Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  What has the philosopher investigated? What has the philosopher brought to light? In the first place, truth and nature (having, unlike the rest of the animal world, followed nature with more than just a pair of eyes, things slow to grasp divinity); and secondly, a rule of life, in which he has brought life into line with things universal. And he has taught us not just to recognize but to obey the gods, and to accept all that happens exactly as if it were an order from above. He has told us not to listen to false opinions, and has weighed and valued everything against standards which are true. He has condemned pleasures an inseparable element of which is subsequent regret, has commended the good things which will always satisfy, and for all to see has made the man who has no need of luck the luckiest man of all, and the man who is master of himself the master of all.

  The philosophy I speak of is not the one* which takes the citizen out of public life and the gods out of the world we live in, and hands morality over to pleasure, but the philosophy which thinks nothing good unless it is honourable, which is incapable of being enticed astray by the rewards of men or fortune, and the very pricelessness of which lies in the fact that it cannot be bought at any price. And I do not believe that this philosophy was in existence in that primitive era in which technical skills were still unknown and useful knowledge was acquired through actual practical experience, or that it dates from an age that was happy, an age in which the bounties of nature were freely available for the use of all without discrimination, before avarice and luxury split human beings up and got them to abandon partnership for plunder. The men of that era were not philosophers, even if they acted as philosophers are supposed to act.† No other state of man could cause anyone greater admiration; if God were to allow a man to fashion the things of this earth and allot its peoples their social customs, that man would not be satisfied with any other system than the one which tradition says existed in those people’s time, among whom

  No farmers tilled ploughed fields; merely to mark

  The line of boundaries dividing land

  Between its owners was a sin; men shared

  Their findings, and the earth herself then gave

  All things more freely unsolicited.*

  What race of men could be luckier? Share and share alike they enjoyed nature. She saw to each and every man’s requirements for survival like a parent. What it all amounted to was undisturbed possession of resources owned by the community. I can surely call that race of men one of unparalleled riches, it being impossible to find a single pauper in it.

  Into this ideal state of things burst avarice, avarice which in seeking to put aside some article or other and appropriate it to its own use, only succeeded in making everything somebody else’s property and reducing its possessions to a fraction of its previously unlimited wealth. Avarice brought in poverty, by coveting a lot of possessions losing all that it had. This is why although it may endeavour to make good its losses, may acquire estate after estate by buying out or forcing out its neighbours, enlarge country properties to the dimensions of whole provinces, speak of ‘owning some property’ when it can go on a long tour overseas without once stepping off its own land, there is no extension of our boundaries that can bring us back to our starting point. When we have done everything within our power, we shall possess a great deal: but we once possessed the world.

  The earth herself, untilled, was more productive, her yields being more than ample for the needs of peoples who did not raid each other. With any of nature’s products, men found as much pleasure in showing others what they had discovered as they did in discovering it. No one could outdo or be outdone by any other. All was equally divided among people living in complete harmony. The stronger had not yet started laying hands on the weaker; the avaricious person had not yet started hiding things away, to be hoarded for his own private use, so shutting the next man off from actual necessities of life; each cared as much about the other as about himself. Weapons were unused; hands still unstained with human blood had directed their hostility exclusively against wild beasts.

  Protected from the sun in some thick wood, living in some very ordinary shelter under a covering of leaves preserving them from the rigours of winter or the rain, those people passed tranquil nights with never a sigh. We in our crimson luxury toss and turn with worry, stabbed by needling cares. What soft sleep the hard earth gave those people! They had no carved or panelled ceilings hanging over them. They lay out in the open, with the stars slipping past above them and the firmament silently conveying onward that mighty work of creation as it was carried headlong below the horizon in the magnificent pageant of the night sky. And they had clear views by day as well as by night of this loveliest of mansions, enjoying the pleasure of watching constellations falling away from the zenith and others rising again from out of sight beneath the horizon. Surely it was a joy to roam the earth with marvels scattered so widely around one. You now, by contrast, go pale at every noise your houses make, and if there is a creaking sound you run away along your frescoed passages in alarm. Those people had no mansions on the scale of towns. Fresh air and the untrammelled breezes of the open spaces, the unoppressive shade of a tree or rock, springs of crystal clarity, streams which chose their own course, streams unsullied by the work of man, by pipes or any other interference with their natural channels, meadows whose beauty owed nothing to man’s art, that was the environment around their dwelling places in the countryside, dwelling places given a simple countryman’s finish. This was a home in conformity with nature, a home in which one enjoyed living, and which occasioned neither fear of it nor fears for it, whereas nowadays our own homes count for a large part of our feeling of insecurity.

  But however wonderful and guileless the life they led, they were not wise men; this is a title that has come to be reserved for the highest of all achievements. All the same, I should be the last to deny that they were men of exalted spirit, only one step removed, so to speak, from the gods. There can be no doubt that before this earth was worn out it produced a better type of offspring. But though they all possessed a character more robust than that of today, and one with a greater aptitude for hard work, it is equally true that their personalities fell short of genuine perfection. For nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art. Certainly they did not go in search of gold or silver or the various crystalline stones to be found in the nethermost dregs of the earth. They were still merciful even to dumb animals. Man was far and away from killing man, not out of fear or provocation, but simply for entertainment. They had yet to wear embroidered clothing, and had yet to have gold woven into robes, or even mine it. But the fact remains that their innocence was due to ignorance and nothing else. And there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, choosing not to do what is wrong and, on the other, not knowing how to do it in the first place. They lacked the cardinal virtues of justice, moral insight, selfcontrol and courage. There were corresponding qualities, in each case not unlike these, that had a place in their primitive lives; but virtue only comes to a character which has been thoroughly schooled and trained and brought to a pitch of perfection by unremitting practice. We are born for it, but not with it. And even in the best of people, until you cultivate it there is only the material for virtue, not virtue itself.

  LETTER XCI

  MY friend Liberalis is in some distress at the present moment following the news of the complete destruction of Lyons by fire. It is a disaster by which anyone might be shaken, let alone a person quite devoted to his home town. This event has left him groping for that staunchness of spirit which, naturally enough, he cultivated when it was a case of facing what to him were conceivable fears. One is not surprised, though, that there were never any advance fears of such an unexpected, virtually unheard of catastrophe, considering that there was no precedent for it. Plenty of cities have suffered damage by fire, but none has ever been blotted out by one. Even when its buildings have been set aflame by enemy hands, in many places the flames the out,
and even if they are continually rekindled they are seldom so all-consuming as to leave nothing for tools to demolish. Earthquakes, too, have hardly ever been so ruinous and violent as to raze whole towns. There has never in fact been a fire so destructive as to leave nothing for a future fire to consume. But here a single night has laid low a host of architectural splendours any one of which might have been the glory of a separate city. In the depth of peace there has come such a blow as could not have been dreaded in war itself. Who would believe it? At a time when military conflict is in abeyance everywhere, when an international peace covers all parts of the globe, Lyons, the showpiece of Gaul, is lost to view. Fortune invariably allows those whom she strikes down in the sight of all a chance to fear what they were going to suffer. The fall of anything great generally takes time. But here a single night is all there was between a mighty city and no city at all. It was destroyed in fact in less time than I have taken telling you of its destruction.

  Sturdy and resolute though he is when it comes to facing his own troubles, our Liberalis has been deeply shocked by the whole thing. And he has some reason to be shaken. What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person’s grief. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events. For what is there that fortune does not when she pleases fell at the height of its powers? What is there that is not the more assailed and buffeted by her the more lustrous its attraction? What is there that is troublesome or difficult for her? Her assaults do not always come along a single path, or even a well-recognized path. At one time she will call in the aid of our own hands in attacking us, at another she will be content with her own powers in devising for us dangers for which no one is responsible. No moment is exempt: in the midst of pleasures there are found the springs of suffering. In the middle of peace war rears its head, and the bulwarks of one’s security are transformed into sources of alarm, friend turning foe and ally turning enemy. The summer’s calm is upset by sudden storms more severe than those of winter. In the absence of any enemy we suffer all that an enemy might wreak on us. Overmuch prosperity if all else fails will hit on the instruments of its own destruction. Sickness assails those leading the most sensible lives, tuberculosis those with the strongest constitutions, retribution the utterly guiltless, violence the most secluded. Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it. A single day strews in ruins all that was raised by a train of construction extending over a long span of time and involving a great number of separate works and a great deal of favour on the part of heaven. To say a ‘day’, indeed, is to put too much of a brake on the calamities that hasten down upon us: an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires. It would be some relief to our condition and our frailty if all things were as slow in their perishing as they were in their coming into being: but as it is, the growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid matter.

  Nothing is durable, whether for an individual or for a society; the destinies of men and cities alike sweep onwards. Terror strikes amid the most tranquil surroundings, and without any disturbance in the background to give rise to them calamities spring from the least expected quarter. States which stood firm through civil war as well as wars external collapse without a hand being raised against them. How few nations have made of their prosperity a lasting thing! This is why we need to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about. Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. Misfortune may snatch you away from your country, or your country away from you, may banish you into some wilderness – these very surroundings in which the masses suffocate may become a wilderness. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes; we should be anticipating not merely all that commonly happens but all that is conceivably capable of happening, if we do not want to be overwhelmed and struck numb by rare events as if they were unprecedented ones; fortune needs envisaging in a thoroughly comprehensive way. Think how often towns in Asia or in Greece have fallen at a single earth tremor, how many villages in Syria or Macedonia have been engulfed, how often this form of disaster has wrought devastation in Cyprus, how often Paphos has tumbled about itself! Time and again we hear the news of the annihilation of a whole city, and how small a fraction of mankind are we who hear such news this often! So let us face up to the blows of circumstance and be aware that whatever happens is never as serious as rumour makes it out to be.

  So a city has burned, a wealthy city and the glory of the provinces of which it was a feature though it stood in a class of its own, perched as it was on a single hill and that not a hill of very great dimensions. But time will sweep away the very traces of every one of those cities of whose splendour and magnificence you nowadays hear. Look at the way the very foundations of once famous cities of Greece have been eroded by now to the point where nothing is left to show that they ever even existed. And it is not only the works of human hands that waste away, nor only structures raised by human skill and industry that the passing days demolish. Mountain massifs crumble away, whole regions have subsided, the waves have covered landmarks once far out of sight of the sea. The immense force of volcanic fires that once made the mountain-tops glow has eaten them away and reduced to lowly stature what once were soaring peaks, reassuring beacons to the mariner. The works of nature herself suffer. So it is only right that we should bear the overthrow of cities with resignation. They stand just to fall. Such is the sum total of the end that awaits them, whether it be the blast of a subterranean explosion throwing off the restraining weight above it, or the violence of floodwaters increasing to a prodigious degree underground until it breaks down everything in its way, or a volcanic outburst fracturing the earth’s crust, or age (to which nothing is immune) overcoming them little by little, or plague carrying off its population and causing the deserted area to decay. It would be tedious to recount all the different ways by which fate may overtake them. One thing I know: all the works of mortal man lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.

  Such, then, are the comforting reflections which I would offer our Liberalis, who burns with a kind of passion beyond belief for his birthplace – which it may be has only been consumed so as to be called to higher things. A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights. That opponent of affluence in the capital, Timagenes, used to declare that the one reason fires distressed him was the knowledge that what would rise up afterwards would be of a better standard than what had burned. In the city of Lyons, too, one may presume that everyone will endeavour to make the work of restoration a greater, more noble achievement than what they have lost. May that work be of lasting duration, and may the new foundation be attended by happier auspices with a view to its lasting for a longer and indeed for all time! This is the hundredth year since the town came into being, and even for a human being such an age is by no means the uttermost limit. Founded by Plancus in an area of concentrated population, it owes its growth to its favourable situation: yet how many grievous blows it has had to suffer in the time it takes for a man to grow old.

  So the spirit must be trained to a realization and an acceptance of its lot. It must come to see that there is nothing fortune will shrink from, that she wields the same authority over emperor and empire alike and the same power over cities as over men. There’s no ground for resentment in all this. We’ve entered into a world in which these are the terms life is lived on – if you’re satisfied with that, submit to them, if you’re not, get out, whatever way you please. Resent a thing by all means if it represents an injustice decreed against yourself personally; but
if this same constraint is binding on the lowest and the highest alike, then make your peace again with destiny, the destiny that unravels all ties. There’s no justification for using our graves and all the variety of monuments we see bordering the highways as a measure of our stature. In the ashes all men are levelled. We’re born unequal, we the equal. And my words apply as much to cities as to those who live in them. Ardea was taken, and so was Rome. The great lawgiver draws no distinctions between us according to our birth or the celebrity of our names, save only while we exist. On the reaching of mortality’s end he declares, ‘Away with snobbery; all that the earth carries shall forthwith be subject to one law without discrimination.’ When it comes to all we’re required to go through, we’re equals. No one is more vulnerable than the next man, and no one can be more sure of his surviving to the morrow.

  King Alexander of Macedon once took up the study of geometry – poor fellow, inasmuch as he would this find out how minute the earth really was, the earth of which he had possessed himself of a tiny part; yes, ‘poor fellow’ I call him, for the reason that he was bound to discover that his title was a false one; for who can be ‘Great’ in an area of minute dimensions? Anyway, the points he was being instructed in were of some subtlety and such that the learning of them demanded the closest concentration, not the sort of thing that would be grasped by a crazed individual projecting his thoughts across the seas. ‘Teach me,’ he said, ‘the easy things,’ to which his instructor answered, ‘These things are the same for everyone, equally difficult for all.’ Well, imagine that nature is saying to you, “Those things you grumble about are the same for everyone. I can give no one anything easier. But anyone who likes may make them easier for himself.’ How? By viewing them with equanimity.