Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  We commonly give the impression that the reasons for our having gone into political retirement are our disgust with public life and our dissatisfaction with some uncongenial and unrewarding post. Yet every now and then ambition rears its head again in the retreat into which we were really driven by our apprehensions and our waning interest; for our ambition did not cease because it had been rooted out, but merely because it had tired – or become piqued, perhaps, at its lack of success. I would say the same about extravagant living, which appears on occasion to have left one and then, when one has declared for the simple life, places temptation in the way. In the middle of one’s programme of frugality it sets out after pleasures which one had discarded but not condemned, its pursuit of them indeed being all the more ardent the less one is aware of it. For when they are in the open vices invariably take a more moderate form; diseases too are on the way towards being cured when once they have broken out, instead of being latent, and made their presence felt. So it is with the love of money, the love of power and the other maladies that affect the minds of men – you may be sure that it is when they abate and give every appearance of being cured that they are at their most dangerous. We give the impression of being in retirement, and are nothing of the kind. For if we are genuine in this, if we have sounded the retreat and really turned away from the surface show, then, as I was saying a little while ago, nothing will distract us. Men and birds together in full chorus will never break into our thinking when that thinking is good and has at last come to be of a sure and steady character.

  The temperament that starts at the sound of a voice or chance noises in general is an unstable one and one that has yet to attain inward detachment. It has an element of uneasiness in it, and an element of the rooted fear that makes a man a prey to anxiety, as in the description given by our Virgil:

  And I, who formerly would never flinch

  At flying spears or serried ranks of Greeks,

  Am now alarmed by every breeze and roused

  By every sound to nervousness, in fear

  For this companion and this load alike.*

  The earlier character here is the wise man, who knows no fear at the hurtling of missiles, or the clash of weapons against weapons in the close-packed ranks, or the thunderous noise of a city in destruction. The other, later one has everything to learn; fearing for his belongings he pales at every noise; a single cry, whatever it is, prostrates him, being immediately taken for the yelling of the enemy; the slightest movement frightens him out of his life; his baggage makes him a coward. Pick out any one of your ‘successful’ men, with all they trail or carry about with them, and you will have a picture of the man ‘in fear for this companion and this load’. You may be sure, then, that you are at last ‘lulled to rest’ when noise never reaches you and when voices never shake you out of yourself, whether they be menacing or inviting or just a meaningless hubbub of empty sound all round you.

  ‘This is all very well,’ you may say, ‘but isn’t it sometimes a lot simpler just to keep away from the din?’ I concede that, and in fact it is the reason why I shall shortly be moving elsewhere. What I wanted was to give myself a test and some practice. Why should I need to suffer the torture any longer than I want to when Ulysses found so easy a remedy for his companions even against the Sirens?*

  LETTER LXIII

  I AM very sorry to hear of your friend Flaccus’ death. Still, I would not have you grieve unduly over it. I can scarcely venture to demand that you should not grieve at all – and yet I am convinced that it is better that way. But who will ever be granted that strength of character, unless he be a man already lifted far out of fortune’s reach? Even he will feel a twinge of pain when a thing like this happens – but only a twinge. As for us, we can be pardoned for having given way to tears so long as they have not run down in excessive quantities and we have checked them for ourselves. When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation. Can you find the rule I am laying down a harsh one when the greatest of Greek poets has restricted to a single day, no more, a person’s right to cry – in the passage where he tells us that even Niobe remembered to eat?* Would you like to know what lies behind extravagant weeping and wailing? In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it. No one ever goes into mourning for the benefit merely of himself. Oh, the miserable folly of it all – that there should be an element of ostentation in grief!

  ‘Come now,’ you will be asking, ‘are you saying that I should forget a person who has been a friend?’ Well, you are not proposing to keep him very long in your memory if his memory is to last just as long as your grief. At any moment something or other will happen that will turn that long face of yours into a smiling one. I do not see very much time going by before the sense of loss is mitigated and even the keenest sorrowings settle down. Your face will cease to be its present picture of sadness as soon as you take your eyes off yourself. At the moment you are keeping a watch on your grief – but even as you do it is fading away, and the keener it is the quicker it is in stopping.

  Let us see to it that the recollection of those we have lost becomes a pleasure to us. Nobody really cares to cast his mind back to something which he is never going to think of without pain. Inevitable as it is that the names of persons who were dear to us and are now lost should cause us a gnawing sort of pain when we think of them, that pain is not without a pleasure of its own. As my teacher Attalus used to say, ‘In the pleasure we find in the memory of departed friends there is a resemblance to the way in which certain bitter fruits are agreeable or the very acidity of an exceedingly old wine has its attraction. But after a certain interval all that pained us is obliterated and the enjoyment comes to us unalloyed.’ If we are to believe him, ‘Thinking of friends who are alive and well is like feasting on cakes and honey. Recalling those who are gone is pleasant but not without a touch of sourness. Who would deny, though, that even acid things like this with a harshness in their taste do stimulate the palate?’ Personally I do not agree with him there. Thinking of departed friends is to me something sweet and mellow. For when I had them with me it was with the feeling that I was going to lose them, and now that I have lost them I keep the feeling that I have them with me still.

  So, my dear Lucilius, behave in keeping with your usual fair-mindedness and stop misinterpreting the kindness of fortune. She has given as well as taken away. Let us therefore go all out to make the most of friends, since no one can tell how long we shall have the opportunity. Let us just think how often we leave them behind when we are setting out on some long journey or other, or how often we fail to see them when we are staying in the same area, and we shall realize that we have lost all too much time while they are still alive. Can you stand people who treat their friends with complete neglect and then mourn them to distraction, never caring about anyone unless they have lost him? And the reason they lament them so extravagantly then is that they are afraid people may wonder whether they did care; they are looking for belated means of demonstrating their devotion. If we have other friends, we are hardly kind or appreciative of them if they count for so very little when it comes to consoling us for the one we have buried. If we have no other friends, we have done ourselves a greater injury than fortune has done us: she has deprived us of a single friend but we have deprived ourselves of every friend we have failed to make. A person, moreover, who has not been able to care about more than one friend cannot have cared even about that one too much. Supposing someone lost his one and only shirt in a robbery, would you not think him an utter idiot if he chose to bewail his loss rather than look about him for some means of keeping out the cold and find something to put over his shoulders? You have buried someone you loved. Now look for someone to love. It is better to make good the loss of a friend than to cry over him.

  What I am about to go on to say is, I know, a commonplace, but I am not going to omit
it merely because every one has said it. Even a person who has not deliberately put an end to his grief finds an end to it in the passing of time. And merely growing weary of sorrowing is quite shameful as a means of curing sorrow in the case of an enlightened man. I should prefer to see you abandoning grief than it abandoning you. Much as you may wish to, you will not be able to keep it up for very long, so give it up as early as possible. For women our forefathers fixed the period of mourning at a year with the intention, not that women should continue mourning as long as that, but that they should not go on any longer: for men no period is prescribed at all because none would be decent. Yet out of all the pathetic females you know of who were only dragged away from the graveside, or even torn from the body itself, with the greatest of difficulty, can you show me one whose tears lasted for a whole month? Nothing makes itself unpopular quite so quickly as a person’s grief. When it is fresh it attracts people to its side, finds someone to offer it consolation; but if it is perpetuated it becomes an object of ridicule – deservedly, too, for it is either feigned or foolish.

  And all this comes to you from me, the very man who wept for Annaeus Serenus, that dearest of friends to me, so unrestrainedly that I must needs be included – though this is the last thing I should want – among examples of men who have been defeated by grief! Nevertheless I condemn today the way I behaved then. I realize now that my sorrowing in the way I did was mainly due to the fact that I had never considered the possibility of his dying before me. That he was younger than I was, a good deal younger top, was all that ever occurred to me – as if fate paid any regard to seniority! So let us bear it constantly in mind that those we are fond of are just as liable to death as we are ourselves. What I should have said before was, ‘My friend Serenus is younger than I am, but what difference does that make? He should die later than me, but it is quite possible he will die before me.’ It was just because I did not do so that fortune caught me unprepared with that sudden blow. Now I bear it in mind not only that all things are liable to death but that that liability is governed by no set rules. Whatever can happen at any time can happen today. Let us reflect then, my dearest Lucilius, that we ourselves shall not be long in reaching the place we mourn his having reached. Perhaps, too, if only there is truth in the story told by sages and some welcoming abode awaits us, he whom we suppose to be dead and gone has merely been sent on ahead.

  LETTER LXV

  I SHARED yesterday with a bout of illness. It claimed the morning but it let me have the afternoon. So I started off by doing some reading to see what energy I had. Then, as it proved up to this, I ventured to make further demands on it – or perhaps I should say concessions to it – and did some writing. I was at this with more than my customary concentration, too, what with the difficulty of the subject and my refusal to give in, until some friends of mine put a stop to it, applying force to restrain me as if I were an invalid who was recklessly overdoing things. The pen gave place to talk, which included the following matter of dispute that I shall now state to you. We have appointed you as arbitrator – and you have more of a case on your hands than you think, for the contest is a three-cornered one.

  Our Stoic philosophers, as you know, maintain that there are two elements in the universe from which all things are derived, namely cause and matter. Matter lies inert and inactive, a substance with unlimited potential, but destined to remain idle if no one sets it in motion; and it is cause (this meaning the same as reason) which turns matter to whatever end it wishes and fashions it into a variety of different products. There must, then, be something out of which things come into being and something else by means of which things come into being; the first is matter and the second is cause. Now all art is an imitation of nature. So apply what I was saying about the universe to man’s handiwork. Take a statue: it had the matter to be worked on by the sculptor and it had the sculptor to give configuration to the matter – bronze, in other words, in the case of the statue, being the matter and the craftsman the cause. It is the same with all things: they consist of something which comes into being and something else which brings them into being.

  Stoics believe that there is only one cause – that which brings things into being. Aristotle thinks that the term ‘cause’ can be used in three different ways. ‘The first cause,’ he says, ‘is matter – without it nothing can be brought into existence. The second is the craftsman, and the third is form, which is impressed on every single piece of work as on a statue.’ This last is what Aristotle calls the idos. ‘And,’ he says, ‘there is a fourth as well, the purpose of the whole work.’ Let me explain what this means. The ‘first cause’ of the statue is the bronze, as it would never have been made unless there had been something out of which it could be cast or moulded. The ‘second cause’ is the sculptor, as the bronze could not have been shaped into the state in which it is without those skilled hands having come to it. The ‘third cause’ is the form, as our statue could not have been called ‘The Man with the Spear’ or ‘The Boy tying up his Hair’* had this not been the guise impressed on it. The ‘fourth cause’ is the end in view in its making, for had this not existed the statue would never have been made at all. What is this end? It is what attracted the sculptor, what his goal was in creating it: it may have been money, if when he worked it he was going to sell it, or fame, if the aim of his endeavours was to win a name, or religion, if it was a work for presentation to a temple. This too, then, is a cause of the statue’s coming into being – unless you take the view that things in the absence of which the statue would never have been created should not be included among the causes of the particular creation.

  To these four causes Plato adds a fifth in the model – what he himself calls the idea – this being what the sculptor had constantly before his eyes as he executed the intended work.

  It does not matter whether he has his model without, one to which he can direct his eyes, or within, conceived and set up by the artist inside his own head. God has within himself models like this of everything in the universe, his mind embracing the designs and calculations for his projects; he is full of these images which Plato calls ideas, eternal, immutable, ever dynamic. So though human beings may perish, humanity in itself – the pattern on which every human being is moulded – lasts on, and while human beings go through much and pass away itself remains quite unaffected. As Plato has it, then, there are five causes: the material, the agent, the form, the model and the end; and finally we get the result of all these. In the case of the statue, to use the example we began with, the material is the bronze, the agent is the sculptor, the form is the guise it is given, the model is what the sculptor making it copies, the end is what the maker has in view, and the final result is the statue itself. The universe as well, according to Plato, has all these elements. The maker is God; matter is the material; the form is the general character and lay-out of the universe as we see it; the model naturally enough is the pattern which God adopted for the creation of this stupendous work in all its beauty; the end is what God had in view when he created it, and that – in case you are asking what is the end God has in view – is goodness. That at any rate is what Plato says: ‘What was the cause of God’s creating the universe? He is good, and whoever is good can never be grudging with anything good; so he made it as good a world as it was in his power to make it.’

  Now it is for you as judge to pronounce your verdict and declare whose statement in your opinion seems to be – not the truest (for that here is as far out of our reach as Truth herself) – but most like the truth.

  This assortment of causes which Aristotle and Plato have collected together embraces either too much or too little. For if they take the view that everything in the absence of which a thing cannot be brought into being is a cause of its creation, they have failed to name enough. They should be including time in their list of causes – nothing can come into being without time. They should be including place – a thing will certainly not come into being if there is nowhere for this to happ
en. They should be including motion – without this nothing either comes into existence or goes out of existence; without motion there is no such thing as art and no such thing as change. What we are looking for at the moment is a primary and general cause. And this must be something elementary, since matter too is elementary. If we ask what cause is, surely the answer is creative reason, that is to say God. All those things which you have listed are not an array of individual causes, but dependent on a single one, the cause that actually creates. You may say form is a cause, but form is something which the artist imposes on his work – a part of the cause, yes, but not a cause. The model, too, is an indispensable instrument of the cause, but not a cause. To the sculptor his model is as indispensable as his chisel or his file: his art can get nowhere without them, but this does not make them parts or causes of the art. ‘The end the artist has in view,’ our friend says, ‘the thing which induces him to set about a work of creation, is a cause.’ Even if we grant that it is, it is only an accessory cause, not the effective cause. Accessory causes are infinite in number; what we are after is the general cause. In any event that assertion on the part of Plato and Aristotle that the universe in its entirety, the whole, completed work of creation, is a cause is not in keeping with their usual acuteness as thinkers. There is a very great difference between a creation and its cause.