Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

But the essence of the advice I’d like to give is this: treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your own superiors. And whenever it strikes you how much power you have over your slave, let it also strike you that your own master has just as much power over you.

A man who examines the saddle and bridle and not the animal itself when he is out to buy a horse is a fool; similarly, only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.

That’s why I think you’re absolutely right in not wishing to be feared by your slaves, and in confining your lashings to verbal ones; as instruments of correction, beatings are for animals only.

We have neither successes nor setbacks as individuals; our lives have a common end. No one can lead a happy life if he thinks only of himself and turns everything to his own purposes. You should live for the other person if you wish to live for yourself.

‘Mouse is a syllable, and a mouse nibbles cheese; therefore, a syllable nibbles cheese.’ Suppose for the moment I can’t detect the fallacy in that.

Keep clear, then, my dear Lucilius, as far as you can, of the sort of quibbles and qualifications I’ve been mentioning in philosophers. Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. Even if you had a large part of your life remaining before you, you would have to organize it very economically to have enough for all the things that are necessary; as things are, isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short!

When some state or other offered Alexander a part of its territory and half of all its property he told them that ‘he hadn’t come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them.’ Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations: ‘It’s not my intention to accept whatever time is left over from you; you shall have, instead, what I reject.’

‘So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.’ ‘When was this?’ you’ll say. Before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. If there is any torment in the later state, there must also have been torment in the period before we saw the light of day; yet we never felt conscious of any distress then. I ask you, wouldn’t you say that anyone who took the view that a lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was lit was an utter idiot? We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquillity.

The fact that a person is living for nobody does not automatically mean that he is living for himself.

I can’t give you any accurate information about the house itself. I only know the front of it and the parts in view, the parts that it displays even to passers-by. There are two artificial grottoes, considerable feats of engineering, each as big as the most spacious hall, one of them not letting in the sun at all, the other retaining it right up until its setting. There is a grove of plane trees through the middle of which runs a stream flowing alternately, like a tide-race, into the sea and into the Acherusian Lake, a stream capable of supporting a stock of fish even if constantly exploited; it is left alone, though, when the sea is open: only when bad weather gives the fishermen a holiday do they lay hands on this ready supply. But the most advantageous feature of the house is that it has Baiae next door; it enjoys all the amenities of that resort and is free from its disadvantages. I can speak for these attractions from personal knowledge, and I am quite prepared to believe, too, that it is an all-the-year-round house, since it lies in the path of the western breeze, catching it to such an extent as to exclude Baiae from the benefit of it. Vatia seems to have been no fool in choosing this place as the one in which he would spend his retirement, sluggish and senile as that retirement had become.

try dalle

The peaceful stillness of the night had lulled The world to rest.fn23 This is incorrect. There is no such thing as ‘peaceful stillness’ except where reason has lulled it to rest. Night does not remove our worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties. For even when people are asleep they have dreams as troubled as their days. The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.

When great military commanders notice indiscipline among their men they suppress it by giving them some work to do, mounting expeditions to keep them actively employed. People who are really busy never have enough time to become skittish. And there is nothing so certain as the fact that the harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.

The earlier character here is the wise man, who knows no fear at the hurtling of missiles, or the clash of weapons against weapons in the close-packed ranks, or the thunderous noise of a city in destruction. The other, later one has everything to learn; fearing for his belongings he pales at every noise; a single cry, whatever it is, prostrates him, being immediately taken for the yelling of the enemy; the slightest movement frightens him out of his life; his baggage makes him a coward. Pick out any one of your ‘successful’ men, with all they trail or carry about with them, and you will have a picture of the man ‘in fear for this companion and this load’.

A person, moreover, who has not been able to care about more than one friend cannot have cared even about that one too much.

Aristotle thinks that the term ‘cause’ can be used in three different ways. ‘The first cause,’ he says, ‘is matter – without it nothing can be brought into existence. The second is the craftsman, and the third is form, which is impressed on every single piece of work as on a statue.’ This last is what Aristotle calls the idos. ‘And,’ he says, ‘there is a fourth as well, the purpose of the whole work.’

To these four causes Plato adds a fifth in the model – what he himself calls the idea – this being what the sculptor had constantly before his eyes as he executed the intended work.

Well, in raising and arguing these less deserving topics my own attitude is that they serve to calm the spirit, and that whilst I examine myself first, certainly, I examine the universe around me afterwards.

Think how long now you’ve been doing the same as them – food, sleep, sex, the never-ending cycle.

Someone, though, will say, ‘But I want to live because of all the worthy activities I’m engaged in. I’m performing life’s duties conscientiously and energetically and I’m reluctant to leave them undone.’ Come now, surely you know that dying is also one of life’s duties? You’re leaving no duty undone, for there’s no fixed number of duties laid down which you’re supposed to complete. Every life without exception is a short one. Looked at in relation to the universe even the lives of Nestor and Sattia were short.

In Sattia, who ordered that her epitaph should record that she had lived to the age of ninety-nine, you have an example of someone actually boasting of a prolonged old age – had it so happened that she had lasted out the hundredth year everybody, surely, would have found her quite insufferable!

Comforting thoughts (provided they are not of a discreditable kind) contribute to a person’s cure; anything which raises his spirits benefits him physically as well.

I have said enough about the first, but will just say this, that the fear is due to the facts of nature, not of illness. Illness has actually given many people a new lease of life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation.

You will die not because you are sick but because you are alive. That end still awaits you when you have been cured. In getting well again you may be escaping some ill health but not death.

Nobody can be in acute pain and feel it for long. Nature in her unlimited kindness to us has so arranged things as to make pain either bearable or brief.

What in fact makes people who are morally unenlightened upset by the experience of physical distress is their failure to acquire the habit of contentment with the spirit. They have instead been preoccupied by the body.

A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is. And complaining away about one’s sufferings after they are over

In the same way as the enemy can do far more damage to your army if it is in full retreat, every trouble that may come our way presses harder on the one who has turned tail and is giving ground.

Another thing which will help is to turn your mind to other thoughts and that way get away from your suffering. Call to mind things which you have done that have been upright or courageous; run over in your mind the finest parts that you have played. And cast your memory over the things you have most admired; this is a time for recollecting all those individuals of exceptional courage who have triumphed over pain: the man who steadily went on reading a book while he was having varicose veins cut out: the man who never stopped smiling under torture albeit that this angered his tormentors into trying on him every instrument of cruelty they had.

If pain has been conquered by a smile will it not be conquered by reason?

How much scope there would be for renown if whenever we were sick we had an audience of spectators! Be your own spectator anyway, your own applauding audience.

And we should, indeed, live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts – which someone can!

‘No person who is drunk,’ he says, ‘is entrusted with a secret: the good man is entrusted with a secret: therefore, the good man will not get drunk.’ Watch how ridiculous he’s made to look when we counter with a single syllogism on the same pattern (of the many we could advance it’s sufficient to instance one). ‘No person who is asleep is entrusted with a secret: the good man is entrusted with a secret: therefore, the good man does not go to sleep ….’

drunkenness is nothing but a state of self-induced insanity.

Explain, then, why the good man should avoid getting drunk, using facts, not words, to show its ugliness and offensiveness.

self-restraint and sense of duty.

I have seen the house, which is built of squared stone blocks; the wall surrounding the park; and the towers built out on both sides of the house for purposes of defence; the well, concealed among the greenery and out-buildings, with sufficient water to provide for the needs of a whole army; and the tiny little bath, situated after the old-fashioned custom in an ill-lit corner, our ancestors believing that the only place where one could properly have a hot bath was in the dark.

Heavens, what a pleasure it is to go into one of those half-lit bath-houses with their ordinary plastered ceilings, where you knew that Cato himself as aedile – or Fabius Maximus, or one of the Cornelii – regulated the warmth of your water with his own hand! For, however high their rank, it was one of the duties of the aediles to enter all such premises as were open to the public and enforce standards of cleanliness and a healthy sort of temperature, sufficient for practical purposes, not the kind of heat which has recently come into fashion, more like that of a furnace – so much so indeed that a slave convicted on a criminal charge might well be sentenced to be bathed alive! There doesn’t seem to me to be any difference now between ‘your bath’s warm’ and ‘your bath’s boiling’.

Writers who have left us a record of life in ancient Rome tell us that it was just their arms and legs, which of course they dirtied working, that people washed every day, bathing all over only once a week on market day.

YOU want to know my attitude towards liberal studies. Well, I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. Time should be spent on them only so long as one’s mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things. They are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Why ‘liberal studies’ are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man.fn36 But there is really only one liberal study that deserves the name – because it makes a person free – and that is the pursuit of wisdom. Its high ideals, its steadfastness and spirit make all other studies puerile and puny in comparison. Do you really think there is anything to be said for the others when you find among the people who profess to teach them quite the most reprehensible and worthless characters you could have as teachers? All right to have studied that sort of thing once, but not to be studying them now.

Attentiveness to words, analysis of syllables, accounts of myths, laying down the principles of prosody? What is there in all this that dispels fear, roots out desire or reins in passion? Or let us take a look at music, at geometry; you will not find anything in them which tells us not to be afraid of this or desire that – and if anyone lacks this kind of knowledge all his other knowledge is valueless to him.

For at one moment they make him a Stoic, giving nothing but virtue his approval, steering clear of pleasure, not even an offer of immortality inducing him to stoop to the dishonourable; at another they make him an Epicurean, praising the way of life of a society passing its days at peace and ease, in an atmosphere of dinner-parties and music-making; at another he becomes a Peripatetic, with a threefold classification of things good; at another an Academic, stating that nothing is certain. It is obvious that none of these philosophies is to be found in Homer for the very reason that they all are, the doctrines being mutually incompatible.

So although old age has made me better at putting up with a lot of things, here I am coming to lose this advantage of being old. The notion occurs to me that inside this old frame there exists a young man as well and one is always less severe on a young man.

The good man should go on living as long as he ought to, not just as long as he likes. The man who does not value his wife or a friend highly enough to stay on a little longer in life, who persists in dying in spite of them, is a thoroughly self-indulgent character.

The story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?

However much you possess there’s someone else who has more, and you’ll be fancying yourself to be short of things you need to the exact extent to which you lag behind him.

Death you’ll think of as the worst of all bad things, though in fact there’s nothing bad about it at all except the thing which comes before it – the fear of it.

If your mind has once experienced the shocks of fright you’ll no longer have any confidence even in things which are perfectly safe; once it has acquired the habit of unthinking panic, it is incapable even of attending to its own self-preservation.

At one moment chance will carry off one of them, at another moment another; but the falling of the leaves is not difficult to bear, since they grow again, and it is no more hard to bear the loss of those whom you love and regard as brightening your existence; for even if they do not grow again they are replaced

While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.

What good has travel of itself ever been able to do anyone? It has never acted as a check on pleasure or a restraining influence on desires; it has never controlled the temper of an angry man or quelled the reckless impulses of a lover; never in fact has it rid the personality of a fault. It has not granted us the gift of judgement, it has not put an end to mistaken attitudes.