Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca

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.

As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.

There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.

It is quite pathetic, after all, if one has put the will to die behind one, to be without the will to live.

There are three upsetting things about any illness: the fear of dying, the physical suffering and the interruption of our pleasures.

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.

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. That is why a man of noble and enlightened character separates body from spirit and has just as much to do with the former, the frail and complaining part of our nature, as is necessary and no more, and a lot to do with the better, the divine element.

‘But it’s hard having to do without pleasures we’re used to, having to give up food and go thirsty as well as hungry.’ Tiresome it is in the first stages of abstinence. Later, as the organs of appetite decline in strength with exhaustion, the cravings die down;

In illness the suffering is always bearable so long as you refuse to be affected by the ultimate threat.

pain is a trivial sort of thing. If by contrast you start giving yourself encouragement, saying to yourself, ‘It’s nothing – or nothing much, anyway – let’s stick it out, it’ll be over presently’, then in thinking it a trivial matter you will be ensuring that it actually is.

Everything hangs on one’s thinking. The love of power or money or luxurious living are not the only things which are guided by popular thinking. We take our cue from people’s thinking even in the way we feel pain.

There may be pleasure in the memory Of even these events one day.

An illness that’s swift and short will have one of two results: either oneself or it will be snuffed out. And what difference does it make whether I or it disappears? Either way there’s an end to the pain.

‘But my illness has taken me away from my duties and won’t allow me to achieve anything.’ It is your body, not your mind as well, that is in the grip of ill health.

become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body; the one requirement is that we cease to dread death. And so we shall as soon as we have learnt to distinguish the good things and the bad things in this world. Then and then only shall we stop being weary of living as well as scared of dying.

a life spent viewing all the variety, the majesty, the sublimity in things around us can never succumb to ennui: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing, is usually the result of an idle and inactive leisure. Truth will never pall on someone who explores the world of nature, wearied as a person will be by the spurious things.

having gained extensive knowledge of the world we live in, having learnt that time adds nothing to the finer things in life. Whereas any life must needs seem short to people who measure it in terms of pleasures which through their empty nature are incapable of completeness.

YOU demand an account of my days – generally as well as individually. You think well of me if you suppose that there is nothing in them for me to hide. 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

Pharius, a likeable young fellow, as you know, but he’s due for a change. I’m looking now for someone rather more youthful. He in fact declares that we’re both at the same climacteric since we’re both losing our teeth. But I’ve reached the stage where I can only keep up with him with difficulty when we’re out for a run,

Running?

‘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….’

Bad argument pulled apart

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

imagine the drunken man’s behaviour extended over several days: would you hesitate to think him out of his mind?

Yes, and what’s more, if you must know, he didn’t even have a bath every day. 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.

Why ‘liberal studies’ are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man.* 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.

The day in question proves me wrong in a sense if it treats me leniently, but even so not really wrong, for just as I know that anything is capable of happening so also do I know that it’s not bound to happen. So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.

all the others who place their talents at the service of our pleasures. What is there, I ask you, that’s liberal about those characters who vomit up their food to empty their stomachs for more, with their bodies stuffed full and their minds all starved and inactive?

What’s the use of overcoming opponent after opponent in the wrestling or boxing rings if you can be overcome by your temper?

‘Beat me, burn me, put me to death, I shall not talk – the more the torture probes my secrets the deeper I’ll hide them! ‘Can liberal studies create that kind of spirit?

never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like to but the amount you ought to take.

Buddhism?

Someone will ask me how I can say that liberal studies are of no help towards morality when I’ve just been saying that there’s no attaining morality without them. My answer would be this: there’s no attaining morality without food either, but there’s no connexion between morality and food.

The fact that a ship can’t begin to exist without the timbers of which it’s built doesn’t mean that the timbers are of ‘help’ to it. There’s no reason for you to assume that, X being something without which Y could never have come about, Y came about as a result of the assistance of X.

Wisdom publishes not words but truths – and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.

There is nothing small or cramped about wisdom. It is something calling for a lot of room to move. There are questions to be answered concerning physical as well as human matters, questions about the past and about the future, questions about things eternal and things ephemeral, questions about time itself.

On this one subject of time just look how many questions there are. To start with, does it ha...

Next, does anything exist prior to time, independently of it? Did it begin with the universe, or did it exist even before then on the grounds that there was ...

There are countless questions about the soul alone – where it comes from, what its nature is, when it begins to exist, and how long it is in existence; whether it passes from one place to another, moving house, so to speak, on transfer to su...

before he earns such compliments as ‘What a learned person!’ Let’s be content with the much less fashionable label, ‘What a good man!’…

declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole. Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists.

only one thing exists; if Zeno, not even one. Then what are we? The things that surround us, the things on which we live, what are they? Our whole universe is no more than a semblance of reality, perhaps a deceptive semblance, perhaps one without substance altogether. I should find it difficult to say which of these people annoy me most, those who would have us know nothing or the ones who refuse even to leave us the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing.

have worth looking up to in philosophy if she were handed out free? Philosophy has the single task of discovering the truth about the divine and human worlds. The religious conscience, the sense of duty, justice and all the rest of the close-knit, interdependent ‘company of virtues’,

dominate the group are either the biggest or the fiercest. The bull who leads the herd is not the weakling, but the one whose bulk and brawn has brought it victory over the other males. In a herd of elephants the tallest is the leader. Among human beings the highest merit means the highest position.

So they used to choose their ruler for his character. Hence peoples were supremely fortunate when among them a man could never be more powerful than others unless he was a better man than they were. For there is nothing dangerous in a man’s having as much power as he likes if he takes the view that he has power to do only what it is his duty to do.

To govern was to serve, not to rule.

Thus far I agree with Posidonius. But that philosophy discovered the techniques employed in everyday life, that I refuse to admit. I will not claim for philosophy a fame that belongs to technology.

skills. Believe me, that age before there ever existed architects or builders was a happy age.

The wise man then followed a simple way of life – which is hardly surprising when you consider how even in this modern age he seeks to be as little encumbered as he possibly can. How, I ask you, can you consistently admire both Daedalus and Diogenes? Tell me which of these two you would say was a wise man, the one who hit on the saw, or the one who on seeing a boy drinking water from the hollow of his hand, immediately took the cup out of his knapsack and smashed it, telling himself off for his stupidity in having superfluous luggage about him all that time, and curled himself up in a jar56 and went to sleep.

marble-worker and the engineer, that we can clothe ourselves without importing silks, that we can have the things we need for our ordinary purposes if we will only be content with what the earth has made available on its surface. If they only cared to listen to this man, the human race would realize that cooks are as unnecessary to them as are soldiers.

That race of men to whom taking care of the body was a straightforward enough matter were, if not philosophers, something very like it. The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort. Follow nature and you will feel no need of craftsmen. It was nature’s desire that we should not be kept occupied this. She equipped us for everything she required us to contend with.

He has told us not to listen to false opinions, and has weighed and valued everything against standards which are true.