Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building up a new one. There is the same difference between having gained a friend and actually gaining a friend as there is between a farmer harvesting and a farmer sowing. The philosopher Attalus used to say that it was more of a pleasure to make a friend than to have one, ‘in the same way as an artist derives more pleasure from painting than from having completed a picture’. When his whole attention is absorbed in concentration on the work he is engaged on, a tremendous sense of satisfaction is created in him by his very absorption. There is never quite the same gratification after he has lifted his hand from the finished work. From then on what he is enjoying is the art’s end product, whereas it was the art itself that he enjoyed while he was actually painting. So with our children, their growing up brings wider fruits but their infancy was sweeter.

  To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle. Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, ‘for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains’, but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake. Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear. These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships. A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined – their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves. The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so. If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship. What is my object in making a friend? To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

  You may say we are not at present concerned with the question whether friendship is something to be cultivated for its own sake. But this, on the contrary, is exactly what needs proving most; for if friendship is something to be sought out for its own sake, the self-contented man is entitled to pursue it. And how does he approach it? In the same way as he would any object of great beauty, not drawn by gain, not out of alarm at the vicissitudes of fortune. To procure friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity.

  ‘The wise man is content with himself.’ A lot of people, Lucilius, put quite the wrong interpretation on this statement. They remove the wise man from all contact with the world outside, shutting him up inside his own skin. We must be quite clear about the meaning of this sentence and just how much it claims to say. It applies to him so far as happiness in life is concerned: for this all he needs is a rational and elevated spirit that treats fortune with disdain; for the actual business of living he needs a great number of things. I should like to draw your attention to a similar distinction made by Chrysippus. The wise man, he said, lacked nothing but needed a great number of things, whereas ‘the fool, on the other hand, needs nothing (for he does not know how to use anything) but lacks everything.’ The wise man needs hands and eyes and a great number of things that are required for the purposes of day-to-day life; but he lacks nothing, for lacking something implies that it is a necessity and nothing, to the wise man, is a necessity.

  Self-contented as he is, then, he does need friends – and wants as many of them as possible – but not to enable him to lead a happy life; this he will have even without friends. The supreme ideal does not call for any external aids. It is homegrown, wholly self-developed. Once it starts looking outside itself for any part of itself it is on the way to being dominated by fortune.

  ‘But what sort of life,’ people may say, ‘will the wise man have if he is going to be left without any friends when he is thrown into prison or stranded among foreigners or detained in the course of a voyage in distant parts or cast away on some desert shore?’ It will be like that of Jove while nature takes her rest, of brief duration, when the universe is dissolved and the gods are all merged in one, finding repose in himself, absorbed in his own thoughts. Such is more or less the way of the wise man: he retires to his inner self, is his own company. So long in fact as he remains in a position to order his affairs according to his own judgement, he remains self-content even when he marries, even when he brings up his children. He is self-content and yet he would refuse to live if he had to live without any human company at all. Natural promptings (not thoughts of any advantage to himself) impel him towards friendship. We are born with a sense of the pleasantness of friendship just as of other things. In the same way as there exists in man a distaste for solitude and a craving for society, natural instinct drawing one human being to another, so too with this there is something inherent in it that stimulates us into seeking friendships. The wise man, nevertheless, unequalled though he is in his devotion to his friends, though regarding them as being no less important and frequently more important than his own self, will still consider what is valuable in life to be something wholly confined to his inner self. He will repeat the words of Stilbo (the Stilbo whom Epicurus’ letter attacks), when his home town was captured and he emerged from the general conflagration, his children lost, his wife lost, alone and none the less a happy man, and was questioned by Demetrius. Asked by this man, known, from the destruction he dealt out to towns, as Demetrius the City Sacker, whether he had lost anything, he replied, ‘I have all my valuables with me.’ There was an active and courageous man – victorious over the very victory of the enemy! ‘I have lost,’ he said, ‘nothing.’ He made Demetrius wonder whether he had won a victory after all. ‘All my possessions,’ he said, ‘are with me’, meaning by this the qualities of a just, a good and an enlightened character, and indeed the very fact of not regarding as valuable anything that is capable of being taken away. We are impressed at the way some creatures pass right through fire without physical harm: how much more impressive is the way this man came through the burning and the bloodshed and the ruins uninjured and unscathed. Does it make you see how much easier it can be to conquer a whole people than to conquer a single man? Those words of Stilbo’s are equally those of the Stoic. He too carries his valuables intact through cities burnt to ashes, for he is contented with himself. This is the line he draws as the boundary for his happiness.

  In case you imagine that we Stoics are the only people who produce noble sayings, let me tell you something – see that you put this down to my credit, even though I have already settled my account with you for today – Epicurus himself, who has nothing good to say for Stilbo, has uttered a statement quite like this one of Stilbo’s. ‘Any man,’ he says, ‘who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is
an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world.’ Or if you prefer to see it expressed like this (the point being that we should be ruled not by the actual words used but by the sense of them), ‘a man is unhappy, though he reign the world over, if he does not consider himself supremely happy.’ To show you, indeed, that these are sentiments of a universal character, prompted, evidently, by nature herself, you will find the following verse in a comic poet:

  Not happy he who thinks himself not so.*

  What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?

  ‘What about so-and-so,’ you may ask, ‘who became rich in such a despicable manner, or such-and-such a person who gives orders to a great many people but is at the mercy of a great many more? Supposing they say they are happy, will their own opinions to this effect make them happy?’ It does not make any difference what a man says; what matters is how he feels, and not how he feels on one particular day but how he feels at all times. But you have no need to fear that so valuable a thing may fall into unworthy hands. Only the wise man is content with what is his. All foolishness suffers the burden of dissatisfaction with itself.

  LETTER XI

  I HAVE had a conversation with your talented friend. From the very beginning of his talk with me it was apparent what considerable gifts of character and intelligence he possesses. He gave me a foretaste of his capabilities, to which he will certainly live up, for the things he said, caught as he was quite off his guard, were entirely unrehearsed. As he was recovering his self-possession, he could scarcely get over his embarrassment – always a good sign in a young man – so deep had the blush been that suffused his face. This I rather suspect will remain with him even when he has built up his character and stripped it of all weakness – even when he has become a wise man. For no amount of wisdom enables one to do away with physical or mental weaknesses that arise from natural causes; anything inborn or ingrained in one can by dint of practice be allayed, but not overcome. When they face a crowd of people some men, even ones with the stoutest of hearts, break into the sort of sweat one usually sees on persons in an overheated and exhausted state; some men experience a trembling at the knees when they are about to speak; some a chattering of the teeth, a stuttering tongue or stammering lips. These are things which neither training nor experience ever eliminates. Nature just wields her power and uses the particular weakness to make even the strongest conscious of her. One of these things I well know is a blush, which has a habit of suddenly reddening the faces of men of even the most dignified demeanour. It is of course more noticeable in the young, with their hotter blood and sensitive complexions; nevertheless seasoned men and ageing men alike are affected by it. Some men are more to be feared on the occasions when they flush than at any other time – as if in so doing they let loose all their inhibitions; Sulla was at his wildest when the blood had rushed to his visage. No features were more susceptible than Pompey’s: he never failed to blush in company, and particularly at public meetings. I remember Fabianus blushing when he appeared to give evidence before the Senate, and this bashfulness looked wonderfully well on him. When this happens it is not due to some mental infirmity, but to the unfamiliarity of some situation or other, which may not necessarily strike any alarm into inexperienced people but does produce a reaction in them if they are thus liable through having a natural, physical predisposition to it; certain people have good, ordinary blood and others just have an animated, lively sort of blood that comes to the face quickly.

  No amount of wisdom, as I said before, ever banishes these things; otherwise – if she eradicated every weakness – wisdom would have dominion over the world of nature. One’s physical make-up and the attributes that were one’s lot at birth remain settled no matter how much or how long the personality may strive after perfect adjustment. One cannot ban these things any more than one can call them up. The tokens used to portray embarrassment by professional actors, those actors who portray emotion, simulate unhappiness and reproduce for us fear and apprehension, are a hanging of the head, a dropping of the voice, a casting down of the eyes and keeping them fixed on the ground; a blush is something they can never manage to reproduce; it is something that will neither be summoned up nor be told to stay away. Against these things philosophy holds out no remedy and avails one nothing; they are quite independent; they come unbidden, they go unbidden.

  My letter calls for a conclusion. Here’s one for you, one that will serve you in good stead, too, which I’d like you to take to heart. ‘We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.’ This, my dear Lucilius, is Epicurus’ advice, and in giving it he has given us a guardian and a moral tutor – and not without reason, either: misdeeds are greatly diminished if a witness is always standing near intending doers. The personality should be provided with someone it can revere, someone whose influence can make even its private, inner life more pure. Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts! And happy, too, is the person who can so revere another as to adjust and shape his own personality in the light of recollections, even, of that other. A person able to revere another thus will soon deserve to be revered himself. So choose yourself a Cato – or, if Cato seems too severe for you, a Laelius, a man whose character is not quite so strict. Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.

  LETTER XII

  WHEREVER I turn I see fresh evidence of my old age. I visited my place just out of Rome recently and was grumbling about the expense of maintaining the building, which was in a dilapidated state. My manager told me the trouble wasn’t due to any neglect on his part: he was doing his utmost but the house was old. That house had taken shape under my own hands; what’s to become of me if stones of my own age are crumbling like that? Losing my temper I seized at the first excuse that presented itself for venting my irritation on him. ‘It’s quite clear,’ I said, ‘that these plane trees are being neglected. There’s no foliage on them. Look at those knotty, dried-up branches and those wretched, flaking trunks. That wouldn’t happen if someone dug round them and watered them.’ He swore by my guardian angel he was doing his utmost: in everything his care was unremitting but the poor things were just old. Between you and me, now, I had planted them myself and seen the first leaf appearing on them myself. Then, turning towards the front door, I said: ‘Who’s that? Who’s that decrepit old person? The door’s the proper place for him all right – he looks as if he’s on the way out. Where did you get him from? What was the attraction in taking over someone else’s dead for burial?’ Whereupon the man said, ‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m Felicio. You used to bring me toy figures.* I’m the son of the manager Philositus, your pet playmate.’ ‘The man’s absolutely crazy,’ I said. ‘Become a little child again, has he, actually calls himself my playmate? Well, the way he’s losing his teeth at this very moment, it’s perfectly possible.’

  So I owe it to this place of mine near town that my old age was made clear to me at every turn. Well, we should cherish old age and enjoy it. It is full of pleasure if you know how to use it. Fruit tastes most delicious just when its season is ending. The charms of youth are at their greatest at the time of its passing. It is the final glass which pleases the inveterate drinker, the one that sets the crowning touch on his intoxication and sends him off into oblivion. Every pleasure defers till its last its greatest delights. The time of life which offers the greatest delight is the age that sees the downward movement – not the steep decline – already begun; and in my opinion even the age that s
tands on the brink has pleasures of its own – or else the very fact of not experiencing the want of any pleasures takes their place. How nice it is to have outworn one’s desires and left them behind!

  ‘It’s not very pleasant, though,’ you may say, ‘to have death right before one’s eyes.’ To this I would say, firstly, that death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one – the order in which we each receive our summons is not determined by our precedence in the register – and, secondly, that no one is so very old that it would be quite unnatural for him to hope for one more day.…*

  Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives. Pacuvius, the man who acquired a right to Syria by prescription,53 was in the habit of conducting a memorial ceremony for himself with wine and funeral feasting of the kind we are familiar with, and then being carried on a bier from the dinner table to his bed, while a chanting to music went on of the words ‘He has lived, he has lived’ in Greek, amid the applause of the young libertines present. Never a day passed but he celebrated his own funeral. What he did from discreditable motives we should do from honourable ones, saying in all joyfulness and cheerfulness as we retire to our beds,

  I have lived; I have completed now the course

  That fortune long ago allotted me.*

  If God adds the morrow we should accept it joyfully. The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others. Whoever has said ‘I have lived’ receives a windfall every day he gets up in the morning.

  But I must close this letter now. ‘What!’ you’ll be saying. ‘Is it coming to me just as it is, without any parting contribution?’ Don’t worry, it’s bringing you something. Why did I call it ‘something’, though? It’s a great deal. For what could be more splendid than the following saying which I’m entrusting to this letter of mine for delivery to you: ‘To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint.’ Of course not, when on every side there are plenty of short and easy roads to freedom there for the taking. Let us thank God that no one can be held a prisoner in life – the very constraints can be trampled under foot.