Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  LETTER XXVI

  IT’s only a short time since I was telling you I was in sight of old age. Now I’m afraid I may have left old age behind me altogether. Some other term would be more in keeping now with my years, or at least my present physical state, since old age connotes a period of decline, not debility. Put me in the list of the decrepit, the ones on the very brink! However, I congratulate myself, mind you, on the fact that my age has not, so far as I’m aware, brought any deterioration in my spirit, conscious as I am of the deterioration in my constitution. Only my vices and their accessories have decayed: the spirit is full of life, and delighted to be having only limited dealings with the body. It has thrown off a great part of its burden. It’s full of vigour, and carrying on an argument with me on the subject of old age, maintaining that these are its finest years. Let’s accept what it says, and let it make the most of its blessings. It tells me to start thinking and examine how far I owe this serenity and sobriety to philosophy, and how far I owe it simply to my years, and to investigate with some care what things I really am refusing to do and what I’m simply incapable of doing – and it’s prepared to accept whatever I’m really pleased to find myself incapable of doing as equivalent to refusing to do them; and what cause can there be for complaint, after all, in anything that was always bound to come to an end fading gradually away? What is troubling about that? ‘Nothing,’ you may say, ‘could be more troubling than the idea of our wasting and perishing away – melting out of existence, one may aptly call it, since we aren’t struck down all of a sudden but worn away, every day that passes diminishing in some degree our powers.’ Moving to one’s end through nature’s own gentle process of dissolution – is there a better way of leaving life than that? Not because there is anything wrong with a sudden, violent departure, but because this gradual withdrawal is an easy route.

  Anyway, here’s what I do: I imagine to myself that the testing time is drawing near, that the day that is going to see judgement pronounced on the whole of my past life has actually arrived, and I take a look at myself and address myself in these terms: ‘All that I’ve done or said up to now counts for nothing. My showing to date, besides being heavily varnished over, is of paltry value and reliability as a guarantee of my spirit. I’m going to leave it to death to settle what progress I’ve made. Without anxiety, then, I’m making ready for the day when the tricks and disguises will be put away and I shall come to a verdict on myself, determining whether the courageous attitudes I adopt are really felt or just so many words, and whether or not the defiant challenges I’ve hurled at fortune have been mere pretence and pantomime. Away with the world’s opinion of you – it’s always unsettled and divided. Away with the pursuits that have occupied the whole of your life – death is going to deliver the verdict in your case. Yes, all your debates and learned conferences, your scholarly talk and collection of maxims from the teachings of philosophers, are in no way indicative of genuine spiritual strength. Bold words come even from the timidest. It’s only when you’re breathing your last that the way you’ve spent your time will become apparent. I accept the terms, and feel no dread of the coming judgement.’ That’s what I say to myself, but assume that I’ve said it to you as well. You’re younger than I am, but what difference does that make? No count is taken of years. Just where death is expecting you is something we cannot know; so, for your part, expect him everywhere.

  I was just intending to stop, my hand considering its closing sentence, but the accounts have still to be made out and this letter issued with its travelling expenses! You may assume that I won’t be announcing the source I intend borrowing from – you know whose funds I’m drawing on! Give me a fraction more time and payment will be made out of my own pocket. In the meantime Epicurus 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. ‘Rehearse death.’ To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate beyond the reach of, all political powers. What are prisons, warders, bars to him? He has an open door. There is but one chain holding us in fetters, and that is our love of life. There is no need to cast this love out altogether, but it does need to be lessened somewhat so that, in the event of circumstances ever demanding this, nothing may stand in the way of our being prepared to do at once what we must do at some time or other.

  LETTER XXVII

  ‘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. I proclaim to my own self: ‘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. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do. Have done with those unsettled pleasures, which cost one dear – they do one harm after they’re past and gone, not merely when they’re in prospect. Even when they’re over, pleasures of a depraved nature are apt to carry feelings of dissatisfaction, in the same way as a criminal’s anxiety doesn’t end with the commission of the crime, even if it’s undetected at the time. Such pleasures are insubstantial and unreliable; even if they don’t do one any harm, they’re fleeting in character. Look around for some enduring good instead. And nothing answers this description except what the spirit discovers for itself within itself. A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the sun without ever defeating its light.’

  How soon will you be fortunate enough to attain to this happiness? Well, you haven’t been dragging your steps up till now, but your pace could be increased. There’s a lot of work remaining to be done, and if you want to be successful you must devote all your waking hours and all your efforts to the task personally. This is not something that admits of delegation. It is a different branch of learning which has room for devilling. 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.* 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 this goes with the other two things – fair game for facetiousness at their expense, suggested to him that he should keep a team of scholars ‘to pick up the bits’. On Sabinus’ letting it be known that the slaves had set him back a hundred thousand sesterces apiece, he said: ‘Yes, for less than that you could have bought the same number of bookcases.’ Sabinus was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally. It was Satellius, again, who started urging Sabinus, a pale and skinny individual whose health was poor, to take up wrestling.

  When Sabinus retorted: ‘How can I possibly do that? It’s as much as I can do to stay alive’, Satellius answered: ‘Now please, don’t say that! Look how many slaves you’ve got in perfect physical condition!’ A sound mind can neither be bought nor borrowed. And if it were for sale, I doubt whether it would find a buyer. And yet unsound ones are being purchased every day.

  But let me pay you what I owe you and say goodbye. ‘Poverty brought into accord with the law of nature is wealth.’ Epicurus is constantly saying this in one way or another. But something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often. With some people you only need to point to a remedy; others need to have it rammed into them.

  LETTER XXVIII

  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,*

  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.’ How can novelty of surroundings abroad and becoming acquainted with foreign scenes or cities be of any help? All that dashing about turns out to be quite futile. And if you want to know why all this running away cannot help you, the answer is simply this: you are running away in your own company. You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you. Imagine your present state as being like that of the prophetess whom our Virgil represents in a roused and excited state, largely taken over by a spirit not her own:

  The Sibyl raves about as one possessed,

  In hopes she may dislodge the mighty god

  Within her bosom.*

  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.

  Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there. We ought not, therefore, to give over our hearts for good to any one part of the world. We should live with the conviction: ‘I wasn’t born for one particular corner: the whole world’s my home country.’ If the truth of that were clear to you, you would not be surprised that the diversity of new surroundings for which, out of weariness of the old, you are constantly heading fails to do you any good. Whichever you first came to would have satisfied you if you had believed you were at home in all. As it is, instead of travelling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

  Could there be a scene of greater turmoil than the City? Yet even there, if need be, you are free to lead a life of peace. Given a free choice of posting, though, I should flee a long way from the vicinity, let alone the sight of the City. For in the same way as there are unpleasant climates which are trying even to the most robust constitutions, there are others which are none too wholesome for the mind, even though it be a sound one, when it is still in an imperfect state and building up its strength. I do not agree with those who recommend a stormy life and plunge straight into the breakers, waging a spirited struggle against wordly obstacles every day of their lives. The wise man will put up with these things, not go out of his way to meet them; he will prefer a state of peace to a state of war. It does not profit a man much to have managed to discard his own failings if he must ever be at loggerheads with other people’s. ‘Socrates,’ they will tell you, ‘had the Thirty Tyrants standing over him and yet they could not break his spirit.’ What difference does it make how many masters a man has? Slavery is only one, and yet the person who refuses to let the thought of it affect him is a free man no matter how great the swarm of masters around him.

  It is time I left off – not before I have paid the usual duty, though! ‘A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation.’ This remark of Epicurus’ is to me a very good one. For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right. You have to catch yourself doing it before you can reform. Some people boast about their failings: 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.

  LETTER XXXIII

  You feel that my present letters should be like my earlier ones and have odd sayings of leading Stoics appended to them. But they never busied themselves with philosophical gems. Their whole system is too virile for that. 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. Poetry is replete with such things; so is history. So please don’t think them peculiar to Epicurus; they are general, and ours more than anyone’s, although they receive more notice in him because they occur at widely scattered intervals, because they are unlooked for, and because it is rather a surprise to find spirited sayings in a person who – so most people consider – was an advocate of soft living. In my own view, Epicurus was actually, in spite of his long sleeves, a man of spirit as well. Courage, energy and a warlike spirit are as commonly given to Persians as to people with a style of dress more suited to action.

  So there’s no call for you to press for stock excerpts, seeing that the sort of thing which in the case of other thinkers is excerpted is in our case continuous writing. That’s why we don’t go in for that business of window-dressing; we don’t mislead the customer, so that when he enters the shop he finds nothing in stock apart from the things on display in the window. We allow him to pick up samples from wherever he likes. And suppose we did want to separate out individual aphorisms from the mass, whom should we attribute them to? Zeno? Cleanthes? Chrysippus? Panaetius? Posidonius? We Stoics are no monarch’s subjects; each asserts his own freedom. Among Epicureans whatever Hermarchus or Metrodorus says is credited to one man alone; everything ever said by any member of that fraternity was uttered under the authority and auspices of one person. I say again, then, that for us, try as we may, it is impossible to pick out individual items from so vast a stock in which each thing is as good as the next.

  The poor man ’tis that counts his flock.*

  Wherever you look your eye will light on things that might stand out if everything around them were not of equal standard.
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  So give up this hope of being able to get an idea of the genius of the greatest figures by so cursory an approach. You have to examine and consider it as a whole. There is a sequence about the creative process, and a work of genius is a synthesis of its individual features from which nothing can be subtracted without disaster. I have no objection to your inspecting the components individually provided you do so without detaching them from the personality they actually belong to; a woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.

  Still, if you press me I won’t treat you so meanly – openhanded generosity it shall be. There is a mass of such things, an enormous mass of them, lying all over the place, needing only to be picked up as distinct from gathered up. They come, not in dribs and drabs, but in a closely interconnected and continuous stream. I have no doubt, too, they may be very helpful to the uninitiated and those who are still novices, for individual aphorisms in a small compass, rounded off in units rather like lines of verse, become fixed more readily in the mind. It is for this reason that we give children proverbs and what the Greeks call chriae* to learn by heart, a child’s mind being able to take these in at a stage when anything more would be beyond its capacity. But in the case of a grown man who has made incontestable progress it is disgraceful to go hunting after gems of wisdom, and prop himself up with a minute number of the best-known sayings, and be dependent on his memory as well; it is time he was standing on his own feet. He should be delivering himself of such sayings, not memorizing them. It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook. ‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said? ‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders? Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.