Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You keep asking me about individual problems, forgetting that a vast sea separates us. Since a large part of good counsel lies in timing, it's inevitable that on some matters my opinion reaches you only when the opposite course has already become the better one. Advice has to be fitted to circumstances; our circumstances are being carried along, or rather swept along, so advice needs to be born close to the day it's used. And even that is too slow: it needs to be born on the spot, as they say. Let me show you how that's done. Whenever you want to know what to avoid or what to pursue, look to the highest good, the guiding purpose of your whole life. Everything we do ought to be consistent with that; no one will get the details right who hasn't already settled on the overall design of his life. No one, however many colors he has ready, will produce a likeness unless he already knows what he wants to paint. That's why we go wrong: we all deliberate about the parts of life, and no one deliberates about the whole. Anyone who wants to shoot an arrow needs to know what he's aiming at, and only then direct and steady his hand toward the target; our plans go astray because they have nothing to aim at. For a man who doesn't know what harbor he's making for, no wind is the right wind. Chance is bound to have great power over our lives, because we live by chance. But some people manage not to know things they in fact know; just as we sometimes go looking for the very people we're standing next to, so most of us fail to notice that the goal of the highest good is right in front of us. You won't work out what the highest good is through many words or a long detour: it has to be pointed to, so to speak, with a finger, not scattered into many pieces. What's the use of breaking it down into fragments? You can simply say: the highest good is what is honorable, and, more surprisingly still, the only good is what is honorable; everything else is a false, counterfeit good. If you convince yourself of this and fall in love with virtue — for merely liking it isn't enough — then whatever happens to touch that virtue, however it looks to others, will be lucky and happy for you. Being tortured, provided you lie there more secure than your torturer; being sick, provided you don't curse fortune or give in to the disease — all the things that look like evils to everyone else will grow tame and turn into goods, if you rise above them. Let this be clear: nothing is good except what is honorable. And every hardship will rightly be called good, so long as virtue has made it honorable. To many people we seem to promise more than the human condition can deliver, and not without reason — because they're looking at the body. Let them turn back to the mind: then they'll measure a human being against a god.
Stand up straight, Lucilius, best of men, and leave behind that grammar-school game the philosophers play, reducing the grandest subject to syllables, dragging the mind down and wearing it out with petty instruction. You'll end up resembling the men who invented these ideas, not the ones who merely teach them and manage to make philosophy look difficult rather than great. Socrates, who brought all of philosophy back to conduct and said that this — distinguishing good from evil — was the whole of wisdom, said: 'Follow those men, if I carry any authority with you, so that you may be happy, and let yourself be thought a fool by someone. Let anyone who wants to insult you and wrong you do so; still you will suffer nothing, so long as virtue stays with you. If you want,' he said, 'to be happy, if you want in good faith to be a good man, let someone despise you.' No one can achieve this except a man who has first despised everything himself, who has ranked all goods as equal, because there is no good without honor, and honor is equal in all its instances.
'What, then? Is there no difference between Cato's praetorship and his defeat in the election? Is there no difference between Cato losing at Pharsalus and Cato winning there? Was the good in him, by which his defeated party could not defeat him, equal to the good by which he would have returned victorious to his country and arranged the peace?' Why shouldn't it be equal? The same virtue conquers bad fortune and puts good fortune in order; and virtue cannot become greater or smaller — it is of one fixed stature. 'But Pompey will lose his army; that splendid facade of the republic, the optimates, the front line of Pompey's party — a senate bearing arms — will be crushed in a single battle, and the ruin of so great an empire will scatter across the whole world: part of it will fall in Egypt, part in Africa, part in Spain. The unhappy republic won't even be granted the mercy of collapsing just once.' Let all of it happen: let Juba get no help in his own kingdom from knowledge of the terrain, nor from the stubborn courage of his people fighting for their king; let even the loyalty of the people of Utica break under disaster and fail; let Scipio's own name betray him in Africa. It was arranged long ago that Cato would suffer no loss. 'And yet he was defeated.' Then count that too among Cato's electoral defeats: he will bear with just as great a spirit the fact that something stood in the way of his victory as he bore the fact that something stood in the way of his praetorship. On the day he was defeated in the election, he played games; on the night he was going to die, he read. He regarded losing the praetorship and losing his life as the same sort of thing; he had convinced himself that whatever happened had to be borne.
Why shouldn't he have endured the upheaval of the republic with a brave and level mind? What is exempt from the risk of change? Not the earth, not the sky, not this whole fabric of things, even though it is guided by the working of a god; it will not keep this order forever, but some day will be thrown off this course. Everything moves on its appointed schedule: things must be born, grow, and be extinguished. Whatever you see running its course above us, and these things on which we stand and lean as if they were utterly solid, will wear away and come to an end; nothing lacks its own old age. Nature dismisses all things toward the same end by unequal intervals: whatever is will cease to be, but it will not perish — it will be dissolved. To us, being dissolved feels like perishing; for we look only at what's nearest, and our sluggish mind, one that has committed itself to the body, doesn't look further ahead. Otherwise it would bear the end of itself and its own more bravely, if it hoped that, just like everything else, life and death likewise pass in turns — things composed are taken apart, things taken apart are composed again — and that in this labor lies the eternal art of the god who governs all things. And so, as Marcus Cato will say, once he has run through the whole span of time in his mind: 'The whole human race, what is and what will be, is condemned to death; all the cities that ever hold power anywhere, and all the great ornaments of foreign empires, will one day be asked where they were, and will be removed by various kinds of destruction: some will be destroyed by wars, others will be consumed by idleness and a peace turned to laziness, and by that ruinous thing that comes with great wealth, luxury. All these fertile plains will be swallowed by a sudden flood of the sea, or carried off by the collapse of settling ground into a sudden chasm. Why then should I be indignant or grieve, if I go ahead of the fate of the state by so small a margin?' Let a great mind obey god, and endure without hesitation whatever the law of the universe commands. Either it is sent out into a better life, to dwell more brightly and calmly among things divine, or at least it will exist without any harm at all, if it is remixed with nature and returns into the whole. So the honorable life of Marcus Cato is no greater good than his honorable death, since virtue is never stretched beyond itself. Socrates used to say that truth and virtue were the same thing. Just as truth does not increase, neither does virtue: it has its own measure, and it is already complete.
So you shouldn't be surprised that goods are equal, both the ones we choose deliberately and the ones that come our way because circumstances demanded it. If you accept this inequality — counting bravely-endured torture among the lesser goods — you will also have to count things among the lesser evils, and you'll end up calling Socrates unhappy in prison, calling Cato unhappy as he tore open his own wounds more fiercely than he had first inflicted them, calling Regulus the most miserable man of all for paying the penalty of keeping his word even to his enemies. Yet no one has dared to say this, not even the most softhearted; they deny that such a man is happy, but they still deny that he is wretched. The old Academics admit that he is happy even amid such torments, but not perfectly or completely happy — which can't be accepted at all: unless he is happy, he is not in possession of the highest good. The highest good has no rank above itself, provided virtue is present in him, provided adversity doesn't diminish it, provided it remains intact even when the body is broken — and it does remain. For I understand virtue to be spirited and lofty, something that is spurred on by whatever attacks it. This spirit, which noble young men of good natural character often put on when the beauty of some honorable action has struck them, so that they scorn everything that depends on chance — wisdom will surely instill and hand down in full; it will convince them that the only good is what is honorable, that this can be neither loosened nor tightened, any more than you can bend the ruler by which straightness is normally tested. Whatever you change in it is a wrong done to straightness itself. So we'll say the same about virtue: it too is straight, and admits no bending — though it can certainly be strengthened, made more taut. Virtue passes judgment on everything else; nothing passes judgment on it. If virtue itself cannot be made more upright, then not even the actions that come from it are more upright than one another; they must correspond to it, and so they are equal.
'What, then?' you say, 'is lying on a dining couch at a banquet the same as being stretched on the rack?' Does that seem surprising to you? Here's something you may find still more surprising: lying at a banquet can be an evil, and lying on the rack can be a good, if the one is done shamefully and the other honorably. It is not the material that makes these things good or bad, but virtue; wherever virtue appears, everything is of the same measure and the same worth. Now that man shakes his fist in my face who judges everyone's spirit by his own, because I say that the goods are equal for someone who judges honorably and for someone who is tested honorably, because I say the goods are equal for the man who celebrates a triumph and for the man who is led before the chariot with his spirit unconquered. Such people don't believe that anything can happen that they themselves are incapable of doing; they pass judgment on virtue out of their own weakness. Why are you surprised if being burned, wounded, killed, chained sometimes brings pleasure, even delight? To the extravagant man, frugality is a punishment; to the lazy man, work is like a penalty; the pampered man pities the hardworking one; to the idle man, study feels like torture. In the same way, we consider things that we're all too weak to face as harsh and unbearable, forgetting how many people find it torment just to go without wine or to be woken at first light. These things are not difficult by nature; we are the ones who are soft and drained of strength. We need to judge great matters with a great spirit; otherwise what is really our own fault will look like a fault in the things themselves. In the same way, certain perfectly straight objects, when lowered into water, appear bent and broken to onlookers. It matters not only what you see, but how you see it: our mind is clouded when it comes to perceiving the truth clearly. Give me a young man of uncorrupted character and lively natural gifts: he will say that the man who can bear the whole weight of adversity with an unbending neck seems to him luckier — the man who rises above fortune. It's no wonder that a person isn't shaken when things are calm; what you should marvel at is someone rising up precisely where everyone else is pushed down, standing precisely where everyone else lies flat. What evil is there in torments, or in the other things we call adversities? This, I think: that the mind gives way, bends, and collapses. None of that can happen to a wise man: he stands upright under any weight whatsoever. Nothing makes him smaller; nothing among the things that must be endured displeases him. For whatever can happen to any human being, he does not complain has happened to him in particular. He knows his own strength; he knows he is capable of bearing the burden. I do not remove the wise man from the ranks of humanity, nor do I shield him from pain as if he were some rock with no capacity for feeling. I remember that he is composed of two parts: one is irrational, and this part is bitten, burned, hurt; the other is rational, and this part holds unshaken convictions, is fearless and unconquered. In this rational part lies that highest good of man. Before it is complete, the mind's movement is uncertain; but once it is perfected, its stability is unmoved. And so a man who is only beginning, advancing toward the heights, a devoted follower of virtue, even if he is drawing near to the complete good but has not yet put the final touch on it, will sometimes step backward and relax the tension of his mind somewhat; for he has not yet passed beyond uncertainty, and he is still walking on slippery ground. But the truly happy man, the man of perfected virtue, loves himself most precisely when he has been tested most bravely, and things that others dread — if they are the price of some honorable duty — he not only bears but embraces, and much prefers to hear 'the better for it' than 'the luckier for it.'
Now I come to the point my anticipation of your objection is calling me to. So that our virtue doesn't seem to be wandering outside the bounds of nature, the wise man will indeed tremble, and feel pain, and turn pale; these are all bodily sensations. So where, then, is disaster, where is real evil? There, of course, if these things drag the mind down, if they lead it to confess its own enslavement, if they make it regret its own condition. The wise man does conquer fortune by virtue, but many people who have professed wisdom have sometimes been terrified by the flimsiest threats. This is our own fault at this point, in that we demand the same thing from the wise man and from the man still making progress. I am still only persuading myself of the things I praise; I have not yet fully convinced myself; and even if I had convinced myself, I wouldn't yet have those convictions so ready and so well-drilled that they would rush forward to meet every circumstance. Just as wool takes some dyes at once, but absorbs others only after repeated soaking and boiling, so some natural gifts show the effects of certain disciplines the moment they receive them, while this discipline, unless it sinks deep and settles in for a long time, coloring the mind rather than merely dyeing its surface, delivers none of what it promised. This much can be taught quickly and in very few words: that virtue is the only good, that certainly nothing is good without virtue, and that virtue itself is situated in the better part of us — that is, the rational part. What will this virtue be? True and unshaken judgment. From this will come the impulses of the mind; by this, every impression that stirs an impulse will be tested and clarified. Consistent with this judgment will be the conclusion that everything touched by virtue is good, and equally good among themselves. But the goods of the body are indeed goods for the body, though not goods in an unqualified sense; they will have some price, but no dignity; they will differ from one another by great intervals: some will be smaller, others greater. And among those actually pursuing wisdom, we must admit there are great differences: one has already made such progress that he dares to raise his eyes against fortune, though not persistently — for such men fall, dazzled by too much brilliance; another has made such progress that he can meet fortune's gaze face to face, unless indeed he has already reached the summit and is full of confidence. The imperfect are bound to waver, sometimes advancing, sometimes slipping back or collapsing. And they will slip back, unless they persevere in going forward and striving; if they relax at all in their dedication and faithful effort, they must go back the way they came. No one finds the progress he has made still there when he returns to the place he had abandoned it.
So let us press on and persevere; more remains than we have already accomplished, but a great part of progress is wanting to make progress. I am aware of this in myself: I want it, and I want it with my whole mind. I see that you too are driven and hurrying with great energy toward the finest things. Let us hurry: only then will life be a gift; otherwise it is a delay, and a shameful one at that, for people caught up in disgraceful things. Let us see to it that all our time becomes truly our own; but it will not be, unless we ourselves first begin to belong to ourselves. When will we manage to scorn both kinds of fortune, when will we manage, with all our passions suppressed and brought under our own control, to utter this word: 'I have won'? You ask whom I have conquered. Not the Persians, nor the farthest reaches of the Medes, nor whatever warlike people lie beyond the Dahae, but greed, but ambition, but the fear of death — which has conquered the conquerors of nations. Farewell.