Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, ‘for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains’, but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful.

You may say we are not at present concerned with the question whether friendship is something to be cultivated for its own sake. But this, on the contrary, is exactly what needs proving most; for if friendship is something to be sought out for its own sake, the self-contented man is entitled to pursue it. And how does he approach it?

Chrysippus. The wise man, he said, lacked nothing but needed a great number of things, whereas ‘the fool, on the other hand, needs nothing (for he does not know how to use anything) but lacks everything.’

He will repeat the words of Stilbo (the Stilbo whom Epicurus’ letter attacks), when his home town was captured and he emerged from the general conflagration, his children lost, his wife lost, alone and none the less a happy man, and was questioned by Demetrius. Asked by this man, known, from the destruction he dealt out to towns, as Demetrius the City Sacker, whether he had lost anything, he replied, ‘I have all my valuables with me.’ There was an active and courageous man – victorious over the very victory of the enemy! ‘I have lost,’ he said, ‘nothing.’ He made Demetrius wonder whether he had won a victory after all. ‘All my possessions,’ he said, ‘are with me’, meaning by this the qualities of a just, a good and an enlightened character, and indeed the very fact of not regarding as valuable anything that is capable of being taken away.

LETTER XI

talks about personalities of known roman characters, interesting

self-possession,

For no amount of wisdom enables one to do away with physical or mental weaknesses that arise from natural causes; anything inborn or ingrained in one can by dint of practice be allayed, but not overcome.

‘We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.’ This, my dear Lucilius, is Epicurus’ advice, and in giving it he has given us a guardian and a moral tutor – and not without reason, either: misdeeds are greatly diminished if a witness is always standing near intending doers.

The personality should be provided with someone it can revere, someone whose influence can make even its private, inner life more pure. Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts! And happy, too, is the person who can so revere another as to adjust and shape his own personality in the light of recollections, even, of that other. A person able to revere another thus will soon deserve to be revered himself. So choose yourself a Cato – or, if Cato seems too severe for you, a Laelius, a man whose character is not quite so strict. Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.

I visited my place just out of Rome recently and was grumbling about the expense of maintaining the building, which was in a dilapidated state. My manager told me the trouble wasn’t due to any neglect on his part: he was doing his utmost but the house was old. That house had taken shape under my own hands; what’s to become of me if stones of my own age are crumbling like that? Losing my temper I seized at the first excuse that presented itself for venting my irritation on him. ‘It’s quite clear,’ I said, ‘that these plane trees are being neglected. There’s no foliage on them. Look at those knotty, dried-up branches and those wretched, flaking trunks. That wouldn’t happen if someone dug round them and watered them.’ He swore by my guardian angel he was doing his utmost: in everything his care was unremitting but the poor things were just old.

‘It’s not very pleasant, though,’ you may say, ‘to have death right before one’s eyes.’ To this I would say, firstly, that death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one – the order in which we each receive our summons is not determined by our precedence in the register – and, secondly, that no one is so very old that it would be quite unnatural for him to hope for one more day ….

Pacuvius, the man who acquired a right to Syria by prescription,1 was in the habit of conducting a memorial ceremony for himself with wine and funeral feasting of the kind we are familiar with, and then being carried on a bier from the dinner table to his bed, while a chanting to music went on of the words ‘He has lived, he has lived’ in Greek, amid the applause of the young libertines present. Never a day passed but he celebrated his own funeral.

‘To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint.’

Epicurus

‘It was Epicurus who said that,’ you protest. ‘What business have you got with someone else’s property?’ Whatever is true is my property.

OUR ancestors had a custom, observed right down as far as my own lifetime, of adding to the opening words of a letter: ‘I trust this finds you as it leaves me, in good health.’ We have good reason to say: ‘I trust this finds you in pursuit of wisdom.’

wisdom-health

‘The life of folly is empty of gratitude, full of anxiety: it is focused wholly on the future.’

Set yourself a limit which you couldn’t even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them.

no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom,

You have to persevere and fortify your pertinacity until the will to good becomes a disposition to good.

Philosophy is not an occupation of a popular nature, nor is it pursued for the sake of self-advertisement. Its concern is not with words, but with facts. It is not carried on with the object of passing the day in an entertaining sort of way and taking the boredom out of leisure. It moulds and builds the personality, orders one’s life, regulates one’s conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm, and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas. Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry. Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to philosophy.

philosophy - self-advertisement philosophy - advise

Whether we are caught in the grasp of an inexorable law of fate, whether it is God who as lord of the universe has ordered all things, or whether the affairs of mankind are tossed and buffeted haphazardly by chance, it is philosophy that has the duty of protecting us.

Here is another saying of Epicurus: ‘If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.’ Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.

a holiday can be celebrated without extravagant festivity.

If you want a man to keep his head when the crisis comes you must give him some training before it comes. This was the aim of the menfn9 who once every month pretended they were poor, bringing themselves face to face with want, to prevent their ever being terrified by a situation which they had frequently rehearsed.

The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during which he would be niggardly in satisfying his hunger, with the object of seeing to what extent, if at all, one thereby fell short of attaining full and complete pleasure, and whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the deficit good.

reductio ad absurdum

Well, I’ll refer you to Epicurus for payment. ‘Anger carried to excess begets madness.’

slaves and enemies.

will oblige me, with the following saying: ‘Rehearse death’, or – the idea may come across to us rather more satisfactorily if put in this form – ‘It is a very good thing to familiarize oneself with death.’ You may possibly think it unnecessary to learn something which you will only have to put into practice once. That is the very reason why we ought to be practising it. We must needs continually study a thing if we are not in a position to test whether we know it.

‘SO you’re giving me advice, are you?’ you say. ‘Have you already given yourself advice, then? Have you already put yourself straight? Is that how you come to have time for reforming other people?’ No, I’m not so shameless as to set about treating people when I’m sick myself. I’m talking to you as if I were lying in the same hospital ward, about the illness we’re both suffering from, and passing on some remedies. So listen to me as if I were speaking to myself. I’m allowing you access to my inmost self, calling you in to advise me as I have things out with myself.

‘Count your years and you’ll be ashamed to be wanting and working for exactly the same things as you wanted when you were a boy.

A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.

There was a rich man called Calvisius Sabinus, in my own lifetime, who had a freedman’s brains along with a freedman’s fortune. I have never seen greater vulgarity in a successful man. His memory was so bad that at one moment or another the names of Ulysses, or Achilles, or Priam, characters he knew as well as we knew our early teachers, would slip his memory. No doddering butler ever went through the introductions of a mass of callers committing quite such solecisms – not announcing people’s names so much as foisting names on them – as Sabinus did with the Greek and Trojan heroes. But this didn’t stop him wanting to appear a well-read man. And to this end he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves, one of them to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod, while he assigned one apiece to each of the nine lyric poets.fn11 That the cost was enormous is hardly surprising: not having found what he wanted in the market he had them made to order. After this collection of slaves had been procured for him, he began to give his dinner guests nightmares. He would have these fellows at his elbow so that he could continually be turning to them for quotations from these poets which he might repeat to the company, and then – it happened frequently – he would break down halfway through a word. Satellius Quadratus, who regarded stupid millionaires as fair game to be sponged off, and consequently also fair game for flattery, as well as – and thi...

‘Poverty brought into accord with the law of nature is wealth.’ Epicurus is constantly saying this in one way or another.

DO you think you are the only person to have had this experience? Are you really surprised, as if it were something unprecedented, that so long a tour and such diversity of scene have not enabled you to throw off this melancholy and this feeling of depression? A change of character, not a change of air, is what you need. Though you cross the boundless ocean, though, to use the words of our poet Virgil, Lands and towns are left astern,fn12 whatever your destination you will be followed by your failings. Here is what Socrates said to someone who was making the same complaint: ‘How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.’

You rush hither and thither with the idea of dislodging a firmly seated weight when the very dashing about just adds to the trouble it causes you – like the cargo in a ship, which does not weigh her down unduly so long as it does not shift, but if it rolls more to one side than the other it is liable to carry the side on which it settles down into the water. Whatever you do is bad for you, the very movement in itself being harmful to you since you are in fact shaking up a sick man.

We should live with the conviction: ‘I wasn’t born for one particular corner: the whole world’s my home country.’

‘A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation.’

can you imagine someone who counts his faults as merits ever giving thought to their cure? So – to the best of your ability – demonstrate your own guilt, conduct inquiries of your own into all the evidence against yourself. Play the part first of prosecutor, then of judge and finally of pleader in mitigation. Be harsh with yourself at times.

When things stand out and attract attention in a work you can be sure there is an uneven quality about it. One tree by itself never calls for admiration when the whole forest rises to the same height.

The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone. There has yet to be a monopoly of truth. And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.

Words need to be sown like seed. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when it lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.

Language, moreover, which devotes its attention to truth ought to be plain and unadorned. This popular style has nothing to do with truth. Its object is to sway a mass audience, to carry away unpractised ears by the force of its onslaught. It never submits itself to detailed discussion, is just wafted away. Besides, how can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself?

The upshot, then, of what I have to say is this: I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.

There is no need to raise our hands to heaven; there is no need to implore the temple warden to allow us close to the ear of some graven image, as though this increased the chances of our being heard. God is near you, is with you, is inside you. Yes, Lucilius, there resides within us a divine spirit, which guards us and watches us in the evil and the good we do. As we treat him, so will he treat us. No man, indeed, is good without God – is any one capable of rising above fortune unless he has help from God? He it is that prompts us to noble and exalted endeavours.

What, then, is this soul? Something which has a lustre that is due to no quality other than its own. Could anything be more stupid than to praise a person for something that is not his?

No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own. We praise a vine if it loads its branches with fruit and bends its very props to the ground with the weight it carries: would any one prefer the famous vine that had gold grapes and leaves hanging on it? Fruitfulness is the vine’s peculiar virtue. So, too, in a man praise is due only to what is his very own. Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him – they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man’s. You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit.

I’M glad to hear, from these people who’ve been visiting you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. It is just what one expects of an enlightened, cultivated person like yourself. ‘They’re slaves,’ people say. No. They’re human beings. ‘They’re slaves.’ But they share the same roof as ourselves. ‘They’re slaves.’ No, they’re friends, humble friends. ‘They’re slaves.’ Strictly speaking they’re our fellow-slaves, if you once reflect that fortune has as much power over us as over them.

This is why I laugh at those people who think it degrading for a man to eat with his slave. Why do they think it degrading?

‘You’ve as many enemies as you’ve slaves.’ They are not our enemies when we acquire them; we make them so.

His sleepless night is divided between his master’s drunkenness and sexual pleasures, boy at the table, man in the bedroom.