Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Your letter delighted me and roused me from my torpor; it also called up my memory, which by now has grown sluggish and slow. And why shouldn't you, my dear Lucilius, think this conviction the greatest instrument of the happy life: that the only good is what is honorable? For whoever judges other things to be goods falls under the power of fortune, becomes subject to another's control; but whoever has bounded every good within the honorable is happy within himself. [2] This man is grieved by the loss of his children, that one is anxious over the sick, another is saddened by disgraceful conduct spattered with some infamy; you will see one man tortured by love for another's wife, another by love for his own; there will be no shortage of a man twisted by a rejection, and there will be others whom honor itself torments. [3] But the largest crowd of the wretched, out of the whole population of mortals, is that which is harried by the expectation of death looming over them from every side; for there is no direction from which it cannot come. And so, like people stationed in enemy territory, they must look about them this way and that, and turn their necks at every noise; unless this fear has been cast out of the breast, life is lived with a fluttering heart. [4] They will meet men driven into exile and stripped of their goods; they will meet men poor in the midst of riches, which is the heaviest kind of poverty; they will meet the shipwrecked and those who have suffered things like shipwreck—men scattered by popular anger, or by envy, that ruinous weapon against the best of men, while they were unsuspecting and secure, in the manner of a storm that tends to rise up out of the very confidence of a clear sky, or of a sudden lightning bolt at whose stroke even the neighboring places trembled. For just as there, whoever stood nearer the fire went numb as if struck himself, so among those to whom something happens by some violent force, calamity crushes one, fear crushes the rest, and it makes those who merely could have suffered feel a sadness equal to those who did. [5] The misfortunes of others, when sudden, disturb the minds of everyone. Just as birds are frightened even by the mere sound of an empty slingshot, so we too are stirred not only by the blow itself but by the mere crack of it. No one, then, can be happy who has entrusted himself to this opinion. For nothing is happy unless it is free of fear; life is lived badly amid suspicions. [6] Whoever has given himself over greatly to chance has made for himself an enormous and inextricable source of disturbance; there is one single road for the person walking toward safety: to look down on external things and be content with the honorable. For whoever thinks something better than virtue, or thinks any good exists apart from it, opens wide his lap to whatever fortune scatters about, and anxiously awaits her missiles. [7] Set this image before your mind: imagine fortune putting on games, and scattering among this gathering of mortals honors, riches, and favor—things of which some are torn apart in the hands of the grabbing crowd, others are divided up in some faithless partnership, others are seized to the great loss of those into whose hands they fell. Of these, some fall to people who weren't even trying for them, some, precisely because they were too eagerly sought after, are lost and knocked away in the very act of being greedily snatched up; and for no one, not even the man for whom the grab succeeded happily, did the joy of the prize last on into the future. And so the most prudent of men, as soon as he sees the little gifts being brought out, flees the theater, and knows that small things cost a great deal. No one comes to blows with someone who is walking away, no one strikes at someone leaving; the fight is over the prize while it's still in the air. [8] The same thing happens with these things that fortune tosses down from above: we wretches seethe, we are pulled apart, we long to have many hands, we look now this way, now that; things that inflame our desires seem to us to be thrown too slowly, things that will reach only a few but are hoped for by all. [9] We long to rush toward the things as they fall; we rejoice if we have grabbed hold of something, and if some vain hope of grabbing has deceived us; we pay for our cheap prize with some great loss, or else we are simply deceived. Let us, then, withdraw from these games and give the grabbers their place; let them watch these goods hanging in the air, and let them themselves hang all the more.
[10] Whoever resolves to be happy should think this the only good: what is honorable. For if he reckons any other thing a good, in the first place he judges providence badly, because many misfortunes befall just men, and because whatever it has given us is brief and small if you compare it to the age of the whole universe. [11] Out of this complaint arises our ingratitude as interpreters of divine things: we complain that our goods do not last forever, that what falls to us is little, uncertain, and destined to pass away. Hence it happens that we want neither to live nor to die: hatred of life grips us, and fear of death. Every plan we make wavers, and no happiness can fill us up. The reason is that we have not arrived at that immense and unconquerable good where our will must necessarily come to rest, because there is no place beyond the highest point. [12] You ask why virtue needs nothing? It rejoices in what is present, it does not crave what is absent; nothing that is enough is anything but great to it. Depart from this judgment, and neither devotion nor good faith will hold firm, for a person who wants to render both fully must endure many of the things called evils, and must spend many of the things we indulge in as though they were goods. [13] Courage perishes, which ought to put itself at risk; greatness of soul perishes, which cannot stand out unless it has despised as trifles all the things the crowd wishes for as if they were the greatest; gratitude and the repayment of gratitude perish if we fear hardship, if we know anything more precious than good faith, if we do not keep our eyes on what is best.
[14] But to pass over those points: either those things called goods are not goods, or man is happier than god, since indeed god does not have in his use the things dear to us; for lust does not belong to him, nor the extravagance of feasts, nor wealth, nor anything of the things that entice men and lead them on with cheap pleasure. So either it must be believed that god lacks goods, or this very fact is proof that they are not goods, namely that god lacks them. [15] Add to this that many things which wish to be seen as goods fall more fully to animals than to man. Animals use food more eagerly, are not wearied equally by sex; their strength has greater and more even endurance; it follows that they would be much happier than man. For they live without wickedness, without deceit; they enjoy pleasures, and they seize them more fully and more easily, without any fear of shame or regret. [16] Consider, then, whether that ought to be called a good in which god is outdone by man, and man by animals. Let us keep the highest good contained within the mind: it goes stale if it passes from the best part of us to the worst, and is transferred to the senses, which are more agile in dumb animals. The sum of our happiness must not be placed in the flesh: those goods are the true ones which reason gives, solid and everlasting, which cannot fall, and cannot even shrink or diminish. [17] The rest are goods only by opinion, and indeed they share a name in common with the true goods, but the property of being good is not in them; so let them be called advantages, and, to use our own language, 'produced things.' For the rest, let us know that they are our slaves, not parts of us, and let them be in our possession, but in such a way that we remember they are outside us; even if they are in our possession, let them be counted among the subject and lowly things, on account of which no one ought to exalt himself. For what is more foolish than for someone to be pleased with himself over something he himself did not make? [18] Let all these things come to us without clinging to us, so that if they are taken away, they may depart without any tearing of ourselves. Let us use them, not boast of them, and let us use them sparingly, as things deposited with us and destined to leave. Whoever possessed them without reason did not hold them long; for happiness itself, unless it is tempered, weighs down on the one who has it. If a person has trusted in the most fleeting of goods, he is quickly abandoned, and, in being abandoned, is afflicted. Few have been able to lay down happiness gently; the rest slip along with the very things among which they stood out, and the same things that raised them up weigh them down. [19] For this reason prudence must be applied, to impose on these things moderation and restraint, since indeed unchecked license hurls one's wealth headlong and drives it on, and immoderate things have never lasted unless reason, that moderator, has restrained them. This the fate of many cities will show you, whose luxurious empires fell at the very height of their flower, and whatever had been won by virtue collapsed through excess. Against these misfortunes we must fortify ourselves. But there is no wall impregnable against fortune from the outside: we must be built up on the inside; if that part is safe, a man can be battered, but not captured. Do you wish to know what this instrument is? [20] Let him refuse to be indignant that anything happens to him, and let him know that the very things by which he seems to be harmed pertain to the preservation of the universe, and are among the things that carry through the course and function of the world; let whatever pleases god please the man; let him admire himself and his own for this very reason, that he cannot be conquered, that he holds the evils themselves beneath him, that by reason—than which nothing is stronger—he subdues chance, pain, and injury. [21] Love reason! Love of it will arm you against the hardest things. Love of their cubs drives wild beasts onto the hunting spears, and savagery and reckless impulse make them fearless; sometimes a youthful longing for glory has sent young minds to scorn both sword and fire alike; the mere appearance and shadow of virtue drives some men to voluntary death: how much braver than all these is reason, how much steadier, so much the more forcefully will it make its way out through the very fears and dangers themselves.
[22] 'You accomplish nothing,' someone says, 'by denying that any good exists besides the honorable. This fortification will not make you safe from fortune or immune to it. For you say that dutiful children and a well-governed homeland and good parents are among the goods. You cannot watch the dangers to these things with unconcern: the siege of your homeland, the death of your children, the enslavement of your parents will disturb you.'
[23] I will set down what is usually answered on our behalf against these people; then I will add what I think should be said in addition. There is a different condition in the case of things which, when taken away, put something harmful in their place: as when good health, once spoiled, turns into bad health; when the keenness of the eyes, once extinguished, afflicts us with blindness; not only is speed lost when the hamstrings are cut, but weakness takes its place. This is not the danger in the cases we mentioned a little earlier. Why? If I have lost a good friend, I do not have to endure treachery in his place; nor, if I have buried good children, does impiety succeed to their place. [24] Then, too, what perishes there is not the friends or the children, but the bodies. A good, however, perishes in one way only: if it passes into an evil; and nature does not allow this, because every virtue, and every work of virtue, remains uncorrupted. Further, even if friends have died, even if children who proved themselves and answered a father's prayers have died, there is something that can fill their place. You ask what it is? The very thing that had made them good too: virtue. [25] This allows no place to stand empty; it holds the whole mind, it removes the longing for everything, it alone is enough; for in it lies the force and origin of all goods. What does it matter whether the flowing water is cut off and departs, if the spring from which it flowed is unharmed? You will not say that a life is more just when the children survive than when they are lost, nor more orderly, nor more prudent, nor more honorable; therefore not better either. The addition of friends does not make a man wiser, nor does their subtraction make him more foolish; therefore neither does it make him happier or more wretched. As long as virtue remains unharmed, you will not feel whatever has gone away.
[26] 'What then? Is a man not happier when he is attended by a crowd of friends and children?' Why would he not be? For the highest good is neither diminished nor increased; it remains within its own measure, however fortune has conducted herself. Whether a long old age has fallen to a man's lot or his life has ended short of old age, the measure of the highest good is the same, however different the length of his life may be. [27] Whether you draw a larger or a smaller circle concerns its size, not its shape: even if one has lasted long and you have drawn the other at once and dissolved into dust the surface on which it was drawn, both were in the same shape. What is right is measured neither by size nor by number nor by time; it can no more be stretched out than it can be shrunk. Take an honorable life spanning a hundred years and shrink it as much as you like, compress it into a single day: it is equally honorable. [28] At one time virtue spreads more widely, governs kingdoms, cities, provinces, brings laws, cultivates friendships, distributes duties among relatives and children; at another time it is hemmed in by the narrow bounds of poverty, exile, childlessness; yet it is no smaller if it is drawn down from a loftier height to a lowly one, from royal estate to private life, from a broad and public sphere of law into the narrow confines of a house, or even of a single corner. [29] It is equally great even if it has withdrawn into itself, shut out on every side; for none the less it is a matter of great and lofty spirit, of perfected prudence, of unbending justice. Therefore it is equally happy; for that happy state is fixed in one place only, in the mind itself—stable, grand, tranquil—and this cannot be achieved without knowledge of things divine and human.
[30] There follows the point I said I would answer. The wise man is not crushed by the loss of children, nor of friends; for he bears their death with the same spirit with which he awaits his own; he no more fears the one than he grieves the other. For virtue consists in consistency: all its works agree and are in harmony with itself. This harmony is destroyed if the mind, which ought to be lofty, is brought low by grief or longing. Every trembling and anxiety is dishonorable, as is sluggishness in any action; for the honorable is secure and unencumbered, unafraid, and stands ready for action. [31] 'What then? Will he not suffer something resembling disturbance? Will his color not change, his expression not be agitated, his limbs not grow cold? And whatever else happens not by the command of the mind, but by some unreasoned impulse of nature?' I admit it; but the same conviction will remain in him, that none of these things is an evil, nor worthy that a sound mind should give way before it. [32] Whatever must be done, he will do boldly and readily. For who would call it anything but foolishness, to do what one does sluggishly and reluctantly, and to drive the body one way and the mind another, and to be torn apart between the most opposite impulses? For on account of the very things by which a man exalts and admires himself, he is despised, and he does not even do gladly the things he boasts of. But if some evil is feared, then, while he awaits it, he is harassed by it just as if it had already come, and whatever he fears he may suffer, he already suffers through fear itself. [33] Just as in weak bodies signs run ahead of exhaustion—for there is a certain nerveless sluggishness, a weariness with no exertion behind it, and yawning, and a shudder running through the limbs—so a weak mind is shaken by evils long before it is crushed by them; it anticipates them and collapses before its time. But what is more insane than to be tormented over what is to come, and not to save oneself for the torment, but to summon miseries to oneself and draw them near, when it is best to put them off, if you cannot dispel them altogether? [34] Do you wish to know that no one ought to be tortured by the future? Whoever hears that he must endure punishments after his fiftieth year is not disturbed—unless he leaps over the intervening space and thrusts himself forward into that anxiety which lies a lifetime ahead. In just the same way it happens that minds that are gladly sick, and hunt out reasons for grief, are saddened by things old and forgotten. Both what has passed and what is yet to come are absent: we feel neither. But there is no pain except from what you actually feel. Farewell.