Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  This is why I laugh at those people who think it degrading for a man to eat with his slave. Why do they think it degrading? Only because the most arrogant of conventions has decreed that the master of the house be surrounded at his dinner by a crowd of slaves, who have to stand around while he eats more than he can hold, loading an already distended belly in his monstrous greed until it proves incapable any longer of performing the function of a belly, at which point he expends more effort in vomiting everything up than he did in forcing it down. And all this time the poor slaves are forbidden to move their lips to speak, let alone to eat. The slightest murmur is checked with a stick; not even accidental sounds like a cough, or a sneeze, or a hiccup are let off a beating. All night long they go on standing about, dumb and hungry, paying grievously for any interruption.

  The result is that slaves who cannot talk before his face talk about him behind his back. The slaves of former days, however, whose mouths were not sealed up like this, who were able to make conversation not only in the presence of their master but actually with him, were ready to bare their necks to the executioner for him, to divert on to themselves any danger that threatened him; they talked at dinner but under torture they kept their mouths shut. It is just this highhanded treatment which is responsible for the frequently heard saying, ‘You’ve as many enemies as you’ve slaves.’ They are not our enemies when we acquire them; we make them so.

  For the moment I pass over other instances of our harsh and inhuman behaviour, the way we abuse them as if they were beasts of burden instead of human beings, the way for example, from the time we take our places on the dinner couches, one of them mops up the spittle and another stationed at the foot of the couch collects up the ‘leavings’ of the drunken diners. Another carves the costly game birds, slicing off choice pieces from the breast and rump with the unerring strokes of a trained hand – unhappy man, to exist for the one and only purpose of carving a fat bird in the proper style – although the person who learns the technique from sheer necessity is not quite so much to be pitied as the person who gives demonstrations of it for pleasure’s sake. Another, the one who serves the wine, is got up like a girl and engaged in a struggle with his years; he cannot get away from his boyhood, but is dragged back to it all the time; although he already has the figure of a soldier, he is kept free of hair by having it rubbed away or pulled out by the roots. His sleepless night is divided between his master’s drunkenness and sexual pleasures, boy at the table, man in the bedroom. Another, who has the privilege of rating each guest’s character, has to go on standing where he is, poor fellow, and watch to see whose powers of flattery and absence of restraint in appetite or speech are to secure them an invitation for the following day. Add to these the caterers with their highly developed knowledge of their master’s palate, the men who know the flavours that will sharpen his appetite, know what will appeal to his eyes, what novelties can tempt his stomach when it is becoming queasy, what dishes he will push aside with the eventual coming of sheer satiety, what he will have a craving for on that particular day.

  These are the people with whom a master cannot tolerate the thought of taking his dinner, assuming that to sit down at the same table with one of his slaves would seriously impair his dignity. ‘The very idea!’ he says. Yet have a look at the number of masters he has from the ranks of these very slaves.* Take Callistus’ one-time master. I saw him once actually standing waiting at Callistus’ door and refused admission while others were going inside, the very master who had attached a price-ticket to the man and put him up for sale along with other rejects from his household staff. There’s a slave who has paid his master back – one who was pushed into the first lot, too, the batch on which the auctioneer is merely trying out his voice! Now it was the slave’s turn to strike his master off his list, to decide that he’s not the sort of person he wants in his house. Callistus’ master sold him, yes, and look how much it cost him!

  How about reflecting that the person you call your slave traces his origin back to the same stock as yourself, has the same good sky above him, breathes as you do, lives as you do, dies as you do? It is as easy for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see a slave in you. Remember the Varus disaster: many a man of the most distinguished ancestry, who was doing his military service as the first step on the road to a seat in the Senate, was brought low by fortune, condemned by her to look after a steading, for example, or a flock of sheep. Now think contemptuously of these people’s lot in life, in whose very place, for all your contempt, you could suddenly find yourself.

  I don’t want to involve myself in an endless topic of debate by discussing the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are exceptionally arrogant, harsh and insulting. 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. ‘I haven’t got a master,’ you say. You’re young yet; there’s always the chance that you’ll have one. Have you forgotten the age at which Hecuba became a slave, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes? Be kind and courteous in your dealings with a slave; bring him into your discussions and conversations and your company generally. And if at this point all those people who have been spoilt by luxury raise an outcry protesting, as they will, ‘There couldn’t be anything more degrading, anything more disgraceful’, let me just say that these are the very persons I will catch on occasion kissing the hand of someone else’s slave.

  Don’t you notice, too, how our ancestors took away all odium from the master’s position and all that seemed insulting or degrading in the lot of the slave by calling the master ‘father of the household’ and speaking of the slaves as ‘members of the household’ (something which survives to this day in the mime)? They instituted, too, a holiday on which master and slave were to eat together, not as the only day this could happen, of course, but as one on which it was always to happen. And in the household they allowed the slaves to hold official positions and to exercise some jurisdiction in it; in fact they regarded the household as a miniature republic.

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ comes the retort, ‘that I’m to have each and every one of my slaves sitting at the table with me?’ Not at all, any more than you’re to invite to it everybody who isn’t a slave. You’re quite mistaken, though, if you imagine that I’d bar from the table certain slaves on the grounds of the relatively menial or dirty nature of their work – that muleteer, for example, or that cowhand. I propose to value them according to their character, not their jobs. Each man has a character of his own choosing; it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job. Have some of them dine with you because they deserve it, others in order to make them so deserving. For if there’s anything typical of the slave about them as a result of the low company they’re used to living in, it will be rubbed off through association with men of better breeding.

  You needn’t, my dear Lucilius, look for friends only in the City or the Senate; if you keep your eyes open, you’ll find them in your own home. Good material often lies idle for want of someone to make use of it; just give it a trial. 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.

  ‘He’s a slave.’ But he may have the spirit of a free man. ‘He’s a slave.’ But is that really to count against him? Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman’, a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. I could show you some highly aristocratic young men who are utter slaves to stage artistes. And there’s no state of slavery more disgraceful than
one which is self-imposed. So you needn’t allow yourself to be deterred by the snobbish people I’ve been talking about from showing good humour towards your slaves instead of adopting an attitude of arrogant superiority towards them. Have them respect you rather than fear you.

  Here, just because I’ve said they ‘should respect a master rather than fear him’, someone will tell us that I’m now inviting slaves to proclaim their freedom and bringing about their employers’ overthrow. ‘Are slaves to pay their “respects” like dependent followers or early morning callers? That’s what he means, I suppose.’ Anyone saying this forgets that what is enough for a god, in the shape of worship, cannot be too little for a master. To be really respected is to be loved; and love and fear will not mix. 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. Besides, what annoys us does not necessarily do us any harm; but we masters are apt to be robbed of our senses by mere passing fancies, to the point where our anger is called out by anything which fails to answer to our will. We assume the mental attitudes of tyrants. For they too forget their own strength and the helplessness of others and grow white-hot with fury as if they had received an injury, when all the time they are quite immune from any such danger through the sheer exaltedness of their position. Nor indeed are they unaware of this; but it does not stop them seizing an opportunity of finding fault with an inferior and maltreating him for it; they receive an injury by way of excuse to do one themselves.

  But I won’t keep you any longer; you don’t need exhortation. It is a mark of a good way of life that, among other things, it satisfies and abides; bad behaviour, constantly changing, not for the better, simply into different forms, has none of this stability.

  LETTER XLVIII

  I SHALL reply later to the letter you sent me while you were on your journey – it was as long as the journey itself! I must first take myself aside and deliberate what advice I should give. For you yourself, before consulting me as you are doing, gave long thought to the question whether you should consult me at all, so I ought to be giving this question of advice far longer thought, on the principle that it takes you more time to solve a problem than to set it. Particularly when one course is to your interest and another to mine – or does this make me sound like an Epicurean again? No, if a thing is in your interest it is also in my own interest. Otherwise, if any matter that affects you is no concern of mine, I am not a friend. Friendship creates a community of interest between us in everything. 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. The assiduous and scrupulous cultivation of this bond, which leads to our associating with our fellow-men and believes in the existence of a common law for all mankind, contributes more than anything else to the maintenance of that more intimate bond I was mentioning, friendship. A person who shares much with a fellow human being will share everything with a friend.

  What I should like those subtle thinkers – you know the ones I mean, my peerless Lucilius – to teach me is this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used and how many different meanings the word ‘man’ has. Before my very eyes wisdom and folly are taking their separate stands: which shall I join, whose side am I to follow? For one person ‘man’ is equivalent to ‘friend’, for another ‘man’ and ‘friend’ are far from being identified, and in making a friend one man will be seeking an asset while another will be making himself an asset to the other; and in the midst of all this what you people do for me is pull words about and cut up syllables. One is led to believe that unless one has constructed syllogisms of the craftiest kind, and reduced fallacies to a compact form in which a false conclusion is derived from a true premise, one will not be in a position to distinguish what one should aim at and what one should avoid. It makes one ashamed – that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.

  ‘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. What danger am I placed in by such lack of insight? What serious consequences are there in it for me? What I have to fear, no doubt, is the possibility, one of these days, of my catching a syllable in a mousetrap or even having my cheese eaten up by a book if I’m not careful. Unless perhaps the following train of logic is a more acute one: ‘Mouse is a syllable, and a syllable does not nibble cheese; therefore, a mouse does not nibble cheese.’ What childish fatuities these are! Is this what we philosophers acquire wrinkles in our brows for? Is this what we let our beards grow long for? Is this what we teach with faces grave and pale?

  Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity? Counsel. One person is facing death, another is vexed by poverty, while another is tormented by wealth – whether his own or someone else’s; one man is appalled by his misfortunes while another longs to get away from his own prosperity; one man is suffering at the hands of men, another at the hands of the gods. What’s the point of concocting whimsies for me of the sort I’ve just been mentioning? This isn’t the place for fun – you’re called in to help the unhappy. You’re pledged to bring succour to the shipwrecked, to those in captivity, to the sick, the needy and men who are just placing their heads beneath the executioner’s uplifted axe. Where are you off to? What are you about? The person you’re engaging in word-play with is in fear – go to his aid.…* All mankind are stretching out their hands to you on every side. Lives that have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you that they look for hope and assistance. They are begging you to extricate them from this awful vortex, to show them in their doubt and disarray the shining torch of truth. Tell them what nature has made necessary and what she has made superfluous. Tell them how simple are the laws she has laid down, and how straightforward and enjoyable life is for those who follow them and how confused and disagreeable it is for others who put more trust in popular ideas than they do in nature. All right if you can point out to me where those puzzles are likely to bring such people relief. Which of them removes cravings or brings them under control? If only they were simply unhelpful! They’re actually harmful. I’ll give you the clearest proof whenever you like of their tendency to weaken and enfeeble even eminent talents once applied to such quibbles. And when it comes to saying how they equip people proposing to do battle with fortune and what weapons they offer them, one hangs one’s head with shame. Is this the way to our supreme ideal? Do we get there by means of all that ‘if X, Y, or if not Y, Z’ one finds in philosophy? And by means of quibbles that would be shameful and discreditable even among persons occupying themselves with law reports? When you’re leading the person you’re questioning into a trap, aren’t you just making it look as if he has lost his case on a purely technical point of pleading? The praetor’s court, however, restores litigants losing in this way to their rightful position, and philosophy does the same for the people thus questioned. Why do philosophers like you abandon the magnificent promises you have made? After assuring me in solemn terms that you will see to it that my eyes shall no more be overwhelmed by the glitter of gold than by the glitter of a sword, that I shall spurn with magnificent strength of purpose the things all other men pray for and the things all other men are afraid of, why do you have to descend to the schoolroom A B C? What do you say?

  Is this the way to the heavens?*

  For that is what philosophy has promised me – that she will make me God’s equal. That’s the invitation and that’s what I’ve come for; be as good as your word.

  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!

  LETTER LIII

  I WONDER whether there’s anything I couldn’t be persuaded into now, after letting myself be persuaded recently into taking a trip by sea. The sea was quite calm when we cast off. The sky was certainly heavily overcast, with the kind of dark clouds that generally break in a squall or downpour. But in spite of the uncertain, threatening skies, I thought it would be perfectly feasible to make it across the few miles from your Parthenope over to Puteoli. And so, with the object of getting the crossing over quicker, I headed straight for Nesis over the open water to cut out all the intervening curves of the coast-line. Now when I had got so far across that it made no odds whether I went on or turned back, first of all the smoothness which had tempted me to my undoing disappeared. There was no storm as yet, but a heavy swell was running by then and the waves were steadily getting rougher. I began asking the helmsman to put me ashore somewhere. He kept saying the coast was a rugged one without a haven anywhere and that there was nothing he feared quite so much in a storm as a lee shore. I was in far too bad a way, though, for any thought of possible danger to enter my head, as I was suffering the torments of that sluggish brand of seasickness that will not bring one relief, the kind that upsets the stomach without clearing it. So I put pressure on him and compelled him, willy-nilly, to make for the shore. Once we were close in there was no waiting on my part for anything to be done in the manner commended by Virgil,