Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

The instability, moreover, of a mind which is seriously unwell, is aggravated by it, the motion itself increasing the fitfulness and restlessness. This explains why people, after setting out for a place with the greatest of enthusiasm, are often more enthusiastic about getting away from it; like migrant birds, they fly on, away even quicker than they came.

For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered. This is the way to liberate the spirit that still needs to be rescued from its miserable state of slavery.

Travelling doesn’t make a man a doctor or a public speaker: there isn’t a single art which is acquired merely by being in one place rather than another. Can wisdom, then, the greatest art of all, be picked up in the course of taking a trip?

If you want to enjoy your travel, you must make your travelling companion a healthy one.

Move to better company: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. If you like Greek company too, attach yourself to Socrates and Zeno: the one would teach you how to the should it be forced upon you, the other how to the before it is forced upon you. Live with Chrysippus, live with Posidonius; they will give you a knowledge of man and the universe; they will tell you to be a practical philosopher: not just to entertain your listeners to a clever display of language, but to steel your spirit and brace it against whatever threatens.

It is self-assertive; it feels assured of honour and respect; it is master of all things; it is above all things; it should accordingly give in to nothing; in nothing should it see a burden calculated to bow the shoulders of a man.

Why, Lucilius, I ask you why should any real man be afraid of hardship, or any human being be afraid of death? I constantly meet people who think that what they themselves can’t do can’t be done, who say that to bear up under the things we Stoics speak of is beyond the capacity of human nature. How much more highly I rate these people’s abilities than they do themselves! I say that they are just as capable as others of doing these things, but won’t. In any event what person actually trying them has found them prove beyond him? Who hasn’t noticed how much easier they are in the actual doing? It’s not because they’re hard that we lose confidence; they’re hard because we lack the confidence.

If you still need an example, take Socrates, an old man who had known his full share of suffering, who had taken every blow life could inflict, and still remained unbeaten either by poverty, a burden for him aggravated by domestic worries, or by constant hardships, including those endured on military service. Apart from what he had to contend with at home – whether one thinks of his wife with her shrewish ways and nagging tongue, or his intractable children, more like their mother than their father – his whole life was lived either in war-time or under tyranny or under a ‘democracy’ that outdid even wars and tyrants in its cruelties. The war went on for twenty-seven years. After the fighting was ended, the state was handed over to the mercy of the Thirty Tyrants, a considerable number of whom were hostile to him. The final blow was his conviction and sentence on the most serious of charges: he was accused of blasphemy and of corrupting the younger generation, whom, it was alleged, he turned into rebels against God, their fathers and the state. After that came the prison and the poison. And so little effect did all this have on Socrates’ spirit, it did not even affect the expression on his face. What a rare and wonderful story of achievement! To the very last no one ever saw Socrates in any particular mood of gaiety or depression. Through all the ups and downs of fortune his was a level temperament.

Would you like another example? Take the modern one of Marcus Cato, with whom fortune dealt in an even more belligerent and unremitting fashion. At every point she stood in his way, even at the end, at his death; yet he demonstrated that a brave man can live in defiance of fortune and can the in defiance of fortune. The whole of his life was passed either in civil war or in conditions of developing civil conflict. And of him no less than of Socrates it is possible to say that he carried himself clear of slaveryfn50 (unless, perhaps, you take the view that Pompey, Caesar and Crassus were friends of freedom). When his country was in a state of constant change, no one ever saw a change in Cato. In every situation he was placed in, he showed himself always the same man, whether in office as praetor, in defeat at the polls, under attack in court, as governor in his province, on the public platform, in the field, or in death itself. In that moment, too, of panic for the Republic, when Caesar stood on the one side, backed by ten legions of the finest fighting men and the entire resources and support of foreign countries as well, and on the other stood Pompey, by himself a match for all...

Now think of the things which goad man into destroying man: you’ll find that they are hope, envy, hatred, fear and contempt.

No one pursues an unremitting and persistent policy of injury to a man for whom he feels nothing but contempt.

To be feared inside your own home, it may be added, is as much a source of trouble as being feared outside it – slave or free, there isn’t a man who hasn’t power enough to do you injury. Besides, to be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind himself.

The person who has made contempt his ally, who has been despised because he has chosen to be despised, has the measure of it under his control. Its disadvantages are negatived by the possession of respected qualities and of friends having influence with some person with the necessary influence. Such influential friends are people with whom it is well worth having ties, without being so tied up with them that their protection costs you more than the original danger might have done.

But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, wi...

Nobody will keep the things he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more.

Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind. People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax. After every act they tremble, paralysed, their consciences continually demanding an answer, not allowing them to get on with other things. To expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it. Where there is a bad conscience, some circumstance or other may provide one with impunity, but never with freedom from anxiety; for a person takes the attitude that even if he isn’t found out, there’s always the possibility of it. His sleep is troubled. Whenever he talks about someone else’s misdeed he thinks of his own, which seems to him all too inadequately hidden, all too inadequately blotted out of people’s memories. A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.