Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  The Son of Atreus and King Priam with

  Achilles wroth with both.†

  For there is Cato denouncing each of them, trying to disarm the pair of them. And the way he casts his vote between them is: ‘If Caesar wins, I kill myself; if Pompey, I go into exile’ What had a man to fear who, win or lose, had dictated to himself such a choice of fates as might have been decreed him by an utterly exasperated enemy? And that is how he came to die, carrying out his own self-sentence.

  You will see, too, the capacity of man for hardship: on foot at the head of his troops he crossed the deserts of North Africa. You see that thirst can be endured as well: always in armour, trailing over a sun-baked plateau the remnants of a beaten army, an army without supplies, he was invariably the last to drink whenever they came upon water. You see that a man can think equally little of either the distinction of office or the stigma of rejection: on the day of his election defeat he played fives at the place of polling. You see that men can defy the might of their superiors: for, with no one daring offend either Caesar or Pompey except to curry favour with the other, Cato challenged the pair of them simultaneously. You see that a man can think as little of death as of exile: he condemned himself to both, and war in the meantime.

  We, then, can show as spirited an attitude to just the same things if we will only choose to slip the yoke from our necks. But first we have to reject the life of pleasures; they make us soft and womanish; they are insistent in their demands, and what is more, require us to make insistent demands on fortune. And then we need to look down on wealth, which is the wage of slavery. Gold and silver and everything else that clutters our prosperous homes should be discarded. Freedom cannot be won without sacrifice. If you set a high value on her, everything else must be valued at little.

  LETTER CV

  YES, I’ll give you some rules to observe that will enable you to live in greater safety. You for your part I suggest should listen as carefully to the advice I give you as you would if I were advising you on how to look after your health at Ardea.

  Now think of the things which goad man into destroying man: you’ll find that they are hope, envy, hatred, fear and contempt. Contempt is the least important of the lot, so much so that a number of men have actually taken shelter behind it for protection’s sake. For if a person feels contempt for someone, he tramples on him, doubtless, but he passes on. No one pursues an unremitting and persistent policy of injury to a man for whom he feels nothing but contempt. Even in battle the man on the ground is left alone, the fighting being with those still on their feet. Coming to hope, so long as you own nothing likely to arouse the greed or grasping instincts of others, so long as you possess nothing out of the ordinary (for people covet even the smallest things if they are rare or little known),* you’ll have nothing to worry about from the hopes of grasping characters. Envy you’ll escape if you haven’t obtruded yourself on other people’s notice, if you haven’t flaunted your possessions, if you’ve learnt to keep your satisfaction to yourself. Hatred either comes from giving offence, and that you’ll avoid by refraining from deliberately provoking anyone, or is quite uncalled for: here your safeguard will be ordinary tact. It is a kind of hatred that has been a source of danger to a lot of people; men have been hated without having any actual enemy. As regards not being feared, a moderate fortune and an easy-going nature will secure you that. People should see that you’re not a person it is dangerous to offend: and with you a reconciliation should be both easy and dependable. To be feared inside your own home, it may be added, is as much a source of trouble as being feared outside it – slave or free, there isn’t a man who hasn’t power enough to do you injury. Besides, to be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind himself. There remains contempt. The person who has made contempt his ally, who has been despised because he has chosen to be despised, has the measure of it under his control. Its disadvantages are negatived by the possession of respected qualities and of friends having influence with some person with the necessary influence. Such influential friends are people with whom it is well worth having ties, without being so tied up with them that their protection costs you more than the original danger might have done.

  But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible. For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. Nobody will keep the things he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more. Neither will anyone who has failed to keep a story to himself keep the name of his informant to himself. Every person without exception has someone to whom he confides everything that is confided to himself. Even supposing he puts some guard on his garrulous tongue and is content with a single pair of ears, he will be the creator of a host of later listeners – such is the way in which what was but a little while before a secret becomes common rumour.

  Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind. People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax. After every act they tremble, paralysed, their consciences continually demanding an answer, not allowing them to get on with other things. To expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it. Where there is a bad conscience, some circumstance or other may provide one with impunity, but never with freedom from anxiety; for a person takes the attitude that even if he isn’t found out, there’s always the possibility of it. His sleep is troubled. Whenever he talks about someone else’s misdeed he thinks of his own, which seems to him all too inadequately hidden, all too inadequately blotted out of people’s memories. A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.

  LETTER CVII

  WHERE’s that moral insight of yours? Where’s that acuteness of perception? Or magnanimity? Does something as trivial as that upset you? Your slaves have seen your absorption in business as their chance to run away. So be it, you have been let down by friends – for by all means let them keep the name we mistakenly bestowed on them and be called such just to heighten their disgrace; but the fact is that your affairs have been freed for good and all of a number of people on whom all your trouble was being wasted and who considered you insufferable to anyone but yourself. There’s nothing unusual or surprising about it all. To be put out by this sort of thing is as ridiculous as grumbling about being spattered in the street or getting dirty where it’s muddy. One has to accept life on the same terms as the public baths, or crowds, or travel. Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired, and openly wish – a lie – for death. At one place you will part from a companion, at another bury one, and be afraid of one at another. These are the kind of things you’ll come up against all along this rugged journey. Wanting to die? Let the personality be made ready to face everything; let it be made to realize that it has come to terrain on which thunder and lightning play, terrain on which

  Grief and vengeful Care have set their couch,

  And pallid Sickness dwells, and drear Old Age.*

  This is the company in which you must live out your days. Escape them you cannot, scorn them you can. And scorn them you will if by constant reflection you have anticipated future happenings. Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even; being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings. We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise. And since it is invariably unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection will ensure that no form of adversity finds you a complete beginner.
/>   ‘I’ve been deserted by my slaves!’ Others have been plundered, incriminated, set upon, betrayed, beaten up, attacked with poison or with calumny – mention anything you like, it has happened to plenty of people. A vast variety of missiles are launched with us as their target. Some are planted in our flesh already, some are hurtling towards us at this very moment, others merely grazing us in passing on their way to other targets. Let’s not be taken aback by any of the things we’re born to, things no one need complain at for the simple reason that they’re the same for everybody. Yes, the same for everybody; for even if a man does escape something, it was a thing which he might have suffered. The fairness of a law does not consist in its effect being actually felt by all alike, but in its having been laid down for all alike. Let’s get this sense of justice firmly into our heads and pay up without grumbling the taxes arising from our mortal state. Winter brings in the cold, and we have to shiver; summer brings back the heat and we have to swelter. Bad weather tries the health and we have to be ill. Somewhere or other we are going to have encounters with wild beasts, and with man, too, – more dangerous than all those beasts. Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another. These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature’s; reversals, after all, are the means by which nature regulates this visible realm of hers: clear skies follow cloudy; after the calm comes the storm; the winds take turns to blow; day succeeds night; while part of the heavens is in the ascendant, another is sinking. It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.

  This is the law to which our minds are needing to be reconciled. This is the law they should be following and obeying. They should assume that whatever happens was bound to happen and refrain from railing at nature. One can do nothing better than endure what cannot be cured and attend uncomplainingly the God at whose instance all things come about. It is a poor soldier that follows his commander grumbling. So let us receive our orders readily and cheerfully, and not desert the ranks along the march – the march of this glorious fabric of creation in which everything we shall suffer is a strand. And let us address Jupiter, whose guiding hand directs this mighty work, in the way our own Cleanthes did, in some most expressive lines which I may perhaps be pardoned for translating in view of the example set here by that master of expressiveness, Cicero. If you like them, so much the better; if not, you will at least know that I was following Cicero’s example.

  Lead me, Master of the soaring vault

  Of Heaven, lead me, Father, where you will.

  I stand here prompt and eager to obey.

  And ev’n suppose I were unwilling, still

  I should attend you and know suffering,

  Dishonourably and grumbling, when I might

  Have done so and been good as, well. For Fate

  The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.*

  Let us speak and live like that. Let fate find us ready and eager. Here is your noble spirit – the one which has put itself in the hands of fate; on the other side we have the puny degenerate spirit which struggles, and which sees nothing right in the way the universe is ordered, and would rather reform the gods than reform itself.

  LETTER CVIII

  THE subject you ask me about is one of those in which knowledge has no other justification than the knowledge itself. Nevertheless, and just because it is so justified, you’re in a great hurry and reluctant to wait for the encyclopedia of ethics I’m compiling at this very moment. Well, I shall let you have your answer immediately, but first I’m going to tell you how this enthusiasm for learning, with which I can see you’re on fire, is to be brought under control if it isn’t going to stand in its own way. What is wanted is neither haphazard dipping nor a greedy onslaught on knowledge in the mass. The whole will be reached through its parts, and the burden must be adjusted to our strength. We mustn’t take on more than we can manage. You shouldn’t attempt to absorb all you want to – just what you’ve room for; simply adopt the right approach and you will end up with room for all you want. The more the mind takes in the more it expands.

  I remember a piece of advice which Attalus gave me in the days when I practically laid siege to his lecture hall, always first to arrive and last to go, and would draw him into a discussion of some point or other even when he was out taking a walk, for he was always readily available to his students, not just accessible. ‘A person teaching and a person learning,’ he said, ‘should have the same end in view: the improvement of the latter.’ A person who goes to a philosopher should carry away with him something or other of value every day; he should return home a sounder man or at least more capable of becoming one. And he will: for the power of philosophy is such that she helps not only those who devote themselves to her but also those who come into contact with her. A person going out into the sun, whether or not this is what he is going out for, will acquire a tan. Customers who sit around rather too long in a shop selling perfumes carry the scent of the place away with them. And people who have been with a philosopher are bound to have derived from it something of benefit even to the inattentive. Note that I say the inattentive, not the hostile.

  ‘That’s all very well, but don’t we all know certain people who have sat at a philosopher’s feet year after year without acquiring even a semblance of wisdom?’ Of course I do – persevering, conscientious people, too. I prefer to call them a philosopher’s squatters, not students. Some come not to learn but just to hear him, in the same way as we’re drawn to a theatre, for the sake of entertainment, to treat our ears to a play, or music, or an address. You’ll find that a large proportion of the philosopher’s audience is made up of this element, which regards his lecture-hall as a place of lodging for periods of leisure. They’re not concerned to rid themselves of any faults there, or acquire any rule of life by which to test their characters, but simply to enjoy to the full the pleasures the ear has to offer. Admittedly some of them actually come with notebooks, but with a view to recording not the content of the lecture, but words from it – to be passed on to others with the same lack of profit to the hearer as they themselves derived from hearing them. Some of them are stirred by the noble sentiments they hear; their faces and spirits light up and they enter into the emotions of the speaker, going into a transport just like the eunuch priests who work themselves into a frenzy, to order, at the sound of a Phrygian flute. They are captivated and aroused not by a din of empty words, but by the splendour of the actual content of the speaker’s words – any expression of bold or spirited defiance of death or fortune making you keen to translate what you’ve heard into action straight away. They are deeply affected by the words and become the persons they are told to be – or would if the impression on their minds were to last, if this magnificent enthusiasm were not immediately intercepted by that discourager of noble conduct, the crowd: very few succeed in getting home in the same frame of mind.

  It is easy enough to arouse in a listener a desire for what is honourable; for in every one of us nature has laid the foundations or sown the seeds of the virtues. We are born to them all, all of us, and when a person comes along with the necessary stimulus, then those qualities of the personality are awakened, so to speak, from their slumber. Haven’t you noticed how the theatre murmurs agreement whenever something is spoken the truth of which we generally recognize and unanimously confirm?

  The poor lack much, the greedy everything.

  The greedy man does no one any good,

  But harms no person more than his own self.*

  Your worst miser will clap these lines and be delighted at hearing his own faults lashed in this manner. Imagine how much more likely it is that this will happen when such things are being said by a philosopher, interspersing passages of sound advice with lines of poetry calculated to deepen their hold on unenlightened minds. For ‘the constricting requirements of verse,’ as Clea
nthes used to say, ‘give one’s meaning all the greater force, in the same way as one’s breath produces a far greater noise when it is channelled through a trumpet’s long and narrow tube before its final expulsion through the widening opening at the end.’ The same things stated in prose are listened to with less attention and have much less impact. When a rhythm is introduced, when a fine idea is compressed into a definite metre, the very same thought comes hurtling at one like a missile launched from a fully extended arm. A lot, for example, is said about despising money. The listener is told at very considerable length that men should look on riches as consisting in the spirit and not in inherited estates, and that a man is wealthy if he has attuned himself to his restricted means and has made himself rich on little. But verses such as the following he finds a good deal more striking.