his freedom to withdraw. But he adds: attempt nothing except at the moment when it can be attempted suitably and in season. Then, when the long-sought occasion comes — up and out. He forbids so much as a doze in anyone who is plotting escape; and he holds out hope of a safe release from even the hardest positions, provided we're neither too hasty before the time nor too sluggish when the time arrives.
Now, I suppose, you want the Stoic motto too. Nobody has any business slandering our school to you for recklessness; the truth is, its caution is greater than its courage. Perhaps you're expecting it to say something like this: "It is shameful to flinch under a burden. Wrestle with the duties you have once taken on. No man is brave and earnest if he runs from danger, if his spirit doesn't grow with the very difficulty of his task." Words like those will indeed be said to you — if your perseverance has an object that's worth the price, if you won't have to do or endure anything unworthy of a good man. Besides, a good man doesn't waste himself on shabby, discreditable work, or stay busy merely for the sake of being busy. Nor will he do what you imagine — get so tangled in ambitious schemes that he has to endure their ebb and flow forever. No: when he sees the dangers, the uncertainties, the hazards he used to be tossed around in, he will withdraw — not turning his back to the enemy, but falling back step by step to a safe position. And business, my dear Lucilius, is easy to escape, if only you will despise its rewards. What holds us back, what keeps us from escaping, is thinking like this: "What? Walk away from such great prospects? Leave right at harvest time? No slaves at my side? No retinue for my litter? No crowd in my reception hall?"
So men leave these advantages reluctantly; they love the reward of their hardships and curse the hardships themselves. They complain about their ambitions the way they complain about their mistresses — which is to say, get at their real feelings, and you'll find not hatred but a lovers' quarrel. Examine the minds of those who cry down what they craved, who talk about escaping the things they can't do without, and you'll see it: they are lingering by their own free will in a life they declare hard and wretched to endure. It is so, my dear Lucilius — slavery holds a few men fast, but many more hold fast to their slavery.
But if you intend to be rid of that slavery, if freedom is genuinely pleasing in your eyes, and if you're asking for advice for this one purpose — to accomplish it without perpetual torment — then how could the whole company of Stoics fail to approve? Zeno, Chrysippus, and all their kind will give you counsel that's temperate, honorable, and fitted to your case. But if you keep twisting around to look behind you — how much can I carry away with me? how much money will I need to outfit my life of leisure? — you'll never find the way out. No man can swim ashore and take his baggage with him. Rise to the higher life, and may the gods favor you — but not the way they favor certain men when, with kind and smiling faces, they hand out magnificent evils, excused by the single fact that these things which burn and torture were granted in answer to prayer.
I was already putting the seal on this letter, but it has to be broken again, so it can come to you with its customary contribution and carry some noble saying along with it. And here is one that comes to mind — I honestly can't tell you whether its truth or its fine expression is the greater. "Said by whom?" you ask. By Epicurus — I am still appropriating other men's property. "Everyone goes out of life just as if he had only just entered it." Take anyone off guard — young, old, middle-aged — and you'll find them all equally afraid of death and equally ignorant of life. No one has anything finished, because we keep pushing everything we undertake into the future. Nothing in that saying pleases me more than the way it taunts old men with being infants. "No one," he says, "leaves the world any differently than he came into it." False! We are worse when we die than when we were born. And the fault is ours, not Nature's. Nature has a complaint to file against us: "What is this? I brought you into the world without desires, without fears, free of superstition, treachery, and the rest of the curses. Go out the way you came in!"
A man has caught the message of wisdom if he can die as free from care as he was at birth. But as it is, we all tremble when the dreaded moment approaches: courage fails, cheeks go white, useless tears fall. And what is more shameful than fretting at the very threshold of peace? The reason is that we arrive stripped of all our goods: we have jettisoned life's whole cargo and we're in distress, because none of it was stowed in the hold — all of it was heaved overboard along the way and has drifted off. Men care nothing about living nobly, only about living long — although living nobly is within everyone's reach, and living long is within no one's power.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Do you expect me to write you about how gently winter treated us — a short season, and a mild one — or what a nasty spring we're having, with cold weather out of season, and all the other small talk people fall back on when they can't think of anything to say? No. I'll write you something that might actually help us both. And what could that be, if not a push toward soundness of mind? You ask what the foundation of a sound mind is? This: do not find your joy in worthless things. Foundation, did I say? It's the summit. You have reached the top when you know what it is that makes you glad, and when you have not handed your happiness over to things outside yourself. A man who is tugged forward by hope of anything — even something within reach, even something easy to get, even if his hopes have never once cheated him — is anxious and unsure of himself. Above all, my dear Lucilius, make this your business: learn how to feel joy.
Do you think I'm robbing you of pleasures when I clear away Fortune's gifts, when I advise you to steer wide of hope, the sweetest thing that warms our hearts? Just the opposite: I don't want you ever to be without gladness. I want it born in your own house — and it is born there, if only it is born inside you. Every other kind of cheer fails to fill the heart; it only smooths the forehead, and it never lasts. Unless, of course, you think a man has joy just because he's laughing. The soul itself must be happy and confident, lifted above everything that can happen to it.
Real joy, believe me, is a serious business. Do you imagine anyone can look death in the face with a careless expression — "bright and breezy," as our young dandies like to put it? Or throw the door open to poverty that way, or keep the reins on his pleasures, or rehearse the endurance of pain? The man who turns these things over in his heart is full of joy — but not a giggling joy. That is exactly the joy I want you to own, because once you have found its source, it will never run dry. Shallow mines give up their yield right at the surface; the truly rich ones hide their veins deep, and they pay out more and more to the miner who keeps digging. The trinkets that delight the crowd give only a thin pleasure, a coat of shine — and any joy that is merely plated has nothing underneath. The joy I'm talking about, the joy I'm trying to lead you to, is solid all the way through, and it opens up wider the deeper you go into it. So do the one thing, dearest Lucilius, that can make you truly happy: throw away and trample underfoot everything that merely glitters, everything dangled in front of you by someone else or obtainable from someone else. Look toward the true good, and take joy only in what comes from your own store. And what do I mean by "your own store"? I mean your very self — the best part of you. Even the frail body, though we can do nothing without it, should be treated as necessary rather than important. It drags us into empty pleasures — brief, soon regretted, and, unless they are reined in by strict self-control, ready to flip into their opposites. I mean exactly this: pleasure, unless it is kept within bounds, goes plunging straight over the edge into sorrow.
But keeping within bounds is hard with anything you believe to be good. Only the real good can be craved safely. What is this real good, you ask, and where does it come from? I'll tell you: it comes from a good conscience, from honorable intentions, from right actions, from contempt for Fortune's gifts, from a calm and even way of living that walks a single road. People who leap from one plan to another — or who don't even leap, but get carried across by sheer accident — how can such wavering, drifting people hold on to any good that is fixed and lasting? Only a few steer themselves and their affairs by a guiding purpose. The rest don't move forward at all; they are simply swept along, like debris floating in a river. Some are caught by slack water and carried gently; some are torn along by a stronger current; some are stranded near the bank as the flow gives out; and some are flushed out to sea by the rush of the stream. So: decide what you want, and stand by the decision.
Now it's time to pay my debt. Here is a saying of your friend Epicurus that will clear this letter's account: "It is a nuisance to be always beginning life." Or another, which may catch the meaning better: "They live badly who are always beginning to live." Why? — you're right to ask; the line needs a commentary. Because for such people life is always unfinished. A man cannot stand ready for death if he has only just started to live. We should aim to have already lived enough — and no one thinks he has, if he's still drawing up the blueprints for his life. Don't imagine such people are rare; practically everyone is like this. Some men, in fact, only begin to live when it's time to stop. And if that surprises you, here is something that will surprise you more: some men have stopped living before they ever began.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You write that you're anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit an angry opponent is holding over you, and you expect me to advise you to picture a happier ending and rest in the comforts of hope. After all, why summon trouble early — it must be endured soon enough once it arrives — why ruin the present out of fear of the future? It is certainly foolish to be miserable now because you may be miserable later. But I'm going to lead you to peace of mind by a different road: if you want to be rid of all worry, assume that whatever you're afraid might happen is certainly going to happen. Whatever the trouble is, take its measure in your own mind and size up your fear. You will soon see that what you dread is either small or short. And you won't need long to gather examples to steady you; every age has produced them. Turn your thoughts to any period of Roman or foreign history, and cases of great achievement and great endurance will come crowding in on you.
If you lose this case, can anything worse happen to you than exile or prison? Is there any fate a man can dread beyond being burned or being killed? Name those penalties one at a time, and then name the men who shrugged them off — you won't have to hunt for them; the only problem is choosing. Rutilius bore his conviction as if the one thing that bothered him was the injustice of the verdict. Metellus endured exile with courage; Rutilius endured it gladly — the first agreed to come back only because his country called him; the second refused to return when Sulla summoned him. And nobody, in those days, said no to Sulla. Socrates went on holding his conversations in prison, and when certain people offered him the chance to escape, he declined; he stayed, in order to free mankind from its two heaviest fears — death and imprisonment. Mucius put his own hand into the fire. Being burned is painful; how much more painful when you are the one doing it to yourself! Here was a man with no learning, not braced for death and pain by any words of wisdom, equipped with nothing but a soldier's courage, punishing himself for the failure of his daring. He stood and watched his own right hand coming apart on the enemy's brazier, and he did not pull back the dissolving limb, its bones laid bare, until his enemy took the fire away. He could have done something more successful in that camp; he could never have done anything braver. See how much keener a brave man is to seize danger than a cruel man is to inflict it: Porsenna was readier to pardon Mucius for trying to kill him than Mucius was to pardon himself for failing.
"Oh," you say, "those stories have been recited to death in every school. The minute you reach the topic 'On Despising Death,' you'll be telling me about Cato." And why shouldn't I tell you about Cato — how on that last glorious night he read Plato's book with a sword laid at his pillow? He had arranged for the two things he needed at the end: the first, the will to die; the second, the means. So he put his affairs in order — as far as anything ruined and near its end can be put in order — and decided he had to make sure that no one would have the power to kill Cato, and no one the luck to save him. Drawing the sword — which he had kept clean of blood until that final day — he cried: "Fortune, you have gained nothing by blocking everything I attempted. Until now I have fought for my country's freedom, not my own. I did not labor so stubbornly to be free myself, but to live among free men. Now, since the cause of mankind is past hope, let Cato be moved to safety." Then he dealt his body the fatal wound. The doctors bound it up; Cato had less blood and less strength, but no less courage. Angry now not only at Caesar but at himself, he set his bare hands against the wound — and that noble soul, which had defied every power on earth, he did not so much release as expel.
I am not piling up these stories to exercise my wit; I'm doing it to brace you against the thing that is thought most terrible. And the job will be all the easier when I show you that it isn't only heroes who have despised the moment when the soul breathes its last; some men who were cowards in everything else have matched the bravest here. Take Scipio, the father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompeius: driven back onto the African coast by a headwind, he saw his ship in enemy hands. He ran himself through with his sword, and when they asked where the commander was, he answered: "All is well with the commander." Those words lifted him to the level of his ancestors, and kept unbroken the glory that fate had granted the Scipios in Africa. It was a great thing to conquer Carthage; a greater thing to conquer death. "All is well with the commander!" Should a general die any other way — above all, one of Cato's generals? I won't send you back through history, collecting all the men across the ages who have despised death; there are too many. Look at our own times — the softness and over-refinement we're always complaining about — and you will still find people of every rank, every station, every age, who cut their misfortunes short by death.
Believe me, Lucilius: death is so far from being fearful that, thanks to it, nothing is fearful. So when your enemy threatens, listen calmly. Your conscience gives you confidence — but since many things outside the merits of a case carry weight, hope for perfect justice, and prepare yourself for perfect injustice. Above all, remember to strip things of the noise and confusion that surround them, and look at what each thing is at bottom. You will find that there is nothing frightening in them except the fear itself. What you see happening with little boys happens to us too — we are only slightly bigger boys. When the people they love, the people they live with and play with, put on masks, the boys are scared out of their wits. It's the mask we need to strip off — not just from people, but from things — and give each thing back its own face.
"Why do you hold up before my eyes swords and fires and a mob of executioners roaring around you? Drop the parade you hide behind to frighten fools! You are nothing but Death — the same Death that a manservant of mine and a maidservant despised only yesterday. Why do you spread out the whips and the rack again in all that grand display? Why the engines built to torture each joint of the body one by one, and the thousand other machines for taking a man apart piecemeal? Put away the stage props that numb us with terror. And you — silence the groans, the cries, the bitter shrieks torn out of a man as he's stretched on the rack! You are nothing but Pain — the pain that gout-ridden man over there scorns, that the invalid endures in the middle of his dinner parties, that a girl bears in childbirth. If I can bear you, you are slight; if I cannot bear you, you are short."
Turn these words over — you have heard them often and said them often. But now prove by the outcome that what you have heard and said is true. For there is an ugly charge that keeps getting leveled at our school: that we deal in the words of philosophy, not its deeds.
What — have you only just now learned that death hangs over your head, that exile does, that grief does? You were born to these risks. Let us treat everything that can happen as something that will happen. I know you have already done what I'm advising; now I add a warning: don't drown your soul in these petty anxieties of yours. If you do, it will go dull, and it will have too little strength left when the moment comes for it to rise. Turn your mind from your own case to the case of men in general. Tell yourself that our little bodies are mortal and fragile; pain can reach them from other directions than an enemy's wrong or a stronger man's power. Our pleasures themselves turn into torments: banquets bring indigestion; drinking bouts bring numbness and trembling; the habits of lust cripple the feet, the hands, every joint of the body.
I may become poor: then I'll be one among many. I may be exiled: then I'll count myself a native of wherever they send me. They may put me in chains. So what? Am I unchained now? Look at this dragging weight of a body that nature has shackled me to. "I shall die," you say. What you mean is: I shall stop being able to fall sick; I shall stop being able to be imprisoned; I shall stop being able to die. I'm not foolish enough to run through the old Epicurean refrain at this point — that the terrors of the underworld are empty, that Ixion is not spinning on his wheel, that Sisyphus is not shouldering his boulder uphill, that no man's entrails can grow back every day to be devoured again. Nobody is childish enough to fear Cerberus, or the shadows, or the ghost-costume of the dead, held together by nothing but bare bones. Death either annihilates us or strips us bare. If we are released, the better part of us remains, its burden lifted; if we are annihilated, nothing remains — good and bad alike are carried off.
Allow me to quote a verse of your own here — first reminding you that when you wrote it, you wrote it for yourself as much as for anyone else. It is shameful to say one thing and mean another; how much more shameful to write one thing and mean another! I remember the day you were handling that familiar theme: that we don't suddenly fall into death, but move toward it by inches. We die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even while we are growing, our life is shrinking. We lose infancy, then childhood, then youth. Count yesterday too: all the time that has passed is time lost; this very day we're spending, we split with death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all the water that flowed out before. In the same way, the final hour, when we cease to exist, does not produce death all by itself; it only completes it. That is the moment we arrive — but we have been on the road a long time. When you had laid all this out, you said, in your usual style (you're always impressive, but never sharper than when you fit the truth with the right words):
The death that comes for us is not one death: the death that takes us off is just the last.
I'd rather you read your own lines than my letter; they will make it plain to you that this death we fear is the last death, not the only one.
I can see what you're looking for: you're asking what I've packed into this letter — what bracing saying from some master mind, what useful rule. Since the subject at hand is the one we've been discussing, I'll send you something on that very theme. Epicurus scolds those who crave death as much as those who dread it: "It is absurd," he says, "to run toward death because you are tired of life, when it is your way of life that has made you run toward death." And in another passage: "What is so absurd as to seek death, when it is fear of death that has robbed your life of peace?" And you may add a third of the same stamp: "So great is men's thoughtlessness — their madness — that some are driven to death by the very fear of it."
Ponder any of these, and you will strengthen your mind to endure both death and life. For we need warning and toughening on both fronts — against loving life too much, and against hating it too much. Even when reason advises ending it, the impulse should not be obeyed rashly or at a run. A brave and wise man should not flee from life; he should make a proper exit. And above all he should avoid the weakness that has taken hold of so many: a lust for dying. For the mind has its unreasoning drifts, my dear Lucilius, and one of them tilts toward death. It seizes the noblest and most spirited men, and it seizes the abject and cowardly too: the first kind despise life; the second find it a burden.
Others slide into it out of sheer over-fullness — from doing and seeing the same things until it isn't that they hate life; they are simply glutted with it. We slip toward this mood with philosophy itself nudging us along, and we say: "How long the same things? I will wake and sleep, get hungry and get full, shiver and sweat. Nothing ends; everything is linked in a kind of circle — things flee and are chased. Night presses at the heels of day, day at the heels of night; summer ends in autumn, winter crowds hard behind autumn, winter softens into spring. Nothing in nature passes except to come back. I do nothing new; I see nothing new. Sooner or later a man gets sick even of this." There are many who feel that living is not painful — merely pointless.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
As for our two friends, we'll have to proceed along different lines: the faults of the one are to be corrected; the faults of the other, stamped out. I intend to take every liberty — I don't love a man if I'm unwilling to hurt his feelings. "What," you say, "do you expect to keep a forty-year-old under your tutelage? Consider his age — hardened by now, past kneading. You can't reshape a man like that; only young minds take the mold." I don't know whether I'll make progress; but I would rather fall short of success than fall short of faith. Don't give up on curing the sick even when the disease is chronic — provided you stand firm against their excesses and make them do, and put up with, plenty of things against their will. As for our other friend, I'm not especially confident either — except for one thing: he still has enough shame left to blush at his sins. That modesty should be nursed along; as long as it lives in his soul, there is room for hope. But this veteran of yours, I think, wants more careful handling, so that he doesn't give up on himself altogether. And there is no better moment to approach him than now, while he's in a quiet stretch and looks like a man who has mended his ways. That lull of virtue has fooled others; it doesn't fool me. I fully expect his faults to come back — with compound interest. For the moment, I'm certain, they are suspended, not gone. I'll give the matter some time, and see whether or not something can be done.
But you — show me, as in fact you are doing, that you have a stout heart. Lighten your baggage for the march. Nothing we own is essential. Let us return to nature's law, and riches lie ready for us there. The things we actually need are free for everyone, or cheap: nature craves only bread and water. Nobody is poor by that standard — and the man who has fenced his desires within those limits can go head-to-head with Jupiter himself for happiness, as Epicurus says. And I must fold one or two more of his sayings into this letter: "Do everything as if Epicurus were watching you." There's no question that it does you good to have posted a guardian over yourself — to have someone you can look up to, someone you count as a witness to your very thoughts. It is nobler still, of course, to live as if some good man were always at your side, watching everything you do; but I'll settle for this much: whatever you do, act as if anyone at all were looking on. Solitude is what talks us into every kind of wrong. When you have come far enough to have some respect for yourself as well, you may dismiss your attendant. Until then, set some man's authority as a guard over you — the great Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius — anyone whose presence would make even hopeless wrecks swallow their bad impulses — while you go on making yourself into the kind of man in whose company you wouldn't dare to sin. When that is accomplished, and you begin to hold yourself in some esteem, I'll gradually allow you what Epicurus suggests in another passage: "The time to withdraw into yourself is exactly when you are forced into a crowd."
You need to make yourself different from the multitude. But until it is safe for you to be alone, pick out particular individuals; everyone does better in somebody's company — anybody's — than alone in his own. "The time to withdraw into yourself is exactly when you are forced into a crowd." Yes — provided you are a good man, a calm man, a self-restrained one. Otherwise, you had better withdraw into a crowd to get away from yourself. Alone, you are keeping bad company.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Just recently I told you I was within sight of old age. Now I'm afraid I've left old age behind me. Some other word belongs to my years now — or at least to my body — because "old age" means a time of life that is tired, not broken down. Count me among the worn out, the ones nearing the end.
Even so, I give myself thanks, with you as my witness. Age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel it in my body. Only my vices have grown senile, along with the organs that served them. My mind is strong, and delighted to have so little business with the body anymore. It has set down most of its load. It is alert. It even picks an argument with me about old age — insists that old age is its season of bloom. Let's take it at its word and let it make the most of what it has. It tells me to do some thinking: to sort out how much of this peace and moderation I owe to wisdom and how much simply to my age; to examine carefully what I can no longer do and what I no longer want to do. And if a power fails that was bound to end anyway — why complain? Why call that a loss?
"But," you say, "it is the worst loss there is — to wear out, to die off, or to put it bluntly, to melt away. We aren't cut down with a single blow; we're worn down, and every day shaves off a little more of our strength."
But is there any better ending than to glide into your own harbor while nature slips the cable? Not that there's anything painful about a sudden blow and an abrupt exit from existence — only that this other way out is gentle: a gradual withdrawal. As for me, I act as if the test were at hand — as if the day had come that will pronounce its verdict on all my years — and I watch over myself and talk to myself like this: "Everything we've shown so far, in word or deed, counts for nothing. It's all a small, deceptive down payment on our spirit, wrapped in a great deal of showmanship. I'll let death decide what progress I've really made. So I am preparing myself for that day, and not faintheartedly — the day when the stage tricks and the actor's makeup come off and I pass judgment on myself: am I merely reciting brave sentiments, or do I actually feel them? Were all those bold threats I hurled at Fortune a pretense and a performance? Set aside the world's opinion; it wavers forever and always votes both ways. Set aside the studies you've pursued all your life; death will deliver the final verdict in your case. I mean this: your debates and learned discussions, your maxims collected from the sayings of the wise, your cultured conversation — none of it proves the real strength of your soul. The most timid man alive can deliver a bold speech. What you have really done will show only when you draw your last breath. I accept the terms. I do not shrink from the verdict." That's what I say to myself — but consider it said to you as well. You are younger. What of it? Death doesn't count our years. You don't know where death is waiting for you, so be ready for it everywhere.
I was about to stop — my hand was already shaping the closing line — but the rites must still be performed and this letter's traveling money paid out. Assume I'm not telling you where I'll borrow the sum; you know whose account I draw on. Wait just a moment and I'll pay you out of my own purse; in the meantime, Epicurus will oblige me with this: "Rehearse death" — or, if you prefer the phrase, rehearse the "migration to heaven." The meaning is plain: it is a wonderful thing to learn thoroughly how to die. Maybe you think it pointless to learn a lesson you can use only once. But that is exactly why we ought to rehearse it. When we can never test whether we truly know a thing, we have to keep learning it. "Rehearse death." Whoever says that is telling us to rehearse freedom. The man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He stands above every outside power — or at least beyond it. What are prisons and chains and bars to him? His way out is always open. There is only one chain that keeps us shackled to life, and that is the love of life. We don't have to throw that chain off; we can wear it thin, so that when the moment demands it, nothing holds us back or hinders us from doing at once what someday we must do anyway.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
"What's this," you say, "you're giving me advice? Have you already advised yourself? Already fixed your own faults? Is that why you have the spare time to reform everyone else?" No — I'm not so shameless as to set up as a doctor while I'm sick myself. What I'm doing is talking through the troubles we share and passing the medicine across, as if we were lying in the same hospital ward. So listen to me as you would if I were talking to myself. I'm letting you into my private thoughts; I'm having it out with myself, and merely using you as my excuse.
I keep crying out to myself: "Count your years, and you'll be ashamed to want and chase the same things you wanted as a boy. Make sure of this one thing before your dying day: let your faults die before you do. Away with those disordered pleasures that must be paid for so dearly — it isn't only the ones still ahead that hurt me, but the ones already come and gone. Crimes, even when they go undetected, don't let the anxiety end when the act does; guilty pleasures are the same — the regret outlasts them. They have no substance, no reliability; even when they do no harm, they vanish. Look around instead for some good that will last. And there is none — except what the soul discovers for itself, within itself. Virtue alone gives a joy that is permanent and secure. Even if something gets in its way, it's only a passing cloud, drifting beneath the sun but never winning against it."
When will it be your luck to reach that joy? You haven't been slow so far, but you need to quicken your pace. A great deal of work remains, and if you want it done, you must spend your own waking hours and your own effort on it. This is one job that can't be delegated. Other kinds of book-work accept outside help. Within our own lifetime there was a rich man named Calvisius Sabinus, who had the bank account of a millionaire and the brains of one. I never saw a man whose good luck was a greater offense against decency. His memory was so bad he would forget the name of Ulysses, or Achilles, or Priam — names we know as well as we know our own servants'. No senile old butler, the kind who can't get anyone's name right and has to invent them, ever botched the roll call of his master's tribesmen the way Sabinus botched the Trojan and Greek heroes. And still he wanted to seem learned. So he devised a shortcut to scholarship: he paid staggering prices for slaves — one to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod, and one apiece for the nine lyric poets. That he paid top price shouldn't surprise you; when he couldn't find them ready-made, he had them made to order. Once he'd assembled this retinue, he began making life miserable for his dinner guests. He kept the fellows stationed at the foot of his couch and asked them, again and again, for verses he could repeat — and then broke down in the middle of a word anyway.
Satellius Quadratus — a sponger on rich fools, therefore a flatterer of them, and therefore (the third quality follows the other two) a mocker of them — suggested that Sabinus hire scholars to pick up his dropped lines. When Sabinus mentioned that each slave had cost him a hundred thousand sesterces, Satellius replied: "You could have bought that many bookcases for less." But Sabinus held firmly to the opinion that whatever anyone in his household knew, he himself knew too. This same Satellius then urged him to take up wrestling — Sabinus, who was sickly, pale, and thin. "How can I?" said Sabinus. "I can barely stay alive as it is." "Don't say that, I beg you," said Satellius. "Look how many perfectly healthy slaves you have!"
A sound mind cannot be borrowed or bought. In fact, I suspect that even if sound minds were up for sale, they'd find no buyers. Depraved ones, though, are bought and sold every day.
But let me pay off my debt and say goodbye: "Poverty brought into line with the law of nature is great wealth." Epicurus says this over and over, in one form or another — but a thing that can never be learned too well can never be said too often. For some patients you need only write the prescription; for others you must force the dose down their throats.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Do you think this has happened to you alone? Are you actually surprised — as if it were news — that all that travel, all those changes of scenery, haven't shaken off the gloom and the weight on your mind? You must change the mind, not the sky. You can cross ocean after ocean; as our Virgil says,
Lands and cities drop astern —
but your faults will travel with you wherever you go. Socrates said the same thing to a man with the same complaint: "Why are you surprised that globe-trotting doesn't help you, when you take yourself with you? The thing that drove you out the door is right at your heels." What pleasure is there in seeing new countries? What good is touring cities and famous sights? All that rushing around is wasted. You ask why running away doesn't help? Because you run away in your own company. You must set down the burdens of the mind; until you do, no place on earth will please you.
Consider that your present condition is like the prophetess Virgil describes — worked up, goaded into frenzy, filled with a spirit not her own:
The priestess raves, and strains to shake the mighty god out of her breast.
You hurry from place to place to shake off a burden that only chafes more with the motion — the way a ship's cargo causes no trouble while it lies stowed, but the moment it shifts, it heels the vessel toward whichever side it has slid to. Everything you do counts against you; you hurt yourself by the very restlessness. You're jostling a sick man.
But remove that trouble, and every change of scene becomes a pleasure. Drive you to the ends of the earth, set you down in any corner of a savage country you like — and that place, however forbidding, will be a hospitable home to you. Who you are when you arrive matters more than where you arrive; that is why we should never chain the mind to any one place. Live with this conviction: "I was not born for one corner of the world; this whole universe is my country." If you saw that clearly, you would stop being surprised that moving to fresh scenery, after growing weary of the old, does you no good. The first place would have pleased you too, if you had believed every place was yours. As it is, you aren't traveling; you're drifting — driven along, trading one place for the next, when the thing you're looking for — living well — is available everywhere.
Can anywhere be as chaotic as the Forum? Even there you can live in peace, if you must. Though frankly, given a free choice, I would flee far from the very sight and neighborhood of the place. Just as pestilential districts wear down even the strongest constitution, so some places are unhealthy for a mind that is healthy but not yet quite sound — still convalescing. I disagree with the people who wade straight into the breakers, who welcome a stormy life and wrestle daily, gamely, with hardship. The wise man will endure all that, but he won't choose it; he would rather be at peace than at war. It does little good to have thrown out your own faults if you must now brawl with other people's. "But there were thirty tyrants standing over Socrates," someone says, "and they couldn't break his spirit." What does it matter how many masters a man has? Slavery has no plural. Whoever has scorned it is free — no matter how thick the mob of overlords around him.
Time to stop — but not before I've paid the toll. "To know your sin is the beginning of salvation." That strikes me as a noble saying of Epicurus. A man who doesn't know he is doing wrong has no wish to be corrected; you must catch yourself in the act before you can reform. Some people brag about their vices — and do you think anyone who counts his faults as accomplishments gives a single thought to curing them? So, as far as you can, put yourself on trial. Investigate yourself; gather the evidence against yourself. Play the accuser first, then the judge, and only last the advocate pleading for mercy. And now and then, be harsh with yourself.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You've been asking about our friend Marcellinus — you want to know how he's getting along. He rarely visits me, for exactly one reason: he's afraid to hear the truth. For the moment he's in no danger of that, because you can't talk to a man unless he's willing to listen. That's why people have long debated whether Diogenes and the other Cynics — who handed out blunt honesty indiscriminately and gave advice to anyone who crossed their path — were right to work that way. What's the sense of scolding the deaf, or people mute from birth or illness?
"Why should I be stingy with words?" you answer. "They cost nothing. I can't know whether I'll help the particular man I advise, but I know I'll help someone if I advise many. I have to scatter this advice by the handful. Try often enough, and sooner or later you succeed."
That, my dear Lucilius, is exactly what I believe a great soul should not do. His influence gets watered down; it loses its force with the very people it might have straightened out, if it hadn't gone stale. An archer shouldn't hit the mark only sometimes; he should miss it only sometimes. Whatever works by chance is not an art. And wisdom is an art. It should have a definite aim: choose the students who will make progress, and withdraw from the ones it has come to see as hopeless — though not giving up on them too soon, and trying the drastic remedies at exactly the point where the case turns desperate.
As for our friend Marcellinus, I haven't lost hope yet. He can still be saved — but the helping hand must be offered soon. There is a real risk he'll pull his rescuer down with him: there's a native vigor in the man, though it's already bending toward vice. Still, I'll brave the danger and dare to show him his faults. He'll do what he always does — reach for his wit, the wit that can get a smile out of mourners. He'll turn the joke first on himself, then on me. He'll say everything I'm about to say before I can say it. He'll ridicule our philosophic systems; he'll accuse philosophers of taking handouts, keeping mistresses, and indulging their appetites. He'll point out one philosopher caught in adultery, another who haunts the taverns, another who hangs around court. He'll bring up Aristo, Marcus Lepidus's philosopher, who used to hold his discussions in his carriage — that being the time slot he'd set aside for producing his researches — so that Scaurus, asked what school Aristo belonged to, said: "Well, one thing's certain — he's not one of the Walking Philosophers." And Julius Graecinus, a distinguished man, asked his opinion on the same question, replied: "I can't tell you — I don't know what he does on foot," as though he'd been asked about a chariot fighter. Charlatans of that sort — men who would have done philosophy more credit by leaving her alone than by peddling her — are what Marcellinus will throw in my face.
But I've decided to put up with the taunts. He may stir my laughter; I may yet stir him to tears. And if he insists on joking, then I'll rejoice, so to speak, in the midst of sorrow, that he's been blessed with such a merry strain of madness. But that kind of merriment doesn't last. Watch such men and you'll see: within a short span they laugh too hard and they rage too hard. My plan is to approach him and show him how much more he was worth back when so many thought him worth less. Even if I don't root out his faults, I'll put a check on them. They won't stop, but they'll pause — and perhaps they'll even stop, if pausing becomes a habit. That is nothing to sneer at: for the gravely ill, a good remission stands in for health.
So while I get myself ready for Marcellinus, you — who can act, who understand where you started and how far you've come, and can therefore guess how far there is still to go — put your character in order. Rouse your courage. Stand firm against the things that have frightened you. Don't count the people who scare you. You'd call a man a fool for fearing a crowd at a spot where only one person can pass at a time, wouldn't you? Just so: not many can actually reach you to kill you, however many threaten it. Nature has arranged it this way — just as only one person gave you life, only one will take it away.
If you had any shame, you'd have let me off this last installment. But no — I won't be stingy at the finish either; I'll clear my debts to the last penny and force on you what I still owe: "I have never wished to please the crowd; for what I know, they do not approve, and what they approve, I do not know." "Who said that?" you ask — as if you didn't know whose payroll I'm on. Epicurus. But every school will shout the same watchword at you — Peripatetic, Academic, Stoic, Cynic. If virtue delights you, how can you delight the crowd? Popular approval has to be won by trickery: you must make yourself just like them, and they will withhold their applause unless they recognize you as one of their own. And what you think of yourself matters far more than what others think of you. The favor of low men can be bought only by low means. So what will that celebrated philosophy do for you — the one we praise, the one we're told outranks every art and every possession? This: it will make you prefer pleasing yourself to pleasing the public. It will make you weigh men's judgments, not merely count them. It will make you live without fear of gods or men. It will make you either conquer your troubles or end them. Otherwise — if I see you carried along on popular applause, if your entrance is met with a roar of cheering and clapping, honors fit for an actor, if the whole city, women and children included, sings your praises — how could I help pitying you? I know what road leads to that kind of popularity.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I have just seen Aufidius Bassus — that good and noble man — broken in health and wrestling with his years. But the years now press on him too heavily for him to get back up; old age has settled onto him with its great weight — no, with its entire weight. You know his body was always frail and dry. For a long time he kept it in hand — kept it together, to put it more accurately — and then all at once it gave way. When a ship springs a leak, you can always plug the first crack, and the second; but when many seams begin to open at once and let in the sea, there is no saving the gaping hull. It is the same with an old man's body: up to a certain point you can prop its weakness and hold it up. But when it starts to resemble a condemned building — when every joint is spreading, and while you repair one, another fails — then it is time for a man to look around and consider how to make his exit.
But the mind of our friend Bassus is fully awake. That is the gift philosophy gives us: joy in the very sight of death; strength and courage no matter what state the body is in; cheerfulness that does not fail even when the body is failing. A great pilot can sail with his canvas in shreds; if his ship is stripped to the hull, he rigs what is left of her and holds her on course. That is exactly what our friend Bassus is doing. He contemplates his own end with a courage and a calm face that you would call excessive indifference in a man contemplating someone else's.
This is a great accomplishment, Lucilius, and one that takes long practice to learn: to depart calmly when the unavoidable hour arrives. Other kinds of death carry an ingredient of hope. A disease runs its course; a fire gets put out; houses that seemed certain to crush the people inside have set them down unhurt; the sea has thrown swimmers back on shore alive by the same force that dragged them under; the soldier has drawn back his sword from the very neck of the doomed man. But those whom old age is leading off to death have nothing left to hope for. Old age alone grants no reprieve. No ending is more painless, true; but none takes longer.
Bassus seemed to me to be attending his own funeral — laying out his own body for burial, living almost like a man who had outlived his own death, bearing his grief at his own departure the way a wise man should. Because he talks freely about death, and works hard to persuade us that if this process contains any discomfort or fear, the fault belongs to the dying person and not to death itself — and that there is no more trouble in the actual moment than there is after it is over. "And it is just as insane," he adds, "to fear what will not happen to you as to fear what you will not feel if it does happen." Can anyone really believe that the very thing that removes all feeling can itself be felt? "Therefore," says Bassus, "death stands so far beyond every evil that it is beyond every fear of evil."
I know all this has been said often and needs to be said often. But such precepts never worked on me the same way when I read them in books, or heard them from men declaring — from a safe distance — that the thing was nothing to fear. This old man carried the greatest weight with me because he discussed death with death standing near. I will tell you what I actually think: I believe a man is braver at the very moment of death than on the approach to it. When death is right in front of us, it gives even the inexperienced the courage to stop dodging what cannot be dodged. That is how a gladiator who was faint-hearted through the entire fight ends it by offering his throat to his opponent and guiding the wavering blade to the spot himself. But an end that is close at hand and certain to come, and slow in coming — that demands a tough, tenacious courage of soul. It is a rarer thing, and only the wise man can supply it.
So I listened to Bassus with the deepest pleasure. He was casting his vote on death — pointing out what sort of thing it is when observed, so to speak, at close range. I suppose a man would command more of your confidence, and carry more weight, if he had come back to life and could report from experience that there is no evil in death. Short of that, the people best qualified to tell you what disquiet the approach of death brings are the ones who have stood in its path, watched it coming, and welcomed it. Count Bassus among them — and he had no wish to deceive us. He says it is as foolish to fear death as to fear old age; for death follows old age exactly as old age follows youth. Whoever does not want to die never really wanted to live. Life is given to us with death as the condition; death is where the whole road leads. How foolish to fear it, then — a man simply awaits what is certain; what he fears is the uncertain. Death has its fixed rule, fair and unavoidable. Who can complain about being governed by terms that include everyone? The chief part of fairness, after all, is that it falls on all alike.
But there is no need to plead Nature's case at the moment. She wants our law to be identical with her own: she simply takes apart what she has put together, and puts together again what she has taken apart. And if any man has the luck to be set gently adrift by old age — not torn suddenly out of life but withdrawn from it bit by bit — he ought to thank the gods, every one of them, because after he has had his fill he is carried off to the rest that is appointed for mankind, the rest a tired man welcomes. You can find certain people who crave death more eagerly than others beg for life. And I honestly do not know which ones give us more courage — those who call for death, or those who meet it calm and cheerful — because the first attitude sometimes springs from madness or a burst of rage, while the second is the calm that comes from settled judgment. Men have gone charging to meet death in a fit of anger before now. But when death comes to meet him, no one welcomes it cheerfully except the man who composed himself for it long ago.
So I admit it: I visited this dear friend of mine again and again on various pretexts, but really to learn whether I would find him the same each time — whether his strength of mind was fading along with his strength of body. It was growing, the way a charioteer's joy shows more and more clearly as he rounds the seventh lap and closes on the prize. In fact, following the counsels of Epicurus, he often said: "First of all, I hope there is no pain at the moment a man breathes his last. But if there is, its very shortness carries a certain comfort — no great pain lasts long. And in the worst case, even if soul and body are being torn apart with excruciating pain, a man finds relief at that very moment in the thought that after this pain he can never feel pain again. As for me, I am sure an old man's soul is sitting on his very lips; it takes only a little force to detach it from the body. A fire that has caught hold of solid fuel needs water to put it out — sometimes the collapse of the whole building. But a fire with nothing left to feed on dies down by itself."
I am glad to hear such words, my dear Lucilius — not because they are new to me, but because they lead me into the presence of the actual fact. And what then? Have I not watched many men break the thread of life? I have indeed. But the ones who carry weight with me are those who come to death without any loathing for life — who let death in, so to speak, instead of pulling it toward them. Bassus kept saying: "This torture is our own fault, because we only shrink from dying when we believe the end is close at hand." But who is not close to it? Death is ready for us in every place and at every hour. "Consider," he went on, "whenever some cause of death seems imminent, how much nearer other kinds of dying stand — kinds we do not fear at all." A man is threatened with death by an enemy; a bout of indigestion beats the enemy to it. If we are willing to examine our fears honestly, we will find that some are real and others only seem to be. We do not fear death; we fear the thought of death. From death itself we are always the same distance. So if death is to be feared at all, it is to be feared always — for what season of life is exempt from it?
But what I really ought to fear is that you will hate a letter this long worse than death itself. So I will stop. As for you: think on death always, so that you never fear it.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Now I recognize my Lucilius! He is beginning to show the character he promised. Follow up that impulse that sent you striding after everything that is best, trampling underfoot whatever the crowd approves. I would not have you greater or better than you planned — in your case the foundations alone already cover a great deal of ground; just finish everything you laid out, and take in hand the plans you have been carrying in your head. In short: you will be a wise man if you stop up your ears. And wax is not enough — you need a denser plug than the one they say Ulysses used on his crew. The song he feared was seductive, but it came from only one direction; the song you have to fear echoes around you not from a single headland but from every quarter of the world. So do not sail past one stretch of coast you distrust for its treacherous pleasures — sail past every city. Be deaf even to the people who love you most: they pray for bad things with good intentions. And if you want to be happy, beg the gods to grant none of their fond wishes for you. The things they want heaped on you are not really good things. There is only one good — the cause and support of a happy life: trust in yourself. And you cannot reach it until you have learned to despise hard work, and to count it among the things that are neither good nor bad. Because a single thing cannot be bad at one time and good at another — light and bearable now, a cause of dread later. Work is not a good. Then what is a good? Contempt for work. So I fault the men who toil for nothing. But when a man is straining toward honorable things, then the harder he pushes, the less he lets himself be beaten or brought to a halt, the louder I will applaud him and shout my encouragement: "So much the better! Up — take a fresh breath — take that hill in a single push if you can!"
Work is the food of noble minds. So there is no reason why, following that old vow of your parents, you should pick and choose which fortune to want or which to pray for — and anyway it is beneath a man who has already made the full circuit of the highest honors to keep pestering the gods. Why pray at all? Make yourself happy through your own effort. You can do it, once you understand this: whatever is blended with virtue is good; whatever is joined to vice is bad. Just as nothing gleams without light mixed into it, and nothing is black unless it contains darkness or draws some dimness into itself, and nothing is hot without the help of fire or cold without air — in the same way it is the presence of virtue or vice that makes things honorable or shameful.
Then what is good? Knowledge. What is evil? Ignorance. Your wise man — who is also a craftsman — will reject or select in each case as the occasion demands; but he does not fear what he rejects or admire what he selects, so long as his soul is stout and unconquerable. I forbid you to be discouraged or cast down. It is not enough not to shrink from work: ask for it. "But," you say, "isn't trivial, pointless work — work sprung from shabby motives — a bad kind of work?" No more than the work spent on noble efforts. Because the very quality that endures toil and drives itself up the hard uphill road belongs to the spirit, which says: "Why are you slacking? It is not a man's part to fear sweat." And beyond this, for virtue to be complete there must be an even temperament and a scheme of life consistent with itself all the way through — and that result cannot be reached without knowledge, and without the art that lets us understand things human and things divine. That is the greatest good. Seize it, and you begin to be the associate of the gods, not their beggar.
"But how," you ask, "do you get there?" Not by crossing the Pennine or Graian passes, or trekking the wastes of Candavia. You do not have to face the Syrtes, or Scylla, or Charybdis — though you traveled through every one of those places for the bribe of a petty governorship. The journey nature has equipped you for is safe and pleasant. She has given you gifts that will lift you level with God — if you do not desert them. Your money will not put you on a level with God: God owns no property. Your bordered robe will not do it: God wears no clothes. Your reputation will not do it, nor showing yourself off, nor having your name known across the world: no one has knowledge of God, and many think poorly of him without paying any price for it. The mob of slaves carrying your litter through the city streets and down foreign roads will not help you: this God I am speaking of, though the highest and most powerful of beings, carries everything on his own shoulders. Even beauty and strength cannot make you blessed; neither of them survives old age.
What we have to look for, then, is something that does not pass, day after day, further under the control of a power that cannot be resisted. And what is that? The soul — but the soul that is upright, good, and great. What else could you call such a soul but a god dwelling as a guest in a human body? A soul like that can descend into a Roman knight just as easily as into a freedman's son, or a slave. For what is a Roman knight, or a freedman's son, or a slave? Titles — born of ambition or of injustice. You can leap to heaven from the very slums. Only rise
and shape yourself into kinship with your God.
You will not do that shaping in gold or silver; an image in the likeness of God cannot be cast from materials like those. Remember that back when the gods were kind to men, they were shaped from clay.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I have been asking about you — questioning everyone who comes from your part of the country: what you are doing, where you are spending your time, and with whom. You cannot deceive me; I am with you. Live exactly as if I were certain to get news of everything you do — no, as if I were certain to see it. And if you wonder what pleases me most in what I hear about you, it is that I hear nothing: most of the people I ask do not know what you are doing.
That is sound practice — keeping clear of people of a different stamp with different aims. And I am confident enough that you cannot be bent, that you will hold to your purpose even if the crowd surrounds you and tries to pull you off it. Then what is on my mind? I am not afraid they will change you; I am afraid they will slow you down. Even a man who merely holds you back does real damage — especially since life is so short, and we make it shorter still with our unsteadiness, forever making fresh starts at living, first one beginning and then immediately another. We break life into little pieces, and fritter it away. So hurry ahead, dearest Lucilius, and think how you would quicken your pace if you had an enemy at your back — if you suspected cavalry closing in, pressing hard on your tracks as you fled. It is true: the enemy is pressing. So pick up speed, get away, reach safe ground — and keep remembering what a noble thing it is to round off your life before death comes, and then wait in peace for whatever portion of time remains, claiming nothing more for yourself, because you are already in possession of the happy life — and a happy life is not made happier by being longer. Oh, when will you see the day when you know that time means nothing to you — when you are peaceful and calm, careless of tomorrow, because you are enjoying your life to the full?
Do you want to know what makes men greedy for the future? No one has yet found himself. Your parents, to be sure, prayed for other blessings for you; but I pray instead that you will despise all the things they wished for you in abundance. Their prayers plunder plenty of other people just so that you can be enriched; whatever is handed over to you has to be taken from someone else. What I pray is this: that you gain such command over yourself that your mind, shaken now by wandering thoughts, finally comes to rest and holds steady; that it becomes content with itself; and that once it understands what things are truly good — and they are ours the moment we understand them — it has no need of added years. He has finally passed beyond every necessity — he has won his honorable discharge and is free — who is still alive after his life is complete.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You want me to close these letters, as I closed the earlier ones, with sayings drawn from the masters of our school. But they never dealt in choice extracts; the whole weave of their work is strong. There is unevenness, you know, when some objects stand out above the rest. A single tree is nothing remarkable when the whole forest rises to the same height. Poetry is crammed with sayings of this kind, and so is history. So do not think of those lines as belonging to Epicurus: they are common property — really, they are ours most of all. They simply get noticed more in Epicurus, because they come at rare intervals, when you are not expecting them, and because it is surprising to hear brave words from a man who made a practice of going soft. That, at least, is what most people say of him. In my own opinion Epicurus is genuinely brave, long sleeves and all. Courage, energy, and readiness for battle can be found among the Persians just as surely as among peoples who dress girded for a fight.
So stop calling on me for extracts and quotations. The kind of thought you pick out here and there from other philosophers runs unbroken through the whole body of our writings. We keep no window display; we do not trick the customer into stepping inside the shop only to find nothing there but what was hanging in the window. We let the customers take their samples from wherever they please. Suppose we did want to sort individual mottoes out of the common stock — to whom would we credit them? Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, or Posidonius? We Stoics are not subjects of a king; each of us claims his own freedom. Among the others, whatever Hermarchus says, whatever Metrodorus says, gets credited to one source; everything anyone in that brotherhood utters is spoken under the leadership and commanding authority of one man alone. But we, I insist, cannot pick out any single thing — try as we may — from so vast a supply of things equally good.
Only the poor man counts his flock.
So give up hoping that you can skim the wisdom of great men out of summaries. You have to look at their wisdom whole; study it whole. They are working out a design, weaving a masterpiece line upon line, from which nothing can be removed without injury to the whole. Examine the separate parts if you like — as long as you examine them as parts of the man himself. A woman is not beautiful because her ankle or her arm draws compliments; she is beautiful when the whole of her makes you forget to admire the parts.
Still, if you insist, I will not be stingy with you — I will be lavish. There is a huge crowd of these passages, scattered about everywhere in profusion; they do not need to be gathered, only picked up. They do not drip out a drop at a time; they flow continuously, unbroken, all of a piece. And no doubt they do real good for beginners — the ones still worshipping outside the shrine. Single maxims sink in more easily when they are framed and fenced off like a line of verse. That is why we give children a proverb to learn by heart — what the Greeks call a chria — because a young mind can hold that much and no more. But for a man whose progress is real to go chasing choice extracts, propping his weakness on the best-known and briefest sayings, leaning on his memory — that is disgraceful. It is time for him to lean on himself. He should be making such maxims, not memorizing them. It is shameful for an old man, or a man in sight of old age, to have nothing but notebook wisdom. "This is what Zeno said." And what have you said? "This is the opinion of Cleanthes." And what is your opinion? How long will you march under another man's orders? Take command. Say something posterity will remember. Put out something from your own stock. This is why I hold that there is nothing distinguished in any of these men who never create anything themselves but lurk forever in someone else's shadow — playing the interpreter, never once daring to put into practice what they have spent so long learning. They have exercised their memories on other men's material. But remembering is one thing; knowing is another. Remembering is guarding something left in your memory's keeping; knowing means making everything your own — not depending on the copy, not forever glancing back at the master. "Thus said Zeno, thus said Cleanthes," indeed! Let there be some daylight between you and your book! How long will you be a student? From now on, be a teacher as well. "But why," someone asks, "should I keep going to lectures on things I can read?" "The living voice," comes the answer, "is a great help." Perhaps — but not the voice that only mouths another man's words and does the work of a stenographer.
Consider this fact, too. Those who never reach independence of mind begin by following their leader in cases where everyone else has abandoned him; then they follow him into questions where the truth is still being worked out. And the truth will never be discovered if we sit content with the discoveries already made. Besides, a man who follows another discovers nothing — he is not even searching. What then? Shall I not walk in the footsteps of the men who went before me? I will indeed use the old road; but if I find a shorter cut that is smoother to travel, I will open the new road. The men who made these discoveries before us are not our masters; they are our guides. Truth lies open to everyone. No one has a monopoly on it yet — and there is plenty of it left for those still to come.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I swell with pride, I jump for joy, I shake off my years and my blood runs warm again, every time your actions and your letters show me how far you have outdone yourself — the ordinary man you left behind long ago. If a farmer is delighted when his tree finally bears fruit, if a shepherd takes pleasure in the new lambs of his flock, if every teacher looks at his student and sees his own youth again — then how do you think it feels to have trained a mind, to have shaped it while it was still young, and suddenly to see it grown up?
I claim you as my own. You are my handiwork. When I first saw what you were capable of, I laid my hand on you. I urged you, I used the goad, I never let you slow to a stroll — I kept prodding you awake. I am still doing it; only now I am cheering on a runner who is already in the race, and who cheers me on in return.
"What more do you want from me, then?" you ask. "The will is still my own." Well, the will in this case is nearly everything — not merely half, as in the proverb "Well begun is half done." It is more than half, because this whole business is decided in the soul. So the greater part of goodness is the will to become good. Do you know what I mean by a good man? One who is complete, finished — a man no pressure and no need can make bad. I see that man in you, if you keep on steadily, bend to the work, and see to it that everything you do and everything you say match each other, answer to each other, and come stamped from the same mold. If a man's acts are out of harmony, his soul is crooked. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
When I push you so hard toward your studies, I am serving my own interest: I want your friendship, and I cannot have it unless you keep developing yourself the way you have begun. Right now you love me, but you are not yet my friend. "Wait," you say, "are those two different things?" Different? They are not even alike. A friend loves you, of course; but someone who loves you is not automatically your friend. Friendship always helps; love sometimes does harm. If for no other reason, then, perfect yourself for this one: so that you may learn how to love.
Hurry, then — so that while you are perfecting yourself for my benefit, you don't end up having learned perfection for somebody else's. True, I am already collecting some of the profit just by imagining that we two will be of one mind, and that whatever strength age has drained from me will flow back to me out of yours — though there really isn't so much difference in our ages. But I want to enjoy the finished fact. We feel a certain joy in the people we love even when they are far away, but that kind of joy is thin and fleeting. Seeing a man, being with him, talking with him — that is living pleasure; above all when you not only see the man you want, but the kind of man you want. So give yourself to me as a gift of great price. And to spur yourself on, remember that you are mortal and that I am old. Hurry to me — but hurry to yourself first. Make progress, and above all work at being consistent with yourself. Whenever you want to test whether you have accomplished anything, check whether you want the same things today that you wanted yesterday. A change of wishes shows a mind at sea, blown here and there, wherever the wind sets. What is settled and solid does not wander from its place. That is the blessed condition of the completely wise man — and, up to a point, of the man who is making progress too. What is the difference between them? The one moves but never changes position: he bobs at anchor where he is. The other does not move at all. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Encourage your friend to look down, with a stout heart, on the people who criticize him for choosing the shade of retirement — for walking away from a career of public honors and preferring peace to everything he might still have won. Let him show these critics, every day, how wisely he has looked out for his own interests. The men everyone envies will keep marching past him; some will be shoved out of the ranks, and others will fall. Prosperity is a turbulent thing; it torments itself. It rattles the brain in more ways than one, goading men toward this aim and that — power for some, high living for others. Some it puffs up; others it slackens until they go completely soft.
"But," comes the retort, "so-and-so carries his prosperity well." Yes — the way he carries his liquor. So don't let that crowd persuade you that a man besieged by admirers is happy. They run to him the way crowds rush a pool of water, muddying it as they drain it. "But," you say, "men call our friend an idler and a slacker." There are people, you know, whose speech comes out backwards — they use words to mean their opposites. They used to call him happy; so what? Was he? It doesn't even bother me that some find him rough and gloomy. Aristo used to say he preferred a stern young man to a cheerful one who pleased the crowd. "Wine that tastes harsh and sour when it is new," he said, "ages into good wine; the wine that tastes fine at the vintage can't survive the years." So let them call him stern, an enemy of his own advancement. That very sternness will age well — provided he keeps cherishing virtue and keeps soaking in the studies that genuinely cultivate a man: not the kind you sprinkle over yourself, but the kind the mind must be steeped in. Now is his time to learn. "What? Is there any time when a man should not learn?" None at all. But while studying is creditable at every age, being schooled is not. An old man learning his ABC's is a disgraceful and ridiculous sight; the young man must store up, the old man must draw out and use. So you will be doing yourself an enormous favor by making this friend of yours as good a man as possible. The kindnesses worth seeking and worth giving, they tell us, are the ones that benefit the giver as much as the receiver — and those are unquestionably the best kind.
Besides, he no longer has any choice in the matter: he has given his word. And it is less disgraceful to settle short with a creditor than to settle short with a promising future. To pay his debt of money, the merchant needs a lucky voyage, the farmer needs fertile fields and kindly weather; the debt your friend owes can be paid in full with nothing but good will. Fortune has no jurisdiction over character. Let him govern his character so that, in perfect peace, he can bring to perfection the spirit within him that feels neither loss nor gain, but stays in the same attitude no matter how things fall out. Heap worldly goods on a spirit like that, and it rises above its wealth; let chance strip away part of that wealth, or all of it, and the spirit is not diminished.
If your friend had been born in Parthia, he would have begun bending the bow as a child; in Germany, he would have been hurling his slender spear from boyhood; in our great-grandfathers' day, he would have learned to ride a horse and strike an enemy hand to hand. That is what each nation's way of life recommends to a man — no, prescribes for him. So what should this friend of yours train at? The one skill that works against every weapon and every kind of enemy: contempt of death. Nobody doubts that death carries something terrifying in it; it shocks even our souls, which nature has shaped to love their own existence. Otherwise there would be no need to prepare ourselves and whet our courage for something we would walk toward by a kind of instinct, the way every creature moves to preserve itself. No man trains so that he can lie down calmly on a bed of roses if the need ever arises. He hardens his courage for this: so that torture cannot make him break his sworn word, and so that, if it comes to it, he can stand his watch in the trenches, wounded, without even leaning on his spear — because sleep steals over a man who props himself up on anything at all.
In death there is nothing harmful — for there would have to be someone left for it to harm. And if you are gripped by such a craving for a longer life, consider this: nothing that vanishes from our sight is annihilated. It is reabsorbed into the world of things it came from — and will soon come from again. Things end their course; they do not perish. And death, which we fear and flinch from, interrupts life; it does not steal it. The day will come when we are returned to the light — though many men would object to that, if they were not brought back with their memories wiped clean.
Later I mean to show you, more carefully, that everything which seems to perish is merely changed. Since you are destined to return, you ought to leave with a calm mind. Watch how the universe circles back on itself: you will see that no star in our sky is snuffed out; they all set and rise in their turns. Summer has gone, but another year will bring it back; winter lies low, but its own proper months will restore it; night has swallowed the sun, but day will soon chase night away again. The wandering stars retrace their old paths; one part of the sky is forever rising, another forever sinking. One thing more, and then I'll stop: infants, and small boys, and the insane have no fear of death — and it is deeply shameful if reason cannot give us the peace of mind their foolishness has given them. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You have promised to be a good man; you have enlisted under oath — and that oath is the strongest chain that can bind you to a sound mind. Anyone who tells you this is a soft, easy kind of soldiering is mocking you, and I won't have you deceived. The words of this most honorable contract are the same as the words of the most disgraceful one — the gladiator's: "to be burned, to be bound, to be killed by the sword." From the men who rent their strength to the arena, who eat and drink what they must pay for in blood, a bond is taken that they will endure all this even against their will. From you the bond is that you will endure it willingly, even gladly. The gladiator may lower his weapon and appeal to the crowd for mercy; you will neither lower your weapon nor beg for your life. You must die on your feet, unbeaten. And anyway, what would you gain — a few days, a few years? From the moment we are born, there is no discharge.
"Then how do I get free?" you ask. You cannot escape necessity, but you can conquer it.
Force makes a way.
And philosophy will give you that force. Turn to philosophy, then, if you want to be safe, untroubled, happy — in short, and this matters most, free. There is no other road to it. Folly is low, abject, mean, slavish — thrown open to a whole pack of the cruelest passions. And those passions, savage taskmasters that rule you sometimes by turns and sometimes all at once, can be driven out by wisdom, which is the only real freedom. There is just one path there, and it runs straight; you will not lose your way. Walk with a steady step. If you want everything under your control, put yourself under the control of reason; if reason rules you, you will rule much else. From reason you will learn what to attempt and how to go about it; you will stop blundering into things. Show me one man who can tell you how he began to crave what he craves. Nobody arrived there by planning; he was shoved there by impulse. Fortune attacks us as often as we attack Fortune. It is disgraceful to be carried along instead of walking — to find yourself suddenly in the middle of a whirlpool of events, asking, dazed: "How did I get here?" Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You are right to insist that we step up our exchange of letters. But the greatest benefit comes from conversation, because it creeps into the soul a little at a time. Prepared lectures, declaimed in front of a crowd, make more noise and less intimacy. Philosophy is good advice, and no one gives advice at the top of his lungs. Sometimes, granted, we need those harangues — if I may call them that — when a doubter needs a shove. But when the aim is not to make a man want to learn but actually to make him learn, we must come down to the low tones of conversation. Quiet words enter more easily and stay in the memory. We do not need many words; we need effective ones.
Words should be scattered like seed. However small a seed may be, once it finds favorable ground it unfolds its strength, and from almost nothing it spreads to its fullest growth. Reason works the same way: it does not look large from the outside, but it grows as it works. Few words are spoken; but if the mind truly catches them, they gather strength and shoot up. Yes, precepts are like seeds: they produce much, and they are slight things. Only — as I said — a favorable mind must receive them and take them in. Then the mind will produce abundantly in its turn, giving back more than it received. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I will indeed put together the notes you ask for, carefully ordered and tightly packed. But consider whether the usual course might not help you more than what people now call a "breviary" — in the good old days, when we still spoke real Latin, it was called a "summary." The full course is what a learner needs; the digest is for the man who already knows. One teaches; the other jogs the memory. But I'll give you plenty of both. And a man like you should not be asking me for this authority or that; the man who has to produce a voucher for every statement admits he is a nobody. So I will write exactly what you want, but in my own way; until then, you have plenty of authors whose works will keep your thinking in order well enough. Pick up the list of the philosophers. That act alone will wake you up, once you see how many men have been working for your benefit. You will burn to be one of them yourself. For this is the finest quality the noble soul carries within it: it can be roused toward honorable things.
No man of high gifts is content with what is low and mean; the vision of great achievement calls him and lifts him up. Just as flame leaps straight into the air and can no more be boxed in or held down than it can hold still, so our soul is always in motion — and the more fire it has, the livelier its motion. But happy is the man who has aimed that momentum at better things! He puts himself beyond the jurisdiction of chance. He will handle prosperity wisely, shrink adversity, and look down on what other men gawk at. It is the mark of a great soul to scorn great things and prefer the moderate to the excessive; the moderate is useful and life-giving, while the excessive does harm precisely by being too much. Too rich a soil lays the grain flat; branches snap under too heavy a load; an over-bearing tree never ripens its fruit. The same happens to souls: unchecked prosperity wrecks them, and they use it to injure not only others but themselves. What enemy was ever as insolent to a foe as some men's pleasures are to them? The only excuse we can allow for their lack of self-control, their mad lusts, is that they suffer the very evils they inflicted on others. And the madness torments them justly, because desire that oversteps nature's mean must run off into limitless space. Nature's mean has boundaries; waywardness, and the acts born of willful lust, have none. Utility measures what you need — but by what yardstick do you measure the superfluous? So men sink into their pleasures, and once accustomed to them they cannot do without them; and they are most wretched of all for this reason: they have reached the point where what was once superfluous has become indispensable. They are the slaves of their pleasures, not the enjoyers of them. They even love their own ills — and that is the worst ill of all. Unhappiness hits bottom when shameful things not only attract a man but delight him, and there is no room left for a cure, because what used to be vices have become habits. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Thank you for writing to me so often; you are showing me your real self in the only way you can. I never receive a letter from you without instantly being in your company. If portraits of absent friends give us pleasure — though they only refresh the memory and offer a false, hollow comfort for our missing them — how much more pleasant is a letter, which carries real traces, real marks, of an absent friend! The sweetest thing about meeting face to face is there in the print of a friend's hand on his letter: recognition.
You write that you heard the philosopher Serapio lecture when his ship put in at your town. "He likes to haul his words up in one great rush," you say. "He doesn't let them flow one at a time; he drives them on so they crowd and trample each other. More words come than any single voice can carry." I do not approve of this in a philosopher. A philosopher's speech, like his life, should be composed — and nothing that rushes headlong in a hurry is well ordered. That is why in Homer the rapid style, sweeping down without a break like a snow-squall, is given to the younger speaker, while from the old man eloquence flows gently, sweeter than honey.
So mark my words: that torrential manner of speaking, fast and copious, suits a sidewalk showman better than a man discussing and teaching a serious, important subject. But I object just as strongly to dripping the words out as to racing them: a speaker should neither keep the ear straining nor bury it. The starved, thin-spun style also loses the audience, worn out by its stammering slowness — though it is true that a word we have waited for sinks in more easily than a word that flits past on the wing. Besides, people speak of "handing down" precepts to a pupil; but you are not handing down what will not stay in the hand. And there is this: speech that serves the truth should be plain and unadorned. This crowd-pleasing style has nothing to do with truth. It wants to stampede the mob, to sweep away careless ears by sheer momentum; it doesn't offer itself for examination — it snatches itself out of reach. How can speech govern others when it cannot govern itself? And may I add that speech meant to heal our minds has to sink down into us? Remedies do no good unless they stay in the system.
Anyway, this kind of speech is mostly hollow: more sound than power. My terrors need to be calmed, my irritations soothed, my illusions shaken off, my indulgences reined in, my greed rebuked. Which of those cures can be done in a hurry? What doctor heals his patient on a flying visit? Can I even say that this roaring jumble of ill-chosen words gives pleasure? No. Just as with tricks you would have sworn were impossible — finding out once how they're done is enough — so with these word-acrobats: to have heard them once is plenty. What would anyone want to learn or imitate there? What should you conclude about a man's soul when his speech charges out in total disorder and cannot be reined in? When you run downhill, you cannot stop where you meant to stop; your body's momentum carries your steps past the place you chose. It is the same here: this speed of speech has no control over itself, and it is unworthy of philosophy — for philosophy should place her words carefully, not fling them, and should move one step at a time.
"What then?" you say. "Shouldn't philosophy sometimes raise her voice?" Of course she should — but let her keep her dignity of character, and that is exactly what violent, excessive force strips away. Let philosophy have great strength, but strength held well under control; let her be a stream that never stops flowing — never a torrent. I would hardly allow even a courtroom orator a speed like this, which cannot be called back and plows ahead lawlessly. How could the jurors follow it — men who are often inexperienced and untrained? Even when an orator is carried away by the urge to show off, or by real emotion, even then he should not quicken his pace and pile up words beyond what the ear can bear.
You will be acting rightly, then, if you pay no attention to the men who care how much they can say rather than how well — and if, forced to choose, you choose to speak like Publius Vinicius, the stammerer. When Asellius was asked how Vinicius spoke, he answered: "Gradually." (Geminus Varius put it this way: "I don't see how you can call that man eloquent — he can't get three words out in a row.") Well, why shouldn't you choose to speak the way Vinicius does? Some joker may cross your path, of course, like the man who — while Vinicius was hauling his words out one at a time, as if he were dictating rather than speaking — called out: "Say, haven't you got anything to say?" And yet that is the better fault to have; for the rush of Quintus Haterius, the most famous orator of his age, is exactly what a sensible man should avoid. Haterius never hesitated, never paused; he started once, and he stopped once.
I suppose, too, that some styles suit some nations more, some less. In a Greek you can put up with the unbridled style; we Romans have gotten into the habit of spacing out our words even when we write. And our own Cicero, the man with whom Roman oratory sprang into prominence, was a slow pacer too. The Roman tongue is more inclined to take stock of itself — to weigh, and to offer something worth weighing. Fabianus, a man notable for his life, for his learning, and — third and least — for his eloquence, used to discuss a subject with dispatch rather than haste; you would call it ease rather than speed. That quality I approve in the wise man, though I do not demand it: let his speech simply come out unhampered — though I would rather it were delivered deliberately than spouted.
But here is one more reason to frighten you away from the disease of speed: you could only master that style by losing your sense of shame. You would have to rub all the modesty off your face and refuse to hear yourself speak. That heedless flood will carry along plenty of expressions you would wish you could call back; and, I repeat, you cannot reach that pace and keep your self-respect. Besides, you would need to practice every day and shift your attention from matter to words. And even if the words came readily and flowed without any effort of yours, they would still have to be kept on the leash. A modest walk suits a philosopher; so does restrained speech, far removed from boldness. So when everything is boiled down, the kernel of my advice is this: I bid you be slow of speech. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You are doing something excellent — something that will do you real good — if, as your letter says, you are pressing on toward sound understanding. It is foolish to pray for what you can get from yourself. We don't need to lift our hands toward heaven, or beg some temple keeper to let us up close to the idol's ear, as if a prayer whispered there carried better. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. I mean that, Lucilius: a holy spirit lives inside us, keeping watch over our good deeds and our bad ones — our guardian. As we treat this spirit, so it treats us. In fact, no one is good without God's help. Can anyone rise above Fortune unless God helps him rise? He is the one who supplies noble and upright counsel. In every good man,
A god dwells — which god, we do not know.
If you have ever come into a grove of ancient trees grown far past their usual height, their crossed and woven branches curtaining off the sky, then the sheer height of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your wonder at that thick unbroken shade in the middle of open country will convince you a divine presence is there. Or if a cave, eaten deep into crumbling rock, holds up a mountain on its arch — a space no hands built, hollowed out to that vastness by nature alone — your soul will be shaken by a certain intimation that God exists. We worship the sources of mighty rivers; we set up altars where a great stream bursts suddenly out of hiding; we honor hot springs as divine; we consecrate certain pools for their dark water or their bottomless depth. So when you see a man unterrified in the middle of dangers, untouched by cravings, happy in adversity, calm in the storm — a man who looks at other men from a higher level and at the gods as equals — won't a feeling of reverence for him steal over you? Won't you say, "This thing is too great and too lofty to be of the same stuff as the little body it lives in. A divine power has come down into that man"? When a soul rises above other souls — steady, under control, passing through every experience as if it were a small matter, smiling at the things we fear and the things we pray for — a force from heaven is moving it. A thing like that cannot stand upright unless the divine is propping it up. So the greater part of it stays in the place it came down from. Just as the sun's rays touch the earth but remain rooted in the source they are sent from, so the great and holy soul — sent down so that we could know the divine at closer range — keeps company with us but stays fastened to its origin. It hangs from that source; it turns its gaze there and strains to return; and it takes part in our affairs the way a superior does, not an equal.
What, then, is such a soul? One that shines with no borrowed good — only its own. What is more foolish than to praise a man for things that aren't his? What is more insane than to marvel at things that can pass to somebody else in the next instant? A golden bit does not make a better horse. The lion with the gilded mane — handled, tamed, worn down until he puts up with the decoration — goes into the arena a very different creature from the wild lion whose spirit is unbroken. The wild one, bold in his attack, exactly as nature meant him to be, magnificent in his shaggy fierceness — his glory is that no one can look at him without fear — stands above that other one, the listless gilded brute.
No one should glory in anything but his own. We praise a vine if it loads its shoots with grapes, if its weight bends the very poles that hold its fruit down to the ground. Would anyone prefer to that vine one with golden grapes and golden leaves hanging on it? Fertility is the virtue that belongs to a vine. In a man, too, praise what belongs to the man. He has a household of handsome slaves, a beautiful house; he plants wide acres and collects a wide income? None of that is in the man himself; it is all around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away — what is peculiarly a man's own. You ask what that is? The soul, and reason brought to perfection in the soul. For man is a reasoning animal. So man's highest good is reached when he has fulfilled the purpose nature designed him for at birth. And what does this reason demand of him? The easiest thing in the world — to live according to his own nature. It is the general madness of mankind that makes this hard: we keep shoving one another into vice. And how can a man be called back to safety when no one is holding him back and the whole crowd is pushing him on?
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
So that friend of yours has already convinced you he is a good man? And yet no one can become good — or be known to be good — in so short a time. Do you know whom I mean now when I say "a good man"? One of the second grade, like your friend. The first-class kind is born perhaps once every five hundred years, like the phoenix. And no wonder greatness comes only at long intervals. Fortune turns out ordinary talents by the batch, made to please the mob; but what she wants us to admire, she advertises by the very fact that she makes it rare.
This man you mention, though, is still a long way from the state he claims to have reached. If he knew what "a good man" meant, he wouldn't believe himself one yet; he might even despair of ever becoming one. "But he thinks badly of bad men," you say. So do bad men themselves; there is no heavier penalty for vice than that it disgusts itself and everything like it. "But he hates men who grab great power suddenly and use it without restraint." And he will do exactly the same the moment he gets the same power. With many men, the vices go unnoticed only because they are powerless; the instant these men feel sure of their own strength, their vices will be every bit as daring as the ones prosperity has already put on display. All they lack is the means to unfold their wickedness. You can handle even a poisonous snake while it is stiff with cold; the venom isn't missing — it is only numbed. With many men, the cruelty, the ambition, the self-indulgence want nothing but Fortune's favor to dare crimes that would match the worst on record. That the wish is there you can discover in a moment: give them power equal to their wishes.
Do you remember? You once declared a certain man was under your influence, and I called him fickle, a bird of passage, and said you were holding him not by the foot but by a wing. Was I wrong? You had him by a single feather; he left it in your hand and escaped. You know what a spectacle he made of himself in front of you afterward, and how many of his schemes were poised to come down on his own head. He did not see that in endangering others he was tottering toward his own fall. He did not stop to think how heavy the things he was chasing were — even the ones that weren't superfluous.
So here is the truth to note about the things we pursue, the things we sweat and strain for: either there is nothing desirable in them, or the undesirable outweighs the rest. Some are superfluous; others are not worth their price. But we don't see this clearly. We treat things as free gifts when in fact they cost us dearly. Here is the proof of our stupidity: we think "buying" applies only to the things we pay cash for, and we call free the things we pay for with our very selves. Things we would refuse to buy if the price were our house or some pleasant, profitable estate — those we are eager to get at the cost of anxiety, of danger, of lost honor, lost freedom, lost time. So true it is that every man holds nothing cheaper than himself.
In all our plans and dealings, then, let's act the way we act at a huckster's stall: let's see what the thing we crave is going to cost. Very often what costs nothing costs us the most. I can show you plenty of prizes whose pursuit and capture have wrenched our freedom right out of our hands. We would belong to ourselves, if only these things did not belong to us.
I would have you run the same calculation on losses, too, not just gains. "This thing is bound to perish." It was an extra; you will live without it as easily as you lived before it. If you had it a long time, you lose it after you've had your fill; if only a short time, you lose it before you've grown attached. "You will have less money." Yes — and less trouble. "Less influence." Yes — and less envy. Look around at the things that drive us mad, the things we lose with floods of tears, and you will see: it is not the loss that hurts us, it is the notion of loss. No one feels that these things are gone; he only thinks they are. The man who owns himself has lost nothing. But how few men are blessed with ownership of themselves!
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You want to know how the news reached me — who told me you were entertaining this idea you hadn't breathed to a single soul? The best-informed character there is: gossip. "What," you say, "am I such a great personage that I can set gossip going?" There is no reason to measure yourself against this part of the world; measure yourself against the place where you live. Whatever rises above its surroundings is great — right at the spot where it rises. Greatness is not absolute; comparison swells it or shrinks it. A ship that looms large on a river looks tiny on the ocean. A rudder that is big for one vessel is small for another.
So in your province you really do matter, however little you think of yourself. People are asking what you do, how you dine, how you sleep — and they are finding out, too. All the more reason to live carefully. But do not count yourself truly happy until you can live in full view — until your walls protect you instead of hiding you. We like to believe we build walls around ourselves for safety; the truth is, we build them so we can sin in more privacy. Here is a fact you can weigh a man's character by: you will hardly find anyone who can live with his door wide open. It was conscience, not pride, that stationed doorkeepers at our doors; we live in such a way that being suddenly seen is the same as being caught in the act. But what good does it do to hide, to dodge every eye and ear? A good conscience welcomes the crowd; a bad one is anxious and troubled even when it is alone. If your deeds are honorable, let everyone know them. If they are shameful, what does it matter that no one else knows, so long as you know? How wretched you are, if you hold that witness cheap!
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You are at it again — telling me you are a nobody, that nature treated you shabbily first and Fortune second — when all the while you have it in your power to step out of the crowd and rise to the highest human happiness. If there is one good thing about philosophy, it is this: it never looks into pedigrees. Trace anyone back to his first source and everyone descends from the gods. You are a Roman knight, and your own steady work carried you into that class; but plenty of men find the fourteen rows barred to them; the senate house does not open to everyone; even the army is choosy about whom it admits to its toil and danger. A noble mind, though, is open to all men. By that test we can all achieve distinction. Philosophy neither rejects nor selects anyone; its light shines for all. Socrates was no aristocrat. Cleanthes hauled water and hired himself out to keep a garden. Philosophy did not find Plato a nobleman; it made him one. Why despair of ranking with men like these? They are all your ancestors — if you conduct yourself in a way that is worthy of them. And you will, if you convince yourself right now that no man outranks you in real nobility. We have all had the same number of forefathers; there is no man whose beginnings do not lie beyond memory. Plato says: "Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors." The long flight of time, with all its turns, has shuffled these things together, and Fortune has turned them upside down. Then who is well-born? The man whose nature is well fitted for virtue. That is the only point worth looking at. Otherwise, if you go hunting through antiquity, everyone traces back to a date before which there is nothing. From the first beginnings of the universe down to today, we have come along a line that runs bright, then shabby, then bright again. A hall packed with smoke-blackened busts does not make the nobleman. No one in the past lived his life to lend us glory; what came before us is not ours. It is the soul alone that makes us noble — and the soul may rise above Fortune from any condition at all, no matter what that condition used to be.
Suppose, then, you were not a Roman knight but a freedman. Even so, you could by your own effort come to be the one free man in a crowd of gentlemen. "How?" you ask. By marking off good things from bad without taking the crowd's word for it. Look not at where things come from but at where they lead. If anything can make life happy, it is good on its own merits — because it cannot be twisted into evil. Then where do we all go wrong, since everyone craves the happy life? We mistake the equipment of happiness for happiness itself, and the harder we chase it, the farther we run from it. The sum and substance of the happy life is unshakable peace of mind, and the secret of that peace is unshaken confidence; yet men keep gathering up the causes of worry, and while they haul their baggage down life's treacherous road, they don't just carry burdens — they pick up more along the way. So they fall farther and farther from what they are seeking, and the more effort they spend, the more they get in their own way and are driven back. That is what happens when you hurry through a maze: the faster you go, the worse you are tangled.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You complain that books are scarce where you are. But it is quality, not quantity, that matters. Reading from a short list does you good; reading from a big assortment only entertains you. A man who wants to reach his destination follows one road; he does not wander down many. What you're describing is not traveling; it is drifting.
"But," you say, "I would rather have your advice than your books." Even so, I am ready to send you every book I own — to ransack the whole storehouse. If I could, I would come myself; and if I weren't hoping you will finish your term of office soon, I would have imposed this old man's journey on myself. No Scylla, no Charybdis, none of their storied straits could have scared me off. I would not just have crossed those waters — I would have swum them, for the chance to greet you and judge with my own eyes how much you have grown in spirit.
As for your asking me to send my own writings — that does not make me think myself learned, any more than a request for my portrait would flatter my looks. I know it comes from your affection rather than your judgment; and if judgment is in it anywhere, affection forced the judgment on you. But whatever my books are worth, read them as the work of a man still searching for the truth — not in possession of it, and searching stubbornly, too. I have sold myself to no man; I carry no master's name. I give great weight to the judgment of great men, but I claim something for my own as well. Those men left us not finished discoveries but open problems still waiting to be solved. They might have discovered the essentials, if they hadn't gone hunting the superfluous too. They lost a great deal of time quibbling over words and building tricky arguments — the sort of thing that exercises the wit to no purpose. We tie knots in words, wrap them in double meanings, and then try to untie them.
Do we have that much spare time? Do we already know how to live — how to die? Our whole soul should be pressing toward the point where the real duty lies: seeing to it that things do not deceive us, not just words. Why draw fine distinctions between look-alike words, when no one is ever fooled by them except in the middle of the debate? It is things that lead us astray; it is between things that you must learn to distinguish. We embrace evil instead of good; we pray for the opposite of what we prayed for yesterday. Our prayers clash with our prayers, our plans with our plans. How closely flattery resembles friendship! It doesn't just imitate friendship — it outdoes it, passes it in the race. It finds ears wide open and indulgent, sinks straight to the bottom of the heart, and pleases precisely where it does harm. Show me how to see through that resemblance! An enemy comes to me full of compliments, wearing a friend's face. Vices creep into us under the names of virtues: recklessness hides under the label of courage, moderation gets called laziness, the coward passes for prudent. And here the danger of going astray is real. So stamp these things with clear labels.
Then again, the man who is asked whether he has horns on his head is not such a fool that he feels his forehead to check — and not so silly or slow, either, that any argument, however subtle, can persuade him he doesn't know the facts. Quibbles like that deceive as harmlessly as the juggler's cups and dice, where the trickery itself is the pleasure. Show me how the trick is done, and I lose all interest. I say the same about these word games — for what else should we call such sophistries? Not knowing them does no harm; mastering them does no good. If you really want to sort out slippery meanings, then teach us this instead: that the happy man is not the one the crowd calls happy — the man whose coffers the money pours into — but the man whose goods are all in his soul. A man who stands upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy; who sees no one he would trade places with; who values men only at their worth as men; who takes Nature for his teacher, conforms to her laws, and lives as she commands; whom no violence can strip of what he owns; who turns evil into good; who is sure in judgment, unshaken, unafraid — a man whom force may move but never bewilder. When Fortune hurls her deadliest missile at him with everything she has, she may graze him — rarely — but never wound him. Her other missiles, the ones she flattens the rest of mankind with, bounce off him like hail rattling on a roof: it makes noise, harms no one inside, and melts away.
Why do you bore me with the famous "liar" fallacy, the one so many books have been written about? Look — suppose my whole life is a lie. Refute that. If you are sharp enough, bring my life back to the truth. As it stands, my life counts things essential that are mostly superfluous; and even the part that is not superfluous has no power to make a man fortunate and blessed. Just because a thing is necessary, it does not follow that it is good. Otherwise we degrade the word "good" by handing it to bread and barley porridge and the other bare necessities of staying alive. The good is always necessary; the necessary is not always good, since some downright paltry things are necessary too. No one so misses the noble meaning of the word "good" as to sink it to the level of these humdrum utilities.
Well then — wouldn't your effort be better spent proving to everyone that the hunt for the superfluous costs a great deal of time, and that many people go through life merely collecting the tools of living? Examine individuals, survey mankind in general: there is no one whose life does not face toward tomorrow. "What's the harm in that?" you ask. Infinite harm. Such people are not living; they are getting ready to live. They postpone everything. Even if we paid strict attention, life would outrun us; as it is, life finds us dawdling and passes us by as if it belonged to someone else — and though it ends on the final day, it perishes every day.
But I must not run past the bounds of a letter, which ought not to overfill the reader's left hand. So I will put off to another day our case against the hair-splitters — those over-subtle fellows who make argument the master when it should be the servant.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Your book arrived — the one you promised me. I opened it intending only to sample it; the plan was to skim now and read properly later. But the book itself coaxed me in deeper. It charmed me into going on. You can judge how eloquent it is from this: it felt light in the hand, though at first glance you'd never guess it was your work or mine — it reads like something by Titus Livius, the historian, or even Epicurus. And the charm gripped me and carried me along so completely that I finished it without setting it down once. The sunshine was calling me outside; hunger was nagging; rain clouds were piling up. And still I swallowed the book whole, from the first page to the last.
I wasn't just pleased with it. I was delighted. What wit it has, what spirit! I would have said what force, if the book had had quiet stretches in it — if it had gathered itself and surged only now and then. But there was no surging; instead there was a steady, even flow, a style muscular and clean. Here and there, though, I caught your sweetness breaking through, and in places that gentleness of yours. The style is tall and noble. That's the manner I want you to keep — that direction, that stride. The subject helped too, which is why you should choose rich, productive topics: subjects that grab hold of the mind and wake it up.
I'll say more about the book after a second reading. For now my judgment is still unsettled — it's as if I'd heard the book read aloud rather than read it myself. Let me really examine it. And don't worry: you'll get the truth from me. What a lucky man you are, to give a friend no opening to lie to you at such long range! Though I suppose that even now, with every excuse for lying stripped away, we still have one left: habit — we lie to each other because we always have.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I was glad to hear, from the people who've been visiting you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. That's exactly what I'd expect from a man of your good sense and education. "They are slaves," people say. No — they are men. "Slaves!" No — comrades. "Slaves!" No — unpretentious friends. "Slaves!" No — fellow-slaves, if you stop to consider that Fortune holds exactly the same power over them and over us.
That's why I laugh at the people who think it's degrading to dine with your slave. Degrading — why? Only because of the snobbish custom that surrounds a rich man at his dinner with a crowd of slaves who must stand while he eats. And how he eats! More than he can hold, with monstrous greed, loading a belly stretched so far it forgets how to do a belly's work — so that he labors harder to get all that food back out of himself than he did to cram it in. And the whole time, the poor slaves may not so much as move their lips. Not to speak — not for anything. The rod silences every murmur. Even accidents — a cough, a sneeze, a hiccup — are paid for with the lash. Any sound that breaks the silence is punished savagely. All night long they stand there, hungry and mute.
The result? Slaves who may not talk in front of the master talk about the master. But the slaves of the old days — the ones allowed to talk not just in the master's presence but with him, the ones whose mouths were not stitched shut — those slaves were ready to bare their own necks for their master, to pull any danger hanging over his head down onto their own. They talked at dinner and kept silent under torture. It was this same arrogant treatment that gave rise to the proverb: "You have as many enemies as you have slaves." We do not acquire them as enemies. We make them enemies.
I'll pass over the other cruel and inhuman ways we treat them — how we abuse them not as if they were men, but as if they were pack animals. While we sprawl at the dinner table, one slave wipes up the spat-out food, another crouches under the table collecting what the drunken guests let fall. Another carves the expensive birds, guiding his practiced hand through breast and thigh in sure, exact strokes — a miserable man, if he exists only to carve fat poultry correctly. Though the man who teaches this art for the sake of pleasure may be more miserable still than the man who learns it because he has no choice. Another slave, the wine-server, is dressed up like a woman and forced to fight against his own advancing years: he cannot escape his boyhood — he's dragged back into it. His body is a soldier's already, but he's kept smooth-cheeked, his hair rubbed away or plucked out at the roots, and he stays awake all night, dividing it between his master's drunkenness and his master's lust — a man in the bedroom, a boy at the table. Another has the job of appraising the guests: he must stand there, poor man, and watch to see whose flattery, whose shamelessness of appetite or of tongue, will win an invitation for tomorrow. And think of the caterers, who study the master's palate with delicate expertise — which flavors will sharpen his appetite, which dishes will please his eye, what new combination might rouse a stomach sick with excess, what he'll refuse today out of sheer glut, and what he'll be hungry for. These are the slaves the master cannot bear to eat with. He'd think it beneath his dignity to share a table with his own slave. God forbid!
And yet how many masters he is creating among those very men. I have seen Callistus's former master standing in line at Callistus's door — I have seen him shut out while others were shown in: the same master who once pinned the "For Sale" ticket on Callistus and put him up in the market with the worthless lots. That slave has paid him back — the slave who was shuffled into the first batch, the ones the auctioneer warms up his voice on. Now it is the slave's turn to strike a name off his list, his turn to judge a man unfit to enter his house. The master sold Callistus. But how dearly Callistus has made the master pay.
Please remember this: the man you call your slave sprang from the same stock as you, is smiled on by the same skies, and on precisely equal terms breathes, lives, and dies. You could as easily see the free man in him as he could see the slave in you. When the massacres of Marius's day were over, plenty of men of distinguished birth — men doing their army service as the first step toward the Senate — were flattened by fortune: one ended up a shepherd, another the caretaker of a country cottage. Go ahead and despise a man in whose place you may find yourself at any moment — despise him if you dare.
I don't want to launch into the whole enormous question of how we treat slaves — and we Romans are excessively arrogant, cruel, and insulting toward them. But here is the kernel of my advice: live with your inferior as you would have your superior live with you. Every time you remember how much power you hold over your slave, remember that your own master holds exactly that much power over you. "But I have no master," you say. You're still young; you may have one yet. Have you forgotten how old Hecuba was when she was enslaved? Or Croesus? Or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?
Live with your slave on kind terms — friendly terms, even. Let him talk with you, plan with you, share your life. I know the whole club of exquisites will howl at me for this: "Nothing could be lower," they'll say, "nothing more shameful." These are the same men I catch kissing the hands of other people's slaves. And don't you see how our ancestors stripped away everything hateful from the master's position and everything humiliating from the slave's? They called the master "father of the household" and the slaves "members of the household" — a usage that survives in the theater to this day. They established a holiday on which masters and slaves ate together — not the only day it was allowed, but a day when it was required. They let slaves hold offices within the household and pronounce judgments there; they considered the household a miniature commonwealth.
"So you're telling me," comes the retort, "that I have to seat every one of my slaves at my table?" No — no more than you have to invite every free man to it. But you're wrong if you think I'd turn away certain slaves because their work is dirty — that muleteer, say, or that herdsman. I propose to value men by their character, not by their jobs. A man's character is his own doing; his job is assigned by accident. Invite some to your table because they deserve the honor, and others so that they may come to deserve it — for if there's anything servile in them from the low company they've kept, eating with better men will shake it out. You don't have to hunt for friends only in the forum or the Senate-house, my dear Lucilius. If you pay attention, you'll find them in your own house. Good material often stands idle for want of a craftsman — try it and see for yourself. A man who goes to buy a horse and inspects not the animal but its saddle and bridle is a fool; the man who appraises another man by his clothes and his rank is a fool twice over — for rank is only one more robe we wear.
"He is a slave." But perhaps a free man in soul. "He is a slave." And will that count against him? Show me a man who isn't one. One man is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition — and every one of us is a slave to fear. I can show you an ex-consul who is slave to a little old woman, a millionaire who is slave to a serving-girl; I can show you young men of the noblest families in bondage to pantomime dancers. No slavery is more shameful than the slavery we choose ourselves.
So don't let those fastidious people scare you out of showing your slaves a friendly face instead of a superior one. Let them respect you rather than fear you. Someone will say I'm calling for the liberty-cap for slaves everywhere, that I'm toppling masters from their thrones, because I said slaves should respect a master rather than fear him — "That's his meaning exactly: slaves paying their respects like clients, like morning callers!" Whoever says this forgets that what satisfies a god cannot be too little for a master. To be respected is to be loved — and love cannot be mixed with fear. So I think you are entirely right in not wanting your slaves to fear you, and in doing your correcting with words. The whip is for animals that can't understand them.
Not everything that annoys us actually harms us. But soft living drives us into fits of rage, so that whatever fails to answer our whim sets off our anger. We put on the temper of kings — for kings, too, forgetting their own strength and other men's weakness, go white-hot with fury as though they'd been injured, when their high station keeps them perfectly safe from any such injury. And they know it perfectly well. But by complaining they seize their chances to do harm; they insist they have received injuries in order to inflict them.
I won't keep you any longer — you don't need the sermon. Good character has this mark, among others: it makes its own judgments and sticks to them. Badness is fickle; it changes constantly — never into something better, only into something different.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
That letter you wrote me on the road — as long as the road itself — I'll answer later. I need to go off by myself and work out what advice to give you. You, after all, thought long and hard before deciding to consult me; shouldn't I think longer and harder before answering? It takes more deliberation to settle a question than to raise one — especially when one answer suits you and a different one suits me.
Am I talking like an Epicurean again? The truth is that what's good for you is good for me. I'm no friend of yours unless everything that concerns you concerns me too. Friendship makes us partners in everything — there is no such thing as good luck or bad luck for one of us alone; we live in common. And no one can live happily who looks only at himself, who converts everything into a question of his own profit. You must live for others if you want to live for yourself. This fellowship — kept carefully and reverently, the fellowship that binds us to all human beings and holds that the human race has certain rights in common — does great service to that closer fellowship I was speaking of, friendship. A man who shares much with his fellow man will share everything with his friend.
And this, my excellent Lucilius, is what I'd rather have your subtle logicians teach me: how to help a friend, how to help a fellow human being — not how many senses the word "friend" can carry, or how many things "man" can mean. Look: Wisdom and Folly are lining up on opposite sides. Which do I join? Which side do you want me on? For one man, "friend" and "man" mean the same thing; for another, "friend" and "man" are worlds apart — the first wants a friend for his own advantage, the second wants to make himself an advantage to his friend. And what do you offer me? Word-twisting and syllable-splitting. Apparently, unless I can rig up some cunning premises and stitch a fallacy onto them by false deduction — some lie grown from a seed of truth — I'll never manage to tell what to pursue from what to avoid! I'm ashamed of us. Old men, facing a matter this serious, and we're playing games.
"'Mouse' is a syllable. A mouse eats cheese. Therefore, a syllable eats cheese." Suppose I can't untangle that one — what terrible danger does my ignorance put me in? What a fix I'll be in! No doubt I'd better watch out, or one of these days I'll be catching syllables in a mousetrap — or, if I get careless, a book will eat my cheese. Or wait — here's a shrewder syllogism still: "'Mouse' is a syllable. A syllable does not eat cheese. Therefore a mouse does not eat cheese." What childish nonsense. Is this what we knit our brows over? Is this why we let our beards grow long? Is this what we teach with faces sour and pale?
Do you want to know what philosophy actually offers the human race? Advice. Death is calling one man away; poverty is grinding another; a third is tormented by his neighbor's wealth — or by his own. This man dreads bad luck; that one wants to escape his good luck. Some are mistreated by men, some by the gods. And you're setting up parlor games for me? This is no time for jokes. You have been retained as counsel for suffering humanity. You have promised to help the shipwrecked, the captive, the sick, the poor, the man whose neck waits under the lifted axe. Where are you wandering off to? What are you doing?
The man you're playing word games with is afraid. Help him — take the noose from around his neck. From every side, hands are stretched out to you, begging; ruined lives, lives about to be ruined, plead for some kind of aid; men's hopes and men's resources hang on you. They ask you to pull them out of their restlessness; they ask you to show them, scattered and wandering as they are, the clear light of truth. Tell them what nature has made necessary and what superfluous. Tell them how simple her laws are — how pleasant and unobstructed life is for those who follow them, how bitter and tangled for those who trust opinion instead of nature.
I might grant your logic-games some value in easing men's burdens if you could first show me which part of the burden they will ease. Which of these games drives out lust? Which one even restrains it? I only wish they were merely useless. They are positively harmful. Whenever you like, I can show you plainly that a noble spirit gets impaired and weakened when it's tangled up in such subtleties. I'm ashamed to say what weapons these men hand to soldiers marching out to war against Fortune, and how wretchedly they equip them. Is this the road to the greatest good? Does philosophy get there by if-and-provided-that — by quibbles that would disgrace even a lawyer drafting contracts? For when you deliberately trap the man you're questioning, what are you doing but making him lose his case on a technicality? And yet — just as a judge can reinstate a litigant tricked out of his suit, so philosophy has reinstated these victims of quibbling to their former condition. Why do you men walk away from your own mighty promises? You swore to me, in the grandest language, that gold's glitter would dazzle my eyes no more than a sword's gleam; that I would trample, with magnificent steadiness, on everything all men crave and everything all men fear — and now you descend to the schoolteacher's ABC's? What is your answer?
Is this the path to heaven?
Because that is exactly what philosophy promises me: that I will be made equal to God. That is the invitation I received; that is what I came for. Philosophy — keep your promise!
So, my dear Lucilius, pull back as far as you can from these exceptions and objections of the so-called philosophers. Frankness and simplicity are the right dress for true goodness. Even if you had many years left, you'd have to spend them thriftily to cover life's necessities. As it is, your time is scarce — and what madness it is to spend scarce time learning superfluous things!
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
A man is truly lazy and careless, my dear Lucilius, if he remembers a friend only when a landscape jogs the memory. And yet there are times when the old familiar places wake a sense of loss that had been stored away in the soul — not restoring dead memories, but rousing sleeping ones, the way the sight of a lost friend's favorite slave, or his cloak, or his house, sharpens the mourner's grief even after time has softened it.
And now — look — Campania, and above all Naples and your beloved Pompeii, have struck me with an astonishingly fresh longing for you. You stand in full view before my eyes. I am at the moment of parting from you all over again. I see you choking down your tears, fighting — and failing — against the feelings that surge up at the very instant you try to stop them. It's as if I lost you only a moment ago.
But what isn't "only a moment ago," once you start using your memory? Only a moment ago I was a boy sitting in the school of the philosopher Sotion; only a moment ago I began pleading cases in the courts; only a moment ago I lost the desire to plead them; only a moment ago I lost the ability. The flight of time is infinitely fast — and no one sees it more clearly than the man looking backward. While we're fixed on the present, we miss it: the rush is so smooth, so headlong, that it feels gentle. Do you want to know why? All past time is in the same place. It wears one face; it lies in one heap. Everything drops into the same abyss. Besides, a thing that is short in its entirety can't contain long stretches. The time we spend living is a point — no, less than a point. And nature has played a trick even on this infinitesimal point, dressing it up to look longer: she made one piece of it infancy, another childhood, another youth, another the long downslope, so to speak, from youth to old age, and old age itself another still. So many steps — for so short a climb!
It was only a moment ago that I saw you off on your journey. And yet that "moment ago" is a healthy share of a lifetime — a lifetime so brief, we should remind ourselves, that it will soon run out altogether. Time never used to seem this fast to me. Now its speed is beyond belief — maybe because I feel the finish-line moving toward me, or maybe because I've finally started paying attention and adding up my losses.
That's why it makes me all the angrier that some men spend the greater part of this time on superfluous things — time which, guard it as carefully as you like, isn't enough even for the necessary ones. Cicero declared that if his days were doubled, he still wouldn't have time to read the lyric poets. Put the logicians in the same bin — only their foolishness is more depressing. The lyric poets are at least openly frivolous; the logicians actually believe they're doing serious work. I don't deny that one should give logic a glance — but only a glance, a nod from the doorway, just enough to make sure you're not being tricked into thinking there's buried treasure in it.
Why torture yourself, why lose weight over some puzzle it's cleverer to scorn than to solve? A soldier at his ease, marching in peacetime, can hunt for trinkets along the road. But when the enemy is closing in from behind and the order comes to quicken the pace, necessity makes him throw away everything he picked up in the easy hours. I have no time to chase disputed inflections of words or to try my cleverness on them.
Look at the clans assembling, the gates slammed shut, the weapons being whetted for the war.
I need a stout heart to hear this din of battle around me without flinching. And everyone would rightly call me mad if — while the old men and the women were hauling rocks for the fortifications, while armed young men inside the gates were waiting for the order to charge out, or demanding it, while enemy spears quivered in our gates and the very ground shuddered with tunnels and mines — if in the middle of all that I sat idle, posing dainty little puzzles like this one: "What you have not lost, you have. You have not lost horns. Therefore, you have horns" — or some other trick built on the same model of pure silliness. And yet you'd be just as right to call me mad if I spent my energy on that stuff now — because I am under siege right now. In the other case the danger would only be outside me, with a wall between me and the enemy. As it is, the deadly threats are in the room with me.
I have no time for such nonsense. There's an enormous piece of work in my hands. What am I to do? Death is on my trail, and life is running away from me. Teach me something that meets that. Bring it about that I stop fleeing from death, and that life stops fleeing from me. Give me courage against hardship; give me calm in the face of the unavoidable. Widen the narrow limits of the time I've been allotted. Teach me that the good in life doesn't hang on life's length but on the use we make of it — and that it is possible, in fact usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little. Say to me when I lie down to sleep: "You may not wake again." And when I wake: "You may never sleep again." Say to me when I walk out my door: "You may not come back." And when I come back: "You may never leave again." You are wrong if you think it's only at sea that the gap between life and death is paper-thin. The gap is exactly that narrow everywhere. Death doesn't show himself this close everywhere — but everywhere he is this close.
The language of truth is simple.
So let's not tangle that language up. Nothing suits a soul aiming at great things less than this sly cleverness.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Your letter reached me many months after you sent it, so I saw no point in asking the courier what you were up to. He'd need a remarkable memory to recall that far back! But I hope by now you're living in such a way that I know what you're up to no matter where you are. And what else would you be up to except improving yourself a little every day, dropping some error, and learning that the faults you blame on your circumstances are actually in you? We love to pin certain vices on the place or the time; but those vices will follow us wherever we move.
You know Harpaste, my wife's clown — she's still in my house, a burden that came with a legacy. Personally I have no taste for these sideshow characters; if I ever want to laugh at a fool, I don't have to look far. I can laugh at myself. Well, this clown suddenly went blind. I know the story sounds unbelievable, but I promise you it's true: she doesn't know she's blind. She keeps asking her attendant to move her to different rooms; she says her apartment is too dark.
You can see at once that what makes us smile at Harpaste happens to every one of us. No one understands that he himself is greedy, or that he is grasping. The blind at least ask for a guide; we wander without one, saying: "I'm not ambitious — but nobody can live at Rome any other way. I'm not extravagant — but city life simply demands a big budget. It isn't my fault that I have a temper, or that I haven't settled on any definite plan of life; blame my youth for that." Why do we lie to ourselves? Our trouble isn't outside us. It's inside us, lodged deep in our vitals — and that is exactly why health is so hard to reach: we don't know we're sick.
Suppose we do begin the cure — when will we shake off all these diseases in full bloom? Right now we won't even call in the doctor, whose job would be far easier if he were brought in while the illness was young. A tender, inexperienced mind would follow his advice if he pointed out the right way. No one finds it hard to return to nature except the person who has deserted her. We blush to be taught good sense; but honestly, if it's beneath us to look for a teacher of this art, we should also give up hoping that so great a good will drop into us by accident.
No — we have to work. And to tell the truth, even the work isn't great, provided we begin to shape and rebuild our souls before the crookedness hardens in. But I don't despair even of the hardened case. There is nothing that won't surrender to persistent treatment, to focused and careful attention. However bent the timber, you can straighten it again; heat unbends curved beams, and wood that grew naturally into one shape gets worked into whatever shape we need. How much more easily is the soul reshaped — pliable as it is, more yielding than any liquid! For what is the soul but air in a certain condition? And air, you notice, is more adaptable than anything else precisely because it's thinner than anything else.
So there is nothing, Lucilius, to keep you from having high hopes for us, just because evil has us in its grip right now, or because it has held us a long while. No one gets a good mind before a bad one; the bad mind takes first possession of us all. Learning virtue means unlearning vice. And we should attack the job of freeing ourselves from our faults with all the more courage because, once the good is handed over to us, it's ours forever. Virtue is not unlearned. Opposites sit uneasily where they don't belong, which is why they can be driven out and hustled away; but what arrives in its rightful place stays faithfully put. Virtue is according to nature; vice is her opponent and her enemy. But though virtues, once admitted, cannot leave and are easy to guard, the first steps toward them are hard going, because a weak and sickly mind is afraid of anything unfamiliar. So the mind has to be forced to make a beginning. After that, the medicine isn't bitter; it starts to please us the moment it starts to cure us. With other treatments the pleasure comes only after the recovery; a draught of philosophy is wholesome and sweet in the same swallow.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Every man does the best he can, my dear Lucilius! You over there have Etna, Sicily's towering and most celebrated mountain — though I can't work out why Messala (or was it Valgius? I've been reading both) called it "unique," since plenty of regions belch fire, and not just the high ones, where it happens more often — presumably because fire climbs as high as it can — but low ground too. As for me, I do the best I can: I've had to settle for Baiae. And I left it the day after I arrived. Baiae is a place to avoid, because for all its natural advantages, luxury has claimed it as her own private resort.
"What," you say, "should any place be singled out as an enemy?" Not at all. But just as one style of clothing suits the wise and upright man better than another — not because he hates any particular color, but because he thinks some colors don't fit a person who has chosen the simple life — so there are also places that the wise man, or the man on his way to wisdom, will avoid as bad company for good character. If he's planning his retreat from the world, he won't pick Canopus (though Canopus doesn't forbid anybody to live simply), and he won't pick Baiae either: both have become headquarters of vice. At Canopus luxury pampers itself to the limit; at Baiae it's looser still, as if the place itself licensed a certain amount of misbehavior.
We ought to choose surroundings that are healthy not only for the body but for the character. I wouldn't want to live in a torture chamber; I don't want to live in a nightclub either. Watching drunks stagger along the beach, the rowdy carousing of the boat parties, the lakes ringing with singing troupes, and all the other ways luxury — off the leash of the law, so to speak — not only sins but advertises its sins: why should I have to watch all that? We should put the greatest possible distance between ourselves and whatever provokes vice. We should toughen our minds and drag them far away from the seductions of pleasure. One winter unstrung Hannibal: the soft living of Campania took the fight out of the hero whom Alpine snows could not break. He conquered with his weapons and was conquered by his vices.
We too have a war to fight — a kind of war that allows no rest and no leave. The first enemy to be beaten is pleasure, which, as you see, has carried off even the sternest characters. Anyone who has grasped how big a task he's taken on will know there's no room for daintiness or soft handling. What do I want with those hot baths, or the sweating-rooms where they trap the dry steam that's meant to drain your strength? Sweat should be earned by work.
Suppose we did what Hannibal did — halted mid-campaign, gave up the war, and handed our bodies over to be coddled. Everyone would rightly blame us for quitting early — a dangerous move even for a victor, let alone for a man still fighting his way toward victory. And we have even less right to it than the soldiers under Carthage's flag: we risk more than they did if we slacken, and our labor is greater than theirs even if we press on. Fortune is at war with me, and I will not carry out her orders. I refuse the yoke — no, more than that, I shake off the yoke already on me, which takes even greater courage. The soul must not be pampered. Surrender to pleasure and you have also surrendered to pain, to toil, to poverty. Ambition and anger will demand the same rights over me that pleasure got, and I'll be torn apart — pulled to pieces, rather — among all these competing passions. I have set freedom before my eyes, and that is the prize I'm working for. And what is freedom, you ask? Being a slave to nothing — no circumstance, no compulsion, no accident — and forcing Fortune to meet me on level ground. The day I know I have the upper hand, her power is nothing. Shall I take orders from her when death is in my own hands?
A man occupied with thoughts like these should choose an austere and clean place to live. Surroundings that are too pleasant weaken the spirit, and there's no doubt that where you live can sap your vigor. Animals whose hooves have hardened on rough ground can travel any road; fatten them on soft, marshy meadow and their hooves soon wear through. The bravest soldiers come from stony country; the town-bred and the house-raised are slow off the mark. The hand that goes straight from plough to sword never complains of the work, but your sleek, well-dressed dandy folds at the first cloud of dust. Training in rugged country makes a character strong and fits it for great undertakings. It was more honorable for Scipio to spend his exile at Liternum than at Baiae; a fall like his didn't need so soft a setting. Even the men into whose hands Rome's rising fortunes first poured the wealth of the state — Gaius Marius, Gnaeus Pompey, Caesar — did build villas near Baiae, but they set them on the very tops of the mountains. It seemed more like a soldier's way, to look down from a height on the lands spread wide below. Look at the sites they chose, the positions, the style of building, and you'll see they weren't country houses — they were camps. Do you imagine Cato would ever have lived in a pleasure palace so he could count the loose women sailing past, the barges painted every color there is, the roses drifting across the lake — or so he could listen to serenaders brawling in the night? Wouldn't he rather have stayed behind a trench he'd dug with his own hands to hold for a single night? Wouldn't any real man rather have his sleep broken by a war-trumpet than by a chorus of serenaders?
But I've ranted against Baiae long enough — though against vice, never long enough. Vice, Lucilius, is what I want you to hound, without limit and without end, for it has neither limit nor end. If any vice is tearing at your heart, throw it away from you; and if it can't be pried loose any other way, tear out your heart along with it. Above all, drive pleasures out of your sight. Hate them beyond everything else. They are like those bandits the Egyptians call "lovers" — they embrace us only to strangle us.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
What is this force, Lucilius, that drags us one way when we're aiming another — that pushes us toward the very place we're longing to leave? What is it that wrestles with our spirit and never lets us settle a desire once and for all? We lurch from plan to plan. Not one of our wishes is free, not one is unqualified, not one lasts. "But that's the fool's problem," you say. "Nothing suits him for long." Yes — but how and when do we tear ourselves loose from that folly? No one has strength enough to climb out on his own. Someone has to reach down a hand; someone has to pull us clear.
Epicurus says that certain men have worked their way to the truth without anyone's help, cutting their own path — and he saves his special praise for these, whose drive came from within, who pushed to the front on their own. Others, he says, need outside help: they won't move unless someone leads the way, but they'll follow faithfully. Metrodorus, he says, was one of these. That kind of man is excellent too, but second class. And we're not first class ourselves; we'll be well treated if we're admitted to the second. Don't sneer at a man who can only be saved with someone else's help, either — the will to be saved counts for a great deal too.
You'll find yet a third class of man, and not one to despise: men who have to be forced and driven into doing right, who need not so much a guide as someone to encourage them — practically to shove them along. If you want a specimen of this pattern too, Epicurus tells us Hermarchus was one. And of the last two classes, he's readier to congratulate the one, but he has more respect for the other: both reached the same goal, and it's a greater credit to have gotten the same result out of tougher material.
Imagine two buildings, equal in height and grandeur but nothing alike underneath. One went up on flawless ground, and construction ran straight ahead. The other swallowed its materials into the foundations, sunk into soft and shifting soil, with enormous labor wasted just reaching solid rock. Looking at the two, you see plainly everything the first has achieved, while the larger and harder part of the second is hidden. It's the same with human dispositions. Some are pliable and easy to manage; others have to be hammered out by hand, so to speak, and spend all their effort laying their own foundations. So I'd call the man who has never had trouble with himself the luckier one — but the other man, I feel, has deserved better of himself: he won a victory over the meanness of his own nature, and he didn't stroll to wisdom. He wrestled his way there.
You can be sure this stubborn nature, the kind that demands heavy labor, is the one planted in us. There are obstacles in the road — so let's fight, and call in some reinforcements. "Whom shall I call?" you say. "This man, or that one?" There's another option open to you: go to the ancients. They have the time to help you. Help can come not only from the living but from the dead. Among the living, though, let's choose — not the men who pour out words with the greatest fluency, grinding out platitudes and putting on their own little private exhibitions — not those, I say, but men who teach us by their lives: men who tell us what to do and then prove it by doing it, who show us what to avoid and are never caught doing what they've ordered us to avoid.
Choose as your guide a man you admire more when you see him act than when you hear him speak. I wouldn't stop you from listening to the philosophers who hold public lectures and debates, provided they come before the crowd for the purpose of improving themselves and their hearers, and not to advance their own careers. For what is uglier than philosophy fishing for applause? Does the patient praise the surgeon in the middle of the operation? Be silent, be reverent, and submit to the cure. Even if you shout your approval, I'll hear it as the groan of a man whose sores are being probed. You want to show that you're paying attention, that the grandeur of the subject stirs you? You may — at the proper time. I'll certainly allow you to judge and cast your vote for the better course. Pythagoras made his pupils keep silent for five years; do you think that entitled them to burst into instant applause?
How mad is the man who walks out of a lecture hall happy — because the ignorant clapped! Why does it please you to be praised by men you couldn't praise yourself? Fabianus used to speak to popular audiences, but his listeners kept their self-control. Now and then a great shout of praise would break out, but it was set off by the greatness of his subject, not by the sound of speech sliding out smooth and soft. Let there be a difference between the applause of the theater and the applause of the school; there is a decent way even to give praise. Watch closely, and every act is significant; you can read character in the smallest signs. The lecher is betrayed by his walk, by a movement of the hand, sometimes by a single answer, by a finger touching his head, by a shifting eye. The scoundrel is exposed by his laugh; the madman by his face and bearing. These things show themselves by their marks — and you can tell the character of any man by watching how he gives and receives praise. The philosopher's audience stretch out admiring hands from every corner, and sometimes the adoring crowd practically hangs over the speaker's head. But if you really understand what you're seeing, that isn't praise; it's just applause. Leave the shouting to the arts whose business is pleasing the crowd; let philosophy be worshipped in silence. Young men, true, must sometimes be given free rein to follow an impulse — but only at moments when it really is impulse, when they can't force themselves to stay silent. Praise like that encourages the listeners themselves and spurs the young mind. But let them be stirred by the matter, not the style; otherwise eloquence does them harm, making them fall in love with itself and not with the subject.
I'll set this topic aside for now; it deserves a long study of its own — how the public should be addressed, what liberties a speaker may take with a crowd, and what a crowd may take with a speaker. There's no doubt philosophy has lost something now that she has put her charms up for sale. But she can still be seen in her sanctuary — if the man presenting her is a priest and not a peddler.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You can talk me into almost anything now: I was recently talked into traveling by water. We cast off on a lazily smooth sea. The sky, I admit, was loaded with dirty clouds, the kind that usually break into rain or squalls; but I figured the few miles from Puteoli to your dear Parthenope could be dashed off quickly, doubtful, lowering sky or not. So to get away faster I struck straight out to sea toward Nesis, meaning to cut across all the inlets. When we were far enough out that it hardly mattered whether I turned back or kept going, the smooth water that had lured me out vanished. It wasn't a storm yet, but the ground-swell was running, and the waves kept coming faster. I began asking the pilot to put me ashore somewhere. He said the coast was rough, with nowhere to land, and that in bad weather nothing frightened him like a lee shore. But I was suffering too badly to think about danger: I was in the grip of that sluggish seasickness that brings no relief — the kind that churns the bile without clearing it. So I laid down the law to my pilot and forced him, like it or not, to make for shore. As we drew near, I didn't wait for things to be done by Virgil's book, until
Prow faced seawards
or
Anchor plunged from bow;
I remembered my credentials as a veteran devotee of cold water, and, cloak and all, I let myself down into the sea, just as a cold-water bather should. What do you think I went through, scrambling over the rocks, hunting out a path or making one? I understood then that sailors have good reason to fear the land. It's hard to believe what I endured when I could not endure myself. Take my word for it: the reason Ulysses got shipwrecked at every possible opportunity wasn't so much that the sea-god had a grudge against him from birth — he was simply prone to seasickness. And I too, whenever I have to go anywhere by sea, will reach my destination in the twentieth year.
Once I'd finally settled my stomach (you know one doesn't escape seasickness just by escaping the sea) and refreshed my body with a rubdown, I began to reflect on how completely we forget or ignore our failings — even the bodily ones, which keep reminding us that they exist, to say nothing of the failings that hide deeper as they grow more serious. A slight chill fools us; but when it builds and a genuine fever catches fire, it forces a confession even out of a hardy man who can take a great deal of suffering: I am ill. There's a pain in the foot, a prickling in the joints; we still cover the complaint up and announce we've twisted an ankle or overdone the exercise. While the ailment is uncertain and just beginning, it hunts for a name; but once it starts swelling the ankles too, and has turned both our feet into "right" feet, there's no way around it — we have to confess it's gout.
With diseases of the soul, the opposite holds: the worse a man has one, the less he feels it. Don't be surprised at that, my dear Lucilius. A light sleeper follows visions in his sleep, and sometimes even knows, while sleeping, that he's asleep; but heavy slumber wipes out the very dreams and sinks the spirit so deep it has no sense of itself at all. Why will no man confess his faults? Because he's still inside them. Only the man who has woken up can tell his dream; confessing your faults is proof of a sound mind.
So let us rouse ourselves, so that we can catch our own mistakes and correct them. But philosophy is the only power that can wake us, the only power that can shake us out of this deep sleep. Devote yourself to her entirely. You are worthy of her; she is worthy of you — fall into each other's arms. Say goodbye to every other interest, boldly and openly. There is no studying philosophy in your spare time.
If you were ill, you'd drop your personal affairs and forget your business; you wouldn't think enough of any client to go plead his case during a mild afternoon between attacks. You'd try your hardest to be rid of the illness as fast as possible. Well then — won't you do the same thing now? Push every obstacle aside and clear your time for getting a sound mind; no one reaches it while busy with other things. Philosophy wields her own authority; she appoints her own hours and doesn't accept whatever slot you assign her. She is not a hobby for odd moments but a daily practice; she is mistress, and she commands our attendance. Alexander, when some city promised him part of its territory and half its property, answered: "I didn't invade Asia to accept whatever you might give — you'll keep whatever I might leave." Philosophy says the same to every other occupation: "I do not intend to take the time you have left over. You will keep the time I leave."
Turn to her, then, with your whole soul; sit at her feet; cherish her — and a great distance will open between you and other men. You'll be far ahead of all mortals, and the gods will not be far ahead of you. What will be the difference between you and the gods, you ask? They will live longer. But truly, it takes a great artist to fit a full likeness into a miniature. The wise man's life spreads as wide for him as all eternity does for a god. And on one point the sage actually beats the god: the god is free from fear by the gift of nature; the wise man, by his own gift. What a thing that is — to have the weaknesses of a man and the serenity of a god! The power of philosophy to blunt every blow of chance is beyond belief. No missile can lodge in her body; she is well guarded and impenetrable. Some spears she simply robs of their force, shrugging them off with the loose folds of her gown as if they had no power to harm; others she knocks aside and hurls back so hard they rebound on the sender.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
My bad health had granted me a long furlough — and then, without warning, it attacked again. "What kind of bad health?" you ask. A fair question, since there's no kind I haven't met. But one particular ailment has been assigned to me, so to speak, as my very own. I don't see why I should call it by its Greek name; "shortness of breath" describes it well enough. The attack is very brief, like a squall at sea; it's usually over within an hour. And no wonder — who can spend a long time breathing his last? Every misery and hazard the body has to offer has passed through me, and none seems worse than this one. Naturally so. Anything else is merely being sick; this is gasping out your life. That's why the doctors call it "rehearsing death." One of these days the breath will finally do what it has practiced so often.
Do you think I'm writing this letter in high spirits just because I escaped? Celebrating this so-called recovery would be as absurd as a defendant thinking he's won his case because he's managed to postpone the trial. But even while I was fighting for air, I never stopped resting easy in cheerful, brave thoughts.
"What's this?" I said to myself. "Does death keep testing me? Let it. I tested death a long time ago." "When?" you ask. Before I was born. Death is simply not existing, and I already know what that's like. What was before me will be after me. If there's any suffering in that state, there must have been suffering back then too, before we came into the light of day — and we felt no discomfort then. I ask you: wouldn't you call a man an utter fool for believing that a lamp is worse off after it's put out than before it was lit? We too are lit and put out. In between comes a stretch of suffering; on either side lies deep peace. Unless I'm badly mistaken, my dear Lucilius, this is where we go wrong: we think death lies only ahead of us, when in fact it lies both behind us and ahead. Whatever was before our birth was death. And what difference does it make whether you never begin or you leave off, when the result of either is the same — you do not exist?
I kept up these encouragements to myself — silently, of course, since I didn't have breath to spare for talking. Then little by little the shortness of breath, already dwindled to a sort of panting, came at longer intervals, then slowed, and finally leveled off. Even now, though the gasping has stopped, my breath doesn't come and go naturally; I feel a catch in it, a hesitation. Let it do as it pleases, so long as the sighing doesn't come from my soul. Take this assurance from me: I will not tremble at the final hour. I'm already prepared; I make no plans for a whole day ahead. But the man you should praise — and imitate — is the one who enjoys living and yet doesn't object to dying. Where's the virtue in leaving when you're being thrown out? And yet there's a virtue here too: I am being thrown out, yes, but as if I were choosing to leave. That's why the wise man can never be thrown out — being thrown out means being removed from a place you're unwilling to leave, and the wise man does nothing unwillingly. He escapes necessity because he wills what necessity is going to force on him anyway.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I've just come back from a ride in my litter, and I'm as worn out as if I'd walked the whole distance instead of being carried sitting down. Even being carried is hard work if it goes on long enough — maybe all the more so because it's an unnatural kind of exercise. Nature gave us legs to do our own walking and eyes to do our own seeing. Our luxuries have sentenced us to weakness: what we long refused to do, we've finally lost the power to do. Still, I needed to give my body a shaking — either to jolt loose the bile that had gathered in my throat, if that was my trouble, or, if the very breath in me had somehow thickened, to let the jolting thin it out; I could feel it was doing me good. So I insisted on riding longer than usual, along an attractive stretch of beach that curves between Cumae and Servilius Vatia's country house, pinned like a narrow path between the sea on one side and the lake on the other. A recent storm had packed the sand firm underfoot. As you know, when the waves beat down hard and fast they level a beach, while a long spell of fair weather loosens it, because the sand loses the moisture that binds it together.
As my habit is, I began looking around for something I could use, and my eyes landed on the villa that had once belonged to Vatia. So this was where that famous praetorian millionaire spent his old age! He was famous for nothing but his leisure, and for that alone people counted him lucky. Whenever men were ruined by their friendship with Asinius Gallus, or ruined by hating Sejanus — and later by being close to him, since offending him was no more dangerous than loving him — people would cry out: "O Vatia, you alone know how to live!" But what Vatia knew was how to hide, not how to live. And there is a world of difference between a life of leisure and a life of idleness. While Vatia was alive, I never drove past that place without saying to myself: "Here lies Vatia."
But philosophy, my dear Lucilius, is such a holy thing — so deserving of reverence — that even its counterfeit pleases people. The crowd assumes that anyone who has withdrawn from society is a man of leisure: carefree, self-sufficient, living for himself. In fact those rewards belong only to the wise man. Does a man gnawed by anxiety know how to live for himself? Does he even know — and this comes first — how to live at all? The man who has run away from affairs and from other people, who has been driven into seclusion by the wreckage his own desires made, who can't bear to see his neighbor happier than he is, who has gone to ground in fear like some timid, sluggish animal — that man is not living for himself. He is living for his belly, his sleep, and his lust, and that is the most shameful thing of all. Living for no one doesn't automatically mean living for yourself. Still, steadiness and sticking to a purpose count for so much that even sheer laziness, stubbornly kept up, manages to command a certain respect.
I can't describe the villa itself with any accuracy. I know only the front of the house and the parts on public display, the parts any passerby can see. There are two grottoes, cut by hand at enormous labor, each as big as the most spacious hall: one never admits the sun; the other holds it until sunset. A stream runs through a grove of plane-trees, drawing its supply from both the sea and Lake Acheron; it cuts through the grove like a race-course, and it's big enough to stock fish, though its water is constantly being drawn off. When the sea is calm they leave it alone; only when storms give the fishermen a forced holiday do they dip into that well-stocked reserve. But the most convenient thing about the villa is this: Baiae is right next door. The villa is spared all the annoyances of that resort and enjoys all its pleasures. I appreciate these attractions myself, and I believe it's a villa for every season of the year. It faces the west wind — intercepts it, in fact, so completely that Baiae never gets it. Vatia was no fool, clearly, when he picked this spot to park his leisure in, though by then his leisure was already barren and decrepit.
But the place where you live contributes very little to your peace of mind. It's the mind that must make everything agreeable to itself. I have seen men gloomy in a cheerful, lovely villa, and I have seen men in the middle of total solitude who looked for all the world like men buried in business. So don't conclude that your life is badly placed just because you aren't here in Campania. Anyway, why aren't you? Just send your thoughts this way. You can converse with absent friends as often as you like, and for as long as you like. In fact we enjoy this pleasure — the greatest pleasure there is — all the more when we're apart. Presence makes us spoiled: because we can talk or sit together whenever we please, once we've parted we give no thought at all to the people we just saw. And we should bear absence cheerfully for another reason: everyone is constantly absent from his friends, even when they're present. Count it up — first the nights spent apart, then each friend's separate engagements, then each one's private studies and trips to the country — and you'll see that foreign travel doesn't steal much from us. A friend should be held in the spirit, and the spirit never loses him; the spirit can see whomever it wants to see, every single day.
So share your studies with me, and your meals, and your walks. Life would be lived within cramped walls indeed if anything were closed off to our thoughts. I see you, my dear Lucilius; I hear you at this very moment. I am so completely with you that I wonder whether I should stop writing you letters and start sending you notes.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
May I die if silence isn't the first requirement for a man who has shut himself away to study! And now imagine the assortment of noises booming around my ears. I have lodgings directly over a public bathhouse. Picture every variety of sound that can make a man hate his own ears. When the strongmen are working out, swinging their lead weights around, straining hard — or pretending to strain hard — I hear the grunting; and every time they let out the breath they've been holding, I hear the whistling, high-pitched panting. When some lazy customer settles for a cheap rubdown, I hear the smack of the masseur's hand on his shoulders — a different note depending on whether the palm lands flat or cupped. Then a professional ball-player shows up and starts shouting the score: that's the finishing touch. Add the occasional rowdy being hauled off, or a pickpocket caught in the act; add the man who loves the sound of his own voice in the bath, and the enthusiasts who hit the swimming pool with a tremendous smack and splash. Besides all these — people whose voices, if nothing else, are at least normal — imagine the hair-plucker, forcing out his thin, shrill cry over and over to advertise himself, never quiet except when he's plucking someone's armpits and making the customer shriek instead of him. Then the cake-seller with his whole repertoire of cries, and the sausage-man, and the sweets-vendor, and every hawker of food crying his wares, each with his own distinctive tune.
"You must have nerves of iron," you say, "or be deaf as a post, if your mind holds together in all that assorted, clashing racket — when our friend Chrysippus is driven half to death by the steady stream of people telling him good morning!" But I swear to you this uproar means no more to me than waves or falling water — even though I'm told a certain tribe once moved their city for the sole reason that they couldn't stand the thunder of a Nile cataract. Words distract me more than noise does. Words demand attention; noise just fills the ears and beats on them. In the category of sounds that surround me without distracting me, I count passing carriages, the machinist on my block, a saw-sharpener nearby, and the fellow demonstrating little pipes and flutes at the Trickling Fountain — who doesn't so much sing as shout.
An intermittent noise, I'll admit, bothers me more than a steady one. But by now I've toughened myself against the whole lot; I could endure even a boatswain screeching out the stroke to his rowers. I force my mind to pay attention to itself and not be lured outside. Let all outdoors be bedlam, so long as there's no riot within — so long as fear and desire aren't brawling in my chest, so long as stinginess and extravagance aren't at each other's throats. What good is a quiet neighborhood if your emotions are in an uproar?
It was night, and all the world lay lulled to rest.
Not true. There is no real rest unless reason has done the lulling. Night doesn't banish our troubles; it brings them out where we can see them. It merely trades one set of worries for another. Even in bed, the sleepless hours are as harassing as the day was. Real tranquility is what an uncorrupted mind enjoys when it relaxes. Look at the poor wretch courting sleep in his hushed mansion: so that no sound may disturb his ear, his whole troop of slaves is ordered silent, and whoever approaches him must come on tiptoe — and there he tosses from side to side, snatching at scraps of sleep between complaints, insisting he heard sounds he never heard at all. And why? His soul is making the noise. The soul is what must be quieted; that's where the mutiny needs putting down. Don't assume a soul is at peace just because the body lies still. Sometimes quiet means disquiet.
So whenever that ungovernable sluggishness gets a grip on us, we should rouse ourselves to action and keep busy with good pursuits. Great generals, when they see their troops turning mutinous, put them to work or keep them occupied with small raids. A busy man has no time for mischief, and nothing is more certain than this: the vices of leisure are worked off by work. People have often supposed I retired from public life out of disgust with politics, out of regret at my luckless, thankless position. Yet here in this retreat — where fear and weariness drove me — my ambition sometimes sprouts up fresh. It never quieted down because it was rooted out; it quieted down because it got tired, or maybe just annoyed at how its plans were going. It's the same with luxury. It seems to have left for good; then, once we've made our public profession of frugality, it starts nagging at us, and in the middle of our economies it goes hunting for the pleasures we merely walked away from but never condemned. And the more stealthily it comes back, the harder it hits. Vices out in the open are milder; even a disease is further along the road to a cure once it breaks out of hiding and shows its strength. Greed, ambition, and the other diseases of the mind — you can be sure they do their worst harm when they hide behind a show of health.
We look retired. We are not. If we had retired sincerely — if we had truly sounded the signal for retreat and turned our backs on the world's glitter — then, as I said above, nothing outside us could distract us. No chorus of men, no chorus of birds, could break in on good thoughts once those thoughts had grown steadfast and sure. A mind that startles at voices and chance sounds is unstable; it hasn't yet withdrawn into itself. It carries a residue of anxiety inside, a rooted fear that makes it prey to worry — as our Vergil says:
I, whom no hurled spear could once make flee, nor Greeks advancing in their massed array, now startle at each sound and fear each breeze, afraid both for my child and for the load I bear.
The first man is the wise man: he doesn't flinch at the whistle of spears, or the clashing armor of the massed enemy, or the roar of a city falling around him. The second man knows nothing; he fears for his belongings, pales at every sound; any cry at all knocks him flat, because he takes it for the battle-shout; the slightest stir leaves him breathless with fright. His load is what makes him afraid. Pick anyone you please from among Fortune's favorites, dragging their many responsibilities, hauling their many burdens, and you'll see Vergil's man — "afraid both for his child and for the load he bears."
You may be sure you're at peace with yourself, then, when no noise reaches you, when no voice can shake you out of yourself — not a flattering voice, not a threatening one, not just an empty racket buzzing meaninglessly around you. "Fine," you say, "but isn't it sometimes simpler just to get away from the uproar?" Granted. And I'm going to do exactly that: I'll move out of this place. I only wanted to test myself and get some practice. Why should I go on being tormented, when Ulysses found so simple a remedy for his crew against even the Sirens?
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
When the time came to return to Naples from Baiae, I had no trouble convincing myself that a storm was brewing — anything to avoid another trip by sea. But the road was so deep in mud the whole way that you might say I made a voyage after all. That day I went through the athlete's complete routine: first the anointing — with mud, in our case — and then the dusting with sand, courtesy of the Naples tunnel. No place could feel longer than that prison. Nothing could be dimmer than those torches, which didn't help us see through the darkness so much as see the darkness itself. And even if the place had any light, the dust would smother it — dust that is oppressive and unpleasant even in the open air. Imagine it in there, where it rolls back on itself and, penned in with no ventilation, blows back into the faces of the very people who stirred it up. So we suffered two opposite plagues at once: on the same road, on the same day, we fought both mud and dust.
Still, the gloom gave me something to think about. I felt a certain jolt in my mind — a change, though not fear — caused by the novelty and the nastiness of an unusual situation. I'm not talking about myself here, of course; I'm nowhere near being a perfect man, or even a middling one. I mean the man over whom Fortune has lost her power. Even his mind will feel the jolt; even his color will change. There are certain feelings, my dear Lucilius, that no courage can escape; nature keeps reminding courage what perishable stuff it is. So even the brave man will knit his brow at grim news, and shudder at a sudden apparition, and go dizzy standing at the rim of a cliff and looking down. That isn't fear. It's a natural reaction that reason cannot argue away. That's why some brave men, perfectly willing to shed their own blood, can't bear to watch someone else's being shed. Some people go weak and faint at the sight of a fresh wound; others react the same way to handling — or even looking at — an old, festering one. And some men will take a sword-stroke more readily than they can watch one being struck.
What I felt, then, as I said, was a change, not a real disturbance. At the first glimpse of daylight my good spirits came back — unbidden, uncommanded. And I began musing to myself on what fools we are to fear some things more than others, when every one of them ends the same way. What difference does it make whether a watchtower falls on you or a mountain? None — you'll find none at all. Yet some men fear the mountain more, though both are equally deadly. That's how blind fear is: it looks not at the outcome but at the machinery of the outcome.
Now perhaps you think I'm talking about the Stoics, who hold that the soul of a man crushed under a great weight can't survive, but is scattered on the spot because it had no free way out. I am not — and the people who say that are, in my opinion, wrong. Just as a flame cannot be crushed out, because it slips around the edges of whatever presses down on it; just as air cannot be damaged by whips and blows, or even sliced apart, but flows back around whatever it yields to — in the same way the soul, which is made of the finest particles there are, cannot be trapped or destroyed inside the body. Because of its very fineness, it slips through the very thing that is crushing it. As a lightning-bolt, however widely its strike flashes, makes its return through a narrow crack, so the soul, subtler even than fire, has a way of escape through any part of the body. So the only real question is this: can the soul be immortal? But of one thing be sure: if the soul does survive the body's crushing, then the soul cannot possibly be crushed out — precisely because it does not perish. The rule of immortality admits no exceptions, and nothing can harm what is everlasting.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Until today I never fully understood how scant of words our language is — how downright poverty-stricken. We happened to be talking about Plato, and a thousand subjects came up that needed names and had none; and there were others that once had names but have lost them, because we became too fussy about using them. But who can afford to be fussy in the middle of poverty? There is an insect the Greeks call oestrus — a gadfly that drives cattle mad and scatters them all over their pasture. Our old word for it was asilus. Don't take my word for it; take Virgil's:
Near Silarus' groves and the green oaks of Alburnus there swarms an insect that the Romans call asilus — in Greek the name is oestrus. Fierce, with a harsh and strident buzz, it drives the panicked herds stampeding through the woods.
From which I gather the word has died out. And, not to keep you waiting too long: there used to be plain, uncompounded words in circulation. Men once said cernere ferro — "to decide it with the sword" — as Virgil again will prove:
Great heroes, born in many lands, had come to settle matters, man to man, with steel.
This "settling of matters" we now express only with the compound decernere; the plain verb has gone obsolete. And the ancients used to say iusso, instead of iussero, for "I shall have ordered" in a conditional clause. Again, don't take it from me; take it from Virgil:
The rest of the soldiers shall conduct the fight with me, where I shall bid.
My purpose in piling up these examples is not to show off how much time I've wasted on the study of language. I only want you to see how many words that were everyday currency in Ennius and Accius have grown moldy with age — and how even Virgil, whose pages are thumbed daily, has had some of his words filched out from under us.
"And what," I suppose you'll say, "is all this preamble for?" I won't keep you in the dark. I want, if possible, to say the word essentia — "essence" — in your hearing and get a favorable reception. If I can't manage that, I'll risk the word anyway and put you out of humor. I have Cicero as my authority for it, and I count him a powerful authority. If you want a more recent witness, I'll cite Fabianus — careful of speech, cultivated, so polished in style that he'll satisfy even our fussy modern taste. For what else can we do, my dear Lucilius? How else are we to find a word for what the Greeks call ousia — the indispensable thing, the natural underpinning of everything? So I beg you: allow me to use essentia. I promise to exercise the privilege you grant me as sparingly as possible; maybe I'll be content merely to hold the right without using it.
Yet what good will your indulgence do me when — look at this — I still can't express in Latin the very idea that gave me my excuse to rail at our language's poverty? And you'll condemn our narrow Roman limits even more when you learn that the word I can't translate is one syllable long. "What word?" you ask. The Greek on: "being." You think I'm slow; you think the translation is lying right there in the open — just say "that which is." But I notice a great difference: you're forcing me to render a noun with a verb. Still, if it must be done, "that which is" it shall be.
A friend of ours, a man of great learning, was saying today that Plato uses this idea in six different senses. I'll explain all six to you — but first I have to point out that there is such a thing as a genus and such a thing as a species.
For the moment we're hunting the primary genus — the one on which all the different species depend, the source of every classification, the term that gathers up all universal ideas. We'll find it if we start from particulars and reckon backward, for the particulars will lead us up to the first notion. "Man" is a species, as Aristotle says; so is "horse"; so is "dog." So we need some common bond that embraces all three and holds them subordinate to itself. What is it? "Animal." Now we have the beginnings of a genus, "animal," containing man, horse, and dog. But some things have life — anima — and yet are not animals: we all agree that plants and trees are alive, which is why we speak of them living and dying. So "living things" takes a still higher place, since animals and plants both fit inside it. Some things, however, lack life — rocks, for instance. So yet another term outranks "living things," and that term is "substance." I'll classify substance by saying that all substances are either animate or inanimate. But there is still something above substance, because we say some things possess substance and other things lack it. What, then, is the term from which everything else derives? The one we gave that awkward name a moment ago: "that which is." For that term divides into species, so that we can say: that which is either possesses substance or lacks it.
This, then, is what genus means — the primary, the original, the "general," to play on the word. There are other genera, of course, but they are special genera. "Man," for example, is a genus: it contains species by nation — Greek, Roman, Parthian; by color — white, black, yellow; and individuals too — Cato, Cicero, Lucretius. Insofar as "man" includes many kinds, it counts as a genus; insofar as it sits beneath a higher term, it counts as a species. But the genus "that which is" is general absolutely: no term stands above it. It is the first word in the classification of things, and everything falls under it.
The Stoics would set yet another genus above this one, more primary still; I'll come to it in a moment, once I've shown that the genus discussed above deserves its first place, capable as it is of including everything. So: I divide "that which is" into two species — things with substance and things without. There is no third class. How do I divide substance? By saying it is either animate or inanimate. How do I divide the animate? "Some things have mind, while others have only life." Or put it this way: "Some things have the power of movement, of walking, of changing place, while others are rooted in the ground and are fed and grow only through their roots." And into what species do I divide animals? They are either perishable or imperishable.
Now, certain Stoics take the primary genus to be "the something," and here is their reasoning. They say: "In the order of nature, some things exist and some things do not — and even the things that do not exist are part of the order of nature. What these are will occur to you at once: centaurs, giants, and every other figment of faulty reasoning, things that have taken on a definite shape even though they have no bodily reality."
But now I return to what I promised: how Plato sorts everything that is into six different classes.
The first class of "that which is" cannot be caught by sight or touch or any of the senses; it can be grasped only by thought. The generic concept — "man" in general — never comes within range of the eyes; a particular man does: Cicero, Cato. Nobody has ever seen "animal"; we think it, we don't see it. What we see is some particular animal — a horse, a dog.
The second class, according to Plato, is that which is prominent and stands out above everything else; this, he says, exists pre-eminently. The word "poet" gets used loosely of anyone who writes verse; but among the Greeks it has come to be the badge of one man. Say "the poet," and everyone knows you mean Homer. So what is the pre-eminent Being? God, surely — greater and more powerful than anything else.
The third class is made up of the things that exist in the proper sense of the term. They are countless, but they lie beyond our sight. "What things?" you ask. Plato's own private furniture, so to speak: he calls them "ideas," and from them all visible things are created, and on their pattern everything is shaped. They are immortal, unchangeable, inviolable. Listen to what an "idea" is — or rather, what Plato takes it to be: "The idea is the everlasting pattern of the things that nature creates." Let me unpack that definition to set the matter in a clearer light. Suppose I want to paint your portrait. You yourself are the pattern of the picture: from your face my mind receives a certain outline, which it then embodies in its own handiwork. The look that teaches and guides me, the pattern I set out to imitate — that is the "idea." Nature possesses an infinite number of such patterns — of men, of fish, of trees — and everything nature has to make is worked out on their model.
In fourth place we'll put "form." To understand what form means you'll have to pay close attention — and hold Plato, not me, to account for the difficulty. But then, there are no fine distinctions without difficulty. A moment ago I used the painter as an illustration. When that artist wanted to paint Virgil in colors, he gazed at Virgil himself. Virgil's outward appearance was the "idea" — the pattern of the intended work. What the artist draws from that pattern and embodies in his own work is the "form." Where's the difference, you ask? The one is the pattern; the other is the shape taken from the pattern and put into the work. The artist follows the one; the other he creates. A statue has a certain look: that look of the statue is the "form." And the pattern itself has a certain look, which the sculptor studied as he carved: that is the "idea." One more distinction, if you want it: the form is in the artist's work; the idea is outside the work — and not just outside it, but prior to it.
The fifth class is the things that exist in the ordinary sense of the term. These are the first things that actually concern us; here belongs everything around us — men, cattle, objects. And into the sixth class goes whatever has a kind of make-believe existence, like void, or time.
Whatever is solid to the sight or the touch, Plato refuses to count among the things that exist in the strict sense. For such things are in flux, endlessly shrinking or growing. None of us is the same man in old age that he was in youth; none of us is the same tomorrow as he was yesterday. Our bodies are swept along like running water; everything we see races past along with time; nothing we look at stands still. I myself, even as I remark on all this change, have changed. This is just what Heraclitus says: "We go down twice into the same river, and yet into a different river." The stream keeps its name, but the water has already flowed past. This is more obvious in a river than in a man, of course; but we mortals are carried past no less swiftly ourselves — which makes me marvel at our madness: we cling with such affection to the body, the most fleeting thing of all, and we fear that some day we may die, when every instant is the death of our previous condition. Won't you stop fearing that what happens every day may happen once?
So much for man — a substance that flows away and slumps, exposed to every blow. But the universe, too, immortal and enduring as it is, changes and never stays the same. It still has within it everything it ever had, but held differently than before: it keeps rearranging itself.
"Very well," you say, "and what good will I get from all this fine reasoning?" None, if you insist on an answer. But just as an engraver rests his eyes when they've been strained too long, calls them away from the work and "feasts" them, as the saying goes, so we ought at times to unbend the mind and refresh it with a little entertainment. Only, let even your entertainment be work; even from amusements, if you stay alert, you'll pick out something worth keeping. That's my habit, Lucilius: from every field of thought, however far from philosophy, I try to extract something and put it to use. And what could be less likely to reform character than the subjects we've just been sifting? How can Plato's "ideas" make me a better man? What can I draw from them to rein in my appetites? Maybe just this: all the things that pander to our senses, that inflame and excite us, Plato denies a place among the things that really exist. They are imaginary; they wear a certain appearance for the moment, but none of them is lasting or solid — and yet we crave them as if they would exist forever, as if we would possess them forever.
We are weak, watery creatures standing in the middle of unrealities. So let us turn our minds toward the things that last. Let us look up at the ideal shapes of all things, hovering on high, and at God moving among them, planning how to defend from death what he could not make deathless — because its material forbade it — and so to overcome by reason the defects of the body. For all things endure, not because they are everlasting, but because they are protected by the care of their governor; what was imperishable would need no guardian. The Master Builder keeps them safe, overriding the weakness of the material by his own power. Let us despise everything so worthless that we're left wondering whether it exists at all.
And let us reflect on this at the same time: if Providence rescues from its perils the world itself, which is no less mortal than we are, then to some extent our own little bodies can be made to linger longer on earth by our own providence — if we learn to control and check the pleasures that destroy the greater part of mankind. Plato himself, by taking pains, made it to old age. He had the luck, true, of a strong and sound body — his very name came from his broad chest — but sea voyages and desperate adventures had drained much of his strength. Even so, by frugal living, by setting a limit on everything that whets the appetite, and by painstaking attention to himself, he reached old age despite the many obstacles. You know, I'm sure, that thanks to his careful living Plato had the good fortune to die on his own birthday, having completed exactly his eighty-first year. Wise men of the East who happened to be in Athens at the time sacrificed to him after his death, convinced that a lifespan so full was too much for a mortal man, since he had rounded out the perfect number of nine times nine. I have no doubt he'd have gladly given back a few of those days — and the sacrifice with them.
Frugal living can carry you to old age; and old age, to my mind, is no more to be refused than it is to be craved. There is a pleasure in being in your own company as long as possible — once you've made yourself worth enjoying. So here is the question on which we must record a judgment: should one shrink from extreme old age and hasten the end by one's own act, instead of waiting for it to come? The man who sits sluggishly waiting for his fate is next door to a coward — just as a man is immoderately fond of wine if he drains the jar dry and sucks up even the dregs. But we'll ask this question too: is the last stretch of life the dregs, or is it the clearest and purest part of all — provided the mind is unimpaired, the senses are still sound and give the spirit their support, and the body is not worn out and dead before its time? For it makes a great deal of difference whether a man is lengthening his life or lengthening his death.
But if the body can no longer perform its service, why shouldn't one free the struggling soul? Perhaps one ought to do it a little before the debt falls due, so that when it does fall due, he isn't unable to pay. And since the danger of living wretchedly is greater than the danger of dying soon, a man is a fool who won't stake a little time for the chance of a great gain. Few men have lasted through extreme old age to death unimpaired; many have lain inert, making no use of themselves. After that, how much crueler do you think it is to have lost a piece of your life than to have lost the right to end it?
Don't hear me out reluctantly, as if this verdict pointed straight at you; just weigh what I say. And it is this: I will not abandon old age, if old age keeps me whole for myself — whole, that is, in my better part. But if it begins to shatter my mind and pull its faculties down piece by piece, if it leaves me not life but mere breath, I shall rush out of a house that is crumbling and tottering. I will not escape illness by dying, so long as the illness is curable and no hindrance to my soul. I will not lay hands on myself because of pain; to die that way is to be defeated. But if I learn that the pain must be endured forever, I shall depart — not because of the pain itself, but because it will block everything I live for. The man who dies just because he is in pain is a weakling and a coward; the man who lives merely to brave out his pain is a fool.
But I'm running on too long — and besides, there's matter here to fill a whole day. And how will a man be able to end his life if he can't end a letter? So farewell — a word you'll read with more pleasure than all my deadly talk about death. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Your letter gave me great pleasure — and kindly allow me to use that word in its everyday sense, without insisting on its strict Stoic meaning. For we Stoics hold that pleasure is a vice. Very likely it is; but it's the word we all reach for when we want to name a happy state of mind. I'm well aware that if we test words against our formula, even pleasure has a bad reputation, and joy is something only the wise man attains. For "joy" is an elevation of the spirit — of a spirit that trusts in the goodness and truth of what it possesses. In common speech, though, we say we take great "joy" in a friend's election to the consulship, or his wedding, or the birth of his child — events which, far from being joys, are more often the openings of sorrows to come. No: the mark of real joy is that it never stops, and never turns into its opposite.
So when our Virgil speaks of
The evil joys of the mind,
the phrase is eloquent, but not strictly accurate. No joy can be evil. He gave the name "joy" to pleasures, and in doing so he said what he meant: that people take delight in their own harm.
Still, I wasn't wrong to say I received great "pleasure" from your letter. Even when an ignorant man's delight has an honorable cause, his emotion is unruly, ready at any moment to swing off in another direction. So I call it "pleasure": it starts from an opinion about a false good; it escapes control; it runs to excess.
But back to the point — let me tell you what delighted me in your letter. You have your words under control. You aren't swept away by your own language, or carried past the limits you set for yourself. Many writers get lured by the charm of some attractive phrase into topics they never meant to discuss. Not you: everything is compact and fitted to the subject. You say all you want to say, and you mean even more than you say. That is proof of the weight of your material — it shows that your mind, like your words, contains nothing superfluous, nothing inflated.
I do find metaphors — not reckless ones, but the kind that have earned their keep through use. I find similes too; and if anyone forbids similes, insisting they belong to poets alone, then he clearly hasn't read our older prose writers, who had not yet learned to strike poses for applause. Those writers, whose eloquence was plain and aimed only at proving the case, are full of comparisons; and I think comparisons are necessary — not for the reasons poets need them, but as props for our weakness, to bring speaker and listener alike face to face with the subject.
As it happens, I'm reading Sextius at this very moment — a sharp man, a philosopher who writes in Greek but holds to the Roman standard of ethics. One of his similes struck me especially: an army marching in hollow square, through country where the enemy might appear from any quarter, ready for battle. "That," he says, "is exactly what the wise man should do: keep his fighting qualities deployed on every side, so that wherever attack threatens, his defenses are ready at hand and answer the commander's signal without confusion." We see this in armies serving under great generals: every unit understands the general's order at once, because the troops are arranged so that a signal from one man reaches cavalry and infantry at the same moment. And this, he says, is even more necessary for people like us. Soldiers have often feared an enemy for no reason at all, and the stretch of road they thought most dangerous has turned out safest. But folly gets no such rest. Fear haunts it at the front of the column and at the rear; both flanks are in a panic. Peril chases folly and meets it head-on. It flinches at everything; it is never prepared; it takes fright even at its own reinforcements. But the wise man is fortified against every assault. He is alert. Let poverty attack, or sorrow, or disgrace, or pain — he will not retreat. He will walk undaunted straight at them, and straight through the middle of them.
We human beings are chained and weakened by many vices. We've wallowed in them so long that getting clean is hard: we aren't merely stained by them — we are dyed. But rather than hop from one figure to the next, let me raise a question I often turn over in my own heart: why does folly grip us so stubbornly? First, because we don't fight it hard enough, don't struggle toward salvation with everything we have. Second, because we don't put enough trust in what the wise have discovered — we don't drink in their words with open hearts; we come at this enormous problem in far too casual a spirit. And how could anyone learn enough in the fight against his vices, if the time he gives to learning is only the time left over from his vices? None of us goes deep. We skim the surface, and we consider a few stray minutes spent in the search for wisdom plenty — more than plenty — for a busy man.
What hinders us most of all is that we are too easily satisfied with ourselves. If we meet someone who calls us good men, or sensible men, or holy men, we recognize ourselves in the portrait. Not content with moderate praise, we accept whatever shameless flattery heaps on us, as if it were owed to us. We agree with the people who declare us the best and wisest of men, even though we know they lie constantly. We're so pleased with ourselves that we want to be praised for a virtue at the very moment we're indulging its opposite. A man hears himself called "most gentle" while he's inflicting torture, "most generous" while he's looting, "most sober" in the middle of drunkenness and lust. It follows that we don't want to be reformed — precisely because we believe we're already the best of men.
Alexander was ranging as far as India, laying waste to tribes barely known even to their own neighbors. During the siege of one city, while he was riding around the walls hunting for the weak spot in the fortifications, an arrow struck him. He kept up the siege for a long time anyway, determined to finish what he had begun. But as the wound dried and the bleeding stopped, the pain grew; his leg went slowly numb against his horse's flank; and when at last he was forced to withdraw, he said: "Everyone swears I am the son of Jupiter — but this wound cries out that I am a man." Let's do the same. Flattery makes a fool of each of us according to his station. Let's answer the flatterer: "You call me a man of sense. But I know how many of the things I crave are useless, and how many of the things I want will do me harm. I don't even have the knowledge a full stomach teaches the animals — the right measure of my own food and drink. I still don't know how much I can hold."
Now I'll show you how to know that you are not wise. The wise man is joyful, cheerful and calm, unshaken; he lives on the same plane as the gods. Now go and examine yourself. If you are never downcast; if no anxiety harasses your mind with worry about what's coming; if day and night your soul keeps its even, unswerving course, upright and content with itself — then you have reached the greatest good a mortal can possess. But if you go seeking pleasures of every kind, in every direction, then know this: you are as far short of wisdom as you are short of joy. Joy is the destination you're aiming for, but you have lost the road if you expect to arrive in the middle of riches and official titles — in other words, if you go looking for joy surrounded by worries. Those things you chase so eagerly, as if they held happiness and pleasure, are causes of grief.
All people of this kind, I insist, are chasing joy; they simply don't know where a joy that is both great and lasting can be found. One hunts for it in dinner parties and self-indulgence; another in campaigning for office and a crowd of clients around him; another in a mistress; another in the idle display of culture, in literature with no power to heal. All of them are led astray by delights that are deceptive and short-lived — like drunkenness, which pays for a single hour of hilarious madness with days of sickness; like applause and the roar of an enthusiastic crowd, which are won, and paid for, at the cost of enormous disquiet.
So reflect on this: the effect of wisdom is a joy that is unbroken and continuous. The wise man's mind is like the sky above the moon: eternal calm fills that region. Here, then, is your reason for wanting to be wise — the wise man is never without joy. And that joy springs from one source only: the knowledge that you possess the virtues. Only the brave, the just, the self-controlled can rejoice. "What," you ask, "don't the foolish and the wicked rejoice too?" No more than lions rejoice over a kill. When men have worn themselves out with wine and lust, when the night gives out before the debauch does, when the pleasures they've heaped on a body too small to hold them begin to fester — then, in their misery, they groan out Virgil's lines:
You know how we passed that last of nights among false-glittering joys.
Pleasure-lovers spend every night among false-glittering joys, and every night as if it were their last. But the joy that comes to the gods, and to those who imitate the gods, is never interrupted, and never ends. It would end, if it were borrowed from outside. Because it is not in anyone else's power to give, it is not subject to anyone else's whim. What Fortune has not given, Fortune cannot take away.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I file a complaint, I bring a lawsuit, I am angry. Do you still want what your nurse, your guardian, your mother prayed you would get? Don't you see yet what evil they were praying for? How hostile to us are the wishes of our own families! And the more completely those wishes come true, the more hostile they are. It no longer surprises me, at my age, that trouble has dogged us from earliest youth: we grew up amid our parents' curses. May the gods hear our own prayer too — one that asks for no favors!
How long shall we go on asking the gods for things, as if we still couldn't support ourselves? How long will we keep filling the marketplaces of our great cities with grain? How long must whole populations gather the harvest for us? How long will fleets of ships, drawing on more than one sea, deliver the makings of a single meal? A bull is filled by grazing a few acres; one forest is enough for a herd of elephants. Man alone forages both the earth and the sea. What then — did nature give us such insatiable bellies, along with such puny bodies, that we should outdo the biggest and hungriest animals in sheer greed? Not at all. How little it takes to satisfy nature! A very little sends her away content. It isn't the natural hunger of our bellies that costs us dear; it's our restless craving. So the people who, as Sallust puts it, "listen to their bellies" should be counted among the animals, not among men — and some of them not even among the animals, but among the dead. He truly lives who is useful to many; he truly lives who makes use of himself. But those who creep into a hole and go torpid are no better off in their houses than they would be in their tombs. You could carve such a man's name right there on the marble over his door — for he has died before he is dead.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Let us stop wanting what we have always wanted. I, at least, am doing it: in my old age I have stopped wanting what I wanted as a boy. My days and my nights go to this one task; this is my work, this is what I think about — putting an end to my old faults. I am trying to live every day as if it were a complete life. I don't snatch at it as if it were my last; I simply regard it as though it could be. This very letter is written in that spirit — as if death might call me away in the act of writing it. I am ready to depart; and I will enjoy life precisely because I am not over-anxious about the date of my departure.
Before I grew old, I tried to live well. Now that I am old, I shall try to die well — and dying well means dying gladly. See to it that you never do anything unwillingly. What is bound to be necessity if you resist it is not necessity if you want it. I mean this: the man who takes his orders gladly escapes the bitterest part of slavery — doing what he does not want to do. The unhappy man is not the one who acts under orders; it's the one who acts against his will. So let us set our minds to want whatever our circumstances demand — and above all, to think about our own end without sadness.
We must prepare for death before we prepare for life. Life is well enough furnished, but we are greedy about the furnishings: something always seems to be missing, and always will. Having lived long enough depends neither on our years nor on our days, but on our minds. I have lived long enough, my dear Lucilius. I have had my fill. I await death.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
People deceive us when they claim that a crowd of obligations keeps them from their liberal studies. They fake their engagements, and multiply them — when their only real engagement is with themselves. As for me, Lucilius, my time is free. It really is free: wherever I am, I am my own master. I don't hand myself over to my affairs; I lend myself to them, and I don't go hunting for excuses to waste time. Wherever I find myself, I carry on my own reflections and turn over some healthy thought in my mind. When I give myself to my friends, I don't withdraw from my own company; and I don't linger with the people some occasion, or some case arising from my official position, has attached to me. Instead, I spend my time with the best men of all: whatever land they lived in, whatever age, I let my thoughts fly to them. Demetrius, the best of men, I take everywhere with me; I leave the wearers of purple and fine linen and talk with him, half-naked as he is, and I hold him in the highest esteem. And why shouldn't I? I have found that he lacks nothing. Anyone at all can despise all things; no one can possess all things. The shortest way to riches is to despise riches. But our friend Demetrius lives not merely as if he had learned to despise everything, but as if he had handed everything over for other people to own.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I am sorry to hear that your friend Flaccus has died — but I would not have you grieve more than is fitting. That you should not grieve at all, I hardly dare demand; and yet I know it would be the better way. But where is the man blessed with the steadiness of soul to manage it, unless he has already risen far above Fortune's reach? Even such a man would feel the sting of a loss like this — but only a sting. As for the rest of us, our tears can be forgiven, provided they don't run to excess, and provided we have checked them ourselves. When we lose a friend, our eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Let your tears flow, but let them also cease. We may weep; we must not wail.
Does the rule I'm laying down for you seem harsh? Then consider that the greatest of Greek poets granted the right of weeping for one day only — he tells us that even Niobe remembered to eat. Do you want to know where all the lamentation and extravagant weeping comes from? Through our tears we are hunting for proof that we feel the loss. We aren't surrendering to sorrow — we're parading it. Nobody goes into mourning for an audience of himself alone. Shame on our miserable folly: there is a streak of vanity even in our grief!
"What," you say, "am I to forget my friend?" It's a short-lived memory you're promising him, if it lasts only as long as your grief. Soon enough some passing thing, however trivial, will smooth that brow of yours into a laugh. And I don't put off to any longer date than that the softening of every regret, the quieting of even the bitterest grief. The moment you stop watching yourself, this picture of sorrow you've been contemplating will fade. Right now you are standing guard over your own suffering — but even while you stand guard, it slips away, and the sharper it is, the sooner it ends.
Let's work at making the memory of those we've lost a pleasant one. Nobody willingly returns to a subject he can't think about without pain. It's inevitable that the names of those we loved and lost come back to us with a certain sting — but there is a pleasure even in that sting. As my friend Attalus used to say: "The memory of dead friends is pleasant the way certain fruits are pleasantly tart, or the way the very bitterness of an extremely old wine is what delights us. Give it enough time, and everything that hurt is extinguished, and the pleasure reaches us pure." If we take his word for it, "thinking of friends alive and well is like enjoying cakes and honey; remembering friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that carries a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even bitter, sharp-edged things can whet the appetite?" There, for my part, I disagree with him. To me, the thought of my dead friends is sweet — even comforting. For I had them as if I would one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still.
So, Lucilius, act in keeping with your usual serenity of mind, and stop putting the wrong interpretation on Fortune's gifts. Fortune has taken away — but Fortune gave. Let us enjoy our friends greedily, because we don't know how long the privilege will be ours. Think how often we leave them behind when we set out on some long journey; think how often we fail to see them even while we're staying in the same place. We'll soon realize that we lost too much of their time while they were alive. And will you put up with people who neglect their friends utterly, and then mourn them abjectly — who love no one until they have lost him? The reason they grieve so extravagantly at such times is that they're afraid people will doubt whether they ever loved at all; too late, they go looking for proofs of their feeling. If we have other friends, we treat them shabbily and rate them cheaply if they count for so little that they can't console us for the loss of one. If we have no other friends, then we have done ourselves a worse injury than Fortune has done us: Fortune robbed us of one friend, but we robbed ourselves of every friend we failed to make. Besides, a man who couldn't love more than one never had much love even for that one. If a thief made off with a man's only tunic, and the man chose to stand there wailing over his loss rather than look around for some way to escape the cold, for something to throw over his shoulders — wouldn't you call him an utter fool?
You have buried someone you loved; now look for someone to love. It is better to replace a friend than to weep for him. What I'm about to add is, I know, a worn old commonplace, but I won't leave it out just because everyone says it: time ends a man's grief even when he never chose to end it himself. And for a sensible man, the most shameful cure for sorrow is simply growing tired of sorrowing. I would rather you abandon grief than have grief abandon you. Stop grieving as soon as you can — because even if you wanted to keep it up, you couldn't keep it up for long. Our ancestors fixed one year as the limit of mourning for women — not because women needed to mourn that long, but so that they would mourn no longer. For men, no term is set, because for a man no term of mourning is honorable. Even so, show me one woman — out of all the pitiful creatures who had to be dragged from the funeral pyre or pried off the corpse — whose tears lasted a whole month. Nothing turns offensive as quickly as grief. While it's fresh, it finds consolers and draws people to its side; once it goes chronic, it gets laughed at — and rightly, because by then it is either put on or foolish.
And the man writing you all this is the very one who wept so uncontrollably for his dear friend Annaeus Serenus that I must be counted — much against my will — among the examples of men defeated by grief. Today I condemn what I did, and I understand the main reason I mourned so wildly: I had never imagined that his death could come before mine. The only thought that ever occurred to me was that he was the younger — much younger, at that. As if the Fates called us up in order of age!
So let us think constantly about our own mortality, just as much as about the mortality of all those we love. Back then I should have said: "My friend Serenus is younger than I am — but what does that matter? He ought to die after me, but he may die before me." Because I never said it, Fortune caught me unprepared with one sudden blow. Now is the time for you to reflect, not only that all things are mortal, but that their mortality follows no fixed schedule. Whatever can happen at any time can happen today. So let us reflect, my beloved Lucilius, that we shall soon arrive where this friend — to our sorrow — has arrived already. And perhaps, if the tale the wise men tell is true and some place stands ready to welcome us, then the friend we think we have lost has only been sent on ahead.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
And restless among the harmless flocks he prays that a foam-flecked boar will cross his path, or a tawny lion come stalking down from the hills.
That is the mood exactly. I want something to overcome — something I can test my endurance against. And this is another remarkable thing about Sextius: he shows you the grandeur of the happy life without ever making you despair of reaching it. You come away understanding that it stands high above you, but that it is within reach of anyone with the will to climb.
Virtue herself has the same double effect: she makes you admire her, and she makes you hope to win her. In my own case, at any rate, just contemplating wisdom takes up much of my time. I stare at her in amazement, the way I sometimes stare at the sky itself, which I often look at as if I were seeing it for the first time. And so I revere the discoveries of wisdom and their discoverers. Stepping into the inheritance of so many predecessors is a delight. It was for me that they stored up this treasure; it was for me that they did all that work. But we should act like a responsible head of the household: we should make what we inherited grow. That inheritance will pass from me to my descendants larger than it came. There is still much work left, and much will always be left; a person born a thousand generations from now will not be shut out from the chance of adding something more.
But suppose the old masters really did discover everything. One thing will always be new: the use of those discoveries — studying them, sorting them, applying them. Say we have inherited prescriptions for healing the eyes. I don't need to hunt for new ones; but the ones we have still must be fitted to the particular disease, and to the particular stage of the disease. Use this one to soothe an inflamed eyelid, that one to bring down the swelling; this one to head off a sudden stab of pain or a rush of tears, that one to sharpen the vision. Then combine them, watch for the right moment, and apply the right treatment to each case.
The cures for the spirit were also discovered by the ancients; but learning how and when to apply them — that is our task. The people who went before us accomplished a great deal, but they did not finish the job. Even so, they deserve reverence; we should honor them the way we honor gods. Why shouldn't I keep statues of great men to fire my enthusiasm, and celebrate their birthdays? Why shouldn't I greet them, every time, with respect and honor? The reverence I owe my own teachers I owe in the same measure to those teachers of the human race, the source from which so much good first flowed. If I meet a consul or a praetor, I will pay him all the honor his office is used to receiving: I will dismount, bare my head, and yield the road. Then what of Marcus Cato, the Elder and the Younger? Laelius the Wise? Socrates and Plato, Zeno and Cleanthes? Shall I let them into my soul with anything less than the highest marks of respect? I revere them in earnest, and I always stand up in honor of such noble names.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Yesterday I split the day with illness. It claimed the whole morning for itself; in the afternoon it gave way to me. So I began by testing my spirit with some reading. When that went well, I dared to demand more of it — or maybe I should say, to indulge it more. I wrote a little, and with more concentration than usual, since I am wrestling with a difficult subject and refuse to be pinned. In the middle of this, some friends came by, with the declared intention of using force to stop me — as if I were a sick man sneaking pleasures he'd been forbidden. So conversation took the place of writing, and from that conversation I'll pass along to you the question that is still in dispute. We have appointed you the referee. You have more work on your hands than you think, because the case has three sides.
Our Stoics, as you know, say there are two things in the universe from which everything comes: cause and matter. Matter lies there inert, a stuff ready for any use, but certain to stay idle if no one sets it moving. Cause — by which we mean reason — molds matter and turns it wherever it wants, producing all the concrete things we see. So for anything at all, there must first be something it is made from, and then an agent it is made by. The first is its material; the second is its cause.
All art is imitation of nature, so let me carry these general principles over to the things human beings make. A statue involves matter that had to submit to the artist's hands, and an artist who had to give that matter its shape. In the statue's case, then, the material was bronze and the cause was the sculptor. Every object works the same way: it consists of what it is made from and who made it.
The Stoics hold that there is one cause only — the maker. But Aristotle thinks "cause" can be used in three ways. "The first cause," he says, "is the matter itself, without which nothing can be made. The second is the workman. The third is the form that is stamped on every work" — on a statue, say. (His own word for this is the eidos.) "And there is a fourth as well: the purpose of the work as a whole." Let me show you what each of these means. Bronze is the "first cause" of the statue, since the statue could never have been made without something to cast and mold it from. The "second cause" is the artist: without a workman's skilled hands, that bronze could never have taken on the statue's outlines. The "third cause" is the form, because our statue could never be called The Spear-Bearer or The Boy Tying His Hair if that particular shape had not been stamped into it. The "fourth cause" is the purpose of the work — for if there had been no purpose, the statue would not have been made. And what is a purpose? Whatever drew the artist on, whatever he was pursuing when he made it: money, if he made it to sell; fame, if he worked for a reputation; piety, if he made it as a gift for a temple. Surely that too is a cause contributing to the statue's existence — or do you think we should refuse to count, among the causes of a finished thing, the very element without which it would never have been finished?
To these four Plato adds a fifth: the pattern, which he calls the "idea" — for this is what the artist kept gazing at while he created the work he had set out to make. It makes no difference whether that pattern is outside him, where he can turn his eyes to it, or inside him, conceived and set up there by himself. God has these patterns of all things within himself; his mind holds the harmonies and measures of everything that is to be brought into being. He is filled with those shapes Plato calls the "ideas" — imperishable, unchangeable, immune to decay. And that is why, though men die, humanity itself — the idea of man, the pattern man is molded on — lasts; and while men labor and perish, it suffers no change at all.
So by Plato's count there are five causes: the material, the agent, the form, the model, and the end in view. And last comes the result of all of them. Take the statue again, since that's where we started: the material is the bronze; the agent is the artist; the form is the shape fitted onto the material; the model is the pattern the agent imitated; the end in view is the purpose in the maker's mind; and the result of all these is the statue itself. The universe, in Plato's opinion, has all the same elements. The agent is God. The source is matter. The form is the shape and arrangement of the visible world. The pattern, of course, is the model on which God made this vast and supremely beautiful creation. And the purpose is his reason for making it. You ask what God's purpose is? Goodness. At least, that is what Plato says: "What was God's reason for creating the world? God is good, and no good person begrudges anything good. So he made it the best world he could." Hand down your verdict, then, judge: tell us who seems to you to say what is truest — not who says what is absolutely true. That is as far beyond our reach as truth itself.
Now, this crowd of causes assembled by Aristotle and Plato takes in either too much or too little. If they count as "causes" everything without which a thing cannot be made, they have named too few. Time would have to be included — nothing is made without time. And place — if there is nowhere for a thing to be made, it will not be made. And motion — nothing is made or destroyed without motion; there is no art, no change of any kind, without it. But what I am after is the first cause, the general cause. And that must be simple, since matter, too, is simple. What is cause, then? Surely it is Creative Reason — in other words, God. All those items you listed are not a series of separate, independent causes; they all hang on one, the one that actually creates. You say form is a cause? Form is only what the artist stamps on his work — a part of a cause, not the cause. The pattern is not a cause either, but an indispensable tool of the cause. The pattern is as necessary to the artist as his chisel or his file; without them art gets nowhere; but they are neither parts of the art nor causes of it. "Well then," someone will say, "the artist's purpose — the thing that moves him to create — that is the cause." Perhaps it is a cause; but not the efficient cause, only an accessory one. And accessory causes are countless; what we are after is the general cause. In fact, when Plato and Aristotle call the whole universe — the finished, perfected work — a cause, they fall short of their usual sharpness. There is a great difference between a work and the cause of a work.
Now either give your verdict or do what is easier in cases like this: declare that the matter is not clear and send it back for another hearing. But I hear you object: "What pleasure do you get from wasting time on these puzzles? They rid you of no passion, they drive out no desire." For my part, I raise and discuss these questions as things that greatly calm the spirit; and I examine myself first, and then the world around me. And even now I am not wasting time, whatever you think. All these questions — provided they aren't minced and shredded into useless hair-splitting — lift and lighten the soul. The soul is weighed down by a heavy load; it longs to be freed and to return to the elements it once belonged to. For this body of ours is the soul's burden and its punishment. Under that pressing weight the soul is crushed and held in chains — unless philosophy comes to its rescue, tells it to breathe freely again in the contemplation of the universe, and turns it from things earthly to things divine. There the soul has its liberty; there it can roam; meanwhile it slips its guards and is restored in heaven. Think of craftsmen doing close, delicate work that strains their eyes: if their light is scanty or uncertain, they go outside and, in some park set aside for the public's recreation, treat their eyes to the free light of day. Just so the soul, shut up in this gloomy, darkened house, escapes into the open sky whenever it can, and finds its rest in contemplating the universe.
The wise man — and the seeker after wisdom too — is tied tightly to his body, but in his better self he is elsewhere; his thoughts are fixed on higher things. He is like a man bound by an oath of service: he treats his lifespan as his term of enlistment. He has trained himself neither to love life nor to hate it; he endures a mortal lot, knowing a larger one awaits him.
Do you forbid me to contemplate the universe? Do you drag me away from the whole and confine me to a part? May I not ask what the beginnings of all things are — who shaped the universe, who took the confused, sluggish jumble of matter and sorted it into its parts? May I not ask who the Master Builder of this universe is, how so vast a bulk was brought under law and order, who gathered the scattered atoms, who separated the tangled elements and gave outward form to what lay in one great shapeless heap? Or where all this flood of light comes from — whether it is fire, or something brighter still? Am I not to ask these questions? Must I stay ignorant of the heights I came down from? Whether I will see this world once only, or be born many times? Where I go afterward — what home waits for my soul when it is released from the terms of its human slavery? Do you forbid me a share in heaven — which is to say, do you order me to live with my head bowed? No. I am above that. I was born for something greater than to be my body's property, and I regard this body as nothing but a chain clamped on my freedom. So I hold it out as a kind of buffer against Fortune, and I let no blow pass through it to reach my soul. My body is the only part of me that can be injured; inside this vulnerable house, my soul lives free. This flesh will never drive me to fear, or to any pretense unworthy of a good man. I will never tell a lie for this little body's sake. When it seems right, I will dissolve our partnership. And even now, while we are bound together, we are not equal partners: the soul hears every dispute in its own court. To despise the body is sure freedom.
To come back to our subject: this freedom is helped enormously by the contemplation we were just discussing. All things are made of matter and of God. God governs matter, which surrounds him and follows him as its guide and leader. What creates — that is, God — is more powerful and more precious than matter, which merely receives his action. God's place in the universe is the soul's place in a man; what matter is to the world, the body is to us. So let the lower serve the higher. Let us be brave in the face of every hazard. Let us not fear wrongs, or wounds, or chains, or poverty. And what is death? Either an end or a crossing. I do not fear ending — it is the same as never having begun. And I do not shrink from crossing into another state, because nowhere will I be as cramped as I am here.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I have just seen Claranus, an old schoolmate of mine, for the first time in many years. You don't need me to add that he is an old man now; but I can tell you that I found him vigorous in spirit and sturdy, even though he is wrestling with a frail and feeble body. Nature was unfair to him — she gave a rare soul a poor house to live in. Or maybe she did it deliberately, to prove to us that an absolutely strong and happy mind can hide under any exterior at all. Either way, Claranus overcomes every one of his handicaps: he began by despising his own body, and from there he has worked his way up to despising everything else that doesn't matter. The poet who sang
Virtue shows more pleasing in a form that's fair,
was mistaken, in my opinion. Virtue needs nothing to set it off; it is its own great glory, and it makes holy whatever body it lives in. At any rate, I have started to see Claranus in a different light. To me he looks handsome — as straight and well-built in body as he is in mind. A great man can come out of a shack; just so, a great and beautiful soul can come out of an ugly, insignificant body. I think Nature breeds certain men of this stamp on purpose, to prove that virtue can be born absolutely anywhere. If she could have produced souls by themselves, naked, she would have done it. As it is, she does something even greater: she produces men whose bodies are obstacles — and who break through the obstruction anyway. Claranus, I believe, was produced as a demonstration, so that we could understand that a soul is not disfigured by an ugly body; rather, it is the body that is beautified by the loveliness of the soul.
Now, though Claranus and I spent only a few days together, we had many conversations, and I'll pour them out to you here just as they came. The first day we dug into this problem: how can all goods be equal if they come in three kinds? According to our school's teaching, certain goods are primary — joy, peace, the welfare of one's country. Others are of the second order, molded out of unhappy material — endurance under suffering, self-control during a severe illness. For the first kind we will pray outright; for the second, only if the need arises. And there is a third variety besides: a modest walk, a calm and honest face, a bearing that suits the wise man. Now how can these things be equal to one another, when we ought to pray for some of them and avoid others?
If we want to sort them out, we had better go back to the First Good and ask what its nature really is. It is this: the soul that gazes straight at truth; that is skilled in what should be sought and what should be avoided; that sets its values not by opinion but by nature; that ranges through the whole universe and turns its contemplating gaze on everything in it; that keeps strict watch over its own thoughts and actions, equally great and equally forceful in both; that stands above hardships and above flattery alike, surrendering to neither extreme of fortune; that rises above everything that comes, blessings and disasters both — a soul absolutely beautiful, perfectly furnished with grace and with strength together, healthy and lean, unruffled, undismayed, a soul no violence can shatter, a soul that no stroke of luck can puff up or beat down. A soul like that is virtue itself. That's what virtue would look like if it ever came into a single view and showed itself all at once, complete. But it has many aspects. They unfold as life varies and as actions differ; yet virtue itself never becomes greater or smaller. The Supreme Good cannot shrink, and virtue cannot slide backward; instead, it transforms itself — now into this quality, now into that — shaping itself to the role it has to play. Whatever it touches, it makes like itself; it dyes everything its own color. It beautifies our actions, our friendships, and sometimes whole households that it has entered and set in order. Whatever it has handled it makes, then and there, lovable, remarkable, admirable.
So the power and greatness of virtue cannot rise any higher, because what is already greatest has no room to increase. You will find nothing straighter than straight, nothing truer than true, nothing more temperate than perfect self-control. Every virtue is limitless — for limits belong to things with fixed measurements. Constancy cannot advance any further; neither can faithfulness, or truthfulness, or loyalty. What can be added to what is perfect? Nothing — otherwise the thing you added to wasn't perfect. And nothing can be added to virtue either; if anything could be added, something must have been missing. Honor, likewise, permits no additions: it is honorable precisely because of the qualities I have named. And what else? Don't you think propriety, justice, and lawfulness belong to the same type — held within fixed bounds? Being able to grow is proof that a thing is still imperfect.
The good, in every case, obeys these same laws. The advantage of the state and the advantage of the individual are yoked together; you can no more separate them than you can separate the praiseworthy from the desirable. Therefore the virtues are all equal to one another; and so are the works of virtue, and so are all the men lucky enough to possess them. The virtues of plants and animals, on the other hand, are perishable — frail, fleeting, uncertain. They spring up and they sink back down, and for that reason they aren't rated at the same value. But human virtues fall under one rule only, because right reason is single and of one kind only. Nothing is more divine than the divine, or more heavenly than the heavenly. Mortal things decay, fall, wear out, grow, drain away, refill; because their lot is uncertain, there is inequality among them. But the nature of divine things is one. And reason is nothing else than a piece of the divine spirit set inside a human body. If reason is divine, and no good is without reason, then every good is divine. Furthermore, there is no distinction between things divine — so there is none between goods, either. Therefore it follows that joy, and a brave unyielding endurance of torture, are equal goods; in both there is the same greatness of soul — relaxed and cheerful in the one case, combative and braced for battle in the other.
What — don't you think the courage of the man who bravely storms the enemy's stronghold equals the courage of the man who endures a siege with total patience? Scipio is great when he rings Numantia with his siege-works and squeezes it, driving an enemy he could not conquer to turn their own hands against themselves. But great, too, are the souls of the defenders — men who know that as long as the road to death lies open, no blockade is complete; men who breathe their last in the arms of liberty. In the same way all the other virtues are equal to one another: tranquility, simplicity, generosity, constancy, even-temperedness, endurance. For underneath them all lies a single virtue — the one that keeps the soul straight and unswerving.
"What then," you say, "is there no difference between joy and the unyielding endurance of pain?" None at all, as far as the virtues themselves are concerned; a very great one, however, in the circumstances in which each virtue gets displayed. In the one case there is a natural relaxing and loosening of the soul; in the other, an unnatural pain. So the circumstances, between which a great gulf can be drawn, belong to the category of indifferent things — but the virtue shown in each case is equal. Virtue is not changed by the material it works on. Hard, stubborn material does not make it worse; pleasant, joyful material does not make it better. So virtue necessarily stays equal. In each case, what is done is done with equal rightness, equal wisdom, and equal honor. The goodness on both sides is equal, and neither man can rise above it — not the one in his joy, not the other in his suffering; each is doing as well as a human being can do. And two goods, neither of which can possibly be better, are equal.
For if things outside virtue could shrink it or swell it, then the honorable would stop being the only good. Grant that, and honor has perished altogether. Why? Let me tell you: because no act is honorable that is done unwillingly, under compulsion. Every honorable act is voluntary. Mix in reluctance, complaints, cowardice, or fear, and it loses its best feature — its own approval of itself. What is not free cannot be honorable, for fear means slavery. The honorable is entirely free of anxiety; it is calm. If it objects, if it laments, if it counts anything as an evil, it falls into turmoil and starts floundering in deep confusion — on one side the appearance of right calls it forward; on the other, the suspicion of evil drags it back. So when a man is about to do something honorable, he should not count any obstacle as an evil — inconvenient, maybe, but not evil — and he should will the deed and do it willingly. Every honorable act is done without orders and without compulsion; it is pure, and mixed with no evil at all.
I know what you may say to me at this point: "Are you trying to make us believe it doesn't matter whether a man feels joy or lies on the rack wearing out his torturer?" I could answer: "Epicurus also maintains that the wise man, even while he is being roasted inside the bronze bull of Phalaris, will cry out, 'How pleasant! This doesn't touch me at all.'" Why should you be surprised that I call the man reclining at a banquet and the victim standing firm under torture possessors of equal goods, when Epicurus maintains something far harder to believe — that it is pleasant to be roasted? But the answer I actually give is this: there is a great difference between joy and pain. If I'm asked to choose, I will seek the one and avoid the other. The first is according to nature; the second is against it. Rated by that standard, a great gulf stands between them. But when it comes to the virtue involved, the virtue is the same in each case, whether it walks in through joy or through sorrow. Vexation and pain and the other inconveniences count for nothing, because virtue overpowers them. Just as the brightness of the sun dims every lesser light, so virtue, by its sheer greatness, shatters and overwhelms all pains, annoyances, and wrongs; wherever its radiance reaches, every light that shines without virtue's help goes out. Inconveniences, when they run into virtue, matter no more than a storm-cloud matters to the sea.
Here is the proof: the good man will rush without hesitation toward any noble deed. Put the executioner in his path, the torturer, the stake — he will keep going, looking not at what he must suffer but at what he must do. He will entrust himself to an honorable deed as readily as he would to a good man; he will count it profitable to himself, safe, lucky. And he will hold the same opinion of an honorable deed loaded with sorrow and hardship that he holds of a good man who is poor, or wasting away in exile. Come now, set a good man rolling in wealth beside a man who has nothing — except that in himself he has everything. They will be equally good, though their fortunes are utterly unequal. The same standard, as I said, applies to things as well as to men: virtue is just as praiseworthy living in a sound and free body as in one that is sick or in chains. So you will not praise your own virtue any more if Fortune has favored you with a sound body than if she has given you a body crippled in some limb — that would be like rating a master low because he is dressed like a slave. Everything Fortune rules over is mere property: money, the body, position — weak things, shifting, quick to perish, held on uncertain terms. But the works of virtue are free and unconquered — no more worth seeking when Fortune treats them kindly, and no less when adversity is weighing them down.
Now, friendship among men corresponds to desirability among things. You would not, I imagine, love a good man more for being rich than for being poor, or love a strong, muscular man more than a slender, delicate one. Then neither will you seek or love a good thing that is cheerful and peaceful more than one that is full of struggle and sweat. Or if you do, then of two equally good men you will care more for the neat, well-groomed one than for the dusty, unkempt one. Next you will go so far as to prefer a good man sound in all his limbs and without a blemish to one who is weak or half-blind; and little by little your pickiness will reach the point where, of two equally just and sensible men, you will choose the one with the long curling hair! Whenever the virtue in two men is equal, the inequality in everything else about them disappears. All those other things are not parts of them; they are accessories. Would any father judge his own children so unfairly as to love a healthy son more than a sickly one, or a tall child of striking stature more than a short or middle-sized one? Wild beasts play no favorites among their young; they lie down and suckle them all alike. Birds share out the food fairly. Ulysses hurries back to the rocks of his Ithaca as eagerly as Agamemnon speeds to the kingly walls of Mycenae. No man loves his homeland because it is great; he loves it because it is his own.
And what is the point of all this? For you to know that virtue looks on all her works with the same eyes, as if they were her children — equally kind to all of them, and more deeply kind to the ones that meet hardship. Even parents lean with extra affection toward the children they pity. Virtue does not exactly love her troubled, heavily burdened works more than the rest; but like a good parent, she gives them more of her care.
Why is no good greater than any other good? Because nothing is more fitting than what fits, and nothing more level than what is level. You cannot say that one thing is "more equal" to a given object than another thing is; and so nothing is more honorable than what is honorable. Accordingly, if all the virtues are equal by nature, then the three varieties of goods are equal too. This is what I mean: feeling joy with self-control and suffering pain with self-control are equal. The joy in the one case does not outrank the steadfastness in the other — the steadfastness that swallows the groan while the victim is in the torturer's grip. Goods of the first kind are desirable; goods of the second are worthy of admiration; and they are equal all the same, because whatever hardship comes attached to the second kind is outweighed by the good itself, which is so much greater. Anyone who believes them unequal has turned his gaze away from the virtues themselves and is inspecting the packaging. True goods have the same weight and the same measure; the counterfeit kind are full of empty space, so that when they are put on the scale they come up short, however imposing and grand they look to the eye.
Yes, my dear Lucilius: the good that true reason approves is solid and everlasting. It strengthens the spirit and lifts it up so that it stays on the heights forever. The things the mob thoughtlessly praises as goods merely puff us up with empty joy; and the things feared as if they were evils merely strike panic into men's minds — for the mind is spooked by the mere appearance of danger, the same way animals are. Both of them distract and sting the spirit for no good reason: the one does not deserve joy, and the other does not deserve fear. Reason alone is unchangeable; reason alone holds fast to its decisions. For reason is not the slave of the senses but their ruler. Reason is equal to reason, as one straight line is equal to another; therefore virtue is equal to virtue, since virtue is nothing else than right reason. All the virtues are reasons. Reasons are reasons if they are right reasons; and if they are right, they are equal. As reason is, so are its actions; therefore all actions are equal too — for since they resemble reason, they resemble one another. And I hold that actions are equal to each other exactly insofar as they are honorable and right. There will be great differences, of course, as the material varies — now broader, now narrower; now glorious, now humble; now wide-ranging, now confined. But the best part in every case is equal: they are all honorable. In the same way, all good men, precisely insofar as they are good, are equal. There are differences of age — one is older, another younger; of body — one is handsome, another ugly; of fortune — this man is rich, that one poor; this one is influential, powerful, known to whole cities and peoples, that one is unknown to almost everybody and obscure. But in the one respect in which they are good, they are equal.
The senses cannot judge what is good and what is evil. They do not know what is useful and what is not. They cannot file an opinion unless the thing is right in front of them; they can neither see into the future nor remember the past; and they do not know what follows from what. Yet it is exactly from that kind of knowledge that a coherent sequence and succession of actions is woven, and a unity of life is created — a unity that will run on a straight course. Reason, then, is the judge of good and evil. Whatever is foreign and external she counts as dross; whatever is neither good nor evil she rates as a mere accessory, insignificant and trivial. For all her good resides in the soul.
But there are certain goods that reason counts as primary and goes after on purpose — victory, for example, good children, the welfare of one's country. Certain others she counts as secondary; these only show themselves in adversity — for example, an even mind in enduring a severe illness or exile. And certain goods are indifferent, no more according to nature than against it — a discreet walk, say, or a composed way of sitting in a chair. For sitting is no less natural an act than standing or walking. The two higher kinds of goods differ from each other. The primary ones are according to nature — such as taking joy in the devotion of your children and in the well-being of your country. The secondary ones are contrary to nature — such as courage under torture, or endurance of thirst when illness sets fever burning through a man's vitals. "What," you say, "can anything contrary to nature be a good?" Of course not. But the thing this good springs from is sometimes contrary to nature. Being wounded, wasting away over a fire, being broken down by disease — those things are contrary to nature. But to keep an unconquerable soul in the middle of such distresses — that is fully in accordance with nature. To put my point briefly: the material a good is concerned with is sometimes against nature, but a good itself never is — because no good exists without reason, and reason follows nature.
"Then what is reason?" you ask. It is copying nature. "And what is the greatest good a man can possess?" It is to conduct yourself according to what nature wills.
"There is no doubt," says the objector, "that peace which was never attacked brings more happiness than peace won back at the cost of great slaughter. There is no doubt, either, that unbroken health brings more happiness than health forced back to soundness, as it were, through endurance and suffering, after an illness that threatened life itself. And in the same way, there will be no doubt that joy is a greater good than a soul grinding to the bitter end through the torment of wounds or the stake." Not at all. Things that come by chance admit of enormous differences, because they are rated by their usefulness in the eyes of the people who experience them. But with goods, the only point to consider is that they agree with nature — and this is equal in all of them. When we vote for someone's motion in the Senate, it cannot be said that one senator is "more in accord with the motion" than another; they all vote for the same motion alike. I say the same of the virtues: they all accord with nature. And I say it of goods too: they all accord with nature. One man dies young, another in old age, still another in infancy, having caught nothing more than a first glimpse out into life. All of them were equally subject to death, even if death let one of them travel further along the road of life, cut off the second in his flower, and broke off the third at the very beginning. One man gets his release at the dinner table. Another's sleep slides straight over into the sleep of death. Another is snuffed out in the middle of his pleasures. Now set beside these the people who have been run through by the sword, or bitten to death by snakes, or crushed under falling buildings, or twisted piece by piece out of existence on the rack. Some of these exits can be counted better, some worse; but the dying itself is equal in all of them. The roads to the end are different; the end is one and the same. Death has no degrees of greater or less. It has the same limit in every case: the closing of a life.
The same is true of goods, I assure you. You will find one good in the middle of pure pleasure, another in the middle of sorrow and bitterness. One manages Fortune's favors; the other overpowers her assaults. Each is equally a good, though one travels a level, easy road and the other a rough one. And the end of them all is the same: they are goods, they deserve praise, they walk in company with virtue and reason. Virtue makes everything it acknowledges equal to everything else.
You needn't be surprised that this is one of our principles. In the writings of Epicurus you will find two goods that make up his Supreme Good, his blessedness: a body free from pain and a soul free from disturbance. These goods, once complete, do not increase — for how can what is complete increase? Suppose the body is free from pain: what can be added to the absence of pain? Suppose the soul is composed and calm: what can be added to that tranquility? Perfectly fair weather, polished to its purest brilliance, does not admit of becoming any clearer. Just so, when a man takes care of his body and of his soul, weaving his good out of both, his condition is perfect; he has found the complete answer to his prayers, so long as there is no storm in his soul and no pain in his body. Whatever extra delights fall to him beyond these two things do not increase his Supreme Good; they merely season it, so to speak — a little added spice. For the absolute good of human nature is satisfied with peace in the body and peace in the soul.
I can show you, right now, a graded list of goods in Epicurus's own writings, very like the one in our own school. There are some things, he declares, that he would prefer to have happen to him — bodily rest free from every discomfort, and a soul at leisure, delighting in the contemplation of its own goods. And there are other things which he would prefer not to happen, but which he praises and approves all the same — for example, the kind of resignation in the face of failing health and terrible suffering that I mentioned a moment ago, and that Epicurus himself showed on the last and most blessed day of his life. He tells us that he had to endure excruciating agony from a diseased bladder and an ulcerated stomach — pain so acute that it could not possibly get worse — "and yet," he says, "that day was none the less happy." And no man can spend such a day in happiness unless he possesses the Supreme Good.
So even in Epicurus we find goods that one would prefer not to experience — goods which, when circumstances decide the matter, must nevertheless be welcomed, approved, and ranked with the highest. We cannot say that the good which rounded out a happy life — the good for which Epicurus gave thanks with the last words he ever spoke — is unequal to the greatest goods there are.
Allow me, my excellent Lucilius, one bolder statement still: if any goods could be greater than others, I would choose the ones that look harsh over the mild and alluring ones — and I would pronounce them greater. Breaking your way through difficulties is a bigger accomplishment than keeping your joy within bounds. It takes the same reason, I know perfectly well, for a man to bear prosperity honorably and to bear misfortune bravely. The soldier who sleeps calmly in front of the ramparts when no enemy is attacking the camp may be every bit as brave as the man who, with the tendons of his legs cut through, props himself up on his knees and does not let his weapons fall. But it is the blood-stained soldier coming back from the front who hears the shout: "Well done, hero!" And so I would give the greater praise to the goods that have stood trial, that show courage, that have fought it out with Fortune. Would I hesitate whether to praise the maimed and shriveled hand of Mucius above the uninjured hand of the bravest man in the world? There Mucius stood, despising the enemy and despising the fire, watching his own hand drip blood over the flames on his enemy's altar — until Porsenna, the very king who had been demanding his punishment, grew envious of the hero's glory and ordered the fire carried away against the victim's will.
Why shouldn't I count this good among the primary goods — and count it greater, in this one respect, than those safe, untested goods that have never had a run-in with Fortune — exactly as it is a rarer thing to have beaten an enemy with a hand lost than with a hand armed? "What," you say, "will you desire that good for yourself?" Of course I will. This is a thing a man cannot achieve unless he can also desire it. Should I desire instead to stretch out my limbs for my slaves to knead — or to have a woman, or a man made over into the likeness of a woman, pull my finger-joints for me? I can't help believing Mucius was the luckier man, because he handled the flames as calmly as if he were holding out his hand to the masseur. He burned away all his old mistakes. He finished the war unarmed and maimed; and with that stump of a hand, he conquered two kings.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Let me open with small talk: spring is finally showing itself. But even as it rounds the corner toward summer, when you'd expect real heat, it has stayed cool, and you can't trust it yet — it keeps sliding back into winter. Want proof of how unreliable it still is? I don't dare get into a genuinely cold bath; even now I take the chill off the water first. "That's no way to build up your tolerance for heat or cold," you'll say. True enough, dear Lucilius, but at my age a man's own natural chill is all the cold he needs. I can barely thaw out in midsummer. So I spend most of my time bundled up, and I actually thank old age for pinning me to my bed. Why shouldn't I thank it? Everything I ought not to want to do, I no longer can do. Most of my conversation these days is with books. Whenever your letters arrive, I feel as if I'm with you — as if I'm about to speak my reply instead of writing it. So let's take up this question of yours together, as if we were talking face to face.
You ask me whether every good is desirable. You put it this way: "If it's a good to be brave under torture, to walk to the stake with a steady heart, to endure sickness patiently, then it follows that these things are desirable. But I don't see that any of them is worth praying for. At least I've never heard of a man paying off a vow of thanks because he'd been cut to ribbons by the whip, or twisted out of shape by gout, or stretched taller on the rack." My dear Lucilius, you have to pull these cases apart; do that, and you'll see there is something in them worth wanting. I'd prefer to be spared torture; but if the time comes when it must be endured, then I'll want to bear it with bravery, honor, and courage. Of course I'd prefer that war never come; but if war does come, I'll want to bear the wounds, the hunger, and everything else war's necessity brings — and bear them nobly. I'm not so crazy as to wish for sickness; but if I must be sick, I'll want to do nothing weak, nothing unworthy of a man. The conclusion isn't that hardships are desirable. It's that virtue is desirable — and virtue is what lets us endure hardships patiently.
Some members of our own school think that of all these qualities, brave endurance is not actually desirable — not to be rejected either, but not to be prayed for — because we should ask heaven only for goods that are pure, peaceful, and out of trouble's reach. Personally, I disagree. Why? First, because nothing can be good without also being desirable. Second, because if virtue is desirable, and nothing good is without virtue, then everything good is desirable. Third, because brave endurance even under torture is desirable in itself. Here let me ask you: isn't bravery desirable? And yet bravery scorns danger and dares it. The most beautiful, most admirable thing about bravery is that it doesn't flinch from the stake, that it advances to meet its wounds, that sometimes it doesn't even dodge the spear but takes it chest-first. If bravery is desirable, then patiently enduring torture is desirable too, for that is a part of bravery. Just sort these things out, as I've suggested, and nothing will lead you astray. For it's not mere endurance of torture that is desirable — it's brave endurance. That "brave" is what I desire; and that is virtue.
"But who ever prayed for such a thing?" you say. Some prayers are open and explicit, when we ask for things one by one; others are folded up, when many requests hide under a single heading. For example: I pray for an honorable life. Now an honorable life is made up of many kinds of action. It may include the chest Regulus was locked into, or the wound Cato tore open with his own hands, or the exile of Rutilius, or the cup of poison that moved Socrates from prison to heaven. So in praying for an honorable life, I have also prayed for the things without which, on some days, no life can be honorable.
Three times and four times blessed were the men who died before their parents' eyes, beneath the high walls of Troy!
What difference does it make whether you pray for this outcome for someone, or admit that it was desirable when it happened? Decius sacrificed himself for the state: he put spurs to his horse and charged into the middle of the enemy, hunting for death. The second Decius, matching his father's courage, repeated the words that had become sacred, already a household prayer, and crashed into the thickest of the fighting, worried about only one thing — that his sacrifice bring a good omen with it — and counting a noble death as something to be desired. Do you doubt, then, that it is best to die gloriously, in the act of doing something brave? When a man endures torture bravely, he is using every virtue at once. Endurance may be the one out front, the most visible; but bravery is there too — endurance and resignation and patient suffering are its branches. Foresight is there, because without foresight no plan gets made, and it is foresight that advises us to bear as bravely as we can what we cannot avoid. Steadfastness is there, which can't be pushed off its ground, which no force can wrench away from its purpose. The whole inseparable company of the virtues is there. Every honorable act is the work of a single virtue, but it is done with the approval of the entire council. And whatever all the virtues approve — even if one alone seems to have done the work — is desirable.
What — do you think the only desirable things are the ones that arrive amid pleasure and ease, the ones we decorate our doorways to welcome? Some goods have grim faces. Some prayers are offered not by a cheering crowd, but by a crowd that bows down in reverence and awe. Don't you think that is how Regulus prayed when he prayed to reach Carthage? Put on a hero's courage, and step back for a moment from the opinions of ordinary men. Get a true picture of virtue — a thing of surpassing beauty and grandeur, an image we worship not with incense and garlands but with sweat and blood. Look at Marcus Cato, laying his clean hands on that sacred breast and tearing open the wounds that hadn't gone deep enough to kill him. Which will you say to him — "I'm sorry for you" and "I hope it all turns out as you wish"? Or "Good fortune in your undertaking!"?
This brings to mind our friend Demetrius, who calls an easy life untroubled by any attack of Fortune a "Dead Sea." If you have nothing to stir you up, nothing to rouse you to action, nothing to test your resolve with threats and assaults; if you lie back in unshaken comfort — that isn't tranquility. That's just a flat calm. The Stoic Attalus used to say: "I would rather Fortune kept me in her camp than in the lap of luxury. If I'm tortured but bear it bravely, all is well. If I die, but die bravely, that is well too." Listen to Epicurus, and he'll tell you it's actually pleasant. I myself will never hang so soft a word on an act so honorable and austere. If I go to the stake, I'll go unbeaten. Why shouldn't I count that desirable — not because the fire burns me, but because it does not conquer me? Nothing is more excellent or more beautiful than virtue; whatever we do at her command is both good and desirable.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I agree with your plan: retire, and hide yourself in rest. But hide the retirement itself as well. In doing this you'll be following the Stoics' example, if not their official teaching — though in fact you'll be following the teaching too, so you can satisfy both yourself and any Stoic you like. We Stoics don't push men into public life in every case, at all times, with no exceptions. Besides, once we have assigned our wise man the public sphere that's actually worthy of him — namely, the universe — he is never outside public life, even when he withdraws. If anything, he has quit one small corner of it and crossed over into greater, wider territory; set among the heavens, he understands how low a seat he occupied when he climbed onto the magistrate's chair or the judge's bench. Take this to heart: the wise man is never more active than when things divine as well as things human have come into his view.
Now back to the advice I started to give you: keep your retirement quiet. There's no need to pin a sign on yourself reading "Philosopher and Quietist." Give your project some other name — call it poor health, physical weakness, or plain laziness. Bragging about retirement is just vanity in hiding. Certain animals conceal their dens by scuffing up the tracks around the entrance. You should do the same; otherwise there will always be somebody following your footprints. Many people walk right past what's in plain sight and go poking after what's hidden and locked away. A locked room invites the thief. What lies in the open looks cheap; the housebreaker passes by what's on display. That's the way of the world, and the way of every ignorant man: they itch to break in on secrets. So it's best not to advertise your retirement — but making too much of your concealment, of your withdrawal from human sight, is itself a kind of advertising. So-and-so has gone into seclusion at Tarentum; that fellow has shut himself up at Naples; this one hasn't crossed his own threshold in years. To advertise your retirement is to collect a crowd. When you withdraw from the world, your business is to talk with yourself — not to have men talk about you.
And what should you talk about? Do exactly what people love to do when they gossip about the neighbors: speak ill of yourself when you're by yourself. You'll get used to telling the truth — and to hearing it. Above all, dwell on whatever you come to feel is your greatest weakness. Every man knows his own body's defects best. That's why one man relieves his stomach by vomiting, another props his up with frequent small meals, another drains and purges himself with regular fasting. Men with painful feet give up wine, or the baths. Careless about everything else, men go out of their way to treat the ailment that keeps coming back. It's the same with our souls: they have certain parts on the sick-list, so to speak, and it's to those parts that the cure must be applied.
What am I doing with my own leisure, then? I'm treating my own sores. If I showed you a swollen foot, an inflamed hand, or the shriveled tendons of a withered leg, you'd give me leave to lie quiet in one place and put compresses on the damaged limb. My trouble is bigger than any of those, and I can't show it to you: the abscess, the ulcer, is deep in my chest. Please, please — don't praise me, don't say, "What a great man! He has learned to despise it all; he has condemned the madness of men's lives and made his escape!" I have condemned nothing except myself. There's no reason to come to me hoping to make progress. You're mistaken if you expect any help from this quarter: no physician lives here, only a patient. I'd rather you said, on your way out: "I used to think him a happy man and a learned one, and I came with my ears pricked to listen. I've been cheated. I saw nothing, heard nothing that I wanted and would come back for." If you feel that way, and say so, some progress has been made. I'd rather you pardoned my retirement than envied it.
"So it's retirement you're recommending, Seneca? You'll be falling back on Epicurus's maxims next!" I do recommend retirement — but only so you can use it for greater and more beautiful work than what you're giving up. Knocking at the proud doors of the powerful, keeping alphabetical lists of childless old men with money, wielding the biggest influence in public life — that kind of power earns you hatred, doesn't last, and, if you price it honestly, is cheap stuff. One man will be far ahead of me in political clout, another in an officer's pay and the rank that comes with it, another in the size of his crowd of clients. It's worth being beaten by all of them, provided I myself can beat Fortune. And in a crowd I'm no match for her — she has the bigger following.
If only you had set your mind on this course years ago! If only we weren't discussing the happy life within plain sight of death! But even now, no delays. Experience has now confirmed what reason should have convinced us of long ago: that a great many things are useless, and many are hostile. Let's do what travelers do when they've started late and want to make up time by speed — let's use the spur. Our time of life is actually the best possible for this work: the boiling and foaming stage is over. The faults that raged unchecked in the first hot blast of youth have weakened; it will take only a little more effort to put them out.
"And when," you ask, "will learning do you any good, if you only learn it on your way out the door — and what good will it do?" Just this good: I shall leave a better man. But don't imagine any age is better suited to a sound mind than the age that has conquered itself through long testing — that has tamed its passions through long and repeated regret for its mistakes, and so arrived at health. This is precisely the season for acquiring that good. Whoever reaches wisdom in old age has reached it by means of his years.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I don't like you changing headquarters and scurrying from place to place. My first reason: all this flitting around is the sign of an unsteady spirit. And the spirit can never settle into unity through retirement until it has stopped its wandering and its sightseeing. To hold your spirit in check, you must first stop the body's runaway flight. My second reason: the cures that help most are the ones that aren't interrupted. Don't let anything break in on your quiet, or on the forgetting to which you've consigned your old life. Give your eyes time to unlearn what they've seen, and your ears time to get used to healthier words. Every time you go out, even just in passing from one place to the next, you'll run into things that wake your old cravings. A man trying to get over an old love must avoid every reminder of the person he once adored — nothing regrows as easily as love — and in the same way, a man trying to lay down his desire for all the things he once craved so hotly must turn both eyes and ears away from what he has left behind. The passions are quick to counterattack; wherever they turn, they'll spot something in front of them worth their attention. There is no evil that doesn't offer a signing bonus. Greed promises money; luxury, a whole menu of pleasures; ambition, the purple robe and the applause, and the influence applause brings, and everything influence can do. Vices recruit you with wages; in the life I'm describing, you must work unpaid. A whole lifetime is barely enough to break our vices and bring them under the yoke, swollen as they are from long indulgence — much less if we chop our short span into pieces with interruptions. Even constant, unbroken attention can barely carry a single undertaking through to the finish.
If you'll take my advice, ponder and practice this: how to welcome death — or even, if circumstances call for it, to invite it. It makes no difference whether death comes to us or we go to death. Convince yourself that the ignorant are wrong when they say, "It is a beautiful thing to die one's own death." There is no man who doesn't die his own death. And here is a further thought to chew on: no one dies except on his own day. You are throwing away none of your own time — for what you leave behind was never yours.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
After a long absence I have seen your beloved Pompeii again, and it brought me face to face with my own youth. Everything I did there as a young man, it seemed to me I could still do — had done, in fact, only a little while ago. We have sailed past life, Lucilius, the way sailors sail past a coastline. At sea, as our poet Virgil puts it,
Lands and towns drop away astern,
and just so, on this voyage where time runs at full speed, we put below the horizon first our boyhood, then our youth, then those years that lie between young manhood and middle age and border on both, and then the best years of old age itself. Last of all we begin to sight the one landfall appointed for the whole human race. Fools that we are, we take it for a dangerous reef. It is the harbor. Some day we must put in there; we are never entitled to refuse it; and if a man reaches that harbor in his early years, he has no more right to complain than a sailor who has made a fast crossing. Some sailors, as you know, are teased and held back by sluggish winds until they grow weary and sick of the flat calm; others are carried home by a steady gale.
Assume the same thing happens to us. Life has rushed some men to the harbor — the harbor they were bound to reach anyway, even dawdling — while others it has chafed and battered the whole way. And to a life like that, as you know, one should not always cling. Merely living is not the good; living well is. So the wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. He will note where he is to live, and with whom, and how, and what he is to be doing. He thinks always about the quality of his life, never the quantity. If life presents him with too many things that torment him and wreck his peace of mind, he sets himself free. And this right is his not only in the final emergency, but the moment Fortune starts to look untrustworthy: then he surveys the ground carefully and considers whether this is the place to stop. It makes no difference to him, he holds, whether he makes his end or merely meets it, whether it comes late or early. He does not fear it as some great loss: no one can lose much when only a trickle is left. It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or badly. And dying well means escaping the danger of living badly.
That is why I find the words of the famous Rhodian utterly spineless. This man had been thrown into a cage by his tyrant and was fed there like a wild animal, and when someone advised him to end it by starving himself, he answered: "While a man has life, he may hope for anything." Perhaps so; but life is not worth buying at every price. Let the prizes be as great and as guaranteed as you please: I will not crawl to them through a shameful confession of weakness. Shall I dwell on the fact that Fortune holds every power over a man while he lives — rather than on the fact that she holds none over a man who knows how to die?
And yet there are times when a man, though death is certain and he knows torture is scheduled for him, will refuse to lend a hand to his own punishment. To himself he would lend it. It is folly to die for fear of dying. The executioner is coming: wait for him. Why get there first? Why volunteer to manage a piece of cruelty that belongs to someone else? Do you begrudge your executioner his job, or are you just sparing him the trouble? Socrates could have ended his life by fasting — died of hunger rather than hemlock. Instead he spent thirty days in prison waiting for death, not with the thought "anything might happen yet" or "so long a stretch has room for plenty of hopes," but so that he might show himself obedient to the laws, and so that his friends might have the last hours of Socrates to live on. What would have been more foolish than to despise death, yet be afraid of poison?
Scribonia, a woman of the stern old school, was the aunt of Drusus Libo, a young man as stupid as he was well-born, with ambitions higher than anyone could afford in that age — or a man like him in any age. He had been carried out of the senate-house sick, in his litter, with a very thin escort — for all his relatives had undutifully abandoned him once he was no longer a defendant but as good as a corpse — and he began to debate whether to kill himself or wait for death. Scribonia said to him: "What pleasure do you find in doing another man's work?" He did not take her advice; he laid hands on himself. And he was right after all. When your enemy has scheduled your death for two or three days out, staying alive really is doing another man's work.
So there is no blanket answer to the question of whether, when a power beyond our control decrees our death, we should go to meet it or wait for it. Plenty of arguments pull in each direction. If one death comes with torture and the other is simple and easy, why not grab the easy one? Just as I will choose my ship when I am going on a voyage, and my house when I am moving in, so I will choose my death when I am leaving life. What's more, a longer life is not automatically a better one, but a longer death is automatically a worse one. In nothing should we humor the soul more than in dying. Let it leave by whatever way it feels the pull: whether it reaches for the sword, or the rope, or a drug that empties the veins, let it go, and snap the chains of its slavery. A man should make his life acceptable to others as well as himself; his death, to himself alone. The best death is the one we like. It is foolish to sit thinking: "One person will say I wasn't brave enough; another, that I was too rash; a third, that some other death would have shown more spirit." What you should think instead is: the decision before me is one that public opinion holds no share in. Your single aim should be to get clear of Fortune as fast as you can; otherwise, there will never be a shortage of people who think badly of what you did.
You can even find men who profess philosophy and yet insist that no violence should be done to one's own life, and who call it an abomination for a man to be his own destroyer: we should wait, they say, for the end nature has decreed. A man who says this does not see that he is closing the road to freedom. Of everything the eternal law ever arranged, the best is this: it gave us one entrance into life, but many exits. Should I wait on the cruelty of disease, or the cruelty of men, when I can walk out through the middle of my tortures and shake off my troubles? This is the one count on which we cannot complain of life: it holds no one against his will. Humanity is well situated: no one is unhappy except by his own fault. If you like life, live; if not, you may go back where you came from. You have often been cupped to relieve a headache; you have had veins opened to bring your weight down. To pierce the heart, no gaping wound is required: a lancet opens the way to that great freedom, and tranquility costs a pin-prick.
What is it, then, that makes us sluggish and slow? None of us reflects that some day he must leave this house of life. It is just the way old tenants are: fondness for the place and force of habit keep them on, even when the place mistreats them. Do you want to be free with respect to your body? Then live in it as a tenant about to move out. Keep it before your mind that some day this lease will end; then you will be braver when moving day becomes necessary. But how will a man ever think about his own end if he craves everything without end? And yet there is nothing we need to rehearse more. Our other training may never be called on. Our souls stand ready for poverty — but our wealth has held out. We have armed ourselves to despise pain — but the good luck of a sound and healthy body has never asked us to prove it. We have taught ourselves to bear bravely the loss of those we love — but Fortune has kept alive everyone we loved. This is the one drill where the day of the test is guaranteed to come.
Do not imagine that only great men have had the strength to burst the bars of human servitude; do not believe this is something only a Cato can do — Cato, who with his bare hand dragged out the soul his sword had failed to set free. Men of the lowliest station have flung themselves to safety by one mighty effort, and when they were not allowed to die at their own convenience, or to pick and choose the instrument of death, they have snatched up whatever lay at hand and by sheer force turned objects harmless by nature into weapons of their own. Recently, in a training-school for beast-fighters, there was a German who was getting ready for the morning show. He withdrew to relieve himself — the only thing he was allowed to do in private, without a guard. There he seized the stick of wood tipped with a sponge that is kept for the filthiest of uses, and rammed the whole thing down his throat, blocking his windpipe and choking the breath out of his body. That was throwing an insult in death's face. Exactly so — not an elegant or a decent way to die; but what is more foolish than being fastidious about dying? What a brave man! He deserved to be given a choice of fate. How boldly he would have used a sword! With what spirit he would have hurled himself into the depths of the sea, or off a cliff! Cut off from every resource, he still found a way to furnish himself with a death, and with a weapon for it — proof that nothing but the will stands between a man and his dying. Let each of us judge this fierce fellow's act as he pleases, so long as we agree on this much: the foulest death is preferable to the cleanest slavery.
Since I began with humble examples, I will keep on with them. Men will demand more of themselves when they see that even the most despised class of men can despise death. We treat the Catos and the Scipios and the other names we are trained to admire as beyond imitation; but I will now show you that the virtue I am speaking of turns up as often in the gladiators' barracks as among the commanders of a civil war. Recently a gladiator, sent off to the morning show, was riding in a cart with the other prisoners. Nodding as if he could not fight off sleep, he let his head droop lower and lower until it slipped between the spokes; then he held his body rigid just long enough for the turning wheel to break his neck. The very wagon that was carrying him to his punishment carried him out of it.
When a man wants to break out and be gone, nothing stands in his way. Nature keeps us in an open enclosure; the way out is unbarred. When our situation permits it, we may look around for an easy exit. If many means of freedom lie ready to hand, we can take our pick and consider the best way out; but if chances are hard to come by, seize the nearest as if it were the best, however unheard-of, however new. A man who does not lack the courage to die will not lack the ingenuity. Look how even the lowest of slaves, when suffering spurs him, rouses himself and outwits the most watchful guards! The truly great man is not just the one who has given himself the order to die, but the one who has found the means.
I promised you a few more illustrations from the same games. During the second event of a mock sea-battle, one of the barbarians sank the spear he had been issued against his enemy deep into his own throat. "Why, oh why," he said, "did I not escape long ago from all this torture and all this mockery? Why do I stand here armed, and wait for death to come?" The show was all the more striking for the lesson it taught: that dying is more honorable than killing.
Well then: if desperate and dangerous men can possess such a spirit, shall it be missing in men who have prepared for these emergencies by long rehearsal — and by reason, the mistress of everything? Reason teaches us that fate has many roads in, but one destination, and that it makes no difference where the inevitable begins. Reason also gives this advice: die as you please, if you can; if you cannot, die as you are able, and seize whatever offers itself for doing yourself that violence. To live by robbery is a crime; but to die by robbery — that is the noblest act of all.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You keep sending me your particular problems, one after another, forgetting that a whole stretch of sea lies between us. Advice is worth most at the moment it's given, so by the time my opinion on some question reaches you, the opposite opinion may be the better one. Advice has to fit circumstances, and our circumstances are not just moving along — they're being whirled along. So advice should be produced on the spot; and even that is too slow. It should "grow as we work," as the saying goes. What I want to show you instead is the method for finding it yourself.
Whenever you want to know what to avoid or what to pursue, look at how it relates to the Supreme Good — to the purpose of your whole life. Everything we do ought to be in harmony with that. No one can put the details of his life in order until he has set the overall aim of his life in front of him. A painter may have all his colors mixed and ready, but he can't produce a likeness until he has decided what he wants to paint. The reason we go wrong is that we all think about the pieces of life, but never about life as a whole. An archer has to know what he's trying to hit; only then can he aim and guide the arrow with his skill. Our plans miscarry because they have no target. If you don't know which harbor you're sailing for, no wind is the right wind. No wonder Fortune has such power over our lives: we live by chance. And with certain people there's an odd twist — they don't know that they know things. Just as we sometimes hunt everywhere for the person standing right beside us, we tend to forget that the goal, the Supreme Good, is close at hand.
To grasp the nature of this Supreme Good, you don't need many words or any roundabout discussion. You should be able to point at it with one finger, so to speak, not scatter it into pieces. What's the use of chopping it into little bits when you can simply say: the Supreme Good is what is honorable? Better yet — and this may surprise you even more — what is honorable is the only good; every other so-called good is alloyed and debased metal. Once you convince yourself of this, and once you come to love virtue devotedly (merely loving it isn't enough), then everything virtue has touched will turn out blessed and prosperous for you, no matter how it looks to anyone else. Torture — if you lie there calmer in mind than the man torturing you. Illness — if you don't curse Fortune and don't surrender to the disease. In short, everything other people call an evil becomes manageable, and ends in good, if you rise above it.
Let this one thing be settled — that nothing is good except what is honorable — and every hardship will have a fair claim to the name of "good," once virtue has made it honorable. Many people think we Stoics are promising more than the human lot allows, and they have a right to think so: they're looking only at the body. Let them turn back to the soul, and they'll soon be measuring man by the standard of God. Rouse yourself, my excellent Lucilius, and drop the philosophers' word-games — the ones that shrink the most glorious subject in the world down to a matter of syllables, that lower and wear out the soul by teaching it in scraps. Then you'll become like the men who discovered these teachings, not like the men whose teaching does its best to make philosophy look difficult rather than great.
Socrates — who called all of philosophy back to conduct, and said the highest wisdom is telling good from evil — put it this way: "Follow these rules, if my words carry any weight with you, so that you may be happy — and let some people think you a fool. Let anyone who wants to insult you and do you wrong; if virtue lives with you, you will suffer nothing. If you wish to be happy, if you want to be, in good faith, a good man, then let this person or that person look down on you." No one can manage this until he has come to regard all goods as equal — because no good exists without the honorable, and the honorable is in every case equal.
"What?" you say. "Is there no difference between Cato winning the praetorship and Cato losing the election? No difference whether Cato is conquered or conqueror on the battle line at Pharsalia? When his party was defeated but he could not be defeated, was that goodness really equal to what he'd have had if he'd returned home victorious and arranged a peace?" Of course it was. It is the same virtue that overcomes bad fortune and keeps good fortune under control; and virtue cannot be increased or decreased. It stands at one height.
"But," you'll object, "Gnaeus Pompey will lose his army! The patricians, the noblest patterns the state ever produced, the front rank of Pompey's cause — a senate under arms — will be routed in a single battle. The wreckage of that great aristocracy will be scattered across the whole world: one part will fall in Egypt, another in Africa, another in Spain. And the poor state won't even be granted the privilege of being ruined once and for all!" Yes, all of it may happen. Juba's knowledge of every position in his own kingdom may do him no good, and no good the stubborn bravery of his people fighting for their king. Even the men of Utica, crushed by their troubles, may waver in their loyalty; and the good fortune that always followed the name of Scipio may desert Scipio in Africa. But long ago destiny "saw to it that Cato should come to no harm."
"He was conquered all the same!" Fine — put that down among Cato's "failures." Cato will bear whatever cheats him of victory with the same stout heart he bore what cheated him of the praetorship. The day he lost the election, he spent playing games; the night he intended to die, he spent reading. To him, losing the praetorship and losing his life belonged in the same category: he had convinced himself that a man must endure whatever can happen. And why shouldn't he suffer a revolution in the state bravely and calmly? What is free from the risk of change? Not the earth, not the sky, not the whole fabric of the universe — even though God's hand steers it. It will not keep its present order forever; some day will throw it from its course. Everything moves on its appointed schedule; all things are destined to be born, to grow, and to be destroyed. The stars you see wheeling above us, and this seemingly immovable earth we cling to and stand on — they will be consumed, and they will cease to exist. Everything has its old age; Nature simply sends all things toward the same finish line at unequal intervals. Whatever is will cease to be — and yet it will not perish; it will be dissolved back into its elements. To our minds, dissolving means perishing, because we see only what is nearest; the sluggish mind, sworn into the service of the body, doesn't see past its own borders. Otherwise it would bear its own ending, and the ending of everything it owns, with more courage — if it could hope that life and death take their turns like everything else in the universe: that whatever is put together is broken apart, whatever is broken apart is put together again, and that the eternal craftsmanship of God, who governs all things, is at work on exactly this task.
So the wise man will say just what a Marcus Cato would say, looking back over his life: "The whole human race, all who are and all who will be, stands condemned to die. Of all the cities that have ever ruled the world, and all that have been the shining ornaments of empires not their own, people will one day ask where they were — and they will have been swept away by destructions of every kind. Some will be ruined by wars; others will be eaten away by idleness, by the kind of peace that ends in sloth, and by the vice that brings down even mighty dynasties — luxury. All these fertile plains will be buried out of sight by a sudden flood of the sea, or the ground will settle and slip and drag them down into a yawning chasm. Why then should I be angry, or grieve, if I go a tiny interval of time ahead of the universal destruction?" Let great souls comply with God's wishes, and accept without hesitating whatever fate the law of the universe ordains. At death the soul is either sent out into a better life, to dwell with the divine in greater radiance and calm — or, at the very least, it suffers no harm: it is mingled back into nature and returns to the universe.
So Cato's honorable death was no less a good than his honorable life, because virtue does not stretch. Socrates used to say that truth and virtue are the same thing. Just as truth does not grow, virtue does not grow either; it has its full proportions; it is complete. So don't be surprised that goods are equal — both the ones we choose deliberately and the ones circumstances impose on us. Because if you once accept that they're unequal — if you rank the brave endurance of torture among the lesser goods — you'll end up ranking it among the evils too. You'll call Socrates unhappy in his prison; you'll call Cato unhappy as he tears his wound open again with his bare hands, more courageously than he inflicted it; you'll call Regulus the unluckiest man of all because he paid the penalty for keeping his word — even to his enemies. And yet no one, not even the softest creature alive, has ever dared to say that. People deny that a man like Regulus is happy; but for all that, they also deny that he is wretched. The earlier Academics do admit that a man is happy even under such tortures — but not completely, not fully happy. With that we cannot agree at all. Unless a man is happy, he has not attained the Supreme Good; and the good which is supreme has no higher degree above it — provided virtue exists in the man, provided adversity does not impair it, provided the virtue stands unharmed even when the body is injured. And it does stand. For as I understand virtue, it is high-spirited and exalted; whatever harasses it only rouses it. That spirit that young men of noble character sometimes catch — when the beauty of some honorable thing strikes them so deeply that they despise all the gifts of Fortune — wisdom pours that spirit into us and makes it ours for good. Wisdom brings the conviction that there is only one good, the honorable; that it can be neither shortened nor extended, any more than a carpenter's rule — the tool we test straight lines with — can be bent. Bend the rule at all, and you spoil the straight line. Apply the same figure to virtue, and we say: virtue too is straight, and it does not bend. Can you tighten what is already rigid? Virtue passes judgment on everything, and nothing passes judgment on virtue. And if the rule itself cannot be made any straighter, then the things virtue produces cannot be straighter in one case and less straight in another. They must correspond to virtue; therefore they are equal.
"What!" you say. "You're calling it equally good to recline at a banquet and to be stretched on the rack?" Does that shock you? Then here is something more shocking: reclining at a banquet can be an evil, and reclining on the rack can be a good — if the first is done shamefully and the second honorably. It isn't the material that makes an act good or bad; it's the virtue. Every act in which virtue shows itself has the same measure and the same worth. Right now the man who measures every soul by his own is shaking his fist in my face, because I hold that there is parity between the goods of the man who passes sentence honorably and the man who suffers sentence honorably; because I hold there is parity between the man celebrating a triumph and the man — unconquered in spirit — being carted along in front of the victor's chariot. Critics like that assume that whatever they can't do, can't be done; they pass judgment on virtue in the light of their own weaknesses. Why marvel that it can help a man — sometimes even please him — to be burned, wounded, killed, or chained in prison? To a man of luxury, a simple life is a penalty; to a lazy man, work is punishment; the dandy pities the hard worker; to the idle, study is torture. In the same way, we call anything we're all too weak for "hard" and "beyond endurance" — forgetting what a torment it is for plenty of men to go without wine, or to be rolled out of bed at dawn. None of these things is difficult by nature. We ourselves are soft and flabby. Great matters must be judged with greatness of soul; otherwise we'll blame them for what is really our own fault. It's like perfectly straight objects that look bent or broken when you sink them in water. It matters not only what you see, but with what eyes you see it: our souls are too dim-sighted to make out the truth. But give me an unspoiled, sturdy-minded young man, and he'll tell you the more fortunate person is the one who carries the whole weight of adversity on unbending shoulders — the one who stands taller than Fortune. There's nothing remarkable about not being tossed around when the sea is calm. Save your wonder for the man who is lifted up when everyone else sinks, who stays on his feet when everyone else is flat on the ground.
What element of evil is there in torture, or in the other things we call hardships? As far as I can see, the evil is this: that the mind sags, and bends, and collapses. None of that can happen to the wise man. He stands upright under any load. Nothing subdues him; nothing he must endure annoys him. He doesn't complain that he has been struck by something that can strike any man. He knows his own strength; he knows he was born to carry burdens. I don't remove the wise man from the human race, and I don't deny him the sense of pain, as if he were a rock that feels nothing. I remember that he is made of two parts. One part is irrational — that's the part that can be bitten, burned, hurt. The other part is rational — that's the part that holds firmly to its convictions, that is courageous and unconquerable. That is where man's Supreme Good lives. Until it is fully attained, the mind wavers in uncertainty; only when it is fully achieved does the mind become fixed and steady. So the man who has just begun — the man climbing toward the heights and cultivating virtue, even the man drawing near the perfect good who hasn't yet put the finishing touch on it — will slip back at times, will feel his mental effort slacken. He hasn't crossed the uncertain ground yet; he's still standing in a slippery place. But the happy man, whose virtue is complete, loves himself most of all when his bravery has passed the severest test — when what everyone else dreads he not only endures but welcomes, if that is the price of a duty honor imposes. He would far rather have people say of him "How much nobler!" than "How much luckier!"
And now I've reached the point your patient waiting has been calling me toward. Don't imagine that our human virtue rises above nature. The wise man will tremble, will feel pain, will turn pale — those are all sensations of the body. Then where does real distress live — the thing that is truly an evil? In the other part of us, no doubt: but only if these trials drag the mind down, force it to confess itself a slave, and make it sorry it exists. The wise man conquers Fortune by his virtue; yet plenty of men who profess wisdom are frightened by the flimsiest threats. And at this stage it's our mistake to demand the same from the learner as from the wise man. I'm still urging myself to do what I recommend, and my urging isn't followed yet. Even if it were, I wouldn't have these principles so ready, so well drilled, that they would rush to my defense in every crisis. Wool takes some dyes the moment it touches them; others it won't absorb unless it is soaked and steeped again and again. It's the same with doctrines: some the mind can apply the moment it accepts them. But this one — unless it has gone deep and soaked in for a long time, unless it has not merely tinted the soul but thoroughly saturated it — delivers on none of its promises. The teaching itself can be handed over quickly, in very few words: virtue is the only good; at any rate, there is no good without virtue; and virtue itself is located in our nobler part — the rational part. And what will this virtue be? A true and never-swerving judgment. From it every impulse of the mind will spring, and by it every outward appearance that stirs an impulse will be brought into clear focus. And it follows from that judgment to count everything virtue has colored as good — and as equally good.
Bodily goods are, to be sure, good for the body; but they are not good, full stop. They will have some value, but no genuine worth, and they will differ widely — some smaller, some greater. And we have to admit there are great differences among the followers of wisdom themselves. One man has already made enough progress to dare to lift his eyes and look Fortune in the face — but not for long; her overwhelming glare dazzles him, and his eyes drop. Another has come far enough to hold her gaze — unless, that is, he has reached the summit and stands full of confidence. Whatever is short of perfection is bound to be unsteady: advancing at one moment, slipping or faltering at the next. And it will surely slip back unless it keeps fighting forward — slacken your zeal and your faithful effort at all, and you go backward. No one can resume his progress at the exact point where he dropped it. So let us press on and persevere. More of the road remains than we have put behind us — but wanting to go forward is the greater part of going forward.
Of this task I am fully aware. I want it, and I want it with my whole heart. I can see you've been roused too, racing with tremendous energy toward infinite beauty. So let us race. Only on those terms is life a blessing to us. Otherwise it is delay — and disgraceful delay at that, while we busy ourselves with things that should disgust us. Let's see to it that all time belongs to us. And it cannot, until we ourselves first belong to us. When will we get to despise both kinds of fortune? When will we get to say — every passion subdued and brought under our own control — the words "I have conquered"? Whom have I conquered, you ask? Not the Persians, not the far-off Medes, not any warlike tribe beyond the Dahae. I have conquered greed, ambition, and the fear of death — the fear that has conquered the conquerors of the world. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
The question you're asking me about was once perfectly clear in my mind. I had mastered it so thoroughly that I didn't even need to think. But I haven't tested my memory of it in a while, and it isn't coming back easily. I feel like a book whose rolls have stuck together from sitting unread. My mind needs to be unrolled; whatever has been stored away in there ought to be taken out and inspected from time to time, so it's ready for use the moment it's needed. So let's set that question aside for now — it demands real labor and real care. As soon as I can expect to stay put in one place for a while, I'll take it up properly. Some subjects you can write about while bouncing along in a carriage; others need a desk, quiet, and a closed door. Still, I ought to get something done even on days like these — days that are booked solid from morning to night. There is never a moment when fresh business won't come along. We sow it ourselves, and that's why one task always sprouts into several. Then we keep granting ourselves postponements: "As soon as I finish this, I'll settle down to serious work," or, "Once I get this annoying mess sorted out, I'll devote myself to study."
But philosophy is not something to put off until you have free time. Everything else should be neglected so that we can attend to philosophy, because no amount of time is long enough for it — not even if our lives stretched from boyhood to the furthest limit granted to man. And it makes little difference whether you abandon philosophy entirely or study it in fits and starts; it doesn't stay where you left it. Break its continuity and it snaps back to the beginning, like a taut cord let go. We have to resist the affairs that eat our time. Don't try to untangle them — shove them out of the way. There is no time that's actually unsuitable for useful study; and yet plenty of men fail to study in the very circumstances that make study necessary. "Something will come up to stop me," he says. Not for the man whose spirit is happy and alert no matter what business he's in. It's the people still short of perfection whose happiness can be interrupted. The joy of the wise man is unbroken and continuous — a fabric woven in one piece, torn by no accident and no turn of Fortune. At all times and in all places, he is at peace. His joy depends on nothing external and waits on no favor from man or Fortune. His happiness is homegrown: it would leave his soul if it had entered from outside, but it was born there. Now and then some event reminds him that he's mortal, but it's a light blow — it only grazes the skin. Some trouble may brush him, I admit, like a puff of wind; but that Supreme Good of his stands unshaken. What I mean is this: there are external nuisances, like pimples and boils breaking out on a body that is basically strong and sound — but there's no disease down deep. The difference between the man of perfect wisdom and the man still making progress is the difference between a healthy man and someone convalescing from a long, hard illness — a man for whom "health" just means a milder attack of his disease. If the convalescent isn't careful, he relapses at once, straight back into the old trouble. But the wise man can't slip back — can't slip into any sickness at all. Bodily health is a temporary arrangement; the doctor can't guarantee it even after he's restored it. Often enough he's rousted out of bed to see the very patient who called him before. The mind, though, once healed, is healed for good.
Let me tell you what I mean by a healthy mind: one that is content with itself; that trusts itself; that understands that everything people pray for, all the advantages men give and chase, count for nothing in a happy life. That mind is sound. Because anything that can be added to is incomplete; anything that can suffer loss won't last. The man who wants his happiness to last should rejoice in what is genuinely his own — and everything the crowd gapes at ebbs and flows. Fortune gives us nothing we can actually own. Even Fortune's gifts only please us once reason has tempered and blended them to our taste; it's reason that makes even external goods agreeable — gulp them down greedily and they turn sour. Attalus, my old teacher, used to use this picture: "Have you ever watched a dog snapping, jaws wide, at scraps of bread or meat his master tosses him? Whatever he catches he swallows whole on the spot, and instantly gapes again in hope of more. That's us. Whatever Fortune throws, we bolt it down without tasting it, and stand there tense and frantic for the next thing to snatch." Not the wise man. He is satisfied. If something does fall his way, he takes it casually and sets it aside. The happiness he enjoys is supremely great, it lasts, and it is his. Now take a man with good intentions who has made progress but is still far below the summit: his life is a series of ups and downs — one moment lifted to heaven, the next brought down to earth. For the untrained and inexperienced, there's no bottom to the fall; they drop into Epicurus's Chaos — empty and boundless. And there's a third class: the men who are close to wisdom. They haven't grasped it, but they have it in view — within striking distance, you might say. They aren't tossed around, and they aren't drifting backward either. They're not yet on dry land, but they're already in the harbor.
So, given the enormous gap between those on the heights and those in the depths, and given that even the men in the middle are chased by their own ebb and flow — and by the very real risk of sliding back into their old degenerate ways — we must not surrender ourselves to busyness. Shut it out. Once it gets a foot in the door, it will bring in replacements for itself. Let's resist it at the start. Better that it never begin than that we have to make it stop.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
It seems to me a mistake to believe that people loyally devoted to philosophy are stubborn and rebellious — scorners of magistrates or kings or anyone who runs public affairs. Just the opposite: no class of men appreciates a ruler more than the philosopher does, and rightly so, because rulers give no one a greater gift than the people they allow to enjoy peace and leisure. So those whose whole purpose — living rightly — profits from the security of the state are bound to cherish the author of that good like a father. Far more, at any rate, than the restless types who live in the public eye, who owe the ruler much but expect from him even more, and who are never so loaded with favors that their cravings — which grow with every feeding — are ever satisfied. A man whose mind is on favors to come has already forgotten the favors received; and there is no worse thing in greed than its ingratitude. Besides, no man in public life thinks of the many he has passed; he thinks only of those still ahead of him. And these men take less pleasure in seeing a crowd behind them than they take offense at seeing anyone in front. That's the disease of every kind of ambition: it doesn't look back. And ambition isn't the only restless thing — every craving is, because every craving begins where it ought to end.
But that other man — upright, clean, the one who has left the senate and the courts and all affairs of state to withdraw to nobler business — cherishes the people who make it possible for him to do so in safety. He alone thanks them unprompted; he alone owes them a great debt they know nothing about. Just as a man honors and reveres the teachers who freed him from his early wanderings, so the wise man honors these men too, under whose protection he can put his good theories into practice. "But other people are also protected by a king's power," you say. Perfectly true. But out of everyone who profits from the same stretch of calm weather, the man who reckons his debt to Neptune largest is the one whose cargo on that voyage was biggest and most valuable. The merchant pays his vow with more feeling than the passenger. And among the merchants themselves, heartier thanks come from the dealer in spices, purple cloth, and goods worth their weight in gold than from the man hauling cheap stuff that's little better than ballast. In the same way, the benefits of this peace, which reaches everyone, are felt most deeply by those who use it well.
For there are plenty of our toga-wearing citizens to whom peace brings more trouble than war. Do you really think the men who spend their peace on drunkenness, or lust, or other vices it would be worth even a war to interrupt, owe as much for it as we do? Not unless you imagine the wise man is so unfair that he believes he owes nothing personally for benefits he enjoys along with everyone else. I owe a great debt to the sun and the moon — and yet they don't rise for me alone. I am personally obliged to the seasons and to the god who governs them, though none of it was portioned out for my benefit. The foolish greed of mortals draws a line between possessing and owning, and counts nothing its own that the public has a share in. But our philosopher considers nothing more truly his own than what he shares in partnership with the whole human race. These things wouldn't be common property — which they are — unless every individual held his portion; even the slightest share in a thing makes you a partner. And here's the further point: the great and true goods are not divided up so that each person gets a sliver. They belong entire to each individual. At a grain distribution, men receive only the amount promised to each; a banquet, a meat-dole, anything a man can carry off in his hands, gets split into portions. But these goods are indivisible — I mean peace and liberty — and they belong whole to all men and whole to every man.
So the philosopher thinks about the person who makes it possible for him to use and enjoy these things — the person who exempts him when the state's dire need calls men to arms, to sentry duty, to defending the walls, and to all the endless demands of war — and he gives thanks to the helmsman of his state. This is what philosophy teaches above all: to acknowledge the debt of benefits received honorably, and to pay it honorably. Though sometimes the acknowledgment itself is the payment. Our philosopher will freely admit, then, that he owes a large debt to the ruler whose management and foresight let him enjoy rich leisure, control of his own time, and a quiet uninterrupted by public duties.
Shepherd, a god gave me this peaceful ease, for he shall be a god to me forever.
And if even leisure like our poet's owes a great debt to the man who gave it — leisure whose greatest boon is only this:
He let me turn my cattle out to graze, as you can see, and play whatever tune I pleased on my rustic reed —
then how highly should we value the philosopher's leisure, which is spent among the gods, and makes us gods? Yes, that is exactly what I mean, Lucilius; and I am inviting you to heaven by a shortcut.
Sextius used to say that Jupiter has no more power than the good man. Jupiter, of course, has more gifts to hand out to mankind. But when you're choosing between two good men, the richer one isn't the better one — any more than, between two pilots of equal skill at the tiller, you'd call the one with the bigger, showier ship the better sailor. In what way is Jupiter superior to our good man? His goodness lasts longer. But the wise man doesn't rate himself one bit lower just because his virtues run on a shorter clock. Take two wise men: the one who dies at a greater age is not happier than the one whose virtue was confined to fewer years. In the same way, a god has no advantage over a wise man in happiness, even though he has one in years. Virtue is not greater for lasting longer. Jupiter possesses everything — but he has handed the possession of it all over to others. The only use of it he keeps for himself is this: he is the cause of everyone else's use. The wise man surveys other people's possessions, and disdains them, as calmly as Jupiter does — and he thinks the better of himself for it, because Jupiter cannot make use of them, and the wise man does not want to. So let's believe Sextius when he points out the path of perfect beauty and cries: "This is 'the way to the stars' — the way of thrift, self-restraint, and courage!"
The gods are not snobbish or jealous. They open the door; they lend a hand as you climb. Are you amazed that a man goes to the gods? God comes to men — no, closer than that: he comes into men. No mind is good without God. Divine seeds are scattered through our mortal bodies. If a good farmer receives them, they spring up true to their source, the equals of the stock they came from. But if the farmer is bad — barren soil, or swampland — he kills the seeds and raises weeds instead of wheat.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Your letter gave me real pleasure, and it shook me out of a sluggish spell. It also gave my memory a nudge — it has been slack and drowsy for some time now.
You are right, of course, my dear Lucilius: the chief means of reaching the happy life is the conviction that the only good is what is honorable. Anyone who counts other things as good has put himself in Fortune's power and handed the controls to someone else. But the man who has defined the good, in every case, by what is honorable carries his happiness inside him.
One man is crushed when his children die; another is anxious when they fall sick; a third is embittered when they disgrace themselves or take a stain on their reputation. You will see one man tortured by passion for his neighbor's wife, another by passion for his own. You will find men wrecked by losing an election, and others actually tormented by the offices they won. But the biggest crowd of unhappy people in the whole throng of mortals are the ones driven to despair by the expectation of death — death that threatens them from every side. For there is no direction death cannot come from. So, like soldiers scouting in enemy country, they have to keep looking every way and turning their heads at every sound; unless the heart is rid of this fear, a man lives with his pulse pounding. You will easily call to mind the people driven into exile and stripped of their property. You will also call to mind — and this is the most serious kind of destitution — the people who are poor in the middle of their riches. You will call to mind men who have suffered shipwreck, or whose sufferings amount to shipwreck: they were untroubled and at ease when the anger, or perhaps the envy, of the crowd — a missile most deadly to those in high places — dismantled them, like a storm that tends to blow up exactly when you are most confident the calm will last, or like a lightning bolt that sets even the surrounding countryside trembling. For just as anyone standing near the strike is stunned and looks like a man who was hit, so in these sudden, violent disasters, only one person is crushed by the blow itself, but the rest are crushed by fear — the mere possibility of suffering leaves them as downcast as the man who actually suffered.
Every one of us is shaken in spirit by evils that fall suddenly on a neighbor. Like birds, who cower at the whirr of an empty sling, we are rattled by mere sounds as much as by blows. No one can be happy who gives himself up to fancies like these. For nothing brings happiness unless it also brings calm; a life spent in dread is a bad way to exist. Whoever has surrendered himself wholesale to Fortune's power has woven himself a huge web of anxiety, and he cannot get free of it. There is only one road to safety: despise externals and be content with what is honorable. For those who think anything is better than virtue, or that there is any good besides virtue, are spreading their arms to catch what Fortune throws to the crowd, and waiting nervously on her favors. Picture it: Fortune is holding a festival, showering honors, riches, and influence down on this mob of mortals. Some of the gifts have already been ripped to pieces in the hands of the people grabbing for them; some have been carved up by treacherous partnerships; some have been seized — to the great harm of the very people they landed on. A few of these favors fell to men who weren't even paying attention; others were lost to their seekers precisely because they snatched too eagerly, knocked from their hands by their own greed. And in that whole crowd there is not one man — not even the one who got lucky in the scramble — whose joy in his haul lasted until the next morning.
The sensible man, then, runs out of the theater the moment he sees the free handout being carried in, because he knows how high a price is paid for small favors. Nobody will wrestle with him on the way out; nobody will hit him as he leaves. The brawling happens where the prizes are. It is the same with the gifts Fortune tosses down to us. Wretches that we are, we get worked up, we are torn every which way, we wish we had a dozen hands, we glance back now this way, now that. The gifts seem to fall toward us far too slowly; all they do is inflame our cravings, since they can reach only a few and are awaited by all. We are desperate to intercept them as they drop. We celebrate if we grab hold of anything — while some are mocked by the empty hope of grabbing. Either we have paid dearly for worthless loot and damaged ourselves in the bargain, or we have been cheated and left standing there empty-handed. So let us walk out of this game and leave the field to the greedy rabble. Let them stare up at their "goods" dangling overhead — and dangle in suspense themselves.
Whoever makes up his mind to be happy should conclude that the good consists only in what is honorable. For if he counts anything else as good, then to begin with he is passing an unfavorable judgment on Providence — on the grounds that upright men often meet with misfortune, and that the time allotted to us is short and skimpy compared with the eternity allotted to the universe.
It is from complaints like these that we turn ungrateful in our commentary on heaven's gifts: we grumble that they are not granted always, that they are few, uncertain, and fleeting. And so we end up willing neither to live nor to die; we are gripped by hatred of life and fear of death. All our plans drift rudderless, and no amount of prosperity can satisfy us. The reason for all of it is that we have not yet reached the good that is beyond measure and beyond surpassing — the good at which all our wishing has to stop, because there is nowhere beyond the highest. Do you ask why virtue needs nothing? Because it is pleased with what it has and does not lust after what it lacks. In virtue's eyes, whatever is enough is abundant.
Break with this judgment, and duty and loyalty will not survive it. For anyone who wants to show those two qualities must endure much of what the world calls evil, and must sacrifice many of the things we are addicted to under the impression that they are goods. Gone is courage, which ought to be testing itself continually; gone is greatness of soul, which can never stand out clearly until it has learned to scorn as trivial everything the crowd covets as supremely important; gone are kindness and the repaying of kindness, if we fear hard work, if we have admitted that anything is more precious than loyalty, if our eyes are fixed on anything but the best.
But set those questions aside. Either these so-called goods are not goods, or else man is luckier than God — because God gets no enjoyment out of the things that are given to us. Lust has nothing to do with God, nor do elegant banquets, nor wealth, nor any of the things that entice mankind and lead him along by cheap pleasure. So either you must believe — hard as that is — that there are goods God does not possess, or else the very fact that God does not possess them is itself the proof that they are not goods. Besides, many things commonly counted as goods are granted to animals in fuller measure than to men. Animals eat their food with a heartier appetite, are not worn down to the same degree by sex, and have greater, steadier constancy in their strength. It follows that they are far luckier than man. For there is no wickedness in their way of living, no injuring of themselves. They enjoy their pleasures — and take them more often and more easily, without any of the fear that comes from shame or regret.
That being so, ask yourself whether anything deserves to be called good when God is outdone in it by man. Let us confine the Supreme Good to the soul; it loses its meaning if it is taken from the best part of us and handed to the worst — that is, transferred to the senses, for the senses are livelier in dumb beasts than in us. The sum total of our happiness must not be lodged in the flesh. The true goods are the ones reason bestows: substantial and eternal, they cannot fall away, cannot shrink, cannot be whittled down. Other things are goods only by opinion; they share a name with the true goods, but the essence of goodness is not in them. So let us call them "advantages" — or, to use our technical term, "preferred" things. And let us recognize that they are our property, not parts of us. Keep them in your possession, but keep remembering that they stand outside you. Even while we hold them, they should be filed under the subordinate and the second-rate — things no man has a right to preen himself on. For what is more foolish than being smug about something you never accomplished by your own effort? Let all such things be attached to us, not grafted into us, so that if one is taken away it comes off without tearing away any part of us. Use them, don't boast of them — and use them sparingly, as things handed over for safekeeping that will be called back. Anyone who holds them without reason never holds them long; prosperity, left unmanaged by reason, buries itself under its own weight. If a man has put his trust in the most fleeting of goods, he is soon stripped of them — and, to avoid being stripped, he suffers in advance. Few men have been allowed to set prosperity down gently. The rest fall together with everything they rose by, and the very things that once lifted them up come down on top of them. That is why foresight has to step in and impose a limit — a frugality in the use of these things — because license wrecks and squanders its own abundance. What has no limit has never lasted, unless reason, which sets limits, has kept it in check. The fate of many cities will prove the point: their power collapsed at its very peak because they had given themselves to luxury, and excess ruined everything virtue had won. We should fortify ourselves against such calamities. But no wall can be built that Fortune cannot take by storm. Let us strengthen the defenses within. If the inner citadel is safe, a man can be attacked — but never captured.
Do you want to know what this defensive weapon is? It is the ability not to chafe at whatever happens to you — the knowledge that the very forces which seem to do harm are working for the preservation of the world, and are part of the plan that carries the universe to the fulfillment of its order and its functions. Let man be pleased with whatever has pleased God. Let him marvel at himself and his own resources for this very reason: that he cannot be conquered, that he holds the powers of evil themselves under his control, and that he brings chance and pain and wrong into subjection by means of that strongest of all powers — reason. Love reason! The love of reason will arm you against the worst that can happen. Wild beasts throw themselves onto the hunter's spear out of love for their young, and it is their wildness, their unthinking charge, that keeps them from being tamed. A hunger for glory has often driven young minds to despise both sword and stake. The mere vision, the mere semblance of virtue drives certain men to a self-chosen death. And reason is sturdier and steadier than any of these impulses — so with that much more force will she drive her way through the thick of terrors and dangers.
People say to us: "You are mistaken if you claim that nothing is good except what is honorable. A defense like that will not make you safe from Fortune and free from her attacks. You yourselves count dutiful children, a well-governed country, and good parents as goods — but you cannot watch these dear things in danger and stay at ease. Your calm will be shattered by a siege against your country, by the death of your children, by the enslavement of your parents." I will first give the answer we Stoics usually make to these objectors, and then add what I think should be said on top of it.
The situation is entirely different with goods whose loss brings some hardship in as a substitute. When good health is damaged, it changes into illness; when an eye is put out, blindness moves in; when the tendons of our legs are cut, we do not merely lose our speed — lameness takes speed's place. But no such danger attends the goods we were just talking about. Why not? If I have lost a good friend, no false friend is installed whom I must endure in his place; if I have buried a dutiful son, I do not have to face unfilial behavior in exchange. And in the second place, what has happened is not the taking away of a friend or a child — only the taking away of their bodies. A good can be lost in one way only: by changing into something bad. And that is impossible under the law of nature, because every virtue, and every work of virtue, endures uncorrupted. Besides, even if friends have perished, or children of proven goodness who lived up to everything their father prayed for, something exists that can fill their place. Do you ask what it is? The very thing that made them good in the first place: virtue. Virtue leaves no space in us unoccupied; it takes possession of the whole soul and removes all sense of loss. It is sufficient by itself, for the strength and the seed of every good lies in virtue herself. What does it matter if running water is cut off and drains away, so long as the spring it flowed from is unharmed? You will not claim that a man's life is more just if his children are alive than if they have died — nor better ordered, nor more intelligent, nor more honorable. Therefore not better, either. Adding friends does not make a man wiser, and losing them does not make him more foolish — therefore not happier or more wretched, either. As long as your virtue is unharmed, you will not feel the loss of anything that has been taken from you. "Come now," you say, "isn't a man happier when he is surrounded by a great company of friends and children?" Why should he be? The Supreme Good is neither diminished nor increased by them; it stays within its own bounds no matter how Fortune has behaved. Whether a long old age falls to your lot or the end comes well short of old age, the measure of the Supreme Good is the same, whatever the difference in years.
Draw a circle large or draw it small: its size affects its area, not its shape. One circle may sit undisturbed for a long time; the other you may rub out at once, merging it back into the sand it was drawn in — yet each circle had the same shape. What is straight is not judged by its size, or its number, or its duration; it can no more be stretched than it can be shortened. Scale the honorable life down as far as you like from the full hundred years — reduce it to a single day — and it is every bit as honorable. Sometimes virtue operates on a broad front: governing kingdoms, cities, and provinces, making laws, cultivating friendships, regulating the duties that hold between relatives and children. At other times it is hemmed in by the narrow bounds of poverty, exile, or bereavement. But it is no smaller for being brought down from proud heights to a private station, from a royal palace to a humble cottage, or for being gathered from a broad, general jurisdiction into the confines of a private house or a tiny corner. Virtue is just as great even when it has retreated into itself and is shut in on every side. Its spirit is no less great and upright, its judgment no less complete, its justice no less unbending. It is, therefore, equally happy. For happiness has its home in one place only — the mind itself: noble, steadfast, and calm. And that state cannot be reached without knowledge of things divine and human.
The other answer, the one I promised to add, follows from this reasoning. The wise man is not crushed by the loss of children or friends. He endures their death in the same spirit in which he awaits his own — and he fears the one as little as he grieves for the other. For the underlying principle of virtue is harmony: all the works of virtue are in tune and in agreement with virtue itself. And that harmony is lost if the soul, which ought to stand tall, is dragged down by grief and longing. It is always a disgrace for a man to be fretting and agitated, to be numb when the moment calls for action. What is honorable is free of anxiety and unhampered; it is unafraid, and it stands ready to act. "What," you ask, "will the wise man feel no stirring at all — no disturbance of spirit? Won't his face lose its color, his features twitch, his limbs go cold? And there are other reactions we produce not by choice but unconsciously, by a kind of natural reflex." I grant all of that. But the wise man will hold on to the settled conviction that none of these things is an evil, or weighty enough to make a healthy mind break down. Whatever still needs doing, virtue will do it with courage and readiness. For anyone would agree it is the mark of a fool to do what he has to do sluggishly and under protest — to send the body one way and the mind another, and be torn apart between contradictory impulses. Folly is despised for the very things she brags about and admires in herself; she does not even do gladly the things she takes pride in. And if folly fears some evil, she is weighed down by it in the very act of waiting for it, exactly as if it had already arrived — suffering in apprehension everything she is afraid she may suffer. Just as in the body the symptoms of hidden ill-health show up before the disease — a certain limp sluggishness, a tiredness no work has earned, a trembling, a shiver running through the limbs — so the feeble spirit is rattled by its troubles long before it is overwhelmed by them. It lives them in advance, and collapses ahead of schedule.
But what is greater madness than to be tortured by the future — not saving your strength for the actual suffering, but inviting your misery in and hurrying it along? If you cannot get rid of it, you can at least postpone it. Will you not understand that no man should be tormented by what is still to come? A man who is told he will have to face torture fifty years from now is not disturbed by it — unless he vaults over all the intervening years and plants himself in the middle of a trouble scheduled to arrive a generation later. In just the same way, souls that enjoy being sick, that hunt for excuses to be sorrowful, grieve over events long past and wiped from the record. Past and future are both absent; we feel neither one. And there can be no pain except from what you feel.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You've been complaining that my letters are carelessly written. Well, who talks carefully unless he wants to sound affected? I want my letters to be exactly what my conversation would be if we were sitting together, or out taking a walk — spontaneous and easy. There is nothing strained or artificial in them. If I could, I would rather show you what I feel than tell you. Even if I were arguing a point, I wouldn't stamp my foot or wave my arms or raise my voice; I'd leave all that to the orators, and be content to have gotten my feelings across to you without dressing them up or dragging them down. The one thing I'd like to convince you of completely is this: I feel everything I say — and I don't just feel it, I'm wedded to it. A man kisses his mistress one way and his children another; but in the father's embrace too, holy and restrained as it is, there is plenty of love on display.
Not that I want our conversation about matters this important to be thin and dry — even philosophy doesn't refuse the company of wit. But you shouldn't spend much attention on mere words. Here is the kernel of my idea: let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let speech harmonize with life. A man has kept his promise when he is the same person whether you see him or hear him. We will see exactly what sort of man he is, and how large a man he is — provided he is one and the same throughout. Let our words aim not to please, but to help. Of course, if eloquence comes to you without labor — if you're naturally gifted, or can pick it up at little cost — then take it and put it to the noblest possible use. But let it be the kind of eloquence that displays the facts rather than itself. Eloquence and the other arts are entirely a matter of cleverness; our business here is the soul.
A sick man doesn't call in a doctor for his speaking voice. If the doctor who can cure him also happens to talk elegantly about the treatment, fine — the patient will take it in good part. But he'll find no reason to congratulate himself on landing an eloquent physician. It's no different from discovering that a skilled ship's pilot is also handsome. Why are you tickling my ears? Why are you entertaining me? That is not the business at hand. I am here to be cauterized, operated on, put on a diet. That's what you were called in to do.
You are being asked to cure a disease that is chronic and serious — one that infects the whole human race. You have as big a job on your hands as a doctor during a plague. And you're worried about words? Be glad right now if you can cope with things. When will you learn everything there is to learn? When will you plant what you've learned so firmly in your mind that it cannot escape? When will you put it all into practice? Because these things can't simply be committed to memory, like other subjects; they have to be tested in action. The happy man is not the one who knows them but the one who does them.
"What?" you say. "Are there no degrees of happiness below your 'happy' man? Is it a sheer cliff just beneath wisdom?" I don't think so. The man who is making progress still counts, technically, among the fools — but a long interval separates him from them. And among the people making progress themselves there are wide gaps. They fall into three classes, as certain philosophers hold.
First come those who don't yet possess wisdom but have already taken up a position nearby — though even "nearby" is still outside. Who are they? If you ask me, they are the men who have already laid aside all their passions and vices, who have learned what to embrace — but whose assurance is still untested. They haven't yet put their good to use. Still, from now on they can't fall back into the faults they escaped. They have already reached a point from which there is no slipping backward — but they don't know it yet. As I remember writing in another letter, "They don't know that they know." It is now given to them to enjoy their good, but not yet to be sure of it. Some define this class — this class of men making progress — as people who have escaped the diseases of the mind but not yet its passions, and who are still standing on slippery ground; because no one is beyond the reach of evil unless he has cleared it away entirely, and no one has cleared it away entirely except the man who has put wisdom in its place.
I've explained before, more than once, the difference between the diseases of the mind and its passions. But let me remind you. The diseases are hardened, chronic vices, like greed and ambition; they have wrapped the mind in too tight a grip and started to become its permanent afflictions. A brief definition: a disease is a persistent distortion of judgment, which makes things that are only mildly worth wanting look intensely worth wanting. Or if you prefer, put it this way: it is straining too hard after things that deserve only mild pursuit or none at all, or prizing highly things that deserve little value or none. The passions are objectionable impulses of the spirit, sudden and violent; when they come often and go unattended, they settle into a state of disease. Think of a cold: one attack, not yet habitual, produces a cough; let it become regular and chronic, and it produces consumption. So we can say that the people who have made the most progress are beyond the reach of the diseases — but they still feel the passions, even when they are very near perfection.
The second class is made up of those who have laid aside both the greatest ills of the mind and its passions, but who don't yet hold their immunity securely. They can still slip back into their former state.
The third class are past many vices — the great vices especially — but not past all of them. They've escaped greed, say, but still feel anger; lust no longer troubles them, but ambition still does; they no longer desire, but they still fear. And because they fear, they stand firm against some things and give way to others: they scorn death and are terrified of pain.
Let's dwell on that for a moment. It will go well with us if we're admitted even to this third class. The second stage takes great good luck in your natural gifts, plus great and unceasing devotion to study. But even the third rank is nothing to sneer at. Think of the mass of evils you see all around you — look how there is no crime without its example, how far wickedness advances every single day, how much goes wrong in the home and in public life. You'll see we're making a considerable gain if we're not counted among the worst.
"But as for me," you say, "I hope I have it in me to rise higher than that!" I would pray for this rather than promise it — we've been beaten to the start. We hurry toward virtue with our vices hanging on us. I'm ashamed to say it, but we honor what is honorable only in our spare time. And yet what a rich reward is waiting if we would only break off the business that keeps cutting ahead of us and the evils that cling to us with such stubborn tenacity! Then neither desire nor fear will rout us. Undisturbed by fears, unspoiled by pleasures, we will dread neither death nor the gods; we will know that death is no evil and that the gods are not powers of evil. What harms is no stronger than what is harmed, and what is utterly good has no power to harm at all. If we ever escape from these low dregs to that high and lofty place, what awaits us is peace of mind and — once every error has been driven out — perfect freedom. You ask what that freedom is? Fearing no man and no god; wanting nothing shameful and nothing in excess; holding supreme power over yourself. And it is a priceless good to be master of yourself.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You have been threatening to become my enemy if I don't keep you posted on everything I do, day by day. See how frankly you and I live with each other: I am going to confide even this to you. I have been attending a philosopher's lectures. Four days now I have been going to his school and listening to the talk that starts at two in the afternoon. "A fine age for that!" you say. Fine indeed — and what could be sillier than refusing to learn a thing just because you've gone a long time without learning it? "So what are you telling me? Should I fall in line with the dandies and the schoolboys?" Well, if this is the only thing that embarrasses my old age, I'm doing pretty well. The classroom admits men of every age. "Is that why we grow old — so we can trail after the youngsters?" But if I, an old man, can go to the theatre, and have myself carried to the races, and can't bear to let a single fight in the arena be settled without me there to watch, shall I blush to show up at a philosopher's lecture?
You should keep learning as long as there is anything you don't know — which means, if the proverb has it right, as long as you live. And no proverb was ever better suited to its occasion: As long as you live, keep learning how to live. Mind you, I do some teaching in that school as well. What, you ask, could I possibly teach there? This: that even an old man should keep learning. But I am ashamed of the human race every time I walk into the lecture-hall. To get to Metronax's house, as you know, I have to pass right by the Theatre of Naples. The building is packed. Inside, men are deciding, with tremendous passion, who deserves to be called a good flute-player; even the Greek piper and the announcer draw a crowd. But in the other place — where the question on the table is "What is a good man?" and the lesson being taught is how to be one — the seats are nearly empty, and most people think the few who do sit in them are wasting their time. Empty-headed idlers, they get called. I hope I'm blessed with mockery like that. The jeers of the ignorant should be heard with an untroubled mind; when a man is marching toward the goal of honor, he should scorn scorn itself.
So push on, Lucilius, and hurry, or you'll end up like me — learning in your old age. Hurry all the more, in fact, because you have put the subject off for so long, and it is one you will barely master even as an old man. "How much progress will I make?" you ask. As much as you try to make. What are you waiting for? Wisdom doesn't fall to any man by luck. Money will come on its own; offices will be handed to you; influence and authority may well be forced on you; but virtue will not drop into your lap. And the knowledge of it is not won with light effort or a little sweat — though the sweating is worth it, when you are about to win every good there is at a single stroke. For there is only one good: the honorable. In all those other things that public opinion smiles on, you will find nothing true, nothing certain. Why there is only one good, and why it is the honorable, I will now explain — since you have ruled that my earlier letter didn't carry the argument far enough, and that the doctrine was recommended to you rather than proved. I'll also compress what other authors have said into a small space.
Everything is judged by the standard of its own particular good. We value a vine for its yield and the flavor of its wine, a stag for its speed. With pack animals we ask how strong their backs are, since carrying loads is their whole use. In a dog, if his job is to find a wild animal's trail, the first thing we want is a keen nose; if his job is to run the quarry down, fast legs; if to attack and grapple with it, courage. In each thing, the best quality should be the one it was born for — the one it is judged by. And what is the best quality in a human being? Reason. By reason man surpasses the animals and is surpassed only by the gods. Perfect reason, then, is the good that belongs peculiarly to man; everything else he shares, to some degree, with animals and plants. Man is strong: so is the lion. Man is handsome: so is the peacock. Man is swift: so is the horse. I am not saying he is outdone in all these categories. I am not looking for what is greatest in him, but for what is distinctly his. Man has a body: so do trees. Man can act deliberately and move at will: so can beasts, so can worms. Man has a voice — but how much louder is the dog's, how much more piercing the eagle's, how much deeper the bull's, how much sweeter and more musical the nightingale's! What, then, is peculiar to man? Reason. When reason is right and has been brought to perfection, a man's happiness is complete. So if everything is praiseworthy — has reached the goal its nature intended — when it has perfected its own particular good, and if man's particular good is reason, then a man who has perfected his reason is praiseworthy and has reached the goal his nature set for him. This perfect reason has a name: virtue. And virtue and the honorable are one and the same.
It follows that the only good in man is the good that belongs only to man. We are not asking, right now, what is a good; we are asking what is man's good. And if nothing belongs peculiarly to man except reason, then reason will be his one distinctive good — but a good worth all the others put together. If a man is bad, I suppose you will think ill of him; if good, well of him. So the quality in a man by which he earns approval or disapproval is his chief good — his only good. You don't doubt that it is a good; you only doubt that it is the sole one. Suppose a man has everything else — health, money, a long pedigree, a reception-hall full of callers — but is admittedly bad: you will disapprove of him. Suppose another man has none of what I've listed — no money, no train of clients, no rank, no line of grandfathers and great-grandfathers — but is admittedly good: you will approve of him. So this is man's one distinctive good. The man who has it deserves praise even if he lacks everything else; the man who lacks it stands condemned and rejected, though he has everything else in heaps. What holds for men holds for things. We call a ship good not when she is painted in expensive colors, not when her prow is plated with silver or gold or her figurehead carved in ivory, not when she is loaded with the imperial treasury or the wealth of kings — but when she is steady and sound and tight, with seams that keep the water out, sturdy enough to take the pounding of the waves, obedient to her helm, fast, and indifferent to the wind. You will call a sword good not because its belt is gold or its scabbard studded with gems, but because its edge cuts clean and its point will go through any armor. Of a carpenter's rule we do not ask how beautiful it is, but how straight it is. Each thing is praised by the standard it exists to meet — by the quality that is its own.
So in the case of a man, too, the relevant question is not how many acres he plows, how much money he has out at interest, how many callers crowd his morning receptions, how costly the couch he lies on or how transparent the cups he drinks from — but how good he is. And he is good if his reason is well-ordered and right and fitted to what his nature intended. That is what we call virtue; that is what we mean by "honorable"; and it is man's unique good. For since reason alone perfects a man, reason alone, perfected, makes him happy — and man's only good is the one thing that makes him happy. We do say, it's true, that the things virtue produces and gathers around itself — all the works of virtue, that is — are also goods. But virtue itself is the only good for this reason: there is no good without it. If every good resides in the soul, then whatever strengthens the soul, lifts it, enlarges it, is a good; and virtue is what makes the soul stronger, higher, larger. Everything else — all the things that set our desires itching — drags the soul down and weakens it. When we think those things are lifting the soul up, they are merely puffing it up, cheating it with so much air.
The whole of life's conduct is governed by one pair of considerations: the honorable and the base. It is with reference to those two that our reason decides to do a thing or leave it undone. Let me spell out what I mean. A good man will do what he believes it is honorable to do, even if it costs him labor; he will do it even if it costs him harm; he will do it even if it costs him danger. And he will not do what is base, even if it brings him money, or pleasure, or power. Nothing will scare him away from the honorable; nothing will tempt him into the base. So if he is resolved to follow the honorable without exception, to avoid the base without exception, and in every act of his life to keep his eye on those two things — counting nothing good but the honorable, nothing bad but the base — if virtue in him is the one thing uncorrupted, holding its steady course on its own, then virtue is that man's only good, and nothing can happen to it now that would make it anything else. It is past all risk of change. Folly can creep upward toward wisdom; wisdom never slips back into folly.
You may remember my telling you that the things people commonly desire and dread have been trampled underfoot by many a man in a moment of blind passion. Men have been found who would thrust their hands into the flames, whose smiles the torturer could not wipe away, who shed not one tear at their children's funerals, who walked to their deaths without flinching. Love, anger, lust — these have dared every danger. Now if a moment's stubbornness, spurred by some goad pricking the spirit, can manage all that, how much more can virtue manage — virtue, which acts not on impulse or on a sudden, but evenly, with a strength that lasts? It follows that the things which men in a fit of passion often despise, and which the wise despise always, are neither goods nor evils. Virtue itself, then, is the only good. She walks proudly between the two extremes of fortune, with a splendid contempt for both.
But once you accept the view that anything besides the honorable is good, every virtue suffers for it. No virtue can ever be won and held if it has to keep one eye on anything outside itself. And if any such thing exists, it stands in conflict with reason, from which the virtues spring — and with truth, which cannot exist without reason. And any opinion in conflict with truth is false. A good man, you'll grant, must show the utmost devotion to the gods. Therefore he will bear whatever happens to him with an untroubled spirit, knowing it has come about through the divine law by which the whole universe moves. Granted that, there will be one good for him and only one — the honorable — since the honorable itself commands us to obey the gods, not to flare up at sudden misfortune or bewail our lot, but to accept fate patiently and do what it orders. If anything besides the honorable is good, then we will be hounded by a greed for life, and a greed for all the furniture of life — an intolerable condition, endless, never settled. The only good, then, is the honorable: the good that knows its limits.
I have argued before that man's life would be more blessed than the gods' if things the gods have no use for — money, high office — were goods. Consider this too: if our souls survive when they are released from the body, a happier state awaits them than they knew while housed in it. But if the things we use for the body's sake are goods, then our souls will be worse off once set free — and that runs against everything we believe, that the soul is happier shut up and confined than free and away into the universe. I also said that if the things dumb animals possess as fully as man are goods, then dumb animals will lead happy lives — which is of course impossible. And one more point: for the sake of the honorable a man must be willing to endure anything — which would not be necessary if there existed any other good besides it.
I treated all this at more length in an earlier letter; here I have compressed it and run through the argument briefly. But a doctrine like this will never ring true to you until you lift your mind higher and put the question to yourself: if duty called, would you be willing to die for your country — to buy the safety of all your fellow-citizens at the price of your own — offering your neck not merely with patience but with gladness? If you would, then in your eyes there is no other good; for you are giving up everything else to get this one. See what power the honorable has: you will die for your country at a moment's notice, the moment you know you ought to. Sometimes a noble act yields great joy even in the shortest, most fleeting span of time; and though none of the fruits of the finished deed will reach its doer once he is dead and gone from human affairs, still the mere contemplation of the deed to come is a delight. The brave and upright man, picturing the rewards of his death — his country free, everyone he is paying out his life for delivered — feels the keenest pleasure and enjoys the fruit of his own peril. But even the man denied that joy, the joy of contemplating his last great effort, will leap to his death without a heartbeat's hesitation, content to be acting rightly and dutifully. Pile discouragements on him if you like. Tell him, "Your deed will be quickly forgotten," or "Your fellow-citizens will hardly thank you." He will answer: "All that lies outside my task. My thoughts are on the deed itself. I know it is honorable. So wherever honor leads and summons me, I go."
This, then, is the only good — and not only every soul that has reached perfection knows it, but every soul that is noble by nature and rightly inclined. All other goods are cheap and changeable. That is why owning them is such an anxious business. Even when Fortune's kindness has piled them high, they sit heavy on their owners, always pressing down, sometimes crushing. Not one of the men you see dressed in purple is happy — no more than the actors on whom the play bestows a scepter and a royal cloak for the length of the performance. They strut their hour before a packed house, chests out, on their high stage boots; the moment they exit, the boots come off and they shrink back to their real height. Not one of the men whom riches and honors have set on high is actually great. Then why does he look great to you? Because you are measuring the pedestal along with the man. A dwarf is not tall because he stands on a mountain-top; a colossus keeps its height even standing in a well. This is the mistake we labor under, the trick that keeps fooling us: we never price a man at what he is; we add on the trappings he comes dressed in. But when you want to know a man's true worth — what kind of man he really is — appraise him naked. Have him set aside his inherited estate, his titles, and all Fortune's other frauds; have him strip off his very body. Look at his soul: its quality, its stature. Then you will know whether his greatness is his own or borrowed.
If a man can watch the flash of a sword with steady eyes, if he knows it makes no difference to him whether his soul leaves through his mouth or through a wound in his throat, call him happy. Call him happy too if, when bodily torture is threatened — by accident or by the strength of the stronger — he can hear talk of chains and exile and all the empty terrors that rattle men's minds, and remain unconcerned, and say:
Maiden, no shape of trouble rises here that is new to me, or sudden; I have gone before it all — faced and surveyed it, long ago, within my soul.
"Today it is you who threaten me with these horrors; but I have always threatened myself with them, and prepared myself, a man, for a man's destiny." An evil pondered in advance lands as a soft blow. To the fool, and to anyone who trusts in Fortune, each event arrives as a shape "new and sudden"; for the inexperienced, a large part of any evil is its novelty. The proof: things men first counted as hardships they bear more bravely once they have grown used to them. That is why the wise man accustoms himself to troubles before they come — lightening by long reflection what others lighten only by long endurance. We sometimes hear the inexperienced say, "I knew this was coming to me." The wise man knows that everything is coming to him. Whatever happens, he says: "I knew it."
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Today, without warning, the “Alexandrian” ships came into view — I mean the ones that are sent ahead to announce the fleet is coming; people call them mail-boats. All Campania is glad to see them. The whole crowd of Puteoli stands packed on the docks, and no matter how many vessels are out there, they can pick out the Alexandrian boats by the very set of their sails. Those ships alone are allowed to keep their topsails spread — the upper canvas that every ship flies on the open sea, because nothing drives a ship along like her topsails; that is where most of the speed comes from. So when the breeze stiffens and grows stronger than is comfortable, crews lower their yards, since the wind has less force close to the water. But once the ships have made Capri and the headland where
Tall Pallas keeps her watch upon the stormy peak,
every other vessel is ordered to make do with her mainsail — and the topsail stands out, unmistakable, on the Alexandrian mail-boats.
While everyone else was bustling and hurrying down to the waterfront, I took great pleasure in my own laziness. I would soon have letters from my friends in hand, but I felt no rush to learn how my affairs were doing overseas, or what news the letters carried. For some time now I have had no losses — and no gains either. Even if I were not an old man, that thought would have pleased me; as things stand, it pleased me all the more. However little I might own, I would still have more travel-money left than road left to travel — especially since the road we are on is one we need not follow to the very end. A journey is incomplete if you stop halfway, or anywhere short of your destination; but a life is not incomplete if it is honorable. Wherever you stop living, if you stop nobly, your life is whole. And often a man must stop bravely, and not necessarily for momentous reasons — after all, the reasons that keep us here are not momentous either.
Tullius Marcellinus — a man you knew very well, quiet in his youth and old before his time — fell ill with a disease that was by no means hopeless, but long, troublesome, and demanding, and so he began to think about dying. He called many of his friends together, and each gave him advice. The timid friend urged him to do whatever he had already made up his mind to do. The flattering, wheedling friend offered the counsel he guessed Marcellinus would find most pleasing when he thought it over later. But our Stoic friend — a rare man, and, to give him the praise he deserves, a man of courage and vigor — advised him best of all, it seems to me. He began like this: “Don’t torment yourself, my dear Marcellinus, as if the question you are weighing were a great matter. Living is not a great matter; all your slaves live, and so do all the animals. What is a great matter is to die honorably, sensibly, bravely. Think how long you have been doing the same things: food, sleep, desire — around and around, the same daily circle. The wish to die can be felt not only by the sensible man, or the brave man, or the unhappy man, but even by the man who is simply full.”
Marcellinus did not need someone to urge him so much as someone to help him: his slaves refused to do what he asked. So the Stoic first took away their fear, showing them the household ran a risk only when it was uncertain whether the master’s death was his own choice — and that besides, it was as bad a practice to kill one’s master as to stop him by force from ending his own life. Then he suggested to Marcellinus himself that it would be a kindness, when life was finished, to hand out gifts to those who had attended him through the whole of it — just as, when a banquet ends, what remains is shared among the attendants standing around the table. Marcellinus was an easygoing and generous soul, even where his own property was concerned; so he distributed small sums among his grieving slaves, and comforted them too. He needed no sword and no bloodshed. For three days he fasted, and had a tent set up in his own bedroom. Then a tub was brought in; he lay in it a long while, and as the hot water was poured over him continuously, he slipped away little by little — not without a certain pleasure, as he himself remarked, the kind of pleasure a slow fading-out tends to bring. Those of us who have ever fainted know from experience what that feeling is.
I have wandered into this little story, but you will not be sorry to hear it, for you will see that your friend’s departure was neither difficult nor painful. Though he brought about his own death, he made the gentlest of exits — he simply glided out of life. And the story may be of some use, too; a crisis often calls for exactly such examples. There are times when we ought to die and are unwilling; and times when we are dying, and are unwilling still. No one is so ignorant as not to know that he must die someday — and yet when death comes near, a man turns to run, trembles, weeps. Wouldn’t you call him an utter fool if he cried because he was not alive a thousand years ago? Then he is just as much a fool if he cries because he will not be alive a thousand years from now. It is all the same: you will not be, and you were not. Neither stretch of time belongs to you. You have been set down on this single point of time — and if you could stretch it, how far would you stretch it? Why weep? Why pray? You are taking pains for nothing.
Give up the hope that prayers of yours can bend what the gods have decreed from its appointed end.
Those decrees are fixed and unalterable, driven by a mighty, everlasting necessity. You will go where all things go. What is strange about that? You were born under this law. It happened to your father, your mother, your ancestors, everyone before you; it will happen to everyone after you. An unbreakable chain that no power can alter binds all things together and draws all things along. Think of the multitudes bound for death who will come after you; think of the multitudes who will go with you! You would die more bravely, I suppose, in the company of many thousands — well, there are many thousands, men and animals both, drawing their last breath at this very moment, in all their different ways, while you stand there hesitating. Did you really believe you would never arrive at the destination you have been traveling toward your whole life? There is no journey without an end.
You expect me, I suppose, to bring out examples of great men at this point. No — I will cite the case of a boy. The story of the Spartan lad has come down to us: taken captive while still very young, he kept shouting in his Doric dialect, “I will not be a slave!” — and he was as good as his word. The very first time he was ordered to do menial, degrading work — the command was to fetch a chamber-pot — he dashed his head against the wall and died. Freedom is that close at hand — and is anyone still a slave? Wouldn’t you rather your own son died like that than grew old by giving in weakly? Why be distressed, then, when even a boy can die so bravely? Refuse to follow, and you will be led. Take into your own hands what is now in the hands of another. Won’t you borrow that boy’s courage and say, “I am no slave”? Poor fellow — you are a slave to men, a slave to your business, a slave to life itself. For life, if the courage to die is missing, is slavery.
And what exactly are you waiting for? The very pleasures that make you linger, that hold you back — you have used them all up. Not one of them is new to you; not one of them hasn’t already turned stale from sheer excess. You know the taste of wine and of cordials. It makes no difference whether a hundred measures pass through your bladder or a thousand: you are nothing but a wine-strainer. You are a connoisseur of the oyster and the mullet; your luxury has left nothing untasted for the years ahead — and yet these are the things you are torn from unwillingly. What else is there you would hate to lose? Friends? Who can be a friend to a man like you? Country? Do you care enough about your country to be late for dinner? The light of the sun? You would blow it out if you could — for what have you ever done that could bear to be seen in the light? Admit the truth: it is not the senate chamber or the forum you are reluctant to leave, not even the natural world — you just can’t bear to leave the fish-market, though you have emptied its stalls.
You are afraid of death — but how heroically you scorn it over a plate of mushrooms! You want to live: do you even know how? You are afraid to die. But tell me: is this life of yours anything but death? Gaius Caesar was passing along the Via Latina when a man stepped out from a column of prisoners, his gray beard hanging to his chest, and begged to be put to death. “What!” said Caesar. “You call this being alive?” That is the answer for men to whom death would come as a relief. “You’re afraid to die? You call this being alive?” “But,” someone says, “I want to live — I am doing so much honorable work. I am reluctant to leave life’s duties; I am carrying them out loyally and tirelessly.” Well — don’t you know that dying is one of life’s duties too? You are deserting no duty, for there is no fixed quota you are obliged to complete.
There is no life that is not short. Measured against the universe, even Nestor’s life was short — even Sattia’s, the woman who had it carved on her tombstone that she had lived ninety-nine years. Some people, you see, boast about a long old age; but who could have stood that old lady if she’d had the luck to round out her hundredth year? Life is like a play: what matters is not how long the acting runs, but how good it is. It makes no difference where you stop. Stop wherever you like — only make sure the ending is well turned.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I'm sorry to hear that you keep being hit by congestion in the head and by the short fevers that follow when the congestion turns chronic — sorry above all because I've had this very illness myself. In its early stages I laughed it off. When I was young I could take hardship and stare a sickness down. But eventually it beat me. I sank to the point where I could do nothing but sniffle, wasted away to skin and bone. More than once I had the impulse to end my life right then. What held me back was the thought of my father — a kind old man. I considered not how bravely I could die, but how little brave he could be at losing me. So I ordered myself to live. Sometimes even staying alive is an act of courage.
Now let me tell you what consoled me in those days, saying up front that these comforts worked on me like medicine. Honest consolation becomes a cure; whatever lifts the soul helps the body too. My studies saved me. I credit philosophy with my recovery, with my getting back on my feet. I owe her my life — and that is the least of what I owe her. My friends also did a great deal for my health. Their encouraging words, the hours they sat by my bed, their conversation — all of it comforted me. Nothing, my excellent Lucilius, restores and strengthens a sick man like the affection of his friends; nothing so quietly steals away the expectation and the fear of death. With them around me, I honestly could not believe I was dying at all. I felt sure I would go on living — not with them, but through them. I imagined myself not surrendering my soul but handing it over to them for safekeeping.
All of this gave me the will to help myself and to endure anything. And besides, it is a miserable state to have lost your appetite for dying without having any appetite for living. These, then, are the remedies you should turn to. The doctor will prescribe how much to walk and how much to exercise. He will warn you not to sink into idleness, the way the inactive invalid tends to do. He will have you read aloud in a stronger voice to work the lungs, whose passages and hollows are the trouble; or take a sail and stir up your insides with a little gentle rocking. He will tell you what to eat, and when wine will build your strength and when to skip it so your cough doesn't get raw and hacking. But my prescription for you is this — and it is a cure not just for this illness but for your whole life: despise death. Once we have escaped the fear of death, there is no sorrow left in the world.
Every illness carries three serious evils: fear of death, bodily pain, and the interruption of our pleasures. About death enough has been said, and I'll add only this: the fear of it is not a fear of illness but a fear of nature. Illness has often postponed death, and looking like a dying man has saved more than one man's life. You will die not because you are sick, but because you are alive. Even cured, the same end waits for you; in recovering, you have escaped ill health, not death.
Now back to the evil that belongs to illness itself: it comes with great suffering. But the suffering is made bearable by its interruptions, because pain at its most extreme has to end. No one can suffer both intensely and for long. Nature, who loves us most tenderly, has built us so that pain is either bearable or brief. The sharpest pains strike in the slenderest parts of the body: nerves, joints, and the other narrow passages hurt most cruelly when trouble builds inside their cramped spaces. But those parts soon go numb, and the very pain robs them of the feeling of pain — whether because the life-force, blocked from its natural course and turned bad, loses the particular power by which it thrives and by which it warns us, or because the diseased fluids of the body, with nowhere left to flow, back up on themselves and deaden the parts they have flooded. That is why gout in the feet and hands, and every pain in the spine and the nerves, has its truces — the moments when it has stunned the parts it was torturing. In all these cases it is the first twinges that do the damage; time blunts the attack, and the pain ends when the numbness sets in. Pain in the teeth, eyes, and ears is so acute precisely because it starts in the body's narrowest spaces — no less acute, frankly, than pain in the head itself. But when it grows more violent than usual, it tips over into delirium and stupor. So here is the consolation for extreme pain: feel it too much and you are guaranteed to stop feeling it. What makes the untrained buckle under bodily suffering is that they have never learned to be content in spirit. They have been too intimate with the body. That is why a great-souled and sensible man separates soul from body and spends his time with the better, divine part, keeping only as much company as he must with this whining, fragile one.
"But it's hard," people say, "to give up the pleasures we're used to — to fast, to go thirsty and hungry." Yes, abstinence is hard at first. Later the craving dies down, because the appetites that drive the craving get tired and quit. Then the stomach turns fussy; then the food we once ached for turns our own stomach. The wants themselves die away. And there is no bitterness in doing without what you have stopped wanting. Besides, every pain stops sometimes, or at least eases up. Besides, you can take precautions against its return and, when it threatens, head it off with remedies. Every kind of pain sends warning signals — at any rate the habitual, recurring kind does. The suffering an illness brings can be endured, if you have learned to scorn what it threatens. But do not make your troubles heavier than they are and weigh yourself down with complaining. Pain is slight if opinion adds nothing to it. If instead you cheer yourself on the other way — "It's nothing, or nearly nothing; keep a stout heart, it will pass" — then by thinking it slight, you will make it slight. Everything hangs on opinion. Ambition, luxury, greed — all look to opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself he is. So I say we should throw out all whining over past suffering, all talk like this: "No one was ever worse off. The agonies, the horrors I endured! Nobody thought I'd pull through. How many times my family wept over me, how many times the doctors gave up on me! Men on the rack aren't torn apart like that!" Even if all of it is true, it is over. What is the good of dragging up old sufferings and being miserable now because you were miserable once? Besides, everyone inflates his own ills and lies to himself about them. And what was bitter to bear is sweet to have borne; it is only natural to rejoice when your troubles end.
Two things, then, must be cut out once and for all: fear of future suffering and memory of past suffering. The past no longer concerns me; the future does not concern me yet. And a man caught in the very middle of troubles should say:
Someday, perhaps, even this pain will be sweet to remember.
Let him fight them with everything he has. Give way once, and he is beaten; strain against his sufferings, and he wins. As it is, most men pull down on their own heads the very ruin they ought to be propping up. When something is toppling toward you, tottering, about to crash, step back from under it and it will follow you and lean on you harder; stand your ground and push back, and it will be forced away. Think of the blows athletes take to the face, to the whole body. For the sake of fame they endure every torment — and they take those blows not only while fighting but in order to be fit to fight. Their very training is torture. Let us win our victories in all our own struggles the same way — for our prize is not a garland or a palm branch or a trumpeter calling for silence while our name is announced, but virtue, steadiness of soul, and a peace won for all time, once Fortune has been beaten outright in even a single bout. "I'm in terrible pain," you say. And does the pain let up because you whimper through it? Just as an enemy is deadliest to an army in retreat, so every trouble Fortune sends hits hardest when we give ground and turn our backs. "But it's serious." What — is that what our strength is for, to carry light loads? Would you rather your illness be long, or quick and short? If it is long, it comes with intermissions: it gives you stretches to recover in, it grants you plenty of time; as it builds, it must also subside. A short, sharp illness will do one of two things: it will be snuffed out, or it will snuff you out. And what difference does it make whether the illness ends or I do? Either way, the pain is over.
This helps too: turn the mind to other things and walk away from the pain. Call up the honorable and brave things you have done; go over the good side of your own life; run through your memory of everything you have most admired. Then think of all the brave men who have conquered pain: the man who went on reading his book while he had his varicose veins cut out; the man who never stopped smiling, though that smile so enraged his torturers that they tried every instrument of their cruelty on him. If pain can be beaten by a smile, can it not be beaten by reason? Name whatever you please — head colds, coughing fits so hard they bring up pieces of our insides, fever that cooks us from the core, thirst, limbs wrenched until the joints stick out in different directions. Worse still are the stake, the rack, the red-hot plates, the device that reopens wounds while they are still swollen and drives its imprint deeper. And yet there have been men who never let out a groan under those tortures. "More!" says the torturer — and the victim doesn't beg off. "More!" — no answer. "More!" — and the victim smiles, and means it. After an example like that, can't you bring yourself to laugh at pain?
"But my illness won't let me do anything," you object. "It has pulled me away from all my duties." It is your body that is hampered by ill health, not your soul too. Illness will slow a runner's feet and tie up the hands of a cobbler or a craftsman; but if your soul has kept in training, you will still advise and teach, listen and learn, investigate and reflect. What more is needed? Do you think you are doing nothing when you keep your self-control while sick? You will be demonstrating that an illness can be overcome — or at least endured. There is room for virtue, I promise you, even on a sickbed. It is not only the sword and the battle line that prove a soul alert and unafraid; a man can show bravery wrapped in his blankets. You have work to do: wrestle well with your disease. If it forces you to nothing and talks you into nothing, you are setting a remarkable example. What a stage for glory it would be, if anyone came to watch us be sick! So be your own spectator; seek your own applause.
Again, there are two kinds of pleasures. Illness checks the pleasures of the body, but it does not abolish them. In fact, truth be told, it sharpens them: a drink delights a man more the thirstier he is; food delights him more the hungrier he is. Whatever comes after a fast is received with extra relish. And the other kind — the pleasures of the mind, which are higher and more reliable — no doctor can deny a sick man. Whoever pursues these, and knows what they really are, scorns all the flatteries of the senses. "Poor sick fellow!" people say. Why exactly? Because he doesn't chill his wine with snow? Because he doesn't chip ice into his cup to refresh the cold of a drink already mixed in a good-sized bowl? Because Lucrine oysters aren't shucked fresh at his table? Because there's no racket of cooks around his dining room, hauling in their stoves right along with the dishes? That is luxury's latest invention: the kitchen accompanies the dinner, so that no course goes lukewarm and nothing arrives insufficiently scalding for a palate already grown leathery. "Poor sick fellow!" — he will eat as much as he can digest. There will be no boar lying in state before his eyes, banished from the table as if it were too common a meat; his sideboard will not be heaped with the breast-meat of birds, because the sight of birds served whole turns his stomach. And what harm has been done to you? You will dine like a sick man — which is to say, once in a while, like a healthy one.
All of it is easy to endure — the gruel, the warm water, everything that seems unbearable to a fussy man gone soft with luxury, sick in soul rather than body — if only we stop shuddering at death. And we will stop, once we have learned the limits of good and evil. Then and only then will life not exhaust us or death frighten us. For weariness of self can never seize a life that surveys all the things that are — manifold, great, divine; it is idle leisure that makes men come to hate their lives. To one who roams the universe, the truth never grows stale; it is the falsehoods that cloy. And on the other side, if death comes calling early — even if it cuts a man down in his prime — he has already tasted everything the longest life has to give. Such a man has largely come to understand the universe. He knows that honorable things do not depend on time to grow. Any life must look short to people who measure it by pleasures that are empty and therefore bottomless.
Refresh yourself with thoughts like these — and meanwhile set aside some hours for our letters. A time will come when we are together again, reunited; however short that time is, we will make it long by knowing how to use it. For as Posidonius says: "A single day among the learned lasts longer than the longest life of the ignorant." In the meantime hold on to this, grip it tight: do not yield to adversity; do not trust prosperity; keep the full reach of Fortune's power before your eyes, as if she would surely do everything she has the power to do. What has been long expected arrives more gently.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I have been waiting for a letter from you telling me what your tour around Sicily turned up — above all, a full report on Charybdis itself. Scylla, I know perfectly well, is just a rock, and not even a rock sailors fear; but about Charybdis I want a complete description, to see whether it matches the myths. And if you happen to have investigated it — it certainly deserves investigating — enlighten me on this: is it whipped into a whirlpool only by wind from one quarter, or do storms from every direction churn its depths alike? And is it true that whatever the whirlpool sucks down in that strait is carried underwater for miles and surfaces on the beach near Tauromenium? Write me a full account of all that, and then I'll have the nerve to ask a further favor: climb Etna, too, at my special request. Certain naturalists have concluded that the mountain is wearing away and gradually sinking, because sailors used to be able to see it from farther off. The reason may be not that its height is shrinking but that the fires have dimmed — the eruptions weaker and thinner, and the smoke, for the same reason, lazier by day. Either explanation is believable: that the mountain is growing smaller because it eats itself daily, or that it stays the same size because it is not devouring itself at all — the boiling matter collects in some underground hollow and is fed from elsewhere, using the mountain not as fuel but simply as an exit. There is a well-known spot in Lycia — the locals call it Hephaestion — where the ground is riddled with holes and ringed by a harmless fire that does no damage to the plants growing there. The place is actually fertile and lush, because the flames don't scorch; they merely glow, with a force too mild and feeble to burn.
But let's shelve that question until you have gone and can tell me just how far from the crater the snow lies — I mean the snow that doesn't melt even in summer, so safe is it from the fire next door. And don't bill this errand to my account: you were going to indulge your itch for fine writing with no commission from anybody. In fact, what would I have to pay you not to work Etna into your poem — not to touch the theme every poet treats as a required rite? Virgil had already covered it in full, and that didn't stop Ovid from taking it up; and neither of them scared off Cornelius Severus. Besides, the ground has been lucky for all of them, and to my eye the earlier poets did not use up what can be said — they merely opened the way.
It makes all the difference whether you take up a subject that is exhausted or one where the ground has only been broken. In the second case the topic grows day by day, and what is already discovered is no obstacle to discovering more. Besides, the one who writes last gets the best of the bargain: he finds the words lying ready, and arranged in a new order they show a new face. And he isn't stealing them, as if they belonged to somebody else — words are common property. Now, if Etna doesn't make your mouth water, I've misjudged you. You have been itching for a while to write something big, something on the scale of the old school. Your modesty won't let you hope any higher — indeed it's so pronounced that I think you would rein in your own talent if there were any danger of outdoing your betters. That is how much you revere the old masters. Wisdom has this advantage, among others: no one can be outdone except during the climb. Once you have reached the top, it's a draw — no room left to rise, the game is over. Can the sun grow bigger? Can the moon swell past her usual fullness? The seas do not increase. The universe keeps the same character, the same limits. Whatever has reached its full stature cannot get taller. So all who have attained wisdom will be equal, on level footing. Each will have his own particular gifts — one more genial, another quicker, another readier in speech, a fourth more eloquent — but in the thing that matters here, the thing that makes life happy, they are all equal. Whether this Etna of yours can collapse into ruins, whether that towering summit, visible for miles across the open sea, is being eaten away by the relentless fire, I do not know. But this I do know: virtue will never be brought lower, by flames or by ruins. Hers is the one greatness that knows no lowering; she can neither rise further nor sink. Her height, like the height of the stars, is fixed. Let us strive to raise ourselves to that altitude.
Much of the climb is behind me already — no; if I make myself tell the truth, not much. Goodness does not mean merely being better than the worst. Who would brag about his eyesight because he could catch a glimmer of daylight? A man who sees the sun through fog may be glad for now that he has escaped the dark, but he does not yet enjoy the blessing of light. Our souls will have no cause to celebrate until they have broken out of this darkness they grope in — until they have not merely glimpsed the brightness with weak eyes but absorbed the full light of day and been restored to their place in the sky, the place assigned them at birth. The soul is summoned upward by its very origin. And it can arrive there even before it is released from this prison below — as soon as it has shaken off its faults and leaps, pure and light, into celestial thoughts.
I am glad, dearest Lucilius, that this is the ideal that occupies us, that we pursue it with everything we have, even if few people know it — even if no one does. Fame is virtue's shadow: it follows her whether she wants it or not. But as a shadow sometimes walks ahead and sometimes trails behind, so fame sometimes goes before us in plain sight and sometimes hangs back — and is all the greater for coming late, once envy has retired from the field. How long did men take Democritus for a madman! Glory barely found Socrates in time. And how long did Rome fail to recognize Cato! The state rejected him and did not learn his worth until it had lost him. If Rutilius had not resigned himself to injustice, his innocence and virtue would have gone unnoticed; the hour of his persecution was the hour of his triumph. Didn't he give thanks for his lot and greet his exile with open arms? So far I have named men whom Fortune made famous in the very moment she was crushing them. But how many men's progress toward virtue came to light only after they died! And how many have been ruined by their reputations rather than raised by them! Take Epicurus: see how he is admired now, not just by the cultivated but by the ignorant crowd as well. Yet this man was unknown to Athens itself, though he had tucked himself away practically next door. So when he had outlived his friend Metrodorus by many years, he added these last words to a letter, celebrating their friendship with grateful pride: "So blessed were Metrodorus and I that it has done us no harm to be unknown, and almost unheard of, in this famous land of Greece." Isn't it true, then, that men did not discover him until after he was gone? And hasn't his renown blazed out all the same? Metrodorus admits the same thing in one of his letters — that he and Epicurus were hardly known to the public — but he declares that whoever chose to follow in their footsteps after they were gone would find a great name ready-made and waiting.
Virtue is never truly hidden; and yet to have been hidden is no loss to her. A day will come that reveals her, however buried or suppressed by the spite of her own times. The man who thinks only of his own generation was born for a mere handful. Many thousands of years, many thousands of peoples, are still to come — look to them. Even if envy has silenced every mouth of your own day, men will come who will judge you without malice and without favor. If fame is any reward virtue receives, that reward cannot perish either. True, the talk of posterity will not reach us; but posterity will cherish and celebrate us all the same, unaware though we are. Virtue has never failed to repay a man, in life and after it, provided he followed her honestly — provided he never dressed himself up or painted himself over, but was the same man whether people saw him announced and expected or suddenly and unprepared. Pretending accomplishes nothing. A mask thrown loosely over the face fools very few. Truth is the same through and through. Whatever deceives has no substance. Lies are thin stuff: hold them to the light and you see right through them.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Today I have some free time — thanks less to my own efforts than to the games, which have drawn off every bore in town to the boxing match. No one will barge in on me, no one will derail my train of thought, which moves ahead all the more boldly for that very confidence. The door hasn't been creaking on its hinges every five minutes; no one will be twitching my curtain aside; my thoughts can march on in safety. And that matters most for a man who travels under his own power and cuts his own path. Do I follow no predecessors, then? I do — but I give myself permission to discover something new, to change things, to throw things out. I am not their slave; I simply give them my vote.
And yet that was a bold thing I just said, promising myself quiet and uninterrupted seclusion. Because listen: a huge roar has just come up from the stadium. It doesn't scatter my thoughts, but it does shift them to a comparison the noise itself suggests. How many men train their bodies, I think to myself, and how few train their minds! What crowds pour into a show that is pure sham, staged for nothing but amusement — and what a desert reigns wherever the good arts are taught! How empty-headed are the athletes whose muscles and shoulders we all admire! Here is the question I keep chewing on: if the body can be drilled to such endurance that it stands up to the punches and kicks of several opponents at once, that a man can last out the whole day under a scorching sun in the burning dust, soaked the entire time in his own blood — if the body can do that, how much more easily could the mind be toughened to take Fortune's blows without going down for good, to struggle back to its feet after it has been flattened, after it has been trampled? The body needs a long list of supplies to be strong; the mind grows from within, feeding and exercising itself. Those athletes need mountains of food, rivers of drink, quantities of oil, and years of training on top of it all. Virtue comes to you without equipment and without expense. Everything it takes to make you a good man is already inside you.
And what do you need in order to become good? To want it. But what better thing could you possibly want than to break out of this slavery — a slavery that weighs on every one of us, and that even slaves of the lowest rank, born into that degradation, fight to strip off by every means they have? To buy their freedom they pay out savings scraped together by cheating their own stomachs. And you won't leap at liberty at any price — you, who claim you were born to it? Stop glancing at your strong-box. Freedom cannot be bought. There is no point entering "freedom" as an item in your ledger; freedom belongs neither to the men who have bought it nor to the men who have sold it. This good you must give to yourself; from yourself you must ask it.
Free yourself first from the fear of death — that is what sets the yoke on our necks — and then from the fear of poverty. If you want to know how little evil there is in poverty, compare the faces of the poor with the faces of the rich. The poor man smiles more often, and more honestly. His troubles don't go down deep; even when some anxiety hits him, it passes like a scrap of cloud. But the good cheer of the people we call happy is an act, while their sadness is heavy and festering — all the heavier because they are not allowed to show it. They must play the part of happiness while sorrows eat out their hearts. I find myself reaching for the same illustration again and again, because nothing captures so well this drama of human life, in which we are handed parts we then play so badly. There stands the actor, strutting the stage with his chest thrown out and his head thrown back, declaiming:
Behold, I am the man whom Argos hails as lord, the heir of Pelops, master of the lands that run from the Hellespont and the Ionian sea down to the straits of the Isthmus.
And who is this fellow? A slave. His wages: five measures of grain and five denarii. And that other one — proud, imperious, swollen with confidence in his own power — who thunders:
Silence, Menelaus, or this hand strikes you dead!
He earns a daily pittance and sleeps on rags. You can say the same of all those fine gentlemen you see riding in litters above the heads of the crowd: in every case their happiness is a costume, put on like an actor's mask. Tear it off, and you will despise them.
When you buy a horse, you order the blanket removed. When slaves are put up for sale, you have their clothes pulled off, so that no bodily flaw can hide from you. And when you judge a man, you judge him with the disguise still on? Slave-dealers use a bit of finery to cover any defect that might put buyers off, which is exactly why the finery itself makes a buyer suspicious. If you spotted a leg or an arm wrapped in bandages, you would demand the wrappings off and the limb itself shown to you. Do you see that Scythian or Sarmatian king over there, his head decorated with the badge of his office? If you want to appraise him — to know his full worth — take off the diadem. A great deal of evil hides underneath it. But why am I talking about other people? If you want to set a value on yourself, put away your money, your estates, your titles, and look inside — into your own soul. Right now, you are taking other people's word for what you are.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You complain that you have run into an ungrateful man. If this is your first time, thank either your luck or your caution. Though in this case, caution can accomplish nothing except to make you stingy. If you want to dodge this particular danger, you will simply stop doing people favors — and so, to keep your benefits from being wasted on someone else, you will waste them yourself.
Better to get no return than to give no benefits. Even after a bad harvest, a man sows again; the losses of a stubborn, barren soil are often made good by one fertile year. To find one grateful person, it is worth testing many ungrateful ones. No one's hand is so sure in giving that he isn't frequently fooled — and it is good for the traveler to lose the road sometimes, so that he learns to hold to it. After a shipwreck, sailors go back to sea. The banker is not scared out of the forum by one swindler. If we had to drop everything that ever gave us trouble, life would soon go slack and dull with idleness. In your case, let this very setback make you more generous: when the outcome of an undertaking is uncertain, you have to try again and again to succeed in the end. But I have discussed all this at length in the books I wrote called On Benefits.
The question that really needs examining — one I don't think has ever been made clear enough — is this: whether a man who once helped us has squared the account and released us from our debt if he harms us later. Add this one too, if you like: what if the later harm outweighs the earlier help? If you want the formal verdict of a strict judge, you will find he offsets one act against the other and rules: "Though the injuries outweigh the benefits, still, whatever of the benefit survives the injury should be credited to the benefit's side." The harm was greater, yes — but the help came first, so time must be weighed as well. Other points are too obvious to need spelling out: How gladly was the help given? How reluctantly was the harm done? Benefits and injuries alike are matters of intent. "I didn't want to do him the favor, but respect for the man won me over" — or his pestering did, or hope of something in return. What we owe in every case depends on the spirit in which the gift was given: we weigh not the size of the gift but the quality of the goodwill behind it. So away with guesswork. The earlier act was a benefit; the later act, which outweighed it, was an injury. The good man arranges the two columns of his ledger so as to cheat himself on purpose — adding to the benefit, subtracting from the injury.
The more lenient judge, though — and I would rather be that judge — will order us to forget the injury and remember the favor. "But surely," you say, "justice means rendering each man his due: thanks for a benefit, and retribution, or at the very least resentment, for an injury!" That holds, I answer, when one man inflicted the injury and a different man conferred the benefit. When it is the same man, the benefit cancels the injury's force. A man who deserves pardon even with no good deeds on his record deserves something better than mere pardon when he does wrong with a benefit standing to his credit. I do not price benefits and injuries at the same rate; I rate a benefit higher. Not every grateful person understands what it means to be in debt for a benefit. Even a thoughtless, crude fellow out of the common herd may know it, especially just after the gift arrives; what he does not know is how deep the debt goes. Only the wise man knows the exact value of everything. The fool I just mentioned, however good his intentions, either pays less than he owes, or pays at the wrong time or in the wrong place; what he ought to return, he fumbles and loses.
There is a wonderfully precise vocabulary for certain things — a long-established terminology that captures whole duties in single expressions. We say, as you know: "So-and-so has made a return for the favor." Making a return means handing over what you owe of your own free will. We do not say he has "paid back" the favor — "pay back" is for a man who has been dunned, for men who pay unwillingly, or under any circumstances at all, or through a third party. We do not say he has "restored" the benefit, or "settled" it; we have never been content with a word that properly belongs to a money debt. Making a return means offering something to the man from whom you received something. The phrase implies a voluntary act: the man who has made a return has served the summons on himself.
The wise man will run through every circumstance in his own mind: how much he received, from whom, when, where, how. And so we declare that no one but the wise man knows how to return a favor — and, for that matter, no one but the wise man knows how to confer a benefit: I mean the man who enjoys the giving more than the receiver enjoys the getting. Someone will file this remark among the startling statements we Stoics are famous for, the ones the Greeks call "paradoxes," and will say: "So you maintain that only the wise man knows how to return a favor? Then no one else knows how to repay a creditor, or pay a seller the full price of his goods?" To keep the resentment off my own head, let me point out that Epicurus says the very same thing; Metrodorus, at any rate, remarks that only the wise man knows how to return a favor. Our objector is also astonished when we say, "Only the wise man knows how to love; only the wise man is a real friend." Yet returning favors is a part of love and of friendship — an ordinary part, in fact, more common than real friendship itself. He is astonished, too, at our saying, "There is no loyalty except in the wise man" — as if he didn't say the same thing himself! Or do you suppose there is loyalty in a man who doesn't know how to return a favor? So let these people stop accusing us of impossible boasting and understand this: the real substance of honor lives in the wise man; what circulates in the crowd is honor's ghost and imitation. None but the wise man knows how to return a favor. Even a fool can return one, up to the limit of his knowledge and his power; what he lacks would be understanding, not willingness. Wanting to is not something that can be taught.
The wise man will compare everything against everything else, for the very same object grows larger or smaller with the time, the place, and the reason. Often all the riches lavished on a palace accomplish less than a thousand denarii given at the right moment. It matters a great deal whether you hand a man a gift or come to his rescue — whether your generosity saves him or sets him up in life. Often the gift is small and its consequences huge. And what a gulf there is between taking something you lacked — something that was offered — and accepting a benefit precisely so you can confer one in return.
But let's not slide back into ground we have already covered. In this weighing of benefits against injuries, the good man will judge with perfect fairness, yes — but he will lean toward the benefit's side; that is the direction he turns more readily. And in matters of this kind, the person involved usually counts for a great deal. "You did me a favor in that business with my slave, but you injured me in my father's case." "You saved my son, but you robbed me of my father." So he will work through every point where comparison is possible, and if the difference is slight, he will pretend not to see it. Even if the difference is large, he will let it pass — provided the concession costs nothing in duty or loyalty, and provided the injury falls on the good man alone. The sum of it is this: the good man will be easygoing in striking the balance; he will let too much be charged against his own account. He will refuse to pay off a benefit by cancelling it against an injury. The side he leans toward, the verdict he wants to reach, is this: to be in debt for the favor, and to make a return for it. Anyone who receives a benefit more gladly than he repays it has it wrong. A man paying off a loan is more lighthearted than a man taking one out; by that same measure, a man unburdening himself of the greatest of all debts — a benefit received — should be more joyful than a man signing for the biggest of all obligations. Ingrates go wrong here too: they pay their creditors principal plus interest, but treat benefits as money they can use interest-free. The debt grows with every postponement, and the longer the payment is put off, the more remains to pay. A man is an ingrate if he repays a favor without interest. So count the interest too, when you compare what you have taken in against what you have paid out. We should try by every means to be as grateful as we can.
For gratitude is a good we do ourselves — unlike justice, which is commonly supposed to concern other people. Gratitude flows back, in large measure, to its source. There is no man who, in helping his neighbor, has not helped himself — and I don't mean because the man you aided will want to aid you, or the man you defended will want to protect you, or because a good example circles back to bless its author the way bad examples recoil on theirs (people get no pity when they suffer wrongs they have taught the world how to commit). I mean that the reward of all the virtues lies in the virtues themselves. They are not practiced for pay: the wage of a good deed is to have done it. I am grateful not so that my neighbor, encouraged by my earlier thanks, will be quicker to help me next time, but simply so that I may do a supremely pleasant and beautiful thing. I feel gratitude not because it profits me, but because it delights me. And to prove it: if I could be grateful only by appearing ungrateful — if I could return a benefit only by an act that looked like an injury — even then I would go calmly ahead toward what honor demands, straight through the disgrace. No one, I think, holds virtue dearer or is more devoted to it than the man who has thrown away his reputation for goodness rather than throw away the approval of his own conscience. So, as I said, your gratitude does more good to you than to your neighbor. He has had a common, everyday experience — getting back what he gave. You have had a great one, the fruit of a soul in its happiest condition: you have felt gratitude. If wickedness makes people miserable and virtue makes them blessed, and if being grateful is a virtue, then what you handed back was merely the customary payment, but what you gained is beyond price — the consciousness of gratitude, which visits only a soul that is godlike and blessed. And the opposite feeling is punished at once, and punished to the limit. No ungrateful man will be unhappy someday. I grant him no grace period. He is unhappy now.
So let us avoid ingratitude — not for other people's sake, but for our own. When we do wrong, only the smallest and lightest part of it splashes onto our neighbor; the worst part — the densest, if I may put it that way — stays home and torments the owner. My master Attalus used to say: "Evil herself drinks the largest portion of her own poison." Snake venom is not like this poison: what the serpent carries for the destruction of others it stores without harm to itself, but this kind ruins its possessor. The ungrateful man racks and torments himself. He hates the gifts he has accepted, because he will have to return them, so he talks their value down — while the injuries done to him he inflates and exaggerates. And what is more wretched than a man who forgets his benefits and clings to his injuries?
Wisdom does the opposite: she lends grace to every benefit, presses it warmly on her own attention, and delights her soul by remembering it again and again. Bad men get one pleasure out of a benefit, and a short-lived pleasure at that: it lasts only while they are receiving it. The wise man draws from it a steady, permanent joy, for his delight is not so much in receiving the gift as in having received it — and that joy never dies; it stays with him always. The wrongs done to him he despises; he forgets them — not by accident, but on purpose. He does not put the worst construction on everything, or go hunting for someone to blame for every mishap; he charges even men's sins to chance. He will not read malice into a word or a look; whatever goes wrong, he softens it by interpreting it generously. He does not remember an injury sooner than a service. As far as he can, he lets his memory settle on the earlier and better deed, and he never changes his attitude toward those who have deserved well of him — except when the bad deeds far outrun the good, and the gap is obvious even to a man trying to shut his eyes to it. And even then he goes only this far: after the injury has tipped the scale, he tries to return to the attitude he held before the benefit. For when the injury merely equals the benefit, some kindly feeling is still left over. Just as a defendant is acquitted when the votes are tied, and just as kindness always bends a doubtful case toward the better reading, so the wise man's mind, when another man's merits merely equal his misdeeds, will stop feeling the obligation — but not stop wanting to feel it. He acts exactly like the man who goes on paying his debts after the court has cancelled them.
But no one can be grateful who has not learned to scorn the things that drive the common herd out of its mind. If you want to make return for a favor, you must be willing to go into exile, to pour out your blood, to accept poverty — even, and this happens often, to let your very innocence be spattered and dragged through shameful slanders. Gratitude does not come cheap. We hold nothing dearer than a benefit while we are chasing it, and nothing cheaper once we have caught it. Do you ask what makes us forget the benefits we have received? Our hunger for the next ones. We think not about what we have obtained but about what we are going to pursue. We are pulled off course by riches, titles, power — everything that is precious in our opinion and worthless at its true price. We do not know how to weigh things. We should take our counsel about them not from their reputation but from their nature. Those glittering things have no grandeur to enchant our minds beyond the fact that we have gotten used to marveling at them. They are not praised because they deserve to be desired; they are desired because they have been praised — and once the error of individuals has created a public error, the public error turns around and creates the errors of individuals.
But just as we take those valuations on faith, let us also take this truth on the faith of the people: nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart. Every city will echo the sentence, every race, even the ones from savage countries. On this point good men and bad will agree. Some praise pleasure, some prefer hard work; some call pain the greatest of evils, some call it no evil at all; some will count riches into the supreme good, others will say their discovery was a disaster for the human race, and that no man is richer than the one for whom Fortune has found nothing left to give. Amid all this squabbling of opinions, every voter, as the saying goes, will shout "aye" to one proposition: that thanks should be returned to those who have deserved well of us. On this question the whole quarrelsome herd agrees — and meanwhile we keep paying back injuries instead of benefits, and the primary reason a man turns ungrateful is that he found it impossible to be grateful enough. Our madness has gone so far that it is now downright dangerous to do a man a great favor: because he thinks it shameful not to repay it, he would prefer his benefactor out of the way entirely. "Keep what you have received. I am not asking for it back; I am not demanding anything. Just let it be safe to have done you a favor." No hatred is deadlier than the hatred born of shame over a benefit betrayed.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I have stopped worrying about you. "And which of the gods," you ask, "did you get to guarantee that?" One that deceives no one, I assure you: a soul in love with what is upright and good. The better part of you is on safe ground. Fortune can do you injury; what matters more is that I have no fear of you doing injury to yourself. Go on the way you have begun, and settle yourself into this way of living — not luxuriously, but calmly. I would rather be in trouble than in luxury; and take "in trouble" here the way people usually mean it: living a hard, rough, toilsome life. We often hear a man's life praised with a little envy in the voice — "So-and-so lives luxuriously" — and what the words really mean is: "He has gone soft." For the soul goes soft by degrees, weakening until it matches the ease and laziness it lies in. Tell me — isn't it better for a real man to end up hard instead? But then these same pampered fellows are terrified of the very thing they have made their lives resemble. There is a great deal of difference between lying idle and lying buried! "But," you say, "isn't it better to lie idle than to be whirled around in these eddies of business?" Both extremes deserve blame — the strain and the sluggishness alike. I hold that the man stretched out on a perfumed couch is no less dead than the man dragged off by the executioner's hook.
Leisure without study is death — a tomb for a living man. What is the advantage of retirement, in the end? As if the real causes of our anxiety didn't follow us across the sea! What hiding place is there that the fear of death cannot enter? What retreat is so fortified, so far withdrawn, that pain doesn't fill it with dread? Wherever you hide yourself, human ills will raise their racket all around you. Plenty of external things circle us, to deceive us or to crush us; and plenty of internal ones boil and fret even in perfect solitude.
So wrap philosophy around yourself — an impregnable wall. Fortune can batter it with every siege engine she has and never find a way in. The soul that has let go of external things stands on unassailable ground; it defends itself in its own fortress; every weapon hurled at it falls short. Fortune does not have the long reach we give her credit for: she can seize no one who is not clinging to her. So let us spring back from her as far as we can — and the only thing that makes that possible is knowledge of ourselves and of nature. The soul should know where it is going and where it came from, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what that Reason is which sorts the desirable from the undesirable — the Reason that tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears.
Some men flatter themselves that they have beaten these evils on their own, no philosophy required; then some accident catches them off guard, and the confession of error is wrung out of them — too late. The boastful words die on their lips the moment the torturer orders them to stretch out their hands, the moment death draws closer. You could say to such a man: "It was easy for you to challenge evils that were nowhere in sight. But here comes pain — the pain you declared you could endure. Here comes death, the thing you hurled so many brave boasts against. The whip cracks, the sword flashes:
Now, Aeneas, you will need your courage, now you will need a sturdy heart!"
That sturdy heart comes from constant study — provided you practice with your soul and not just your tongue, and provided you prepare yourself to meet death. And for that preparation, expect no encouragement, no cheer, from the men who try to argue you into believing, by hair-splitting logic, that death is no evil. Because I do take pleasure, my excellent Lucilius, in poking fun at the absurdities of the Greeks — absurdities I am continually surprised to find I haven't shaken off myself. Our own master Zeno uses a syllogism like this: "No evil is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is no evil." There's a cure, Zeno! Consider me freed of fear — after that, I won't hesitate to stretch my neck out on the block. You're quibbling a man into scorning death? Couldn't you find sterner words, instead of making a dying man laugh? And honestly, Lucilius, I couldn't easily tell you which of the two was the bigger fool: the man who thought this syllogism would quench the fear of death, or the man who took the trouble to refute it — as if any of it had anything to do with the matter. For the refuter set up a counter-syllogism of his own, built on our classing death as "indifferent" — one of the things the Greeks call adiaphora. "Nothing indifferent," he says, "can be glorious; death is glorious; therefore death is not indifferent." You can see the trick sliding through that one: mere death is not, in fact, glorious; a brave death is glorious. And when you say "nothing indifferent is glorious," I'll grant it — with this addition: nothing is glorious except in its dealings with indifferent things. By "indifferent" I mean neither good nor evil: sickness, pain, poverty, exile, death. None of these is glorious in itself; but nothing can be glorious without them. For it is never poverty we praise — it is the man poverty cannot humble or bend. It is never exile we praise — it is the man who walks into exile in the same spirit in which he would have sent another man there. We do not praise pain; we praise the man pain never coerced. No one praises death; we praise the man whose soul death carried off before it could shake it. All these things are, in themselves, neither honorable nor glorious; but let virtue visit and touch any one of them, and virtue makes it honorable and glorious. They simply lie in the middle, and the deciding question is only this: does wickedness lay hold of them, or does virtue? The death that in Cato's case is glorious becomes, in the case of Brutus, instantly base and disgraceful. This is the Brutus who, condemned to death, kept angling for a postponement — who stepped aside a moment to relieve himself, and then, summoned to die and ordered to bare his throat, cried out: "I will bare my throat, if only I may live!" What madness, to run away when there is no turning back! "I will bare my throat, if only I may live!" He came very close to adding: "even under Antony!" There was a man who deserved to be sentenced to life!
But, as I was saying: you can see that death in itself is neither an evil nor a good. Cato used it most honorably; Brutus most shamefully. Add virtue to a thing and it takes on a glory it never had before. We call a room sunny even though the same room is pitch-black at night. The day fills it with light; the night steals the light away. So it is with the things we call indifferent — the "middle" things: riches, strength, beauty, titles, kingship, and their opposites — death, exile, sickness, pain, and all the other evils that frighten us to one degree or another. It is the wickedness or the virtue that hands out the names "good" and "evil." An object is not hot or cold by its own essence: throw it into the furnace and it heats; drop it into water and it chills. Death is honorable when it is joined to something honorable — I mean virtue, and a soul that despises the worst that can happen.
And there are vast distinctions among these "middle" things. Death is not as indifferent as, say, the question of whether your hair is trimmed evenly or unevenly. Death belongs to the class of things that are not evils, but still wear the look of evil. For we are born with love of self, with a desire to exist and preserve ourselves, and with a horror of dissolution — death seems to strip us of so many goods, to pull us away from the abundance we have grown used to. And one more thing estranges us from death: the present we already know, but the future we are crossing into is unknown, and we shrink from the unknown. It is natural, too, to fear the world of shades, where death is supposed to lead. So although death is an indifferent, it is not the kind of thing you can shrug off easily. The soul must be hardened by long practice before it can bear the sight of death and the approach of it.
Death deserves far more scorn than it usually gets — because we believe too many of the stories about it. Plenty of great minds have worked hard to blacken its reputation: they have painted the prison of the world below, the land drowned in everlasting night, where
the huge warden of Hell, sprawled in his blood-stained cave on half-gnawed bones, keeps the bloodless ghosts in terror with a bark that never ends.
Even if you win that argument — even if you prove these are only stories, and the dead have nothing left to fear — a second fear comes creeping in. For the fear of going to the underworld is matched, exactly, by the fear of going nowhere.
With all these notions dinned into our ears by long tradition, how can the brave endurance of death be anything but glorious — anything but one of the greatest achievements of the human mind? The mind will never climb to virtue while it believes death is an evil; it will climb once it holds death to be a matter of indifference. Nature does not build men to march with a great heart toward what they believe is evil: a man will shuffle toward it, dragging his feet. And nothing glorious ever comes of reluctance and cowardice. Virtue does nothing under compulsion. Besides, no deed is honorable unless the whole heart is in it — unless the doer has given himself to it completely, with no part of him in revolt. But when a man goes to face an evil because he fears something worse, or because he hopes for goods that matter enough to make the one evil worth swallowing, then his judgment is pulled in two directions. On one side is the motive urging him to carry out his plan; on the other, the motive holding him back, making him flee from what looks suspicious or dangerous. He is torn both ways — and the moment that happens, the glory of the act is gone. For virtue carries out its plans only when the spirit is in harmony with itself. There is no fear in anything virtue does.
Do not yield to evils. Meet them head-on, bolder still, wherever your fortune allows you a way.
You cannot meet them "bolder still" if you are convinced they are real evils. Dig that idea out of your soul by the roots; otherwise your fear will hang there, undecided, and choke the impulse to act. You will be shoved toward the thing you ought to charge at like a soldier.
Those of our school, it is true, would have you think that Zeno's syllogism is correct, and that the second one — the counter — is deceptive and false. For my part, I refuse to reduce such questions to the rules of logic, to the quibbles of an utterly worn-out system. Away with the whole business, I say — the kind of question that makes a man feel cornered the moment it is put to him, that forces him to concede a premise and then to say one thing in his answer while believing another. When truth is at stake, we must deal more frankly; when fear is to be fought, more bravely. These questions the dialecticians tangle up in subtleties, I would rather untangle and weigh in plain reason — aiming to win conviction, not to trap the judgment.
A general is about to lead an army into action — men prepared to die for their wives and children. How does he fire them for battle? I give you the Fabii, one clan taking a whole state's war onto its shoulders. I point you to the Spartans posted in the very pass of Thermopylae. They have no hope of victory, no hope of coming home. The ground they stand on is to be their tomb. In what language do you urge them to make a barricade of their bodies, to take the ruin of their whole people onto themselves, to retreat from life sooner than from their post? Will you say: "What is evil is not glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not an evil"? What a stirring speech! After words like those, who could hesitate to throw himself onto the massed spears of the enemy and die where he stood? But take Leonidas — how bravely he spoke to his men! "Fellow soldiers," he said, "eat your breakfast as men who will dine in the underworld!" And the food did not turn to lumps in their mouths, or stick in their throats, or slip from their fingers: they accepted the invitation cheerfully — to breakfast and to dinner both. And think of the famous Roman general who sent his soldiers to seize a position straight through an enormous enemy army, and addressed them so: "Men, you must go to that place. There is no must about your coming back."
You see how straightforward virtue is, how commanding. But what man on earth will your logical trickery make braver or more upright? It breaks the spirit instead — and there is no worse time to cramp the spirit and pin it to petty, thorny puzzles than when some great work is being planned. It is not the Three Hundred who need to be relieved of the fear of death — it is all mankind. And how will you prove to all of them that death is no evil? How will you overcome the notions of a whole lifetime, dyed into us from infancy? What rescue will you find for human helplessness? What will you say that sends men burning with zeal into the middle of danger? What speech will talk the whole race out of this universal fear — what feat of cleverness will overturn the settled conviction of the human race standing squarely against you? Are you going to build me catchwords, and string together petty little syllogisms? It takes great weapons to bring down great monsters. You remember the monstrous serpent in Africa — more terrifying to the Roman legions than the war itself — which arrows and slings attacked in vain. Even "Pythius," their great siege engine, could not wound it: its sheer size, and a hide as tough as its bulk, made spears and every weapon thrown by a human hand glance off. It was finally crushed by rocks the size of millstones. And you — is that the kind of toy weapon you are hurling at death? Will you stop a lion's charge with an awl? Your arguments are sharp, I grant you. So is a stalk of grain — nothing is sharper. And some arguments are made useless and unavailing by their very subtlety.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You ask me for an account of each of my days — the whole day, start to finish. You must think well of me if you assume there's nothing in them to hide. And in fact that is how we ought to live: as if we lived in plain sight of everyone. That is how we ought to think, too: as if someone could look into our inmost hearts — because someone can. What good does it do to hide something from people? Nothing is shut away from the sight of God. He is the witness of our souls; he stands in the very middle of our thoughts — and I say "stands in" as one who may, at any moment, walk out. So I'll do as you ask, and gladly report by letter what I'm doing and in what order. I'm going to keep watch on myself continually and — a most useful habit — review each day when it's over. This is exactly what makes us bad: none of us looks back over his own life. We think only about what we're going to do next. And yet our plans for the future always hang on the past.
Today has come to me in one piece; no one has stolen the smallest scrap of it. The whole of it has been divided between rest and reading. A small slice went to physical exercise, and on that score I can thank old age: my exercise costs very little effort. The moment I move, I'm tired — and tiredness is the whole aim and end of exercise, no matter how strong you are. You want to know who my training partners are? One is enough for me: the slave Pharius, a pleasant fellow, as you know — though I'll be trading him for another. At my time of life I need someone of even tenderer years. Pharius, for his part, insists that he and I are at the same stage of life, since we're both losing our teeth. Even so, I can barely match his pace when he runs, and before long I won't be able to match it at all — see what daily exercise does for you! A wide gap opens fast between two people traveling in opposite directions. He is climbing at the very moment I'm coming down, and you know how much quicker coming down is. No — I put that wrong. My life isn't coming down anymore; it's dropping straight off. Still, you ask, how did today's race come out? A dead heat — something that rarely happens in a footrace.
After tiring myself out that way (I can't call it exercise), I took a cold bath — which, at my house, means just short of hot. I, the old cold-water fanatic, who used to salute the new year with a plunge into the canal, who used to open every first of January with a dive into the Aqua Virgo as naturally as I'd sit down to read or write or draft a speech — I have switched my allegiance, first to the Tiber, and then to my own tank, which is warmed by nothing but the sun, and only on days when I'm at my strongest and my body has no complaints. There's not much bathing left in me. After the bath, some stale bread, and breakfast without a table — no need to wash your hands after a meal like that. Then a very short nap. You know my habit: I take the barest scrap of sleep — just unharnessing, so to speak. It's enough for me to simply stop being awake. Sometimes I know I've slept; other times I merely suspect it.
Listen — there's the roar of the Races all around me now! A sudden, unanimous cheer slams against my ears. But it doesn't shake my thoughts or even break their thread. I can put up with an uproar with complete patience. All those voices blended into a single note sound to me like waves breaking, or wind lashing the treetops, or any other noise that carries no meaning.
What, then, have I been giving my attention to? I'll tell you. A thought has been stuck in my head since yesterday: what did the shrewdest men in the world mean when they offered flimsy, tangled little proofs for questions of the greatest importance — proofs that may be true, and yet look exactly like tricks? Zeno, that greatest of men, the revered founder of our brave and holy school of philosophy, wants to talk us out of drunkenness. So listen to his argument that the good man won't get drunk: "No one entrusts a secret to a drunken man; but people entrust secrets to a good man; therefore, the good man will not get drunk." Now watch how ridiculous Zeno looks when we set a matching syllogism beside his. There are many to choose from, but one will do: "No one entrusts a secret to a man who's asleep; but people entrust secrets to a good man; therefore, the good man does not sleep."
Posidonius defends our master Zeno in the only way possible — and even that way, I hold, won't hold up. Posidonius says the word "drunken" is used in two senses: of a man who is loaded with wine and has lost control of himself, and of a man who habitually gets drunk — a slave to the habit. Zeno, he says, meant the second: the man in the habit of getting drunk, not the man who is drunk right now; and nobody would trust that man with a secret, because he might blurt it out over his cups. That's a dodge. The syllogism is about the man who is actually drunk, not the man who is going to get drunk. And you'll surely grant there's a big difference between a man who's drunk and a drunkard. The man who's drunk right now may be drunk for the first time in his life, with no habit at all; and the drunkard is often stone sober. So I take the word in its ordinary meaning — especially since the syllogism comes from a man who makes a business of precision, who weighs every word he uses. Besides, if that's what Zeno meant, and what he wanted it to mean to us, then he was exploiting an ambiguous word to smuggle in a fallacy — and no one should do that when the object is truth.
But fine — let's grant he meant what Posidonius says. Even then the conclusion is false: that secrets are not entrusted to a habitual drinker. Think how many soldiers — hardly models of sobriety — have been trusted by a general or a captain or a centurion with messages that had to stay secret! Take the famous plot to kill Gaius Caesar — I mean the Caesar who defeated Pompey and got control of the state. Tillius Cimber was trusted with it every bit as much as Gaius Cassius. Cassius drank water his whole life; Cimber was a sot and a brawler besides. Cimber even joked about it himself: "Me, carry a master? I can't even carry my liquor!" So let each of us call to mind the men we know who can't be trusted with wine but can be trusted with a secret. One case comes to my mind that I'll pass along, so it doesn't slip into oblivion — life should be stocked with vivid examples, and we shouldn't always be reaching back into the dim past.
Lucius Piso, the man in charge of keeping order in Rome, was drunk from the very moment of his appointment. He spent the better part of every night at banquets and slept until noon — that was his morning. Yet he applied himself most diligently to his official duties, which included the safekeeping of the city. Even the sainted Augustus trusted him with secret orders when he gave him command of Thrace — which Piso conquered. Tiberius trusted him too, when he went off on his Campanian holiday, leaving behind in Rome plenty of unfinished business that stirred up both suspicion and hatred. And I suspect it was because Piso's drunkenness had worked out so well for the emperor that he later named Cossus city prefect — a man of weight and balance, but so soaked, so pickled in drink, that once, arriving at a Senate meeting straight from a banquet, he sank into a sleep nobody could rouse him from and had to be carried home. This is the man to whom Tiberius sent many orders written in his own hand — orders he decided he couldn't trust even to the staff of his own household. Cossus never let a single secret slip, personal or public.
So let's retire all the set speeches like this one: "The man in the grip of drink is not master of his own soul. As new wine bursts the very vats, and the strength of the fermentation heaves the dregs up from the bottom, so when the wine froths inside a man, whatever lies hidden in him is carried up and brought into the open. A man overloaded with wine can't keep down his food — and he can't keep down a secret either. He pours out his own and other people's alike." That does commonly happen — but so does this: we take counsel on serious matters with men we know to be steady drinkers. So the claim laid down in defense of Zeno's syllogism — that a secret is never entrusted to the habitual drinker — is false.
How much better to indict drunkenness openly and expose its vices! Even the middling good man avoids them — never mind the perfect sage, who is satisfied once his thirst is quenched, and who, even if a friend's celebration occasionally carries him a little far, always stops short of drunk. Whether too much wine can scramble even the sage's mind and push him into a fool's behavior, we can look into later. Meanwhile, if you want to prove that a good man shouldn't get drunk, why work it out by logic? Say how disgraceful it is to pour down more than you can carry, without knowing the capacity of your own stomach. Say how many things drunk men do that make them blush when they're sober. Say plainly that drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. Stretch the drunkard's condition out over several days — would you have any doubt then that he's insane? As it is, the madness is no smaller; it just doesn't last as long. Think of Alexander of Macedon, who stabbed Clitus, his dearest and most loyal friend, at a banquet; when Alexander understood what he had done, he wanted to die — and he certainly should have.
Drunkenness ignites every vice and puts it on display, and it strips away the shame that veils our worst undertakings. For more men hold back from what's forbidden because they're ashamed of sinning than because their desires are good. When the wine grows too strong and takes command of the mind, every evil that was lurking comes out of its hiding place. Drunkenness doesn't create vice; it merely brings it into view. That's when the lustful man doesn't even wait for the privacy of a bedroom, but grants his appetites everything on the spot; that's when the shameless man announces and advertises his disease; that's when the surly man restrains neither his tongue nor his fist. The arrogant man grows more arrogant, the ruthless man more cruel, the slanderer more spiteful. Every vice is off its leash and out in front. Add to this that we forget who we are; the words come halting and slurred; the eyes swim; the step falters; the head spins; the very ceiling starts to wheel around as if a cyclone had hold of the whole house; and the stomach is in torment as the wine turns to gas and bloats our very insides. All of that can be endured, at least, while the man still has his strength. But what is he to do when sleep has sapped it, and what was drunkenness has become indigestion?
Think what calamities drunkenness has brought down on whole nations! This is the evil that has betrayed the most spirited and warlike peoples to their enemies; that has opened breaches in walls defended through years of stubborn fighting; that has forced under a foreign yoke peoples who were utterly unyielding and refused all mastery; that has conquered with the wine-cup men who were unconquerable in the field. Alexander — I just mentioned him — came safely through all his marches, all his battles, all his winter campaigns fought through every disadvantage of season and terrain, all the rivers flowing down from unknown sources, all the seas. It was overdrinking that laid him low — that, and the notorious death-dealing "bowl of Hercules."
Where's the glory in holding a lot of liquor? When you've won the prize; when the other guests, sprawled out snoring or vomiting, have declined your challenge to yet another round; when you're the last man standing at the party; when you've vanquished everyone with your magnificent show of prowess and no one has a capacity to match yours — you have been vanquished by the cask. Mark Antony was a great man, a man of distinguished ability; and what ruined him, what drove him into foreign habits and un-Roman vices, if not drunkenness — and, no less potent than wine, his love of Cleopatra? Drink made him an enemy of the state; drink left him no match for his enemies; drink made him cruel — for he would sit at dinner while the heads of the leading men of Rome were carried in; amid the most elaborate feasts and royal luxury he would study the faces and hands of the men he had proscribed; and heavy with wine, he still thirsted for blood. That he was getting drunk while he did such things was intolerable; that he did such things while actually drunk — how much worse! Cruelty usually follows hard drinking, because a man's soundness of mind gets corrupted and turns savage. Just as a lingering illness makes men whiny and irritable, wild at the least crossing of their wishes, so continual bouts of drunkenness brutalize the soul. When men are often beside themselves, the habit of madness settles in, and the vices the liquor bred keep their strength even when the liquor is gone.
So state the reasons why the wise man ought not to get drunk. Show the ugliness of the thing, and the evils that haunt it, by facts and not by words. Do the easiest thing of all: demonstrate that what people call pleasures turn into punishments the moment they pass their proper limits. Because if you set out to prove that the wise man can soak himself in any amount of wine and still hold his course, still steady even in his cups, then you may as well go on to conclude, syllogism by syllogism, that he won't die if he swallows poison, won't sleep if he takes a sleeping draught, and won't vomit up what's clogging his stomach when you dose him with hellebore. But when a man's feet are tottering and his tongue is tripping, what reason do you have to call him half sober rather than half drunk?
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
These journeys you mention — the kind that shake the laziness out of my system — I count as good both for my health and for my studies. Why they help my health, you can see: since my passion for books makes me lazy and careless about my body, traveling lets me exercise by proxy. Why they help my studies, I'll show you: I haven't cut back on my reading in the slightest. And reading, I hold, is indispensable — first, so that I'm not satisfied with myself alone; and second, so that once I've learned what others have found out, I can judge their discoveries and think about the discoveries still waiting to be made. Reading feeds the mind, and refreshes it when it's worn out with study — though the refreshment isn't had without study either. We shouldn't confine ourselves to writing only, or to reading only: endless writing will darken and drain your strength; endless reading will make it soft and watery. Better to turn from one to the other, blending them, so that the pen works the gatherings of your reading into something solid.
We ought to imitate the bees, as people say: they wander about and raid the flowers best suited for making honey, then arrange what they've brought home and sort it through the combs, and — as our Virgil puts it —
pack close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet.
It isn't certain whether the juice they draw from the flowers is honey the moment they gather it, or whether they change what they've collected into that delicious thing by blending something with it — some property of their own breath. Some authorities believe bees have no art of making honey, only of gathering it; they say that in India honey has been found on the leaves of certain reeds, produced by a dew peculiar to that climate, or by the juice of the reed itself, which has an unusual sweetness and richness. Our own grasses, they say, carry the same quality, fainter and less obvious, and a creature born for exactly this work hunts it out and collects it. Others hold that what the bees have culled from the tenderest of the blooming, flowering plants is transformed into this new substance by being packed away and carefully stored, helped along by something like fermentation, which fuses the separate elements into one.
But I mustn't get pulled off into another subject. The point is: we too ought to copy these bees. We should sort out whatever we've gathered from our varied reading — such things keep better when kept separate — and then, applying the supervising care our nature has given us (our own talent, in plain terms), blend all those separate flavors into one delicious compound, so that even though you can see where it came from, it is clearly a different thing from its source. This is what we watch nature do in our own bodies with no effort on our part: the food we eat is a burden only as long as it keeps its original form and sits whole in the stomach; only when it has been changed from what it was does it pass into muscle and blood. Let's do the same with the food that feeds our higher nature: whatever we take in, let's not allow it to sit inside us unchanged and foreign — then it would never be part of us. It has to be digested. Otherwise it goes into the memory and not into the reasoning power. Let's welcome these ideas wholeheartedly and make them our own, so that out of many things one thing is formed — the way one number is formed out of many smaller sums when a single reckoning gathers up the different amounts. This is what our mind should do: let the mind hide all the sources; show only the result. And even if a resemblance does show through — to some writer your admiration has stamped deep into you — I want you to resemble him the way a child resembles his father, not the way a portrait resembles its subject. A portrait is a dead thing.
"What," you say, "won't people be able to tell whose style you're imitating, whose way of arguing, whose sharp sayings?" Sometimes, I think, they can't tell at all — not if the copy is a true one; for a true copy stamps its own form on everything it takes from its model, so that it all fuses into a unity. Haven't you noticed how many voices there are in a chorus? Yet out of them all comes one voice. One takes the high part, another the low, another the middle; there are women's voices in among the men's, and flutes woven between them. The individual voices are hidden; what you hear belongs to all of them together. (I mean the chorus the old philosophers knew. At our modern spectacles there are more singers on stage than there used to be spectators in the old theaters: the aisles are packed with rows of them, brass rings the auditorium, the stage throbs with flutes and instruments of every kind — and out of all those clashing sounds comes a harmony.)
That's the kind of mind I want mine to be: stocked with many skills, many precepts, and patterns of conduct drawn from many ages of history — but all of it blended into harmony, into one. "How is that done?" you ask. By constant attention — by doing nothing without the approval of reason. And if you're willing to hear her voice, reason will tell you: "Abandon the pursuits that have kept you running here and there. Abandon riches; they are either a danger or a burden to whoever holds them. Abandon the pleasures of body and mind; they only soften and weaken you. Abandon the chase for office; it is a swollen, idle, empty thing with no finish line, as anxious that no one gets ahead of it as that no one comes up behind it. It is sick with envy — a double envy, in fact; and you see how wretched a man is when he is envied and envies too."
Do you see those mansions of the great, those doorways loud with the shoving of morning callers? They have plenty of insults for you on your way in the door, and more once you're inside. Walk past the staircases of the rich and the porches made hazardous by the crush — there you'd be standing not just on the edge of a cliff but on slippery ground. Set your course instead toward wisdom; seek her ways, which are ways of surpassing peace and plenty. Whatever looks prominent in human affairs — however small it really is, and prominent only next to what's lowest — is still reached by a hard, grinding climb. It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. But if you choose to scale this peak, which stands far above Fortune's whole range, you will look down from there on everything men count loftiest — and yet you can reach the top over level ground.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I had meant to spare you. I was leaving out the knotty problems that still remained, satisfied to give you just a taste of our school's arguments — the ones designed to prove that virtue, all by itself, is enough to complete the happy life. But now you order me to bring in the whole arsenal: our syllogisms, and the ones rival schools have devised to belittle us. If I'm willing to do that, the result won't be a letter; it will be a book. And I say it again, for the record: I take no pleasure in this kind of quibbling. I'm ashamed to march into the arena and do battle on behalf of gods and men armed with nothing but an awl.
Still, you asked. Here is the chain: "Whoever has prudence also has self-restraint; whoever has self-restraint is steadfast; whoever is steadfast is unperturbed; whoever is unperturbed is free from sadness; whoever is free from sadness is happy. Therefore the prudent man is happy, and prudence is enough for the happy life."
Certain Peripatetics — Aristotle's school — answer this by redefining the terms. "Unperturbed," they say, means a man who is rarely perturbed, and only moderately — not a man who is never perturbed at all. Likewise a man is called "free from sadness" if he isn't prone to sadness, if he falls into that unfortunate state seldom and not too deeply. Human nature being what it is, they argue, no one's spirit can be exempt from sadness; the wise man isn't overwhelmed by grief, but he is touched by it — and so on, all according to the teachings of their school. They don't abolish the passions this way; they only moderate them. But what a petty superiority we're granting the wise man, if he's merely braver than the biggest coward, happier than the most dejected, more self-controlled than the most out-of-control, and greater than the lowest of the low! Would Ladas, the legendary runner, brag about his speed by comparing himself with the lame and the feeble?
She could skim over the tips of the standing grain and never bruise the tender ears as she ran, or dart across open sea, poised above the swell, and never wet her flying feet in the water.
If the wise man, on your definition, has any passions at all, his reason will be no match for them; it will be swept along as if on a rushing current — especially if you assign him not one passion to wrestle with, but all of them. And a crowd of passions, even moderate ones, can do more to him than the violence of one powerful passion. He craves money, but moderately. He has ambition, but it isn't fully roused yet. He has a temper, but it can be talked down. He's fickle, but not wildly or restlessly so. He has lust, but not the violent kind. We'd have an easier time with a man who had one full-blown vice than with a man who has all the vices, none of them in extreme form.
Besides, the size of a passion makes no difference. Whatever its size, it doesn't know how to obey, and it doesn't take advice. No animal obeys reason — not the wild ones, not the tame and gentle ones either; nature made them deaf to counsel. In the same way the passions don't follow and don't listen, however slight they are. Tigers and lions never put off their wildness. They set it aside sometimes, and then, just when you're least prepared, that softened ferocity flares back into savagery. Vices are never genuinely tamed.
Again: if reason prevails, the passions never even get started. But if they get moving against reason's will, they'll keep moving against reason's will. It's easier to stop them at the start than to steer them once they've gathered force. So this halfway position is misleading and useless. Treat it exactly the way you'd treat the claim that we ought to be "moderately" insane, or "moderately" sick. Virtue alone possesses moderation; the evils that afflict the mind don't come in moderate sizes. You can remove them more easily than you can manage them. Can anyone doubt that the vices of the human mind, once they've become chronic and hardened — at that point we call them "diseases" — are beyond control? Greed, cruelty, brutality: uncontrollable. Then the passions are beyond control too, because the passions are the road we take to reach the vices.
Again: grant any allowance to sadness, fear, desire, and the rest of the wrong impulses, and they'll slip out of our jurisdiction entirely. Why? Because the triggers that rouse them lie outside our power. So they'll grow in proportion as their causes are greater or smaller. Fear will swell as the terrifying thing looks bigger or comes closer; desire will sharpen as the hope of a bigger prize calls it into action. If the existence of the passions isn't in our control, neither is their strength; once you let them get started, they'll grow right along with their causes, and they'll end up as big as they're going to grow. Besides, however small these evils are, they get bigger. Whatever is harmful never keeps within bounds. However trifling a disease is at the beginning, it creeps forward — and sometimes the slightest worsening of an illness is what finishes off a weakened body.
But what folly it is, when the beginnings of a thing lie outside our control, to believe that its endings lie within it! How can I have the power to shut something down when I didn't have the power to keep it out? It's easier to bar the door than to subdue the intruder once you've let him in.
Some have drawn this distinction: "The self-controlled and wise man is at peace in the settled attitude and habit of his mind, but not in what actually befalls him. As far as his habit of mind goes, he isn't perturbed or saddened or afraid; but plenty of outside causes strike him and bring disturbance with them." What they mean is this: "He's not a man of angry temperament, but he still sometimes gives way to anger," and "He's not a fearful man, but he still sometimes feels fear." He's free of the fault, in other words, but not free of the feeling. But let fear in once, and through repeated use it turns into a vice; let anger into the mind, and it corrupts what was formerly the habit of a mind without anger. Besides, if the wise man doesn't despise everything that comes at him from outside — if he ever fears anything at all — then when the moment arrives to march bravely against the spear or the flames for his country, his laws, and his liberty, he'll go out reluctantly, with his spirit dragging. And that kind of inner contradiction doesn't suit the wise man.
Then there's another point: we should be careful not to tangle together two principles that ought to be tested separately. It's one conclusion, reached on its own, that the honorable is the only good; and a separate conclusion that virtue is sufficient for the happy life. If the honorable is the only good, everyone agrees that virtue is enough for living happily. But it doesn't run backward: if virtue alone makes men happy, no one will concede on that basis that the honorable is the only good. Xenocrates and Speusippus, Plato's successors, hold that a man can become happy by virtue alone without holding that the honorable is the only good. Epicurus, too, judges that the man who has virtue is happy — but that virtue by itself isn't sufficient for the happy life, because what makes him happy is the pleasure that results from virtue, not the virtue itself. A useless distinction. For the same philosopher declares that virtue never exists without pleasure; so if virtue is always joined to pleasure, always inseparable from it, then virtue is sufficient all by itself. It keeps pleasure in its company; even alone, it is never without it. And it's absurd to say that a man will be happy by virtue alone, and yet not completely happy. I can't discover how that would even work. The happy life contains within itself a perfect good, a good that can't be surpassed; and if a man has that good, his life is completely happy.
Now, if the life of the gods contains nothing greater or better, and the happy life is divine, then there is no further height a man can be raised to. Moreover, if the happy life lacks nothing, then every happy life is perfect: it is happy and supremely happy at the same time. Do you have any doubt that the happy life is the Supreme Good? Then if it possesses the Supreme Good, it is supremely happy. Just as the Supreme Good doesn't admit of increase — what could stand above the supreme? — so the happy life can't be increased either, since it doesn't exist without the Supreme Good. Bring in one man who is "happier" than another, and you'll soon bring in one who is "much happier"; you'll end up slicing the Supreme Good into countless gradations — when, as I understand it, the Supreme Good is precisely the good that has no degree above it. If one man is less happy than another, it follows that he'd rather have the happier man's life than his own. But the happy man prefers no one's life to his own. Either alternative is unbelievable: that there should be something left for a happy man to wish for beyond what is, or that he should fail to prefer what's better than what he already has. Certainly the more prudent he is, the more he'll strive for the best and want to reach it by every possible means. But how can a man be happy who is still able — no, still bound — to crave something more?
I'll tell you where this error comes from: people don't understand that the happy life is a single whole. It's the quality of the life, not its size, that sets it on the highest plane. That's why there is complete equality between the long life and the short one, between the life spread wide and the life kept narrow, between the life whose influence is felt in many places and many directions and the life confined to a single pursuit. Whoever measures life by number, by size, or by parts strips it of what makes it distinctive. And in a happy life, what is the distinctive thing? Its fullness. Satiety, I take it, is the limit of our eating and drinking. A eats more and B eats less — what difference does it make? Each is now full. A drinks more and B drinks less — what difference? Neither is thirsty anymore. A lives many years and B lives few: no matter, so long as A's many years hold as much happiness as B's few. The man you insist is "less happy" isn't happy at all; the word doesn't come in smaller sizes.
"Whoever is brave is fearless; whoever is fearless is free from sadness; whoever is free from sadness is happy." This syllogism is our own school's work. The attempted refutation goes like this: we Stoics are treating as settled a premise that is false and hotly disputed — namely, that the brave man is fearless. "What!" they say. "The brave man won't fear the evils hanging over his head? That's the condition of a madman, a lunatic — not a brave man. The brave man feels fear, certainly, only very slightly; he isn't absolutely free of it." But people who say this are doubling back to their old move: treating smaller vices as the equivalent of virtues. The man who feels fear rarely and slightly isn't free of the evil; he just suffers a milder case of it. "Not so," comes the reply. "I say a man is mad if he doesn't fear the evils hanging over his head." What you say is perfectly true — if the things threatening him really are evils. But if he knows they aren't evils, if he believes the only evil is disgrace, then he'll be bound to face dangers without anxiety and to despise the things other men can't help fearing. Or, if not fearing evils is the mark of a fool and a madman, then it follows that the wiser a man is, the more afraid he ought to be!
"So it's Stoic doctrine, then, that the brave man will expose himself to dangers." Not at all. He won't fear them — but he will avoid them. Caution suits him; fear does not. "What then? Won't he fear death, prison, burning, and all the other missiles Fortune throws?" Not at all, because he knows they aren't evils; they only look like evils. He counts all these things among the bogeymen of human existence. Paint him the whole picture: slavery, the lash, chains, want, limbs mangled by disease or by torture — add whatever else you like. He'll file every one of them under panics of a deranged mind. These things are fearful only to the fearful. Or do you call that an evil which, some day, we may be driven to choose freely, of our own accord?
Then what is an evil, you ask? Giving in to the things that are called evils — surrendering your liberty into their hands, when you ought to suffer anything to preserve that liberty. Liberty is lost unless we despise the things that put the yoke on our necks. If people knew what bravery really was, they'd have no doubts about how a brave man should act. Bravery isn't thoughtless recklessness, or a love of danger, or an appetite for frightening situations. It is the knowledge that lets us tell what is an evil from what is not. Bravery takes the most attentive care of itself — and, at the same time, endures with the greatest patience everything that wears the false mask of evil. "What then?" comes the question. "If the sword is brandished over your brave man's neck, if he's run through in one place and then another, if he watches his own entrails spill into his lap, if the torture is paused and then renewed so he'll feel it more keenly, if the blood runs fresh from wounds that had only just stopped bleeding — is he not afraid? Will you tell me he hasn't felt pain, either?" He has felt pain; no human virtue can strip away feeling. But he has no fear. Unconquered, he looks down on his sufferings from a great height. Do you ask what spirit is in him at such a moment? The spirit of a man comforting a sick friend.
"What is evil does harm; what does harm makes a man worse; but pain and poverty don't make a man worse; therefore they are not evils." "Your premise is wrong," says the objector, "because what harms a man doesn't necessarily make him worse. The storm and the squall do harm to the pilot, but they don't make him a worse pilot for all that." Some of our own Stoics answer this as follows: "The pilot is made a worse pilot by storms and squalls, in the sense that he can't carry out his intention and hold his course. In his art he becomes no worse a pilot; in his work, he does become worse." To which the Peripatetics retort: "Then poverty will make even the wise man worse, and so will pain, and so will everything of that sort. Those things won't strip him of his virtue, but they will hinder virtue's work."
That would be a fair point, except that the pilot and the wise man are two different kinds of person. The wise man's aim in conducting his life is not to accomplish whatever he attempts at any cost, but to do everything rightly. The pilot's aim is to bring his ship into port at any cost. The arts are servants: they must deliver what they promise. Wisdom is mistress and ruler. The arts render a slave's service to life; wisdom gives the orders.
For my own part, I'd give a different answer altogether: the pilot's art is never made worse by the storm — and neither is his practice of it. The pilot never promised you a prosperous voyage; he promised a competent performance of his job — that is, expert knowledge of steering a ship. And the harder Fortune presses him, the more that expert knowledge shows. The man who can say, "Neptune, you will never sink this ship except on an even keel," has met the full requirement of his art. The storm doesn't hinder the pilot's work — only his success. "What," you say, "isn't a pilot harmed by whatever keeps him from making port, wrecks all his efforts, drags him out to sea, holds his ship pinned, or strips her masts?" No — it harms him as a voyager, not as a pilot; as a pilot, he's untouched. So far is the storm from hindering the pilot's art that it actually puts the art on display: anyone, as the proverb says, is a pilot on a calm sea. These disasters obstruct the voyage, not the steersman as steersman. A pilot plays a double role. One he shares with everyone on board, because he is a passenger too. The other is his alone, because he is the pilot. The storm harms him as a passenger, not as a pilot.
And there's more. The pilot's art is a good that belongs to other people: it concerns his passengers, the way a doctor's art concerns his patients. But the wise man's good is a common good — it belongs both to the people he lives among and to himself. So perhaps the pilot really is harmed, since the services he promised to others are blocked by the storm. But the wise man is not harmed by poverty, or by pain, or by any of life's other storms. Not all of his functions are shut down — only the ones directed at other people. He himself is always in action, and he is greatest in performance at the very moment Fortune has blocked his road, because that is when he's doing the business of wisdom itself — and wisdom, as I've already said, is both a good for others and his own good too. Nor is he barred from helping others even when hard circumstances are pressing him down. His poverty prevents him from showing how the state should be managed; but he teaches, all the same, how poverty should be managed. His work goes on through the whole of his life.
So no stroke of Fortune, no external circumstance, can shut the wise man off from action. The very thing that claims his attention is what keeps him from attending to other things. He stands ready for either outcome: if goods come, he governs them; if evils come, he conquers them. He has trained himself this thoroughly, I mean: to make his virtue visible in prosperity and in adversity alike, keeping his eyes on virtue itself, not on the materials virtue happens to be working with. So neither poverty nor pain nor anything else that turns the inexperienced aside and sends them stampeding will pull him off his course. Do you suppose he's weighed down by evils? He makes use of them. Phidias, the great sculptor, didn't know how to make statues only out of ivory; he made them out of bronze too. If you'd handed him marble, or some still cheaper material, he'd have carved the best statue that material allowed. In the same way, the wise man will develop virtue amid wealth if he can, and if not, in poverty; in his own country if possible, and if not, in exile; as a commander if possible, and if not, as a common soldier; in sound health if possible, and if not, enfeebled. Whatever Fortune hands him, he will make something remarkable out of it.
Animal-tamers never miss. They take the most savage beasts — creatures that would terrify anyone who stumbled on them — and bend them to man's will; and not content with driving out the ferocity, they gentle them until beast and man live under the same roof. The trainer puts his hand in the lion's mouth; the keeper kisses his tiger; a small Ethiopian boy orders the elephant down onto its knees, or has it walk the rope. Just so, the wise man is an expert at taming evils. Pain, want, disgrace, prison, exile — dreaded everywhere — when they come up against the wise man, they are tamed.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I am writing to you from the country house that once belonged to Scipio Africanus himself. I have been resting here, and before I sat down to write I paid my respects to his spirit, and to an altar which, I suspect, is actually the great soldier's tomb. That his soul went back to the sky it came from, I have no doubt — and not because he commanded mighty armies. Cambyses had mighty armies too, and Cambyses was a madman who simply happened to use his madness successfully. No, I believe it because Scipio showed moderation and a sense of duty to a degree that is hard to believe. And I admire those qualities more in the moment he walked away from his country than in all the years he defended her. Because by then it had come down to this: either Scipio stayed in Rome, or Rome stayed free. "I want nothing," he said, "that infringes our laws or our customs by so much as an inch. Let every Roman citizen have equal rights. My country, enjoy the good I have done you — but enjoy it without me. I have been the cause of your freedom; now I will be the proof of it. If it is true that I have grown too big for your good, then I go into exile."
How can I not admire that greatness of spirit — choosing voluntary exile just to take the weight off the state? Matters had reached the point where either liberty had to do harm to Scipio, or Scipio had to do harm to liberty. Either one would have been an offense against heaven. So he yielded to the laws and withdrew here to Liternum, putting the state in his debt for his own exile just as surely as for Hannibal's.
I have gone through the whole house. It is built of squared stone. A wall runs around an entire forest. There are towers buttressed out on both sides to defend the house, and a well hidden among the buildings and shrubbery — big enough to supply an army. And then there is the bath: tiny, and buried in darkness, in the old style, because our ancestors did not believe a bath could be hot unless it was dark. It gave me real pleasure to stand there and compare Scipio's ways with ours. Think of it. In this cramped little recess, the "terror of Carthage" — the man Rome must thank for being captured only once — used to wash a body worn out by work in the fields. For he kept himself busy, and he tilled the soil with his own hands, the way the good old Romans did. Under this dingy roof he stood; this floor, cheap as it is, bore his weight.
But who could bear to bathe like that now? A man thinks himself poor and shabby these days unless his walls gleam with huge, expensive mirrors; unless his Alexandrian marbles are set off with mosaics of Numidian stone, their borders worked over on every side with elaborate patterns in as many colors as a painting; unless the vaulted ceiling is buried in glass; unless the swimming pools are lined with Thasian marble — a sight that was once rare and wonderful in any temple — pools into which we lower bodies already drained weak by heavy sweating; and unless, to finish it off, the water pours out of silver spigots. And so far I have only been describing the ordinary bathhouses. What am I supposed to say when I get to the baths of the freedmen? The sheer crowds of statues! The columns that hold up nothing at all, installed purely for decoration, purely for the sake of spending money! The masses of water crashing noisily down from level to level! We have grown so luxurious that we refuse to walk on anything but precious stones.
In this bath of Scipio's there are little chinks — you cannot really call them windows — cut through the stone wall in a way that lets in light without weakening the defenses. Nowadays, though, people say a bath is fit only for moths unless it has been designed to catch the sun all day long through the widest possible windows, unless a man can bathe and get a tan at the same time, unless he can lie in his tub and gaze out over stretches of land and sea. And so it goes: the establishments that drew crowds and won gasps of admiration when they first opened get deserted and filed away with the venerable antiques the moment luxury works out some new trick — luxury busily inventing her own undoing. In the early days, though, there were few baths, and nobody dressed them up at all. Why should anyone lavish decoration on a thing that costs a penny to enter and was invented for use, not for delight? The bathers of those days did not have water poured over them, and it did not run endlessly fresh as if from a hot spring; they did not think it mattered in the least how perfectly clear the water was that they were about to leave their dirt in. Good gods, what a pleasure it is to step into that dark bath, under its plain common roof, and know that your hero Cato, as aedile — or Fabius Maximus, or one of the Cornelii — warmed its water with his own hands! For even that used to be part of the noblest aediles' job: to walk into the places where ordinary people gathered and demand that they be kept clean and heated to a temperature fixed by use and health — not the temperature that has lately become fashionable, as hot as a house fire, so hot that a slave convicted of some crime could now simply be sentenced to be bathed alive. As far as I can tell, there is no longer any difference between "the bath is warm" and "the bath is on fire."
And how people today sneer at Scipio as a country bumpkin — because he did not let daylight into his sweating-room through wide windows, because he did not roast himself in the blazing sun and dawdle around until he could stew in the hot water! "Poor fool," they say, "he didn't know how to live! His water wasn't even filtered. It was often cloudy, and after a heavy rain it was practically mud!" But it did not matter much to Scipio if his bathwater looked like that. He came there to wash off sweat, not ointment. And how do you suppose certain people will answer me? They will say: "I don't envy Scipio. A bath like that — now that was truly an exile's life." Friend, if you were wiser, you would know that Scipio did not even bathe every day. The writers who have handed down the old Roman ways tell us that the Romans washed their arms and legs daily — those being the parts that picked up dirt in a day's work — and bathed all over just once a week. At this point somebody will snort: "Well! They must have been filthy fellows. Imagine what they smelled like!" They smelled of the camp, the farm, and heroism. Now that spotless, glittering bathhouses have been invented, men are actually fouler than they used to be. When Horace wants to describe a scoundrel, a man notorious for over-the-top luxury, what does he say? "Buccillus smells of perfume." Show me a Buccillus today: his perfume would rank as pure goat-stink, and he would have to take the place of Gargonius, the smelly fellow Horace set opposite him in the same passage. Nowadays it is not enough merely to wear scent; you have to slap on a fresh coat two or three times a day so it will not evaporate off your body. And why on earth does a man preen over that perfume as if the smell were his own?
If all this strikes you as too gloomy, charge it to Scipio's villa — where I have also learned a lesson from Aegialus, the most careful of farmers and the current owner of this estate. He has taught me that a tree can be transplanted no matter how far along in years it is. We old men need to learn that lesson, since there is not one of us who is not planting an olive orchard for his successor. I have seen those orchards bearing fruit in due season after three or four unproductive years. And you too, one day, will be shaded by the tree that
is slow to grow, but will bring shade to cheer your grandsons in the far-off years,
Sow beans in the spring; then you too, clover, are welcome in the crumbling furrows; and the millet calls for its yearly care.
You can judge from a little incident whether those crops should really be planted at the same time, or whether both belong to spring. It is June as I write this — we are well along toward July — and this very day I have watched farmers harvesting beans and sowing millet.
But back to our olive orchard. I saw it planted in two ways. If the trees were large, Aegialus took the trunks and cut the branches back to a foot each; then he transplanted the tree with its root-ball, first trimming off the roots and leaving only the thick knob they hang from. He smeared this with manure, set it into the hole, and then not only heaped the earth up around it but stamped and pressed it down hard. Nothing, he says, works better than this packing. It keeps out the cold and the wind; and besides, the trunk is not shaken about so much, which gives the young roots a chance to come out and take hold in the soil. Roots that new are necessarily still soft; they have only a slight grip, and a very little shaking tears them loose. The root-ball itself he shaves clean before he covers it up, because, he maintains, new roots spring from every part that has been shorn. And the trunk should stand no more than three or four feet out of the ground. That way it greens over thickly right from the base, and there is none of that big, dry, withered stump you see in old olive orchards. The second way of planting was this: he set out, in the same fashion, branches that were strong and soft-barked, the way young saplings' branches usually are. These grow a little more slowly, but since they spring from what is practically a cutting, there is nothing rough or ugly about them.
One more thing I have seen recently: an aged vine transplanted out of its own vineyard. With a vine, the little fibers should be gathered up too, if possible, and then you should cover the stem more generously with earth, so that roots will sprout even from the stock itself. I have seen such plantings made not only in February but at the very end of March — and the vines take hold of elms that are strangers to them, and embrace them. All the trees that are, so to speak, "thick-stemmed," Aegialus declares, should be helped along with water from the tank. If we have that help, we are our own rain-makers.
I do not intend to pass along any more of these secrets — otherwise I will do to you what Aegialus did to me, and train up my own competitor.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
"I was shipwrecked before I ever got on board." I won't explain how that happened, or you'll file it away as one more Stoic paradox. But I will prove to you — whenever you're willing to listen, and even if you're not — that the words are neither false nor as surprising as they sound at first. In the meantime, here is what the journey showed me: how much we own that we don't need, and how easily we could decide to let go of things whose loss, whenever necessity does take them from us, we never even feel.
My friend Maximus and I have just spent two of the happiest days imaginable on the road, taking along very few slaves — one carriage-load — and no gear beyond what we wore on our backs. The mattress lies on the ground; I lie on the mattress. Of our two rugs, one goes under us and one over. Nothing could have been trimmed from our lunch: it took less than an hour to prepare, and we were nowhere without dried figs, never without writing tablets. If I have bread, the figs are a relish; if I don't, the figs are the bread. They make every day a New Year's feast for me, and I make the New Year happy and prosperous with good thoughts and greatness of soul — for the soul is never greater than when it has set aside everything that isn't its own and made its own peace by fearing nothing, its own riches by craving none.
The vehicle I'm riding in is a farmer's cart. The mules prove they're alive only by walking. The driver is barefoot — and not because it's summer, either. And yet I can barely force myself to want anyone to think this cart is mine. My false embarrassment about the truth is still holding out, you see. Whenever we meet a more elegant party on the road, I blush in spite of myself — proof that the conduct I approve and applaud has not yet found a firm, settled home in me. The man who blushes at riding in a rattletrap will brag when he rides in style.
So my progress is still too small. I don't yet have the courage to own my thrift in public. I still worry about what other travelers think of me. What I should have done instead was throw my opinion straight in the face of the whole human race: "You are mad. You are deceived. You pour your admiration on superfluous things. You value no man at what he's really worth. When property is at stake, you know exactly how to calculate. Before you lend a man money or favors — because by now you enter favors in your account-book too — you run the numbers with the most scrupulous care. 'His estates are wide, but his debts are heavy.' 'A fine house — built on borrowed capital.' 'No one can field a more brilliant retinue on short notice, but he can't cover what he owes.' 'If he paid off his creditors, he'd have nothing left.'" Well, you should do the same in every other case too: subtract, and find out what each man actually owns.
You call a man rich, I suppose, because his gold dinner service travels with him wherever he goes, because he farms land in every province, because the account-book he unrolls is a long one, because he owns estates so vast near the city that people would grudge him that much acreage even in the empty wastelands of Apulia. But when you've listed all of it — he is poor. Why? He's in debt. "For how much?" you ask. For everything he has. Or do you think it matters whether a man has borrowed from another man or from Fortune? What good are mules matched in identical livery? Or decorated chariots, and
Horses draped in purple and embroidery, gold harness hanging at their necks, champing gilded bits, in trappings all of gold?
Neither master nor mule is improved by any of it.
Marcus Cato the Censor — whose life did the state as much good as Scipio's, for while Scipio made war on our enemies, Cato made war on our bad morals — used to ride a donkey; and a donkey, at that, loaded with saddlebags carrying the master's necessities. How I'd love to see him meet on the road today one of our fashionable dandies, with his outriders and his Numidian couriers and a great cloud of dust rolling ahead of him. Your dandy would look refined and well-attended next to Marcus Cato, no question — your dandy who, in the middle of all his luxurious equipment, is chiefly debating whether to hire himself out to the sword or to the hunting-knife. What a glory to his times: a general who had celebrated a triumph, a censor, and — most remarkable of all — a Cato, content with a single nag, and with less than a whole nag at that, since the baggage hanging down over both flanks had claimed part of the animal for itself. So wouldn't you rather have Cato's horse — that one horse, saddle-worn by Cato himself — than the dandy's whole string of plump ponies, Spanish cobs, and trotters? I can see there will be no end to this subject unless I make one myself. So I'll say no more about superfluous things — surely the man who first called them "hindrances" had a prophet's inkling that they would become exactly what they are now. Instead, let me deliver to you the syllogisms of our school — still a very small number — that bear on the question of virtue, which in our judgment is sufficient for the happy life.
"What is good makes men good. In the art of music, for example, what is good makes the musician. But chance events do not make a good man; therefore chance events are not goods." The Peripatetics answer that the premise is false: men are not in every case made good by what is good. In music there is something good — a flute, a harp, an organ tuned to accompany singing — but none of those instruments makes the musician. To which we reply: "You misunderstand what we mean by 'the good in music.' We don't mean what equips the musician; we mean what makes him. You are pointing at the tools of the art, not at the art itself. If anything in the art of music itself is good, that thing will make the musician — every time." Let me put it more clearly still. "Good in the art of music" can mean two things: what helps the musician's performance, and what helps his art. The instruments — flutes and organs and harps — belong to the performance; they have nothing to do with the art itself. A man is an artist without them; at most he lacks the means to exercise his art. But the good in a man is not double in that way, because the good of a man and the good of his life are one and the same.
"What can fall to the lot of the basest and most despised of men is not a good. But wealth falls to the lot of the pimp and the gladiator-trainer; therefore wealth is not a good." "Another false premise," they say, "for we see goods fall to very low sorts of men — in scholarship, and in the art of healing, and in the art of navigation too." But those arts make no claim to greatness of soul. They rise to no heights, and they don't frown on whatever Fortune brings. It is virtue that lifts a man up and sets him above everything mortals hold dear; virtue neither craves too much what people call good nor fears too much what people call bad. Chelidon, one of Cleopatra's eunuchs, held enormous wealth; and more recently Natalis — a man whose tongue was as shameless as it was filthy, a man whose mouth performed the vilest services — was heir to many men and made many men his heirs. Well? Was it the money that made him unclean, or did he dirty the money? Money tumbles into some men's hands the way a coin tumbles down a sewer. Virtue stands above all that. It is appraised in coin of its own minting, and it counts none of these random windfalls as good. But medicine and navigation don't forbid themselves or their practitioners to admire such things. A man who is not good can still be a doctor, a pilot, a scholar — yes, just as easily as he can be a cook. A man who comes to possess something that is not of a random sort cannot be called a random sort of man; a person is the same sort as what he possesses. A strongbox is worth exactly what it holds — or rather, it's a mere accessory of what it holds. Who ever prices a full purse at anything except the count of the money inside it? The same goes for the owners of great estates: they are accessories and afterthoughts to their own possessions.
Why, then, is the wise man great? Because he has a great soul. So it stands: what falls even to the most contemptible person is not a good. That's why I would never call inactivity a good — even the tree-frog and the flea have that. Nor would I call rest and freedom from bother a good — what has more leisure than a worm? Do you ask what produces the wise man? The same thing that produces a god. You must grant that there is something godlike in the wise man, something heavenly, something grand. The good doesn't come to everyone, and it doesn't tolerate just any owner. Look:
See what each country bears, and what it won't: here grain grows richer, there the vine; elsewhere young trees and grasses, all unbidden, clothe themselves in green. See how Tmolus ships its saffron perfume out, how ivory comes from India; soft Sheba sends its incense, and the naked Chalybes their iron.
These products were parceled out to separate countries so that human beings would be forced to trade with one another, each needing something from his neighbor in turn. The Supreme Good has its own homeland too. It does not grow where ivory grows, or iron. Where does the Supreme Good live, then? In the soul. And unless the soul is pure and holy, there is no room in it for God.
"Good does not come from evil. But riches come from greed; therefore riches are not a good." "It isn't true," they say, "that good doesn't come from evil. Money comes from sacrilege and theft. Sacrilege and theft are evils, yes — but only because they work more evil than good. They bring profit; but the profit comes packaged with fear, anxiety, and torment of mind and body." Whoever says this has to admit that sacrilege, though an evil because it works much evil, is also partly good because it accomplishes a certain amount of good. What could be more monstrous than that? Though, to be honest, we have actually convinced the world that sacrilege, theft, and adultery belong among the goods. How many men feel no blush at theft; how many boast of their adulteries! Petty sacrilege gets punished; sacrilege on the grand scale rides in a triumphal procession. Besides, if sacrilege were wholly good in any respect, it would also be honorable and would count as right conduct — for it is conduct, and conduct concerns us. And no human being, thinking it over seriously, admits that.
So goods cannot spring from evil. For if sacrilege is an evil, as you object, only because it brings on much evil, then absolve sacrilege of its punishment, guarantee it immunity, and sacrilege becomes wholly good. And yet the worst punishment for a crime is inside the crime. You are mistaken, I insist, if you save your punishments for the hangman or the prison. The crime is punished the moment it is finished — no, the moment it is committed. Good does not spring from evil any more than figs grow on olive trees. What grows corresponds to its seed; goods cannot wander from their stock. Just as the honorable does not grow from the base, good does not grow from evil. For the honorable and the good are identical.
Some of our own school push back against this as follows: "Suppose money from any source whatsoever is a good. Then even when it is taken by an act of sacrilege, the money doesn't owe its origin to the sacrilege. Take this illustration. In one jar there is a piece of gold and there is a serpent. If you take the gold out of the jar, the jar doesn't yield me the gold because it contains the serpent too; it yields the gold in spite of containing the serpent. In the same way, gain results from sacrilege not because sacrilege is a base and cursed act, but because the act contains gain as well. In the jar, the serpent is the evil, not the gold lying beside it; in the act of sacrilege, the crime is the evil, not the profit." I disagree with these men, and here's why: the two cases are not alike at all. In the one, I can take the gold without the serpent; in the other, I cannot take the profit without committing the sacrilege. The gain in that case doesn't lie beside the crime; it is blended into the crime.
"What entangles us in many evils while we are trying to get it is not a good. But while we are trying to get riches, we are entangled in many evils; therefore riches are not a good." "Your first premise," they say, "carries two meanings. One is: we become entangled in many evils while trying to get riches. But we also become entangled in many evils while trying to get virtue — one man is shipwrecked traveling for his studies, another is captured by pirates. The second meaning is: that through which we become entangled in evils is not a good. And it won't logically follow from your proposition that it is through riches or through pleasure that we're entangled in evils. Otherwise, if riches are the route to many evils, riches are not merely not-a-good; they are a positive evil. You claim only that they are not a good. Besides," the objector adds, "you grant that riches have some use. You count them among the advantages. But on that same reasoning they can't even be an advantage, since the pursuit of them costs us so much disadvantage." Certain men answer the objection this way: "You are wrong to charge the disadvantages to riches. Riches injure no one. What harms a man is his own folly or his neighbor's wickedness — just as a sword by itself kills nobody; it is merely the tool in the killer's hand. Riches themselves don't harm you just because you come to harm on account of riches."
I think Posidonius reasons better. He holds that riches are a cause of evil not because they do any evil themselves, but because they goad men on until they are ready to do it. The efficient cause — the one that necessarily does harm directly — is one thing; the antecedent cause is another. It is the antecedent cause that riches carry inside them: they puff up the spirit and breed pride, they attract resentment, and they unsettle the mind so thoroughly that we delight in the mere reputation of being wealthy, even though that reputation is bound to hurt us. Goods, properly speaking, should be beyond all blame. They are pure; they don't corrupt the spirit; they don't tempt us. They lift and enlarge the spirit, yes — but without inflating it. Goods produce confidence; riches produce brazenness. Goods give us greatness of soul; riches give us arrogance. And arrogance is nothing but a false front of greatness.
"By that account," says the objector, "riches are not merely not-a-good; they are a positive evil." They would be an evil if they did harm by themselves — if, as I said, the efficient cause were what they carried. In fact what they carry is the antecedent cause — and a cause that doesn't merely rouse the spirit but drags it along by force. For riches shower on us a semblance of the good, so like the real thing that most people take it on trust. Virtue carries an antecedent cause too: the envy it draws — for many men are resented for their wisdom, and many for their justice. But that cause, though it comes with virtue, is not virtue's own product, and it is no mere semblance of reality. On the contrary: far closer to reality is that vision which virtue flashes into men's spirits, summoning them to love it and marvel at it.
Posidonius thinks the syllogism should be framed like this: "Things that give the soul no greatness, no confidence, no freedom from care are not goods. But riches and health and conditions like them do none of these things; therefore riches and health are not goods." Then he extends it further: "Things that give the soul no greatness, no confidence, no freedom from care — and that furthermore breed in it arrogance, vanity, and insolence — are evils. But the gifts of Fortune push us into those evil ways. Therefore the gifts of Fortune are not goods." "But by that reasoning," says the objector, "the gifts of Fortune won't even be advantages." No — advantages and goods stand on different footing. An advantage is what contains more usefulness than annoyance. But a good must be unmixed, with no harmfulness anywhere in it. A thing is not good if it does more benefit than injury — only if it does nothing but benefit. Besides, advantages can belong to animals, to imperfect men, to fools. So an advantage may have some disadvantage stirred into it; we call the mixture an "advantage" by judging its dominant element. The good can belong to the wise man alone, and it must be without alloy.
Cheer up: there's only one knot left for you to untangle, though it's a knot fit for a Hercules. "Good does not come from evil. But riches come from many cases of poverty; therefore riches are not a good." Our school doesn't recognize this syllogism; the Peripatetics both concoct it and solve it. But Posidonius reports that this fallacy, batted around every school of logic there is, was refuted by Antipater as follows: "The word 'poverty' denotes not the possession of something but the non-possession of it — or, as the ancients put it, deprivation (the Greeks say 'by deprivation,' meaning negatively). 'Poverty' states not what a man has, but what he does not have. So no fullness can come from a multitude of empties; riches are made up of many positive possessions, not many deficits. You have," he says, "the wrong notion of what poverty means. Poverty is not the possession of little; it is the non-possession of much. The word applies not to what a man has, but to what he lacks." I could say all this more easily if Latin had a word for the Greek term meaning "not-possessing." Antipater assigns that quality to poverty; for my own part, I can't see what poverty is except the possession of little. If we ever find ourselves with plenty of leisure, we can investigate what the essence of riches is and what the essence of poverty is. But when that day comes, let's also consider whether it might be better to soften poverty, and to take the arrogance out of wealth, than to quibble over the words as if the question of the things were already settled.
Imagine we've been summoned to an assembly, and a bill to abolish riches is on the floor. Is this how we'd argue for it or against it — with these syllogisms? Will syllogisms make the Roman people demand poverty and praise it — poverty, the foundation and the cause of their empire — and shrink in fear from their own wealth instead? Will they make the people reflect that they found that wealth among the peoples they conquered; that wealth is the source from which the vote-hunting and the bribery and the disorder burst into a city once famous for scruple and sobriety; that the spoils of conquered nations are put on display far too lavishly; and that whatever one people has snatched away from all the rest can be snatched even more easily by all the rest from one? Better to vote for that law with our conduct, and to take our desires by direct assault, than to outflank them with logic. If we can, let us speak more bravely; if not, let us speak more frankly.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You have been wanting to know what I think of the liberal studies. Here is my answer: I have no respect for any study, and I count no study good, whose end is making money. Those are trades — useful exactly as far as they train the mind for something greater, and no farther. You should stay with them only as long as your mind can manage nothing better; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. You can see why they are called "liberal" studies: they are the studies thought worthy of a free man. But there is only one study that is truly liberal — the one that makes a man free. That is the study of wisdom, and it is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All the others are small and childish. You surely don't believe there is any real good in subjects whose teachers are — look at them — men of the cheapest and shabbiest stamp? We shouldn't be learning these things; we should be done learning them.
Some people have decided that the real question about the liberal studies is whether they make men good. But the teachers of these subjects don't even claim to know anything about that. The scholar busies himself with language; if he wants to range farther, he takes up history; if he wants to push out to the farthest limits, poetry. Which of these paves the road to virtue? Sounding out syllables, investigating words, memorizing plays, drawing up rules for the scansion of verse — what is there in any of it that removes fear, roots out desire, or bridles passion? The question is simple: do these men teach virtue, or don't they? If they don't teach it, they can't pass it on. If they do teach it, they are philosophers. Would you like to know how far their lecture chairs are from being chairs of virtue? Look how unlike their subjects are — and they would resemble one another if they were all teaching the same thing.
Perhaps they persuade you that Homer was a philosopher — though they disprove it with the very arguments they use to prove it. Sometimes they make him a Stoic, approving nothing but virtue, shunning pleasure, refusing to trade honor even for immortality. Sometimes they make him an Epicurean, praising the quiet city that passes its days in feasting and song. Sometimes he is a Peripatetic, sorting goods into three classes; sometimes an Academic, holding that everything is uncertain. Clearly none of these doctrines belongs to Homer, precisely because all of them are in him — for they contradict one another. But let us grant these men their point: Homer was a philosopher. Then surely he was wise before he ever knew a line of poetry. So let us learn the things that made Homer wise.
Asking whether Homer or Hesiod was the older poet is no more to the point than knowing why Hecuba, though younger than Helen, wore her years so badly. And what, I ask you, would be the point of settling the ages of Achilles and Patroclus? Do you ask, "Where did Ulysses wander?" instead of working to keep ourselves from wandering all the time? We have no leisure for lectures on whether he was tossed between Italy and Sicily or blown beyond the known world — a wandering that long could hardly have fit inside such narrow bounds. We meet storms of the spirit every day of our lives, and our own badness drives us into every trouble that ever plagued Ulysses. For us there is never any shortage of beauty to tempt the eye, or of enemies to attack us; here are savage monsters that delight in human blood, there the treacherous songs that seduce the ear, and out beyond, shipwreck and the whole varied catalogue of misfortune. Teach me this instead, by the example of Ulysses: how to love my country, my wife, my father — and how, even after shipwreck, to keep sailing toward those honorable harbors. Why try to settle whether Penelope was a model of purity or just fooled her generation? Whether she suspected the man standing in front of her was Ulysses before she knew it? Teach me instead what purity is, and how great a good we have in it — and whether it lives in the body or in the soul.
Now I turn to the musician. You, sir, are teaching me how the treble and the bass harmonize, how strings sounding different notes can still produce concord. Teach my soul harmony instead — bring it into accord with itself, and don't let my purposes fall out of tune. You are showing me which keys are mournful; show me instead how to keep from sounding a mournful note in the middle of adversity. The mathematician teaches me how to survey my estates; I would rather be taught how to measure what is enough for a man. He teaches me to count, and lends my fingers to greed; I would rather he taught me that all that arithmetic is beside the point — that a man is no happier for possessions that wear out his bookkeepers. Or rather, how useless property is to a man for whom it would be the worst of misfortunes to have to total up his own holdings using his own head. What good is knowing how to divide a field into parcels, if I don't know how to share it with my brother? What good is calculating an acre to the inch, and catching the sliver that slipped past my measuring rod, if I turn bitter the moment a bad-tempered neighbor scrapes off a corner of my land? The mathematician teaches me how to lose none of my boundaries; what I want to learn is how to lose them all with a light heart. "But I'm being driven off the farm my father and grandfather owned!" So? Who owned the land before your grandfather? Can you name the people — never mind the person — who held it first? You didn't enter it as a master; you entered as a tenant. And whose tenant are you? If your case goes well, your heir's. The lawyers say public property can't become private by squatting on it; well, what you hold and call your own is public property — it belongs to the human race. What marvelous skill you have! You can measure the circle; you can square any shape set in front of you; you can name the distances between the stars; nothing in the universe escapes your calculations. If you are really a master of your craft, then measure a human soul. Tell me how great it is — or how small. You know a straight line when you see one; what good is that, if you don't know what is straight in this life of ours?
Next I come to the man who boasts of knowing the heavens — who knows
Where Saturn's chilly star conceals itself, And through what orbit Mercury goes straying.
What is the benefit of knowing this? That I should worry when Saturn and Mars stand in opposition, or when Mercury sets in the evening in plain view of Saturn — instead of learning that those stars, wherever they stand, are kindly, and cannot change? They are driven along by an unending round of destiny, on a course they cannot leave. They return on schedule; they either set the whole world's work in motion or mark off its intervals. But if they are responsible for everything that happens, what does it help you to know the secrets of what cannot be altered? And if they merely give signs, what is the use of foreseeing what you cannot escape? Know these things or don't — they will happen anyway.
But watch the racing sun, and watch the stars That follow in his train, and then tomorrow Will never take you in, and no clear night Will ever lead you wrong.
Provision enough has already been made to keep me safe from anything that could take me in. "What," you say, "tomorrow never plays me false? Whatever happens without my knowledge plays me false." I don't know what will happen; but I do know what can happen. And about that I will file no complaints. I expect the future in its entirety; if any of its severity is remitted, I take it as a gift. Tomorrow deceives me if it treats me kindly — and even then it doesn't really deceive me. For just as I know that anything can happen, I also know that it won't all happen. So I count on the favorable and stand ready for the bad.
In this discussion you must bear with me if I don't follow the standard course. For I refuse to admit painting into the list of liberal arts, and sculpture too, and marble-work, and the other servants of luxury. I also strike off wrestling and the whole science compounded of oil and mud — otherwise I would have to admit the perfumers as well, and the cooks, and everyone else who hires out his wits to the service of our pleasures. For what is "liberal," tell me, about those ravenous gulpers of emetics, whose bodies are fattened while their minds stay thin and dull? Or do we seriously believe that sort of training is "liberal" for the young men of Rome — the young men our ancestors used to teach to stand straight and hurl a spear, to wield a pike, to manage a horse, to handle weapons? Our ancestors taught their children nothing that could be learned lying down. But neither the new system nor the old one teaches or nourishes virtue. What good does it do us to guide a horse and check his speed with the curb, and then discover that our own passions, completely uncurbed, have bolted with us? What good is beating opponent after opponent at wrestling or boxing, and then being beaten by our own temper?
"What then," you say, "do the liberal studies contribute nothing to our welfare?" A great deal in other respects — nothing at all toward virtue. Even the admittedly low-grade arts that work with the hands contribute plenty to the equipment of living, yet they have nothing to do with virtue. "Then why do we educate our children in the liberal studies?" Not because these studies can bestow virtue, but because they prepare the soul to receive it. Just as the old "primary course," as the ancients called it, which taught boys their letters, does not teach the liberal arts but clears the ground for learning them, so the liberal arts do not carry the soul all the way to virtue; they merely set it moving in that direction.
Posidonius divides the arts into four classes. First come the common and low; then the arts of amusement; then the arts for educating boys; and finally the liberal arts. The common ones belong to workmen and are plain handwork; their business is equipping life, and they make no pretense of beauty or honor. The arts of amusement are the ones that aim to please the eye and the ear. Here you may file the stage-machinists, who invent scaffolding that rises on its own, floors that climb silently into the air, and plenty of other surprises — things that fit together and then fall apart, things that stand separate and then join by themselves, things that tower up and then slowly collapse. Such tricks stun the inexperienced eye; people who don't know the causes marvel at everything that happens without warning. The arts for educating boys, which come somewhat nearer the liberal arts, are the ones the Greeks call the "cycle of studies" and we Romans call the "liberal." But the only arts that are really liberal — or, to give them their truer name, really free — are the ones whose business is virtue.
"But," someone will say, "just as philosophy has one part dealing with nature, one with ethics, and one with reasoning, so this family of liberal arts claims its own place in philosophy. When you come to questions about nature, the decision rests on a word from the mathematician; therefore mathematics is a department of the branch it assists." But many things assist us without being parts of us — indeed, if they were parts of us, they wouldn't assist. Food is an aid to the body, but it is not a part of the body. Mathematics performs a service for us; it is as necessary to philosophy as the carpenter is to the mathematician. But carpentry is not a part of mathematics, and mathematics is not a part of philosophy. Besides, each has its own boundaries. The wise man investigates and learns the causes of natural things; the mathematician follows after and computes their numbers and measurements. The wise man knows the laws by which the heavenly bodies hold their courses, what powers they have and what natures; the astronomer merely logs their comings and goings, the rules of their rising and setting, and the occasional stretches when they seem to stand still — though in fact no heavenly body can stand still. The wise man will know what causes the reflection in a mirror; the mathematician can only tell you how far the object must be from the image, and what shape of mirror will produce what reflection. The philosopher will prove that the sun is a large body; the astronomer will compute exactly how large, working forward by trial and observation — but to work forward at all he must borrow certain principles. And no art stands on its own feet if its foundation is held on loan. Philosophy asks no favors of anyone; it raises its whole structure on its own ground. Mathematics is, so to speak, built on the next man's property — it builds on borrowed soil. It accepts its first principles as a favor, and only by that favor reaches its further conclusions. If it could march unassisted to the truth, if it could grasp the nature of the whole universe, I would say it offered real help to our minds — for the mind grows by contact with things heavenly, and draws down something from above. But there is only one thing that brings the soul to perfection: the unshakable knowledge of good and evil. And no other art investigates good and evil.
I would like to run through the virtues one by one. Bravery scorns everything that inspires fear; it looks down on, challenges, and crushes the powers of terror and everything that would drive our freedom under the yoke. Do "liberal studies" strengthen that virtue? Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart. No compulsion can force it into betrayal; no reward can bribe it. Loyalty cries: "Burn me, cut me, kill me — I will not betray my trust; and the harder torture digs for my secret, the deeper I will bury it!" Can the "liberal arts" produce that spirit in us? Self-control governs our desires: some it hates and routs outright; others it disciplines back to a healthy measure; and it never goes near a desire for the desire's own sake. It knows that the best measure for appetite is not what you want to take but what you ought to take. Kindness forbids you to be overbearing with your companions, and forbids you to be grasping. In words, in deeds, in feelings, it shows itself gentle and courteous to everyone. It counts no trouble as merely someone else's. And the chief reason it loves its own good is that someday that good will belong to someone else. Do "liberal studies" teach a man this kind of character? No — no more than they teach simplicity, moderation and self-restraint, thrift and economy, or the mercy that spares a neighbor's life as if it were its own and knows that no man is a thing for other men to waste.
"But," comes the objection, "since you declare that virtue can't be attained without the liberal studies, how can you deny that they assist virtue?" Because you can't attain virtue without food either, and food has nothing to do with virtue. Wood gives no assistance to a ship, even though a ship can't be built without wood. There is no reason, I tell you, to think a thing is made by the help of whatever it can't be made without. And we could actually go further: it is possible to attain wisdom without the liberal studies at all. Virtue has to be learned, yes — but it isn't learned through them.
And really, why should I assume that a man who doesn't know his letters can never be wise, when wisdom isn't found in letters? Wisdom deals in facts, not words — and perhaps memory is more dependable when it has nothing to lean on outside itself. Wisdom is a large and spacious thing. It needs room to breathe. One must learn about things divine and human, the past and the future, the perishable and the eternal — and about Time. Look how many questions arise about time alone: first, whether it is anything in and of itself; second, whether anything exists before time and apart from time; and again, did time begin along with the universe — or, since something existed even before the universe began, did time exist then too? About the soul alone the questions are countless: where it comes from, what it is, when it begins to exist, how long it lasts; whether it moves from place to place, changing its lodgings, passed on from one animal shape to another, or serves only a single term and then roams the universe once it is set free; whether it is corporeal or not; what it will do when it stops using us as its instrument; how it will spend its freedom once it has escaped this present prison; whether it forgets its whole past, and begins to know itself only at the moment when, released from the body, it has withdrawn to the skies.
So whatever province of things human and divine you take up, you will be worn out by the sheer mass of what must be answered and what must be learned. And to give these vast and weighty subjects free lodging in your soul, you must throw out everything superfluous. Virtue will not squeeze herself into our narrow spaces; a great thing needs wide room to move in. Drive everything else out; empty the whole chest for virtue.
"But it's a pleasure to be acquainted with many arts." Then let us keep only as much of them as we actually need. Do you blame the man who ranks the superfluous alongside the useful and fills his house with a parade of costly objects — and then not blame the man who has buried himself in the useless furniture of learning? Wanting to know more than enough is its own kind of intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly chase after the liberal arts makes men tiresome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials precisely because they've learned the non-essentials. Didymus the scholar wrote four thousand books. I would pity him if he had merely read that many useless volumes. In those books he investigates Homer's birthplace, who Aeneas's real mother was, whether Anacreon was more of a lecher or more of a drunkard, whether Sappho was a loose woman — and other questions whose answers, if ever found, ought to be forgotten on the spot. Now don't tell me that life is long! And when you turn to our own countrymen, I can show you plenty of works there too that deserve the axe.
It costs an enormous outlay of time, and enormous wear on other people's ears, to win the compliment: "What a learned man you are!" Let's settle for the plainer, more countrified one: "What a good man you are!" Do I mean it? Should I unroll the annals of the world's history and hunt for the first man who wrote poetry? Should I estimate, without any written records, the number of years between Orpheus and Homer? Should I study Aristarchus's absurd notations, in which he branded the text of other men's verses, and wear my life away on syllables? Shall I go wallow in the geometer's dust? Have I so completely forgotten that useful saying, "Save your time"? Must I know these things? Then what may I choose not to know? Apion the scholar — who drew crowds to his lectures all over Greece in the days of Gaius Caesar, and whom every city hailed as a second Homer — used to maintain that Homer, after finishing his two poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, added a preliminary poem embracing the whole Trojan war. His proof? That Homer had deliberately planted in his opening line two letters containing a key to the number of his books. A man who wants to know many things must know things like that — and must take no account of all the time stolen from him by illness, public duties, private duties, daily duties, and sleep. Take the measure of your years; they have no room for all of this.
So far I have been speaking of the liberal studies. But think how much superfluous, unusable matter the philosophers carry around! They too have stooped to drawing fine divisions between syllables, to fixing the true meanings of conjunctions and prepositions — they have grown jealous of the grammarians, jealous of the mathematicians. Everything superfluous in those arts they have imported into their own, and the result is that they know more about speaking carefully than about living carefully. Let me tell you what evil this over-fine exactness does, and what an enemy of truth it is! Protagoras declares that you can argue either side of any question with equal success — including this very question, whether every question can be argued from either side. Nausiphanes holds that among the things which seem to exist, there is no difference between existing and not existing. Parmenides maintains that of everything which seems to exist, nothing exists except the universe alone. Zeno of Elea swept away all the difficulties by sweeping away one: he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian, and Academic schools are all working at much the same job; they have introduced a new branch of knowledge — non-knowledge. Sweep the whole lot of them in with the superfluous troop of "liberal" studies. The one group of men gives me knowledge that will be of no use to me; the other takes away all hope of knowledge whatsoever. Better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing. One set offers no lamp by which I might steer my gaze toward the truth; the other digs out my very eyes and leaves me blind. If I follow Protagoras, nothing in the whole of nature is anything but doubtful. If I follow Nausiphanes, only one thing is sure — that nothing is sure. If Parmenides, there is nothing but the One; if Zeno, not even the One.
Then what are we? What becomes of all these things that surround us, support us, sustain us? The whole universe turns out to be an empty or deceptive shadow. And I honestly cannot say which men annoy me more — the ones who would have it that we know nothing, or the ones who won't leave us even that.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
What you want to know is genuinely useful — essential, in fact, for anyone in a hurry to reach wisdom: the parts of philosophy, and how that enormous body divides into its separate limbs. Study the parts, and the whole comes easier. I only wish philosophy could appear before our eyes entire, the way the whole expanse of the sky spreads out for us to gaze at — it would be a sight very much like the sky. Every mortal who saw her would fall helplessly in love, and we would abandon all the things we now believe to be great because we don't know what greatness is. But since that view isn't granted to us, we have to study philosophy the way we study the secrets of the heavens: one piece at a time.
The wise man's mind, it's true, takes in the whole structure of philosophy at a glance, sweeping over it as quickly as our eyes sweep the sky. But the rest of us are still breaking through fog; our vision blurs even for what's right in front of us. For people like us, it's easier to be shown each object separately while the universe as a whole is still beyond our grasp. So I'll do what you ask and divide philosophy into parts — but not into scraps. Dividing it is useful; mincing it is not. What is impossibly large is hard to take in, and so is what is impossibly small. A people is divided into tribes, an army into companies; anything that has grown large becomes easier to see once it's broken up — but the pieces, as I say, must not be countless and tiny. Over-analysis is faulty in exactly the same way as no analysis at all: grind anything down to dust and you might as well have left it a lump.
First, then, if you agree, let me draw the line between wisdom and philosophy. Wisdom is the perfect good of the human mind; philosophy is the love of wisdom, and the striving to reach it. Philosophy aims at the goal wisdom has already reached. And it's obvious why philosophy got its name: the name itself confesses what it loves. Some people have defined wisdom as the knowledge of things divine and things human. Others add: "and their causes as well." The added phrase seems unnecessary to me, since the causes of things divine and human are themselves part of the divine order. Philosophy, too, has been defined in all sorts of ways. Some have called it "the study of virtue," others "the study of straightening out the mind," others "the pursuit of right reason." But one thing is as good as settled: philosophy and wisdom are not the same. The seeker and the thing sought cannot be identical. Greed and money are different things — one does the craving, the other is what's craved — and philosophy and wisdom differ in the same way: one is the result and reward of the other. Philosophy does the traveling; wisdom is the destination.
Wisdom is what the Greeks call sophia. The Romans used that word too, in the old days, in the same sense in which they now also say "philosophy." Our old national plays will prove it to you, and so will the epitaph carved on the tomb of Dossennus:
Pause, stranger, and read the wisdom of Dossennus.
Some of our own school, though — even though philosophy meant to them "the study of virtue," with virtue the thing sought and philosophy the seeker — have insisted that the two cannot be pulled apart. Philosophy cannot exist without virtue, nor virtue without philosophy. Philosophy is the study of virtue, but a study carried on by means of virtue itself; and there can be no virtue without the study of virtue, and no study of virtue without virtue. This isn't like shooting at a target far off, where the archer stands in one place and the mark in another. The approaches to virtue don't lie outside her the way roads into a city lie outside the city; the path that leads to virtue leads through virtue herself. Philosophy and virtue hold on to each other.
The greatest authors — and the greatest number of them — have held that philosophy has three divisions: moral, natural, and rational. The first keeps the soul in order. The second investigates the universe. The third works out what words really mean, how they combine, and the proofs that keep falsehood from creeping in and shoving truth aside. But there have also been those who carved philosophy into fewer parts, and those who carved it into more. Certain Peripatetics, Aristotle's school, added a fourth division, "civil philosophy," on the grounds that it demands its own sphere of activity and deals with its own subject matter. Some added a department they call by the Greek name "economics" — the science of managing one's own household. Still others made a separate heading for the various kinds of life. Yet there isn't one of these subdivisions that won't be found already filed under "moral" philosophy.
The Epicureans held that philosophy was twofold, natural and moral; they threw out the rational branch. Then, when the facts themselves forced them to sort out ambiguous ideas and expose the fallacies that hide under the costume of truth, they too smuggled in a heading — they call it "on judgment and rule" — which is simply "rational" under another name, though they treat it as an appendix to the natural department. The Cyrenaic school abolished the natural and the rational departments both, and settled for the moral side alone — and then they too readmitted, under other titles, exactly what they had rejected. For they divide moral philosophy into five parts: first, what to avoid and what to seek; second, the passions; third, actions; fourth, causes; fifth, proofs. But the causes of things really belong to the natural division, and the proofs to the rational. Aristo of Chios declared that the natural and the rational were not only superfluous but actually got in the way. Then he trimmed even the moral part, the only one he had left: he abolished the department that gives advice, insisting that advice was a tutor's business, not a philosopher's. As if the wise man were anything other than the tutor of the human race!
Since philosophy is threefold, then, let's begin by setting the moral side in order. It has been agreed that this, too, divides into three parts. First comes appraisal — the part that assigns each thing its proper function and weighs what each is worth — and in usefulness it ranks highest. For what is so indispensable as putting the right price on everything? The second part deals with impulse, the third with action. The first duty is to determine what things are worth; the second, to form toward them an impulse that is measured and orderly; the third, to make your impulse and your actions agree, so that in all these matters you are consistent with yourself. Let any one of the three go wrong, and the others fall into confusion with it. What good is it to have everything correctly appraised, each in its proper place, if your impulses run to excess? What good is it to have checked your impulses and to hold your desires in your own hands, if when the moment for action arrives you don't know the right times and seasons — don't know when, where, and how each thing should be done? It is one thing to understand the worth and merit of facts, another to know the precise moment for acting, and still another to curb your impulses and walk, rather than rush, toward what has to be done. So life is in harmony with itself only when action has not deserted impulse, and when impulse arises in each case from the worth of its object — languid or eager as the case may be, depending on whether the object is worth pursuing.
The natural side of philosophy is twofold: bodily things and bodiless things. Each divides into its own ranks of importance, so to speak. The topic of bodies deals first with these two ranks: what creates and what is created — and the created things are the elements. Now this very topic of the elements, some writers hold, is a single integral subject; others divide it into matter, the cause that moves all things, and the elements themselves.
It remains for me to divide rational philosophy into its parts. All speech is either continuous or split up between questioner and answerer. It has been agreed that the first should be called rhetoric and the second dialectic. Rhetoric deals with words, meanings, and arrangement. Dialectic divides into two: things said, and the words they are said in. Then comes a subdivision of each — and it is vast. So I shall stop at this point, and
only treat the climax of the story;
because if I took a fancy to list all the subdivisions, this letter would turn into a debater's handbook. I'm not trying to discourage you from reading on the subject, excellent Lucilius — provided only that whatever you read, you promptly refer to conduct.
It's your conduct you must hold in check. Rouse what has gone slack in you, bind fast what has come loose, conquer what is stubborn, make war on your own appetites — and on mankind's — as hard as you can. And to those who say, "How long will this unending talk go on?" answer: "I ought to be asking you, 'How long will these unending sins of yours go on?'" Do you really want my remedies to quit before your vices do? I'll speak of them all the more — and precisely because you object, I'll keep on talking. Medicine begins to do good at the moment a touch makes the diseased body tingle with pain. I'll say things that help men even against their will. Now and then something other than compliments should reach your ears, and since as individuals you refuse to hear the truth, hear it all together.
How far will you extend the boundaries of your estates? An estate that once held a whole nation is too narrow for a single owner. How far will you push your plowed fields — you who won't confine even a single farm within the borders of a province? Noble rivers flow down through your private grounds; mighty streams that once marked the border between nations now run through your property from source to mouth. Even that is too little for you, unless your estates fence in whole seas, unless your steward holds sway on the far side of the Adriatic, the Ionian, and the Aegean, unless islands that were home to famous chieftains are counted among your most trifling possessions. Spread them as wide as you like; have as a "farm" what was once called a kingdom; make everything yours that you can — provided only that it's more than your neighbor has.
And now a word with you, whose luxury sprawls as wide as those men's greed. To you I say: "Will this go on until there is no lake your rooftop towers don't loom over? No river whose banks aren't lined with your lordly buildings? Wherever hot springs gush from the ground, you'll be raising new resorts of luxury. Wherever a shore bends into a bay, you'll be laying foundations on the spot — and, not content with any land you haven't manufactured yourselves, you'll bring the sea inside your boundaries. Let your rooftops flash in the sun on every side — perched on mountain peaks commanding wide views of sea and land, or hoisted from the plain to the height of mountains; build your endless structures, your enormous piles — you are still only individual men, and puny ones at that. What good are all your bedrooms? You sleep in one. No place is yours where you yourselves are not."
"Next I come to you, whose bottomless, insatiable gullet ransacks the seas on one side and the earth on the other, hunting down its prey with enormous toil — now with hook, now with snare, now with nets of every kind; no animal is left in peace unless you're already stuffed with it. And of those banquets so many hands prepare for you, how small a portion does your pleasure-jaded palate actually taste! Of all that game, so dangerous to take, how small a portion does the master's sick and squeamish stomach relish! Of all those shellfish, imported from so far away, how small a portion slips down that insatiable gullet! Poor wretches — don't you know that your appetites are bigger than your bellies?"
Talk this way to other men — provided that while you talk, you also listen. Write this way — provided that while you write, you read; and remember that everything you hear or read is to be applied to conduct, and to the calming of passion's fury. Study, not to add anything to your knowledge, but to make your knowledge better.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Who can doubt, my dear Lucilius, that life is the gift of the immortal gods, but that living well is the gift of philosophy? It would follow that we owe philosophy more than we owe the gods — by exactly as much as a good life outweighs mere life — if philosophy itself were not something the gods gave us. The knowledge of it they have given to no one; the capacity for it they have given to everyone. If they had made philosophy a blanket gift too — if we were all born understanding — then wisdom would have lost her finest quality: that she is not one of Fortune's handouts. As things stand, this is precisely what is precious and noble about her: she does not come out to meet us. Each man owes her to himself alone. We do not get her secondhand.
What would there be in philosophy worth respecting if she were passed out like charity? Her one job is to discover the truth about things divine and things human. Religion never leaves her side, nor duty, nor justice, nor the whole company of virtues that travel together, arm in arm. Philosophy has taught us to worship what is divine and to love what is human; she has told us that dominion belongs to the gods, and fellowship to men. And that fellowship stayed whole for a long time — until greed tore the community apart and became the cause of poverty even for the people it had made richest. For men stop possessing everything the moment they want everything for themselves.
But the first men, and the generations that sprang from them, were still unspoiled; they followed nature. They took one man as both their leader and their law, and put themselves in the hands of someone better than they were. Nature makes a habit of subjecting the weaker to the stronger. Even among the dumb animals, the biggest or the fiercest hold sway. It is no weakling bull that leads the herd; it is the one that has beaten every other male with muscle and might. Among elephants, the tallest walks first. Among men, the best man ranked highest. So the ruler was chosen for his mind — and that is why the happiest peoples were the ones where a man could not become more powerful without being better. A man can safely be given all the power he wants when he believes he can do nothing except what he ought to do.
So in that age we call the golden age, Posidonius holds that government was in the hands of the wise. They kept their own hands in check and protected the weak from the strong. They advised people what to do and what not to do; they showed what was useful and what was useless. Their foresight kept their people from lacking anything; their bravery kept dangers away; their generosity made their subjects prosperous and their lives handsome. Ruling was a service, not a throne. No ruler tested his power against the very people who had given him his power in the first place; and no one had the urge — or the excuse — to do wrong, because the ruler ruled well and the ruled obeyed well, and the sternest threat a king could make against a disobedient subject was banishment from the kingdom.
But once vice crept in and kingdoms turned into tyrannies, laws became necessary — and at first the wise framed those too. Solon, who set Athens on a foundation of just laws, was one of the seven men famous for their wisdom. If Lycurgus had lived in the same era, an eighth would have joined that hallowed number. The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas are still praised; and those two men learned the principles of justice they would establish in Sicily (flourishing, in those days) and through the Greek cities of Italy not in the forum, not in the offices of legal experts, but in the silent, holy retreat of Pythagoras.
Up to this point, I agree with Posidonius. But that philosophy discovered the crafts our daily life depends on — that I refuse to admit. I will not hand her a workman's diploma. Posidonius says: "When men were scattered across the earth, sheltering in caves, or in hollows dug out of cliffs, or in the trunks of hollow trees, it was philosophy that taught them to build houses." I say philosophy no more devised these clever stacked dwellings of ours — story piled on story, city crowding against city — than she invented the fish-ponds, walled in so that no man's gluttony has to take its chances with the weather, so that however wildly the sea is raging, luxury has its own safe harbors where it can fatten exotic breeds of fish. What! Did philosophy teach men the use of locks and keys? What was that but a hint dropped to greed? Was it philosophy that stacked up all these towering tenements, so dangerous to the people who live in them? Wasn't it enough for a man to roof himself with whatever came to hand, and find himself some natural shelter without engineering and without fuss? Believe me, that was a happy age — before there were architects, before there were builders. All of that was born when luxury was being born: this business of cutting timber square, of sawing a beam with a practiced hand along the marked-out line.
The earliest men split wood with wedges.
They were not framing a roof for a future banquet-hall; they did not haul pines and firs down trembling streets in long trains of wagons just to hang paneled ceilings, heavy with gold, from the rafters. Two forked poles, one at either end, propped up the house. Packed branches and leaves, heaped and laid on a slope, let even the heaviest rain run off. Beneath such roofs they lived — but they lived in peace. A thatched roof once covered free men; under marble and gold lives slavery.
I part ways with Posidonius on another point too: he holds that the wise invented our mechanical tools. On that logic you might as well say the wise were the men who taught
The setting of the snare for game, the liming Of twigs for birds, the circling of great woods with dogs.
It was man's ingenuity that discovered all these tricks, not his wisdom. And I disagree with him again when he says it was wise men who discovered our mines of iron and copper — "when the earth, scorched by forest fires, melted the shallow veins of ore and the metal gushed out." No: the sort of men who discover such things are the sort of men who work at them. Nor does the question strike me as subtle as it strikes Posidonius — whether the hammer or the tongs came first into use. Both were invented by some man whose mind was nimble and sharp, but not great and elevated. And the same goes for anything else that can only be found by a man whose back is bent and whose eyes are on the ground.
The wise man lived simply. Of course he did — even in our own day he would prefer to travel as light as possible. How, I ask you, can you admire both Diogenes and Daedalus? Which of the two looks like a wise man to you: the one who invented the saw? Or the one who saw a boy drinking water out of his cupped hand, immediately pulled the cup from his knapsack and smashed it, scolding himself — "What a fool I am, hauling around superfluous baggage all this time!" — and then curled up in his tub and went to sleep? And in our own times, which man do you call wiser: the one who invents a system for spraying saffron perfume to a tremendous height from hidden pipes, who fills and empties canals in a single rush of water, who builds a dining room with a ceiling of sliding panels that shows one pattern after another, a new roof for every course of the meal — or the one who proves, to himself and to everyone else, that nature has laid down no harsh or difficult law? That we can live without the marble-cutter and the engineer; that we can clothe ourselves without a silk trade; that we can have everything we actually need if we will only be content with what lies on the earth's surface? If mankind were willing to listen to this sage, they would learn that the cook is as superfluous as the soldier. The men who made caring for the body a simple problem were wise men, or something like them. What is indispensable takes no elaborate effort to get; it is the luxuries that demand the labor. Follow nature and you will need no craftsmen.
Nature did not want us harassed. Whatever she required of us, she equipped us for. "But the naked body can't endure cold." Well? Aren't there the hides of wild beasts and other animals, which can keep off the cold well enough and more than enough? Don't plenty of tribes cover themselves with the bark of trees? Aren't birds' feathers sewn together to serve as clothing? To this very day, doesn't a large part of the Scythian people dress in the skins of foxes and mice — soft to the touch, and windproof? "Even so, men need something thicker than skin to keep off the summer sun." Well? Hasn't time itself hollowed out plenty of retreats — caverns opened up by decay or by some accident or other? Well? Didn't the very first men weave twigs into wicker mats by hand, plaster them with common mud, roof them over with straw and wild grasses, and pass their winters snug and dry, the rain sliding off the sloping gables? Well? Don't the peoples along the edge of the Syrtes live in dug-out houses — along with every other tribe whose sun burns too fiercely for any shelter to keep out the heat except the parched earth itself?
Nature was not so spiteful that, having given every other animal an easy time of it, she made man alone unable to live without all this apparatus. None of it was imposed on us by her; none of it had to be painfully invented to keep us alive. Everything was ready for us at birth. It is we who have made everything difficult for ourselves by turning up our noses at what is easy. Housing, shelter, comfort, food — all the things that have now become a colossal industry of trouble — were ready to hand, free to all, obtainable for trivial effort. In those days the limit of everything matched the need. It is we who have made these things expensive, we who have made them marvelous, we who have made them the objects of elaborate, endlessly multiplying arts of pursuit. Nature is sufficient for everything she asks of us. Luxury has turned her back on nature; every day she swells herself further, gathering strength through all the centuries, her cleverness in the service of the vices. First luxury began craving what was superfluous; then what was contrary to nature; and finally she sold the soul to the body and ordered it to be the utter slave of the body's appetites. All these trades that keep the city bustling — or should I say, in an uproar — are doing the body's business. There was a time when everything was supplied to the body as to a slave; now everything is procured for it as for a master. So we get the workshops of the weavers and the carpenters; so we get the smells of the professional kitchens; so we get the dancing-masters with their suggestive poses, and the suggestive, affected singing. The moderation nature prescribes — desires limited to means, and means limited to needs — has left the field. It has now come to this: wanting only what is enough is taken as proof that you are a bumpkin, or a beggar.
It is hard to believe, my dear Lucilius, how easily the charm of eloquence can lure even great men away from the truth. Look at Posidonius — in my judgment one of the men who have given the most to philosophy — when he sets out to describe the art of weaving. He tells how some threads are twisted and others drawn out from the soft, loose mass of wool; how the upright warp holds its threads taut with hanging weights; how the inserted thread of the woof, which softens the stiff texture of the web gripping it on either side, is driven home by the batten and pressed into a tight union with the warp. And he maintains that even the weaver's art was discovered by wise men — forgetting that the elaborate loom he is describing was invented much later, the art in which
The web is bound to the frame; the reed divides The warp; between the threads the pointed shuttles Carry the woof, and the broad comb's notched teeth Drive it home.
What if he had lived to see the weaving of our own day, which produces clothing that conceals nothing — clothing that offers no protection, I won't say to the body, but even to modesty!
Posidonius then moves on to the farmer. With just as much eloquence he describes the ground broken up by the plough and crossed again, so that the loosened earth gives the roots freer play; then the seed sown, and the weeds pulled by hand so that no stray growth or wild plant can spoil the crop. This trade too, he declares, is the creation of the wise — as if farmers were not discovering countless new ways to improve the soil's yield at this very moment! And not content with these arts, he actually demotes the wise man to the mill. For he tells us how the sage began making bread by copying nature's own processes. "The grain," he says, "once taken into the mouth, is crushed by the hard teeth meeting in collision, and whatever escapes them the tongue pushes back to those same teeth. Then it is blended into a mass, so it can slide more easily down the throat. When it reaches the stomach, it is cooked by the stomach's even heat, and then — only then — is it taken up into the body. Following this model," he goes on, "someone set two rough stones one on top of the other, in imitation of the teeth: one set fixed, waiting on the motion of the other. Then by rubbing stone against stone the grain is crushed, and brought back again and again, until repeated grinding reduces it to flour. Then this man sprinkled the flour with water, worked it and kneaded it into obedience, and shaped the loaf. At first it was baked in hot ashes, or in a red-hot earthen vessel; later, ovens were gradually discovered, and the other devices whose heat obeys the sage's will." One step more and Posidonius would have declared that the cobbler's trade was the discovery of the wise man.
All these things were devised by reason — but not by right reason. They were invented by man, but not by the wise man. The same goes for ships, in which we cross rivers and seas — fitted with sails to catch the force of the wind, with rudders hung at the stern to swing the vessel's course this way or that. The model was the fish, which steers itself with its tail and by the slightest flick to one side or the other bends its darting course. "But," says Posidonius, "the wise man did discover all these things; they were just too petty for him to handle himself, so he handed them over to his humbler assistants." No. These early inventions were thought up by exactly the class of men who run them today. We know that certain devices have appeared within living memory — windows of transparent tile that let in clear light; vaulted baths with pipes set into the walls to spread the heat and keep the temperature even from floor to ceiling. Need I mention the marble that makes our temples and our private houses gleam? Or the huge rounded and polished blocks of stone we use to raise colonnades and halls roomy enough for nations? Or our signs for whole words, which let us take down a speech however fast it is delivered, the hand keeping pace with the tongue? All of this has been devised by the lowest grade of slaves. Wisdom sits higher up. She does not train the hands; she is the teacher of minds.
Would you like to know what wisdom has actually brought to light — what she has accomplished? Not the body's graceful poses. Not the varied notes of horn and flute, where the breath goes in and comes out transformed into voice. Not weapons, not walls, not the machinery of war — her voice is for peace, and she calls all mankind to live in concord. She is not, I insist, the manufacturer of our everyday tools, however indispensable. Why assign her such small things? What you see in her is the master craftsman of life itself. The other arts do fall under her authority, it's true — for the servant of life is also served by the things that equip life. But wisdom's course is set toward the happy life. That is where she leads us; that is the road she opens for us. She shows us what things are evil and what things only look evil; she strips the mind of empty illusion. She gives us a greatness that is solid, and deflates the greatness that is puffed up, all show and hollowness; and she never lets us stay confused about the difference between what is great and what is merely swollen. She delivers to us the knowledge of the whole of nature, and of her own nature. She reveals what the gods are, and of what sort; what the gods below are, and the household deities, and the guardian spirits; what those souls are that have won lasting life and been admitted into the second rank of divinities; where they dwell, and what they do, and what they can do, and what they will.
These are wisdom's rites of initiation — and what they unlock is not some village shrine but the vast temple of all the gods, the universe itself, whose true images and true faces she offers to the gaze of our minds; for the eyes are too dull for sights that great. Then she goes back to the beginnings of things: to the eternal Reason poured into the whole, and to the force alive in every seed, shaping each thing after its kind. Then wisdom begins asking about the soul — where it comes from, where it lives, how long it lasts, into how many parts it falls. Finally she has turned from the bodily to the bodiless, and examined truth up close, and the marks by which truth is known — asking next how the ambiguous can be told apart from the true, in life and in language alike; for in both, the false is mingled with the true.
My own view is that the wise man did not withdraw from those arts, as Posidonius thinks. He never took them up in the first place. For he would have judged nothing worth inventing that he would not afterward judge worth using always. He would not pick up what he would have to put down.
"But Anacharsis," says Posidonius, "invented the potter's wheel, whose spinning gives shape to vessels." And then, because the potter's wheel turns up in Homer, people would rather believe the verses are spurious than that Posidonius's story is! I maintain Anacharsis was not the inventor of that wheel — and if he was, then a wise man invented it, but not as a wise man; just as there are plenty of things wise men do as men, not as wise men. Suppose a wise man happens to be exceptionally fast on his feet: he will beat every runner in the race because he is fast, not because he is wise. I would love to show Posidonius a glass-blower, whose breath moulds glass into shapes the most skillful hand could scarcely form. These discoveries have been made since we stopped discovering wisdom.
Posidonius again: "Democritus is said to have discovered the arch, in which a curved line of stones, leaning gradually inward, is locked together by the keystone." I am inclined to call this false. There must have been bridges and gateways before Democritus, curved toward the top. And it seems to have quite slipped your memory that this same Democritus discovered how to soften ivory, and how a pebble could be boiled into an emerald — the very process still used today for coloring stones that take the treatment. A wise man may well have discovered such things; but he did not discover them because he was wise. He does plenty of things that we see done just as well — or more deftly and skillfully — by men with no wisdom whatsoever.
You ask, then, what the wise man has actually tracked down, what he has brought into the light? First, truth, and nature — which he has not followed the way the other animals do, with eyes too dull to see the divine in it. Second, the law of life: he has made life conform to universal principles; he has taught us not merely to know the gods but to follow them, and to welcome whatever chance brings exactly as if it were a divine command. He has forbidden us to listen to false opinions, and has weighed the worth of everything on a true scale. He has condemned the pleasures that come mixed with remorse, and praised the goods that will always satisfy; and he has published this truth to the world: the happiest man is the man who needs no happiness, and the most powerful man is the man who has power over himself.
I am not talking about the philosophy that has set the citizen outside his country and the gods outside the universe, and handed virtue over to pleasure — but about the philosophy that counts nothing good except what is honorable; the philosophy that cannot be sweet-talked by the gifts of men or of Fortune; whose price is that she cannot be bought at any price. That this philosophy existed in that rough age, when the arts and crafts were still unknown and useful things could only be learned by using them — that I refuse to believe.
Next came the fortune-favored era when nature's bounty lay open to everyone, for everyone's use alike, before greed and luxury broke the bonds that held mortals together and men abandoned their common life, scattered, and turned to plunder. The men of that second age were not wise men, even if they did what wise men should do. There is no other condition of the human race anyone would rate more highly; and if God commissioned a man to fashion earthly creatures and hand institutions to peoples, that man would approve no other system than the one that held among the men of that age, when
No ploughman worked the soil; it was not lawful To mark off land or fence one's property. Men pooled their gains, and the earth gave her riches More freely to sons who never asked for them.
Was any race of men ever more blessed than that one? They enjoyed all of nature in partnership. She was sufficient for them all, guardian now as she had been parent before; and her gift was this — the secure possession, by every man, of the common resources. Why shouldn't I call that race the richest in human history, since you could not have found a poor man in it?
But greed broke in on this happy arrangement, and in its eagerness to set something aside for its own private use, it made everything the property of somebody else, and shrank itself from boundless wealth down to cramped need. It was greed that introduced poverty: by craving much, it lost all. So now she tries to recover her losses; she adds estate to estate, buying out one neighbor and cheating out the next; she swells her country places to the size of provinces and calls it "ownership" when a tour of your own property counts as extensive travel — and for all that, no pushing back of boundary lines will ever bring us back to where we started.
When we have done everything that can be done, we shall possess much. We used to possess the whole world. The earth itself was more productive untilled — generous enough for peoples who did not rob one another. Whatever nature produced, a man took as much delight in showing it to someone else as in finding it. No one could have more than anyone else, and no one less; whatever there was, was divided among friends who did not quarrel. The stronger had not yet begun laying hands on the weaker; the miser had not yet begun hiding away what lay in front of him, shutting his neighbor off from the bare necessities. Each man cared as much for his neighbor as for himself. Weapons lay unused; hands unstained by human blood turned all their hostility against the wild beasts. Those men, sheltered from the sun by a thick grove, safe from the bite of winter and rain in their humble hideaways, spent their days under the branches and passed untroubled nights without a sigh. We toss with worry in our purple sheets — it prods us out of bed with the sharpest of goads; but how soft was the sleep the hard earth gave those men! No carved and paneled ceilings hung over them. They lay out under the open sky, and the stars glided overhead, and the great pageant of the night — the firmament — swept silently past, doing its mighty work without a sound. By day and by night alike, the views of that most glorious dwelling-place stood open and free. It was their joy to watch the constellations sinking down from mid-heaven, and others rising up out of their hidden places. What could it be but joy, to wander among marvels scattered so far and wide? But you people of today tremble at every sound your houses make; if anything creaks while you sit among your frescoes, you flinch and run. They had no houses the size of cities. The open air; the breezes blowing free across open ground; the drifting shade of a crag or a tree; springs crystal-clear, and streams not spoiled by man's meddling — no water-pipes, no forced channels, just water running where it liked; and meadows beautiful without a landscaper — this was the setting of their rough homes, trimmed by rustic hands. That was a dwelling in accordance with nature. It was a joy to live in it, afraid neither of the house nor for it. Today our houses make up a large share of our dread.
But however splendid and guileless the life of those men was, they were not wise men; that title is reserved for the highest achievement of all. Still, I would not deny they were men of lofty spirit — fresh from the gods, if I may put it that way. There is no doubt the world turned out better offspring before it was worn out. But though their native powers were sturdier than ours across the board, and better built for hard work, those powers had not been perfected in every case. For nature does not hand out virtue; becoming good is an art. They, at least, did not go rummaging through the lowest dregs of the earth for gold or silver or translucent gemstones; and they were still merciful even to the dumb animals — that age stood so far from the custom of man killing man not in anger, not in fear, but for the pleasure of the spectacle. They had no embroidered clothing yet; cloth was not yet woven with gold; gold was not yet even mined.
What is the upshot, then? Those men were innocent because they were ignorant — and it makes a very great difference whether a man refuses to sin or simply does not know how. They had no justice, no prudence, no self-control, no bravery. Their rough life had certain qualities that resembled all these virtues; but virtue itself comes only to a soul that has been trained and taught and brought to its full growth by unrelenting practice. We are born for virtue, but not with it. And even in the best of men, until you refine them by instruction, there is only the raw material of virtue — not virtue itself.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Our friend Liberalis is heartbroken. He has just gotten the news of the fire that wiped out the colony of Lyons. A disaster like that would shake anyone, let alone a man who loves his home city as dearly as he does. And the blow has forced him to ask how strong his own character really is — a character he trained, I suppose, against the troubles he thought he had reason to fear. But this trouble was so unexpected, so nearly unheard of, that I'm not surprised it caught him without his guard up. There was no precedent for it. Fire has damaged plenty of cities; it has annihilated none. Even when an enemy hurls fire against the walls, the flames gutter out in a hundred places, and however often they are rekindled, they rarely devour so completely that nothing is left for the sword to finish. Even earthquakes have hardly ever been violent enough to flatten whole cities. And no blaze anywhere has ever raged so fiercely that a second fire would have found nothing left to burn. Yet here, so many beautiful buildings — any one of which would have made a town famous by itself — came down in a single night. In the deepest peace, something happened worse than anyone fears in wartime. Who can believe it? With weapons at rest everywhere, with the whole world at peace, Lyons — the pride of Gaul — is missing.
Fortune has usually given people warning when she meant to strike them all at once; she has let them feel the disaster coming. Every great thing has been granted some grace period before its fall. But here, a single night lay between a very great city and none. In short: it takes me longer to tell you the city perished than it took the city to perish.
All of this has bent even Liberalis' will, which stands so straight and steady against his own troubles. And there is a reason he was shaken: it is the unexpected that lands with the most weight. Strangeness adds heaviness to disaster; every mortal hurts more from a blow that also surprises him.
So nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out ahead to meet every problem, and we should consider not what usually happens, but what can happen. For what is there that Fortune, when she chooses, cannot drag down from the very peak of its prosperity? What is there that she doesn't attack all the more violently the more brilliantly it shines? What is hard or laborious for her? She doesn't always come at us the same way, or even at full strength. Sometimes she turns our own hands against us; sometimes, content with her own powers, she invents dangers that need no human agent. No moment is exempt. In the middle of our pleasures, the causes of our suffering are already sprouting. War breaks out in the middle of peace, and the very things we counted on to protect us become the things we fear; the friend turns enemy, the ally turns hostile. The summer calm whips itself into sudden storms wilder than winter's. With no enemy in sight, we suffer what enemies inflict — and if every other cause of disaster fails, too much good fortune will invent one on its own. Illness attacks the most temperate, wasting disease the strongest, punishment the most innocent, and the noisy mob the most secluded.
Fortune picks out some new weapon to remind us of her strength whenever she thinks we've forgotten her. Whatever has been built up by a long line of years, at the cost of enormous labor and by the great kindness of the gods, one single day scatters and destroys. No — whoever said "a day" has granted disaster too generous a schedule. An hour, an instant, is enough to overthrow an empire. It would be some consolation for our frailty, and the frailty of everything we make, if things perished as slowly as they came into being. But as it is, growth is sluggish and ruin is quick. Nothing is stable, public or private. The destinies of men, and of cities too, are spinning. In the middle of the greatest calm, terror rises; with nothing outside to stir up trouble, disasters burst out of the places we least expected. Thrones that stood firm through civil wars and foreign wars crash down with no one pushing them. How few states have carried their good fortune all the way to the end!
We should therefore think through every possibility, and fortify our minds against whatever evils may come. Exile, the torture of disease, war, shipwreck — rehearse them all. Fortune may tear you from your country, or your country from you; she may banish you to a wasteland — and this very place, where the crowds are suffocating, may become a wasteland itself. Let us set the whole of the human lot before our eyes. If we don't want to be overwhelmed — or even stunned — by unusual disasters, as though they were something new, then let us picture in advance not just the worst that commonly happens, but the very worst that can happen. We must think Fortune through fully and completely.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been leveled by a single shock of earthquake! How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed whole! How often has that kind of devastation left Cyprus in ruins! How often has Paphos collapsed! Word reaches us constantly of entire cities utterly destroyed — and how small a part of the world are we, to whom such news comes so often!
So let us stand up to face whatever Fortune does, and whatever happens, let us be sure of this: it is never as great as rumor advertises. A rich city has been burned to ashes — the jewel of the provinces, counted among them and yet standing apart from them; but rich as it was, it sat on a single hill, and not a very large one. And of all those cities whose magnificence and grandeur you hear about today, time will erase even the traces. Don't you see how, in Achaia, the foundations of the most famous cities have already crumbled away, until nothing is left to show they ever existed? It's not only what human hands have made that totters to the ground; not only what human art and effort set in place that the passing days overthrow. Mountain peaks dissolve. Whole regions have subsided. Places that once stood far out of sight of the sea now lie under the waves. Fire's enormous power has eaten away the hills it once glowed through, and gnawed down to nothing the loftiest summits — once the sailor's comfort and his beacon. The works of nature herself take this battering; so we ought to bear the destruction of cities with untroubled minds. They stand only to fall. That end waits for every one of them. Maybe some force pent up inside, some blast of air made tremendous because its way is blocked, will throw off the weight that holds it down; maybe a whirlpool of raging currents, mightier for being hidden in the depths of the earth, will smash through whatever resists it; maybe the violence of fire will burst the framework of the earth's crust apart; maybe time, from which nothing is safe, will wear them down little by little; maybe an unhealthy climate will drive the inhabitants out and mold will eat the deserted walls. It would be tedious to count all the roads fate can take. But this one thing I know: everything mortals make is doomed to be mortal — and we live in the middle of things that are destined to die.
These are the thoughts, and thoughts like them, that I am offering as consolation to our friend Liberalis, who burns with an almost unbelievable love for his city. Perhaps it was destroyed only so it could be raised again to something better. Often a setback has simply cleared the ground for greater prosperity. Many buildings have fallen only to rise higher. Timagenes, who held a grudge against Rome and her success, used to say the only thing that grieved him about fires in Rome was knowing that better buildings would rise than the ones the flames had taken. In Lyons, too, most likely, every citizen will work to rebuild everything larger and safer than what was lost. May it be built to last — built, under happier omens, for a longer life! This colony is only in its hundredth year — not even the limit of a single human lifetime. Planted by Plancus, its founder, and favored by its natural site, it grew strong and swelled to the population it holds today. And yet think how many disasters, and how severe, it has endured within the span of one old man's life!
So let the mind be trained to understand its lot and to endure it. Let it know that there is nothing Fortune does not dare — that she has the same jurisdiction over empires as over emperors, the same power over cities as over the citizens who live in them. We must not cry out against any of this. We have entered into such a world; these are the laws we live under. If the terms suit you, obey; if not, leave by whatever door you please. Cry out in anger if some unfair rule is aimed at you personally; but if this inescapable law binds the highest and the lowest alike, then make your peace with fate, which dissolves all things. You should not measure us by our burial mounds, or by the monuments of unequal size that line the road; their ashes level all men. We are unequal at birth, but we are equal in death. And what I say about cities I say about the people in them: Ardea, the little town, was captured — and so was Rome. The great founder of human law made no distinctions among us for high lineage or famous names, except while we live. When we come to the end that waits for all mortals, he says: "Away with ambition! Let one and the same law apply to every creature that burdens the earth." For endurance, we are all equal: no one is more fragile than anyone else, and no one is more certain of being alive tomorrow.
Alexander, king of Macedon, took up the study of geometry. Unhappy man — because it would teach him how tiny the earth really was, this earth of which he had seized only a fraction. Unhappy man, I say again, because he was bound to discover that his title was a lie. Who can be "the Great" in something so small? The lessons were intricate and could only be mastered by careful attention — not the sort of thing a madman could grasp, a man whose thoughts went ranging out beyond the ocean. "Teach me something easy!" he cries. And his teacher answers: "These things are the same for everyone — just as hard for one as for another." Imagine that nature is saying the same to us: "The things you complain of are the same for all. I can make nothing easier for any man. But whoever wishes can make things easier for himself." How? Through an even mind. You will have to feel pain, and thirst, and hunger, and old age too — if a longer stay among men is granted you. You will have to be sick, and lose things, and die. But don't believe the noisy crowd around you: none of these things is an evil, none is beyond your strength to bear, none is truly heavy. It's only common opinion that makes them frightening. Fearing death, then, is like fearing gossip — and what is more foolish than a man afraid of words? Our friend Demetrius puts it cleverly: "The talk of ignorant men is like the rumblings of the belly. What difference does it make to me," he says, "whether the noise comes from above or below?" What madness, to fear a bad reputation among people whose reputations are bad! Just as you had no cause to be terrified of what people say, you have no cause now to fear these things — things you would never have feared if their talk hadn't forced the fear on you. Does it harm a good man to be spattered with unjust gossip? Then don't let gossip damage death in our estimation either — for death has a bad reputation too. Yet not one of the people who slander death has ever tried it.
Meanwhile it is reckless to condemn what you know nothing about. This much, though, you do know: death is a help to many people. It sets many free from torture, from want, from sickness, from suffering, from weariness. Nothing has any power over us, once we have death in our own power.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You and I will agree, I think, on the following: that outward things are sought for the body's sake, that the body is cared for out of regard for the soul, and that the soul itself has service departments — the parts that let us move and stay alive — which exist only for the sake of the ruling part. That ruling part contains something irrational and something rational. The irrational part obeys; the rational part is the one thing that takes orders from nothing else and refers everything else to itself. Divine reason, after all, is set in supreme command over the universe and answers to nothing; and the reason we carry around is the same stuff, because it is derived from the divine.
If we agree on that, we must agree on what follows: the happy life depends on one thing and one thing only — our attainment of perfect reason. Reason alone keeps the soul from bowing down; reason alone stands its ground against Fortune. Whatever state a man's affairs are in, it keeps him untroubled. And the only real good is the one that can never be damaged. The happy man, I declare, is the one whom nothing can make less than he is. He holds the heights leaning on no one but himself — for whoever props himself up on anything can fall. If it's otherwise, then things that are not us begin to hold great power over us. And who wants Fortune holding the upper hand? What sensible man preens himself on what isn't his own?
What is the happy life? Peace of mind, and a tranquility that is unbroken and continuous. You will have it if you have greatness of soul; you will have it if you have the steadiness to hold onto a good judgment once you have reached it. How does a man get there? By seeing the truth whole; by keeping, in everything he does, order, measure, and fitness; by having a will that is kindly and gives no offense, that stays fixed on reason and never leaves it, that earns love and admiration at the same time. To give you the whole principle in one sentence: the wise man's soul should be the sort of soul that would suit a god.
What more can a man want who already has everything honorable? For if dishonorable things can contribute to the best condition, then a happy life becomes possible without an honorable one. And what is more debased, or more foolish, than tying the good of a rational soul to irrational things? Yet certain philosophers hold that the Supreme Good can be increased, on the grounds that it is hardly complete when the gifts of Fortune run against it. Even Antipater, one of the great leaders of that school, admits he gives some weight to externals — though only a very little. But you see the absurdity: it is adding a lamp to broad daylight. What can a spark matter in the blaze of the sun?
If honor alone doesn't content you, then you must want to add either the calm the Greeks call "undisturbedness," or else pleasure. The first can be had in any case: the mind is free of disturbance when it is fully free to contemplate the universe, and nothing pulls it away from the study of nature. The second, pleasure, is simply the good of cattle. To honor it is to bolt the irrational onto the rational, the shameful onto the honorable. A pleasant tingle in the body affects this life of ours — so why hesitate to say that all is well with a man because all is well with his appetite? And would you count — I won't say among heroes, but among men — a person whose Supreme Good is a matter of flavors and colors and sounds? Let him fall out of the ranks of the noblest class of living beings, second only to the gods. Let him go herd with the dumb beasts — an animal whose delight is fodder.
The irrational part of the soul is itself double. One part is spirited, ambitious, headstrong; it lives in the passions. The other is lowly, sluggish, and sold out to pleasure. Philosophers have neglected the first — which, unbridled as it is, is still the better of the two, certainly braver and more worthy of a man — and have declared the second, the nerveless and ignoble one, indispensable to the happy life. They have ordered reason to wait on it. They have made the Supreme Good of the noblest of living beings a mean, abject thing — and a monster besides, a hybrid stitched together from parts that don't match. As our Virgil says, describing Scylla:
Above, a human face and a maiden's breast — a lovely breast — below, a shapeless monster, huge in bulk, a dolphin's tail joined to a belly like a wolf's.
And yet Scylla is at least assembled from wild animals — dreadful ones, swift ones. From what grotesque shapes have these wiseacres pieced together wisdom! Man's primary art is virtue itself; joined to it is the useless, short-lived flesh, fit only — as Posidonius remarks — for taking in food. That divine virtue ends in filth; onto its higher parts, which are holy and heavenly, they fasten a sluggish, flabby animal. As for the second item on the wish list — quiet — although by itself it would do the soul no actual good, it would at least clear hindrances out of the soul's way. Pleasure, on the other hand, actively destroys the soul and softens all its strength. Where will you find elements so mismatched yoked together? To the most vigorous thing is joined the most sluggish; to the austere, the frivolous; to the most holy, the unrestrained — unrestrained to the point of impurity.
"What, then," comes the retort, "if good health, rest, and freedom from pain won't hinder virtue — shouldn't you seek them?" Of course I'll seek them. Not because they are goods, but because they are according to nature, and because I will acquire them through the exercise of good judgment on my part. What will be good in them, then? Only this: that choosing them well is a good thing. When I put on suitable clothes, or walk as I should, or dine as I ought to dine, the dinner and the walk and the clothes are not goods; the good is the deliberate choice I show in them, keeping in each thing I do a measure that squares with reason. Let me add this too: choosing clean clothing is a fitting aim for a man's efforts, because man is by nature a clean and well-groomed animal. So the choice of neat clothes is a good, not the neat clothes themselves — the good is not in the thing selected, but in the quality of the selecting. It's our actions that are honorable, not the objects they handle.
And what I've said about clothing, you may apply to the body. Nature has wrapped the soul in the body as in a kind of garment; the body is the soul's cloak. But who ever priced clothes by the wardrobe that held them? A scabbard makes a sword neither good nor bad. So about the body I give you the same answer: if I have the choice, I'll choose health and strength — but the good involved will be my judgment about them, not the things themselves.
Another retort: "Granted, the wise man is happy. Still, he doesn't attain the Supreme Good as we've defined it unless the means nature provides for reaching it are at his disposal. A man who has virtue can't be unhappy; but he can't be perfectly happy either if he lacks natural gifts like health or sound limbs." In saying this, you grant the claim that seems harder to believe — that a man in unremitting, extreme pain is not wretched, is even happy — and you deny the far less serious one, that he is completely happy. But if virtue can keep a man from being wretched, it will find it easier still to make him completely happy; for the gap between happy and completely happy is smaller than the gap between wretched and happy. Can a power strong enough to snatch a man out of disaster and set him among the happy fail to finish the job and make him supremely happy? Does its strength give out at the very top of the climb?
Life contains advantages and disadvantages — both beyond our control. If a good man is not wretched though weighed down with every kind of disadvantage, how is he not supremely happy just because he lacks a few advantages? As the load of disadvantages does not drag him down to wretchedness, so the lack of advantages does not pull him back from supreme happiness. He is just as supremely happy without the advantages as he is free of wretchedness under the load of disadvantages. Otherwise, if his good can be damaged, it can be taken from him altogether.
A little way back I said that a tiny fire adds nothing to the sun's light. The sun's brightness blots out any light that shines on its own beside it. "But," someone says, "certain objects block even sunlight." The sun is unimpaired even among obstacles: an object may come between and cut off our view of it, but the sun sticks to its work and keeps its course. Whenever it shines out from behind the clouds, it is no smaller — and no less punctual either — than when the sky is clear; because there is a great difference between something merely standing in the way of its light and something interfering with its shining. In the same way, obstacles take nothing away from virtue. It is no smaller; it merely shines with less brilliance. To our eyes it may be dimmer and harder to see; in itself it is the same and, like the sun in eclipse, is still exerting its power in secret. Disasters, losses, and wrongs have only as much power over virtue as a cloud has over the sun.
Then we meet someone who maintains that a wise man who has suffered bodily misfortune is neither wretched nor happy. He too is wrong: he is putting the results of chance on a level with the virtues, and giving the honorable no more weight than things with no honor in them. And what is more detestable, more unworthy, than filing contemptible things in the same class as things that deserve reverence? Reverence belongs to justice, duty, loyalty, courage, and prudence. The other list is worthless — a sturdy leg, strong shoulders, good teeth, firm healthy muscles — attributes the most worthless men are often blessed with in fuller measure. Again, if the wise man whose body torments him is to be rated neither wretched nor happy, but parked in some halfway position, then his life will also be neither desirable nor undesirable. But what is as foolish as calling the wise man's life not desirable? And what is further past believing than a life that is neither desirable nor undesirable? Again: if bodily ills don't make a man wretched, then they leave him free to be happy; for things that have no power to change his condition for the worse have no power to disturb that condition at its best either.
"But," someone will say, "we know what cold is and what hot is; lukewarm lies between. In the same way, A is happy, B is wretched, and C is neither happy nor wretched." Let's examine this figure they deploy against us. If I add more cold water to your lukewarm water, it ends up cold; if I pour in more hot, it finally turns hot. But with your man who is neither wretched nor happy, no matter how many troubles I add, by your own argument he does not become unhappy — so your figure offers no analogy. Now, set before me this man of yours, neither miserable nor happy. I add blindness to his misfortunes: he is not made unhappy. I cripple him: not made unhappy. I pile on afflictions, severe and unceasing: not made unhappy. Well then — a man whose life all these ills cannot turn to misery cannot be dragged by them out of a happy life either. And if, as you admit, the wise man cannot fall from happiness into wretchedness, he cannot fall into non-happiness at all. Once you've started to slip, where exactly do you stop? Whatever keeps a man from rolling to the bottom keeps him at the summit. Why, you ask, can't the happy life possibly be destroyed? It can't even be loosened at the joints. And that is why virtue, all by itself, is sufficient for the happy life.
"But isn't the wise man happier if he has lived longer, with no pain to distract him, than one who has had to wrestle bad Fortune all his days?" Answer me this: is he any better, any more honorable? If not, then he isn't happier either. To live more happily, he must live more rightly; if he can't do that, he can't live more happily either. Virtue cannot be stretched any tighter, and so neither can the happy life, which depends on virtue. Virtue is so great a good that it doesn't feel petty assaults like shortness of life, pain, and the body's assorted complaints. As for pleasure — it doesn't deserve so much as a glance from virtue.
Now, what is the chief thing in virtue? That it needs not a single day beyond the present, and keeps no running count of the days that are ours. In the smallest sliver of time, virtue completes an eternity of good. These goods sound incredible to us, beyond human nature — because we measure virtue's grandeur by the yardstick of our own weakness, and we give our vices the name of virtue. But doesn't it sound just as incredible that a man in extreme suffering should say, "I am happy"? Yet that very sentence was heard in the factory of pleasure itself. "Today, and one other day," said Epicurus, "have been the happiest of my life" — and this though on the one day he was tortured by a blocked bladder, and on the other by the incurable pain of an ulcerated stomach; and yet, that day was none the less happy. Why, then, should the goods that virtue bestows be incredible to us, who cultivate virtue, when they turn up even among people who take pleasure for their mistress? They too, base and small-minded as they are, declare that even in extreme pain and misfortune the wise man will be neither wretched nor happy. But that is incredible too — more incredible, in fact, than the other claim. I cannot see how virtue, once knocked from her heights, can help being flung all the way to the bottom. Either she must keep a man happy, or, once driven from that post, she cannot stop him from becoming unhappy. As long as virtue stands her ground, she cannot be driven from the field. She must either conquer or be conquered.
But some say: "Virtue and the happy life belong to the immortal gods alone; we can grasp only the shadow, so to speak, and semblance of goods like theirs. We approach them; we never arrive." Yet reason is common to gods and men. In them it is already perfected; in us it is capable of being perfected. What drives us to despair is our vices. Man, the second class of rational being, is of a lower order — a guardian, so to speak, too unstable to hold fast to what is best, his judgment still wavering and unsure. He may need eyes and ears, good health, an outward appearance that isn't repellent, and, beyond that, a longer span of days with his constitution intact. Through reason he can lead a life he won't regret; yet there also lives in this imperfect creature, man, a certain force that makes for badness, because he has a mind easily tipped toward the perverse. Suppose the badness that is out in the open, already stirred into action, were removed — the man is still not a good man, but he is being molded toward goodness. And whoever is missing any quality that makes for goodness is bad.
in whose body virtue dwells, and spirit ever present,
is the equal of the gods. Mindful of where he came from, he strives to return there. No man does wrong in attempting to climb back to the heights he once came down from. And why shouldn't you believe that something divine exists in one who is a part of God? This whole universe that surrounds us is one thing, and it is God; we are God's associates, God's limbs. Our soul has the capacity, and it is carried up to that place, if vices do not hold it down. Just as our bodies are built by nature to stand erect and look up at the sky, so the soul — which can reach out as far as it will — was framed by nature for this very end: to desire equality with the gods. And if it uses its powers and stretches upward into its own proper region, it is by no foreign road that it struggles toward the heights. It would be a great labor to journey to heaven; the soul merely returns there. Once it has found the road, it marches on boldly, scornful of everything else. It casts no backward glance at wealth. Gold and silver — things fully worthy of the darkness they once lay in — it values not by the sheen that dazzles ignorant eyes, but by the muck of the old days, out of which our greed first pried and dug them.
The soul, I insist, knows that riches are stored somewhere other than in men's heaped-up treasure-houses; it is the soul, not the strong-box, that should be filled. It is the soul that men may set in dominion over all things and install as owner of the universe, so that its wealth has no boundary short of East and West; so that, like the gods, it possesses all things; so that, with vast resources of its own, it looks down from on high upon the wealthy — not one of whom enjoys his own money as much as he resents another's. When the soul has lifted itself to this lofty height, it treats the body too not as a thing to love but as a thing to supervise — a burden that must be carried; it will not serve what it was set over as master. No man is free who is a slave to his body. Pass over all the other masters that come from fussing too much about the body: the rule the body itself exercises is fussy and fastidious enough.
From this body the soul goes forth — sometimes calm, sometimes exultant — and once it has gone, it does not ask what will become of the deserted clay. Just as we take no thought for the clippings of our hair and beard, so that divine soul, at the point of leaving the mortal man, cares no more where its earthly container ends up — burned by fire, sealed under stone, buried in earth, torn by wild beasts — than a newborn child cares about the afterbirth. Whether this body is cast out for the birds to pick at, or devoured when
thrown to the sea-dogs as prey,
what is that to him who is nothing? Even while it is among the living, the soul fears nothing that may happen to the body after death; such things may have been brandished as threats, but they were never enough to terrify the soul before the moment of dying. It says: "The executioner's hook does not frighten me, nor the ugly mutilation of a corpse exposed to the sneers of spectators. I ask no one to perform the last rites for me; I entrust my remains to no one's keeping. Nature has made provision that none shall go unburied. Time will lay away whatever cruelty has cast out." Maecenas put it eloquently:
I want no tomb: for Nature gives outcast bodies burial.
You would think that was said by a man of strict principles. He did indeed have a noble and vigorous nature — but in prosperity he let it go slack, and it spoiled. Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I was reading the letter in which you mourn the death of Metronax — as if he could have lived longer, and somehow should have. And I missed something in it: the fairness you show everywhere else. You have fairness in abundance when you deal with people and events; it deserts you on this one subject, as it deserts every one of us. I have met plenty of people who are fair to their fellow men. I have never met anyone who was fair to the gods. Every day we curse Fate: "Why was this man cut down in the middle of his career? Why not that one instead? Why does he get to drag out an old age that is a burden to himself and everyone around him?"
But tell me honestly — which seems fairer to you: that you obey Nature, or that Nature obey you? And what difference does it make how soon you leave a place you must leave sooner or later? Our aim should be not to live long, but to live rightly. Living long is Fate's department; living rightly is the soul's. A life is long if it is full — and it becomes full only when the soul has secured its own proper good, only when it has taken command of itself. What good are eighty years to a man who spent them doing nothing? A man like that hasn't lived; he has loitered awhile in life. He didn't die late; he just took a long time dying. He lived eighty years, did he? That depends on which date you count as his death. Your other friend, though, died in the bloom of his manhood — but he had fulfilled every duty of a good citizen, a good friend, a good son; he came up short in nothing. His age was incomplete, but his life was complete. The other man existed for eighty years — unless by "he lived" you mean what we mean when we say a tree "lives."
Let's see to it, my dear Lucilius, that our lives are like precious jewels: remarkable not for their size but for their weight. Let's measure them by their performance, not by their duration. Do you want to know the difference between the hardy man who despises Fortune, serves through every campaign of life, and reaches life's Supreme Good — and the man who has merely had many years pass over his head? The first still exists after his death; the second was dead before he died.
So let's praise, and count among the blessed, the man who invested well whatever time he was given, however little. He saw the true light. He was not one of the common herd. He didn't just live; he flourished. Sometimes he enjoyed clear skies; sometimes, as usually happens, the radiance of that mighty star reached him only in flashes through the clouds. Why do you keep asking, "How long did he live?" He is living still! In one bound he has crossed over into posterity and handed himself into the keeping of memory.
Not that I would turn down a few extra years for myself. But if my span is cut short, I will not say I lacked anything essential to a happy life. I never planned to live out the very last day my greedy hopes promised me; I have looked on every day as if it were my last. Why ask my birth date, or whether I'm still on the register of the younger men? What I have is my own. Just as a short man can be a complete man, a short life can be a complete life. Age belongs among the externals. How long I exist is not mine to decide; how long I go on truly living, in my present way, is entirely in my control. Ask only this of me — that I stop measuring out an inglorious old age in the dark, and devote myself to living instead of being carried along past life.
And what, you ask, is the fullest span of life? Living until you possess wisdom. Whoever reaches wisdom has arrived — not at the farthest goal, but at the most important one. That man may boldly rejoice and give thanks to the gods — and to himself as well — and count Nature in his debt for having lived. He has earned the right: he paid her back a better life than the one he received. He set up the pattern of a good man; he showed what a good man is, and how great he can be. One more year would only have been like all the rest.
And really, how long are we supposed to keep on living? We have had the joy of learning the truth about the universe. We know the beginnings from which Nature rises; how she orders the course of the heavens; by what regular changes she calls back the year; how she has set an end to everything that has ever existed, and made herself the only end of her own being. We know that the stars move by their own motion; that nothing stands still except the earth, while every other body races on without pause. We know how the moon overtakes the sun; why the slower body leaves the faster behind; how she receives her light and loses it again; what brings on the night and what brings back the day. Where you are going, you will see all of this from closer up. "And yet," says the wise man, "it is not this hope that makes me depart more bravely — not my judgment that the road lies clear to my own gods. I have earned admission to their company; in fact, I have already been in it. I sent my soul to them, as they had already sent theirs to me. But suppose I am wiped out completely, and nothing of a man remains after death — my courage is not one bit less, even if my road, when I go, leads nowhere at all."
"But," you say, "he could have lived so many more years." There are books of only a few lines that are admirable and useful despite their size — and then there are the Annals of Tanusius. You know how bulky that book is, and what people say about it. Some men's long lives are exactly that: the Annals of Tanusius. Do you think the fighter killed on the last day of the games is luckier than the one who dies in the middle of the festival? Do you believe anyone is so foolishly greedy for life that he would rather have his throat cut in the dressing-room than in the arena? The head start we have on one another is no longer than that. Death makes its rounds to everyone; the slayer soon follows the slain. What people discuss with so much anxiety is, in the end, a trifle. And anyway — what does it matter how long you avoid the one thing you cannot escape?
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
There is a branch of philosophy that deals in precepts — advice fitted to the individual case rather than framed for the whole human race. It tells a husband how to behave toward his wife, a father how to bring up his children, a master how to govern his slaves. Some philosophers accept this branch as the only one worth having and throw out all the rest, on the grounds that the rest wanders off beyond anything we practically need — as if anyone could give advice about one portion of life without first gaining a knowledge of life as a whole!
Aristo the Stoic takes the opposite view. He thinks this branch counts for very little. It doesn't sink into the mind, he says; it holds nothing but old wives' precepts. The greatest benefit comes from philosophy's actual doctrines, from the definition of the Supreme Good. Once a man has completely understood that definition and thoroughly learned it, he can frame his own precept for whatever the situation demands. A student of javelin-throwing keeps aiming at one fixed target, training his hand to guide the throw; and once instruction and practice have given him the skill, he can use it against any target he pleases — he has learned to hit not some random object, but precisely the thing he aims at. In the same way, the man who has equipped himself for the whole of life needs no advising on each separate item, because he is now trained to meet his problem as a whole. He doesn't merely know how to live with his wife or his son; he knows how to live rightly — and how to live with wife and children is included in that knowledge.
Cleanthes takes a middle line: this branch of wisdom is useful, yes, but a feeble thing unless it flows from general principles — unless it rests on philosophy's actual doctrines and main headings. So the subject splits into two separate questions. First: is precept-giving useful or useless? And second: can it by itself produce a good man? In other words, is it superfluous — or does it make everything else superfluous?
Those who call this branch superfluous argue like this: "If an object held in front of the eyes blocks the vision, it has to be removed. As long as it's in the way, it is a waste of time to hand out precepts like 'Walk this way; stretch your hand out in that direction.' In the same way, when something blinds a man's soul and keeps him from seeing his line of duty clearly, there is no use in advising him: 'Live this way with your father, that way with your wife.' Precepts will do no good while the mind is clouded with error; only when the cloud is scattered will it become clear what his duty is in each case. Otherwise you are merely showing a sick man what he ought to do if he were well, instead of making him well. Suppose you're trying to teach a poor man the art of acting rich — how can that be managed while his poverty stays put? You are trying to explain to a starving man how to play the part of a man with a full stomach, when what he needs first is relief from the hunger gripping his gut.
"The same thing, I assure you, holds for every fault. The faults themselves must be removed, and no precepts should be given that cannot possibly be carried out while the faults remain. Unless you drive out the false opinions we suffer under, the miser will never take in a lesson on the proper use of money, nor the coward a lesson on scorning danger. You must make the miser see that money is neither a good nor an evil — show him rich men who are miserable to the last degree. You must make the coward see that the things that scare us out of our wits are less fearsome than rumor advertises them, whether the object of fear is suffering or death; that when death comes — the sentence law has fixed for every one of us — it is often a great comfort to reflect that it can never come again; that in the middle of suffering, a resolute soul will be as good as a cure, for the soul lightens any burden it endures with stubborn defiance. Remember that pain has this most excellent quality: if it is prolonged, it cannot be severe, and if it is severe, it cannot be prolonged. And we should bravely accept whatever commands the unbreakable laws of the universe lay upon us.
"Once doctrines like these have brought the erring man to a sense of his own condition — once he has learned that the happy life is not the life that conforms to pleasure but the life that conforms to Nature; once he has fallen deeply in love with virtue as man's only good and recoiled from baseness as man's only evil, and knows that everything else — riches, office, health, strength, power — falls in between and is not to be counted among goods or among evils — then he will not need a monitor at his elbow for every separate action, saying: 'Walk this way, eat that way. This is the conduct proper for a man and that for a woman; this for a married man and that for a bachelor.' Indeed, the people who take the greatest pains to hand out such advice are the very ones who can't practice it. It is the tutor lecturing the boy, the grandmother lecturing her grandson; it is the hottest-tempered schoolmaster who insists that one must never lose one's temper. Walk into any elementary school and you will find that these very pronouncements, straight from the high-browed philosophers, are sitting in the children's lesson-book!
"And will you offer precepts that are clear, or precepts that are doubtful? The clear ones need no counsellor, and the doubtful ones win no belief — so the giving of precepts is superfluous. Here's the proof. If you are counselling someone on a matter that is unclear or ambiguous in meaning, you will have to back your precepts with proofs; and if you have to fall back on proofs, then it is the proofs that do the work, and do it better on their own. 'This is how you must treat your friend, this your fellow citizen, this your associate.' And why? 'Because it is just.' But I can find all of that material under the heading of Justice. There I find that fair dealing is desirable for its own sake, that we are not forced into it by fear or hired into it for pay, and that no man is just who is drawn to anything in this virtue except the virtue itself. Once I have convinced myself of that view and thoroughly absorbed it, what good can I get from precepts that only teach a man who is already trained? To one who knows, giving precepts is superfluous; to one who does not know, it is insufficient — for he must be told not only what he is being instructed to do, but why. I ask again: are such precepts useful to the man with correct ideas about good and evil, or to the man without them? The man without them will get no benefit from you: some notion that clashes with your counsel has already monopolized his attention. And the man who has carefully decided what to seek and what to avoid knows what he ought to do without a single word from you. So that whole branch of philosophy can be abolished.
"There are two reasons we go astray: either the soul carries an evil quality planted in it by wrong opinions, or — even if not yet possessed by false ideas — it leans toward falsehood and is quickly corrupted by some outward appearance that pulls it the wrong way. So our duty is either to doctor the diseased mind carefully and free it from its faults, or to take possession of the mind while it is still unoccupied, though tilted toward evil. Philosophy's main doctrines accomplish both; therefore this giving of precepts accomplishes nothing. Besides, if we are to hand out precepts to each individual, the task is staggering. One class of advice for the financier, another for the farmer, another for the businessman, another for the man cultivating a king's good graces, another for the man seeking the friendship of his equals, another for the man courting those below him. In marriage, you will advise one man how to conduct himself with a wife who came to him a maiden, and another how to behave with a woman who was married to someone else before; how the husband of a rich woman should act, and how the husband of a dowerless one. Or do you think there is no difference between a childless wife and a mother of children, between a woman advanced in years and a mere girl, between a mother and a stepmother? We cannot cover all the types, and yet each type demands its own treatment. The laws of philosophy, by contrast, are concise, and they bind in every case. What's more, the precepts of wisdom ought to be definite and certain; where things cannot be defined, they lie outside wisdom's sphere — for wisdom knows the proper limits of things.
"We should therefore do away with this whole branch of precepts, because it cannot give to everyone what it promises only to a few — while wisdom embraces everyone. Between the madness of people in general and the madness that goes to a doctor there is no difference except this: the one suffers from disease, the other from false opinions. In the one case the symptoms of raving can be traced to ill health; the other is the ill health of the mind itself. If a man offered precepts to a lunatic — how he ought to speak, how he ought to walk, how to conduct himself in public and in private — he would be more of a lunatic than his patient. What is really needed is to treat the black bile and remove the root cause of the madness. And that is what must be done in the other case too, the case of the diseased mind. The madness itself must be shaken off; otherwise your words of advice will vanish into thin air."
That is what Aristo says, and I will answer his arguments one by one. First, his point about the obligation to remove whatever blocks the eye and hinders the vision. I admit that such a person needs no precepts in order to see; what he needs is treatment — a cure for his eyesight, the removal of the obstacle handicapping him. For it is Nature that gives us our eyesight, and whoever removes the obstruction simply restores to Nature her proper function. But Nature does not teach us our duty in every case. Again, a man whose cataract is cured cannot, the moment he recovers, give back their eyesight to other men as well; but when we are freed from evil, we can free others too. The eye needs no encouragement — no counsel, even — to distinguish different colors; black and white can be told apart without prompting from anyone. The mind, on the other hand, needs many precepts before it can see what to do in life. And notice that even in eye-treatment the physician doesn't just accomplish the cure — he throws in advice into the bargain. He says: "There's no reason to expose your weak vision to dangerous glare right away. Begin with darkness, then move into half-light, and only then grow bolder, accustoming yourself gradually to the bright light of day. There's no reason to read directly after eating; no reason to impose hard tasks on your eyes while they are swollen and inflamed. Keep winds and strong blasts of cold air off your face" — and other suggestions of the same sort, which are worth just as much as the drugs themselves. The physician's art supplements remedies with advice.
"But error is the source of sin," comes the reply; "precepts do not remove error, nor do they rout our false opinions about Good and Evil." I admit that precepts alone are not enough to overthrow the mind's mistaken beliefs; but that does not make them useless when they accompany other measures. In the first place, they refresh the memory. In the second place, matters that looked like a jumbled mass when viewed as a whole can, once sorted into their proper classes, be examined with far greater care. By our opponents' logic, you might as well call consolation and exhortation superfluous. Yet they are not superfluous; neither, therefore, is counsel.
"But it is folly," they retort, "to prescribe what a sick man ought to do as if he were well, when you should really be restoring his health; without health, precepts aren't worth a straw." But don't sick men and sound men have certain things in common, about which they need continual advice — not to grab greedily at food, for instance, and to avoid getting overtired? Poor and rich alike have certain precepts that fit them both. "Cure their greed, then," people say, "and you won't need to lecture either the poor man or the rich one, once the craving in each of them has subsided." But isn't it one thing to be free of the lust for money, and quite another to know how to use money? Misers don't know the proper limits in money matters — but even men who are not misers fail to understand its use. Then comes the reply: "Do away with error, and your precepts become unnecessary." Wrong. Suppose greed is slackened, luxury confined, rashness reined in, laziness pricked with the spur — even after the vices are removed, we must still go on learning what we ought to do, and how we ought to do it.
"Nothing will be accomplished," it is said, "by applying advice to the more serious faults." No — and medicine cannot master incurable diseases either; yet it is still used, in some cases as a cure, in others as a relief. Not even the power of philosophy entire, summoning all its strength for the purpose, will pull out of the soul a disease that has become stubborn and chronic. But Wisdom is not incapable of curing anything just because she cannot cure everything. People say: "What good does it do to point out the obvious?" A great deal of good — for we sometimes know facts without paying attention to them. Advice is not teaching; it engages the attention, rouses us, concentrates the memory and keeps it from losing its grip. We miss much that sits right before our eyes. Advice is really a kind of exhortation. The mind often works hard at not noticing even what lies in plain sight; so we must force upon it the knowledge of things it knows perfectly well. Think of what Calvus said at Vatinius' trial: "You all know that bribery has been going on — and everyone knows that you know it." You know friendship should be scrupulously honored, and you do not honor it. You know a man does wrong to demand chastity of his wife while carrying on with other men's wives; you know that just as she must have no dealings with a lover, you must have none with a mistress — and you do not act on it. That is why you must be brought back to these facts again and again: they should not sit in storage, but be ready for use. Whatever is wholesome should be discussed often and held before the mind often, so that it is not merely familiar to us but ready to hand. And remember, too, that in this way what is already clear often becomes clearer.
"But if your precepts are not obvious," comes the answer, "you will be bound to add proofs — so it is the proofs, not the precepts, that will be helpful." But can't the adviser's authority carry weight even without proofs? — the way a legal expert's opinions hold good even when he doesn't deliver the reasons behind them. Besides, the precepts themselves carry great weight of their own, whether woven into the fabric of verse or condensed into prose proverbs, like the famous wisdom of Cato: "Buy not what you need, but what you must have; what you do not need is dear at a penny." Or those oracles, and sayings like oracles: "Be thrifty with time!" "Know thyself!" Will you need somebody to explain the meaning when a person quotes you lines like these?
Forgetting trouble is the way to cure it.
Fortune favors the brave; the coward is defeated by his own faint heart.
Maxims like these need no special pleader. They go straight to our emotions, and they help us simply because Nature is exercising her proper function. The soul carries within itself the seed of everything honorable, and advice stirs that seed to growth, the way a spark fanned by a gentle breeze unfolds its natural fire. Virtue is roused by a touch, a jolt. Moreover, there are certain things that live in the mind and yet are not ready to hand; they begin to work easily only once they are put into words. Other things lie scattered about in various places, and the unpracticed mind cannot arrange them in order; so we should bring them into unity and join them together, to make them more powerful and more of a lift to the soul. Or, if precepts accomplish nothing at all, then every method of instruction should be abolished, and we should content ourselves with Nature alone.
The people who hold that view forget that one man is lively and quick of wit, another sluggish and dull — that some men simply have more intelligence than others. The strength of the mind is nourished and kept growing by precepts; they add new points of view to the inborn ones and straighten out warped ideas. "But suppose," people retort, "that a man does not possess sound doctrines — how can advice help him when he is chained down by vicious ones?" In this way, plainly: it frees him from them. His natural disposition has not been crushed, only overshadowed and held down. Even so it keeps trying to rise, struggling against the influences that push toward evil; and when it gets support, when the aid of precepts arrives, it grows stronger — provided the chronic trouble has not corrupted or annihilated the natural man. In that case, not even the training philosophy gives, striving with all its might, will restore him. And what is the difference, really, between the doctrines of philosophy and precepts, except that doctrines are general precepts and precepts are special ones? Both give advice — the one through the universal, the other through the particular.
Some say: "If a man is familiar with upright and honorable doctrines, advising him is superfluous." By no means. This man has indeed learned to do what he ought to do; but he does not see clearly enough what those things are. For it is not only our emotions that keep us from praiseworthy deeds; it is also lack of practice in discovering what a particular situation demands. Our minds are often under good control and yet, at the same time, idle — untrained in finding the path of duty. Advice makes that path plain. Again, it is written: "Cast out all false opinions about Good and Evil, replace them with true ones, and advice will have nothing left to do." Order in the soul can certainly be established that way — but that is not the only way. Even if proofs establish just what Good and Evil are, precepts still have their proper role. Prudence and justice consist of certain duties, and duties are set in order by precepts. What's more, our very judgment of Good and Evil is strengthened by following up our duties, and precepts lead us to that end. The two agree with each other; nor can precepts take the lead unless the duties follow. They keep their natural order — so precepts clearly come first.
"Precepts are numberless," it is said. Wrong again! On the important, essential things they are not numberless. Of course there are slight variations of time, place, and person; but even for these, precepts of general application are given. "But no one cures madness by precepts," it is said, "and therefore no one cures wickedness by them either." There is a difference. If you rid a man of insanity, his sanity returns on its own; but if we remove false opinions, insight into practical conduct does not immediately follow. And even if it did follow, counsel would still confirm his right opinion about Good and Evil. It is also wrong to believe that precepts are of no use to the mad. On their own they accomplish nothing, but they help the cure along: both scolding and correction rein a lunatic in. (I mean here lunatics whose wits are shaken, not hopelessly gone.)
"Still," it is objected, "laws do not always make us do what we ought — and what are laws but precepts with threats mixed in?" First of all: if laws fail to persuade, it is precisely because they threaten; precepts do not coerce — they correct men by pleading. Again, laws frighten a man away from crime, while precepts urge him toward his duty. And besides, laws too are a help toward good conduct — at least when they instruct as well as command. On this point I disagree with Posidonius, who says: "I do not think the preambles should have been added to Plato's Laws. A law should be brief, so that the uninstructed can grasp it the more easily. It should be like a voice sent down from heaven: it should command, not discuss. Nothing seems to me duller or more foolish than a law with a preamble. Warn me, tell me what you want me to do — I am not learning; I am obeying." No: laws framed with preambles are helpful — and notice that a state with defective laws will have defective morals. "But they do not work in every case." Well, neither does philosophy; and philosophy is not therefore ineffectual and useless in the training of the soul. And besides — what is philosophy but the Law of Life? But grant, if we like, that laws do not help; it does not follow that advice does not help either. On that ground you would have to say that consolation does not help, or warning, or exhortation, or scolding, or praise — for these are all varieties of advice, and it is by such means that we arrive at a perfected state of mind. Nothing succeeds better at bringing honorable influences to bear on the mind, or at straightening a wavering spirit inclined to evil, than the company of good men. Seen often and heard often, they sink little by little into the heart and take on the force of precepts.
The mere meeting of wise men lifts us up; a great man can help you even when he is silent. I could not easily tell you how it helps — I only know for certain that I have been helped that way. Phaedo says: "Certain tiny creatures leave no pain when they sting us; so subtle is their power, so deceptive for purposes of harm. Only a swelling reveals the bite, and even in the swelling there is no visible wound." That will be your experience in dealing with wise men: you will not discover how or when the benefit reaches you, but you will discover that you have received it. "And what is the point of this remark?" you ask. The point is that good precepts, welcomed within you often, will do you just as much good as good examples. Pythagoras declares that our souls undergo a change when we enter a temple and behold the images of the gods face to face and stand waiting for the word of an oracle. And who can deny that certain precepts strike even the rawest beginner with real force? Brief sayings, but weighty ones: "Nothing in excess." "The greedy mind no gain can satisfy." "Expect from others the treatment you have given them." We feel a kind of shock when we hear such sayings; no one ever thinks of doubting them or asking "Why?" — so strongly does plain truth attract us, even with no reason attached. If reverence reins in the soul and checks vice, why can't counsel do the same? If a rebuke can shame a man, why shouldn't counsel have the same power, even using bare precepts? And the counsel that supports its suggestion with reason — that adds why a thing should be done, and what reward waits for the man who does it and obeys — works better still and settles deeper in the heart. If commands are helpful, so is advice. But commands are helpful; therefore advice is helpful too.
Virtue divides into two parts: the contemplation of truth, and conduct. Training teaches contemplation; admonition teaches conduct. And right conduct both exercises virtue and reveals it. If a man about to act is helped by advice, he is helped by admonition too. Therefore, if right conduct is necessary to virtue, and admonition makes right conduct clear, then admonition is an indispensable thing. The soul has two strong supports — trust in the truth, and confidence — and both come from admonition. For men believe it; and once belief is established, the soul receives great inspiration and fills with confidence. Therefore admonition is not superfluous.
Marcus Agrippa — a great-souled man, and the only one of all those the civil wars raised to fame and power whose success was good for the state — used to say that he owed a great debt to the proverb: "Harmony makes small things grow; discord makes great things fall apart." He held that this saying had made him the best of brothers and the best of friends. And if proverbs of this kind, welcomed intimately into the soul, can mold the very soul, why shouldn't the branch of philosophy that consists of such proverbs carry equal influence? Virtue depends partly on training and partly on practice: you must first learn, and then strengthen what you have learned by action. If that is true, then it is not only the doctrines of wisdom that help us but the precepts too, which check and banish our passions like a kind of official decree.
It is said: "Philosophy divides into two things — knowledge, and a state of mind. For a man who has learned and understood what he should do and avoid is not yet a wise man until his mind has been remolded into the shape of what he has learned. This third department — precepts — is compounded out of the other two, from doctrine and from state of mind; so it is superfluous for the perfecting of virtue, since the other two are enough for the purpose." At that rate consolation would be superfluous too, since it is also a compound of the other two — and so would exhortation, and persuasion, and even proof itself, for proof also springs from a well-ordered and steady state of mind. But though these things flow from a sound state of mind, the sound state of mind also flows from them: it both creates them and results from them. Furthermore, what you describe is the mark of a man already perfect, one who has reached the summit of human happiness. The approach to that summit is slow; and in the meantime, in practical affairs, the path should be pointed out for the man who is still short of perfection but making progress. Wisdom may perhaps show herself this path without any prompting, once she has brought the soul to the point where it can only be moved in the right direction. Weaker characters, however, need someone to walk ahead of them and say: "Avoid this," or "Do that." Besides, if a man waits until he can know on his own what the best course of action is, he will sometimes go astray in the meantime, and going astray will keep him from ever arriving at the point where he can be content with himself. The soul must be guided at the very moment it is becoming able to guide itself. Schoolboys learn by direction: their fingers are held and guided by another hand so that they can trace the outlines of the letters; then they are told to imitate a model and form their handwriting on it. In the same way the mind is helped when it is taught by direction. Facts like these prove that this branch of philosophy is not superfluous.
The next question is whether this part alone is enough to make men wise. That problem I will take up at the proper time; but for now, setting all argument aside, isn't it obvious that we need someone to serve as our preceptor against the precepts of the world at large? No word reaches our ears without doing us harm. We are injured by good wishes and by curses alike. Our enemies' angry prayers plant false fears in us; and our friends' affection spoils us with its kindly wishes — for that affection sends us groping after goods that are far away, uncertain, and unsteady, when we could be opening the storehouse of happiness at home. We are not allowed, I tell you, to travel a straight road. Our parents draw us into wrong; our slaves draw us into wrong. Nobody confines his mistakes to himself: people sprinkle folly on their neighbors, and take it back from them in turn. That is why you find a nation's vices in each individual — because the nation gave them to him. Each man, in corrupting others, corrupts himself; he drinks in badness, and then pours it out again — and the result is one vast mass of wickedness, the worst of every separate person concentrated in a single heap.
We should therefore have a guardian, so to speak, to keep plucking us by the ear — to bat away the rumors and protest against the crowd's enthusiasms. For you are mistaken if you suppose our faults are born in us: they came from outside; they were heaped upon us. So by frequent admonitions we can push back the opinions that din around our ears. Nature allies us with no vice. She produced us whole and free. She set nothing before our eyes that might stir up the itch of greed. She put gold and silver beneath our feet, and gave those feet the job of stamping down and crushing everything that causes us to be stamped down and crushed. She lifted our gaze toward the sky, and willed that we look upward at her glorious and wonderful works: the rising and the setting sun; the whirling course of the onrushing world, which discloses the things of earth by day and the heavenly bodies by night; the movements of the stars — slow, if you compare them with the universe, yet enormously swift if you consider the size of the orbits they trace at unslackening speed; the eclipses of sun and moon, each in its turn; and all the other wonders, wonderful whether they arrive on schedule or leap suddenly into view — trails of fire by night, flashes across an open sky with no stroke or rumble of thunder, columns and beams and the varied shapes of flame. All these she ordained to travel above our heads. But gold and silver — and the iron which, because of the gold and silver, never brings peace — she hid away, as if they were dangerous things to trust to our keeping. It is we ourselves who dragged them into the light of day, so that we could fight over them. It is we ourselves who tore away the earth that covered them and dug up the causes and instruments of our own destruction. It is we ourselves who then blamed our misdeeds on Fortune, and are not ashamed to hold up as the loftiest of objects things that lately lay in the depths of the earth. Do you want to know how false the gleam is that has deceived your eyes? There is really nothing fouler, nothing more sunk in darkness, than this stuff of earth, buried and covered so long in the mud where it belongs. Of course it is foul — it was hauled up through a long, murky mine-shaft. There is nothing uglier than these metals while they are being refined and separated from the ore. And watch the workmen themselves, the ones who must handle and sift the barren grade of dirt that comes up from the bottom — see how caked with soot they are! Yet the stuff they handle dirties the soul more than the body; and there is more foulness in the owner than in the workman.
It is indispensable, then, that we be admonished — that we have some advocate of upright mind, and amid all the uproar and jangle of falsehood hear one voice only. But what voice shall it be? Surely a voice that, amid all the tumult of self-seeking, whispers wholesome words into the deafened ear, saying: "You have no need to envy the men the people call great and fortunate. Applause need not shake your composure or your sanity of mind. You need not grow disgusted with your own calm spirit at the sight of a great man in purple, ringed by the famous symbols of power. You need not judge the magistrate for whom the road is cleared to be any happier than yourself, whom his officer shoves off the road. If you would wield a command that profits you and injures nobody, clear your own faults out of the way. There are plenty of men who set fire to cities, who storm garrisons that stood impregnable for generations and safe through countless ages, who raise siege-mounds as high as the walls they are attacking, who shatter towers of wondrous height with battering-rams and engines. There are plenty who can send their columns ahead and press murderously on the enemy's rear, who can reach the Great Sea dripping with the blood of nations. But even these men, before they could conquer their enemy, were conquered by their own greed. No one withstood their attack — and they themselves could not withstand their own desire for power and impulse to cruelty. At the very moment they seemed to be hounding others, they were being hounded themselves. A mad desire to lay waste other men's territory hounded Alexander into misfortune and dispatched him to unknown countries. Do you call that man sane, who began by devastating Greece — the land where he was educated? Who snatched from each nation its dearest possession, ordering Spartans to be slaves and Athenians to hold their tongues? Not content with the ruin of all the states Philip had conquered or bribed into bondage, he knocked down commonwealth after commonwealth in place after place and carried his weapons across the whole world. His cruelty grew tired, but it never stopped — like a wild beast that tears to pieces more than its hunger demands. Already he has fused many kingdoms into one kingdom; already Greeks and Persians fear the same master; already nations Darius left free are bending under the yoke. Yet on he presses, past the Ocean, past the Sun, thinking it shame to turn his victorious course aside from the tracks of Hercules and Bacchus; he is ready to do violence to Nature herself. It is not that he wants to keep going; it is that he cannot stop — like a falling weight, whose plunge ends only when it lies motionless.
"It was not virtue or reason that persuaded Gnaeus Pompeius into foreign and civil wars; it was his mad craving for unreal glory. Now he attacked Spain and the faction of Sertorius; now he sailed off to put the pirates in chains and subdue the seas — excuses, all of it, pretexts for extending his power. What dragged him into Africa, into the North, against Mithridates, into Armenia and every corner of Asia? Nothing but a bottomless desire to grow bigger — for only in his own eyes was he not great enough. And what drove Gaius Caesar to the combined ruin of himself and the state? Glory, self-seeking, and a refusal to set any limit to his pre-eminence over all other men. He could not bear that even a single person outrank him — though the state was content to have two men standing at its head. And do you imagine that Gaius Marius — who held the consulship once by election and stole it every other time — was inspired by virtue as he slaughtered the Teutons and the Cimbri and chased Jugurtha through the wilds of Africa? Marius led armies, and ambition led Marius."
Men like these, while they were shaking the world, were shaken themselves — like cyclones, which whirl up everything they seize only because they are whirled first, and rush on with all the greater force because they have no control over themselves; and so, after wrecking so much for others, they come to feel in their own bodies the ruinous force that let them wreak havoc on so many. You must never believe that a man can become happy through the unhappiness of another. We must untangle all these examples that are forced before our eyes and crammed into our ears; we must clean out our hearts, for they are stuffed full of evil talk. Into the ground those opinions have seized, virtue must be led — the kind of virtue that roots out falsehood and every doctrine that contradicts the truth; that separates us from the crowd we trust far too much, and restores us to sound opinions. For this is wisdom: a return to Nature, a restoration to the condition from which our common errors have driven us. It is a great part of health to have deserted the counsellors of madness — to have fled far from a companionship in which each party poisons the other.
If you want proof of what I'm saying, look how differently each man lives in public and in private. A quiet home does not by itself give lessons in upright conduct; the countryside does not by itself teach plain living. But when the witnesses and the onlookers are removed, the faults that ripen on being seen and displayed sink into the background. Who puts on the purple robe with no one there to see it? Who dines off gold plate alone? Who, flinging himself down in the shade of some country tree, unpacks the splendor of his luxury in solitude? Nobody dresses up for his own eyes only, or even for the admiration of a few friends and relatives; a man spreads out his well-appointed vices in proportion to the size of the crowd admiring them. That is how it is: the claque and the witnesses are the irritants of all our mad cravings. Make us stop displaying, and you will make us stop craving. Ambition, luxury, and waywardness need a stage to perform on; you will cure them all if you keep out of sight.
Therefore, if our home must stand amid the din of a city, let there be an adviser standing at our side. When men praise great incomes, let him praise the man who can be rich on a small estate and measures his wealth by the use he makes of it. When men glorify influence and power, let him recommend, unprompted, a leisure devoted to study — a soul that has turned away from external things and found itself. Let him point out men who are happy by the crowd's reckoning but who totter on their envied heights of power — dismayed, holding an opinion of themselves very different from what everyone else holds. What others see as an eminence, they experience as a sheer drop. So their hearts sink and they flutter with fear whenever they look down the steep face of their own greatness; for they reflect that there are many ways of falling, and that the topmost point is the most slippery footing of all. Then they dread the very thing they fought for, and the good fortune that made them weighty in other men's eyes weighs still more heavily on themselves. Then they praise easy leisure and independence; they hate the glitter and look for an escape while their fortunes still stand. Then, at last, you may watch them turning to philosophy out of fear, and hunting for sound advice as their fortunes run aground. For good fortune and good sense stand, as it were, at opposite poles — that is why we are wiser in the midst of adversity. It is prosperity that takes away right judgment.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You keep asking me to take up, right now and without postponement, a topic I once said should wait for its proper time: whether the department of philosophy the Greeks call "paraenetic" and we Romans call "preceptorial" — the giving of practical advice — is enough by itself to make us perfectly wise. Now, I know you would take it in good part if I refused. But that is exactly why I accept your request all the more willingly, and I refuse to let the old saying lose its point:
Don't ask for what you'll wish you hadn't got.
For sometimes we work hard to get things we would turn down if they were freely offered. Call that fickleness or call it childishness — either way, the cure for the habit is prompt compliance. There are plenty of things we want people to think we want, when we really don't. A lecturer sometimes hauls onto the platform an enormous work of research, written in the tiniest handwriting and rolled up tight; after reading off a good chunk of it he says, "I'll stop, if you like" — and up goes the shout, "Read on! Read on!" from the very people who are praying he'll shut his mouth then and there. We often want one thing and pray for another, and we don't tell the truth even to the gods — while the gods either don't listen, or take pity on us. Well, I shall be entirely without pity, and take my revenge by loading a huge letter onto your shoulders. If you find yourself reading it with reluctance, you may say, "I brought this on myself," and count yourself among the men driven frantic by the ambitious wives they schemed to marry, or the men tormented by riches they sweated blood to earn, or the men tortured by the titles they chased with every trick and every ounce of effort they had — and all the others who are the authors of their own misfortunes.
But enough preamble; let me come to the question. People argue like this: "The happy life consists in upright conduct; precepts guide us to upright conduct; therefore precepts are sufficient for the happy life." But precepts do not always guide us to upright conduct. They work only when the will is receptive; sometimes they are applied entirely in vain, when wrong opinions have the soul in their grip. Besides, a man may act rightly without knowing that he is acting rightly. Nobody, unless he has been trained from the start and equipped with complete reason, can develop to full proportions — understanding when he should do a given thing, and how far, and with whom, and how, and why. Without that training a man cannot strive wholeheartedly after what is honorable, or even steadily or gladly; he will forever be glancing back over his shoulder and wavering.
Then it is argued: "If honorable conduct results from precepts, then precepts are amply sufficient for the happy life; the first statement is true; therefore so is the second." Our reply: honorable conduct is indeed brought about by precepts — but not by precepts alone. "Well then," comes the answer, "if the other arts get along on precepts, wisdom can get along on them too; for wisdom is itself an art — the art of living. A pilot is made by precepts that tell him to turn the tiller this way and that, set his sails, use a fair wind, tack, make the best of shifting and contrary breezes — all in the proper manner. Other craftsmen are drilled by precepts too; so precepts can do the same job for our craftsman in the art of living." But notice: all those arts are concerned with the tools of life, not with life as a whole. That is why so much can clog them from the outside and complicate them — hope, greed, fear. But the art that professes to teach the art of living cannot be blocked by any circumstance from doing its work; it shakes off the tangles and drives straight through the obstacles. Would you like to know how different its standing is from that of the other arts? In their case, it is more forgivable to go wrong on purpose than by accident; in the case of wisdom, the worst fault of all is to sin deliberately. Here is what I mean. A scholar will blush for shame if he makes a grammatical blunder by accident — not if he makes one on purpose. A doctor who fails to notice that his patient is sinking is a far worse practitioner than one who notices it and hides what he knows. But in this art of living, it is the deliberate mistake that is the more shameful.
Furthermore, many arts — and the most liberal of them at that — have their own bodies of doctrine, not mere precepts of advice. Medicine, for example: hence the different schools of Hippocrates, of Asclepiades, of Themison. And no art with a theoretical side can exist without its own doctrines — the Greeks call them dogmas, while we Romans may say "doctrines" or "tenets" or "adopted principles," the sort of thing you find in geometry or astronomy. But philosophy is both theoretical and practical; it contemplates and acts at the same time. You are quite mistaken if you think philosophy offers you nothing but everyday assistance; her ambitions run far higher than that. "I investigate the whole universe," she cries. "I do not stay shut up in a mortal dwelling, content to hand you advice for or against. Great matters summon me — matters set far above your head." As Lucretius puts it:
To you I shall reveal the ways of heaven And of the gods, and spread before your eyes The atoms — out of which all things are born, Grow, and are fed by nature's building power, And into which she breaks them at the end.
Philosophy, then, being theoretical, must have her doctrines. And why? Because no one can perform right actions properly except the man who has been entrusted with reason — reason that will let him, in every case, fulfill every category of duty. And he cannot honor those categories unless he receives precepts for every occasion, not just the present one. Precepts by themselves are weak — rootless, so to speak — if they are attached to the parts of life and not to the whole. It is the doctrines that fortify us, that keep us safe and calm, that take in at one sweep the whole of life and the whole of the universe. The difference between philosophical doctrines and precepts is the difference between elements and limbs: the limbs depend on the elements, while the elements are the source of the limbs and of everything else.
"But the old-style wisdom," people say, "did nothing but tell you what to do and what to avoid — and the men of those days were far better men. Ever since the scholars showed up, the sages have grown scarce. That frank, simple virtue has turned into hidden and crafty cleverness; we are taught how to argue, not how to live." No doubt the old wisdom, especially in its beginnings, was crude — just as the other arts were, which grew refined as they went along. But in those days there was not yet any need for carefully engineered remedies. Wickedness had not yet risen so high, or scattered itself so widely. Plain vices could be treated by plain cures. Now we need defenses built with all the more care, because the forces attacking us are so much stronger. Medicine was once the knowledge of a few herbs — to stop bleeding, to heal wounds; by degrees it reached its present tangled variety. And no wonder medicine had less to do in the early days! Men's bodies were still sound and strong; their food was light, unspoiled by art and luxury. But once they began to seek out dishes not to satisfy appetite but to arouse it, and devised countless sauces to whip up their gluttony, then what had been nourishment to a hungry man became a burden to a stuffed stomach. From that come pallor, and the trembling of wine-soaked muscles, and a wasted thinness that owes more to indigestion than to hunger. From that come weak, tottering steps, and a stagger like a drunkard's walk. From that comes dropsy, spreading under the whole skin, and the belly swelling into a paunch from the standing habit of taking in more than it can hold. From that come yellow jaundice, discolored faces, bodies rotting from within, fingers going knotty as the joints stiffen, muscles numbed past all feeling, and the heart pounding away without pause. Why should I mention the dizzy spells? Or the pain of the eye and the ear, the itching and throbbing of a fevered brain, and ulcers all through the digestive tract? Beyond these there are countless kinds of fever — some savagely acute, some creeping up on us with quiet damage, others arriving with chills and violent shaking. Why go through the other numberless diseases — the tortures that high living hands out?
Men used to be free of such ills, because they had not yet gone soft with indulgence, because they still governed themselves and supplied their own needs. They toughened their bodies with work and genuine toil, wearing themselves out with running or hunting or working the soil. They came home to food that only a hungry man could enjoy. Hence there was no need for our huge medical apparatus, all the instruments and the pill-boxes. Their health was plain for a plain reason: it takes elaborate courses to produce elaborate diseases. Just count the number of things — all destined for a single throat — that luxury mixes together after ransacking land and sea. So many different foods are bound to disagree with each other; they go down with difficulty and are digested with difficulty, each one jostling against the rest. No wonder the diseases bred by ill-assorted food are shifting and manifold; when so many unnatural combinations are dumped in together, something has to overflow. That is why there are as many ways of being sick as there are ways of living. The illustrious founder of the medical profession remarked that women never lose their hair or suffer pain in the feet. Yet nowadays their hair falls out and their feet ache with gout. Woman's physical nature has not changed; it has been conquered. By matching men's indulgences they have also matched men's diseases. They stay up just as late, they drink just as hard; they challenge the men at wrestling and at carousing; they match them in vomiting up from strained stomachs all the wine they poured in — drinking to vomit, and vomiting to drink again; they match them, too, in chewing ice to soothe a fevered digestion. Even in their lusts they yield nothing to the males — although they were born to the passive role (may the gods and goddesses confound them!) — devising the most contorted varieties of unchastity, and playing the man's part in men's company. Why be surprised, then, that we can catch out the greatest and most skilled of physicians in a false statement, when so many women are gouty and bald? By their vices they have forfeited the privileges of their sex; having put off their womanhood, they are condemned to suffer the diseases of men.
The doctors of the old days knew nothing of prescribing frequent feedings and propping up a feeble pulse with wine; they did not understand the drawing of blood, or easing chronic conditions with sweat-baths; they did not know how, by binding the ankles and arms, to draw back to the surface the hidden strength that had retreated to the core. They were not forced to hunt up so many varieties of relief, because the varieties of suffering were so few. But now — look how far the evils of ill-health have advanced! This is the interest we pay on the pleasures we coveted past all reason and all decency. Are you surprised that diseases are beyond counting? Count the cooks. All serious study is at a standstill; teachers of the liberal arts lecture to empty rooms in out-of-the-way corners. The halls of the professors and the philosophers stand deserted — but look at the crowd in the cookshops! Look how many young men besiege the kitchens of their gluttonous patrons! I pass over the troops of unhappy boys who, when the banquet is finally over, must endure other humiliations in the bedroom. I pass over the regiments of slave-boys kept for lust, sorted by nation and by color — all required to have the same smooth skin, the same first down on the cheek, the same style of hair, so that no straight-haired boy gets mixed in among the curly-heads. I pass over the swarm of bakers, and the mob of waiters who scurry in with the courses at a signal. Ye gods — how many men kept busy in the service of a single belly! What — do you imagine those mushrooms, the epicure's poison, are doing no secret damage, even if they haven't struck yet? Do you suppose your snow in summer doesn't harden the tissue of the liver? Do you suppose those oysters — sluggish meat fattened on slime — don't load a man down with their mud-bred heaviness? Do you suppose the so-called "Sauce of the Provinces," that costly extract of rotten fish, doesn't scald the stomach with its salted putrefaction? Do you suppose those festering delicacies, swallowed practically flaming from the kitchen fire, are quenched in the digestive tract without doing any harm? Then how foul and how unhealthy their belches are — and how men disgust themselves, breathing out the fumes of yesterday's debauch! You may be certain their food is not being digested. It is rotting.
I remember once hearing gossip about a notorious dish into which a cookshop, on its way to a well-earned bankruptcy, had piled together everything the epicures love to linger over: two kinds of mussels, and oysters trimmed round to the edible line, set off at intervals by sea-urchins, the whole thing flanked with mullets, filleted and served boneless. These days we are ashamed of foods served one at a time; people mash many flavors into one. The dinner table now does the work the stomach ought to do. I fully expect, next, to see food served pre-chewed — and how far off is that, really, when the shells and bones are picked out for us and the cook performs the office of the teeth?
"It's too much trouble," they say, "to take our luxuries one at a time. Let's have everything served at once, blended into a single flavor. Why should I reach for one dish at a time? Let many arrive together; let the dainties of the separate courses be combined and confounded. Those who used to claim this was all done for show and vanity should understand: it is not for display — it is a solemn offering to our sense of duty! Let the dishes usually served in sequence come drenched together in one sauce. Let there be no distinctions: let oysters, sea-urchins, shellfish, and mullets be mixed up and cooked in the same pan." Vomited food could not be jumbled together more thoroughly. And as the food is confounded, so the resulting diseases are complex, unaccountable, manifold, variegated — and medicine has had to arm itself against them with many weapons and many rules of treatment.
Now I tell you the same holds for philosophy. It was once simpler, because men's sins were on a smaller scale and could be cured with modest effort; but in the face of this moral upheaval, every remedy must be tried. And if only the plague could be beaten even so! We are mad — not just individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and the murder of individuals; but what about war, and the celebrated glory of slaughtering whole peoples? Our greed knows no limits; neither does our cruelty. And as long as such crimes are committed quietly, by single men, they are less harmful and less monstrous; but now cruelty is practiced by decree of senate and popular assembly, and the state orders publicly what it forbids privately. Deeds that would cost a man his life if done in secret, we applaud because generals in uniform carried them out. Man, the gentlest species of all by nature, is not ashamed to revel in one another's blood, to wage war, and to hand war down to his sons — when even the dumb beasts, even the wild ones, keep peace with their own kind. Against this overpowering, epidemic madness, philosophy has become a heavier labor; she has had to gain strength in proportion to the strength of what she fights.
It used to be easy to scold the men who were slaves to the bottle and hunted after fancier food; it took no great effort to lead the spirit back to a simplicity it had strayed from only a little way. But now
One needs the rapid hand, the master's craft.
Men hunt pleasure from every source. No vice stays within its own limits; luxury topples over into greed. Honor has fallen into oblivion. Nothing is shameful anymore, if it fetches a good price. Man — a sacred thing to man — is slaughtered for sport; men whom it was once a sacrilege even to train for the giving and receiving of wounds are now driven into the arena naked and unarmed, and a human being turned into a corpse is judged a satisfying show.
Amid this wreckage of morals, something stronger than the usual is needed — something to shake off ills grown chronic. To root out beliefs in error that have sunk this deep, conduct must be governed by doctrines. Only when we add precepts, consolation, and encouragement to those doctrines can they prevail; by themselves, precepts are ineffective. If we want to hold men fast and tear them free of the ills that grip them, they must learn what is evil and what is good. They must know that everything except virtue changes its name, turning now good and now bad. Just as the soldier's first bond is his oath of allegiance — his love for the standard and his horror of desertion — and just as, once the oath has been sworn, every other duty can easily be demanded of him and every trust placed in him: so it is with those you would lead to the happy life. The foundations must be laid first, and virtue worked deep into the man. Let men be held by something like a religious devotion to virtue; let them love her; let them long to live with her, and refuse to live without her.
"But wait," people say. "Haven't certain men reached excellence without any elaborate training? Haven't they made great progress obeying bare precepts alone?" Quite true — but they had lucky temperaments; they snatched salvation in passing, as it were. For just as the immortal gods never learned virtue — being born with virtue complete, goodness built into their very nature — so certain men are fitted with extraordinary gifts and arrive without a long apprenticeship at what is ordinarily a matter of teaching, embracing what is honorable the moment they hear it. Hence the choice minds that seize on virtue at once, or produce it from within themselves. But your dull, sluggish fellow, hobbled by bad habits, must have this rust scoured off his soul again and again. Now, since those inclined toward the good can be lifted to the heights more quickly, the weaker spirits, too, will be helped and freed from their false opinions if we entrust to them the settled principles of philosophy — and you may see how essential those principles are in the following way. Certain things sink into us and make us sluggish in some directions and headlong in others. These two faults — recklessness and sloth — cannot be checked or roused until we remove their causes, which are mistaken admiration and mistaken fear. So long as those feelings possess us, you may say to us, "You owe this duty to your father, this to your children, this to your friends, this to your guests" — and greed will hold us back, try as we may. A man may know he should fight for his country; fear talks him out of it. A man may know he should sweat out his last drop of strength for his friends; soft living forbids it. A man may know that keeping a mistress is the deepest insult to his wife; lust drives him the other way. So it is useless to hand out precepts unless you first clear away what will stand in the precepts' path; it does no more good than laying weapons beside a man and marching him up to the enemy with his hands tied. To deal with the precepts we offer, the soul must first be set free. Suppose a man is doing just what he ought: he cannot keep it up continuously or consistently, because he will not know why he is doing it. Some of his conduct will come out right through luck or through practice, but he will hold in his hand no rule to measure his actions by — nothing he can trust to tell him whether what he has done is right. A man who is good by accident gives no guarantee of staying good forever. Furthermore, precepts may perhaps help you to do what ought to be done; they will not help you do it in the right way — and if they don't get you that far, they don't lead you to virtue. I grant that a man who is warned will do what he should. But that isn't enough, because the credit lies not in the deed itself but in the way it is done. What is more shameful than a lavish dinner that eats through a knight's whole income? What deserves the censor's condemnation more than a man forever indulging himself and — as the gluttons say — his "inner man"? And yet many a careful man has spent a cool million on his inaugural dinner! The very sum called disgraceful when spent on appetite is beyond reproach when spent for official purposes. For then it isn't luxury — it's an expense sanctioned by custom.
A mullet of monstrous size was once presented to the Emperor Tiberius. They say it weighed four and a half pounds — and why shouldn't I tickle certain epicures' palates by naming its weight? Tiberius ordered it sent to the fish-market and put up for sale, remarking, "My friends, I shall be very much surprised if either Apicius or Publius Octavius doesn't buy that mullet." The guess came truer than he expected: the two men bid against each other, and Octavius won — earning a tremendous reputation among his set because he had paid five thousand sesterces for a fish the Emperor had sold and even Apicius had failed to buy. Paying such a price was disgraceful for Octavius, but not for the man who first bought the fish to present it to Tiberius — though I would blame him as well; still, at least he admired it as a gift he thought worthy of Caesar.
When people sit at the bedsides of sick friends, we honor them for it. But when people do it to angle for a legacy, they are vultures waiting for the carcass. The same act can be shameful or honorable: the purpose and the manner make all the difference. Now, every act of ours will be honorable if we pledge our allegiance to honor and judge honor, and what flows from it, to be the only good that can fall to a man — everything else being good only for a day. So I hold that there must be planted deep in us a settled conviction that applies to life as a whole: this is what I call a doctrine. As that conviction is, so will our acts and thoughts be; and as our acts and thoughts are, so will our lives be. When you are ordering an entire existence, advice about the details is not enough. Marcus Brutus, in the book he entitled On Duty, gives many precepts to parents, to children, to brothers; but no one will do his duty as he ought unless he has some principle to refer his conduct to. We must set before our eyes the goal of the Supreme Good — something to strive toward, something every act and every word can look to for its bearings — just as sailors must steer by a fixed star. Life without an ideal is aimless drifting; and the moment an ideal has to be set up, doctrines become necessary. You will admit, I am sure, that nothing is more shameful than hesitant, wavering conduct — than the habit of timidly backing out. And that will be our experience in everything, until we remove whatever checks the spirit, whatever clogs it and keeps it from committing itself wholly to the attempt.
Precepts are commonly given on how the gods should be worshipped. But let us forbid the lighting of lamps on the Sabbath: the gods have no need of light, and even men take no pleasure in soot. Let us forbid the morning levee and the crowding of temple doorways: those ceremonies flatter human ambition — God is worshipped by those who know him. Let us forbid the carrying of towels and body-scrapers to Jupiter, and the holding of mirrors for Juno: God seeks no servants. Of course not — he himself is mankind's servant; everywhere, and for everyone, he stands ready to help. A man may hear all about the proper limits of sacrifice, and how far to keep clear of burdensome superstition; but he will never make real progress until he has formed a right conception of God — as the one who possesses all things and allots all things, and gives them freely, without price. And what reason do the gods have for their kindnesses? Their nature. Anyone who thinks they are merely unwilling to do harm is mistaken: they cannot do harm. They can neither suffer injury nor inflict it — for to harm and to be harmed belong to the same order of things. Universal nature, glorious and beautiful in all her parts, has made those she lifted beyond the danger of evil incapable of dealing it out.
The first way to worship the gods is to believe in the gods. The next is to acknowledge their majesty — and their goodness, without which there is no majesty; to know that they are the powers presiding over the universe, ruling all things by their strength and standing guard over the human race, even though they sometimes take no notice of the individual man. They neither have evil nor give it; but they do chasten certain men, and restrain them, and impose penalties — and sometimes their punishment comes disguised as a blessing. Would you win the gods' favor? Be a good man. Whoever imitates them has worshipped them enough. Then comes the second question: how to deal with men. What is our aim? What precepts do we give? To abstain from bloodshed? What a small thing it is not to harm the very person you ought to help! High praise indeed, that a human being should be gentle to a human being! Shall we advise stretching out a hand to the shipwrecked sailor, pointing the road to the lost traveler, sharing bread with the starving? Yes — when I can first list everything that ought to be given or withheld. In the meantime, I can lay down for mankind one short rule covering all our duties to one another: everything you see, everything that contains both the divine and the human, is one. We are all limbs of one great body. Nature made us kin, creating us from the same materials and for the same ends. She planted in us love for one another and made us for fellowship. She established fairness and justice; and by her decree, it is more wretched to do harm than to suffer it. By her command, let our hands be ready wherever help is needed. Keep this verse in your heart and on your lips:
I am a man; nothing that touches man Do I count foreign to me.
Let us hold things in common — for our birth is in common. Human society is like a stone arch: it would fall if the stones did not brace one another — and that mutual pressure is exactly what holds it up.
Next, after gods and men, let us consider how to make use of things. It is pointless to have rattled off precepts unless we begin by settling what opinion we ought to hold of each thing — of poverty, riches, fame, disgrace, one's country, exile. Let us shut rumor out and set a value on each thing for ourselves, asking what it is rather than what it is called.
Now to the virtues. Some will advise us to rate prudence very high, to cherish courage, and to cling to justice, if possible, more tightly than to any other quality. But this will do us no good if we do not know what virtue is — whether it is simple or compound; whether it is one or many; whether its parts stand separate or are woven together; whether the man who has one virtue has them all; and how, exactly, they differ from one another. A carpenter has no need to investigate his craft in terms of its origin or its purpose, any more than a pantomime dancer must investigate the art of dance; those arts understand themselves, and that is enough — they do not refer to life as a whole. But virtue is knowledge of other things as well as of herself: to learn virtue, we must learn everything about virtue. Conduct will not be right unless the will behind it is right, for the will is the source of conduct. And the will cannot be right without a right attitude of mind, for the mind is the source of the will. And that attitude of mind will not be found even in the best of men unless he has learned the laws of life as a whole, worked out a sound judgment on everything, and measured facts against the standard of truth. Peace of mind belongs only to those who have reached a fixed and unchanging standard of judgment; everyone else ebbs and flows in their decisions, floating between rejecting things and chasing them. And what causes all this tossing back and forth? Nothing is clear to them, because they consult the least reliable of all authorities — rumor. If you would always desire the same things, you must desire the truth. And no one reaches the truth without doctrines, for doctrines take in the whole of life. Good and evil, honorable and disgraceful, just and unjust, dutiful and undutiful; the virtues and their exercise; the possession of comforts; reputation and standing; health, strength, beauty, sharpness of the senses — all of these call for someone able to appraise them. You should be permitted to know what each item on the list is really worth; for you are often deceived into thinking things are worth more than they are — so badly deceived that what men rate highest of all — riches, influence, power — should really be marked down to a penny.
You will never understand this unless you have examined the actual standard by which such things are measured against each other. Just as leaves cannot flourish on their own — they need a branch to hold to and draw sap from — so your precepts, taken alone, wither away; they must be grafted onto a school of philosophy. Besides, those who abolish doctrines don't see that the very arguments they use to disprove doctrines establish them. For what are they saying? That precepts are sufficient to equip a life, and that the doctrines of wisdom — the dogmas — are superfluous. But that very claim is a doctrine — just as it would be if I now declared that precepts must be dropped as superfluous, that doctrines alone should be used, and that our studies should aim at doctrines only: by the very act of declaring that precepts should not be taken seriously, I would be uttering a precept. Some matters in philosophy call for admonition; others call for proof — and a great deal of proof, because they are complicated and can barely be untangled with the utmost care and the utmost skill in argument. If proofs are necessary, so are doctrines, for doctrines deduce the truth by reasoning. Some things are plain, some are obscure: plain, whatever the senses and the memory can take hold of; obscure, whatever lies beyond their reach.
But reason is not satisfied with the obvious. Its higher and nobler business is with hidden things. Hidden things require proof; proof cannot come without doctrines; therefore doctrines are necessary. What produces settled conviction — and perfected conviction too — is assured belief in certain facts; and if, for lack of that assurance, everything drifts loose in our minds, then doctrines are indispensable, for they give the mind the means of unswerving judgment. When we advise a man to value his friends as highly as himself, to remember that an enemy can become a friend, to cultivate love in the one and soften hatred in the other, we add: "This is just and honorable." But the just and honorable element in our doctrines is grasped by reason; so reason is necessary, for without it the doctrines cannot exist either. But let us join the two together. Branches are useless without their roots — and the roots themselves are strengthened by the growth they have produced. Everyone can see how useful the hands are; their help is out in the open. But the heart, which gives the hands their growth and power and motion, is hidden. I can say the same of precepts: they are out in the open, while the doctrines of wisdom lie concealed. And just as only the initiated know the innermost portion of the rites, so in philosophy the hidden truths are revealed only to those who have been received and admitted into her mysteries — while precepts and the like are familiar even to outsiders.
Posidonius holds that not only precept-giving (nothing stops me from using the word) but even persuasion, consolation, and encouragement are necessary. To these he adds the investigation of causes — and I don't see why I shouldn't dare to call it "aetiology," since the scholars who mount guard over the Latin language use the term as if they had every right to. He remarks that it will also be useful to give a portrait of each particular virtue; this science Posidonius calls "ethology," while others call it "characterization." It sets out the signs and marks belonging to each virtue and each vice, so that like can be told from like. Its function is the same as precept-giving. The man who gives precepts says, "If you would have self-control, do this and this." The man who draws the portrait says, "The man who does this and this, and refrains from that, is the man who has self-control." What's the difference, you ask? One gives the precepts of virtue, the other gives virtue in the flesh. These portraits — these samples, to borrow the merchant's word — do have their use, I admit; just put them on display with a good recommendation, and you will find men to copy them. Wouldn't you consider it useful to be given the marks by which to recognize a thoroughbred horse, so that you aren't cheated in your purchase or left wasting your time on a nag? Then how much more useful to know the marks of a surpassingly fine soul — marks one man may take over from another for himself!
Straightway the foal of the noble herd, brought up in the pastures, Marches with spirited step, and sets down his feet with a light touch; First on the dangerous path he goes, and into the threatening river, Trusting himself to the unknown bridge, unafraid at its creakings; Neck carried high in the air, and a clean-cut head, and a belly Spare, and a rounded back, and a breast abounding in courage And muscle. And when the far-off clash of weapons resounds, he Cannot stand still: he pricks up his ears, and his limbs are all trembling, And out he pours the pent-up fire held close in his nostrils.
Vergil's description, though it refers to something else, might perfectly well be the portrait of a brave man; at any rate, I would choose no other image for a hero. If I had to describe Cato — unterrified amid the din of civil war, first to attack the armies already marching on the Alps, throwing himself face-forward into the civil conflict — this is exactly the bearing and expression I would give him. Surely no one ever "marched with more spirited step" than the man who rose against Caesar and Pompey at the same time and, while some backed Caesar's party and others Pompey's, threw down his challenge to both — showing that the Republic, too, still had someone on its side. For it is not enough to say of Cato "unafraid at its creakings." Of course he is not afraid! He does not flinch at real and present thunder; in the face of ten legions, Gallic auxiliaries, and a motley host of citizens and foreigners, he speaks the language of freedom, urging the Republic not to give up the fight for liberty but to hazard everything — declaring that it is more honorable to fall into servitude than to fall in step with it. What force, what energy is his! What confidence, in the midst of the general panic! He knows he is the one man whose standing is not in question — that men do not ask whether Cato is free, but whether he is still among the free. Hence his contempt for danger and for the sword. What a pleasure it is to say, in admiration of a hero's unflinching steadiness while the whole state fell in ruins around him:
A breast abounding in courage and muscle!
It will help not only to describe the usual character of good men and sketch their figure and features, but to relate and retell the actual men there have been of this kind. We might picture Cato's last and bravest wound, through which Freedom breathed her last; or the wise Laelius, and the harmony of his life with his friend Scipio; or the noble deeds of the Elder Cato at home and abroad; or the wooden couches of Tubero, spread at a public feast — goatskins in place of tapestry, and earthenware vessels set out for the banquet before the very shrine of Jupiter. What was that but consecrating poverty on the Capitol? Even if I knew no other deed of his to rank him with the Catos, is that one not enough? It was a censorship, not a banquet. How pitifully the men who covet glory misunderstand what glory is, and how it should be sought! On that day the Roman people looked over the furniture of many hosts, and marveled at one man's only. The gold and silver of all the rest has been broken up and melted down a hundred times over; but Tubero's earthenware will outlast eternity.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Still grumbling? Still complaining, after everything? Don't you see that in all the evils you list there is really only one — the fact that you grumble and complain? If you ask me, nothing is miserable for a man unless there is something in the universe he has decided to call miserable. The day I find anything in my life unendurable, I will have become unendurable to myself.
I'm sick — that's part of my lot. My slaves have come down with fever, my income has dropped, my house is falling apart; losses, accidents, hard labor, and alarms have hit me from every side — well, that's a common story. No, that was an understatement: it's an inevitable story. Things like this come by assignment, not by accident. If you'll believe me, I'm opening my inmost feelings to you right now: whenever everything seems to go hard and uphill, I have trained myself not merely to obey God but to agree with his decisions. I follow him because my soul chooses to, not because I have to. Nothing will ever happen to me that I'll receive with a sour temper or a long face. There is no tax I won't pay willingly. And all the things that make us groan and flinch are simply the tax of living — things, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope to escape, and never ask to.
It was disease of the bladder that had you frightened; gloomy letters kept arriving; you kept getting worse. Let me come a little closer to the truth: you were afraid for your life. But come now — when you prayed for a long life, didn't you know that this was what you were praying for? A long life contains all these troubles, just as a long journey contains dust and mud and rain. "But," you cry, "I wanted to live, and to be immune from every ill at the same time." A cry like that does no credit to a man. Here is a prayer of mine instead — consider the spirit you should receive it in, because I offer it in not just a good spirit but a noble one: "May the gods and goddesses never allow Fortune to keep you in luxury!" Ask yourself honestly: if some god gave you the choice, would you rather live your life in a tavern or in an army camp?
And life, Lucilius, is a soldier's service. So the men who are tossed about at sea, who slog uphill and downhill over punishing crags, who draw the campaigns of greatest danger — these are the heroes, the front-rank fighters. The ones who loll in rotten luxury while other men sweat are turtle-doves: safe only because nobody thinks them worth striking.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You're mistaken, my dear Lucilius, if you think that luxury, the neglect of decent manners, and the other vices every man charges against his own times belong especially to our era. They are the vices of mankind, not of the times. No age has been free of guilt. In fact, once you start auditing the misconduct of any particular period, you will find — to humanity's shame be it said — that sin never walked around more openly than in Cato's own presence.
Would anyone believe that money changed hands at the trial of Clodius? He stood accused of secret adultery with Caesar's wife, and of profaning the ritual of that sacrifice which is offered on behalf of the people — the rite from which every male is banished so strictly that even pictures of male animals are covered up. And yet the jury was bribed; and — fouler still than the bribe — the seduction of married women and noble youths was demanded and thrown in as a kind of bonus payment. The charge contained less sin than the acquittal did: the defendant in an adultery case parceled out adulteries, and could not feel sure of his own safety until he had made the jurors criminals like himself. All this was done at a trial where Cato gave evidence — though that was his only part in the affair.
I'll quote Cicero's actual words, because the facts are too bad for belief: "He summoned them, made promises, pleaded, gave gifts. And more than that — merciful heavens, what a rotten state of affairs! — on several of the jurors, to round out their pay, he even bestowed nights with certain women and introductions to youths of noble family." The bribe itself isn't worth our shock; the extras were worse. "Would you like the wife of A., that solemn prig? Done. Or of B., the millionaire? I'll guarantee you sleep with her. Fail to commit adultery, and you're free to convict Clodius. That beauty you've been wanting will pay you a visit — I promise you a night in her company without delay, and my promise will be honored inside the legal period of postponement." Parceling out crimes like that means more than committing them; it means blackmailing the dignified married women of Rome. These Clodius jurors had asked the Senate for a bodyguard — a favor only a jury intending to convict could have needed — and the request was granted. Hence the witty remark of Catulus after the defendant got off: "Why did you ask us for the guard? Were you afraid of having your money stolen?" And amid jokes like these a man went unpunished who before the trial was an adulterer, during the trial a pimp — a man who escaped conviction more foully than he had earned it.
Can you believe any morals were ever more corrupt than those — when lust could not keep its hands off either religious worship or the courts of law, when in the very inquiry the Senate convened by special order, more crime was committed than investigated? The question on trial was whether a man could be safe after committing adultery; the answer turned out to be that he could not be safe without committing it. And all this bargaining went on in the presence of Pompey and Caesar, of Cicero and Cato — yes, the very Cato whose presence, they say, made the crowd give up demanding the usual routine of naked actresses at the Floralia, the spring festival. If you can believe it: men behaved more strictly at a festival than in a courtroom! Such things will be done in the future, as they have been done in the past; and the licentiousness of cities will sometimes ebb through discipline and fear — never on its own.
So don't believe that ours is the generation that has yielded most to lust and least to law. Today's young men live far more simply than the young men of an era when a defendant denied an adultery charge before his judges and his judges confessed to it before the defendant — when debauchery was practiced to secure a verdict, and Clodius, in favor thanks to the very vices he was on trial for, played the pimp during the actual hearing of his case. Could anyone believe it? The man whom one adultery would have condemned was acquitted because of many. Every age will produce men like Clodius; not every age will produce men like Cato. We slide into degeneracy easily, because we lack neither guides nor companions in our wickedness — and the wickedness marches on even without guides or companions. The road to vice is not just downhill; it is steep. And what makes so many men incorrigible is this: in every other craft, mistakes shame the good craftsman and gall the one who makes them, but the mistakes of life are a positive pleasure. The pilot does not rejoice when his ship goes over on her beam-ends; the doctor does not rejoice when he buries his patient; the lawyer does not rejoice when his client loses the case through his advocate's bungling. But every man enjoys his own crimes. A. delights in an affair — the difficulty was exactly what attracted him. B. delights in forgery and theft, and is displeased with his sin only when his sin has missed its mark. All of this is what perverted habit produces.
And yet — here is the other side, and it proves that even souls led into the most depraved ways keep a buried sense of right conduct, that men are not ignorant of what evil is but indifferent to it — all men hide their sins. However well things turn out, they enjoy the profits while concealing how they got them. A good conscience wants to step forward and be seen; wickedness is afraid even of the shadows. So I think Epicurus put it very aptly: "The guilty man may have the luck to remain hidden; the confidence that he will remain hidden he can never have." Or, if you think the meaning comes across more clearly this way: "Concealment does wrongdoers no good, because even when they have the luck of it, they never have the assurance of it." What I mean is this: crimes can be well guarded; they cannot be carefree.
This view, I maintain, is not at odds with the principles of our school, if it is explained properly. Why? Because the first and greatest punishment of sinners is the fact of having sinned. Crime may be decked out with Fortune's favors; she may protect it, take it under her wing — it can never go unpunished, since the punishment of the crime lies in the crime itself. But hard on the heels of that first punishment come the second ones: constant fear, constant dread, and distrust of one's own safety.
Why, then, should I let wickedness off with anything less? Why shouldn't I leave it hanging forever in suspense? Let us disagree with Epicurus on the one point — when he declares that nothing is just by nature, and that crime should be avoided only because the fear it breeds cannot be avoided. But let us agree with him on the other: that bad deeds are lashed by the whip of conscience, and that conscience suffers its worst torture because endless anxiety drives and flogs it on, and it can never trust the guarantors of its own peace of mind. For this, Epicurus, is exactly the proof that we shrink from crime by nature: even in perfect safety, there is no guilty man who does not feel afraid. Luck frees many men from punishment; it frees no man from fear. Why should that be, if not that nature has condemned certain things, and a loathing for them is bred into us? That is why even men who hide their sins can never count on staying hidden: their conscience convicts them and shows them to themselves. To be afraid is the very property of guilt. With so many crimes escaping the law and its prescribed punishments, we would have come off badly — except that those grievous offenses against nature must pay their penalty in ready cash, and where the punishment does not fall, the fear falls in its place.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Never believe that anyone who depends on happiness is happy. Delight in things that come from outside is a fragile prop; the joy that walked in will someday walk out. But the joy that springs wholly from within is loyal and sound; it grows, and it stays with us to the last. Everything else the crowd admires is a good for a day only. "What do you mean?" you reply. "Can't such things be useful and delightful too?" Of course they can — but only if they depend on us, and not we on them. Everything Fortune looks upon becomes fruitful and pleasant only if its possessor is also in possession of himself, and is not the property of his own property. For men make a mistake, my dear Lucilius, when they hold that Fortune gives us anything, good or evil. She gives us only the raw material of goods and ills — the beginnings of things which, in our keeping, will grow into good or into evil. The soul is stronger than any Fortune; by its own action it steers its affairs in either direction, and by its own power it makes its life a happy one or a wretched one.
A bad man turns everything bad — even things that arrived wearing the look of the best. An upright and honest man corrects the wrongs of Fortune; he softens hardship and bitterness because he knows how to endure them; he accepts prosperity with gratitude and moderation, and stands against trouble with steadiness and courage. A man may be prudent, may weigh every interest with balanced judgment, may attempt nothing beyond his strength — he will still never reach the good that is pure and beyond the reach of threats unless he is sure in his dealings with the unsure. Whether you prefer to watch other men (it is easier to make up your mind when the affairs you're judging are someone else's) or to watch yourself with every prejudice set aside, you will see and admit that none of these desirable, beloved things is any use unless you have armed yourself against the fickleness of chance and everything that follows in its train — unless, at every mishap, you repeat to yourself often and without complaint: "Heaven decreed otherwise." No — let us take a phrase braver and nearer the truth, one that will prop your spirit more safely. Whenever things turn out against your expectation, say to yourself: "Heaven decreed better."
To a man so poised, nothing will come as a blow. And a man will be so poised if he reflects on the possible ups and downs of human affairs before he feels their force — if he regards his children, his wife, his property as things he will not necessarily have forever, and things whose loss will not make him one bit more wretched. It is a tragic soul that dreads the future, that is wretched in advance of wretchedness, eaten up with anxiety that the things it delights in should stay in its hands to the very end. Such a soul will never be at rest; waiting for what is coming, it will lose the blessings in front of it — the ones it could actually enjoy. And there is no difference between grief over a thing lost and the fear of losing it.
Not that I'm advising you to be careless. No — steer away from whatever might cause fear. Whatever planning can foresee, foresee. Whatever is likely to hurt you, watch for it and turn it aside long before it happens. Your best help in this will be a confident spirit and a mind firmly resolved to endure all things. The man who can bear Fortune can also beware of Fortune. At the very least, calm seas throw up no breakers. And nothing is more wretched or more foolish than fearing ahead of schedule. What madness it is to run out to meet your troubles! In short, let me compress my thought and sketch you those busybodies, those self-tormentors: they are as unrestrained in the middle of their troubles as they were before them. He who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. The same weakness that keeps such men from being ready for suffering keeps them from ever measuring it; and with the same lack of restraint they fondly imagine that their luck will last forever, and fondly imagine that their gains are bound not merely to continue but to grow. They forget the springboard on which all mortal things are tossed, and guarantee for themselves — of all people — that the gifts of chance will hold steady.
For exactly this reason I think the saying of Metrodorus is excellent — from the letter of consolation he wrote to his sister on the loss of her son, a boy of great promise: "All the good of mortals is mortal." He means the goods men run after in shoals. The real good does not perish; it is certain and lasting, and it consists of wisdom and virtue — the one immortal thing granted to mortals. But men are so wayward, so forgetful of where they are headed and of the point toward which every single day is shoving them, that they are surprised to lose anything — although one day they are bound to lose everything. Whatever you are listed as owner of is in your possession, but it is not yours; nothing weak has strength, nothing frail is lasting and invincible. We must lose our lives as surely as we lose our property — and this, if we understand the truth, is itself a consolation. Lose calmly; you must lose your life as well.
What resource is left to us, then, against these losses? Just this: to keep the things we have lost in memory, and not let the enjoyment we drew from them slip away along with them. To have can be taken from us; to have had, never. A man is thankless in the extreme if, after losing a thing, he feels no debt for ever having received it. Chance robs us of the thing, but leaves us its use and its enjoyment — and it is we who throw that away by the unfairness of our regret. Say to yourself: "Of all these things that look so frightful, not one is unbeatable. Each one has been beaten by many before now: fire by Mucius, crucifixion by Regulus, poison by Socrates, exile by Rutilius, death by the sword by Cato. Let us, too, beat something." And the things that lure the crowd with their look of beauty and happiness — those, too, have been scorned by many men, on many occasions. Fabricius refused riches when he was a general, and condemned them when he was censor. Tubero judged poverty worthy of himself and of the god on the Capitol when he set out earthenware dishes at a public feast — showing that a man should be content with what the gods themselves could still use. The elder Sextius turned down the honors of office: he was born with an obligation to take part in public affairs, and yet he would not accept the broad stripe, the senator's badge, even when the deified Julius offered it to him. For he understood that what can be given can also be taken away.
Let us, then, do something courageous of our own accord — let us take our place among the great examples of history. Why have we gone slack? Why do we lose heart? Whatever could be done once can be done now, if only we cleanse our souls and follow Nature. Stray from Nature, and you are condemned to crave, to fear, and to slave for the things of chance. We may return to the true path; we may be restored to our proper state. Let us be restored — so that we can endure pain in whatever form it attacks the body, and say to Fortune: "You are dealing with a man. Go find someone you can beat."
By these words, and words like them, the anger of the ulcer is being soothed; and I truly hope it can be reduced — either cured, or at least halted, left to grow old along with the patient himself. But I am easy in my mind about him. What we are discussing now is our own loss: the taking-off of a most excellent old man. He himself has lived a full life; anything added to it he craves not for his own sake, but for the sake of those who need his services. In going on living, he is being generous. Another man might have put an end to these sufferings; but our friend considers it no less shameful to flee toward death than to flee from it. "But," comes the objection, "if circumstances call for it, won't he make his exit?" Of course — if he can no longer be useful to anyone, if his one remaining occupation would be pain. This, my dear Lucilius, is what we mean by studying philosophy in practice, by drilling on the real thing: watching how much courage a prudent man has against death, and against pain, when the one draws near and the other bears down. What ought to be done must be learned from a man who does it. Up to now we have dealt in arguments — whether anyone can resist pain, whether the approach of death can bring down even great souls. Why argue further? Here is the fact itself, right in front of us: death does not make our friend braver against pain, and pain does not make him braver against death. Rather, he trusts himself against both. He does not suffer patiently because he hopes for death, and he does not die gladly because he is tired of suffering. Pain he endures; death he awaits.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I'm enclosing a copy of the letter I wrote to Marullus when he had lost his little son and was reported to be grieving with less self-command than a man should. In it I did not follow the usual rules of condolence, because I didn't think he should be handled gently — in my judgment he deserved criticism more than comfort. When a man has just been struck and is struggling under a fresh, heavy wound, you have to humor him for a while: let him grieve it out, or at least discharge the first shock. But people who have settled into grief as an indulgence should be called out at once, and taught that there is such a thing as foolishness even in tears.
"You're looking for comfort? Let me give you a scolding instead. You are taking your son's death the way a woman would — what would you do if you had lost a close friend? A son died: a little child, his promise still unknown; a small piece of time is gone. We go hunting for reasons to grieve; we'd even file unfair complaints against Fortune, as if Fortune would never hand us a just one! I honestly believed you had spirit enough to face solid troubles, let alone these shadowy ones that men moan over out of sheer habit. If you had lost a friend — and that is the greatest blow of all — your task would have been to work at rejoicing that you had him, rather than mourning that you lost him.
"But most men never add up their gains, never count their joys. Grief like yours has this evil among its others: it is not only useless, it is ungrateful. Was it all for nothing, then, that you had such a friend? So many years, such close companionship, such intimate sharing of everything that mattered — did all of it accomplish nothing? Do you bury the friendship along with the friend? And why lament losing him, if having him did you no good? Believe me, a great part of those we have loved stays with us, even after chance has taken their persons away. The past is ours, and nothing we hold is more secure than what has already been. We are ungrateful for what we've received because we are forever hoping for the future — as if the future, supposing any future is ours at all, won't quickly blend into the past. People who take pleasure only in the present put narrow limits on their enjoyment; the future and the past both serve our delight — the one with anticipation, the other with memory — but the one is uncertain and may never arrive, while the other cannot un-happen.
"What madness, then, to lose our grip on the surest thing we own! Let us rest content with the pleasures we have already drunk down — so long as, while we drank them, the soul wasn't pierced like a sieve, losing whatever it received. There are countless cases of men who have buried sons in the prime of manhood without a tear — men who walked back from the funeral pyre to the Senate chamber, or to whatever public duty, and got straight to work on something else. And rightly. First, grieving is pointless if grief brings you no help. Second, it is unfair to complain about what has happened to one man when it lies in store for all. Third, it is foolish to mourn a loss when the gap between the lost and the mourner is so slight. We should take these things with a calmer spirit, because we follow close behind the ones we have lost.
"Look at the speed of time — the swiftest thing there is. Consider the shortness of the course we run at full tilt. Watch this whole throng of humanity straining toward the same finish line, separated by the briefest intervals even when they seem longest: the one you count as lost has simply been sent ahead. And what is more irrational than to weep for the man ahead of you on a road you yourself must travel? Does a man weep over an event he knew would happen? If he never thought of death as part of the human bargain, he was only cheating himself. Does a man weep over an event he has been admitting all along is unavoidable? Whoever complains that someone died is complaining that he was human. We are all bound by the same terms: whoever is granted birth is scheduled for death. Stretches of time separate us; death levels us. The span between our first day and our last is shifting and uncertain: measure it by its troubles and it is long even for a boy; measure it by its speed and it is scanty even for an old man. Everything is slippery, treacherous, more changeable than any weather. Everything is tossed about and turns into its opposite at Fortune's whim, and in all this churning of mortal affairs only one thing is guaranteed to anyone — death. Yet everybody complains about the one thing in which no one is ever deceived. 'But he died a boy.' I'm not yet prepared to argue that whoever finishes life quickly has gotten the better bargain; so consider instead the man who has grown old. How little has he gained over the child! Set before your mind's eye the vast abyss of time; take in the whole universe; then compare what we call a human life with infinity — and you will see how tiny a thing we pray for, how little it is we strain to stretch. How much of that time is taken up with weeping, how much with worry! How much with praying for death before death arrives, how much with our health, how much with our fears! How much goes to the years when we were too green to use, or used badly! And half of the whole is spent asleep. Add our labors, our griefs, our dangers — and you will grasp that even in the longest life, actual living is the smallest part. And yet who will admit that a man is not better off for being allowed to go home early, his journey finished before it wore him out? Life is neither a good nor an evil; it is simply the place where goods and evils happen. So this little boy has lost nothing except a gamble in which loss was more certain than gain. He might have turned out temperate and sensible; with your care he might have been shaped into something better; but — and this fear is the more reasonable one — he might have turned out just like the many. Look at the young men of the noblest houses, whose extravagance has flung them into the arena; look at the men who serve their own lusts and other people's, whose days never pass without a drunken bout or some spectacular disgrace — and it will be clear to you that there was more to fear than to hope for.
"So you should not go inviting excuses for grief, or swell small burdens with indignation. I'm not urging you to strain and rise to some great height; I don't think so little of you as to believe you need to summon your whole stock of virtue for this trouble. This is not pain; it is a sting — and it is you yourself who are turning it into pain.
"Philosophy has certainly done you good service if you can bear bravely the loss of a boy still better known to his nurse than to his father! What then — am I now advising you to be hard-hearted? Do I want your face unmoved at the funeral itself, your soul not permitted even the pinch of pain? Not at all. That would be lack of feeling, not virtue — to watch the burial of your own dear ones with the same expression you wore when they were alive, and to feel nothing at the first bereavement in your family. But suppose I did forbid you to feel: certain feelings claim their own rights. Tears fall no matter how we fight to check them, and in falling they ease the soul. So what shall we do? Let them fall — but let us not command them to. Let us weep as much as emotion floods our eyes, not as much as imitation demands. Let us add nothing to natural grief, and not swell it to match other people's example. The performance of grief demands more than grief itself: how few men are sad in their own company! They wail the louder for being heard; people who are quiet and contained when alone break into fresh fits of tears the moment they see others near them. That is when they lay violent hands on themselves — which they could have done more easily with no one there to stop them; that is when they pray for death; that is when they throw themselves off their couches. Their grief slackens the moment the audience leaves. Here, as everywhere, we are stuck in the same fault: conforming to the pattern of the many, looking to convention instead of duty. We abandon nature and hand ourselves over to the mob — never good advisers in anything, and in this matter, as in all others, utterly inconsistent. People see a man bearing his grief bravely: they call him unloving and cold-hearted. They see a man collapse and cling to his dead: they call him womanish and weak. Everything, therefore, should be brought back to reason. And nothing is more foolish than to court a reputation for sorrow and give tears your official sanction; for I hold that in a wise man some tears fall by consent, and others by their own force.
"Here is the difference. When the first news of a bitter loss strikes us — when we hold the body that will soon pass from our arms to the funeral flames — then tears are wrung from us by nature's own necessity: the life-force, struck by grief's blow, shakes the whole body, and the eyes with it, pressing out the moisture that lies within. Tears like these are forced out, against our will. Different are the tears we allow to escape when we linger in memory over those we have lost. There is a certain sweet sadness in them — a pleasant voice remembered, a warm conversation, the busy devotion of the old days — and then the eyes loosen, as it were, with joy. This kind of weeping we permit; the other kind overpowers us.
"So there is no reason why, just because a group of people is standing in front of you or sitting at your side, you should either dam up your tears or pour them out. Held back or let flow, they are never so disgraceful as when they are faked. Let them come naturally. Tears can fall from eyes that are calm and at peace; they often flow without touching the wise man's authority — with such measure that they show no lack of feeling and no lack of self-respect. We can, I assure you, obey nature and keep our dignity. I have seen men worthy of reverence at the burial of their own dear ones — love written plainly on their faces even with the whole apparatus of mourning stripped away — with nothing in their bearing beyond what genuine emotion allowed. There is a gracefulness even in grief. The wise man should cultivate it: in tears, as in everything else, there is such a thing as enough. It is the unwise whose sorrows, like their joys, overflow.
"Accept what is inevitable with an unruffled spirit. What can happen that is past believing? What that is new? How many men at this very moment are arranging funerals! How many are buying grave-clothes! How many are mourning after you yourself have finished mourning! Every time you reflect that your boy has ceased to be, reflect also on man — who holds no sure promise of anything, whom Fortune does not necessarily escort all the way to old age, but lets go at whatever point she pleases. Do speak of the departed often, and cherish his memory as much as you can. The memory will come back to you all the more often if it comes without bitterness; no one enjoys spending time with a sorrowful companion, much less with sorrow itself. And whatever things he said, whatever little jokes — child as he was — gave you pleasure to hear, recall them again and again; tell yourself with confidence that he could have made good on the hopes you, his father, had for him. To forget the beloved dead, to bury their memory along with their bodies, to weep for them extravagantly and afterward scarcely think of them — that is the mark of a soul beneath a man's. That is how birds and beasts love their young: the affection flares up hot, almost to madness, and cools completely when its object dies. That does not suit a man of sense. Keep remembering; stop mourning. And I do not in the least approve of Metrodorus's remark — that there is a certain pleasure akin to sadness, and that at times like these one ought to hunt it down. Those are Metrodorus's actual words. I have no doubt how you will feel about them; for what is baser than to chase pleasure in the very middle of mourning — no, by means of mourning — and to hunt among your own tears for something that feels good? And these are the men who accuse us of too much strictness, who slander our teaching as harsh — because we say grief should either not be admitted into the soul at all, or should be shown the door at once. But which is harder to believe, which more inhuman: to feel no grief at the loss of a friend, or to go hawking after pleasure in the middle of grief? What we Stoics advise is honorable: when emotion has drawn a moderate flow of tears and has, so to speak, ceased to boil, the soul is not to be surrendered to grief. But what do you mean, Metrodorus — that grief should come with a blending of pleasure? That is the candy method of pacifying children; that is how we quiet a crying infant, by pouring milk down its throat.
"Even at the moment your son's body is on the pyre, or your friend is drawing his last breath, you will not let your pleasure pause — you would rather tickle your grief with it? Which is more honorable: to remove grief from your soul, or to invite pleasure in to keep grief company? Invite, did I say? No — chase after it, and out of grief's own hands. 'There is a certain pleasure related to sadness,' he says. We Stoics may say that; you may not. The only good you recognize is pleasure, and the only evil, pain — and what kinship can there be between a good and an evil? But suppose such kinship exists: is now, of all times, the moment to dig it up? Shall we ransack grief itself, to see what delight and pleasure might be found around it? Some remedies, beneficial for one part of the body, cannot be applied to another, because there they would be offensive and unfit; what would do good in one case at no cost to decency becomes shameful because of where the wound sits. Aren't you likewise ashamed to cure sorrow with pleasure? No — this sore spot needs harsher treatment. Say this instead: no sensation of evil can reach a man who is dead — for if it can reach him, he is not dead. Nothing, I say, can hurt a man who is nothing; if he can be hurt, he is alive. Do you think him badly off because he no longer exists, or because he still exists as somebody? No torment can come to him from not existing — for what can be felt by one who is not there? — and none from existing, since he has escaped the greatest disadvantage death carries: not existing at all.
"And let us say this, too, to the man who mourns and misses one taken young: measured against eternity, young or old, we all live equally short lives. Of all time, less comes to us than anyone could call least — for 'least' is at any rate some fraction, but this life of ours is next to nothing. And yet — fools that we are — we spread it out as if it were broad and grand!
"I have written you all this not because you should expect a cure from me this late — it is clear to me that you have already told yourself everything you will read here — but to rebuke you even for the brief delay in which you slipped away from your true self, and to brace you for what comes next: rouse your spirit against Fortune, and keep watch for her missiles — not as if they might come, but as things that are bound to come."
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You write that you read Fabianus Papirius's book, The Duties of a Citizen, with the greatest eagerness, that it fell short of your expectations — and then, forgetting you are dealing with a philosopher, you start criticizing his prose.
Suppose your claim is true — that he pours his words out rather than placing them. Let me tell you at the start that this trait has a charm of its own, a grace that belongs to a smoothly gliding style. It matters a great deal, I maintain, whether prose tumbles out or flows along. And there is a further difference here, which I'll make clear: Fabianus's words do not spill, to my mind — his words flow like a river, abundant without confusion, yet never slow. His style openly declares and announces that he has not spent long hours kneading his material and twisting it into shape. But even granting the facts as you'd have them: the man was building character, not sentences, and he wrote his words for the mind, not for the ear. Besides, had he been delivering them in person, you would have had no time to inspect the details — the whole would have swept you along. And as a rule, what pleases by its swiftness loses value when you take it in hand to read.
Even so, that very power of catching you at first sight is a great advantage, whether or not careful inspection turns up something to criticize. If you ask me, the writer who forces approval is greater than the one who earns it — though I know the second kind is safer; I know he can post surer guarantees for the future. A fussy, meticulous way of writing does not suit the philosopher. If he is timid about words, when will he ever be brave and steady? When will he ever show what he is made of? Fabianus's style was not careless; it was confident. That is why you will find nothing shoddy in his work: the words are well chosen but not hunted down; not wrenched out of order and inverted after the current fashion; and they carry distinction even though they come from ordinary speech. There you have honorable, splendid thoughts, not shackled into aphorisms, but spoken with room to breathe. Of course we will notice passages not pruned enough, not built with enough care, missing the polish that is in vogue nowadays; but survey the whole, and you will find no clever subtleties spun about nothing. There may be no variety of marbles, no water piped from room to room, no "poor man's rooms," none of the other devices luxury piles up when plain charm is not enough — but, as the common phrase puts it, it is a good house to live in.
Besides, opinions differ about style itself. Some want it filed smooth of every roughness; some take such pleasure in abruptness that wherever a passage happens to spread out smoothly, they would deliberately break it up, scattering the closing words so the sentences land where you least expect. Read Cicero: his style is all of a piece; it moves at a measured pace, gentle without going soft. Asinius Pollio's, by contrast, is bumpy, jerky, quitting where you least expect it. Cicero always brings things to rest gradually; Pollio drops them mid-stride — except in the very few places where he holds to a fixed rhythm and a single pattern.
You say next that everything in Fabianus strikes you as commonplace, lacking lift; I hold that he is free of any such fault. His style is not commonplace — it is calm, fitted to his peaceful and well-ordered mind: not low, but level. It lacks the orator's punch and spur, which is what you are looking for, and the sudden jolt of epigrams. But look, please, at the whole work — how well ordered it is. There is a distinction in it. His style does not possess dignity; it suggests it.
Name someone you would rank above Fabianus. Cicero, say — whose books on philosophy are nearly as numerous as Fabianus's own. Granted; but it is no small thing to be less than the greatest. Or Asinius Pollio, say. Granted again; I will content myself with answering: it is a distinction to be third in a field this great. Add Livy too, if you like — for Livy wrote dialogues that belong to history as much as to philosophy, and works that deal with philosophy outright. I will yield on Livy as well. But consider how many writers Fabianus outranks, if only three surpass him — and those three the greatest masters of eloquence.
But, you may say, he does not offer everything. His style is elevated but not muscular; it flows abundantly but lacks force and sweep; it is not crystal, though it is clear. "You would look in vain," you object, "for any savage denunciation of vice, any brave words in the face of danger, any proud defiance of Fortune, any scornful jab at ambition. I want to see luxury rebuked, lust condemned, willfulness broken. Give me the orator's edge, the tragedian's height, the comedian's fine touch." You want him to lean on the smallest thing of all — phrasing; but he has sworn allegiance to the greatness of his subject, and eloquence follows him like a shadow, without his aiming at it.
Our author will not, I grant, examine every detail, or drill into it, or weigh and press each separate word. I admit it. Plenty of phrases will fall short or fail to strike home, and at times the style will slide along lazily. But there will be light everywhere throughout the work; there will be long stretches that never tire the reader. And finally, he offers you this: he makes it plain that he meant what he wrote. You will understand that his aim was for you to know what pleased him — not for him to please you. All of it works toward progress and toward sanity, with no fishing for applause.
I do not doubt that his writings are just as I have described them, though I am reaching back for him rather than holding a firm memory; the general flavor of his work stays with me — not from a careful recent reading, but in outline, the way things do after an acquaintance of long ago. But certainly, whenever I heard him lecture, this is how his work struck me: not dense, but full — the kind that would fire young men of promise and rouse their ambition to become like him, without making them despair of surpassing him. And that seems to me the most helpful encouragement of all; for it is disheartening to awaken in a man the desire to emulate while taking away the hope of it. At any rate, his language flowed freely, and though you might not approve of every detail, the whole was noble.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Every day and every hour show us what nothings we are. Some fresh piece of evidence reminds us of the frailty we keep forgetting — and forces us, right in the middle of planning for eternity, to glance over our shoulder at death.
You ask what this gloomy opening means? It means Cornelius Senecio, a distinguished and capable Roman knight — you knew him. He had climbed from small beginnings to real money, and the rest of the road ran downhill in front of him. Rank grows more easily than it gets started, and money comes slowest while it still lives next door to poverty; it limps along until it has crawled clear. Senecio was right on the border of wealth, carried there by two very powerful assets, either of which could have made him rich by itself: he knew how to make money, and he knew how to keep it.
He was a man who lived very simply and took care of his health and his fortune with equal attention. He called on me early in the morning, as usual. Then he spent the whole day, right up to nightfall, at the bedside of a friend who was seriously and hopelessly ill. He ate a pleasant dinner. Then a sudden, violent attack of quinsy seized him, and with the breath squeezing through his swollen throat, he barely lasted until daybreak. Within a very few hours of performing every duty of a sound and healthy man, he was gone. A man who was venturing money by land and by sea, who had entered public life and left no kind of business untried, was snatched from the world at the very peak of his success, at the very moment the money was pouring into his coffers.
Graft your pear trees now, Meliboeus — set out your vines in their rows!
How foolish it is to lay out plans for a life when you don't even own tomorrow! What madness, to build long-range hopes! "I'll buy and build, lend money and call it in, collect offices and honors — and then, old and full of years, I'll retire to a life of ease." Believe me: everything is doubtful, even for the fortunate. No one has any right to promise himself anything out of the future. The very thing we're holding slips through our fingers, and Fortune cuts into the very hour we're cramming so full. Time does roll on by a fixed law — but it rolls in the dark. What good is it to me that nature's course is certain, when my own is not?
We plan long voyages, and homecomings postponed until we've wandered every foreign shore. We plan for military service, and for the slow rewards of hard campaigning. We angle for a governorship, then for the office after that — and the whole time, death is standing right beside us. But since we never think of it except as something that happens to the neighbors, the examples of mortality press in on us daily and stay in our minds only as long as they surprise us.
Yet what is more foolish than being surprised that something which can happen every day has happened on some particular day? There is indeed a limit set for each of us, fixed exactly where the unbending law of fate has fixed it — but none of us knows how close he stands to that limit. So let us set our minds in order as though we had come to the very end. Let us postpone nothing; let us balance life's books each day. The greatest flaw in life is that it is always unfinished, always with some part of it put off. The man who puts the finishing touches on his life every day is never short of time. And yet out of that shortage come fear, and a craving for the future that eats away at the mind. Nothing is more wretched than dangling over the question of how things will turn out. How much is left? What kind will it be? — and the troubled mind flutters with a fear it can't even account for.
How do we escape this churning? One way only: if our life stops straining forward and gathers itself into itself. The only man anxious about the future is the man whose present is doing him no good. But when I have paid my soul what I owe it, when a well-balanced mind knows that a day is no different from eternity — then, whatever days and whatever problems are still to come, the soul looks out from a great height and laughs heartily to itself at the endless parade of the ages. What disturbance can the shifts and instability of Fortune cause, if you stand certain in the face of everything uncertain?
So begin at once, my dear Lucilius, to live — and count each separate day as a separate life. The man who has prepared himself this way, whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind. But those who live on hope alone watch the immediate future slip out of their grasp again and again, while greed creeps in to take its place, along with the fear of death — a curse that lays a curse on everything else. Out of that fear came the most degraded prayer on record, in which Maecenas accepts weakness, deformity, and finally the torture of the cross, so long as his life is stretched out through all of it:
Cripple my hand, cripple my foot, pile a hump on my crooked back, shake my teeth loose in my head — all is well, if my life remains. Keep it for me, I beg you, even if I sit on the sharp cross itself!
There he is, praying for the thing that would be the most pitiable fate in the world if it actually happened — and begging for an extension of his torment as though he were begging for life! I would consider him utterly contemptible if he'd been willing to live right up to the moment of crucifixion. "No," he cries, "break my body if you must, so long as the breath stays in the battered, useless wreck. Maim me — just give me a little more time in the world, misshapen and deformed as I may be. Nail me up, if it comes to that, and set my seat on the sharp cross." Is it worth pressing down on your own wound, worth hanging stretched out on a gibbet, just to postpone the one thing that is the cure for troubles and the end of all punishment? Is it worth weakening yourself to that point just to keep breathing — breath you'll only have to give up anyway? What could you wish for Maecenas except that heaven show him mercy? What is the meaning of such spineless, disgraceful verse? What is the meaning of cutting deals with panic? Of begging for life so abjectly? He can't ever have heard Virgil read the line:
Tell me — is death really such a misery?
He asks for the extremity of suffering and — harder still to bear — for its prolongation, its extension. And what does he gain by it? Merely a longer existence. But what kind of life is a drawn-out death? Can you find anyone who would rather waste away in pain, dying one limb at a time, letting his life out drop by drop, than die once and be done with it? Can you find any man willing to be fastened to the accursed tree — already sick, already deformed, chest and shoulders swollen with ugly tumors — and draw breath after breath through long-drawn-out agony? He would have had plenty of reasons to die before he ever mounted the cross!
Deny it now, if you can: nature is very generous in making death unavoidable. Many men have stood ready to strike bargains even more shameful — to betray their friends so they could live a little longer, or to hand over their own children to disgrace so they could keep enjoying the daylight that had witnessed all their sins. We must shake off this greed for life, and learn that it makes no difference when your suffering comes, because sooner or later you are bound to suffer. The point is not how long you live, but how nobly. And often, living nobly means you cannot live long.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
A man is annoying when he shakes you out of a pleasant dream — he's spoiling a pleasure that may be unreal but looks and feels exactly like the real thing. Your letter has done me the same injury. It pulled me back abruptly from a meditation I was absorbed in and ready to carry further, if I'd been allowed. I was taking pleasure in investigating the immortality of souls — more than that, in believing it. I was lending a ready ear to the great authors, who not only approve that most welcome doctrine but promise it. I was giving myself over to a noble hope. I was already weary of myself, already starting to look down on the broken fragments of this existence, feeling that I was bound for that infinity of time, that inheritance of eternity — when your letter arrived and woke me, and I lost my lovely dream. But once I've settled accounts with you, I'll go looking for it and get it back.
At the beginning of your letter you remarked that I hadn't worked through the whole problem — the one where I was trying to prove a doctrine of our school: that the renown which comes to a man after death is a good. You said I hadn't answered the standard objection: "No good can be made up of things that are separate and distinct; yet renown is made up of exactly such things." What you're asking about, my dear Lucilius, belongs to another chapter of the same subject, and that's why I had set those arguments aside — them, and others covering the same ground. As you know, logical questions get tangled up with ethical ones. So I handled the essential part, the part that bears on conduct: whether it's foolish and useless to concern ourselves with what lies beyond our last day; whether our goods die with us and nothing is left of the man who is no more; whether any profit can be gained, or pursued in advance, from something we won't be able to feel when it comes.
All of that bears on conduct, so it went in under its proper topic. But what the logic-choppers say against the idea had to be sifted out separately, and so it was set aside. Now that you demand answers to all of it, I'll examine their claims and refute them one by one. But my rebuttals will be impossible to follow without one preliminary remark. And what is it? Just this: some bodies are continuous, like a man. Some are composite — a ship, a house, anything that results from joining separate parts into a single whole. And some are made up of members that remain distinct, each one standing separate — like an army, a crowd, or a senate. The people who make up such bodies are united by law or by function, but by their nature they are distinct individuals. What else do I need to lay down beforehand? Only this: we hold that nothing is a good if it is composed of separate things. A single good must be held together and governed by a single soul; the essential quality of each single good must itself be single. This can be proved on its own whenever you like; for now it simply had to be stated, because our own weapons are being hurled back at us.
The opponents argue like this: "You say no good can be made up of separate things? Yet this renown of yours is nothing but the favorable opinion of good men. Reputation doesn't consist of one person's remarks, and disgrace doesn't consist of one person's disapproval; in the same way, renown doesn't mean we've merely pleased one good man. To constitute renown, the agreement of many distinguished and praiseworthy men is required. But that agreement is the verdict of a number of people — that is, of persons who are distinct. Therefore it is not a good.
"You say, again, that renown is the praise given to a good man by good men. Praise means speech; speech is utterance with a particular meaning; and utterance, even from the lips of good men, is not in itself a good. Not everything a good man does is a good. He shouts applause, he hisses disapproval — but no one calls the shouting or the hissing a good, even if his conduct as a whole is admired and praised, any more than anyone would applaud a sneeze or a cough. Therefore renown is not a good.
"Finally, tell us this: does the good belong to the one who praises, or to the one who is praised? If you say it belongs to the one who is praised, you're on as foolish an errand as claiming that my neighbor's good health is my own. But praising worthy men is an honorable action; so the good belongs entirely to the man doing the praising — the man performing the action — and not to us, the ones being praised. And that was the whole question under discussion."
Now let me answer these objections one at a time, and quickly. The first question is still whether any good can be made up of separate things — and there are votes on both sides. But does renown really need many votes? It can be satisfied with the verdict of one good man: it is one good man who decides that we are good. "What!" comes the retort. "Would you define reputation as the esteem of one individual, and disgrace as one man's spiteful chatter? Glory, as we understand it, is something broader — it demands the agreement of many." But "the many" and "the one" stand on different footing here. Why? Because if the good man thinks well of me, that amounts in practice to being thought well of by all good men — for they would all think the same, if they knew me. Their judgment is one and the same; truth stamps it identically. They cannot disagree, which means they would all hold the same view, being unable to hold different ones. "One man's opinion," you say, "isn't enough to create glory or reputation." In the first case, one judgment is a universal judgment, because all of them, if asked, would judge alike. In the other case, people of dissimilar character hand down divergent verdicts. You'll find tangled emotions there — everything doubtful, shifting, untrustworthy. Do you suppose the many could ever hold one opinion? Even one man among them doesn't hold one opinion. With the good man, it is truth that produces conviction, and truth has one face and one function; the crowd agrees only on unsound ideas, and the false are never steady — they are irregular and clashing.
"But praise," says the objector, "is nothing but an utterance, and an utterance is not a good." When they define renown as praise bestowed on the good by the good, what they're referring to is not an utterance but a judgment. A good man may say nothing at all; but if he decides that a certain person deserves praise, that person is praised. Besides, praise is one thing and praise-giving another; the giving requires the voice as well. That's why no one speaks of a "funeral praise" but of a eulogy — a giving of praise — because its whole function depends on speech. When we say a man is worthy of praise, we are promising him men's goodwill not in words but in judgment. So even the good opinion of a man who silently approves of someone good is praise.
Praise, as I've said, is a matter of the mind rather than of speech; speech merely brings out the praise the mind has already formed and publishes it to the crowd. To judge a man worthy of praise is to praise him. When our tragic poet sings that it is a wonderful thing "to be praised by a well-praised hero," he means a hero worthy of praise. And when an equally venerable poet says "praise nurtures the arts," he doesn't mean praise-giving — that ruins the arts. Nothing has corrupted oratory, and every other art that plays to an audience, so much as popular approval. Reputation cannot exist without words; but renown can be content with men's judgments and complete without a syllable being spoken. It is satisfied not only with silent approval, but even in the face of open protest. Here, in my opinion, is the difference between renown and glory: glory rests on the judgments of the many; renown, on the judgments of the good.
"But whose good is it," comes the reply, "this renown, this praise given to a good man by good men? Does it belong to the one praised, or to the one who praises?" To both, I say. It is my good, as the one being praised, because nature made me to love all men, and I rejoice in having done good deeds, and I congratulate myself on finding men who express their sense of my virtues with gratitude. That they are grateful is a good for the many — but it's a good for me too. My spirit is arranged so that I can count other men's good as my own — above all the good that I myself have caused. And this good belongs also to the ones who give the praise, for it is exercised through virtue, and every act of virtue is a good. My friends could not have gained this blessing if I hadn't been the right sort of man. So being praised when you deserve it is a good belonging to both sides — just as a just decision is a good both for the one who renders it and for the one in whose favor it is rendered. Do you doubt that justice is a blessing to its possessor as well as to the man who receives his due? To praise the deserving is justice; therefore the good belongs to both.
That's answer enough for these dealers in fine print. But our purpose shouldn't be to argue cleverly, dragging philosophy down from her majesty into petty quibbles like these. How much better to follow the open, straight road than to lay out a winding course for yourself that you'll have to retrace with endless trouble! Argumentation of that kind is nothing but experts juggling with each other.
Tell me instead how much in keeping with nature it is to let the mind reach out into the boundless universe. The human soul is a great and noble thing; it accepts no limits except the ones it shares with the gods themselves. First of all, it will not accept a lowly birthplace — Ephesus, or Alexandria, or any spot still more crowded with people and thickly packed with houses. The soul's homeland is the whole sweep that circles the height and breadth of the sky — the entire rounded dome under which lie land and sea, under which the upper air divides the human from the divine and joins them too, and where all the sentinel stars stand their turns on watch. And the soul will not put up with a narrow allowance of time. "All the years are mine," it says. "No age is closed to great minds; all time lies open to the progress of thought. When the day comes to separate the heavenly from its earthly mixture, I will leave the body here, where I found it, and take myself back to the gods of my own accord. I am not cut off from them even now — only held back, in a heavy earthly prison."
These delays of mortal existence are the prelude to a longer and better life. The mother's womb holds us for ten months, preparing us not for the womb itself but for the open world we are delivered into once we're finally fit to draw breath and survive in the open air. In just the same way, through all the years that stretch from infancy to old age, we are ripening toward another birth. A different beginning waits for us, a different state of things. As yet we can bear the light of heaven only in rare glimpses. So look ahead without fear to that appointed hour — the last hour of the body, but not of the soul. Look around at everything lying about you as if it were luggage in a roadside inn: you must travel on. Nature searches you as bare on the way out as on the way in. You cannot take away more than you brought — in fact, you must throw away most of what you carried into life. You will be stripped of this outer skin, your last protection; stripped of the flesh; drained of the blood that runs and circulates through your body; stripped of the bones and sinews, the framework of these frail and temporary parts.
This day, which you fear as your last, is your birthday into eternity. Lay down your burden — why hang back? — as if you hadn't once before left a body that was hiding you. You cling to it, you struggle; well, at your first birth too, it took your mother's great labor to set you free. You weep and wail — and that very weeping happens at birth as well, though then it was forgivable: you came into the world ignorant of everything and utterly unpracticed. When you left the warm, sheltering protection of your mother's womb, a freer air breathed on your face; then you flinched at the touch of a rough hand, and you stared in amazement at unfamiliar things, still soft and knowing nothing.
But now it is nothing new for you to be separated from what you were once a part of. Let these limbs go calmly — they're of no more use — and lay aside the body you have lived in so long. It will be torn apart, buried out of sight, and worn away. Why be downcast? This is what always happens: when we are born, the afterbirth perishes. Why love such a thing as if it were your own possession? It was only your covering. The day will come that tears you out and leads you away from this foul, reeking womb of a world. Withdraw from it now, as much as you can. Withdraw from pleasure, except what is bound up with the essential and important things of life; grow a stranger to it even now, and turn your thoughts to something nobler and higher. One day the secrets of nature will be laid open to you, the haze will be shaken from your eyes, and bright light will stream in on you from every side.
Picture the blaze when all the stars mingle their fires. No shadow will trouble that clear sky; the whole expanse of heaven will shine evenly — day and night take turns only in the lowest layer of the air. Then you will say that you lived your whole life in the dark, once you have seen the perfect light with your whole, perfected being — the light you now see only darkly, through vision cramped to its narrowest. And yet, far off as it is, you already gaze at it in wonder. What do you think that heavenly light will be, when you have seen it in its own home?
Thoughts like these let nothing mean settle in the soul — nothing low, nothing cruel. They insist that the gods are witnesses of everything. They command us to seek the gods' approval, to prepare ourselves to join them some day, and to plan for immortality. The man who has grasped this idea shrinks from no attacking army, isn't rattled by the trumpet-blast, isn't cowed by any threat. Why should a man feel fear, when he looks forward to death? Even the man who believes the soul lasts only as long as it is chained to the body, and scatters the moment it is released, still arranges his life so that he'll be useful even after death. For though he is taken from our sight, still
again and again our thoughts run back to the hero, and the glory his line has won returns to the mind.
Consider how much good examples help us, and you will understand this: the memory of a great man is no less useful than his presence.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Why are you scanning the horizon for troubles that might come your way — and might just as easily never come at all? I mean fires, collapsing buildings, the kind of accidents that simply happen to us rather than plot against us. Watch out instead for the troubles that dog our steps and reach out to grab us. Accidents can be serious, but they're rare — a shipwreck, a carriage overturning. It is from man that man's daily peril comes. Arm yourself against that; keep your eye fixed on that. No evil is more common, none more persistent, none better at slipping past your guard. Even a storm gives warning before it breaks; houses creak before they crash; smoke announces the fire. But damage from a human being is instantaneous — and the closer it comes, the more carefully it is hidden.
You're wrong to trust the faces of the people you meet. They have the look of men and the souls of wild animals — except that with animals, only the first encounter is dangerous; they don't chase what they've already passed by. Nothing drives them to hurt you except necessity: hunger or fear forces them into a fight. But man delights in ruining man.
Still, think about the danger you face from man in order to work out the duty you owe as a man. Deal with others so as to do no harm, and you're less likely to be harmed. Share in everyone's joys, feel for them in their troubles, and remember what you should offer and what you should hold back. What will you gain by living this way? Not necessarily safety from their hands — but at least safety from their deceit. And as far as you can, take refuge in philosophy. She will hold you close, and in her sanctuary you will be safe — or at any rate safer than before. People only collide when they're traveling the same road. But you must never flaunt this philosophy of yours; worn with insolence and arrogance, it has been the ruin of many. Let philosophy strip away your faults, not sharpen your tongue for the faults of others. Don't let her stand aloof from the ordinary customs of mankind, or make it her business to condemn everything she herself doesn't do. A man can be wise without parading it, and without making enemies.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I've run off to my villa at Nomentum — fleeing what, do you suppose? The city? No: a fever that was quietly working its way into my system. It already had a grip on me. My doctor kept insisting that when the pulse is upset and irregular, throwing off its natural rhythm, the disease is under way. So I ordered the carriage brought around at once and insisted on leaving, over the protests of my wife Paulina, who tried to stop me. I remembered what my master Gallio said when a fever came over him in Achaia and he boarded a ship immediately: the disease, he insisted, was in the place, not in his body. That's what I told my dear Paulina, who is always urging me to take care of my health. I know her very life-breath comes and goes with mine, and so, in caring for her, I am beginning to care for myself. Old age has made me braver about enduring many things, but here I'm gradually losing that gift of age. For it occurs to me that inside this old man there is a young person too — and youth needs tenderness. Since I cannot persuade her to love me more heroically, she persuades me to cherish myself more carefully. And genuine feelings deserve to be indulged. Sometimes, even against weighty reasons, the breath of life must be called back and held at our very lips, at the cost of real suffering, for the sake of those we love — because a good man should live not as long as it pleases him, but as long as he ought. The man who doesn't value his wife or his friend enough to linger a little longer in life, who stubbornly insists on dying, is not a hero. He is self-indulgent.
The soul should give itself this order whenever the needs of loved ones require it: it should pause and humor those near and dear, not only when it merely wants to die, but even when it has already begun. It shows a great heart to come back to life for the sake of others, and noble men have done it more than once. But I think this, too, is kindness of the highest order: the greatest privilege of old age is the license to be careless about self-preservation and to spend life more daringly — yet you should guard your old age all the more carefully if you know that doing so is pleasing, useful, or dear to someone you love. There's no small joy and profit in it, either. What is sweeter than to be so valued by your wife that you become more valuable to yourself because of it? So my dear Paulina manages to make me answerable not only for her fears, but for my own.
You're curious how the travel prescription turned out? The moment I escaped the oppressive air of the city — and that dreadful reek of smoking kitchens which, once fired up, pour out a ruinous mess of steam and soot — I felt my health mending at once. And how much stronger do you think I felt when I reached my vineyards! Turned out to pasture, so to speak, I positively charged at my meals. I'm my old self again: no wavering weakness in my body, no fog in my brain. I'm getting back to work with all my energy.
But the place itself contributes little, unless the mind is fully its own master and can find seclusion at will even in the thick of business. The man who is forever choosing resorts and hunting for leisure will find something to distract him in every one of them. Socrates is said to have answered a man who complained that his travels had done him no good: "It serves you right — you traveled in your own company!" What a blessing it would be for some people, if they could only wander away from themselves! As it is, they are their own source of worry, vexation, demoralization, and fear. What's the profit in crossing the sea, in moving from city to city? If you want to escape your troubles, what you need is not a different place but a different self. Say you've reached Athens, or Rhodes; pick any city you fancy — what does its character matter? You'll be bringing your own.
Suppose you believe wealth is a good: then poverty will torture you, and — most pitiful of all — an imaginary poverty. You may be rich; but because your neighbor is richer, you'll consider yourself poor by exactly the amount you fall short of him. Suppose you believe public office is a good: you'll be galled every time another man is made consul, or made consul again; you'll burn with envy whenever you see a certain name repeated in the public records. Your ambition will be so frantic that if anyone at all is ahead of you, you'll feel you're running last. Or suppose you rate death as the worst of evils — when there is really nothing evil in it except what comes before it: fear. You'll be scared out of your wits by dangers imagined as much as real, tossed forever on a sea of illusion. What good will it do you to have
threaded your way through all the towns of Argolis, a fugitive slipping through the thick of your enemies?
Peace itself will supply you with fresh alarms. Once the mind has taken a shock, it loses confidence even in the midst of safety; once it acquires the habit of blind panic, it can no longer provide even for its own preservation. It doesn't avoid danger — it runs from it. And we are more exposed to danger with our backs turned.
You may judge the loss of someone you love to be the heaviest of blows; yet that would be as foolish as weeping because the trees that delight your eye and beautify your home drop their leaves. Look on everything that pleases you as a plant in flower: enjoy it while it's in leaf, for one plant after another must fall and die, each in its season. But just as losing leaves is a light matter, because they grow again, so it is with losing those you love, the delights of your life: they can be replaced, even if they can't be reborn. "But the new friends won't be the same." No — and neither will you. You change with every day and every hour. In other people you see readily enough what time steals; in yourself the theft is hidden, because it doesn't happen in plain view. Others are snatched from our sight; we are being secretly stolen from ourselves. You won't consider any of this, won't put any salve on these wounds; instead you'll sow yourself a crop of worries by hoping one moment and despairing the next. If you're wise, mix the two: never hope without a dose of despair, never despair without a dose of hope.
What has travel, by itself, ever done for anyone? It has never restrained pleasure, bridled desire, checked bad temper, or crushed the wild assaults of passion; it has never rid the soul of any evil. It doesn't give us judgment, doesn't shake off our errors; it merely occupies our attention for a moment with novelty, the way children stop to gawk at something unfamiliar. What's more, it aggravates the instability of a mind that's already sick; the very motion makes it more restless and jittery. That's why the places we sought most eagerly, we abandon more eagerly still — like birds that flit off as soon as they've landed. What travel will give you is acquaintance with other nations. It will show you mountains of strange shape, unfamiliar stretches of plain, valleys watered by everlasting springs, the peculiarities of some notable river — how the Nile rises and swells in summer, how the Tigris vanishes underground, runs through hidden channels, and reappears at full force, or how the Maeander, that well-worn theme and plaything of the poets, coils in loop after loop, winding so close to its own channel before it flows on. But none of this information will make us better men, or sounder ones.
We should be spending our time in study instead, and with the masters of wisdom, learning what has been investigated but not yet settled. That is how the mind is rescued from the most wretched slavery and won over to freedom. As long as you don't know what to avoid and what to seek, what is necessary and what is superfluous, what is right and what is wrong, you are not traveling — you are wandering. All this rushing around will do you no good, for you travel in the company of your emotions, and your afflictions follow you. If only they were following you! They'd be farther away. As it is, you're not leading them — you're carrying them. So they press in on you from every side, chafing and galling. It's medicine the sick man should be shopping for, not scenery. Suppose someone has broken a leg or dislocated a joint: he doesn't board a carriage or a ship for foreign parts; he calls in a doctor to set the fracture or work the joint back into its socket. Well then — when the spirit is broken or wrenched in so many places, do you think a change of address can heal it? The trouble sits too deep to be cured by a journey. Travel makes no one a doctor or an orator; no art is learned simply by living somewhere.
Where does that leave us? Can wisdom, the greatest art of all, be picked up along the road? Believe me: travel as far as you like, and you will never get beyond the reach of desire, beyond the reach of temper, beyond the reach of fear. If you could, the whole human race would have set out on pilgrimage to the spot long ago. As long as you carry the causes of these ills around with you, they will weigh you down and wear you to skin and bone across every land and sea. Are you surprised that running away doesn't help? What you're running from is inside you. So fix yourself; lift the load off your own shoulders; and hold within safe limits the cravings that ought to be removed altogether. Scrub every trace of wickedness from your soul. If you want to enjoy your travels, cure your traveling companion. As long as that companion is greedy and grasping, greed will stick to you; keep company with an arrogant man, and your own swagger sticks too. Live with an executioner and you'll never shed your cruelty; make an adulterer your clubmate and he'll fan your basest appetites. If you want to be stripped of your faults, get far away from the models of those faults. The miser, the swindler, the bully, the cheat — the ones who would damage you just by standing near you — are inside you.
Move to better company, then: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. And if you like Greek company too, spend your time with Socrates and Zeno — the one will teach you how to die if it becomes necessary, the other how to die before it becomes necessary. Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius. They will introduce you to things earthly and things heavenly. They will order you to work at something more than neat turns of phrase mouthed for the entertainment of an audience; they will order you to harden your heart and rise above threats. The only harbor safe from this life's seething storms is this: contempt for the future, a firm stance, and a readiness to take Fortune's missiles full in the chest — not skulking, not turning your back. Nature brought us forth with brave spirits. Just as she planted ferocity in some animals, cunning in others, timidity in others, so she gave us a soaring, aspiring spirit that seeks the most honorable life, not the safest one — a spirit most like the soul of the universe, which it follows and imitates as far as mortal steps allow. This spirit pushes itself forward, sure of winning praise and esteem. It stands above everything, master of all it surveys, so it should bow to nothing: no task too heavy for it, nothing strong enough to weigh down a man's shoulders.
Shapes dread to look upon, of toil and death
are not dreadful in the least to anyone who can face them with an unflinching gaze and pierce through the shadows. Many a thing held up as a terror by night is turned to ridicule by day. "Shapes dread to look upon, of toil and death": our Vergil put it perfectly. These shapes are dreadful not in reality but only "to look upon" — that is, they seem terrible; they are not. What is there in these apparitions, I ask you, half as fearsome as rumor makes out? Why on earth, my dear Lucilius, should a man fear toil, or a mortal fear death? I can think of countless men who assume that whatever they themselves cannot do is impossible, who insist that we Stoics talk bigger than human nature can deliver. But how much more highly I think of these men than they do! They can do these things — they simply decline to. Ask anyone who ever actually tried: whom have these tasks ever failed? Who didn't find them easier in the doing? It is not the difficulty that drains our confidence; it is our lack of confidence that creates the difficulty.
If you want a model, take Socrates: a long-suffering old man, storm-tossed through every hardship, yet unconquered by poverty (made heavier by burdens at home) and unconquered by toil, including the drudgery of military service. He was sorely tried at home too — think of his wife, with her rough manners and shrewish tongue, or his children, whose unruliness proved them their mother's sons more than their father's. And consider the times he lived in: war, or tyranny, or a democracy crueler than wars and tyrants. The war lasted twenty-seven years; then the state fell prey to the Thirty Tyrants, many of them his personal enemies. Last came that final condemnation on the gravest of charges: they accused him of corrupting the state religion and corrupting the young — of teaching the youth, they said, to defy the gods, defy the council, defy the state itself. After that, the prison, and the cup of poison. And all of it changed the soul of Socrates so little that it didn't even change his face. What a marvelous, rare distinction! He held that bearing to the very end: no one ever saw Socrates too elated or too downcast. Amid all the turbulence of Fortune, he was untroubled.
Do you want another case? Take the younger Marcus Cato, whom Fortune handled with even more hostility and more persistence. He withstood her at every turn, and at the end, at the point of death, he showed that a brave man can live in spite of Fortune and die in spite of her. His whole life was spent either in civil war or under a regime that was breeding one. And you may say that he, no less than Socrates, pledged himself to liberty in the middle of slavery — unless you happen to think Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus were liberty's allies! No one ever saw Cato change, however often the state changed. He kept himself the same in every circumstance: as praetor, in defeat, under accusation, in his province, on the speaker's platform, in the army, in death. In the republic's hour of terror — Caesar on one side with ten battle-ready legions and whole foreign nations at his call, Pompey on the other, content to stand alone against all comers, and the citizens leaning toward one or the other — Cato alone founded a party for the Republic. If you want a mental picture of that moment, imagine on one side the people and the whole mob, hungry for revolution; on the other, the senators and knights, the chosen and honored men of the state; and left standing between them, just these two: the Republic, and Cato.
I promise you, you will marvel when you see
Atreus' son, and Priam, and Achilles, angry at them both.
Like Achilles, Cato scorns both factions and disarms them. And this is the vote he casts on the pair of them: "If Caesar wins, I kill myself; if Pompey wins, I go into exile." What was left to fear for a man who, in victory or defeat, had already sentenced himself as harshly as his most furious enemies could have? So he died by his own decision.
You see that toil can be endured: Cato led an army on foot through the African desert. You see that thirst can be endured: he marched over sun-scorched hills, dragging the remnants of a beaten army with no supply train, going without water, wearing a full weight of armor — and always the last to drink at the few springs they happened to find. You see that honor can be despised, and dishonor too: on the very day Cato lost the election, they say, he played a game of ball. You see that a man can be free of fear of the powerful: Cato attacked Caesar and Pompey at the same time, in an age when no one dared cross the one without currying favor with the other. You see that death can be scorned as easily as exile: Cato sentenced himself to exile, and finally to death — and to war the whole time.
And so, if only we're willing to pull our necks out of the yoke, we can keep just as stout a heart against terrors like these. But first and foremost we must refuse pleasures; they make us soft and feeble, they demand a great deal from us, and they drive us, in turn, to demand a great deal from Fortune. Second, we must spurn wealth: wealth is the badge of slavery. Give up gold and silver and whatever else burdens our richly furnished houses. Liberty cannot be had for free. If you set a high price on liberty, you must set a low price on everything else.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I'm going to tell you some things to keep in mind if you want to live more safely. And I suggest you listen to these precepts exactly as if I were advising you how to keep your health at your country place in Ardea.
Consider what it is that goads man into destroying man: you'll find it is hope, envy, hatred, fear, and contempt. Of all these, contempt is the least harmful — so much so that many people have actually hidden behind it as a kind of cure. The man who despises you does you an injury, true, but then he moves on; no one goes on hurting, deliberately and persistently, a person he despises. Even on the battlefield, soldiers lying on the ground are passed over; men fight with those still on their feet. As for the greedy hopes of the wicked, you can avoid those as long as you own nothing that stirs another man's appetite, nothing that stands out. People will covet even small things, if they catch the eye or come along rarely.
You'll escape envy if you don't push yourself into public view, if you don't boast about what you have, if you know how to enjoy things privately. Hatred comes either from giving offense — and you avoid that by provoking no one — or it comes unprovoked, and there common sense will keep you safe. Yet unprovoked hatred has been dangerous to many; some people have been hated without ever having made an enemy. As for not being feared: a moderate fortune and an easygoing nature will see to that. Let people know you're the kind of man who can be wronged without danger, and that reconciling with you is easy and sure. Being feared is as much trouble at home as it is out in the world — as bad to be feared by a slave as by a free man, for everyone has strength enough to do you some harm. Besides, whoever is feared, fears: no one has ever managed to inspire terror and live with a peaceful mind.
That leaves contempt. The man who has made contempt part of his own equipment — who is despised because he chooses to be, not because he has to be — holds its measure in his own hands. Any inconveniences on that score can be dispelled by honorable pursuits, and by friendships with men who have the ear of a man of influence. Engage with such men, but don't get entangled — or the cure may cost you more than the risk. Nothing, though, will help you so much as keeping quiet: talk very little with others, and as much as possible with yourself. There is a certain charm in conversation, something subtle and coaxing, which — like wine or love — draws our secrets out of us. And no one keeps to himself what he hears. No one repeats only as much as he was told. The man who tells the tale will tell the name too. Everyone has someone he trusts with exactly what was entrusted to him. Even if each one curbs his chattiness and settles for a single listener, he'll end up with a nation — and what was a secret a moment ago becomes common talk.
The greatest contribution to peace of mind is this: never do wrong. People without self-control lead disturbed and stormy lives; their crimes are matched by their fears, and they are never at rest. After the deed they tremble; they are trapped. Their consciences won't let them attend to anything else, and keep hauling them back to answer for themselves. Whoever expects punishment receives it — and whoever deserves it expects it. A guilty conscience may find safety in something, but it finds ease in nothing; such a man assumes that even if he isn't caught yet, he may be caught soon. His sleep is troubled. Whenever he mentions another man's crime, he thinks of his own — never sufficiently blotted out, he feels, never sufficiently hidden. A wrongdoer sometimes has the luck to escape notice — never the assurance of it.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
My slowness in answering your letter was not because I was busy. Don't accept that excuse — not from me, not from anyone. I am free, and so is everyone who wants to be. No man is at the mercy of his affairs. He tangles himself up in them by his own choice, and then flatters himself that being busy is proof of a full and happy life. So why didn't I answer sooner? The question you asked me was being woven into the fabric of my book. You know I'm planning to cover the whole of moral philosophy and settle every problem that touches it. So I hesitated: should I make you wait until the subject came up in its proper place, or hand down a ruling out of order? In the end it seemed kinder not to keep someone waiting who has come from so far away. So I'm going to pull this question out of its sequence — and I'll also send you, without waiting to be asked, whatever belongs to the same family of problems.
What family is that? Questions where the knowing is pleasant rather than useful. Your question, for instance: is the good corporeal — a physical body? Well, the good acts, because it does us good; and what acts is a body. The good stirs the mind and, in a way, molds and shapes what is essential to it. The goods of the body are bodily; so the goods of the soul must be too, because the soul itself is a body. And so man's good must be a body, since man himself is one. I am badly lost if the things that sustain a man, that preserve or restore his health, are not physical — and therefore his good is a body. You won't doubt, I'm sure, that the emotions are bodies (let me wedge in one more topic that wasn't on the agenda) — anger, love, sternness — unless you doubt that they change our faces, knot our foreheads, relax our features, spread a blush, or drain the blood away. Well then? Do you think marks that show so plainly on the body are stamped there by anything but a body? And if the emotions are bodies, so are the diseases of the spirit — greed, cruelty, and all the faults that harden in our souls until they pass the point of cure. So evil is a body too, with all its branches — spite, hatred, pride. And so are the goods: first because they are the opposite poles of the bad, and second because they show you the same physical symptoms. Don't you see how courage makes the eye flash? How prudence pulls the face into concentration? How reverence produces a settled calm, joy a serenity, sternness a stiffness, gentleness an easing of the features? These qualities are bodies, then — they change the tone and shape of physical stuff, each exercising its power in its own kingdom.
Now, all the virtues I've named are goods, and so is everything they produce. And can you doubt that whatever can touch is a body?
Nothing but body can touch or be touched,
as Lucretius says. The changes I've described could not affect the body without touching it; therefore they are bodies. Furthermore, anything with the power to move, force, restrain, or control is a body. Well? Doesn't fear hold us back? Doesn't boldness push us forward? Courage spur us on and give us momentum? Restraint rein us in and call us home? Joy lift our spirits, sadness drag them down? In short, everything we do, we do at the command of vice or virtue. And only a body can control or force another body. The good of the body is a body; a man's good is bound up with his bodily good; therefore it is a body.
Now that I've humored you, I'll say your line before you can: "What a board game we're playing!" We dull our fine edge on superfluous puzzles like these; they make men clever, not good. Wisdom is a plainer thing than that. In fact, it is clearly better to use our learning to improve the mind — instead of squandering philosophy itself the way we squander everything else, on things we don't need. We suffer from excess in everything, and we suffer from excess in learning too: we learn not for life but for the lecture hall.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Where is that good sense of yours? Where is that skill of yours at sizing things up? That greatness of soul? Have you really been reduced to torment by a trifle? Your slaves saw that you were absorbed in business and took it as their chance to run away. Fine. If your friends had deceived you — and by all means let them keep the name we wrongly gave them, so that their shame is the greater for failing to live up to it — if your friends, I say, had deceived you, all your affairs would be missing something. As it is, you have merely lost men who were damaging your own work and making you a burden to your neighbors. Nothing in this is unusual or unexpected. To be upset by such things is as absurd as complaining that you got splashed in the street or spattered with mud. The program of life is the program of a bathhouse, a crowd, a journey: some things will be thrown at you, and some will hit you by accident. Life is not a dainty business. You have set out on a long road: you are bound to slip, collide, fall, wear out, and cry "I want to die!" — which is to say, you are bound to lie. At one stage you will leave a comrade behind; at another you will bury one; at another you will be afraid for one. It is across stumbling ground like this that the rugged journey has to be traveled.
Does someone wish for death? Let the mind be prepared to meet everything. Let it know it has arrived at the heights where the thunder plays; let it know it has come to the place where
Grief and avenging Cares have made their beds, where pale Disease lives, and gloomy Old Age.
These are the housemates you must spend your days with. Avoid them you cannot; despise them you can. And you will despise them, if you think ahead often and rehearse the future. Everyone walks bravely toward a danger he prepared for long in advance, and stands up even under hardship if he has practiced meeting it. It's the unprepared who panic at the smallest things. We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise. And since everything is heavier when it is unfamiliar, constant reflection will guarantee that whatever the trouble is, you won't face it like a raw schoolboy.
"My slaves have run away from me!" Yes — and other men have been robbed, blackmailed, murdered, betrayed, trampled underfoot, attacked with poison or with slander. Name any trouble you like; it has happened to many. Beyond that, there are missiles of every kind hurled at us. Some are already planted in us; some are in the air and on their way at this very moment; some that were aimed at other men graze us instead. We should not be surprised at any of the conditions we were born into — conditions no one should complain about, because they are ordained equally for all. Yes, I say equally: for a man might have suffered even the thing he escaped. An equal law is not one that everyone has felt, but one that is laid down for everyone. Prescribe this sense of fairness for your own mind: let us pay the tax of our mortality without complaint.
Winter brings the cold: we must shiver. Summer comes back with its heat: we must sweat. Freak weather shakes our health: we must fall ill. In some places we will meet wild beasts — or men more destructive than any beast. Flood will cost us something, or fire will. We cannot change this order of things. What we can do is acquire stout hearts worthy of good men — hearts that endure chance bravely and fall into step with Nature. And Nature steers this world-kingdom you see around you by means of change: clear skies follow cloudy ones; after a calm comes the storm; the winds blow by turns; day follows night; part of the sky is rising while part is setting. Eternity is made of opposites.
It is to this law that our souls must adjust themselves; this they should follow, this they should obey. Whatever happens, assume it was bound to happen, and do not volunteer to rail at Nature. What you cannot fix, it is best to endure — and to attend, without complaining, on the God under whose guidance everything moves forward. It is a bad soldier who grumbles while following his commander. So let us take our orders briskly and cheerfully, and never desert the march of this most beautiful universe, into which everything we will ever suffer is already woven.
Let us address Jupiter, the pilot of this world-mass, in the words of our great Cleanthes — those most eloquent lines, which I will allow myself to render in Latin, following the example of the eloquent Cicero. If you like them, make the most of them; if they displease you, you'll know I was only doing what Cicero did:
Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny, wherever you have decreed that I shall go. I will follow without flinching. And if I falter and turn unwilling, I will follow anyway — groaning, enduring in vice what I might have done in virtue. Fate leads the willing soul, and drags the unwilling along.
Let us live that way, and speak that way: let Fate find us ready and eager. That is the great soul — the man who has handed himself over to Fate. And the weakling, the degenerate, is the man who struggles, who bad-mouths the order of the universe, and who would rather reform the gods than reform himself.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
The question you ask belongs to that class of subjects where the knowing is the whole point — we want the knowledge for its own sake. Still, because it does concern us, you are in a hurry. You are not willing to wait for the books I am arranging for you at this very moment, the ones that cover the whole field of moral philosophy. I will send them right away. But first let me write to you about how this eagerness to learn — and I can see you are on fire with it — ought to be managed, so it does not trip over its own feet. Knowledge is not to be grabbed at random, and subjects should not be gulped down wholesale in a greedy rush; you arrive at the whole by mastering the parts. The load should be fitted to your strength; do not shoulder more than you can properly carry. Take in not everything you want, but everything you can hold. Just get yourself a sound mind, and then you will be able to hold everything you want. The more a mind receives, the more it expands.
This, I remember, was the advice Attalus gave me back in the days when I practically laid siege to his classroom — first to arrive, last to leave. Even while he paced up and down, I would draw him into one discussion after another; for he did not merely make himself available to his students, he came out to meet them halfway. His rule was: "Teacher and student should share a single purpose — the one aiming to help, the other aiming to improve." Whoever studies under a philosopher should carry home one good thing every day: he should return each evening a sounder man, or at least on the way to becoming one. And he will, because it is one of philosophy's powers to help not only those who study her but even those who just spend time in her company. A man who walks in the sun gets a tan, whether or not that was the plan. A man who lingers in a perfume shop, even briefly, carries the scent out with him. And a man who keeps a philosopher's company is bound to pick up some benefit, even if he is careless about it. Note the word: careless — not defiant.
"What's this?" you say. "Don't we all know men who sat at a philosopher's feet for years without picking up the faintest tint of wisdom?" Of course I know such men — very persistent gentlemen, too, who really stuck at it. I don't call them students of the wise; I call them squatters. Some of them come to hear, not to learn, just as we are drawn to the theater to please our ears with a speech, a song, or a play. This crowd, you will find, makes up a large share of any philosopher's audience — people who treat the lecture hall as a comfortable place to park their leisure. They are not there to drop any of their faults, or to pick up a rule of life to measure their character against; they only want to give their ears a treat. Some even arrive with notebooks — not to take down the substance, but the phrases, so they can repeat them later to others with as little profit as they got themselves. Others are swept up by the ringing sentences and mirror the speaker's feelings with eager faces and eager minds — exactly like those Phrygian priests who work themselves into a frenzy on cue the moment the flute begins to play. But the true listener is seized and stirred by the beauty of the subject itself, not by the jingle of empty words. When some brave word is flung in the face of death, or some defiant jab at Fortune, we take delight and itch to act at once on what we have heard. Men are moved by such words, and they become what the words command — if only the impression stays in the mind, and if the crowd, that great discourager of honorable things, does not immediately ambush the noble impulse. Only a few manage to carry home the state of mind they were inspired with. Yet it is easy to rouse a listener to crave what is right, because Nature has laid the foundations and planted the seeds of virtue in every one of us. We are all born with these advantages; add the spark, and the good in us stirs as if it had been let out of chains. Haven't you noticed how the theater roars whenever some line is spoken whose truth we all recognize and confirm with one voice?
The poor man lacks much; the greedy man lacks everything.
The greedy man does good to no one — and most harm Of all to himself.
At verses like these your meanest miser claps and cheers, delighted to hear his own sins abused. Now imagine how much stronger the effect when such things come from a philosopher's mouth — when he weaves verses in among his wholesome teachings so they sink deeper into a beginner's mind. Cleanthes used to say: "Just as our breath makes a louder sound when it is driven through the long narrow tube of a trumpet and escapes through the flared opening at the end, so the tight constraints of verse make our meaning ring out clearer." The very same words are received more carelessly and strike us less when spoken in prose; but add meter — compress a noble idea into regular rhythm — and the selfsame thought comes hurtling at you with all its force. We talk endlessly about despising money; we give the longest speeches urging mankind to believe that true riches live in the mind, not in the bank account, and that the man who fits himself to slender means and makes himself wealthy on a little is the man who is truly rich. But our minds are struck harder by one verse like this:
He needs but little who desires but little.
or:
He has his wish, whose wish is only for What is enough.
When we hear words like these, we are driven toward admitting the truth.
Even men who think nothing is ever enough will marvel and applaud at such lines, and swear eternal hatred against money. When you see them in that mood, strike home. Keep after them, press this duty on them, and drop the double meanings, the syllogisms, the hair-splitting, and all the other sideshows of pointless cleverness. Preach against greed, preach against luxury; and when you see that you are making progress and getting through to your hearers, press harder still. You cannot imagine how much good a speech of that kind can do when you are bent on curing your listeners and wholly devoted to their best interests. A young mind is easily won over to love what is honorable and upright; truth, given a decent advocate, lays strong hands on those who can still be taught — the ones only lightly spoiled.
I can tell you, when I used to hear Attalus denouncing sin, error, and the evils of life, I often felt pity for the whole human race, and I looked on Attalus as a noble and majestic being, standing above our mortal height. He called himself a king; to me he was more than a king, because he was qualified to pass judgment on kings. And when he began to praise poverty, and to show what a useless and dangerous burden everything is that goes beyond our need, I often wanted to walk out of that lecture hall a poor man. Whenever he lashed our pleasure-chasing lives and praised a clean body, a modest table, and a mind free of unnecessary pleasures — never mind unlawful ones — I felt the urge to put limits on my food and drink. And some of those habits have stayed with me, Lucilius. For I had laid out my whole life in a set of grand resolutions; and later, when I returned to a citizen's duties, I did keep a few of them. That is why I have sworn off oysters and mushrooms forever: they are not food at all, but relishes designed to bully a full stomach into eating more — the darlings of gourmands who stuff themselves past what they can digest: down it goes quickly, and up it comes quickly! That is why, all my life, I have avoided perfume: the best scent for the body is no scent at all. That is why my stomach is a stranger to wine. That is why, all my life, I have shunned the baths, convinced that stewing the body and sweating it thin is as useless as it is soft. Other resolutions I have broken — but broken in such a way that where I gave up total abstinence, I have kept to a limit that sits right next door to abstinence. Perhaps that is even harder; for some things it is easier for the will to cut off completely than to enjoy in moderation.
Since I have started telling you how much hotter my rush toward philosophy was in youth than my pace has been in old age, I will not be ashamed to confess the passion Pythagoras once lit in me. Sotion used to explain why Pythagoras refused to eat animals, and why Sextius, in later days, refused as well. Their reasons were different, but each was a noble reason. Sextius held that a man has food enough without resorting to blood, and that cruelty becomes a habit once butchering is practiced for pleasure. He added that we ought to shrink the sources of our luxury, and he argued that a varied diet works against health and is wrong for our bodies. Pythagoras, on the other hand, held that all beings are related, and that there is a system of exchange among souls, which pass from one bodily shape into another. If you believe him, no soul ever perishes or even pauses in its work, except for the tiny interval while it is being poured from one body into the next. We may leave open the question of when, and after how many changes of station, a soul returns to human form after wandering through so many dwellings; in the meantime, the doctrine made men afraid of guilt — afraid of parricide — since without knowing it they might be attacking a parent's soul, wounding it with knife or with teeth, if the kindred spirit happened to be lodging for a while in that piece of flesh. When Sotion had laid out this teaching, and filled it in with proofs of his own, he would say: "You don't believe that souls are dealt out to one body after another, and that what we call death is merely a change of address? You don't believe that in cattle, in wild beasts, in the creatures of the deep, there may linger the soul of what was once a man? You don't believe that nothing on this earth is annihilated, but only changes its neighborhood — that animals too have their cycles, and their souls travel an orbit of their own, no less than the heavenly bodies wheeling in their fixed circuits? Great men have believed this. So keep your own opinion if you like, but hold the whole question open in your mind. If the doctrine is true, abstaining from flesh is purity; if it is false, it is thrift. And what does it cost you to believe it? All I am taking from you is the diet of lions and vultures."
I was soaked in this teaching, and I began to abstain from animal food; and at the end of a year the habit was as pleasant as it was easy. I began to feel that my mind was quicker — though today I would not swear to you whether it really was. You ask how I came to give it up? It happened this way. My young days fell in the early part of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Certain foreign rites were then being stirred up, and abstaining from particular animal foods was counted as evidence of devotion to the strange cult. So at the request of my father — who did not fear an accusation, but who hated philosophy — I went back to my old habits; and, to be honest, it did not take much persuading to get me to dine more comfortably.
Attalus used to recommend a pillow that does not give way beneath the body; and old as I am, I still use one so hard it takes no imprint from your weight. I have told you all this to show you how fiercely beginners charge toward the highest ideals, when someone does his part by urging them on and fanning the flame. But things do go wrong — partly through the fault of teachers who train us to argue rather than to live, and partly through the fault of students who come to their teachers to sharpen their wits rather than their souls. And that is how the study of wisdom has turned into the study of words.
Now, it makes a great deal of difference what you have in mind when you come to a subject. If a future language scholar is examining Virgil, he does not read that noble line
Time flies away, and cannot be recalled
in this spirit: "We must wake up. Unless we hurry, we will be left behind. Time rolls swiftly on and rolls us along with it; we are swept forward, ignorant of our destination; we lay all our plans for the future, and lounge at our ease on the edge of a cliff." No — he points out that whenever Virgil speaks of the speed of time, he uses the word "flies":
The choicest days of our unhappy life Fly first; disease and bitter age press on, And toil, till death's hard hand sweeps all away.
The man who reads these lines as a philosopher takes the words in their proper sense. "Virgil never says time goes," he comments, "but always time flies, because flying is the fastest of all movements — and our best days are always the first to be snatched away. Why then are we so slow to spur ourselves on, to try to match the pace of the swiftest thing there is?" The good flies past, and the worse takes its place. Just as the purest wine pours from the top of the jar while the heaviest dregs settle at the bottom, so in our human life the best comes first. Shall we let other men drink off the best, and keep the dregs for ourselves? Let this line fasten itself to your soul; let it satisfy you as if an oracle had spoken it:
Each choicest day of our unhappy life Flies first.
Why the "choicest" day? Because what is coming is unsure. Why the "choicest"? Because in youth we can learn — we can bend minds still supple and ready toward nobler purposes; because this is the season for work, for keeping the mind busy with study and the body busy with useful effort. What comes after is more sluggish and short of spirit — closer to the end.
So let us strive with our whole heart, ignoring the attractions along the roadside; let us struggle with a single purpose, or we will discover too late — after we have been left behind — just how fast that flying time moves which we can never stop. Let every day, the moment it arrives, be welcomed as the choicest, and be made our own property. What is fleeing must be caught. But the man who reads those same lines with a scholar's eye never reflects that our first days are the best because disease is on the way, because old age is already pressing down and hanging over our heads while we are still daydreaming about our youth. He notes instead that Virgil always sets disease and age side by side — and, to be fair, rightly so, for old age is a disease without a cure. "And besides," he says to himself, "look at the epithet Virgil attaches to age: he calls it bitter" —
Disease and bitter age press on.
And elsewhere Virgil says:
There pale disease has made its home, and bitter age.
There is no reason to marvel that each man harvests from the same field material suited to his own pursuits: in one and the same meadow the cow finds grass, the dog hunts the hare, and the stork hunts the lizard. When Cicero's book On the State is opened by a philologist, a language scholar, and a follower of philosophy, each man runs his investigation his own way. The philosopher is astonished that so much could be said in it against justice. The philologist opens the same book and notes this: that there were two Roman kings, one with no father and one with no mother — for no one can settle who Servius's mother was, and Ancus, Numa's grandson, has no father on record. He also notes that the officer we call dictator, and read about in our histories under that title, was in the old days named the magister populi, "master of the people" — the name survives today in the augurs' records, and the proof is that the man the dictator chose as his second-in-command was called the magister equitum, "master of the horse." He will remark, too, that Romulus met his end during an eclipse; and that even under the kings there was a right of appeal to the people — so the pontiffs' register says, and Fenestella, among others, agrees. When the language scholar unrolls the very same volume, he enters into his notebook the forms of words: he notes that Cicero uses reapse for re ipsa, "in actual fact," and sepse just as often for se ipse, "he himself." Then he turns to shifts in usage. Cicero, for instance, writes: "since his interruption calls us back from the very calx" — for the finish line in the racecourse that we now call the creta, the chalk, was in the old days called the calx, the lime. Next he collects verses of Ennius, especially the ones about Africanus:
A man whom neither friend nor foe could pay The worth of all his labors and his deeds.
From this passage the scholar declares he can infer that the word opem once meant not merely "aid" but "effort" — for Ennius must mean that neither friend nor foe could pay Scipio a reward equal to his efforts. Then he congratulates himself on discovering the source of Virgil's lines:
Over whose head the mighty gate of heaven Thunders,
remarking that Ennius stole the idea from Homer, and Virgil stole it from Ennius; for preserved in this same book of Cicero's, On the State, is a couplet of Ennius:
If it is right for a mortal to climb to the regions of heaven, Then for me alone the sky's great gate swings open.
But I must not slip into playing philologist or language scholar myself while I am busy with another errand. So here is my advice: all study of philosophy, and all reading, should be applied to the goal of living the happy life. We should not go hunting for archaic or far-fetched words, for eccentric metaphors and figures of speech; we should look for teachings that will help us — brave and spirited sayings that can be turned into fact on the spot. We should learn them in such a way that words become deeds. And I hold that no man has done mankind a worse turn than the one who studies philosophy as a trade to be sold — who lives one way and teaches another. Men like that, guilty of every fault they denounce, walk around as advertisements for useless training. A teacher of that sort can help me no more than a seasick pilot can help in a storm. The pilot has to grip the tiller while the waves are tossing him; he has to wrestle with the sea itself; he has to strip the sails when the storm rages — what good to me is a helmsman who is terrified and vomiting? And how much greater, do you think, is the storm of life than any storm that ever tossed a ship! One must steer, not talk.
Every word these men utter and juggle before an admiring crowd belongs to someone else. Plato said it, Zeno said it, Chrysippus said it, or Posidonius, or one of that whole company of Stoics, as numerous as they are excellent. I will show you how men can prove that the words are their own: let them do what they have been saying. And now, since I have delivered the message I wanted you to have, I will satisfy your eagerness — but I will save the complete answer to your question for a fresh letter, so that you do not come tired to a subject that is thorny, and that demands an attentive and painstaking ear.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You wanted to know whether one wise man can help another. After all, we say the wise man is fully stocked with every good — he has reached perfection. So how could anyone help a man who already possesses the Supreme Good?
Good men are good for each other. Each gives the other's virtues a workout and keeps his wisdom in fighting trim. Each needs someone to compare notes with, someone to investigate things alongside. Skilled wrestlers stay sharp by sparring; a musician is spurred on by a player of equal skill. The wise man, too, needs his virtues kept in motion — and just as he prods himself into action, he can be prodded by another wise man. What does one wise man actually do for another? He quickens his impulses. He points out openings for honorable action. Beyond that, he can work out some of his own ideas in company and share what he has discovered. For even the wise man will always have something left to discover, some territory where his mind can push into new ground.
Bad men harm bad men. Each drags the other lower — stoking his anger, applauding his rudeness, praising his pleasures. Bad men hit bottom when their faults have thoroughly blended, when their wickedness has been pooled, so to speak, into a partnership. Flip that over, and you see how a good man helps a good man. "How?" you ask. He brings the other joy. He strengthens his confidence. Each looks at the other's calm, and the delight of both grows. Besides, they teach each other things they know — because the wise man is not all-knowing. And even if he were, someone might still devise shortcuts and point them out, ways of getting the whole business across more easily. The wise man helps the wise man not by his own strength alone, mind you, but by the strength of the man he's helping. The other could, it's true, develop his own gifts by himself — but even the swiftest runner is helped by a pacesetter.
"The wise man doesn't really help the wise man; he helps himself. Here's the proof: strip the second man of his own powers, and the first accomplishes nothing." On that logic you might as well say sweetness isn't in the honey — since it's the eater whose tongue and palate must be built for that kind of food, so that the flavor delights him instead of putting him off. There are people so altered by disease that honey tastes bitter to them. Both men need to be in good health: one to give the help, the other to be fit to receive it.
Again they say: "Once a thing has reached its highest heat, adding more heat is pointless. Once a man has reached the Supreme Good, a helper is pointless. Does a fully stocked farmer beg supplies from his neighbors? Does a soldier armed head to toe for battle need more weapons? Neither does the wise man — he is equipped and armed for life." My answer: even a thing heated to the highest degree needs continued heat to stay there. And if you object that heat maintains itself, I say you're comparing very different things. Heat is one single thing; helpfulness comes in many kinds. And heat doesn't need more heat added in order to be hot — but the wise man cannot hold his mind at its own high level without the company of friends of his own kind, people to share his goodness with. What's more, there is a kind of mutual friendship among all the virtues. So the man who loves the virtues of his peers, and shows his own to be loved in return, is being helpful. Like delights in like — especially when the likeness is honorable and the approval runs both ways. And besides, only a wise man can prompt another wise man's soul intelligently, just as only a human being can prompt a human being rationally. As reason is needed to prompt reason, so perfect reason is needed to prompt perfect reason.
Some say we're also "helped" by people who hand us the so-called indifferent things — money, influence, security, and all the other prized or essential props of living. Argue that way, and the biggest fool in town will count as a helper of the wise. But helping really means prompting the soul in accordance with Nature — by the excellence of the prompter and the excellence of the prompted alike. And this can't happen without profit to the helper too, for in training another man's excellence you necessarily train your own. But set aside the supreme goods and their causes; wise men can still be useful to each other. For a sage merely to discover another sage is itself worth wanting, since everything good is naturally dear to the good man. One feels at home with a good man the way one feels at home with oneself.
To prove the point, I have to move from this question to a neighboring one. People ask whether the wise man will weigh his opinions alone, or turn to others for advice. He is forced to do the latter whenever he takes up public or household business — everything, so to speak, that is mortal. In such matters he needs outside advice, just like the doctor, the pilot, the attorney, the courtroom pleader. So the wise will sometimes help the wise; they will persuade each other. But even in the great matters — the divine matters, as I've been calling them — the wise man can be useful too: by discussing honorable things in common, by contributing his thoughts and ideas. Besides, it accords with Nature to show affection for our friends and to rejoice in their progress as if it were absolutely our own. If we don't do that, even virtue — which stays strong only by exercising our perceptions — will not stay with us. Now virtue tells us to arrange the present well, to think ahead about the future, to deliberate and apply the mind. And a man who brings a friend into the council can apply his mind and think a problem through more easily.
So the wise man will seek out either the perfect sage or someone who has progressed to the very border of perfection. And the perfect sage will help us further if he backs up our deliberations with ordinary good sense. They say men see farther in other people's affairs than in their own. In ordinary people that's a defect of character: self-love blinds them, and fear in the hour of danger robs them of a clear view of what's useful — a man only begins to be wise when he is at ease and free of fear. But even wise men see certain things more clearly in another's case than in their own. Moreover, the wise man, together with his fellow sage, will make good on that sweetest and most honorable of proverbs — always desiring the same things, and always refusing the same things. It is a noble outcome when two draw the load with an equal yoke.
There — I've answered your demand, though it really belongs in my volumes On Moral Philosophy. Reflect, as I keep telling you, that there's nothing in topics like these for us except mental gymnastics. For I come back again and again to the same thought: "What good does this do me? Make me braver now, more just, more restrained! I haven't yet had the chance to use my training; I still need the physician. Why ask me to carry useless knowledge? You promised great things — test me, watch me! You assured me I'd be unterrified though swords flashed around me, though the blade's point grazed my throat. You assured me I'd be at ease though fires blazed around me, though a sudden whirlwind snatched up my ship and carried it across the whole sea. Give me the course of treatment that lets me despise pleasure and glory. Afterward you can teach me to untangle knotty problems, settle doubtful points, see through what's obscure. For now, teach me what I need to know!"
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
From my villa at Nomentum, I send you greetings and this instruction: keep a sound spirit within you — in other words, win the blessing of all the gods. For the man who has become a blessing to himself is assured of their grace and favor. Set aside, for now, the belief certain people hold that each of us has a god assigned as a kind of attendant — not a god of full rank, but one of the lower grade, one of those Ovid calls "plebeian gods." But while you set the belief aside, remember this: our ancestors who held it were being Stoics without knowing it, for they assigned a Genius or a Juno to every individual. Later on we'll investigate whether the gods have time on their hands to manage the affairs of private individuals. In the meantime, know this: whether we're allotted special guardians or abandoned to Fortune, you can lay no heavier curse on a man than to pray that he be at war with himself.
Not that there's any reason to ask the gods to turn hostile toward someone you think deserves punishment. They are hostile to such a man already, I maintain — even when he seems to be rising by their favor. Look carefully at how our affairs actually stand, not at what people say about them, and you'll understand that our so-called evils are more likely to help us than to hurt us. How often has "misfortune" been the source and beginning of happiness! How often have privileges we received with deep thanksgiving built themselves into a staircase up the side of a cliff — lifting still higher men who were already eminent, as if they had previously stood somewhere they could fall from in safety! Yet even that fall holds nothing evil, if you look at the end of it, beyond which nature lays no man lower. The universal limit is close; yes, close by is the point where the prosperous man is toppled — and the point where the unfortunate man is set free. It is we who stretch both distances out, lengthening them with our hopes and our fears.
If you're wise, though, measure everything by the human condition: keep your joys and your fears alike on a short leash. In fact, it's worth not rejoicing over anything for long, so that you won't fear anything for long. But why am I narrowing the scope of this evil? There is no reason to think anything is to be feared. Everything that rattles us and keeps us aflutter is empty. Not one of us has sifted out the truth; we've simply handed our fear along to one another. No one has dared to walk up to the thing that frightened him and get to know his fear — even the good hidden inside it. That's why falsehood and vanity keep their credit: nobody refutes them. Let's decide it's worth looking closely. Then it will become clear how fleeting, how unsure, how harmless the things we fear really are. The confusion in our spirits is just what Lucretius diagnosed:
Like boys who cower, frightened, in the dark, we grown-ups fear things in the light of day.
Well then — aren't we more foolish than any child, we who are afraid in daylight? Except you were wrong, Lucretius: we are not afraid in the daylight. We have turned everything into darkness. We see neither what harms us nor what helps us; all our lives we blunder ahead, and we neither stop nor step more carefully for that. You see what madness it is to charge forward in the dark. And yet we're bent on it — on making ourselves harder to call back, from farther away. We don't know where we're going, but we rush at full speed in the direction we're straining toward.
Yet the light can begin to dawn, if we're willing. Only one thing can bring it about: acquiring, through knowledge, a familiarity with things divine and human — not just splashing in it but steeping ourselves in it; reviewing the same principles over and over, even when we understand them, and applying them again and again to ourselves; investigating what is good, what is evil, and what has been falsely labeled one or the other; investigating, finally, honor and baseness, and Providence. And the range of human intelligence isn't fenced in even there. It may explore beyond the universe itself — where it is headed, where it arose, and the ruin toward which all nature is hurrying so fast. We have dragged the soul away from that divine contemplation and down into mean, low work: to slave for greed; to abandon the universe and its frontiers and, under the orders of masters who will try anything, to pry beneath the earth and dig up whatever evil it can find there — unsatisfied with what was laid out in front of it for free.
God, the Father of us all, placed whatever was meant for our good ready at our hands. He didn't wait for us to search; he gave it voluntarily. What would harm us, he buried deep in the earth. We have no one to complain about but ourselves: against the will of Nature, who hid them, we hauled up into the light the materials of our own destruction. We have signed our souls over to pleasure — and serving pleasure is the beginning of every evil. We have surrendered ourselves to ambition and reputation, and to other aims equally idle and equally useless.
So what am I urging you to do? Nothing new — we aren't hunting cures for new diseases — but first of all this: figure out for yourself what is necessary and what is superfluous. What is necessary will meet you everywhere; what is superfluous always has to be hunted down, and hunted hard. But don't congratulate yourself too much for despising gilded couches and jeweled furniture. What virtue is there in despising useless things? Admire yourself when you've come to despise the necessities. It's no great feat to live without royal pomp, to feel no craving for thousand-pound boars or flamingo tongues or the other absurdities of a luxury so jaded with whole roasted game that it picks different bits from different animals. I'll admire you when you've learned to scorn even plain bread; when you've convinced yourself that grass grows for the needs of men as well as cattle; when you've discovered that the treetop can fill the belly — that belly into which we cram precious things as if it could keep what it receives. We should feed the stomach without being fussy about it. What does it matter what the stomach takes in, when it must lose everything it takes? You delight in the carefully arranged delicacies caught on land and sea — some prized when they reach the table fresh, others when they've been fed and fattened so long they nearly melt and can barely hold their own grease. You like their subtly engineered flavors. But I promise you: once those choice, elaborately seasoned dishes have gone down, one and the same corruption overtakes them all. Do you want to despise the pleasures of eating? Then look at where eating ends. I remember some words of Attalus that drew applause from the whole room:
"Riches deceived me for a long time. I would catch some gleam of them here and there and stand dazed. I assumed their hidden power matched their visible shine. Then, at a certain elaborate entertainment, I saw embossed work in silver and gold equal to the wealth of an entire city; colors and tapestries contrived to match objects worth more than gold or silver, brought not only from beyond our borders but from beyond our enemies' borders; here files of slave-boys picked for their training and their beauty, there throngs of slave-women, and everything else a prosperous and mighty empire could put forward after taking inventory of its possessions. What is this, I said to myself, but a deliberate stirring-up of human cravings that are inflamed enough already? What is the point of this whole parade of money? Did we gather here to learn what greed is? For my part, I walked out with less craving than I walked in with. I came to despise riches — not because they are useless, but because they are petty. Did you notice how that whole program, slow-moving and carefully staged as it was, played itself out inside a few hours? Has a business filled up this entire life of ours that could not fill up one whole day?
"Another thought struck me too: the riches seemed as useless to the men who owned them as to the men who watched. So now, whenever some spectacle of that sort dazzles my eyes — whenever I see a splendid palace, a polished corps of attendants, handsome bearers carrying a litter — I say to myself: Why wonder? Why gape? It's all show. These things are shown to you, not given to you — and even while they please, they are passing away. Turn instead to the true riches. Learn to be content with little, and call out with courage and greatness of soul: 'We have water, we have porridge — let us compete in happiness with Jupiter himself.' And why not, I ask you, make that challenge even without the porridge and the water? To hang the happy life on silver and gold is disgraceful — and to hang it on water and porridge is just as disgraceful. 'But what would I do without them?' someone says. You want the cure for want? Hunger ends hunger. Otherwise, what real difference is there between being enslaved by big things and being enslaved by small ones? What does it matter how little it is that Fortune can refuse you? Even your porridge and water can fall under someone else's control. Freedom belongs not to the man over whom Fortune has little power, but to the man over whom she has none at all. Here is what I mean: you must crave nothing, if you would go head to head with Jupiter — for Jupiter craves nothing."
That is what Attalus told us. If you're willing to think on these things often, you will work not to seem happy but to be happy — and to seem happy to yourself, rather than to others.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You asked me for a Latin word for the Greek sophismata. Many people have tried to pin a term on them, but no name has stuck — naturally enough, since the thing itself never won general acceptance among us, and so the name met resistance too. The word Cicero used seems the best fit to me: he called them cavillationes — quibbles. A man who surrenders himself to them weaves plenty of clever little traps, but he makes no progress toward actual living. He doesn't come out braver, or more restrained, or loftier in spirit.
But the man who has practiced philosophy as his own cure becomes great-souled, full of confidence, unbeatable — and bigger the closer you get to him. It's the same with high mountains: from far off they look lower than they are, and only when you approach do you see plainly how tall the peaks stand. That, my dear Lucilius, is the true philosopher — true in deeds, not in tricks. He stands on high ground: admirable, lofty, genuinely great. He doesn't stretch himself or walk on tiptoe like people who cheat their height, wanting to look taller than they are; he is content with his own size. And why shouldn't he be content, when he has grown to a height Fortune's hands can't reach? He is above earthly things and equal to himself in every situation — whether the current of life runs smooth, or he is tossed on rough and desperate seas. That kind of steadiness can never be won by the hair-splitting I just mentioned. The mind plays with quibbles and profits nothing; all it does is drag philosophy down from her heights onto the flat ground. The real philosopher climbs; the quibbler just walks in circles at sea level.
I wouldn't forbid you to practice such exercises now and then — but save them for a time when you want to do nothing. Their worst feature is this: they generate a charm of their own, gripping and holding the soul with a show of subtlety — while matters of real weight are calling for us, and a whole lifetime is barely enough to learn one single principle: to despise life. "What? Surely you meant 'control,' not 'despise'?" No. Controlling life is the second task. No one has ever controlled his life rightly who has not first learned to despise it.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Believe me, I want your friend shaped and trained just as much as you do. But he has come to us in a very hardened state — or rather, and this is the harder problem, in a very soft state, broken down by bad habits of long standing.
Let me give you an illustration from my own hobby. Not every vine will take a graft. If the vine is old and decayed, or thin and feeble, it will either refuse the cutting outright or fail to feed it; it won't take the graft into itself and make it part of its own body, won't adapt itself to the new wood's quality and nature. So what we usually do is cut the vine off above the ground, so that if nothing comes of the first attempt, we can try our luck a second time and graft below the ground.
Now, this man you've written to me about has no strength. He has pampered his vices. He has managed to go flabby and hard at the same time. He cannot receive reason, and he cannot nourish it. "But," you say, "he wants it. He asks for it of his own free will." Don't believe him. I don't mean he's lying to you — he genuinely thinks he wants it. Luxury has upset his stomach, that's all; give it a little while and the two of them will be reconciled. "But he says he's disgusted with his old way of living." Very likely. Who isn't? People love their vices and hate them at the same time. The right season to pass judgment on him will come when he has given us a guarantee that he really hates luxury. As things stand now, he and luxury are merely not on speaking terms.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You want my written opinion on a question our school likes to kick around: whether justice, courage, foresight, and the other virtues are living things. It's quibbles like this, my dear Lucilius, that have convinced the public we sharpen our wits on useless targets and fritter away our free time on debates that will profit no one. Still, you asked, so I'll lay out the question as our school sees it. For myself, I confess to a different creed: I think some topics are best left to the sort of man who goes around in white shoes and a Greek cloak. But the arguments that stirred the old masters — or that the old masters stirred up — I will explain to you.
The soul, everyone agrees, is a living thing, because it is what makes us living things, and because "living things" take their very name from it. Now, virtue is nothing but the soul in a certain condition; therefore virtue is a living thing. Again: virtue acts, and no action happens without impulse; and whatever has impulse must be a living thing, because nothing except a living thing has impulse. The comeback to this is: "If virtue is a living thing, then virtue itself possesses virtue." Of course it does — it possesses its own self! Just as the wise man does everything by means of virtue, virtue does everything by means of itself. "In that case," they say, "all the arts are living things too, and all our thoughts, and everything the mind grasps. It follows that many thousands of living things dwell in the cramped quarters of a man's heart, and that each of us is — or at least contains — a whole crowd of living creatures."
Stuck for an answer? Here it is: each of these will be a living thing, but they will not be many separate living things. Why not? I'll explain, if you'll lend my words your subtlety and your concentration. Each separate living thing must have a substance of its own. But all the things I just listed share a single soul; so each can be a living thing without their being many. I myself am a living thing and a man, but you can't say there are two of me on that account. Why? Because to be two, they would have to be two separate existences — one would have to be split off from the other to make a pair. Whatever is manifold inside a single whole falls under a single nature, and so it is single.
My soul is a living thing, and so am I, but we are not two persons. Why? Because the soul is a part of me. A thing will only be counted as something in its own right when it stands by itself. As long as it is part of something else, it cannot be regarded as separate. Why? I'll tell you: because what is separate must be its own thing — personal, whole, and complete in itself.
I've put myself on record as holding a different opinion. For if you accept this doctrine, then not only the virtues will be living things, but so will their opposite vices, and the emotions too — anger, fear, grief, suspicion. Push the argument further, and every opinion and every thought becomes a living thing. That is simply not admissible; for not everything a man does is the man himself.
"What is Justice, then?" people say. Justice is a soul holding itself in a certain attitude. "So if the soul is a living thing, Justice is one too." Not at all. Justice is a state of the soul — a kind of power the soul has — and that same soul shifts into various likenesses without becoming a different kind of animal every time it acts differently. Nor is what the soul produces a living thing.
If Justice, Courage, and the other virtues are actually alive, do they stop being living things and then start life over again, or are they living things forever? Virtues cannot cease to exist. Then there are many — no, countless — living things lodging in this one soul. "Not many," comes the answer, "because they are all attached to the one soul, parts and limbs of a single whole." Then the picture we're painting of the soul is a many-headed hydra, each head fighting and destroying on its own. And yet no head is a separate living thing; each is the head of a living thing, and the hydra itself is one single animal. Nobody ever believed the Chimaera contained a living lion or a living serpent; those were parts of the whole Chimaera, and parts are not living things. So how do you conclude that Justice is a living thing? "Justice is active and helpful," they reply. "What acts and helps has impulse, and what has impulse is a living thing." True — if the impulse is its own. But Justice's impulse is not its own; it comes from the soul.
Every living thing remains what it began as, until death. A man is a man until he dies, a horse a horse, a dog a dog; they cannot change into anything else. Now let's grant that Justice — defined as "a soul in a certain attitude" — is a living thing. Suppose it so. Then Courage is alive too, being "a soul in a certain attitude." But which soul? The one we just defined as Justice? The soul is kept inside the first creature and cannot cross over into another; it must live out its existence in the being where it began. Besides, one soul cannot belong to two living things, much less to many. And if Justice, Courage, Restraint, and all the other virtues are living things, how will they share one soul? They must have separate souls, or else they are not living things. Several living things cannot have one body — our very opponents admit that. Now, what is the "body" of Justice? "The soul," they concede. And of Courage? "The soul again." And yet there cannot be one body for two living things. "But the same soul," they answer, "puts on the guise of Justice, or Courage, or Restraint." That would work if Courage were absent while Justice was present, and Restraint absent while Courage was present. As it stands, all the virtues are there at the same time. So how can the individual virtues be living things, if you grant there is one single soul — and one soul cannot make more than one single living thing?
Again: no living thing is part of another living thing. But Justice is part of the soul; therefore Justice is not a living thing. By now I seem to be wasting effort on an acknowledged fact — this is a topic to laugh out of the room, not to debate. And no two living things are equal. Look at the bodies of all creatures: every one has its particular color, shape, and size. Among all the reasons to marvel at the genius of the divine Creator, I count this one: in all that abundance, nothing repeats. Even things that look alike turn out, on comparison, to be different. God has made the whole multitude of leaves we see, and each is stamped with its own pattern; all the many animals, and no two the same size — always some difference. The Creator has set himself the task of making things distinct — unlike and unequal. But the virtues, by your own argument, are all equal. Therefore they are not living things.
Every living thing acts on its own; but virtue does nothing on its own — it must act in partnership with a man. All living things are either rational, like men and gods, or irrational, like beasts and cattle. The virtues are certainly rational; yet they are neither men nor gods; therefore they are not living things. Every rational living thing sits inactive until some external impression stirs it; then impulse comes, and finally assent confirms the impulse. Let me explain what assent is. Suppose I ought to take a walk: I do walk, but only after giving myself the order and approving my own opinion. Or suppose I ought to sit down: I do sit, but only after the same process. Now, this assent is no part of virtue. Say the virtue in question is Prudence: how is Prudence going to assent to the opinion "I must take a walk"? Nature doesn't allow it. Prudence looks after the interests of its possessor, not its own; Prudence can neither walk nor sit down. So it has no power of assent, and it is not a rational living thing. And if virtue is a living thing, it must be rational; but it is not rational; therefore it is not a living thing.
If virtue is a living thing, and virtue is a Good — then isn't every Good a living thing? It is; our school professes exactly that. Now, saving your father's life is a Good; giving a judicious opinion in the senate is a Good; handing down just verdicts is a Good. Therefore the act of saving your father is a living thing, and so is the act of giving sound opinions. We have pushed this absurdity so far that you can't keep from laughing out loud: wise silence is a Good, and so is a frugal dinner; therefore silence is a living thing, and so is dining. And I will never stop tickling my own mind and making sport for myself with this dainty nonsense. Justice and Courage, if they are living things, are certainly earthly ones. And every earthly living thing gets cold and hungry and thirsty. Therefore Justice shivers, Courage goes hungry, and Kindness could use a drink!
And why stop there? Shouldn't I ask our honorable opponents what shape these creatures have? A man's? A horse's? A wild beast's? If they give them a round shape, like a god's, I shall ask whether greed and luxury and madness are equally round — for these, too, are "living things." If I find they've rounded those off as well, I'll go on to ask whether a modest walk is a living thing. By their own argument they'll have to admit it — and say that a gait is a living thing, and a round one at that!
Now, don't imagine I'm the first man in our school to speak from his own judgment instead of the rulebook. Cleanthes and his pupil Chrysippus could not agree on what walking is. Cleanthes held it was spirit transmitted from the ruling essence to the feet; Chrysippus, that it was the ruling essence itself. So why, following Chrysippus's own example, shouldn't every man claim his freedom and laugh down all these "living things" — so numerous that the universe itself can't hold them?
Someone might say: "The virtues are not many living things, and yet they are living things. Just as one individual can be both poet and orator without being two men, so these virtues are living things without being many. The soul is one and the same; it can be at once just and prudent and brave, holding itself in a certain attitude toward each virtue." The dispute is settled; we're agreed. For the moment I'll grant that the soul is a living thing — reserving my final vote for later — but I deny that the soul's acts are living creatures. Otherwise all words and all verses would be alive. If prudent speech is a Good, and every Good is a living thing, then speech is a living thing. A prudent line of poetry is a Good; every Good is a living thing; therefore the line of poetry is a living thing. And so "Arms and the man I sing" is a living thing — though they can hardly call it round, since it has six feet!
"This whole business we're discussing," you say, "is a tangled web." I split with laughter whenever I reflect that solecisms and barbarisms and syllogisms are living things, and, like a portrait painter, I give each one a suitable face. Is this what we discuss with knitted brow and wrinkled forehead? After this I can't say, with Caelius, "What melancholy trifling!" It's more than trifling; it's absurd. What all this buys you, I can't see. Why don't we discuss something useful and wholesome instead — how we may attain the virtues, and what road will take us to them?
Teach me, not whether Courage is a living thing, but that no living thing is happy without courage — without the strength, that is, to stand against hazards and to master every stroke of Fortune by rehearsing and anticipating her attack. And what is Courage? It is the impregnable fortress of our mortal weakness. The man who has walled himself inside it holds out, free of anxiety, through life's whole siege, because he is using his own strength and his own weapons. Here let me give you a saying of our philosopher Posidonius: "Never think yourself safe because you carry the weapons of Fortune. Fight with your own! Fortune supplies no arms against herself; men equipped against their enemies stand unarmed against Fortune."
Alexander, to be sure, harried and routed the Persians, the Hyrcanians, the Indians, and every other nation the East spreads out to the edge of the Ocean; but he himself, as he killed one friend and lost another, would lie in the dark mourning now his crime, now his loss. The conqueror of so many kings and nations was laid low by anger and grief! For he had made it his aim to win control of everything except his emotions. What enormous mistakes possess men who long to push the borders of empire beyond the seas, who count themselves most prosperous when their armies occupy many provinces and they can stitch new territory onto the old — and who know nothing of the kingdom that stands equal to heaven itself in greatness! The greatest command is command of yourself.
Let self-command teach me what a holy thing Justice is — the virtue that always looks to another's good and asks nothing for itself except the chance to be exercised. It should have nothing to do with ambition and reputation; it should be its own satisfaction. And before everything else, let each man convince himself of this: "I must be just without reward." And that's not enough; let him convince himself of this as well: "May I take pleasure in devoting myself, of my own free will, to this noblest of virtues." Let all his thoughts turn as far as possible from personal advantage. Don't look around for the reward of a just deed; a just deed in itself pays a still greater one. Drive deep into your mind what I said a moment ago: it makes no difference how many people know of your integrity. Those who want their virtue advertised are working for fame, not virtue. Aren't you willing to be just without being famous? In fact, you will often have to be just and disgraced at the same time. And then, if you're wise, let a bad reputation, well earned, be a delight to you.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You've been asking me why certain periods produce a rotten style of speaking — how a whole generation's talent can slide into the same vices, so that in one era the fashion is prose all puffed up and straining for power, and in another it's prose that minces along, modulated like a piece of concert music. You wonder why one age applauds ideas so bold you can hardly believe anyone dared them, while another goes in for choppy, insinuating phrases where you have to read in more meaning than actually reaches your ear. And why some epochs claimed the right to use metaphor shamelessly, as if there were no such thing as going too far.
Here is the answer, and you already know it — it's a saying you hear on the street, one the Greeks turned into a proverb: men's speech matches their lives. Just as each individual's way of acting speaks for him, so a period's way of speaking reproduces the general character of the time, whenever public morals have slackened and the public has given itself over to softness. Decadence in speech is proof of decadence in the city — provided it's popular and fashionable, not just the quirk of one or two individuals.
A man's talent cannot be one thing and his soul another. If the soul is healthy, well ordered, serious, and restrained, the talent is likewise sound and sober. When the soul goes bad, the talent is infected too. Haven't you noticed that when a man's soul has gone sluggish, his limbs drag and his feet shuffle? That if the soul is soft, you can spot the softness in the very walk? That a keen, confident soul quickens the step? That madness in the soul — or anger, which is madness's near relation — speeds the body's movements from walking to rushing?
And how much more must all this affect one's talent, which is woven through and through with the soul — shaped by it, taking its orders from it, receiving its laws from it.
How Maecenas lived is too well known to need retelling here: how he walked, how soft he was, how he loved putting himself on display — how determined he was that his vices should not go unnoticed. Well then: doesn't the looseness of his prose match his loose, ungirt clothing? Are his habits, his entourage, his house, his wife, any less on display than his sentences? He could have been a man of great powers, if he had gone at his work by the straight road — if he hadn't shrunk from being understood, if he hadn't been just as slack in his style as in everything else. What you find in his eloquence, you will see, is a drunk man's talk: winding, wandering, sprawling without limit.
Is there anything more unbecoming than this: "a stream and a bank all shaggy with long-tressed woods"? Or look how "men plow the channel with boats and, churning up the shallows, leave gardens in their wake." Or this: "he crimps his lady-locks, and bills and coos, and falls a-sighing, like a lord of the forest who offers prayer with drooping neck." Or: "an unredeemed crew, they hunt out folk at feasts, and lay siege to households with the wine-cup, and by hope exact death." Or: "a Genius could scarcely stand witness to his own festival"; or "threads of slender tapers and crackling meal"; or "mothers or wives robing the hearth."
Reading through words like these, can't you instantly picture him — the man who was forever parading through the city with his tunic hanging loose? Even when he was standing in for the absent emperor, he was in undress when they came to him for the day's password. The man who sat as judge on the bench, or spoke in public, or appeared at any official function with his cloak pulled up over his head, only the ears sticking out, like the millionaire's runaway slaves in the farce. The man who, at the very moment the state was locked in civil war — the city in crisis, under martial law — went about in public attended by two eunuchs, both of them more man than he was. The man who had only one wife and yet was married a thousand times.
Those sentences of his — so faultily joined, so carelessly tossed off, arranged in such deliberate defiance of common practice — announce that their author's character was equally strange, equally unsound, equally off the track. He does get high praise, and deserves it, for his humanity: he was sparing with the sword, he shrank from bloodshed, and the only field where he showed what his power could do was his self-indulgence. But he spoiled that genuine credit with these ridiculous fussy affectations of style. Look closely and you see he was not really gentle, but soft — the proof is in his twisted word order, his upside-down expressions, and those startling thoughts of his, which often contain something great but go nerveless in the telling. Too much success, you would say, had turned his head.
Sometimes the fault lies in the man, sometimes in his times. When prosperity has spread luxury far and wide, people begin with more careful attention to how they look. Next they go crazy over furniture. Then it's the houses: how to spread them over more ground, as if they were country estates; how to make the walls gleam with marble shipped across the seas; how to gild the ceiling until it matches the shine of the inlaid floors. From there the exquisite taste moves to the dinner table, where the game is to win applause by novelty and by scrambling the customary order of the courses — serving first what used to come last, so that departing guests get the dishes that once greeted them when they arrived.
Once the mind has gotten into the habit of despising the usual, of finding the customary cheap, it starts hunting for novelty in speech as well. Now it dredges up obsolete, antique words and shows them off; now it coins words nobody has heard, or mangles existing ones; now a bold, incessant use of metaphor becomes the signature of style, according to whatever fashion has just come in. Some writers chop their thoughts short, hoping to impress by leaving the meaning in doubt and making the listener suspect his own dullness. Some dwell on a thought and stretch it out. Others go right up to the edge of a fault — which a writer really must do, if he wants grandeur — but these actually fall in love with the fault itself. In short, wherever you see a corrupt style winning applause, you can be sure the character of the age has also strayed from the true standard.
Just as extravagant banquets and elaborate clothes are symptoms of a sick state, so a slack style — if it's popular — shows that the mind, which is where words come from, has lost its balance. And don't be surprised that corrupt speech is welcomed not only by the grubby crowd but by our cultivated set as well; the two differ in their clothes, not in their judgment. What you may more fairly wonder at is that approval goes not just to the products of vice, but to the vices themselves. It has always been so: no talent has ever won acceptance without something being pardoned. Name me any famous man you like; I can tell you what his age forgave in him, what his age deliberately overlooked. I can show you many men whose vices never hurt them, and more than a few who were actually helped by them. I can show you men of the highest reputation, held up as models for our admiration — and yet if you set out to correct their faults, you erase them, because the vices are so entangled with the virtues that they drag the virtues down with them.
Besides, style has no fixed laws. It is changed by the usage of the crowd, and never stays the same for long. Many orators go raiding earlier centuries for their vocabulary and talk in the language of the Twelve Tables — Rome's oldest law code. To them, Gracchus, Crassus, and Curio are too polished and too modern; so it's back to Appius and Coruncanius! Others, determined to use nothing but worn, everyday expressions, sink into flatness. Both classes are degenerate, each in its own way — and it's every bit as degenerate to use only words that are showy, high-flown, and poetical, avoiding whatever is familiar and in common use. The one fault, I'd say, is as bad as the other: the first crowd grooms itself beyond all reason, the second neglects itself beyond all reason; the former shave their legs, the latter won't even shave their armpits.
Now let's turn to the arrangement of words. Here — what an endless catalogue of faults I could show you! Some writers are all for abruptness and rough edges, deliberately jumbling anything that threatens to flow smoothly. They want a jolt at every transition; whatever lands unevenly on the ear they call strong and manly. With others it isn't so much an arrangement of words as a setting of them to music, so coaxing and soft is the glide of their style. And what shall I say of the arrangement where words are held back and back, until, long awaited, they barely slip in at the sentence's end? Or of that gently closing style, Cicero-fashion, easing down its slope with the same poised descent every time, and always to the same familiar rhythm? Nor do the faults stop at the shape of the sentences — thoughts too can be petty and childish, or cheap, or more daring than decency allows, or flowery and cloying, or built to end in nothing, delivering sound and nothing more.
Some one individual makes these vices fashionable — whoever rules the eloquence of the day — and the rest follow his lead and pass the habit around. So when Sallust was at his height, phrases were lopped short, words stopped where you least expected, and obscure brevity passed for elegance. Lucius Arruntius, a man of rare plainness of character, who wrote a history of the Punic War, was a card-carrying member of the Sallust school. Sallust has the phrase exercitum argento fecit — literally "he made an army with silver," meaning he raised troops with money. Arruntius fell in love with this and planted the verb "make" all through his book. In one place he "makes a rout" of our forces; in another Hiero, king of Syracuse, "makes a war"; in another the news "makes" the people of Panormus surrender to Rome. I only want to give you a taste — the entire book is stitched together out of stuff like this. What Sallust kept for occasional use, Arruntius made a constant, almost continuous habit — and no wonder: Sallust's phrases came to him; Arruntius went out hunting for them. That is what comes of copying another man's vices. Again, Sallust wrote of "wintering waters." Arruntius, in the first book of his Punic War, has a storm that "suddenly wintered"; elsewhere, wanting to say a year was unusually cold, he says "the whole year wintered"; elsewhere he sends off sixty light transports with only soldiers and essential crew aboard "while the north wind wintered" — and he keeps propping up passage after passage with the same metaphor. Somewhere Sallust says that amid civil war a man "sought fame for fairness and goodness"; Arruntius cannot hold himself back from announcing at once, in book one, that there were vast "remindings" of Regulus.
Faults like these, stamped into a style by imitation, are not necessarily signs of slack standards or a debased mind. A man's true faults are personal, homegrown, and you can read his temperament from them: an angry man talks angrily, an excitable man in a flutter, a soft man in a style with no push-back in it. You see the same tendency in the men who pluck or thin their beards, who shave the upper lip close while carefully cultivating the rest, who wear cloaks in outrageous colors and see-through togas, and who will not lift a finger to do anything that might escape notice. They want to provoke attention, to catch the eye; they'll accept even disapproval, so long as they get looked at. That is Maecenas's style, and the style of everyone else who strays off the road not by accident but knowingly and on purpose.
This comes from a great sickness in the soul. Just as with wine, the tongue doesn't stumble until the mind buckles under the load and gives way or betrays itself — so with this drunkenness of style (what else can I call it?): it troubles no one unless the soul has started to totter. So take care of the soul. From the soul come our thoughts, from the soul our words, from the soul our bearing, our expression, our very walk. When the soul is sound and strong, the style is vigorous, energetic, manly; when the soul falls, everything else comes down in the ruins.
Keep the king safe, and one mind rules the swarm; lose him, and the bees break faith.
The soul is our king. While it is safe, all the other functions stay at their posts and obey orders; let the soul wobble even slightly, and they wobble with it. And once the soul has surrendered to pleasure, its powers and its actions go slack, and everything it undertakes comes from a source that is limp and unsteady.
To keep on with my comparison: the soul is sometimes a king and sometimes a tyrant. A king, when it honors what is honorable, watches over the welfare of the body in its charge, and gives that body no shameful, no degrading orders. But a soul that is unrestrained, ruled by desire, gone soft, turns kingship into that most hateful and dreaded thing — tyranny. Then it falls prey to the passions, which dog its steps: exhilarated at first, like a mob gorged on a public handout that will be its ruin, pawing at what it cannot consume. But when the disease has gradually eaten the strength away, when luxury has worked into marrow and sinew, such a soul gloats over the very limbs its overindulgence has made useless. Barred from its own pleasures, it watches other people's instead; it becomes the procurer and the spectator of the appetites that its own excesses have left it unable to feel. Its heap of delights is less sweet to it than bitter, because it can no longer push all the old delicacies down its overworked throat and stomach, because it can no longer whirl through its maze of eunuchs and mistresses — and it grieves that so large a share of its happiness is shut off by the limits of the body.
Isn't it madness, Lucilius, plain madness, that not one of us stops to reflect that he is mortal? That he is fragile? That he is, after all, one single person? Look at our kitchens — the cooks scurrying among all those fires. Is it for one belly, do you think, that all this bustle of food preparation goes on? Look at our vintage wines and the storehouses stacked with vintages of many generations. Is it for one belly, do you think, that we lay down wine sealed with the names of so many consuls, gathered from so many vineyards? Look how many regions of the earth are under the plow, how many thousands of farmers are tilling and digging. Is it for one belly, do you think, that crops are sown in Sicily and Africa? We would be sane, and our wants would shrink to reason, if each of us would take stock of himself — measure his body's needs while he's at it, and grasp how little he can actually consume, and for how short a time. But nothing will help you toward moderation so much as this frequent thought: that life down here is short and uncertain. Whatever you are doing, keep death in view.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I wish, my dear Lucilius, that you would stop fussing so much over words and their arrangement; I have bigger things to commend to your care. Ask what to write, not how to write it — and ask even that not for the sake of writing it but of feeling it, so that you can press what you have felt deeper into yourself and, so to speak, set your seal on it. Wherever you notice a style that is too careful, too polished, you can be sure the mind behind it is equally absorbed in petty things. The truly great man speaks casually and easily; whatever he says, he says with assurance rather than with effort.
You know the type — the young dandies, beards and hair just so, fresh out of the bandbox. From them you will never get anything strong, anything solid. Style is the clothing of thought: if it has been trimmed and dyed and worked over, it tells you the mind has its flaws and blemishes too. Elaborate elegance is not the dress of a man.
If we were granted the privilege of looking into a good man's soul — oh, what a face we would see: how fair, how holy, how magnificent, how gracious and shining! Radiant here with justice and self-control, there with courage and wisdom. And besides these, thrift, moderation, endurance, refinement, kindness, and — hard as it is to believe — love of one's fellow men, that Good so rare among men: all shedding their glory over that soul. And forethought joined with fine taste, and rising out of them all, greatness of soul, the noblest virtue of the lot — heavens, what charm it would add, what authority and dignity! What a marriage of sweetness and power! No one could call such a face lovable without also calling it worthy of worship. If anyone ever did behold such a face, more exalted and more radiant than mortal eyes are used to, wouldn't he stop dead, as if struck by a visitation from above, and breathe a silent prayer — "May I be forgiven for having looked on this!"? And then, drawn on by the encouraging kindness of its expression, wouldn't we bow down and worship? After long gazing at a countenance so far above us, so far beyond anything we're used to seeing — gentle-eyed, yet flashing with living fire — wouldn't we then, in reverence and awe, come out with those famous lines of our poet Virgil:
O maiden, what shall I call you? For your face is more than mortal, and your voice rings sweeter than any human tongue... Be gracious, whoever you are, and lighten this load we carry.
And such a vision will indeed be a present help and a relief to us, if we are willing to worship it. And that worship does not mean slaughtering fattened bulls, or hanging up offerings of gold and silver, or pouring coins into a temple treasury. It means a will that is reverent and upright.
There is not one of us, I tell you, who would not burn with love for this vision of virtue, if only he were allowed to see it. As it is, too much stands in the way — our sight is either pierced by excess glare or clogged with darkness. But if, just as certain drugs are used to sharpen and clear the eyesight, we are willing to clear the eye of the mind of what obstructs it, then we will be able to make out virtue even when it is buried in a body — even with poverty standing in front of it, even with lowliness and disgrace blocking the road. We will see that beauty, I say, though it be smothered in rags. And by the same token we will see straight through to evil and the deadness of a sorrow-laden soul, despite the broad glitter of riches flashing all around it, despite the false light of high office on one side and great power on the other beating hard against the eye.
Then we will finally be able to understand how contemptible the things we admire really are. We are like children, who count every toy a treasure, who hold necklaces bought for a penny dearer than their parents or their brothers. And what is the difference, as Aristo says, between us and the children — except that we grown-ups go crazy over paintings and sculpture, and our folly comes at a higher price? Children delight in the smooth speckled pebbles they pick up on the beach; we delight in tall columns of veined marble, hauled in from the sands of Egypt or the deserts of Africa to hold up some colonnade or a dining hall big enough to seat a city. We admire walls veneered with a thin skin of marble — knowing perfectly well what defects the marble is hiding. We cheat our own eyes; and when we have plated our ceilings with gold, what are we delighting in but a lie? For we know that under all that gilding lurks some ugly wood.
And this kind of surface decoration isn't confined to walls and ceilings. All those famous men you see strutting about with their heads in the air — their prosperity is gold leaf too. Look underneath, and you'll learn how much evil sits beneath that thin coating of titles.
Take the commodity that keeps so many magistrates and judges busy — that makes magistrates and judges: money. Ever since money came to be honored, the true honor of things has been in ruins. We become, by turns, merchants and merchandise; we ask not what a thing is but what it costs. We do our duty if it pays, and neglect it if it pays; we hold an honorable course as long as it feeds our expectations, ready to swing to the opposite tack the moment crooked conduct promises more. Our parents drilled the admiration of gold and silver into us; the craving, planted young, settled deep and grew as we grew. Then too the whole nation, at odds on everything else, agrees on this: this is what they respect, this is what they beg for their children, this is what they dedicate to the gods when they want to show gratitude — as if it were the greatest thing a human being can possess. And finally public opinion has sunk to this: poverty is a hissing and a byword, despised by the rich and hated by the poor.
Add to the account the verses of the poets, throwing fuel on our passions — verses in which wealth is praised as if it were the one credit and glory of mortal life. The immortal gods themselves, to hear the poets tell it, can neither give anything better than wealth, nor own anything better:
The Sun-god's palace rose on towering columns, ablaze with gold.
Or look at the Sun's own chariot:
Gold was the axle, gold the pole, gold the rims around the circling wheels, and every spoke was silver.
And finally, when they want to praise an age as the best of all, they call it the Golden Age. Even in the Greek tragic poets there are characters who trade innocence, health, and good name for profit:
Call me a scoundrel — only call me rich.
We all ask how much wealth he has; no one asks whether he's good.
Nobody asks where your fortune came from, or how — only how big it is.
Every man is worth exactly what he owns.
What is shameful for us to own? Nothing.
Rich, I choose to live; poor, I'd rather die.
A man dies well who dies while making money.
Money — that colossal blessing to mankind! — no mother's love can match it, no small child's lisp, no father's claim to honor. And if Venus's face has half its sparkle, no wonder Love sets gods and men on fire.
When these last lines were spoken at a performance of one of Euripides' tragedies, the entire audience rose as one man to hiss the actor and the play off the stage. But Euripides jumped up, claimed a hearing, and asked them to wait and see what end was in store for this admirer of gold. Bellerophon, in that drama, was to pay the penalty — the penalty that every man pays in the drama of life. For greed never goes unpunished; though greed is, all by itself, punishment enough. What tears and toil money wrings out of us! Greed is miserable in what it craves, and miserable in what it gains. Think, too, of the daily worry, which torments every owner in proportion to what he owns. Having money is a greater agony than getting it. And how we grieve over losses — which fall heavy, and seem heavier still. And finally, even if Fortune takes nothing away, whatever we fail to gain on top counts as sheer loss.
"But," you'll say, "people call that man over there happy and rich; they pray to someday own as much as he does." True enough. And so? Can you imagine a more pitiable condition than owning misery and hatred into the bargain? If only those doomed to crave wealth could compare notes with the rich man! If only those doomed to chase office could confer with the ambitious men who have reached the top of the honors ladder! They would soon change their prayers — because these great men are forever gaping after some new gain while cursing everything already behind them. There is no one in the world satisfied with his own prosperity, even when it comes at a run. Men complain of their plans and of how their plans turned out; what they failed to get always looks better than what they got.
So philosophy can settle this problem for you, and give you what I count the greatest gift there is: never having to regret your own conduct. That is a happiness that holds; no storm can shake it. And no finely woven words, no smoothly flowing language, will steer you into that harbor. Let words go as they please — provided only that the soul keeps its own sure order; provided the soul is great, and holds steadily to its convictions, pleased with itself precisely for the things that displease everyone else; a soul that measures its progress by how it lives, and reckons that it knows exactly as much as it neither desires nor fears.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
People have often debated the question: is it better to have moderate passions, or none at all? Our Stoic school throws the passions out; the Peripatetics keep them on a leash. I, for my part, don't see how a disease in moderation can be healthy or useful. But don't be afraid — I'm not going to confiscate anything you'd hate to give up. I'll be kind and easygoing about the things you chase — the ones you consider necessary for life, or useful, or pleasant. What I'll strip away is the vice in the chasing. After I've put desire itself under a ban, I'll still let you want those same things — but fearlessly, and with sharper judgment; you'll actually feel the pleasures more than you do now. Why wouldn't they come more readily when you call, once you're their master instead of their slave?
"But," you object, "it's natural to suffer when I lose a friend. Grant a few tears their right to fall! It's also natural to care what people think, and to feel low when their opinion of me is unfavorable. Why won't you allow me such an honorable dread of a bad reputation?"
There is no vice that can't produce a character reference. There is no vice that isn't modest and reasonable at the start; the trouble spreads from there. If you allow it to begin, you cannot guarantee it will stop. Every passion is weak at first. Then it wakes itself up and gathers strength as it goes: it is easier to keep it out than to throw it out. Who denies that all the passions flow from a source that is, in a sense, natural? Nature gave us a concern for our own well-being; but that very concern, overindulged, becomes a vice. Nature mixed pleasure into the necessities of life — not so that we would chase the pleasure, but so that the extra sweetness would make the indispensable things attractive to us. Let pleasure start claiming rights of its own, and its name is luxury.
So let us resist these faults while they are standing at the door, because, as I said, it is easier to refuse them entry than to show them out. And if you protest, "A person should be allowed a certain amount of grief, a certain amount of fear" — I answer that the "certain amount" has a way of stretching on, and it will not stop on your schedule. The wise man can safely be his own supervisor: he can halt his tears, and his pleasures, at will. We can't retrace our steps so easily, so for us the best plan is not to take the first step at all. I think Panaetius gave a very neat answer to a young man who asked him whether the wise man should fall in love. "As for the wise man, we shall see," he said. "But you and I, who are still a long way from wisdom, had better not trust ourselves to a state that is disordered, out of control, enslaved to another person, and worthless in its own eyes. If our love is returned, the kindness inflames us; if it is scorned, our pride does. An easy love hurts us as much as a difficult one: we're captured by the one that yields, and we batter ourselves against the one that resists. So, knowing how weak we are, let's stay quiet. Let's not expose this unstable spirit to drink, or beauty, or flattery, or anything else that coaxes and pulls."
What Panaetius said about love applies, I believe, to all the passions. As far as we can, let's step back from the slippery ground; even on dry footing it's hard enough to stand firm. At this point I know you'll hit me with the standard complaint against the Stoics: "You promise too much and demand too much. We are mere miniatures of men; we can't deny ourselves everything. We'll grieve, but not too much; we'll desire, but in moderation; we'll get angry, and then we'll be talked down." Do you know why we can't reach the Stoic ideal? Because we refuse to believe we can. No — the truth is, something else is at work too: we are in love with our vices. We stand up for them, and we would rather excuse them than evict them. Nature gave us strength enough — if only we would use it, if only we would gather our powers and make them all fight for us, or at least not against us. Unwillingness is the reason; inability is the excuse.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You are going to manufacture a lot of trouble for me — and drag me, without meaning to, into a long argument and considerable bother — if you keep sending me these petty little questions. To settle them, I can't disagree with my fellow Stoics without hurting my standing among them, and I can't sign on without hurting my conscience. Your question is whether the Stoic doctrine is true: that wisdom is a Good, but that being wise is not. I'll lay out the Stoic position first, and then I'll be bold enough to give you my own.
We Stoics hold that the Good is corporeal — a body — because the Good is active, and whatever acts is a body. What is good, helps. But to help, a thing must act; and if it acts, it is a body. The Stoics declare that wisdom is a Good; it follows that they must call wisdom corporeal too. But being wise, they think, doesn't rate the same treatment. It is incorporeal — a mere attendant on something else, namely wisdom — and so it doesn't act or help in any way.
"What!" comes the reply. "Then why do we say that being wise is a Good?" We do say so — but only by referring it back to the thing it depends on, wisdom itself. Before I build my own creed and plant myself entirely on the other side, let me tell you how other philosophers answer this. "By that logic," they say, "not even living happily is a Good. Like it or not, your school has to answer that the happy life is a Good, but that living happily is not." And this objection gets thrown at our school as well: "You want to be wise. Therefore being wise is something to be desired. And if it is to be desired, it is a Good." So our philosophers are forced to twist their terms — to wedge an extra syllable into the word "desired" that our language does not normally allow. With your permission, I'll wedge it in anyway. "What is good," they say, "is a thing to be desired; the desirable extra is what falls to us after we have attained the Good. It is not sought as a Good itself; it is a bonus added on once the Good has been won."
I don't share this view. I judge that our philosophers have sunk to this argument because they are already shackled by the first link in the chain, and so they aren't free to change their definition. We usually give great weight to what all men take for granted; for us, universal agreement is evidence of truth. For instance, we infer that the gods exist partly from this: every human being has some idea of deity planted in him, and there is no tribe anywhere so far beyond law and custom that it doesn't believe in gods of some sort. When we discuss the immortality of the soul, the general opinion of mankind — who fear, or worship, the spirits of the world below — carries real weight with us. Well, I'll cash in that same universal belief: you will find no one who doesn't hold that wisdom is a Good, and being wise a Good too. But I won't appeal to the crowd like a beaten gladiator throwing himself on the audience's mercy. Let's fight at close quarters, with our own weapons.
When something affects an object, is it inside the object it affects, or outside? If inside, it is just as much a body as the thing it affects — for nothing can affect another thing without touching it, and what touches is a body. If outside, then it withdrew after doing its work; withdrawal is motion, and what moves is a body. You expect me, I suppose, to deny that "a race" differs from "running," that "heat" differs from "being hot," that "light" differs from "giving light." I grant that each pair differs — but not that the two fall into separate classes. If health is an indifferent thing, so is being healthy; if beauty is indifferent, so is being beautiful. If justice is a Good, so is being just. If baseness is an evil, then being base is an evil — exactly as, if sore eyes are an evil, having sore eyes is an evil too. Neither member of the pair, you can be sure, can exist without the other. Whoever is wise is a man of wisdom; whoever is a man of wisdom is wise. The one so exactly matches the other that some people regard them as one and the same thing.
But here is a question I'd love to put: granted that all things are good, bad, or indifferent — into which class does being wise fall? People deny it's a Good; it obviously isn't an evil; so it must be one of the "middle" things. But by the "middle" or "indifferent" we mean what can fall to the bad man as easily as to the good — money, beauty, high social position. Being wise can fall to the good man alone; therefore it is not indifferent. It isn't an evil either, because it cannot fall to the bad man at all. Therefore, it is a Good. What only the good man can possess is a Good; being wise belongs only to the good man; therefore it is a Good. "It's merely an accessory of wisdom," says the objector. Fine, I answer: this thing you call being wise — does it actively produce wisdom, or does it passively tag along with wisdom? Either way it's a body: for what is acted upon and what acts are both bodies, and if it's a body, it's a Good. The only thing that could disqualify it would be being incorporeal — and it isn't.
The Peripatetics hold that there is no distinction at all between wisdom and being wise, since each implies the other. Can you imagine anyone being wise without possessing wisdom? Or anyone possessing wisdom without being wise? But the old masters of logic do distinguish the two, and from them the classification has come all the way down to the Stoics. What kind of classification, I'll explain. A field is one thing; possessing the field is another — obviously, since "possessing the field" refers to the possessor rather than to the field itself. In the same way, wisdom is one thing and being wise another. You'll grant, I suppose, that these are two separate ideas — the possessed and the possessor: wisdom the thing possessed, the wise man its possessor. Now, wisdom is Mind perfected — developed to its highest and best; it is the art of living. And what is being wise? I can't call it "Mind perfected"; rather, it is what falls to the man who has a perfected mind. So a good mind is one thing, and having a good mind, so to speak, is another.
"There are," the argument runs, "certain natural classes of bodies: we say 'this is a man,' 'this is a horse.' Attending on these bodily natures are certain movements of the mind that declare something about the bodies. And these declarations have an essential quality all their own, cut off from body. For example: I see Cato walking. The senses report it; the mind believes it. What I see is a body, and it is on a body that I fix my eyes and my mind. But then I say, 'Cato walks.' What I say" — so they continue — "is not a body; it is a declarative statement about a body — call it an utterance, a declaration, a proposition. So when we say 'wisdom,' we mean something bodily; when we say 'he is wise,' we are making a statement about a body. And it makes a real difference whether you name the person directly or make a statement about him."
Suppose for the moment that these really are two separate conceptions (I'm not ready to give my own verdict yet): what prevents there being a third thing — which is nonetheless a Good? I said a moment ago that a "field" is one thing and "possession of a field" another; naturally, because possessor and possessed are of different natures — one is land, the other is the man who owns the land. But in the question before us, both are of the same nature: the possessor of wisdom, and wisdom itself. Moreover, with the field, the thing possessed is one thing and the possessor another; here, possessed and possessor come under the same heading. The field is owned by legal right; wisdom is owned by nature. The field can change hands and pass to a new owner; wisdom never leaves its owner. So there's no point trying to compare things so unlike.
I had started to say that these can be two separate conceptions and yet both be Goods. Wisdom and the wise man, for instance, are two separate things, and you grant that both are good. And just as there is no objection to counting both wisdom and the possessor of wisdom as Goods, there is no objection to counting as a Good both wisdom and the possession of wisdom — in other words, being wise. The only reason I want to be a wise man is in order to be wise. And really — isn't a thing a Good when, without it, a certain other thing can't be a Good? You'll surely admit that wisdom offered without the right to use it is not worth accepting. And what is the use of wisdom? Being wise. That is its whole value; take it away, and wisdom is useless. If torture is an evil, then being tortured is an evil — with this proviso, in fact: strip away the consequence, and the instruments aren't evil at all. Wisdom is the condition of a perfected mind; being wise is the employment of a perfected mind. How can the employment of a thing not be a Good, when without employment the thing itself is not a Good? If I ask you whether wisdom is desirable, you admit it. If I ask whether the employment of wisdom is desirable, you admit that too — since you say you wouldn't accept wisdom if you weren't allowed to employ it. Now, what is desirable is a Good. Being wise is the employment of wisdom — just as making a speech is the employment of eloquence, and seeing is the employment of the eyes. Being wise is the employment of wisdom; the employment of wisdom is desirable; therefore being wise is desirable; and if it is desirable, it is a Good.
For years now I have been condemning myself for imitating these men in the very act of prosecuting them — for wasting words on a point that's perfectly obvious. Who can doubt that if heat is an evil, being hot is an evil too? Or that if cold is an evil, being cold is an evil? Or that if life is a Good, so is being alive? All these questions live on the outskirts of wisdom, not in wisdom itself — and wisdom itself is where we should make our home. Even if the mind fancies a ramble, wisdom has large and spacious grounds of its own: we may investigate the nature of the gods, the fuel that feeds the stars, all the varied courses of the heavenly bodies; we may ask whether our affairs move in step with the stars, whether the impulse to motion flows from there into every mind and body, and whether even the events we call chance are bound by strict laws — whether nothing in this universe is unforeseen or off schedule in its rounds. Such subjects have been dropped from moral instruction these days, but they lift the mind and raise it to the scale of what it studies. The questions I was discussing a moment ago do the opposite — they grind the mind down and wear it thin, not whetting it, as you and your friends maintain, but weakening it. And I ask you: are we really going to squander the study we owe to greater and better themes on a question that may well be wrong and is certainly worthless? What will it profit me to know whether wisdom is one thing and being wise another? What will it profit me to know that the one is a Good and the other isn't? Let me take a gamble and put up this prayer: "Wisdom for you, and being wise for me!" We'll come out even.
Show me instead the road to those greater ends. Tell me what to avoid and what to seek; by what studies I can shore up my tottering mind; how I can beat back the waves that hit me broadside and drive me off course; how I can face down all my evils, and how I can be rid of the calamities that have crashed in on me and the ones I have crashed into myself. Teach me how to carry sorrow without a groan, and prosperity without making anyone else groan. Teach me not to sit waiting for the final, inevitable end, but to make my own retreat, of my own free will, when it seems right to me. Nothing seems to me more shameful than praying for death. If you want to live, why pray for death? And if you don't want to live, why ask the gods for what they gave you at birth? That you must die some day has been settled, whether you like it or not; when you shall wish to die is in your own hands. The one is a necessity for you; the other is a privilege.
I recently read a most disgraceful sentiment from — the more shame to him — a learned gentleman: "May I die as soon as possible!" You fool, you are praying for what is already yours. "May I die as soon as possible!" Perhaps you grew old in the act of saying it! In any case, what's stopping you? No one is holding you; leave by whatever road you please. Pick any part of Nature and tell it to supply the exit. The elements by which the world does its work — water, earth, air — are no more the causes of life than they are the roads to death. "May I die as soon as possible!" And what exactly do you mean by "as soon as possible"? What day are you setting for the event? It may come sooner than your prayer asks. Talk like this comes from a weak mind, one fishing for pity with its curses; the man who prays for death does not want to die. Ask the gods for life and health. If you have resolved to die, death's reward is this: you are done with praying.
These, my dear Lucilius, are the problems we should be dealing with — these are the problems on which we should be shaping our minds. This is wisdom; this is what being wise means: not batting empty subtleties around in idle, petty debates. Fortune has set you so many problems that you haven't solved yet — and you're still splitting hairs? How foolish, to practice fancy exhibition strokes after the signal for battle has sounded! Throw away the practice weapons; you need armor for a fight to the finish. Tell me how to keep sadness and fear from shaking my soul; tell me how to shrug off this load of hidden cravings. Do something! "Wisdom is a Good, but being wise is not a Good" — the payoff of talk like that is a verdict that we aren't wise, and a whole field of study made into a joke for wasting its effort on useless things. Would you believe this question is debated too: whether future wisdom is a Good? As if anyone could doubt it! Do barns feel the weight of the harvest that is still to come? Does boyhood sense approaching manhood in its muscle and force? The sick man, in the meantime, gets no help from the health that is on its way — no more than a runner or a wrestler is refreshed by the rest period that comes months after the match. Who doesn't know that what is yet to be is not a Good, for the simple reason that it is yet to be? What is good necessarily helps; only things that exist now can help; what doesn't help isn't a Good; and if it helps, it already is. I shall be wise some day, and that Good will be mine when I am — but in the meantime it doesn't exist. A thing must first be, and only then be of some particular kind. How, I ask you, can what is still nothing already be a Good? What better proof could you want that a thing does not exist than to say, "It is yet to be"? What's still on the road obviously hasn't arrived. "Spring will follow" — so I know it is winter now. "Summer will follow" — so I know it is not summer. The best evidence that a thing isn't here yet is that it's still coming. I hope to be wise some day, but in the meantime I am not wise; for if I had that Good, I'd already be free of this evil. Some day I shall be wise — and from that very sentence you can tell that I am not wise yet. I cannot live in that Good and in this evil at once; the two don't mix, and good and evil don't share the same person.
So let's rush past all this clever nonsense and hurry on to what will actually help us. No man running frantically for a midwife while his daughter is in labor stops to read the praetor's edict or the schedule of the games. No one racing to his burning house pauses over a checkerboard to work out how the trapped piece might be freed. But good heavens — the news is pouring in on you from every side: your house on fire, your children in danger, your country under siege, your property plundered. Add shipwreck, earthquakes, and everything else there is to dread. Battered by all this, you're setting aside time for intellectual entertainment? You're asking the difference between wisdom and being wise? Tying and untying knots while that ruin hangs over your head? Nature has not been so generous and open-handed with our time that we can afford to waste any of it. And notice how much gets lost even by the careful: one man's time is stolen by his own poor health, another's by illness in the family; now private business swallows the hours, now public business; and all the while sleep splits our lives with us, half and half.
Out of this time — so short, so swift, carrying us off in its current — what is the sense of spending the greater part on useless things? Besides, our minds have gotten into the habit of entertaining themselves instead of curing themselves — of making philosophy an aesthetic pleasure, when philosophy should really be a remedy. What the difference is between wisdom and being wise, I do not know; but I do know this: it makes no difference to me whether I know it or not. Tell me — when I have found out the difference between wisdom and being wise, will I be wise?
Why, then, do you keep me busy with the words of wisdom rather than its works? Make me braver. Make me calmer. Make me Fortune's equal — make me her superior. And I can be her superior, if I turn everything I learn to that end.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You have been demanding letters from me more often. But if we compare the account books, you will not come out on the credit side. Our agreement, in fact, was that your part came first: you were to write the first letters, and I was to answer them. Still, I won't be difficult about it. I know you're good for the money, so I'll pay in advance. And even so I will not do what the eloquent Cicero tells Atticus to do: "Even if you have nothing to say, write whatever comes into your head." I will always have something to write about, even if I skip all the kinds of news Cicero stuffs his letters with — which candidate is in trouble; who is campaigning on borrowed money and who on his own; who is running for consul leaning on Caesar, or on Pompey, or on his own strongbox; what a merciless moneylender Caecilius is, out of whom his own friends can't pry a penny at less than one percent a month.
It is better to deal with your own ills than with someone else's — to sift yourself, to see how many empty offices you are secretly a candidate for, and to cast your vote for none of them. This, my dear Lucilius, is a noble thing; this is what brings peace and freedom — to campaign for nothing, and to walk straight past all of Fortune's elections. When the voting tribes are called together and the candidates are sweating in their favorite temples — one promising cash handouts, another doing his business through an agent, another wearing his hand raw with the kisses of men he won't touch with one finger after he's elected — when everyone is waiting breathless for the herald's announcement, how can you call it anything but delightful to stand idle and watch this whole vanity fair without buying and without selling? And how much greater is the joy of the man who watches, untroubled, not just the election of a praetor or a consul, but the great election underneath it — where some are running for offices that last a year, others for permanent power, others for a triumph and a lucky war, others for riches, or a marriage and children, or the safety of themselves and their families! What a great-souled thing it is to be the one person campaigning for nothing, petitioning no man, and saying: "Fortune, I have no business with you. I am not at your service. I know that you snub men like Cato and promote men like Vatinius. I ask you for nothing." That is how you demote Fortune to the ranks.
So these are the things we can write each other about — the ever-fresh material we can keep digging out as we look over the restless mobs of men, all of them struggling through evil after evil to reach something ruinous, chasing what they will soon have to run from, or find sickening once they have it. Was anyone ever satisfied, once he got it, with the thing that loomed so large while he was praying for it? Happiness is not the greedy thing people imagine. It is a lowly thing — and that is why it never glutted anyone's appetite. The things you're chasing look lofty to you because you are down low and far away from them; to the man who has reached them, they look cheap. And I am much mistaken if he isn't itching to climb higher still. What you take for the summit is only a rung on the ladder. The trouble with everyone is ignorance of the truth: misled by common report, men chase these things as if they were good, and then, after winning them and suffering plenty on the way, they find them evil, or empty, or smaller than advertised. Most people admire whatever fools them at a distance; to the crowd, good things and big things are the same thing.
To keep that from happening to us, let's ask: what is the Good? It has been explained in various ways; different thinkers have described it differently. Some define it like this: "The Good is what attracts and calls the spirit to itself." But the objection is immediate: what if it attracts you straight to ruin? You know how seductive many evils are. The true differs from the plausible; and the Good is bound up with the true — it isn't good unless it is also true. But what merely attracts and entices is only plausible: it steals your attention, demands your interest, pulls you in. So some have defined it instead: "The Good is what stirs desire for itself, or rouses toward itself the impulse of a striving soul." The same objection applies: plenty of things rouse the soul's impulses, and the chase does the chaser harm. This definition is better: "The Good is what rouses the soul's impulse toward itself in accordance with nature, and is only to be sought when it becomes thoroughly worth seeking." By that point it is already an honorable thing — for that is what is completely worth seeking.
The topic prompts me to state the difference between the Good and the honorable. They share one quality that blends into both and can't be pried out of either: nothing can be good without some element of the honorable in it, and the honorable is necessarily good. What, then, is the difference? The honorable is the perfect Good; the happy life is fulfilled by it; through its influence other things become good as well. I mean something like this: there are things that are neither good nor bad — military service, a diplomatic post, the pronouncing of legal judgments. When such things are conducted honorably, they begin to be good; they cross over from the "indifferent" column into the Good. The Good comes from partnership with the honorable; the honorable is good in itself. The Good springs from the honorable; the honorable springs from itself. What is good might have been bad. What is honorable could never have been anything but good.
Some have offered this definition: "The Good is what is according to nature." Now follow my point carefully: what is good is according to nature, but what is according to nature does not thereby become good. Many things harmonize with nature but are too petty to deserve the name of good; they are trivial, fit to be ignored. There is no such thing as a tiny, contemptible good — for as long as it is scanty, it is not good, and when it begins to be good, it stops being scanty. How, then, is the Good recognized? Only when it is completely according to nature.
"You admit," someone says, "that what is good is according to nature — that's its special property. And you admit that other things are according to nature which are not good. How can the one be good and the other not? How can the essential character change, when both share the same distinguishing mark of agreeing with nature?" By sheer magnitude. It is nothing new for things to change as they grow. A person who was a child becomes a youth; his essential character is transformed, for the child could not reason and the youth can. Some things don't merely get bigger as they develop — they grow into something else. "But," comes the reply, "getting bigger doesn't mean becoming different. It makes no difference whether you pour wine into a flask or into a vat; the wine keeps its character in both. Honey tastes the same in small amounts and large." You are citing different cases. Wine and honey have a uniform quality; enlarge the quantity all you like, the quality stays the same. Some things do persist in their kind and character even when they are enlarged.
But there are others which, after many additions, are transformed by the last one: a new character is stamped on them, different from what they were before. One stone makes an archway — the one that wedges the leaning sides and holds the whole arch together by sitting in the middle. Why does the last addition, tiny as it is, make so much difference? Because it does not increase; it completes. Some things, as they develop, shed their old shape and are altered into a new one. When the mind has dwelt on some idea a long time and grown weary trying to grasp its size, the thing comes to be called "infinite" — and then it has become something very different from what it was when it seemed vast but finite. In the same way, we think of something as hard to divide; at the very end, as the task grows harder and harder, it turns out to be "indivisible." So too, from what could barely be budged we advance step by step to the "immovable." By the same reasoning, a certain thing was according to nature; its magnitude has changed it into a different character altogether, and made it a Good.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Whenever I make a find, I don't wait for you to shout "Halves!" — I say it to myself on your behalf. If you want to know what I've discovered this time, open your pocket: it is pure profit. What I am going to teach you is how to get rich as fast as possible. You're all ears now, and rightly so: I am going to lead you by a shortcut to the greatest wealth there is. You will need a loan, though. To do business, you must go into debt — but I don't want you borrowing through a middleman, and I don't want the brokers gossiping about your credit rating. I will supply you with a ready lender: Cato's famous one, who says, "Borrow from yourself!" However little it is, it will be enough, if we can only make up the shortfall out of our own resources. For it makes no difference, my dear Lucilius, whether you don't crave a thing or you have it. In either case the essential point is the same: freedom from worry.
I am not advising you to refuse nature anything. Nature is insistent; she cannot be beaten down; she demands what she is owed. But you should understand that anything beyond nature's wants is an "extra" — not a necessity. If I am hungry, I must eat. Nature doesn't care whether the bread is coarse or the finest wheat; she doesn't want the stomach entertained, only filled. If I'm thirsty, nature doesn't care whether I drink water from the nearest tank or chill it artfully in heaps of snow. Nature's one order is that the thirst be quenched. Whether the cup is gold, or crystal, or precious carved stone, or common clay from Tibur, or my own cupped hands — it doesn't matter. Look to the end of a thing, in every case, and you will throw the superfluities away. Hunger calls me: I reach for whatever is nearest; my hunger itself has made whatever I can grab look appetizing. A starving man despises nothing.
Do you want to know, then, what has delighted me? This noble saying I've discovered: "The wise man is the keenest seeker after the riches of nature." "What!" you say. "You hand me an empty plate? What is this? I had my strongboxes arranged. I was already scouting for some stretch of water to send trading ships across, some public revenues to farm, some merchandise to buy up. This is a swindle — promising me riches and showing me poverty." But, my friend, do you call a man poor who lacks nothing? "Yes — thanks to himself and his endurance, not thanks to his fortune." And you hold that such a man isn't rich — precisely because his wealth can never run out? Tell me: would you rather have much, or enough? The man who has much wants more — proof that he doesn't yet have enough. The man who has enough has arrived at something no rich man ever reaches: a stopping point. Or do you refuse to call this riches because no one was ever put on the execution lists for owning it? Because no wife or son ever poured poison down a throat to get it? Because in wartime it goes unplundered? Because in peacetime it means leisure? Because it is neither dangerous to own nor troublesome to invest?
"But a man possesses too little, if all he's free of is cold and hunger and thirst." Jupiter himself possesses no more. Enough is never too little, and not-enough is never too much. Alexander was still poor after conquering Darius and the Indies. Am I wrong? Look at him: hunting for something he can call his own, probing unknown seas, sending fresh fleets out over the Ocean, breaking down — you might say — the very bars of the universe. What is enough for nature is not enough for man. There have been men who craved something more after obtaining everything — so blind are our wits, so easily does each man forget his beginnings once he is under way. The man who only yesterday was the disputed lord of one obscure corner of the world reaches the edge of the globe — and is gloomy, because now he must march home through a world that belongs to him. Money never made anyone rich; all it does is infect its owner with a greater craving for itself. You ask the reason? The man who has more has begun to be capable of more.
To sum it up: haul out for inspection any of the millionaires whose names come up whenever people talk of Crassus and Licinus. Let him bring his credit rating, his current holdings, and his future prospects, and add them all together. By my reckoning, such a man is poor; by yours, he may become poor someday. But the man who has arranged his affairs by the measure of nature's demands is free of the fear of poverty and of the feeling of it too. And just so you know how hard it is to narrow one's wants down to nature's limits — even this man we're describing, the one you call poor, owns something superfluous. Wealth dazzles and draws the mob: a great pile of ready cash carried out of a man's house, walls crusted thick with gold, a retinue of attendants picked for their handsome build or handsome dress. All that kind of prosperity faces the public; but the man we have snatched out of the hands of the people and of Fortune is happy from the inside. As for those in whose lives busy, bustling poverty has stolen the title of riches — they have riches the way we say we "have a fever," when really the fever has us. We're used to putting it the other way around: "A fever grips him." And in the same way we should say: "Riches grip him." There is no advice I would rather give you than this — and of this advice no one can have too much: measure everything by nature's demands, for those can be satisfied either free of charge or very cheaply. Only don't stir any vices into the demands. Why ask how your food should be served, on what sort of table, with what sort of silver, by what well-matched, smooth-cheeked serving boys? Nature demands nothing but food.
When thirst is burning in your throat, do you demand a golden cup? When hunger comes, do you turn up your nose at everything but peacock and turbot?
Hunger is not ambitious. It is quite content to stop, and it doesn't much care what stops it. All those other things are the tools of a luxury that has nothing to do with happiness — a luxury that studies how to stretch hunger out past the point of fullness, how to stuff the stomach rather than fill it, how to reawaken a thirst that the first drink already quenched. So Horace's words are excellent: it makes no difference to your thirst, he says, how costly the goblet is or how elegantly the hand that pours the water. If you care how curly-haired the boy is who serves you, or how transparent the cup he offers — you are not thirsty.
Among her other gifts, nature has granted us this special blessing: sheer necessity is never picky. Only the superfluous things allow for choosiness. "That's not suitable"; "this doesn't come well recommended"; "that offends my eye." The Builder of the universe, who laid down the laws of life for us, arranged that we should live well, not that we should live in luxury. Everything that serves our well-being is prepared and lying ready to hand; what luxury demands can never be scraped together without misery and anxiety.
So let us use this blessing of nature and count it among the great ones. Let us reflect that nature has no better claim on our gratitude than this: whatever we want out of sheer necessity, we accept without turning up our nose.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Your letter wandered through several small problems but finally settled on one and asked me to explain it: how do we come to know the good and the honorable? Other schools treat these as two separate things; our school only distinguishes them. Here is what I mean. Some people believe the good is whatever is useful — so they hand the title to riches, horses, wine, even shoes. That is how cheap the good becomes for them, how low they let it stoop. The honorable, for them, is whatever squares with right conduct: caring dutifully for an aging father, helping a friend out of poverty, showing courage on campaign, giving prudent and balanced advice. We make the good and the honorable two things, but out of one substance: only the honorable can be good, and the honorable is always, necessarily, good. It would be superfluous to add the fine distinction between the two — I have drawn it so many times. But I will say this one thing: we count nothing as good that can be put to bad use by anybody. And you can see for yourself what bad uses many men make of their riches, their high positions, and their muscles.
Back, then, to your question: how did we first acquire knowledge of the good and the honorable? Nature could not teach us this directly. She gave us the seeds of knowledge, not knowledge itself. Some say we simply stumbled on it — but it is unbelievable that a vision of virtue ever presented itself to anyone by accident. Our view is that it came from inference and observation, from comparing acts that occurred again and again; our school holds that the good and the honorable were grasped by analogy. And since Latin scholars have granted the word "analogy" citizenship, I don't think it should be deported — I think it should be welcomed into the full citizenship it can justly claim. So I'll use the word, not as a tolerated resident but as an established one.
What is this analogy? Let me explain. We understood what health of the body was, and from that we deduced that there must also be a health of the mind. We knew bodily strength, and from that we inferred a sturdiness of soul. Certain kind acts, humane acts, brave acts had amazed us, and we began to admire them as if they were perfect. Underneath lay plenty of faults, hidden by the shine of a few conspicuous deeds — and to those we shut our eyes. Nature tells us to magnify whatever deserves praise, and everyone polishes fame beyond the truth. So from deeds like these we drew our picture of some enormous good. Fabricius refused King Pyrrhus's gold, judging it greater than a crown to be able to scorn a king's money. And the same Fabricius, when Pyrrhus's own physician promised to poison his master, warned Pyrrhus to watch out for the plot. One and the same man had the strength of will neither to be bought by gold nor to win by poison. So we admired him — a hero who could not be moved by the king's promises, or by promises made against the king; a man who held fast to his ideal; a man who (is anything harder?) waged war without sin, for he believed there were wrongs one could commit even against an enemy; a man who, in the extreme poverty he had made his glory, recoiled from taking riches just as he recoiled from using poison. "Live, Pyrrhus, thanks to me," he cried, "and be glad, for once, of the very thing you've been grieving over — that Fabricius cannot be bribed!"
Horatius Cocles blocked the narrow bridge alone and ordered his own retreat cut off, so that the enemy's way in would be destroyed with it; then he held off his attackers until the crash of the collapsing beams rang in his ears. When he looked back and saw that his country, through his own danger, was out of danger, he shouted: "Whoever wants to chase me, come this way!" — and plunged in headlong, taking as much care to come out of that churning channel with his weapons as to come out unhurt. He returned with the glory of his conquering arms intact, as safely as if he had walked back across the bridge.
These deeds and others like them showed us the face of virtue. Now let me add something that may surprise you: evil things have sometimes worn the look of what is honorable, and the best has shone out through its opposite. For there are, as you know, vices that live next door to virtues; even what is lost and degraded can resemble what is upright. The spendthrift passes himself off as a generous man — though it matters a great deal whether a man knows how to give or simply doesn't know how to keep. Believe me, my dear Lucilius, there are many men who don't give their money away; they throw it away. I don't call a man generous for being on bad terms with his own cash. Carelessness looks like ease, and recklessness looks like courage. This resemblance is what forced us to watch closely, and to tell apart things that look alike on the surface but are at war underneath. And in watching men whom some noble effort had made famous, we began to notice which of them had done a deed with high spirit and lofty impulse — and had done it exactly once. We saw one man brave in war and a coward in politics, bearing poverty with courage and disgrace with a hangdog face; we praised the deed, and we despised the man. We saw another man kind to his friends and restrained toward his enemies, running his public and private affairs with scrupulous devotion, patient wherever something had to be endured and prudent wherever something had to be done. We saw him giving with an open hand when payment was owed, and, when hard work was called for, digging in resolutely and lifting his body's weariness by sheer will. More than that: he was always the same man, consistent in everything he did, right not only by judgment but by habit so ingrained that he not only could act rightly but could not help acting rightly. In such a man we formed our conception: here perfect virtue exists.
We divided this perfect virtue into its parts. Desires had to be reined in, fears suppressed, right actions put in order, debts paid where owed — so we marked off self-control, courage, prudence, and justice, and assigned each its special job. Then how did we form our idea of virtue itself? From that man's order, his propriety, his steadfastness, the complete harmony of all his actions, and a greatness of soul that rose above everything. From there we derived our conception of the happy life — the life that flows along with a steady current, entirely under its own control. And how did we discover that? I'll tell you. That perfect man, the man who had attained virtue, never cursed his luck, never met what chance brought with a fallen face. Believing himself citizen and soldier of the universe, he accepted his labors as if they were orders. Whatever happened, he did not spurn it as some evil blown in on him by accident; he took it as an assignment. "Whatever this is," he said, "it is my lot. It's rough and it's hard — so let's get to work on it."
Necessarily, then, he showed himself a great man — he never groaned in evil days, never complained about his destiny. He gave many people a clear picture of what he was; he shone like a light in the dark and turned everyone's thoughts toward himself, because he was gentle and calm, and equally ready to obey the orders of men and of God. He had a perfect soul, developed to its utmost height — a soul that nothing outranks except the mind of God, from which a portion flows down even into this mortal chest of ours. And the chest is never more divine than when it reflects on its own mortality — when it understands that a man was born to finish his life, and that the body is not a permanent home but the soul's inn — and a short stay at that — to be left behind the moment you see you have become a burden to your host. The greatest proof, my dear Lucilius, that the soul comes down from somewhere higher is this: it finds its present quarters cramped and low, and it is not afraid to leave. For the man who remembers where he came from knows where he is going. Don't we see how many discomforts plague us, how badly this flesh of ours fits? We complain now about our heads, now about our digestion, now about our chests and throats. One day it's the nerves, another day the feet; then diarrhea, then a cold; sometimes too much blood, sometimes too little. Now this troubles us, now that, and we're told to move along — which is exactly what happens to people living in someone else's house.
And yet we, who were allotted these decaying bodies, still set eternity before our eyes. We reach in our hopes for the furthest stretch a human life can possibly be spun out to, satisfied with no income and no influence. Could anything be more shameless, more foolish? Nothing is enough for us — for us, who must die someday; who, in fact, are dying already. Every day we stand nearer the edge, and every hour shoves us toward the drop we must go over. Look how blind our minds are! What I keep calling the future is happening at this very minute — and a large part of it has already happened, for it consists of all the life we've lived. We're wrong to fear our last day: every day contributes just as much to death's account. The stumbling step doesn't cause the exhaustion; it announces it. The final hour reaches death; every hour approaches it. Death wears us away; it does not sweep us away.
For this reason the noble soul, conscious of its better nature, takes care to behave honorably and diligently at the post where it is stationed — yet it counts none of these surrounding things as its own. It uses them as a loan, the way a traveler passing through uses what he finds, hurrying on. When we see steadfastness like that in a man, how can we help sensing the image of an extraordinary nature — especially if, as I said, its consistency proved the greatness genuine? For it is consistency that lasts; what is false doesn't hold up. Some men are a Vatinius one day and a Cato the next. One moment Curius isn't stern enough for them, Fabricius isn't poor enough, Tubero isn't frugal enough or content with plain enough things; the next moment they're rivaling Licinus in wealth, Apicius at the table, Maecenas in soft living. The surest proof of a sick mind is wavering — this endless seesaw between pretending to virtue and loving vice.
He'd keep two hundred slaves on hand — then ten. One hour his talk was kings and potentates and nothing short of greatness; the next hour: "A three-legged table, a dish of clean salt, and a coarse-woven gown to keep the cold out — that's all I ask." Yet hand him a cool million, that sparing, that contented man, and in five short days there'd be nothing in his purse.
The men I'm describing are of the stamp Horace sketches there — never the same man twice, never even resembling himself, so far does he swing between opposites. Did I say many men are like this? Almost all of them are. Everyone changes his plans and prayers by the day. Now he wants a wife, now a mistress; now he wants to reign, now he grovels lower than any slave; now he puffs himself up until everyone hates him, now he shrinks and flattens himself below the genuinely humble; now he flings money about, now he steals it. That is how a foolish mind gives itself away most clearly: it appears in one shape after another and is never like itself — and nothing, to my mind, is more shameful. Believe me, it is a great role — playing one man. Nobody but the wise man can play a single person; the rest of us keep changing masks. No man can wear one face in private and another in public for long. One moment you'll think us thrifty and serious; the next, wasteful and idle. We keep swapping characters, taking up a part opposite to the one we just threw off. So demand this of yourself: the character you assumed at the beginning, keep it to the final scene of life's drama. Make it possible for people to praise you — or, failing that, at least to recognize you. As things stand, a man can fairly ask about someone you saw only yesterday: "Who is this?" That is how great the change has been.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
You'll take me to court, I'm sure of it, when I lay out today's little problem — one we've already fumbled with long enough. You'll shout, yet again: "What does this have to do with character?" Shout away — but first let me name you some other defendants for your lawsuit, Posidonius and Archidemus; let them stand trial. Then I'll add this: whatever deals with character doesn't necessarily produce good character. A man needs one thing for his food, another for his exercise, another for his clothing, another for his instruction, another for his pleasure. All of it relates to his needs; not all of it makes him better. Character, likewise, is served by different things in different ways: some things correct it and keep it in line; others investigate its nature and where it comes from. And when I ask why Nature produced man, and why she set him above the other animals, do you suppose I've left the study of character behind me? Wrong. How are you to know what character is worth wanting unless you've discovered what suits man best — unless you've studied his nature? You can find out what you should do and what you should avoid only when you've learned what you owe to your own nature.
"What I want," you say, "is to learn how to desire less and fear less. Strip me of my unreasoning beliefs. Show me that this thing people call happiness is fickle and hollow — a word just one prefix away from unhappiness." I'll give you what you want: I'll cheer on your virtues and flog your vices. People may decide I'm overzealous and reckless on this point, but I will never stop hounding wickedness, bridling the wildest of the emotions, blunting the pleasures that end in pain, and shouting down men's prayers. Of course I will — for the greatest evils are exactly the things we've prayed for, and everything we've ever given thanks for has turned into something that needs consoling.
Meanwhile, allow me to chew thoroughly on some points that may seem, for the moment, rather far from the question at hand. We were once debating whether all animals have a feel for their own constitution — their basic makeup. The best proof that they do is the fitness and nimbleness of their movements: they handle themselves as though they'd been trained for it. Every creature is expert in its own line. The skilled workman handles his tools with an ease born of experience; the pilot knows how to steer his ship; the painter, quick of eye and hand, moves among the countless colors he has laid out for the portrait, back and forth between palette and canvas. In just the same way, an animal is agile in everything that involves the use of its body. We tend to marvel at skilled dancers, whose gestures fit every meaning and emotion of the piece, whose movements keep pace with the speed of the words. But what art gives the performer, nature gives the animal. No animal fumbles with its own limbs; none is at a loss for how to use its body. They do this from the moment of birth. They arrive in the world with the knowledge; they are born fully trained.
"But," people answer, "the reason animals use their limbs so deftly is that moving them wrongly would hurt. On your own school's theory, they're compelled — it's fear, not will, that steers them right." Wrong. Bodies driven by compulsion move slowly; motion that comes from within has snap to it. And the proof that fear of pain isn't the prompt is this: even when pain checks them, they keep struggling toward their natural movement. So the child who is working on standing, getting used to carrying his own weight, no sooner starts testing his strength than he falls — and gets up, in tears, again and again, until through painful practice he has drilled himself into what nature demands. And certain animals with hard shells, flipped onto their backs, twist and grope with their feet and rock from side to side until they right themselves. The tortoise on his back feels no pain; but he is restless for his natural position, and he does not stop heaving himself about until he stands on his feet again.
So all these animals have a consciousness of their own constitution, and that is why they manage their limbs so readily; and we have no better proof that they're born equipped with this knowledge than the fact that no animal is clumsy at using its own body. But here comes an objection: "According to you, a constitution is 'the ruling power of the soul standing in a certain relation to the body.' How is a baby supposed to comprehend anything that intricate and subtle — something I can barely explain even to you? Every living creature would have to be born a logician, just to understand a definition that's over the heads of most Roman citizens." A fair complaint — if I had said that animals understand the definition of a constitution, rather than their own constitution. Nature is easier to understand than to explain. That baby doesn't know what "constitution" is; he knows his own constitution. He doesn't know what "a living creature" is; he feels that he is one. And even that constitution of his he grasps only confusedly, sketchily, in the dark. We, too, know that we have souls; but what the soul is, where it sits, what it's like, where it comes from — that we do not know. And just as we are conscious of our own souls while knowing nothing of their nature or their address, so all animals are conscious of their own constitutions. They cannot help feeling it, because the very faculty they feel everything else with is the same one; they cannot help having a feel for the thing they obey, the thing that governs them. Every one of us understands that there is something that stirs his impulses; what it is, he doesn't know. He knows he has a drive in him; what it is or where it comes from, he doesn't know. In the same way, even children and animals are conscious of their ruling part — just not clearly, not in sharp outline.
"So you're claiming," says the objector, "that every living thing starts out adapted to its own constitution, and that man's constitution is a rational one — so man is attached to himself not merely as a living being but as a reasoning being? For man is dear to himself precisely in the part that makes him a man. Then how can a baby, who doesn't yet have reason, be adapted to a rational constitution?" But each age has its own constitution — one for the infant, another for the boy, another for the old man; each is adapted to the constitution it currently finds itself in. The infant is toothless: he is fitted to that condition. Then his teeth come in: he is fitted to that condition too. The plant that will become grain and fruit has one constitution when it is young and barely peeking over the furrow, another when it has gathered strength and stands on a stalk soft but sturdy enough to carry its weight, another still when it turns yellow, hardens in the ear, and promises the threshing floor — whatever constitution it comes into, it keeps it and conforms to it. Infancy, boyhood, youth, and old age are different stages; but I, who have been infant and boy and youth, am still the same I. So although each thing has a different constitution at different times, its adaptation to its constitution is the same. Nature doesn't assign boyhood or youth or old age to me; she assigns me to them. So the child is adapted to the constitution he has right now, in childhood — not to the one he'll have as a young man. Even if there is some higher phase waiting for him to grow into, the state he's born in is according to nature too. First and foremost, the living thing is adapted to itself — for there has to be a standard that everything else gets referred back to. I seek pleasure. For whom? Myself. So I am looking out for myself. I shrink from pain. On whose behalf? My own. So I am looking out for myself. If I gauge everything I do by my own welfare, then my own welfare comes before everything else. This exists in every living being — not grafted on, but inborn.
Nature raises her own offspring; she does not cast them off. And because the most dependable protection is the protection closest at hand, each of us has been entrusted to himself. That is why, as I've said in earlier letters, even young animals, fresh from the womb or the egg, know at once and on their own what will hurt them, and steer clear of what deals death. They even flinch at the shadow of a hawk gliding overhead.
No animal enters life free from the fear of death. "How," people ask, "can an animal at birth understand what is wholesome and what is deadly?" The first question is whether it understands, not how. And that it does understand is clear from this: even if you added understanding, the animals would act no more competently than they already do. Why doesn't the hen fear the peacock or the goose, yet run from the hawk — a far smaller bird, and one she has never even met? Why do chicks fear a cat and not a dog? Clearly these birds carry a foreknowledge of harm that rests on no experiments — they avoid the thing before they could possibly have experience of it. And so you won't put it down to chance: they don't shrink from other things you'd expect them to fear; they never once forget their watchfulness; and they all possess, equally, the knack of avoiding what would destroy them. Besides, their fear doesn't grow as their lives go on.
From this it's plain enough that they didn't reach this condition through experience; it comes from an inborn drive for self-preservation. What experience teaches is slow and uneven; what Nature hands down comes to everyone alike, and comes at once. But if you insist on an explanation, shall I tell you how it is that every living thing tries to understand what would harm it? It feels that it is made of flesh — and so it perceives what flesh can suffer: cutting, burning, crushing — and which animals are armed to inflict the damage. From these it forms its idea of the harmful and the hostile. The two tendencies are joined: every creature at one and the same time looks out for its own safety, reaching for what helps it and recoiling from what would hurt it. Impulse toward the useful and revulsion from its opposite are according to nature; without any reflection to prompt them, without any instruction, whatever Nature has prescribed gets done.
Don't you see how skillful bees are at building their cells — how completely harmonious in sharing and enduring the work? Don't you see the spider's web, too fine for any human hand to copy — what a task it is to arrange those threads, some running straight to the center to make the web solid, others circling round and thinning out, spread to tangle and net the smaller insects for whose ruin the web is hung? This art is born, not taught — and that is why no animal is more skilled than another. Look: every spiderweb is equally fine; every opening in a honeycomb is identical in shape. What art passes along is uncertain and uneven; what Nature deals out is always uniform. She has handed down nothing except the duty of self-care and the skill to carry it out — which is why living and learning begin at the same time. No wonder creatures are born with the one gift whose absence would make being born pointless. This is the first equipment Nature issued them for survival: attachment to themselves, and love of themselves. They could not have survived without wanting to. The wanting alone wouldn't have saved them; but without it, nothing could have. In no animal will you find contempt for itself, or even neglect of itself. Dumb beasts, sluggish at everything else, are clever at living. So you will see that creatures useless to everyone else never fail themselves.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
The days have started to shrink. They've lost a good deal of light already, but there's still plenty of time in them — if you get up when the day itself does. The man who's awake to meet the dawn is more productive and, frankly, a better man. But the one who lies snoring while the sun stands high overhead, who only comes to at noon — and for plenty of people even noon feels like the middle of the night — that man is a disgrace to himself.
Some people have gone further and swapped the jobs of light and darkness entirely. Their eyes, still swollen from yesterday's binge, don't open until night is coming on. They're like those peoples Vergil describes, whom Nature has tucked away on the far side of the world, directly beneath our feet:
When Dawn with her panting horses breathes down on our faces, for them the red evening is just lighting its late lamps.
Except with these men it isn't their country that's on the opposite side of the world — it's their life. There are Antipodes living right here in our own city who, as Cato put it, "have never seen the sun rise or set." Do you think people like this know how to live, when they don't even know when to live? Do they fear death — these men who have already buried themselves alive? They're as unnatural as owls and night-birds. They may pass their dark hours surrounded by wine and perfume; they may spend the whole of their backwards waking life eating dinners of course after course, each cooked separately; but that isn't a banquet. It's a funeral service they're holding for themselves. And at least the dead get their banquets in the daytime.
To a man who's actually doing something, no day is long. So let's lengthen our lives — because the duty of life, and the proof of it, is action. Trim the night short; carry some of it over into the day's work. Birds being fattened for the table are kept in the dark, so that they'll plump up without moving. It's the same with men who vegetate: no exercise, and the idle body drowns in its own flesh; in their smug retirement, the fat of laziness settles on them. That's why the bodies of these sworn servants of darkness are so repulsive to look at. Their color is more alarming than an invalid's — pale, limp, bloated, walking corpses while they're still alive. And that, believe me, is the least of their troubles. How much deeper the darkness is inside them! Such a man is dazed at the core; his inner sight has gone dim; he could envy the blind. Whoever had eyes so that he could see in the dark?
You ask how the soul acquires this perversion — this habit of turning its back on daylight and handing its whole existence over to the night. All vices rebel against Nature; every one of them deserts the appointed order. Luxury's motto is: enjoy the unusual. It isn't enough to stray from the right path — luxury wants to get as far from it as possible, and finally to plant its flag on the exact opposite side. Tell me: don't men live against Nature when they drink on an empty stomach, pouring wine into empty veins and arriving at their food already drunk? Yet that's a favorite trick of the young set — building up their capacity so they can start drinking practically in the doorway of the bathhouse, among the naked bathers, and then swig wine and immediately scrape off the sweat they've worked up with round after round of hot drinks. To them, a glass after lunch or dinner is hopelessly middle-class — that's what country squires do, men who don't understand pleasure. What delights them is the neat wine with no food to cushion it, the way it goes straight to the muscles; the whole joy of the binge is the empty stomach.
Don't men live against Nature when they trade clothes with women? Don't men live against Nature when they chase a fresh, boyish look at an age when nothing about them is boyish? What could be crueler, or more pitiful? Will he never be allowed to grow up — held forever in an artificial boyhood? Don't men live against Nature when they crave roses in winter, and force a spring lily to bloom in the cold with hot-water pipes and rigged temperatures? Don't men live against Nature when they plant orchards on top of walls? When whole forests wave on the roofs and towers of their houses, the roots starting at a height the treetops would be showing off to reach? Don't men live against Nature when they sink the foundations of their bathhouses into the sea — and can't enjoy a swim unless the heated pool is being slapped by storm waves?
Once men have decided to want everything the wrong way around, they end by abandoning Nature's way altogether. "It's daylight — time for bed! Everyone's resting — now for our workout, our drive, our lunch! Look, dawn's coming — dinner time! We can't do what ordinary people do. Living the usual, conventional way is cheap and common. Let's give up the standard-issue day. Let's have a morning that's ours alone, custom-made!" Men like this are as good as dead. Living by torches and lamps — aren't they attending their own funeral, and ahead of schedule?
I remember when this way of life was actually fashionable. Take Acilius Buta, a man of praetorian rank, who burned through an enormous fortune; when he confessed to Tiberius that he was broke, the emperor answered: "You've woken up too late!" Or take the day Julius Montanus was giving a public reading of his poetry — a middling poet, famous for being Tiberius's friend and then for losing that friendship. Montanus loved to stuff his poems with sunrises and sunsets. So when somebody complained that his reading had gone on all day and swore no one should ever attend one again, Natta Pinarius said: "I'll make him the fairest offer he'll ever get: I'm willing to listen to him from sunrise to sunset!" Montanus read on and reached these lines:
Now the bright morning begins to spread its clear-burning flames; the red dawn scatters its light, and the sad-eyed swallow returns to her nestlings, carrying food to the chatterers, sharing it out, serving them with her sweet bill.
At that, Varus — a Roman knight who trailed around after Marcus Vinicius, a sponger who earned his seat at elegant dinners with his nasty wit — shouted: "Bedtime for Buta!" Later, when Montanus declaimed:
Look, now the shepherds have folded their flocks, and the slow-moving darkness begins to spread silence over the drowsy, sleep-lulled land,
the same Varus called out: "What, night already? I'll go pay my morning call on Buta!" Nothing, you see, was more notorious than Buta's upside-down life. And as I said, for a while that life was the fashion.
Why do some men live this way? Not because they think night itself has any special charm, but because what's normal gives them no pleasure. Light is a bitter enemy to a bad conscience. And to a man who prices every desire and every contempt by what it costs him, illumination that comes free is beneath notice. There's more: the luxurious man wants to be talked about his whole life long. If people are silent about him, he feels he's wasting his time. It actually pains him whenever one of his stunts goes unnoticed.
Plenty of men devour their fortunes; plenty keep mistresses. To make a name in that crowd, you need a program not just of luxury but of notoriety — in a city this busy, garden-variety scandal doesn't even register. I once heard Pedo Albinovanus — the most delightful storyteller — describing life in his apartment above the townhouse of Sextus Papinius. Papinius belonged to the tribe that shuns the light. "Around nine at night I hear whips cracking. I ask what's happening: Papinius is going over his accounts. Around midnight, furious shouting. I ask what's wrong: he's doing his voice exercises. Around two in the morning, the sound of wheels — what's that? He's going out for his drive. And at dawn, total uproar — slaves being summoned, butlers running, chaos among the cooks. I ask about that too: he's back from the bath and has called for his cordial and his appetizer. 'Did his dinner run past the day?' Certainly not," said Pedo. "He lived very frugally — the night was the only thing he spent freely. So if you believe the people who call him a tightwad and a miser, go ahead and call him a slave of the lamp as well."
Don't be surprised to find so many varieties of vice. Vices are endless; they come in countless shapes; no catalogue could hold them all. Doing right is simple; doing wrong is complicated, with infinite room to swerve. The same goes for character. Follow Nature, and character is easy to manage, free, and varies only in small shades. But the sort of men I've described are warped through and through — out of tune with everything, including themselves. The main cause of this disease, I think, is a fastidious disgust with ordinary life. Just as these men set themselves apart by their dress, by the theatrical staging of their dinners, by the elegance of their carriages, so they want to be special in the way they carve up the hours of their day. They refuse to be wicked in the conventional way, because the whole payoff of their wickedness is notoriety. Notoriety is what every such man is after — every man who is, quite literally, living backwards.
So, Lucilius, let's keep to the road Nature has mapped out for us, and never leave it. Follow Nature, and everything is easy and open; fight her, and life is nothing but rowing against the current.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Worn out — more by the discomfort of the trip than by its length — I reached my villa at Alba late at night and found nothing ready except myself. So I'm shaking off my fatigue at the writing table, and getting some good out of my cook's and my baker's slowness. In fact, I'm talking the matter over with myself, and the topic is exactly this: nothing is heavy if you pick it up lightly, and nothing needs to make you angry — provided you don't add anger to your pile of troubles. My baker has no bread; but the overseer has some, or the steward, or one of my tenants. "Bad bread!" you say. Just wait: it will turn good. Hunger will make even that loaf soft and fine as bakery's best. The trick is not to eat until hunger gives the order. So I'll wait, and I won't touch food until I either get good bread or stop being fussy about bad. You have to train yourself to a slim table. Time and place throw up obstacles everywhere — even the rich man, fully rigged for pleasure, will run into them and be pulled up short. To have whatever he wants is in no man's power. What is in his power is this: not to wish for what he doesn't have, and to make cheerful use of whatever shows up. A good-humored stomach — one willing to take rough handling — is a long stride toward freedom.
You can't imagine how much pleasure I'm taking in the way my tiredness is settling down all by itself. No masseurs, no bath, no cure of any kind — except time. What work has piled up, rest carries away. This supper, whatever it turns out to be, will give me more pleasure than a banquet celebrating some new consul. I've put my spirit to a surprise test — and that's the simpler and truer kind. When a man has made his preparations and formally ordered himself to be patient, you can't tell how much strength he really has. The surest proofs are the ones given on the spot: looking at your own troubles not just fairly but calmly, without tantrums or arguments; making up your own shortfall by simply not craving the thing you were owed; and reminding yourself that a habit of ours may go unsatisfied — we ourselves never truly lack anything. How many things are superfluous we never realize until they run out. We were using them not because we needed them but because we had them. And how much do we buy only because our neighbors bought it, or because most people own one! Half our troubles come from living by the pattern — steering not by reason but by convention.
If only a few people did a thing, we'd refuse to copy it; but let the majority start, and we fall in line — as if being common made a thing more honorable! Once a wrong idea becomes widespread, it passes for the standard of what's right. Everyone now travels with Numidian outriders in front and a squad of runners to clear the road; it's a disgrace to have no attendants elbowing crowds out of your way, no great cloud of dust announcing that Somebody Important is coming. Everyone now has mules loaded with crystal cups and myrrhine vases carved by famous artists; it's a disgrace if your baggage is the kind that can rattle down the road without danger. Everyone's page-boys ride with their faces slathered in ointment so heat and cold won't trouble their tender complexions; it's a disgrace if a single boy in your entourage shows a healthy cheek not covered in cosmetics.
Avoid conversation with all such people. These are the men who pass their bad habits from hand to hand, grafting them onto everyone they meet. We used to think the worst of the breed were the ones who paraded their fine words; but there are men who parade their vices. Their talk does real damage. Even when it doesn't convince you on the spot, it leaves seeds of trouble in the soul, and the evil follows us around after we've left them, sure to spring up later with fresh strength. People who've heard a concert carry the melodies home in their heads, and the sweetness of the tunes keeps intruding, making serious thought impossible. In just the same way, the talk of flatterers and cheerleaders for vice sticks with us long after we've heard it. A catchy tune is hard to evict from the memory — it stays, it lasts, it comes back when you least expect it. So shut your ears against evil talk, and do it at the first note. Once that talk has gotten inside — once the words are admitted and settled in the mind — they grow bolder. And then we begin to talk like this: "Virtue, Philosophy, Justice — a rattle of empty words. The only happiness is treating yourself well. Eating, drinking, spending — that's real living; that's how you remember you're mortal. The days are running out; life is racing away and can't be refunded. Why hesitate to wise up? Life won't take pleasures forever; meanwhile, while it can, while it's begging for them, what's the point of forcing frugality on it? Get ahead of death — whatever death is going to steal from you, spend on yourself now. You have no mistress, no favorite slave-boy to make a mistress jealous; you show up in public sober every day; you dine as though Father were going to audit your account-book. That isn't living — that's minding someone else's life. And what madness, to look out for your heir's interests and deny yourself everything, until the sheer size of the inheritance turns your friends into enemies! The more your heir stands to gain, the harder he'll celebrate your exit. As for those sour types who set themselves up as schoolmasters to the world, judging everyone else's life while making an enemy of their own — don't give them a second thought, and don't hesitate to choose good living over a good name."
These are the voices you must flee the way Ulysses fled the Sirens — he wouldn't sail past until he was lashed to the mast. These voices are every bit as powerful. They lure men away from country, parents, friends, and every honest habit; they wreck them, with hopes that are shameful — or at best doomed — on a shameful life. How much better to hold a straight course and steer for the harbor where "pleasant" and "honorable" finally mean the same thing! We can get there once we understand that there are two classes of things: those that attract us and those that repel us. Riches, pleasures, beauty, ambition — everything seductive and smooth — pulls us in; toil, death, pain, disgrace, a stricter table — these push us away. So we must train ourselves out of fearing the one and desiring the other. Fight the battle in reverse: retreat from what entices, and charge what attacks.
Notice how differently men walk downhill and uphill? Going down a slope, you lean back; climbing a steep grade, you lean forward. To throw your weight forward on the way down, Lucilius, or backward on the way up — that is to side with vice. The pleasures run downhill; the road to what is rough and hard runs up. Downhill, hold the body back on the rein; uphill, throw it forward.
Do you think I'm saying the only men who ruin our ears are the ones who preach pleasure and teach us to dread pain — pain, which is frightening enough on its own? I think we're also injured by men who dress up in the Stoic uniform and coach us into vice all the same. They boast that only the wise and learned man knows how to be a lover: "He alone has the science of this art; the wise man is also the best-trained at drinking and feasting. The one question worth studying is: up to what age does the bloom of love last?" Let all that be written off as a concession to Greek ways. We should be turning our attention to words like these instead: "No man is good by accident. Virtue has to be learned. Pleasure is a low, small thing, worth nothing — we share it with the dumb animals; the tiniest and meanest of them go fluttering after it. Glory is empty and fleeting, lighter than air. Poverty is an evil to no one — unless he kicks against it. Death is not an evil. What is it, you ask? The one law of mankind that plays no favorites. Superstition is a lunatic's error: it fears the very beings it should love, and insults the very beings it worships. What difference is there between denying the gods and defaming them?"
Principles like these you should learn — no, learn by heart. Philosophy has no business writing excuses for vice. When a doctor tells a sick man to live recklessly, the patient is past saving.
Farewell.
Greetings from Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
Many an old-time precept I could hand you, if you did not flinch, ashamed to study lessons that look so lowly.
But you do not flinch, and no fine point of study scares you off. Your mind is too well trained to take up serious questions in a casual, easygoing way. I like your method: everything has to count toward some real measure of progress, and the only thing that annoys you is when the utmost subtlety accomplishes nothing at all. I am going to take some pains to show that this is not one of those cases. Our question is this: is the Good grasped by the senses, or by the understanding? And a corollary comes with it: the Good does not exist in animals or in small children.
Everyone who sets pleasure on the throne as the supreme ideal holds that the Good is a matter of the senses. We Stoics say it is a matter of the understanding, and we assign it to the mind. If the senses were the judges of what is good, we would never turn down a single pleasure — there is no pleasure that does not attract, none that does not please. And by the same token we would never voluntarily accept any pain, because there is no pain that does not grate against the senses. What's more, the people who are too fond of pleasure, and the people who fear pain above everything, would deserve no blame at all. Yet in fact we condemn men who are slaves to their appetites and their lusts, and we despise men who are too afraid of pain to dare anything worthy of a man. But what wrong would such men be doing, if they were simply consulting the senses — the very judges to whom you and your school have entrusted the whole test of what to seek and what to avoid?
Surely reason is the governing power in a question like this. Reason made the ruling about the happy life, about virtue, about honor; reason has made the ruling about good and evil too. With our opponents, the vilest part of us is allowed to pass sentence on the better part, so that the senses — dense, dull things, and more sluggish in human beings than in the other animals — get to pronounce judgment on the Good. Imagine someone trying to make out tiny objects by touch instead of by eyesight! To tell good from evil we would need the subtlest, sharpest faculty we possess — nothing cruder than the eye could even attempt it. So you can see in what ignorance of truth a man spends his days, and how flat he has knocked down the lofty and the divine, if he thinks the sense of touch can pass judgment on the nature of the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil!
"Just as every science and every art," he says, "must have some element that is tangible, something the senses can grasp — that is where sciences start and where they grow from — so the happy life takes its foundation and its beginnings from tangible things, from what falls within the reach of the senses. Surely you admit that the happy life starts from things the senses can touch."
But what we call "happy" is what accords with Nature; and what accords with Nature is obvious, plain to see at once — just as obvious as what is complete. What accords with Nature, what is handed to us as a gift the moment we are born, is not the Good, I maintain, but the beginning of the Good. You, on the other hand, hand the Supreme Good, pleasure, to newborn babies — so that the child starts out at the very point the perfected man arrives at. You are putting the treetop where the root belongs. If somebody claimed that the child still hidden in its mother's womb — its sex unknown, delicate, unformed, unfinished — was already in possession of goodness, he would obviously be talking nonsense. And yet how little difference is there between the child who has just received the gift of life and the one who is still a hidden burden inside its mother! As far as understanding good and evil goes, they are equally developed; a baby is no more capable of grasping the Good than a tree is, or some animal.
And why is the Good absent from a tree or an animal? Because reason is absent. For the same cause it is absent from a child: the child has no reason yet either, and will reach the Good only when it reaches reason. There are creatures without reason; there are creatures not yet endowed with reason; and there are creatures who have reason, but only incompletely. In none of these does the Good exist, because the Good arrives only in reason's company. What separates the three classes I just listed? In the one that will never possess reason, the Good will never exist. In the one not yet endowed with reason, the Good cannot exist at that time. In the one that has reason but only incompletely, the Good is capable of existing — but does not exist yet. This is my point, Lucilius: the Good is not to be found in just any body, or at just any age. It is as far removed from infancy as last is from first, as far as the finished thing is from the thing that has only just sprung into being. So it cannot exist in a tender little body whose frame has only begun to knit itself together. Of course not — no more than in the seed.
Grant all this, and here is how to understand it. There is a certain good of a tree or a plant — but not when the first shoot is just breaking out of the ground. There is a certain good of wheat — but it does not yet exist in the swelling stalk, or when the soft ear is pushing its way out of the husk; only when summer days and the wheat's appointed ripeness have matured it. Just as Nature everywhere does not deliver her good until she is brought to completion, so man's Good does not exist in man until both reason and the man are complete. And what is this Good? I'll tell you: a mind that is free and upright, that puts other things beneath itself and puts itself beneath nothing. Infancy is so far from admitting this Good that boyhood cannot even hope for it; young manhood hopes for it without any right to; and even old age is very lucky if it has arrived there after long and concentrated study. If this is the Good, then the Good is a matter of the understanding.
"But," comes the retort, "you admitted a certain good of trees and of grass — so surely there can be a certain good of a child too." The true Good, though, is not found in trees or in animals; what exists in them is called "good" only as a courtesy. "Then what is it?" you ask. Simply whatever accords with the nature of each. The real Good cannot possibly find a home in an animal; its nature is more blessed, of a higher order altogether. Where there is no room for reason, the Good does not exist.
There are four natures to consider here: tree, animal, man, and God. The last two, because they have the power of reason, are of the same nature — distinguished only in that one is immortal and the other dies. The Good of one of them, God, is perfected by Nature herself; the Good of the other, man, is perfected by effort and study. The rest are perfect only after their own kind — not truly perfect, since they lack reason. For, to put the whole thing in a sentence, only that is truly perfect which is perfect according to nature as a whole, and nature as a whole possesses reason. Everything else can be perfect merely in its kind.
Whatever cannot contain the happy life cannot contain what produces the happy life; and the happy life is produced by Goods alone. In animals there is no trace of the happy life, and no trace of what produces it: in animals the Good does not exist. The animal takes in the world around it through its senses alone. It remembers the past only when it bumps into something that jogs those senses — a horse, for instance, remembers the right road only when it is standing at the start of it. In its stall it has no memory of the road at all, however many times it has trodden it. And the third division of time — the future — lies entirely beyond an animal's reach.
How, then, can we call their nature perfect when they have no experience of time in its completeness? Time is threefold: past, present, and future. Animals are given only the slice that matters most to them in their brief coming and going — the present. Rarely do they recall the past, and then only when some present reminder confronts them. So the Good of a perfect nature cannot exist in an imperfect nature; if a nature of that sort could possess the Good, then so could a vegetable. I don't deny that animals have strong and swift impulses toward the actions that seem natural to them — but those impulses are confused and disordered, and the Good is never confused or disordered.
"What!" you say. "Animals move in a disturbed and disorderly fashion?" I would say they moved in a disturbed and disorderly fashion if their nature admitted of order; as it is, they move in accordance with their nature. A thing can only be called "disturbed" if it could at some other time be undisturbed; a thing is only "in trouble" if it could be at peace. No man is vicious except one who has the capacity for virtue; in animals, their motion is simply what their nature produces. But — not to wear you out — there is a certain sort of good in an animal, a certain sort of virtue, a certain sort of perfection; only not the Good, or virtue, or perfection in the absolute sense. That privilege belongs to reasoning beings alone, the ones who are permitted to know the why, the how far, and the how. So: good can exist only in that which possesses reason.
Do you ask where this whole argument is heading, and what use it will be to your mind? I'll tell you. It exercises the mind and sharpens it, and by keeping it honorably occupied, guarantees that it will accomplish some good. And even this is a benefit — anything that detains men when they are hurrying toward wickedness. But I will say something more: I can do you no greater service than by showing you the Good that is rightfully yours — by lifting you out of the class of the animals and setting you on a level with God.
Why, tell me, do you nurse and train your physical strength? Nature has dealt out more of it to cattle and to wild beasts. Why do you cultivate your looks? When you have done everything you can, the animals still surpass you in beauty. Why the endless fussing over your hair? Let it hang loose in the Parthian style, tie it up like the Germans, let it run wild like a Scythian — you will still see a thicker mane tossing on any horse you please, and a handsomer one bristling on the neck of any lion. Even after training yourself for speed, you will be no match for a hare. Aren't you willing to walk away from all these contests — where you are bound to lose, since you are straining after something that was never yours — and come back to the Good that really belongs to you?
And what is that Good? A clear and flawless mind — a rival to God's — raised above mortal concerns, counting nothing of its own as lying outside itself. You are a reasoning animal. What Good, then, lies inside you? Perfect reason. Will you develop it to its farthest limit, to its fullest growth? Count yourself happy only when all your joys are born of reason — when, having surveyed everything men grab at, pray for, and stand guard over, you find nothing left that you desire; I do not say nothing you would prefer. Here is a short rule to measure yourself by, a test to tell you when you have reached perfection: "You will come into your own when you understand that the people the world calls fortunate are really the most unfortunate of all."
Farewell.