Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

he tells Lucilius in his eighth letter, he was committing to writing in the hope that they might be ‘of use to later generations’.

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

Self apprecition

People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.

‘A cheerful poverty,’ he says, ‘is an honourable state.’ But if it is cheerful it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.

You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.

But if you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.

Friendship

After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge.

Those people who, contrary to Theophrastus’ advice, judge a man after they have made him their friend instead of the other way round, certainly put the cart before the horse.

Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to ...

I need hardly say, live in such a way that there is nothing which you could not as easily tell yo...

Regard him as loyal, and you will make him loyal.

Why should I keep back anything when I’m with a friend? Why shouldn’t I imagine I’m alone when I’m in his company?

We should not keep silver plate with inlays of solid gold, but at the same time we should not imagine that doing without gold and silver is proof that we are leading the simple life.

Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature: it is quite contrary to nature to torture one’s body, to reject simple standards of cleanliness and make a point of being dirty, to adopt a diet that is not just plain but hideous and revolting.

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

‘Cease to hope,’ he says, ‘and you will cease to fear.’

Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.

I SEE in myself, Lucilius, not just an improvement but a transformation, although I would not venture as yet to assure you, or even to hope, that there is nothing left in me needing to be changed. Naturally there are a lot of things about me requiring to be built up or fined down or eliminated. Even this, the fact that it perceives the failings it was unaware of in itself before, is evidence of a change for the better in one’s character.

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.

‘What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend.’ That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend of all.

Associating with people in large numbers is actually harmful: there is not one of them that will not make some vice or other attractive to us, or leave us carrying the imprint of it or bedaubed all unawares with it.

am writing this,’ he says, ‘not for the eyes of the many, but for yours alone: for each of us is audience enough for the other.’

Lay these up in your heart, my dear Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure that comes from the majority’s approval. The many speak highly of you, but have you really any grounds for satisfaction with yourself if you are the kind of person the many understand? Your merits should not be outward facing.

I am acting on behalf of later generations. I am writing down a few things that may be of use to them; I am committing to writing some helpful recommendations, which might be compared to the formulae of successful medications, the effectiveness of which I have experienced in the case of my own sores, which may not have been completely cured but have at least ceased to spread. I am pointing out to others the right path,

Those who appear inactive are, believe me, engaged in far more important activity; they’re dealing with matters divine and human at the same moment.

‘To win true freedom you must be a slave to philosophy.’

The difference here between the Epicurean and our own school is this: our wise man feels his troubles but overcomes them, while their wise man does not even feel them.

The philosopher Attalus used to say that it was more of a pleasure to make a friend than to have one, ‘in the same way as an artist derives more pleasure from painting than from having completed a picture’.

Road before destination

If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well.

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? In the same way as he would any object of great beauty, not drawn by gain, not out of alarm at the vicissitudes of fortune. To procure friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity.

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.’ The wise man needs hands and eyes and a great number of things that are required for the purposes of day-to-day life; but he lacks nothing, for lacking something implies that it is a necessity and nothing, to the wise man, is a necessity.

course of a voyage in distant parts or cast away on some desert shore?’ It will be like that of Jove while nature takes her rest, of brief duration, when the universe is dissolved and the gods are all merged in one, finding repose in himself, absorbed in his own thoughts. Such is more or less the way of the wise man: he retires to his inner self, is his own company.

So long in fact as he remains in a position to order his affairs according to his own judgement, he remains self-content even when he marries, even when he brings up his children. He is self-content and yet he would refuse to live if he had to live without any human company at all.

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’,

Never losing

‘Any man,’ he says, ‘who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world.’

Not happy he who thinks himself not so.*

What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?

It does not make any difference what a man says; what matters is how he feels, and not how he feels on one particular day but how he feels at all times. But you have no need to fear that so valuable a thing may fall into unworthy hands. Only the wise man is content with what is his. All foolishness suffers the burden of dissatisfaction with itself.

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.…*

Old age and death +youth and dying young

live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint.’ Of course not, when on every side there are plenty of short and easy roads to freedom there for the taking. Let us thank God that no one can be held a prisoner in life – the very constraints can be trampled under foot.

But whatever you do, return from body to mind very soon. Exercise it day and night. Only a moderate amount of work is needed for it to thrive and develop.

Travelling in one’s carriage shakes the body up and doesn’t interfere with intellectual pursuits; you can read, dictate, speak, or listen – nor does walking, for that matter, preclude any of these activities. Nor need you look down on voice-training, though I will not have you practising any of this ascending and then descending again by degrees through set scales – if you start that, you’ll be going on to take lessons in walking! Once let into your house the sort of person that hunger teaches unheard-of occupations and you’ll have someone regulating the way you walk and watching the way you use your jaws as you eat, and in fact going just as far as your patience and credulity lead his audacity on.

Our purpose in all this is not to give the voice, exercise, but to make it give us exercise.

What is the purpose of my labours going to be? See, this day’s my last – or maybe it isn’t, but it’s not so far away from it.

What help can philosophy be if there is a deity controlling all? What help can it be if all is governed by chance? For it is impossible either to change what is already determined or to make preparations to meet what is undetermined; either, in the first case, my planning is forestalled by a God who decrees how I am to act, or, in the second case, it is fortune that allows me no freedom to plan.’ Whichever of these alternatives, Lucilius, is true – even if all of them are true – we still need to practise philosophy. 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. She will encourage us to submit to God with cheerfulness and to fortune with defiance; she will show you how to follow God and bear what chance may send you.

‘If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.’

For 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 men* 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.