Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  Bows faced seawards

  or

  Anchor cast from bow.*

  Remembering my training as a long-standing devotee of cold baths, I dived into the sea in just the way a cold-water addict ought to – in my woolly clothes. You can imagine what I suffered as I crawled out over the rocks, as I searched for a route to safety or fought my way there. It made me realize how right sailors are in being afraid of a lee shore. What I endured, in my inability to endure my then self, is beyond belief. You can take it from me that the reason Ulysses got himself wrecked everywhere was not so much because Neptune was against him from the day he was born, but because he was given to seasickness like me – it’ll take me twenty years to reach my destination, too, if I ever have to journey anywhere by sea!

  As soon as I’d settled my stomach (for stomachs, as you know, aren’t clear of seasickness the moment they’re clear of the sea) and rubbed myself over with embrocation to put some life back into my body, I began to reflect how we are attended by an appalling forgetfulness of our weaknesses, even the physical ones which are continually bringing themselves to our notice, and much more so with those that are not only more serious but correspondingly less apparent. A slight feverishness may deceive a person, but when it has developed to the point where a genuine fever is raging it will extract an admission that something is wrong from even a tough and hardened individual. Suppose our feet ache, with little needling pains in the joints: at this stage we pass it off and say we’ve sprained an ankle or strained something in some exercise or other; while the disorder is in its indeterminate, commencing phase, its name eludes us, but once it starts bending the feet in just the way an ankle-rack does and makes them both misshapen, we have to confess that we’ve got the gout.

  With afflictions of the spirit, though, the opposite is the case: the worse a person is, the less he feels it. You needn’t feel surprised, my dearest Lucilius; a person sleeping lightly perceives impressions in his dreams and is sometimes, even, aware during sleep that he is asleep, whereas a heavy slumber blots out even dreams and plunges the mind too deep for consciousness of self. Why does no one admit his failings? Because he’s still deep in them. It’s the person who’s awakened who recounts his dream, and acknowledging one’s failings is a sign of health. So let us rouse ourselves, so that we may be able to demonstrate our errors. But only philosophy will wake us; only philosophy will shake us out of that heavy sleep. Devote yourself entirely to her. You’re worthy of her, she’s worthy of you – fall into each other’s arms. Say a firm, plain no to every other occupation. There’s no excuse for your pursuing philosophy merely in moments when occasion allows. If you were sick you would take a rest from attending to your personal affairs and drop your practice in the courts. And during a spell of improvement in your condition you wouldn’t look on any client as being so important that you’d undertake his case in court. No, you’d devote your entire attention to recovering from your illness in the quickest possible time. Well, then, aren’t you going to do the same in these circumstances? Away with every obstacle and leave yourself free to acquire a sound mind – no one ever attains this if he’s busy with other things. Philosophy wields an authority of her own; she doesn’t just accept time, she grants one it. She’s not something one takes up in odd moments. She’s an active, full-time mistress, ever present and demanding. When some state or other offered Alexander a part of its territory and half of all its property he told them that ‘he hadn’t come to Asia with the intention of accepting whatever they cared to give him, but of letting them keep whatever he chose to leave them.’ Philosophy, likewise, tells all other occupations: ‘It’s not my intention to accept whatever time is left over from you; you shall have, instead, what I reject.’

  Give your whole mind to her. Sit at her side and pay her constant court, and an enormous gap will widen between yourself and other men. You’ll end up far in advance of all mankind, and not far behind the gods themselves. Would you like to know what the actual difference between yourself and the gods will be? They will exist for longer. And yet to me what an indisputable mark it is of a great artist to have captured everything in a tiny compass; a wise man has as much scope before him as a god with all eternity in front of him. There is one thing, too, in which the wise man actually surpasses any god: a god has nature to thank for his immunity from fear, while the wise man can thank his own efforts for this. Look at that for an achievement, to have all the frailty of a human being and all the freedom from care of a god. Philosophy’s power to blunt all the blows of circumstance is beyond belief. Never a missile lodges in her; she has strong, impenetrable defences; some blows she breaks the force of, parrying them with the slack of her gown as if they were trivial, others she flings off and hurls back at the sender.

  LETTER LIV

  ILL health – which had granted me quite a long spell of leave – has attacked me without warning again. ‘What kind of ill health?’ you’ll be asking. And well you may, for there isn’t a single kind I haven’t experienced. There’s one particular ailment, though, for which I’ve always been singled out, so to speak. I see no reason why I should call it by its Greek name,* difficulty in breathing being a perfectly good way of describing it. Its onslaught is of very brief duration – like a squall, it is generally over within the hour. One could hardly, after all, expect anyone to keep on drawing his last breath for long, could one? I’ve been visited by all the troublesome or dangerous complaints there are, and none of them, in my opinion, is more unpleasant than this one – which is hardly surprising, is it, when you consider that with anything else you’re merely ill, while with this you’re constantly at your last gasp? This is why doctors have nicknamed it ‘rehearsing death’, since sooner or later the breath does just what it has been trying to do all those times. Do you imagine that as I write this I must be feeling in high spirits at having escaped this time? No, it would be just as absurd for me to feel overjoyed at its being over – as if this meant I was a healthy man again – as it would be for a person to think he has won his case on obtaining an extension of time before trial.

  Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections. ‘What’s this?’ I said. ‘So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.’ ‘When was this?’ you’ll say. Before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. If there is any torment in the later state, there must also have been torment in the period before we saw the light of day; yet we never felt conscious of any distress then. I ask you, wouldn’t you say that anyone who took the view that a lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was lit was an utter idiot? We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquillity. For, unless I’m mistaken, we are wrong, my dear Lucilius, in holding that death follows after, when in fact it precedes as well as succeeds. Death is all that was before us. What does it matter, after all, whether you cease to be or never begin, when the result of either is that you do not exist?

  I kept on talking to myself in these and similar terms – silently, needless to say, words being out of the question. Then little by little the affliction in my breathing, which was coming to be little more than a panting now, came on at longer intervals and slackened away. It has lasted on, all the same, and in spite of the passing of this attack, my breathing is not yet coming naturally. I feel a sort of catch and hesitation in it. Let it do as it pleases, though, so long as the sighs aren’t heartfelt. You can feel assured on my score of this: I shall not be afraid when the last hour comes – I’m already prepared, not planning as much as a day ahead. The man, though, whom you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die. For where’s the virtue in going out when you’re really being thrown out? And yet there is this virtue about my case: I’m in the process of
being thrown out, certainly, but the manner of it is as if I were going out. And the reason why it never happens to a wise man is that being thrown out signifies expulsion from a place one is reluctant to depart from, and there is nothing the wise man does reluctantly. He escapes necessity because he wills what necessity is going to force on him.

  LETTER LV

  I’VE just this moment returned from a ride in my sedanchair, feeling as tired as if I’d walked the whole distance instead of being seated all the way. Even to be carried for any length of time is hard work, and all the more so, I dare say, because it is unnatural, nature having given us legs with which to do our own walking, just as she gave us eyes with which to do our own seeing. Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility; we cease to be able to do the things we’ve long been grudging about doing. However, I was needing to give my body a shaking up, either to dislodge some phlegm, perhaps, that had collected in my throat, or to have some thickness, due to one cause or another, in my actual breathing reduced by the motion, which I’ve noticed before has done me some good. So I deliberately continued the ride for quite a long way, with the beach itself tempting me onwards. It sweeps round between Cumae and Servilius Vatia’s country house in a sort of narrow causeway with the sea on one side and a lagoon on the other. A recent storm had left it firm; for, as you know, a fast-running heavy surf makes a beach flat and smooth, while a longish period of calm weather leads to a disintegration of this surface with the disappearance of the moisture that binds the particles of sand together.

  I had started looking around me in my usual way to see whether I could find anything I could turn to good account, when my eyes turned to the house which had once belonged to Vatia. This was the place where Vatia passed the latter part of his life, a wealthy man who had held the office of praetor but was famed for nothing but his life of retirement, and considered a fortunate man on that ground alone. For whenever a man was ruined through being a friend of Asinius Gallus or an enemy of Sejanus, or devoted to Sejanus (for it came to be as dangerous to have been a follower of his as it was to cross him), people used to exclaim, ‘Vatia, you’re the only person who knows how to live!’ What in fact he knew was how to hide rather than how to live. And there is a lot of difference between your life being a retiring one and its being a spineless one. I never used to pass this house while Vatia was alive without saying, ‘Here lieth Vatia.’ But philosophy, my dear Lucilius, is such a holy thing and inspires so much respect, that even something that resembles it has a specious appeal. Let a man retire and the common crowd will think of him as leading a life apart, free of all cares, self-contented, living for himself, when in fact not one of these blessings can be won by anyone other than the philosopher. He alone knows how to live for himself: he is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing, how to live. The person who has run away from the world and his fellow-men, whose exile is due to the unsuccessful outcome of his own desires, who is unable to endure the sight of others more fortunate, who has taken to some place of hiding in his alarm like a timid, inert animal, he is not ‘living for himself’, but for his belly and his sleep and his passions – in utter degradation, in other words. The fact that a person is living for nobody does not automatically mean that he is living for himself. Still, a persevering steadfastness of purpose counts for a lot, so that even inertia if stubbornly maintained may carry a certain weight.

  I can’t give you any accurate information about the house itself. I only know the front of it and the parts in view, the parts that it displays even to passers-by. There are two artificial grottoes, considerable feats of engineering, each as big as the most spacious hall, one of them not letting in the sun at all, the other retaining it right up until its setting. There is a grove of plane trees through the middle of which runs a stream flowing alternately, like a tide-race, into the sea and into the Acherusian Lake, a stream capable of supporting a stock of fish even if constantly exploited; it is left alone, though, when the sea is open: only when bad weather gives the fishermen a holiday do they lay hands on this ready supply. But the most advantageous feature of the house is that it has Baiae next door; it enjoys all the amenities of that resort and is free from its disadvantages. I can speak for these attractions from personal knowledge, and I am quite prepared to believe, too, that it is an all-the-year-round house, since it lies in the path of the western breeze, catching it to such an extent as to exclude Baiae from the benefit of it. Vatia seems to have been no fool in choosing this place as the one in which he would spend his retirement, sluggish and senile as that retirement had become.

  The place one’s in, though, doesn’t make any contribution to peace of mind: it’s the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself. I’ve seen for myself people sunk in gloom in cheerful and delightful country houses, and people in completely secluded surroundings who looked as if they were run off their feet. So there’s no reason why you should feel that you’re not as much at rest in your mind as you might be just because you’re not here in Campania. Why aren’t you, for that matter? Transmit your thoughts all the way here. There’s nothing to stop you enjoying the company of absent friends, as often as you like, too, and for as long as you like. This pleasure in their company – and there’s no greater pleasure – is one we enjoy the more when we’re absent from one another. For having our friends present makes us spoilt; as a result of our talking and walking and sitting together every now and then, on being separated we haven’t a thought for those we’ve just been seeing. One good reason, too, why we should endure the absence patiently is the fact that every one of us is absent to a great extent from his friends even when they are around. Count up in this connexion first the nights spent away from one another, then the different engagements that keep each one busy, then the time passed in the privacy of one’s study and in trips into the country, and you’ll see that periods abroad don’t deprive us of so very much. Possession of a friend should be with the spirit: the spirit’s never absent: it sees daily whoever it likes. So share with me my studies, my meals, my walks. Life would be restricted indeed if there were any barrier to our imaginations. I see you, my dear Lucilius, I hear you at this very moment. I feel so very much with you that I wonder whether I shouldn’t start writing you notes rather than letters!

  LETTER LVI

  I CANNOT for the life of me see that quiet is as necessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be. Here am I with a babel of noise going on all about me. I have lodgings right over a public bathhouse. Now imagine to yourself every kind of sound that can make one weary of one’s years. When the strenuous types are doing their exercises, swinging weight-laden hands about, I hear the grunting as they toil away – or go through the motions of toiling away – at them, and the hissings and strident gasps every time they expel their pent up breath. When my attention turns to a less active fellow who is contenting himself with an ordinary inexpensive massage, I hear the smack of a hand pummelling his shoulders, the sound varying according as it comes down flat or cupped. But if on top of this some ball player comes along and starts shouting out the score, that’s the end! Then add someone starting up a brawl, and someone else caught thieving, and the man who likes the sound of his voice in the bath, and the people who leap into the pool with a tremendous splash. Apart from those whose voices are, if nothing else, natural, think of the hair remover, continually giving vent to his shrill and penetrating cry in order to advertise his presence, never silent unless it be while he is plucking someone’s armpits and making the client yell for him! Then think of the various cries of the man selling drinks, and the one selling sausages and the other selling pastries, and all the ones hawking for the catering shops, each publicizing his wares with a distinctive cry of his own.

  ‘You must be made of iron,’ you may say, ‘or else hard of hearing if your mind is unaffected by all this babel of discordant noises around you, when continual “good morning” greetings were enough to finish off the Stoic Chrysippus!
’ But I swear I no more notice all this roar of noise than I do the sound of waves or falling water – even if I am here told the story of a people on the Nile who moved their capital solely because they could not stand the thundering of a cataract! Voices, I think, are more inclined to distract one than general noise; noise merely fills one’s ears, battering away at them while voices actually catch one’s attention. Among the things which create a racket all around me without distracting me at all I include the carriages hurrying by in the street, the carpenter who works in the same block, a man in the neighbourhood who saws, and this fellow tuning horns and flutes at the Trickling Fountain and emitting blasts instead of music. I still find an intermittent noise more irritating than a continuous one. But by now I have so steeled myself against all these things that I can even put up with a coxswain’s strident tones as he gives his oarsmen the rhythm. For I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things distract it. There can be absolute bedlam without so long as there is no commotion within, so long as fear and desire are not at loggerheads, so long as meanness and extravagance are not at odds and harassing each other. For what is the good of having silence throughout the neighbourhood if one’s emotions are in turmoil?

  The peaceful stillness of the night had lulled

  The world to rest.*

  This is incorrect. There is no such thing as ‘peaceful stillness’ except where reason has lulled it to rest. Night does not remove our worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties. For even when people are asleep they have dreams as troubled as their days. The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind. Look at the man whose quest for sleep demands absolute quiet from his spacious house. To prevent any sound disturbing his ears every one of his host of slaves preserves total silence and those who come anywhere near him walk on tip-toe. Naturally enough he tosses from side to side, trying to snatch some fitful sleep in between the spells of fretting, and complains of having heard sounds when he never heard them at all. And what do you suppose is the reason? His mind is in a ferment. It is this which needs to be set at peace. Here is the mutiny that needs to be suppressed. The fact that the body is lying down is no reason for supposing that the mind is at peace. Rest is sometimes far from restful. Hence our need to be stimulated into general activity and kept occupied and busy with pursuits of the right nature whenever we are victims of the sort of idleness that wearies of itself. When great military commanders notice indiscipline among their men they suppress it by giving them some work to do, mounting expeditions to keep them actively employed. People who are really busy never have enough time to become skittish. And there is nothing so certain as the fact that the harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.