Seneca by Penguin
Ref: Penguin Group (1969). Seneca. Letters by a Stoic. Penguin.
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Summary
I am acting on behalf of later generations. I am writing down a few things that may be of use to them; I am committing to writing some helpful recommendations, which might be compared to the formulae of successful medications, the effectiveness of which I have experienced in the case of my own sores, which may not have been completely cured but have at least ceased to spread. I am pointing out to others the right path, which I have recognized only late in life, when I am worn out with my wanderings (Letter VIII).
Philosophy is not an occupation of a popular nature, nor is it pursued for the sake of self-advertisement. Its concern is not with words, but with facts. It is not carried on with the object of passing the day in an entertaining sort of way and taking the boredom out of leisure. It molds and builds the personality, orders one’s life, regulates one’s conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm, and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas. Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry. Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to philosophy (Letter XVI).
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 (Letter CVIII).
Pursue a straight course and eventually reach that destination where the things that are pleasant and the things that are honourable finally become, for you, the same. And we can achieve this if we realize that there are two classes of things attracting or repelling us. We are attracted by wealth, pleasures, good looks, political advancement and various other welcoming and enticing prospects: we are repelled by exertion, death, pain, disgrace and limited means. It follows that we need to train ourselves not to crave for the former and not to be afraid of the latter. Let us fight the battle the other way round – retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us (Letter CXXIII).
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Stoicism
Stoicism: Founded by Zeno in ~300 BCE. The Stoics saw the world as a single great community in which all men are brothers, ruled by a supreme providence which could be spoken of, almost according to choice or context, under a variety of names or descriptions including the divine reason, creative reason, nature, the spirit or purpose of the universe, destiny, a personal god, even (by way of concession to traditional religion) ‘the gods’. It is man’s duty to live in conformity with the divine will, and this means, firstly, bringing his life into line with ‘nature’s laws’, and secondly, resigning himself completely and uncomplainingly to whatever fate may send him. Only by living thus, and not setting too high a value on things which can at any moment be taken away from him, can he discover that true, unshakeable peace and contentment to which ambition, luxury and above all avarice are among the greatest obstacles.
Living ‘in accordance with nature’ means not only questioning convention and training ourselves to do without all except the necessities (plain food, water, basic clothing and shelter) but developing the inborn gift of reason which marks us off as different from the animal world.
The summum bonum or ‘supreme ideal’, is usually summarized in ancient philosophy as a combination of four qualities: wisdom (or moral insight), courage, self-control and justice (or upright dealing). It enables a man to be ‘self-sufficient’, immune to suffering, superior to the wounds and upsets of life (often personalized as Fortuna, the goddess of fortune).
The duties it inculcated – courage and endurance, self-control and self-reliance, upright conduct and just dealing, simple and unluxurious habits, rationality, obedience to the state – were self-evident to many Romans, corresponding quite closely to the traditional idea of virtus.
The target stoics set seem too high for ordinary men. It stifled and repressed ordinary human emotions in striving after apatheia, immunity to feeling.
Stoicism held that in certain circumstances a man’s self-respect may invite, as an act of supreme nobility, his suicide.
In pursuing the ideal of autarkeia, self-sufficiency, it seemed to make the perfect man a person detached and aloof from his fellows, superior to the world he lived in. Altogether the impression it conveyed, for all its idealism and sincerity, could be cold, dogmatic and unrealistic.
Stoics had an implicit belief in the equality and brotherhood of man despite all barriers of race or class or rank.
Natural Law: The law which was thought to transcend national boundaries and form a basis for the validity of international law.
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LETTER II
To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.
If you say, ‘But I feel like opening different books at different times’, my answer will be this: tasting one dish after another is the sign of a fussy stomach, and where the foods are dissimilar and diverse in range they lead to contamination of the system, not nutrition.
Each day, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well.
After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day.
It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.
What is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.
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LETTER III
If you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.
After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge.
Trusting everyone is as much a fault as trusting no one (though I should call the first the worthier and the second the safer behaviour).
Delight in bustling about is not industry – it is only the restless energy of a hunted mind. And the state of mind that looks on all activity as tiresome is not true repose, but a spineless inertia.
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LETTER V
Refrain from following the example of those whose craving is for attention, not their own improvement, by doing certain things which are calculated to give rise to comment on your appearance or way of living generally.
The first thing philosophy promises us is the feeling of fellowship, of belonging to mankind and being members of a community; being different will mean the abandoning of that manifesto.
One’s life should be a compromise between the ideal and the popular morality.
Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope and you will cease to fear’ (Hecato).
Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present. Thus, it is that foresight, the greatest blessing humanity has been given, is transformed into a curse.
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LETTER VI
Friendship…(is the) mutual inclination of two personalities…in a fellowship of desire for all that is honourable.
Nothing, however outstanding and however helpful, will ever give me any pleasure if the knowledge is to be for my benefit alone.
There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.
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LETTER VII
YOU ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd. It is something to which you cannot entrust yourself yet without risk.
Associating with people in large numbers is actually harmful: there is not one of them that will not make some vice or other attractive to us, or leave us carrying the imprint of it or bedaubed all unawares with it. And inevitably enough, the larger the size of the crowd we mingle with, the greater the danger.
When a mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd: it is so easy for it to go over to the majority.
You should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach.
Your merits should not be outward facing.
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LETTER VIII
Indulge the body just so far as suffices for good health.
Your food should appease your hunger, your drink quench your thirst, your clothing keep out the cold, your house be a protection against inclement weather. It makes no difference whether it is built of turf or of variegated marble imported from another country: what you have to understand is that thatch makes a person just as good a roof as gold does. Spurn everything that is added on by way of decoration and display by unnecessary labour. Reflect that nothing merits admiration except the spirit, the impressiveness of which prevents it from being impressed by anything.’
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LETTER IX
The difference here between the Epicurean and our own school is this: our wise man feels his troubles but overcomes them, while their wise man does not even feel them.
The wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practicing friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle.
A person adopted as a friend for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful.
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.
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.
The wise man lacks nothing but needs 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.’-Chrysippus.
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.
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.
Any man 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.’-Epicurus.
Not happy he who thinks himself not so.
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LETTER XI
‘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.’
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.
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LETTER XII
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.
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.
‘What business have you got with someone else’s property?’ Whatever is true is my property.
The things of greatest merit are common property.
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LETTER XV
Without wisdom the mind is sick, and the body itself, however physically powerful, can only have the kind of strength that is found in persons in a demented or delirious state.
There is the taking on as coaches of the worst brand of slave, persons who divide their time between putting on lotion and putting down liquor, whose idea of a well spent day consists of getting up a good sweat and then replacing the fluid lost with plenty of drink, all the better to be absorbed on a dry stomach. Drinking and perspiring – it’s the life of a dyspeptic!
The mind has to be given some time off, but in such a way that it may be refreshed, not relaxed till it goes to pieces.
‘The life of folly is empty of gratitude, full of anxiety: it is focused wholly on the future’ (Greek maxim).
When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you.
Set yourself a limit which you couldn’t even exceed if you wanted to, and say good-bye at last to those deceptive prizes more precious to those who hope for them than to those who have won them.
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LETTER XVI
The perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life.
Making noble resolutions is not as important as keeping the resolutions you have made already.
You have to persevere and fortify your pertinacity until the will to good becomes a disposition to good.
You’ve no grounds for forming a ready, hasty belief in yourself. Carry out a searching analysis and close scrutiny of yourself in all sorts of different lights. Consider above all else whether you’ve advanced in philosophy or just in actual years.
‘If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.’-Epicurus.
Nature’s wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.
Give up pointless, empty journeys, and whenever you want to know whether the desire aroused in you by something you are pursuing is natural or quite unseeing, ask yourself whether it is capable of coming to rest at any point; if after going a long way there is always something remaining farther away, be sure it is not something natural.
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LETTER XVIII
Set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, coarse clothing, and will ask yourself, ‘Is this what one used to dread?’ It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times…Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes more, so that it is a genuine trial and not an amusement.
Cultivate a relationship with poverty.
As with fire what matters is not the fierceness of the flame but where it catches – solid objects may resist the fiercest flame while, conversely, dry and inflammable matter will nurse a mere spark into a conflagration…The outcome of violent anger is a mental raving, and therefore anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.
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LETTER XXVI
‘Rehearse death.’ To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
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LETTER XXVII
Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do.
A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.
Something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often. With some people you only need to point to a remedy; others need to have it rammed into them.
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LETTER XXVIII
We should live with the conviction: ‘I wasn’t born for one particular corner: the whole world’s my home country.’
I do not agree with those who recommend a stormy life and plunge straight into the breakers, waging a spirited struggle against worldly obstacles every day of their lives. The wise man will put up with these things, not go out of his way to meet them; he will prefer a state of peace to a state of war.
‘A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation.’-Epicurus.
To the best of your ability – demonstrate your own guilt, conduct inquiries of your own into all the evidence against yourself. Play the part first of prosecutor, then of judge and finally of pleader in mitigation. Be harsh with yourself at times.
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LETTER XXXIII
One tree by itself never calls for admiration when the whole forest rises to the same height.
A work of genius is a synthesis of its individual features from which nothing can be subtracted without disaster.
A woman is not beautiful when her ankle or arm wins compliments, but when her total appearance diverts admiration from the individual parts of her body.
It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook…‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said? ‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders? Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.
A spiritless lot – the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else’s shadow.
It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to your memory, whereas to know, by contrast, is actually to make each item your own, and not to be dependent on some original and be constantly looking to see what the master said.
No new findings will ever be made if we rest content with the findings of the past.
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LETTER XXXVIII
Words need to be sown like seed. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when it lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size. Reason does the same; to the outward eye its dimensions may be insignificant, but with activity it starts developing.
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LETTER XL
Language which devotes its attention to truth ought to be plain and unadorned.
Be a slow-speaking person.
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LETTER XLI
A god (what god we are uncertain) dwells.
If you have ever come on a dense wood of ancient trees that have risen to an exceptional height, shutting out all sight of the sky with one thick screen of branches upon another, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, your sense of wonderment at finding so deep and unbroken a gloom out of doors, will persuade you of the presence of a deity. Any cave in which the rocks have been eroded deep into the mountain resting on it, its hollowing out into a cavern of impressive extent not produced by the labours of men but the result of processes of nature, will strike into your soul some kind of inkling of the divine.
A man who is never alarmed by dangers, never affected by cravings, happy in adversity, calm in the midst of storm, viewing mankind from a higher level and the gods from their own, is it not likely that a feeling will find its way into you of veneration for him?
No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.
Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man’s. You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit.
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LETTER XLVII
Treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your own superiors.
Value your inferiors according to their character, not their jobs. Each man has a character of his own choosing; it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job.
A man who examines the saddle and bridle and not the animal itself when he is out to buy a horse is a fool; similarly, only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.
Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear…There’s no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
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LETTER XLVIII
We have neither successes nor setbacks as individuals; our lives have a common end. No one can lead a happy life if he thinks only of himself and turns everything to his own purposes. You should live for the other person if you wish to live for yourself.
Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity? Counsel.
You’re called in to help the unhappy. You’re pledged to bring succor to the shipwrecked, to those in captivity, to the sick, the needy and men who are just placing their heads beneath the executioner’s uplifted axe.
All mankind are stretching out their hands to you on every side. Lives that have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you that they look for hope and assistance. They are begging you to extricate them from this awful vortex, to show them in their doubt and disarray the shining torch of truth. Tell them what nature has made necessary and what she has made superfluous. Tell them how simple are the laws she has laid down, and how straightforward and enjoyable life is for those who follow them and how confused and disagreeable it is for others who put more trust in popular ideas than they do in nature.
What philosophy has promised me – that she will make me God’s equal.
Isn’t it the height of folly to learn inessential things when time’s so desperately short!
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LETTER LIII
We are attended by an appalling forgetfulness of our weaknesses.
The worse a person is, the less he feels it.
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.
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.’
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LETTER LIV
The man 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.
There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly. He escapes necessity because he wills what necessity is going to force on him.
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LETTER LV
Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility.
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.
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LETTER LVI
The only true serenity is the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.
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.
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LETTER LXIII
You have buried someone you loved. Now look for someone to love. It is better to make good the loss of a friend than to cry over him.
Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.
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LETTER LXV
Are you telling me not to investigate the natural world? Are you trying to bar me from the whole of it and restrict me to a part of it? Am I not to inquire how everything in the universe began, who gave things form, who separated them out when they were all plunged together in a single great conglomeration of inert matter? Am I not to inquire into the identity of the artist who created that universe? Or the process by which this huge mass became subject to law and order? Or the nature of the one who collected the things that were scattered apart, sorted apart the things that were commingled, and when all things lay in formless chaos allotted them their individual shapes? Or the source of the light (is it fire or is it something brighter?) that is shed on us in such abundance? Am I supposed not to inquire into this sort of thing? Am I not to know where I am descended from, whether I am to see this world only once or be born into it again time after time, what my destination is to be after my stay here, what abode will await my soul on its release from the terms of its serfdom on earth? Are you forbidding me to associate with heaven, in other words ordering me to go through life with my eyes bent on the ground? I am too great, was born to too great a destiny to be my body’s slave.
What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end, this being the same as never having begun, nor of transition, for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here.
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LETTER LXXVII
What is a great thing is to die in a manner which is honourable, enlightened and courageous.
Caligula was once passing a column of captives on the Latin Road when one of them, with a hoary old beard reaching down his breast, begged to be put to death. ‘So,’ replied Caligula, ‘you are alive, then, as you are?’ That is the answer to give to people to whom death would actually come as a release. ‘You are scared of dying? So you are alive, then, as you are?’
It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.
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LETTER LXXVIII
My own advice to you – and not only in the present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear.
If you start giving yourself encouragement, saying to yourself, ‘It’s nothing – or nothing much, anyway – let’s stick it out, it’ll be over presently’, then in thinking it a trivial matter you will be ensuring that it actually is. Everything hangs on one’s thinking.
A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.
As soon as we have learnt to distinguish the good things and the bad things in this world. Then and then only shall we stop being weary of living as well as scared of dying. For a life spent viewing all the variety, the majesty, the sublimity in things around us can never succumb to ennui: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing, is usually the result of an idle and inactive leisure.
Truth will never pall on someone who explores the world of nature, wearied as a person will be by the spurious things.
Time adds nothing to the finer things in life.
Any life must needs seem short to people who measure it in terms of pleasures which through their empty nature are incapable of completeness.
‘In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.’-Posidonius.
Cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.
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LETTER LXXXIII
What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.
I’m grateful for old age, for the exercise costs me little trouble. I only have to stir and I’m weary, and that after all is the end of exercise even for the strongest.
Drunkenness inflames and lays bare every vice, removing the reserve that acts as a check on impulses to wrong behaviour.
What else was it but drinking to excess, together with a passion for Cleopatra itself as potent as drink, that ruined that great and gifted man, Mark Antony, dragging him down into foreign ways of living and un-Roman vices? This it was that made him an enemy of the state; this is what made him no match for his enemies; it was this that made him cruel, having the heads of his country’s leading men brought in to him at the dinner-table, identifying the hands and features of liquidated opponents in the course of banquets marked by sumptuous magnificence and regal pomp, still thirsting for blood when filled to the full with wine.
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LETTER LXXXVI
I’ve learnt from Aegialus (who’s the present owner of the estate, and gives a great deal of attention to its management) that trees can be transplanted even when quite old – a lesson that we old men need to learn when we reckon that every one of us who puts down a new olive plantation is doing so for someone else’s benefit.
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LETTER LXXXVIII
I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. Time should be spent on them only so long as one’s mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things.
Every day we’re running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew. We’re not spared those eye-distracting beauties, or attackers. We too have to contend in various places with savage monsters reveling in human blood, insidious voices that beguile our ears, shipwrecks and all manner of misfortune. What you should be teaching me is how I may attain such a love for my country, my father and my wife, and keep on course for those ideals even after shipwreck.
What use is it to me to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I’m unable to divide it with a brother? What use is the ability to measure out a portion of an acre with an accuracy extending even to the bits which elude the measuring rod if I’m upset when some high-handed neighbour encroaches slightly on my property? The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling.
Oh, the marvels of geometry! You geometers can calculate the areas of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating stars. Nothing’s outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you’re such an expert, measure a man’s soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you’ve no idea what straightness means in life?
Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen; but I do know what’s capable of happening – and none of this will give rise to any protest on my part. I’m ready for everything. If I’m let off in any way, I’m pleased. The day in question proves me wrong in a sense if it treats me leniently, but even so not really wrong, for just as I know that anything is capable of happening so also do I know that it’s not bound to happen. So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.
Moral Values (Moral Values are things which have to be learnt)
Bravery: Treating with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear; despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom.
Loyalty: The most sacred quality that can be found in a human breast, never corrupted by a bribe, never driven to betray by any form of compulsion.
Self-Control: The quality which takes command of the pleasures; some she dismisses out of hand, unable to tolerate them; others she merely regulates, ensuring that they are brought within healthy limits; never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like to but the amount you ought to take.
Humanity: The quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s fellows, or being acrimonious. In words, in actions, in emotions she reveals herself as kind and good-natured towards all. To her the troubles of anyone else are her own, and anything that benefits herself she welcomes primarily because it will be of benefit to someone else.
Virtue will not bring herself to enter the limited space we offer her; something of great size requires plenty of room. Let everything else be evicted, and your heart completely opened to her.
To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance.
Obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need.
Listen and let me show you the sorry consequences to which subtlety carried too far can lead, and what an enemy it is to truth. Protagoras declares that it is possible to argue either side of any question with equal force, even the question whether or not one can equally argue either side of any question! Nausiphanes declares that of the things which appear to us to exist, none exists any more than it does not exist. Parmenides declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole. Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian and Academic schools pursue more or less similar lines; the last named have introduced a new branch of knowledge, non-knowledge. Well, all these theories you should just toss on top of that heap of superfluous liberal studies. The people I first mentioned provide me with knowledge which is not going to be of any use to me, while the others snatch away from me any hopes of ever acquiring any knowledge at all. Superfluous knowledge would be preferable to no knowledge. One side offers me no guiding light to direct my vision towards the truth, while the other just gouges my eyes out. If I believe Protagoras there is nothing certain in the universe; if I believe Nausiphanes there is just the one certainty, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, only one thing exists; if Zeno, not even one. Then what are we? The things that surround us, the things on which we live, what are they? Our whole universe is no more than a semblance of reality, perhaps a deceptive semblance, perhaps one without substance altogether. I should find it difficult to say which of these people annoy me most, those who would have us know nothing or the ones who refuse even to leave us the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing.
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LETTER XC
Life is the gift of the immortal gods, but living well is the gift of philosophy?
Philosophy has the single task of discovering the truth about the divine and human worlds. The religious conscience, the sense of duty, justice and all the rest of the close-knit, interdependent ‘company of virtues’, never leave her side. Philosophy has taught men to worship what is divine, to love what is human, telling us that with the gods belongs authority, and among human beings fellowship.
People cease to possess everything as soon as they want everything for themselves.
The bull who leads the herd is not the weakling, but the one whose bulk and brawn has brought it victory over the other males. In a herd of elephants the tallest is the leader. Among human beings the highest merit means the highest position. So they used to choose their ruler for his character. Hence peoples were supremely fortunate when among them a man could never be more powerful than others unless he was a better man than they were. For there is nothing dangerous in a man’s having as much power as he likes if he takes the view that he has power to do only what it is his duty to do.
(In the) Golden Age, government, so Posidonius maintains, was in the hands of the wise. They kept the peace, protected the weaker from the stronger, urged and dissuaded, pointed out what was advantageous and what was not. Their ability to look ahead ensured that their peoples never went short of anything, whilst their bravery averted dangers and their devotedness brought well-being and prosperity to their subjects. To govern was to serve, not to rule. No one used to try out the extent of his power over those to whom he owed that power in the first place. And no one had either reason or inclination to perpetrate injustice, since people governing well were equally well obeyed, and a king could issue no greater threat to disobedient subjects than that of his own abdication.
Men in a state of freedom had thatch for their shelter, while slavery dwells beneath marble and gold.
Tell me which of these two you would say was a wise man, the one who hit on the saw, or the one who on seeing a boy drinking water from the hollow of his hand, immediately took the cup out of his knapsack and smashed it, telling himself off for his stupidity in having superfluous luggage about him all that time, and curled himself up in a jar and went to sleep.
Luxury has turned her back on nature, daily urging herself on and growing through all the centuries, pressing men’s intelligence into the development of the vices.
Philosophy is far above all this; she does not train men’s hands: she is the instructress of men’s minds…Philosophy takes as her aim the state of happiness…She strips men’s minds of empty thinking…She sees that we are left in no doubt about the difference between what is great and what is bloated.
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.
Nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.
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.
Virtue only comes to a character which has been thoroughly schooled and trained and brought to a pitch of perfection by unremitting practice.
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LETTER XCI
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.
The growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid matter.
All the works of mortal man lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.
A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.
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.
In the ashes, all men are levelled.
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LETTER CIV
A story is told that someone complained to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good and received the reply: ‘What else can you expect, seeing that you always take yourself along with you when you go abroad?’
What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
To lose someone you love is something you’ll regard as the hardest of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from the beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home.
Preserve a sense of proportion in your attitude to everything that pleases you.
If you’re sensible you’ll never hope without an element of despair, never despair without an element of hope.
Travel won’t make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, and carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered.
Mend your ways and get rid of the burden you’re carrying. Keep your cravings within safe limits. Scour every trace of evil from your personality.
For the only safe harbour in this life’s tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident, squaring the breast to take without skulking or flinching whatever fortune hurls at us.
It’s not because something is hard that we lose confidence; it’s hard because we lack the confidence.
Apart from what he had to contend with at home – whether one thinks of his wife with her shrewish ways and nagging tongue, or his intractable children, more like their mother than their father – his whole life was lived either in war-time or under tyranny or under a ‘democracy’ that outdid even wars and tyrants in its cruelties.
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.
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LETTER CV
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.
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LETTER CVII
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.
We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise.
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.
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.
For Fate The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.
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.
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LETTER CVIII
The more the mind takes in the more it expands.
‘A person teaching and a person learning, should have the same end in view: the improvement of the latter.’
The poor lack much, the greedy everything. The greedy man does no one any good, but harms no person more than his own self.
Speak out against the love of money. Speak out against extravagance.
The virtues of poverty show how everything which goes beyond our actual needs is just so much unnecessary weight, a burden to the man who has to carry it.
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).
Things tend 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.
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.
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.
How men can prove that their words are their own: let them put their preaching into practice.
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LETTER CXIV
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.
See, then, that the spirit is well looked after. Our thoughts and our words proceed from it. We derive our demeanor and expression and the very way we walk from it. If the spirit is sound and healthy our style will be firm and forceful and virile, but if the spirit tumbles all the rest of our personality comes down in ruins with it. The queen unharmed, the bees all live at one; Once she is lost, the hives in anarchy. The spirit is our queen. So long as she is unharmed, the rest remains at its post, obedient and submissive. If she wavers for a moment, in the same moment the rest all falters.
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LETTER CXXII
More active and commendable still is the person who is waiting for the daylight and intercepts the first rays of the sun; shame on him who lies in bed dozing when the sun is high in the sky, whose waking hours commence in the middle of the day – and even this time, for a lot of people, is the equivalent of the small hours.
Devotion to what is right is simple, devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations. It is the same with people’s characters; in those who follow nature they are straightforward and uncomplicated, and differ only in minor degree, while those that are warped are hopelessly at odds with the rest and equally at odds with themselves.
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LETTER CXXIII
Nothing is burdensome if taken lightly, and nothing need arouse one’s irritation so long as one doesn’t make it bigger than it is by getting irritated.
One shouldn’t eat until hunger demands. I shall wait, then, and not eat until I either start getting good bread again or cease to be fussy about bad bread. It is essential to make oneself used to putting up with a little. Even the wealthy and the well provided are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations. It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.
When the spirit has prepared itself beforehand, has called on itself in advance to show endurance, it is not so clear just how much real strength it possesses; the surest indications are the ones it gives on the spur of the moment, when it views annoyances in a manner not merely unruffled but serene, when it refrains from flying into a fit of temper or picking a quarrel with someone, when it sees to everything it requires by refraining from hankering after this and that, reflecting that one of its habits may miss a thing, but its own real self-need never do so.
Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are.
There are persons who spread vices. And association with them does a lot of damage.
The path that leads to pleasures is the downward one: the upward climb is the one that takes us to rugged and difficult ground. Here let us throw our bodies forward, in the other direction rein them back.
‘No man’s good by accident. Virtue has to be learnt. Pleasure is a poor and petty thing. No value should be set on it: it’s something we share with dumb animals – the minutest, most insignificant creatures scutter after it. Glory’s an empty, changeable thing, as fickle as the weather. Poverty’s no evil to anyone unless he kicks against it. Death is not an evil. What is it then? The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination. Superstition is an idiotic heresy: it fears those it should love: it dishonours those it worships. For what difference does it make whether you deny the gods or bring them into disrepute?’ These are things which should be learnt and not just learnt but learnt by heart. Philosophy has no business to supply vice with excuses; a sick man who is encouraged to live in a reckless manner by his doctor has not a hope of getting well.
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Ancient Eastern People
Aeneas: The hero of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid.
Anacharsis: Lived in the early 6c BCE and was one of the later so-called Seven Wise Men of antiquity; he appears to have preached the simple life later advocated by the Cynics, and to have been put to death for an attempt to introduce a Greek religious ritual into his country, Scythia (modern Southern Russia).
Anacreon: A Greek lyric poet born in ~570 BCE.
Ancus Martius: An early Roman king, traditionally 642-617 BCE.
Appius Claudius Caecus: Roman statesman, orator and first prose writer (~300 BCE).
Aristotle: Famous Greek philosopher (384-322 BCE), tutor of Alexander the Great.
Attalus: A stoic philosopher whose lectures Seneca attended.
Cambyses: King of Persia and its empire 529–521 B.C., conqueror of Egypt.
Cato (‘Marcus Porcius Cato’): Roman statesman and stern moral figure, in his own lifetime (95–46 B.C.) and centuries following celebrated for his unbending principles; an opponent of Caesar and after civil war broke out a follower of Pompey; famous suicide after defeat of Pompeian’s at Thapsus (in what is now Tunisia); looked back on by later Romans as a champion of the republic, freedom and (like his famous great-grandfather who bore the same name) the old Roman morality.
Chrysippus: Greek philosopher (c. 280–207 B.C.) head of the Stoic school following Cleanthes and a prolific writer; molded Stoicism into a formal system, with a basis in logic and a theory of knowledge to him probably more important than ethics.
Cicero (‘Marcus Tullius Cicero’): Roman advocate and statesman (106–43 B.C.), whose writings included works presenting, almost for the first time in Latin, the arguments of the Greek philosophers, and whose literary style became a model
Cleanthes: Greek philosopher, pupil and successor of Zeno as head (263–232 B.C.) of the Stoics; introduced a religious note into the philosophy; among his writings there was a famous hymn to Zeus, of which a Christian might almost have been the author if for ‘Zeus’ is read ‘God’; this has been preserved.
Cleopatra: Macedonian queen of Egypt whose ambitions, greatly feared at Rome, led her to become mistress in turn of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
Crassus (Marcus Licinius Crassus): Wealthy and power-hungry Roman politician of the 1c BCE and at different times opponent of Pompey or supporter of both Pompey and Caesar.
Croesus: Proverbially rich king of Lydia, in Asia Minor, in the 6c BCE, overthrown by the Persians.
Daedalus: In Greek mythology; the legendary craftsman to whom all inventions could be attributed.
Darius: Powerful ruler of the Persian Empire (521–486 B.C.), who made unsuccessful attempts to conquer Greece.
Daughters of Danaus: In Greek mythology; were set to fill a leaking jar as punishment in Hades.
Demetrius: Macedonian military figure and later (in the early 3c BCE) King; campaigned in Greece, Cyprus and the Near East.
Democritus: Much admired Greek philosopher and mathematician (c. 460-c. 370 B.C.); associated with elaborate atomic theory of matter or the universe.
Didymus: An immensely learned Alexandrian Greek scholar of the 1c BCE, producing (among other works) detailed commentaries on many classical authors.
Diogenes: Renowned Greek philosopher (c. 400–325 B.C.), founder of the Cynic sect (Greek kunikoi, the canine or ‘doggish’ people, so nicknamed, apparently, because he and many later followers lived by begging and made a virtue of shamelessness), wit, ascetic, declared enemy of convention and worldly goods, his preaching about virtue and the simple life was largely adopted by the Stoics.
Epicurus: Famous Greek philosopher (342/1–271/0 B.C.), founder of the Epicurean school, the main rival school to the Stoics; in physics followed, with modifications, Democritus’ atomist doctrine, regarded sense-perception as the only basis of knowledge, decried superstitions and all fear of the gods or death, and advocated a retiring life; the highest good, in his and his successors’ eyes, was pleasure (the Greek hedone), by which was meant not sensual indulgence but rather an independent freedom from all care; established in Athens a community living under him the simplest (e.g. diet mainly of bread and water) and most peaceful of existences; his letters, and will, reveal a warm, attractive personality.
Fabianus (‘Papirius Fabianus’): Philosopher, a pupil of Sextius, and a lecturer attended by Seneca.
Gallio (Lucius Junius Novatus): Seneca’s elder brother who became a consul and was governor of Achaea in 50-51.
Hecato: Stoic philosopher from Rhodes, pupil of Panaetius; who wrote mainly books on ethics.
Hermarchus: Disciple of Epicurus and his successor as head of the Epicurean school.
Livy: Chief Roman historian (59 B.C.-A.D. 17), writing over a period of 40y a history of Rome in 142 books from the earliest times to his own.
Lucilius (Lucilius Junior): The addressee of Seneca’s letters and of the Naturales Quaestiones (Problems in Nature) and of an essay De Providentia (On Providence).
Lycurgus: Legendary legislator of Sparta in Greece.
Nausiphanes: 4c BCE Greek philosopher who followed Democritus’ atomist theory and taught Epicurus.
Niobe: In Greek mythology a mother suddenly robbed by divine vengeance of all her children.
Numa (Numa Pompilius): An early Roman king, traditionally 715–673 BCE.
Panaetius: Stoic philosopher (c. 185–109 BCE) from Rhodes, who knew many leading Romans; having also been the teacher of Posidonius and an influence upon Cicero, he was largely instrumental in the making known of Stoicism to Romans.
Parmenides (~5c BCE): Greek philosopher living in Italy; a monist, often regarded as the founder of logic, whose study of the verb ‘to be’ led him to deny, in opposition to Heraclitus, that anything changes.
Lucius (Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi): Roman soldier and provincial governor (48 BCE-32); ‘praefectus’ (Prefect or Warden) of the City of Rome, enjoying the trust of Tiberius, for twenty years.
Plato (429-347 BCE): Famous Athenian philosopher greatly influenced by Socrates, of whom he was a pupil, author of the celebrated doctrine of ideas, thinker whose writings have influenced almost every philosopher, ancient or modern, since his day.
Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeus) (106-48 BCE): Ambitious and powerful Roman politician and successful general against foreign armies; at first allied to Caesar but later defeated by him in the civil wars and murdered.
Posidonius (~135-51 BCE): An important Stoic philosopher; a Greek of Syrian birth, pupil of Panaetius; also a historian and a scientist (studying the oceans and tides, and primitive cultures, and calculating the circumference of the earth and the distance between the earth and the sun); Cicero attended his lectures and his writings were widely read; he taught, unusually among Stoics, that the soul did not perish with the body.
Protagoras (5c BCE): Greek philosopher, the most notable of the itinerant Sophists, an agnostic and sceptic; said, ‘Man is the measure of all things’.
Pythagoras (6c BCE): Influential Greek mathematician who established in south Italy a religious community believing in the transmigration of souls and practicing vegetarianism.
Quintus Sextius: Eclectic philosopher of Rome in the Augustan period; Stoic, though he denied it, in his ethics, and Pythagorean in his vegetarianism.
Sappho (612 BCE- Unk): Greek poet of Lesbos.
Scipio (Pubilius Cornelius Scipio Africanus) (236-184 BCE): Famous Roman soldier whose brilliant tactics and generalship resulted in victory over the Carthaginian armies led by Hannibal; the achievement earned him the title Africanus (‘of Africa’, the final victory having been won in Carthaginian home territory in what is now Tunisia).
Sejanus (Lucius Aelius Sejanus) (unk-31): An ambitious Roman politician, executed in 31 for conspiring against the emperor Tiberius, of whom he had been a favorite.
Servius Tullius: Early Roman king, traditionally 578–535 BCE.
Socrates (469-399 BCE): A remarkable Athenian figure whose method of inquiry into moral values and own personal character inspired Plato and other philosophers; not known to have put any philosophical thoughts or arguments into writing; condemned to death, unjustly, for ‘corrupting the youth’ of Athens, he refused an opportunity of escape and took the executioner’s poison.
Solon (639-559 BCE): Early Athenian statesman and legislator; one of the ‘Seven Wise Men’ of antiquity.
Stilbo (4c BCE): Greek philosopher, head of the Megarian school; in ethics agreed with the Cynics on the importance of apatheia, immunity to feeling.
Sulla (‘Lucius Cornelius Sulla’) (138-78 BCE): Roman general and dictator, a reforming but cruel ruler.
Theophrastus (4c BCE): Greek scholar and philosopher, a pupil of Aristotle and almost as productive, writing systematic treatise on botany and other scientific subjects, and some amusing sketches called the Characters.
Tyrants: The Thirty, an unconstitutional band of oligarchs who inaugurated a reign of terror in Athens in 404 BCE.
Varus (‘Publius Quinctilius Varus’): Roman general and provincial governor, consul in 13 BCE; in 9 in Germany with three legions, his entire army was wiped out in a sudden German attack near the modern Osnabruck and he took his own life.
Virgil (Publius Vergilious Maro) (70-19 BCE): The greatest Roman poet, author of the Roman epic, the Aeneid, of the Georgia and shorter, pastoral poems, who soon became a model to later writers and a school text-book; Seneca quotes from him some 65 times in the Letters to Lucilius.
Zaleucus: Early Greek legislator, laying down laws for many cities founded by Greeks in Italy and Sicily.
Zeno: Founder, having previously been a Cynic, of the Stoic philosophy in the early 3c BCE; author of most of its basic beliefs, regarding ethics as the most important part of philosophy.
Zeno of Elea (490-unk): Greek monist philosopher and logician, born about 490 BCE, pupil of Parmenides.
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Ancient Eastern Geography
Achaea: The southern part of Greece.
Gaul: The Roman name (Gallia) for the area of approximately modern France.
Lyons: The Roman Lugdunum, flourishing capital of one of the provinces of Gaul, founded in 43 BCE.
Thrace: The area of the eastern Balkans.
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Misc Quotes
The word ‘God’ or ‘the gods’ was used by the philosophers more as a time-honored and convenient expression than as standing for any indispensable or even surely identifiable component of the Stoic system.
‘Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.’-Emerson.
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Chronology
65: Many people lose their lives on the discovery a conspiracy against Roman Emperor Nero. Seneca, like many others, is asked to commit suicide, the then prevailing method of imperial execution (Seneca by Penguin).
Each with one incision of the blade, he and his wife cut their arms. But Seneca’s aged body, lean from austere living, released the blood too slowly. So he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind his knees. Exhausted by severe pain, he was afraid of weakening his wife’s endurance by betraying his agony – or of losing his own self-possession at the sight of her sufferings. So he asked her to go into another bedroom. But even in his last moment his eloquence remained. Summoning secretaries, he dictated a dissertation. Seneca’s death was slow and lingering. Poison, such as was formerly used to execute state criminals at Athens, had long been prepared; and Seneca now entreated his well-tried doctor, who was also an old friend, to supply it. But when it came, Seneca drank it without effect. For his limbs were already cold and numbed against the poison’s action. Finally he was placed in a bath of warm water. He sprinkled a little of it on the attendant slaves, commenting that this was his libation to Jupiter. Then he was carried into a vapourbath, where he suffocated (Seneca by Penguin).
62: Death (probably murder) of Roman prefect Burrus, which purportedly breaks Seneca’s power in Rome. Enemies gain the ear of Nero with tales of Seneca’s popularity and growing wealth; the first was represented as being dangerous to the throne, the second as overshadowing the possessions of the emperor himself (Seneca by Penguin).
59: Roman Emperor Nero has his mother, Agrippina, put to death, the murder being carried out in cold blood after the calamitous failure of an attempt to stage an accident at sea (Seneca by Penguin).
54: Nero, son of Roman Emperor Claudius and Agrippina, becomes Roman Emperor. Seneca serves as an unofficial chief minister for the first 8 years of Nero’s reign (Seneca by Penguin).
49: Roman Emperor Claudius has his 3rd wife, Valeria Messalina, executed. Messalina was the 2nd cousin of Emperor Caligula, paternal cousin of Emperor Nero, and a great-grandniece of Emperor Augustus. The emperor’s new wife, Agrippina, has Seneca recalled to Rome where he is made Roman praetor and appointed to tutor her 12yo son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (‘Nero’) (Wiki, Seneca by Penguin).
9: Three Roman legions under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus are wiped out in a sudden German attack near the modern Osnabruck. Varus commits suicide (Seneca by Penguin).
~5 BCE- 65: Life of Seneca; Roman stoic scholar and advisor to Emperor Nero during his childhood and later reign; wrote his “Letters” to Lucilius; committed suicide in 65 on the order of Nero after a conspiracy he was charged as part of (Seneca by Penguin).
43 BCE: Lyons is founded as the Roman Lugdunum, a flourishing capital of one of the provinces of Gaul (Seneca by Penguin).
59 BCE- 17: Life of Livy, chief Roman historian, writing over a period of 40y a history of Rome in 142 books from the earliest times to his own (Seneca by Penguin).
70-19 BCE: Life of Virgil (Publius Vergilious Maro); the greatest Roman poet, author of the Roman epic, the Aeneid, of the Georgia and shorter, pastoral poems, who soon became a model to later writers and a school text-book (Seneca by Penguin).
95-46 BCE: Life of Cato (‘Marcus Porcius Cato’), Roman statement and stern moral figure celebrated for his unbending principles; an opponent of Caesar and after civil war broke out a follower of Pompey; famously committed suicide after the defeat of Pompeian’s at Thapsus (modern Tunisia) (Seneca by Penguin).
106-43 BCE: Life of Cicero (‘Marcus Tullius Cicero’), Roman advocate and statement whose writings include works presenting, almost for the first time in Latin, the arguments of the Greek philosophers, and whose literary style became a model (Seneca by Penguin).
106-48 BCE: Life of Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeus), an ambitious and powerful Roman politician and successful general; at first allied to Caesar but later defeated by him in the civil wars and murdered (Seneca by Penguin).
~135-51 BCE: Life of Posidonius, an important Stoic philosopher; a Greek of Syrian birth, pupil of Panaetius; also a historian and a scientist (studying the oceans and tides, and primitive cultures, and calculating the circumference of the earth and the distance between the earth and the sun); Cicero attended his lectures and his writings were widely read; he taught, unusually among Stoics, that the soul did not perish with the body (Seneca by Penguin).
138-78 BCE: Life of Sulla (‘Lucius Cornelius Sulla’); Roman general and dictator (Seneca by Penguin).
~185-109 BCE: Life of Panaetius, a stoic philosopher from Rhodes, who knew many leading Romans; having also been the teacher of Posidonius and an influence upon Cicero, he was largely instrumental in the making known of Stoicism to Romans (Seneca by Penguin).
236-184 BCE: Life of Scipio (‘Pubilius Cornelius Scipio Africanus’), a famous Roman soldier whose brilliant tactics and generalship resulted in victory over the Carthaginian armies led by Hannibal; the achievement earned him the title Africanus (‘of Africa’, the final victory having been won in Carthaginian home territory in what is now Tunisia) (Seneca by Penguin).
263-232 BCE: Cleanthes; Greek philosopher, pupil and successor of Zeno rules as head of the Stoics; introduced a religious note into the philosophy; among his writings there was a famous hymn to Zeus, of which a Christian might almost have been the author if for ‘Zeus’ is read ‘God’; this has been preserved (Seneca by Penguin).
280-207 BCE: Life of Chrysippus, Greek philosopher; head of the Stoic school following Cleanthes and a prolific writer; molded Stoicism into a formal system, with a basis in logic and a theory of knowledge to him probably more important than ethics (Seneca by Penguin).
Early 3c BCE: Demetrius reigns as Macedonian King. He campaigns in Greece, Cyprus, and the Near East (Seneca by Penguin).
~336/335 BCE: Birth of Zeno, of Phoenician descent in Cyprus. He teaches and lectures in a stoa (a colonnade or porch) and founds stoicism (Seneca by Penguin).
342/1-271/0 BCE: Life of Epicurus, famous Greek philosopher and founder of the Epicurean school, the main rival school to the Stoics; in physics followed, with modifications, Democritus’ atomist doctrine, regarded sense-perception as the only basis of knowledge, decried superstitions and all fear of the gods or death, and advocated a retiring life; the highest good, in his and his successors’ eyes, was pleasure (the Greek hedone), by which was meant not sensual indulgence but rather an independent freedom from all care; established in Athens a community living under him the simplest (e.g. diet mainly of bread and water) and most peaceful of existences (Seneca by Penguin).
4c BCE: Life of Stilbo; Greek philosopher, head of the Megarian school; in ethics agreed with the Cynics on the importance of apatheia, immunity to feeling (Seneca by Penguin).
4c BCE: Life of Nausiphanes; Greek philosopher who followed Democritus’ atomist theory and taught Epicurus (Seneca by Penguin).
384-322 BCE: Life of Greek philosopher Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Great (Seneca by Penguin).
400-325 BCE: Life of Diogenes; Renowned Greek philosopher and founder of the Cynic sect (Greek kunikoi, the canine or ‘doggish’ people, so nicknamed, apparently, because he and many later followers lived by begging and made a virtue of shamelessness), wit, ascetic, declared enemy of convention and worldly goods, his preaching about virtue and the simple life was largely adopted by the Stoics (Seneca by Penguin).
404 BCE: The Tyrants (‘30’), an unconstitutional band of oligarchs, inaugurate a reign of terror in Athens (Seneca by Penguin).
429-347 BCE: Life of Plato, the famous Athenian philosopher; greatly influenced by Socrates, of whom he was a pupil, author of the celebrated doctrine of ideas, thinker whose writings have influenced almost every philosopher, ancient or modern, since his day (Seneca by Penguin).
~460-370 BCE: Life of Democritus, a much-admired Greek philosopher and mathematician; associated with elaborate atomic theory of matter or the universe (Seneca by Penguin).
~5c BCE: Life of Parmenides; Greek philosopher living in Italy; a monist, often regarded as the founder of logic, whose study of the verb ‘to be’ led him to deny, in opposition to Heraclitus, that anything changes (Seneca by Penguin).
5c BCE: Life of Protagoras; Greek philosopher, the most notable of the itinerant Sophists, an agnostic and sceptic; said, ‘Man is the measure of all things’ (Seneca by Penguin).
469-399 BCE: Life of Socrates, a remarkable Athenian figure whose method of inquiry into moral values and own personal character inspired Plato and other philosophers; not known to have put any philosophical thoughts or arguments into writing; condemned to death, unjustly, for ‘corrupting the youth’ of Athens, he refused an opportunity of escape and took the executioner’s poison (Seneca by Penguin).
490 BCE- Unk: Life of Zeno of Elea, Greek monist philosopher and logician, a pupil of Parmenides (Seneca by Penguin).
521-486 BCE: Reign of Persian King Darius, who makes unsuccessful attempts to conquer Greece (Seneca by Penguin).
529-521 BCE: Reign of Persian King Cambyses, conqueror of Egypt (Seneca by Penguin).
6c BCE: Croesus, the proverbially rich king of Lydia, in Asia Minor, is overthrown by the Persians (Seneca by Penguin).
6c BCE: Life of Pythagoras; Influential Greek mathematician who established in south Italy a religious community believing in the transmigration of souls and practicing vegetarianism (Seneca by Penguin).
578-535 BCE: Reign of early Roman king Servius Tullius (Seneca by Penguin).
Early 6c BCE: Life of Anacharsis; one of the later so-called Seven Wise Men of antiquity; he appears to have preached the simple life later advocated by the Cynics, and to have been put to death for an attempt to introduce a Greek religious ritual into his country, Scythia (modern Southern Russia) (Seneca by Penguin).
612 BCE- Unk: Life of Sappho; Greek poet of Lesbos (Seneca by Penguin).
639-559 BCE: Life of Solon, early Athenian statement and legislator; one of the ‘Seven Wise Men’ of antiquity (Seneca by Penguin).
642-617 BCE: Reign of early Roman King Ancus Martius (Seneca by Penguin).
715-673 BCE: Reign of early Roman King Numa Pompilius (Seneca by Penguin).
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