Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  You must needs experience pain and hunger and thirst, and grow old (assuming that you are vouchsafed a relatively long stay among men) and be ill, and suffer loss, and finally perish. But you needn’t believe the chatter of the people around you: there’s nothing in all this that’s evil, insupportable or even hard. Those people are afraid of these things by a kind of general consent. Are you going to feel alarm at death, then, in the same way as you might at some common report? What could be more foolish than a man’s being afraid of people’s words? My friend Demetrius has a nice way of putting things when he says, as he commonly does, that to him the utterances of the unenlightened are as noises emanating from the belly. ‘What difference does it make to me,’ he asks, ‘whether their rumblings come from their upper or their nether regions?’

  What utter foolishness it is to be afraid that those who have a bad name can rob you of a good one. Just as the dread aroused in you by some common report has proved groundless, so too is the dread of things of which you would never be afraid if common report did not tell you to be. What harm could ever come to a good man from being besmirched by unwarranted gossip? We shouldn’t even let it prejudice us against death, which itself has an evil reputation. Yet none of the people who malign it has put it to the test. Until one does it’s rather rash to condemn a thing one knows nothing about. And yet one thing you do know and that is this, how many people it’s a blessing to, how many people it frees from torture, want, maladies, suffering, weariness. And no one has power over us when death is within our own power.

  LETTER CIV

  I HAVE got away to my place at Nomentum – getting away from what? Guess. The city? No, a fever. And just as it was infiltrating my defences, too. It had already taken a hold on me, my doctor being decided in his opinion that a disturbed, irregular pulse, its natural rhythm upset, was the start of it. Whereupon I immediately ordered my carriage out, and although my Paulina tried to hold me back, insisted on driving away. I kept saying the same thing as my mentor Gallio when he started sickening for a fever in Achaea. He immediately boarded a ship, assuring everyone that the disorder was to be put down to the place where he was living and not to his constitution.

  I told Paulina this. She is forever urging me to take care of my health; and indeed as I come to realize the way her very being depends on mine, I am beginning, in my concern for her, to feel some concern for myself. So although old age has made me better at putting up with a lot of things, here I am coming to lose this advantage of being old. The notion occurs to me that inside this old frame there exists a young man as well and one is always less severe on a young man. The consequence is that since I haven’t managed to get her to put a little more bravery into her love for me, she has managed to induce me to show a little more love and care for myself.

  For concessions have to be made to legitimate emotions. There are times when, however pressing one’s reasons to the contrary, one’s dying breath requires to be summoned back and held back even as it is passing one’s lips, even if this amounts to torture, simply out of consideration for one’s dear ones. The good man should go on living as long as he ought to, not just as long as he likes. The man who does not value his wife or a friend highly enough to stay on a little longer in life, who persists in dying in spite of them, is a thoroughly self-indulgent character. This is a duty which the soul should also impose on itself when it is merely the convenience of near and dear ones that demands it. And not only if and when it feels the wish to die, but also if and when it has begun to carry out the wish, it should pause a while to fit in with their interests.

  To return to life for another’s sake is a sign of a noble spirit; it is something that great men have done on a number of occasions. Yet to give your old age greater care and attentiveness in the realization that this pleases any of the persons closest to you, or is in their interests, or would be likely to gratify them (and this in spite of the fact that the greatest reward of that period is the opportunity it gives you to adopt a relatively carefree attitude towards looking after yourself and a more adventurous manner of living), is also, to my mind, a mark of the highest possible kindness. Besides it brings you more than a little pleasure and recompense: for can anything be sweeter than to find that you are so dear to your wife that this makes you dearer to yourself? So it comes about that my Paulina succeeds in making me responsible for anxiety of my own as well as hers on my behalf.

  I expect you’re keen to hear what effect it had on my health, this decision of mine to leave? Well, no sooner had I left behind the oppressive atmosphere of the city and that reek of smoking cookers which pour out, along with a cloud of ashes, all the poisonous fumes they’ve accumulated in their interiors whenever they’re started up, than I noticed the change in my condition at once. You can imagine how much stronger I felt after reaching my vineyards! I fairly waded into my food – talk about animals just turned out on to spring grass! So by now I am quite my old self again. That feeling of listlessness, being bodily ill at ease and mentally inefficient, didn’t last. I’m beginning to get down to some whole-hearted work.

  This is not something, however, to which mere surroundings are conducive, unless the mind is at its own disposal, able at will to provide its own seclusion even in crowded moments. On the contrary, the man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet, will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing. The story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’ What a blessing it would be for some people if they could only lose themselves ! As things are these persons are a worry and a burden, a source of demoralization and anxiety, to their own selves. What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person. Suppose you’ve arrived in Athens, or suppose it’s Rhodes – choose any country you like – what difference does the character of the place make? You’ll only be importing your own with you. You’ll still look on wealth as a thing to be valued: your poverty will be causing you torment, while (this being the most pathetic thing about it all) your poverty will be imaginary. However much you possess there’s someone else who has more, and you’ll be fancying yourself to be short of things you need to the exact extent to which you lag behind him. Another thing that you’ll regard as something to be valued is success in public life; in which case you’re going to feel resentment when so-and-so is elected consul (or when so-and-so is re-elected for that matter), and be jealous whenever you see a person’s name appearing too often in the honours-lists. Your ambition will be running at so feverish a pitch that if anyone’s ahead of you in the race you’ll see yourself as coming last.

  Death you’ll think of as the worst of all bad things, though in fact there’s nothing bad about it at all except the thing which comes before it – the fear of it. You’ll be scared stiff by illusory as well as genuine dangers, haunted by imaginary alarms. What good will it do you to

  Have found a route past all those Argive forts

  And won escape right through the enemy’s lines?*

  Peace itself will supply you with new fears. If your mind has once experienced the shocks of fright you’ll no longer have any confidence even in things which are perfectly safe; once it has acquired the habit of unthinking panic, it is incapable even of attending to its own self-preservation. For it runs away from dangers instead of taking steps to avert them, and we’re far more exposed to them once our backs are turned.

  To lose someone you love is something you’ll regard as the hardest of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from the beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home. Preserve a sense of proportion in your attitude to everything that pleases you, and make the most of them while the
y are at their best. At one moment chance will carry off one of them, at another moment another; but the falling of the leaves is not difficult to bear, since they grow again, and it is no more hard to bear the loss of those whom you love and regard as brightening your existence; for even if they do not grow again they are replaced ‘But their successors will never be quite the same’ No, and neither will you. Every day, every hour sees a change in you, although the ravages of time are easier to see in others; in your own case they are far less obvious, because to you they do not show. While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.

  Are you never going to give any of these considerations any thought and never going to apply any healing treatment to your wounds, instead of sowing the seeds of worry for yourself by hoping for this or that, or despairing of obtaining this or that other thing? If you’re sensible you’ll run the two together, and never hope without an element of despair, never despair without an element of hope.

  What good has travel of itself ever been able to do anyone? It has never acted as a check on pleasure or a restraining influence on desires; it has never controlled the temper of an angry man or quelled the reckless impulses of a lover; never in fact has it rid the personality of a fault. It has not granted us the gift of judgement, it has not put an end to mistaken attitudes. All it has ever done is distract us for a little while, through the novelty of our surroundings, like children fascinated by something they haven’t come across before. The instability, moreover, of a mind which is seriously unwell, is aggravated by it, the motion itself increasing the fitfulness and restlessness. This explains why people, after setting out for a place with the greatest of enthusiasm, are often more enthusiastic about getting away from it; like migrant birds, they fly on, away even quicker than they came.

  Travel will give you a knowledge of other countries, it will show you mountains whose outlines are quite new to you, stretches of unfamiliar plains, valleys watered by perennial streams; it will allow you to observe the unique features of this or that river, the way in which, for example, the Nile rises in summer flood, or the Tigris vanishes from sight and at the completion of its journey through hidden subterranean regions is restored to view with its volume undiminished, or the way the Meander, theme of every poet’s early training exercises, winds about, loop after loop, and again and again is carried close to its own bed and then once more diverted into a different course before it can flow into its own stream. But travel won’t make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered. This is the way to liberate the spirit that still needs to be rescued from its miserable state of slavery.

  So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honourable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way. If only they were really following you! They’d be farther away from you: as it is they’re not at your back, but on it! That’s why they weigh you down with just the same uncomfortable chafing wherever you are. It’s medicine, not a particular part of the world, that a person needs if he’s ill. Suppose someone has broken his leg or dislocated a joint; he doesn’t get into a carriage or board a ship: he calls in a doctor to have the fracture set or the dislocation reduced. Well then, when a person’s spirit is wrenched or broken at so many points, do you imagine that it can be put right by a change of scenery, that that sort of trouble isn’t so serious that it can’t be cured by an outing?

  Travelling doesn’t make a man a doctor or a public speaker: there isn’t a single art which is acquired merely by being in one place rather wan another. Can wisdom, then, the greatest art of all, be picked up in the course of taking a trip? Take my word for it, the trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears. If it did, the human race would be off there in a body. So long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea. Does it surprise you that running away doesn’t do you any good? The things you’re running away from are with you all the time.

  What you must do, then, is mend your ways and get rid of the burden you’re carrying. Keep your cravings within safe limits. Scour every trace of evil from your personality. If you want to enjoy your travel, you must make your travelling companion a healthy one. So long as you associate with a person who’s mean and grasping you will remain a money-minded individual yourself. So long as you keep arrogant company, just so long will conceit stick to you. Cruelty you’ll never say goodbye to while you share the same roof with a torturer. Familiarity with adulterers will only inflame your desires. If you wish to be stripped of your vices you must get right away from the examples others set of them. The miser, the swindler, the bully, the cheat, who would do you a lot of harm by simply being near you, are actually inside you. Move to better company: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. If you like Greek company too, attach yourself to Socrates and Zeno: the one would teach you how to the should it be forced upon you, the other how to the before it is forced upon you. Live with Chrysippus, live with Posidonius; they will give you a knowledge of man and the universe; they will tell you to be a practical philosopher: not just to entertain your listeners to a clever display of language, but to steel your spirit and brace it against whatever threatens. For the only safe harbour in this life’s tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.

  When she created us, nature endowed us with noble aspirations, and just as she gave certain animals ferocity, others timidity, others cunning, so to us she gave a spirit of exalted ambition, a spirit that takes us in search of a life of, not the greatest safety, but the greatest honour – a spirit very like the universe, which, so far as mortal footsteps may, it follows and adopts as a model. It is self-assertive; it feels assured of honour and respect; it is master of all things; it is above all things; it should accordingly give in to nothing; in nothing should it see a burden calculated to bow the shoulders of a man.

  Shapes frightening to the sight, Hardship and Death*

  are not so at all if one can break through the surrounding darkness and look directly at them. Many are the things that have caused terror during the night and been turned into matters of laughter with the coming of daylight.

  Shapes frightening to the sight, Hardship and Death.

  Our Virgil perfectly rightly says that they are frightening, not in reality, but ‘to the sight’, in other words that they seem so but in fact are not. Just what is there about them that is as terrifying as legend would have us believe? Why, Lucilius, I ask you why should any real man be afraid of hardship, or any human being be afraid of death? I constantly meet people who think that what they themselves can’t do can’t be done, who say that to bear up under the things we Stoics speak of is beyond the capacity of human nature. How much more highly I rate these people’s abilities than they do themselves ! I say that they are just as capable as others of doing these things, but won’t. In any event what person actually trying them has found them prove beyond him? Who hasn’t noticed how much easier they are in the actual doing? It’s not because they’re hard that we lose confidence; they’re hard because we lack the confidence.

  If you still need an example, take Socrates, an old man who had known his full share of suffering, who had taken every blow life could inflict, and still remained unbeaten either by poverty, a burden for him aggravated by domestic worries, or by constant hardships, including those endured on military servic
e. Apart from what he had to contend with at home – whether one thinks of his wife with her shrewish ways and nagging tongue, or his intractable children, more like their mother than their father – his whole life was lived either in war-time or under tyranny or under a ‘democracy’ that outdid even wars and tyrants in its cruelties. The war went on for twenty-seven years. After the fighting was ended, the state was handed over to the mercy of the Thirty Tyrants, a considerable number of whom were hostile to him. The final blow was his conviction and sentence on the most serious of charges: he was accused of blasphemy and of corrupting the younger generation, whom, it was alleged, he turned into rebels against God, their fathers and the state. After that came the prison and the poison. And so little effect did all this have on Socrates’ spirit, it did not even affect the expression on his face. What a rare and wonderful story of achievement! To the very last no one ever saw Socrates in any particular mood of gaiety or depression. Through all the ups and downs of fortune his was a level temperament.

  Would you like another example? Take the modern one of Marcus Cato, with whom fortune dealt in an even more belligerent and unremitting fashion. At every point she stood in his way, even at the end, at his death; yet he demonstrated that a brave man can live in defiance of fortune and can the in defiance of fortune. The whole of his life was passed either in civil war or in conditions of developing civil conflict. And of him no less than of Socrates it is possible to say that he carried himself clear of slavery* (unless, perhaps, you take the view that Pompey, Caesar and Crassus were friends of freedom). When his country was in a state of constant change, no one ever saw a change in Cato. In every situation he was placed in, he showed himself always the same man, whether in office as praetor, in defeat at the polls, under attack in court, as governor in his province, on the public platform, in the field, or in death itself. In that moment, too, of panic for the Republic, when Caesar stood on the one side, backed by ten legions of the finest fighting men and the entire resources and support of foreign countries as well, and on the other stood Pompey, by himself a match for all comers, and when people were moving to join either the one or the other, Cato all on his own established something of a party pledged to fight for the Republic. If you try to picture the period to yourself you will see on the one side the populace, the mob all agog for revolution, on the other the time-honoured elect of Rome, the aristocracy and knighthood; and two forlorn figures, Cato and republicanism, between them. You will find it an impressive sight, I can assure you, as you watch