Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  He needs but little who desires but little.

  He has his wish, whose wish can be

  To have what is enough.

  When we hear these lines and others like them, we feel impelled to admit the truth. The people for whom nothing is ever enough admire and applaud such a verse and publicly declare their distaste for money. When you see them in such a mood, keep at them and drive this home, piling it on them, having nothing to do with plays on words, syllogisms, sophistries and all the other toys of sterile intellectual cleverness. Speak out against the love of money. Speak out against extravagance. When you see that you’ve achieved something and had an effect on your listeners, lay on all the harder. It is hardly believable how much can be achieved by this sort of speech, aimed at curing people, wholly directed to the good of the people listening. When the character is impressionable it is easily won over to a passion for what is noble and honourable; while a person’s character is still malleable, and only corrupted to a mild degree, truth strikes deep if she finds the right kind of advocate.

  For my part, at any rate, when I heard Attalus winding up the case against the faults of character, the mistaken attitudes and the evils generally of the lives we lead, I frequently felt a sense of the sorry plight of the human race and looked on him as a kind of sublime being who had risen higher than the limits of human aspiration. He himself would use the Stoic term ‘king’ of himself; but to me he seemed more than a king, as being a man who had the right to pass judgement on the conduct and the character of monarchs. And when he began extolling to us the virtues of poverty and showing us how everything which went beyond our actual needs was just so much unnecessary weight, a burden to the man who had to carry it, I often had a longing to walk out of that lecture hall a poor man. When he started exposing our pleasures and commending to us, along with moderation in our diet, physical purity and a mind equally uncontaminated, uncontaminated not only by illicit pleasures but by unnecessary ones as well, I would become enthusiastic about keeping the appetites for food and drink firmly in their place. With the result that some of this, Lucilius, has lasted with me right through life. For I started out on it all with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, and later, after my return to public life, I managed to retain a few of the principles as regards which I had made this promising beginning. This is how I came to give up oysters and mushrooms for the rest of my life (for they are not really food to us but titbits which induce people who have already had as much as they can take to go on eating – the object most desired by gluttons and others who stuff themselves with more than they can hold – being items which will come up again as easily as they go down). This too is why throughout life I have always abstained from using scent, as the best smell a body can have is no smell at all. This is why no wine ever finds its way into my stomach. This is the reason for my life-long avoidance of hot baths, believing as I do that it is effeminate as well as pointless to stew one’s body and exhaust it with continual sweating. Some other things to which I once said good-bye have made their reappearance, but nevertheless, in these cases in which I have ceased to practise total abstinence, I succeed in observing a limit, which is something hardly more than a step removed from total abstinence (and even perhaps more difficult – with some things less effort of will is required to cut them out altogether than to have recourse to them in moderation).

  Now that I’ve started disclosing to you how much greater my enthusiasm was in taking up philosophy as a young man than it is when it comes to keeping it up in my old age, I shan’t be ashamed to confess the passionate feelings which Pythagoras inspired in me. Sotion used to tell us why Pythagoras, and later Sextius, was a vegetarian. Each had a quite different reason, but each was a striking one. Sextius believed that man had enough food to sustain him without shedding blood, and that when men took this tearing of flesh so far that it became a pleasure a habit of cruelty was formed. He argued in addition that the scope for people’s extravagance was in any case something that should be reduced; and he gave reasons for inferring that variety of diet was incompatible with our physical make-up and inimical to health. Pythagoras, on the other hand, maintained that all creatures were interrelated and that there was a system of exchange of souls involving transmigration from one bodily form to another. If we are to believe Pythagoras, no soul ever undergoes death, or even a suspension of its existence except perhaps for the actual moment of transfusion into another body. This is not the moment for inquiring by what stages or at what point a soul completes its wanderings through a succession of other habitations and reverts to human form. It is enough for our present purposes that he has instilled into people a dread of committing the crime of parricide, in view of the possibility that they might, all unknowing, come across the soul of an ancestor and with knife or teeth do it dreadful outrage, assuming that the spirit of a relative might be lodging in the flesh concerned. After setting out this theory and supplementing it with arguments of his own, Sotion would say, ‘You cannot accept the idea of souls being assigned to one body after another, and the notion that what we call death is only a move to another home? You cannot accept that the soul which was once that of a man may sojourn in wild beasts, or in our own domestic animals, or in the creatures of the deep? You cannot accept that nothing ever perishes on this earth, instead merely undergoing a change in its whereabouts? And that the animal world, not just the heavenly bodies that revolve in their unalterable tracks, moves in cycles, with its souls propelled along an orbital path of their own? Well, the fact that these ideas are ones which have been accepted by great men should make you suspend judgement. You should preserve an open mind on the whole subject anyway. For if these ideas are correct, to abstain from eating the flesh of animals will mean guiltlessness; and even if they are not, it will still mean frugal living. What do you lose by believing in it all? All I am depriving you of is what the lions and the vultures feed on.’

  Fired by this teaching I became a vegetarian, and by the time a year had gone by was finding it an enjoyable as well as an easy habit. I was beginning to feel that my mind was more active as a result of it – though I would not take my oath to you now that it really was. I suppose you want to know how I came to give up the practice. Well, my years as a young man coincided with the early part of Tiberius’ reign, when certain religious cults of foreign origin were being promoted, and among other things abstinence from certain kinds of animal food was regarded as evidence of adherence to such superstitions. So at the request of my father, who did not really fear my being prosecuted, but who detested philosophy, I resumed my normal habits. And in fact he had little difficulty in persuading me to adopt a fuller diet. Another thing, though, which Attalus used to recommend was a hard mattress; and that is the kind I still use even in my old age, the kind which shows no trace of a body having slept on it. I tell you all this just to show you the tremendous enthusiasm with which the merest beginner will set about attaining the very highest goals provided someone gives him the necessary prompting and encouragement. Things tend, in fact, to go wrong; part of the blame lies on the teachers of philosophy, who today teach us how to argue instead of how to live, part on their students, who come to the teachers in the first place with a view to developing not their character but their intellect. The result has been the transformation of philosophy, the study of wisdom, into philology, the study of words.

  The object which we have in view, after all, makes a great deal of difference to the manner in which we approach any subject. If he intends to become a literary scholar, a person examining his Virgil does not say to himself when he reads that magnificent phrase

  Irrestorable, Time flies*

  ‘We need to bestir ourselves; life will leave us behind unless we make haste; the days are fleeting by, carried away at a gallop, carrying us with them; we fail to realize the pace at which we are being swept along; here we are making comprehensive plans for the future and generally behaving as if we had all the leisure in the world when there are precipices all around us.�
� No, his purpose is to note that Virgil invariably uses this word ‘flies’ whenever he speaks of the swift passage of time.

  Life’s finest days, for us poor human beings,

  Fly first; the sicknesses and sufferings,

  A bleak old age, the snatching hand

  Implacable of merciless death, creep near.†

  It is the person with philosophy in his mind who takes these words in the way they are meant to be taken. ‘Virgil,’ he says, ‘never speaks of the hours as “passing” but as “flying”, this being the swiftest form of travel. He is also telling us that the finest ones are the first to be borne away. Then why are we so slow to get ourselves moving so as to be able to keep up with the pace of this swiftest of all things?’ The best parts of life are flitting by, the worse are to come. The wine which is poured out first is the purest wine in the bottle, the heaviest particles and any cloudiness settling to the bottom. It is just the same with human life. The best comes first Are we going to let others drain it so as to keep the dregs for ourselves? Let that sentence stick in your mind, accepted as unquestioningly as if it had been uttered by an oracle:

  Life’s finest days, for us poor human beings,

  Fly first.

  Why finest? Because what is to come is uncertain. Why finest? Because while we are young we are able to learn; when the mind is quick to learn and still susceptible to training we can turn it to better ends. Because this is a good time for hard work, for studies as a means of keeping our brains alert and busy and for strenuous activities as a means of exercising our bodies; the time remaining to us afterwards is marked by relative apathy and indolence, and is all the closer to the end. Let us act on this, then, wholeheartedly. Let us cut out all distractions and work away at this alone for fear that otherwise we may be left behind and only eventually realize one day the swiftness of the passage of this fleeting phenomenon, time, which we are powerless to hold back. Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable. What flies past has to be seized at.

  These thoughts never occur to someone who looks at the lines I have quoted through the eyes of our literary scholar. He does not reflect that our first days are our best days for the very reason that ‘the sicknesses creep near’, with old age bearing down on us, hovering over our heads whilst our minds are still full of our youth. No, his comment is that Virgil constantly couples ‘sicknesses’ and ‘old age’ (and not without good reason, I can tell you: I should describe old age itself as a kind of incurable sickness). The scholar further remarks on the epithet attached to old age, pointing out that the poet speaks in the passage quoted of ‘bleak old age’ and in another passage writes

  Where dwell wan Sicknesses and bleak Old Age.*

  There is nothing particularly surprising about this way which everyone has of deriving material for his own individual interests from identical subject-matter. In one and the same meadow the cow looks for grass, the dog for a hare and the stork for a lizard. When a commentator, a literary man and a devotee of philosophy pick up Cicero’s book The State, each directs his attention in different directions. The philosopher finds it astonishing that so much could have been said in it by way of criticism of justice. The commentator, coming to the very same reading matter, inserts this sort of footnote: ‘There are two Roman kings one of whom has no father and another no mother, the mother of Servius being a matter on which there is uncertainty, and Ancus, the grandson of Numa, having no father on record.’ He observes further that ‘the man to whom we give the title Dictator and read about in the history books under the same name was called the Master of the Commons by the early Romans; this title survives to the present day in the augural records, and the fact that the person appointed by him as his deputy was known as the Master of the Knights is evidence that this is correct.’ He similarly observes that ‘Romulus died during an eclipse of the sun’; that ‘the right of appeal to the Commons was recognized as early as the period of the monarchy; there is authority for this in the pontifical records, in the opinion of a number of scholars, in particular Fenestella.’ When the literary scholar goes through the same book, the first thing he records in his notebook is Cicero’s use of reapse for re ipse, and sepse likewise for se ipse. He then goes on to examine changes in usage over the years. Where, for example, Cicero uses the expression: ‘Since we have been called back right from the calx by this interruption of his’, he notes that the calx was the name which the old Romans gave to the finishing line in the stadium that we nowadays call the creta. The next thing he does is assemble lines from Ennius, and in particular those referring to Scipio of Africa:

  None, foe nor Roman, can assess the value

  Of his succour and do justice to his feats.*

  From this passage the scholar claims to deduce that the word ‘succour’ to the early Romans signified the rendering not merely of assistance but of actual services, Ennius saying that no one, foe or Roman, was capable of assessing the value of the services Scipio rendered Rome. Next he congratulates himself on discovering the source from which Virgil chose to take the following:

  Above whose head the mighty gates of heaven

  Thunder.†

  He tells us that Ennius filched the idea from Homer and that Virgil filched it from Ennius, there being a couplet of Ennius (preserved in this very work of Cicero’s I was mentioning, The State) which reads

  If any man may rise to heaven’s levels,

  To me, alone, lie open heaven’s huge gates.

  But enough, or before I know where I am I shall be slipping into the scholar’s or commentator’s shoes myself. My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application – not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech – and learn them so well that words become works. No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live. People prone to every fault they denounce are walking advertisements of the uselessness of their training. That kind of man can be of no more help to me as an instructor than a steersman who is seasick in a storm – a man who should be hanging on to the tiller when the waves are snatching it from his grasp, wrestling with the sea itself, rescuing his sails from the winds. What good to me is a vomiting and stupefied helmsman? And you may well think the storm of life is a great deal more serious than any which ever tosses a boat. What is needed is a steering hand, not talking. And apart from this, everything which this kind of man says, everything he tosses out to a thronging audience, belongs to someone else. The words were said by Plato, said by Zeno, said by Chrysippus and Posidonius and a whole host more of Stoics like them. Let me indicate here how men can prove that their words are their own: let them put their preaching into practice.

  Now that I’ve given you the message I wanted to convey to you, I’ll go on from here to satisfy that wish of yours. But I’ll transfer what you wanted from me to another, fresh letter, to avoid your coming mentally weary to a subject which is a thorny one and needs to be followed with a conscientious and attentive ear.

  LETTER CXIV

  YOU ask why it is that at certain periods a corrupt literary style has come into being; and how it is that a gifted mind develops a leaning towards some fault or other (resulting in the prevalence at one period of a bombastic form of exposition, at another of an effeminate form, fashioned after the manner of songs); and why it is that at one time approval is won by extravagant conceits and at another by sentences of an abrupt, allusive character that convey more to the intelligence than to the ear; and why there have been eras in which metaphors have been shamelessly exploited. The answer lies in something that you hear commonly enough,
something which among the Greeks has passed into a proverb: people’s speech matches their lives. And just as the way in which each individual expresses himself resembles the way he acts, so in the case of a nation of declining morals and given over to luxury forms of expression at any given time mirror the general behaviour of that society. A luxuriant literary style, assuming that it is the favoured and accepted style and not just appearing in the odd writer here and there, is a sign of an extravagant society. The spirit and the intellect cannot be of different hues. If the spirit is sound, if it is properly adjusted and has dignity and self-control, the intellect will be sober and sensible too, and if the former is tainted the latter will be infected as well. You’ve observed surely, how a person’s limbs drag and his feet dawdle along if his spirit is a feeble one? And how the lack of moral fibre shows in his very gait if his spirit is addicted to soft living? And how if his spirit is a lively and dashing one his step is brisk? And how if it is a prey to madness or the similar state of anger, his body moves along in an uncontrolled sort of way, in a rush rather than a walk? Isn’t this all the more likely to be the case where a person’s intellect is concerned, his intellect being wholly bound up with his spirit – moulded by and responsive to it and looking to it for guidance?

  The manner in which Maecenas lived is too well known for there to be any need to describe the way he walked, his self-indulgent nature, his passion for self-display, his reluctance that his faults should escape people’s notice. Well, then, wasn’t his style just as undisciplined as his dress was sloppy? Wasn’t his vocabulary just as extraordinary as his turnout, his retinue, his house, his wife? He would have been a genius if he had pursued a more direct path instead of going out of his way to avoid being intelligible, had he not been as loose in matters of style as he was in everything else. Which is why you’ll notice that his eloquence resembles a drunken man’s, tortuous and rambling and thoroughly eccentric. Could there be a worse expression than ‘the bank with mane of stream and woods’? And look at ‘men tilling with wherries the channel, driving the gardens back with the shallows’ churning over’. What about a person ‘curvetting at a woman’s beck, with lips on billing bent, a sigh the opening of his addresses, neck lolling like a forest giant in his ecstasy’? ‘The unregenerate company rummage homes for victuals, raiding them with provision jars and trading death for hope.’ ‘But hardly should I call as witness on his holy day my guardian spirit.’ ‘Else the wick of a slender waxlight and sputtering meal.’ ‘Mothers or wives accoutre the hearth’ When you read this sort of thing, doesn’t it immediately cross your mind that this is the same man who invariably went around with casual clothes on in the capital (even when Maecenas was discharging the emperor’s duties during the absence of Augustus, the officer coming to him for the daily codeword would find him in informal attire), who appeared on the bench, on the platform and at any public gathering wearing a mantle draped over his head leaving both ears exposed, looking just like the rich man’s runaway slave as depicted on the comic stage? The same man whose public escort, at a time when the nation was embroiled in a civil war and the capital was under arms and in a state of alarm, consisted of a pair of eunuchs, and who went through a thousand ceremonies of marriage with his one wife?