Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You complain that you have run into an ungrateful man. If this is the first time it has happened, thank either your luck or your own care. But in this matter care can accomplish nothing except to make you stingy; for if you want to avoid this risk, you will simply stop giving benefits at all. So rather than have them wasted on someone else, you will waste them by never giving them. Better that they go unanswered than that they never be given: even after a bad harvest, you must sow again. Often a single year's abundance restores everything that a soil's unbroken sterility had lost. [2] It is worth the trouble of testing even ungrateful men, for the sake of finding a grateful one. No one has so sure a hand at giving benefits that he is never mistaken; men must miss the mark sometimes in order to hit it at other times. After a shipwreck, people still take to the sea; a moneylender is not driven from the forum by a bankrupt debtor. Life would quickly stiffen into a useless idleness if we had to abandon everything that ever disappointed us. Indeed this very risk should make you more generous, not less; for when the outcome of something is uncertain, you must try it often in order for it to succeed even once.
[3] But I have said enough on that subject in the books I wrote on benefits. The question that seems to need more attention, one that I do not think has been adequately worked out, is this: if a man who once helped us later harms us, has he thereby balanced the accounts and cleared our debt to him? Add to that, if you like, the further case where he later harmed us far more than he had earlier helped. [4] If you want the strict verdict of a rigorous judge, he will weigh one thing against the other and say, 'even though the injuries outweigh the benefits, still whatever remains after subtracting the injury should be credited to the benefits.' He did more harm, but he helped first; so the matter of timing should also be taken into account. [5] It is obvious enough, hardly needing to be pointed out, that we must ask how willingly he helped and how reluctantly he harmed us, since both benefits and injuries are matters of intention. 'I did not want to give the benefit; I was overcome by embarrassment, or by someone's persistence, or by hope of gain.' [6] Whatever is owed is owed according to the spirit in which it was given; what counts is not the size of the gift but the quality of the will behind it. Now let us set guesswork aside: both the earlier act and the later one were real -- the earlier was a benefit, and the later, insofar as it exceeded the measure of the first, was an injury. A good man weighs both sides of the ledger in a way that shortchanges himself: he adds to the benefit, he subtracts from the injury. The more lenient judge -- and I would rather be that kind -- will order us to forget the injury and remember the service. [7] 'Surely,' you say, 'justice requires giving each its due: gratitude for a benefit, retaliation -- or at least ill will -- for an injury.' That would be true if one person had done the injury and another had given the benefit; but if it is the same person, the benefit cancels out the force of the injury. For someone who would have deserved forgiveness even without prior merit is owed more than mere pardon if he harms us after having helped us. [8] I do not set the two on equal footing: I value a benefit more highly than an injury. Not everyone knows how to be grateful; even a fool, an unrefined man, one indistinguishable from the crowd, can recognize that he owes a debt of gratitude, at least while the memory of receiving it is fresh -- but he has no idea how much he owes for it. Only the wise man knows exactly what value to place on each thing. As for the sort of man I was just calling a fool -- even if he means well, he repays either less than he owes, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong place; whatever he ought to return he pours out and throws away carelessly.
[9] The precision of language in certain matters is remarkable, and the usage of old-fashioned speech marks certain distinctions with signs that most effectively teach us our duties. We regularly say, for instance, 'he returned the favor to him.' To return is to bring, of your own accord, what you owe. We do not say 'he repaid the favor'; for people repay even when they are being dunned for it, even unwillingly, from wherever, even through an intermediary. We do not say 'he restored the benefit' or 'he settled it': no word suited to a monetary debt has ever satisfied us here. [10] To return is to bring the thing back to the one from whom you received it. This word implies a voluntary act of returning: whoever 'returns' has, so to speak, named himself as the one doing it. The wise man will examine everything within himself -- how much he received, from whom, why, when, where, in what manner. So we say that no one but the wise man knows how to return a favor, just as no one but the wise man knows how to give a benefit -- the wise man, that is, being the one who takes more pleasure in giving than another does in receiving. [11] Someone classes this among the things we seem to say that strike everyone as paradoxical (the Greeks call them paradoxa), and says, 'so no one but the wise man knows how to return a favor? Then does no one else know how to repay what he owes a creditor, or how to pay a seller the price when he buys something?' Well, so that this reproach not fall on me alone, know that Epicurus says the same thing. Metrodorus, certainly, says that only the wise man knows how to return a favor. [12] Then the same person is amazed when we say, 'only the wise man knows how to love, only the wise man is a friend.' And yet returning a favor is part of both love and friendship -- indeed this is more common and applies to more people than true friendship does. Then the same person is amazed that we say faithfulness exists only in the wise man, as though he himself did not say the same thing. Does it seem to you that a man who does not know how to return a favor can be trusted to keep faith? [13] So let people stop slandering us as though we were throwing out incredible claims, and let them recognize that with the wise man these virtues are the real things, while with the crowd they are mere copies and images of honorable things. No one knows how to return a favor except the wise man. The fool, too, returns one, however and as best he can; what he lacks is the knowledge rather than the will -- the will cannot be taught. [14] The wise man will weigh everything against everything else; the same thing becomes greater or lesser depending on time, place, and circumstance. Often a fortune poured into a household could not do what a thousand denarii, given at the right moment, could. It matters a great deal whether you gave a gift or came to someone's rescue, whether your generosity saved him or merely equipped him; often what is given is small, but what follows from it is large. And how much difference do you think there is between someone taking from his own resources what he then gives, and someone receiving a benefit in order to pass it on as a gift?
[15] But so as not to circle back over ground we have already examined enough, in this comparison of benefit and injury the good man will judge, certainly, according to strict fairness, but he will lean in favor of the benefit; he will be more inclined to that side. [16] The person involved usually carries the greatest weight in matters like this: 'you gave me a benefit through a slave, but did me an injury through my father; you saved my son for me, but took my father from me.' He will go on to weigh everything else through which the whole comparison proceeds, and if the difference is small, he will overlook it; even if it is large, but if it can be forgiven without violating loyalty and duty, he will let it go -- that is, if the injury falls entirely on himself alone. [17] The sum of the matter is this: he will be easygoing in settling accounts; he will let more be charged to his own debt than is fair; he will only reluctantly cancel a benefit by offsetting it against an injury; he will lean and incline in this direction, so as to want to owe gratitude, to want to return it. For anyone is mistaken who thinks a benefit is received more gladly than it is repaid: just as the man who pays off a debt is happier than the one who borrows, so the man who unburdens himself of a great debt of gratitude for a benefit received ought to be happier than the man who is just now incurring the obligation. [18] For ungrateful people are mistaken about this too: with a creditor they pay, beyond the principal, extra interest as a matter of course, but they think that the use of a benefit costs nothing; yet benefits, too, grow with delay, and the longer one waits, the more one owes. A man who repays a benefit without interest is ungrateful; so this too will be taken into account when receipts and payments are reckoned up.
[19] We should do everything we can to be as grateful as possible. For this good belongs to us; it is not, as is commonly believed, something that concerns others -- a large part of it comes back to ourselves. Whenever a man benefits another, he has also benefited himself -- and I do not say this merely because the one he has helped will want to help him in turn, the one he has defended will want to protect him, because a good example returns by a roundabout path to the one who set it (just as bad examples fall back on their authors, and no pity is due to those who suffer wrongs which their own actions taught others could be done) -- but because the reward of every virtue lies within itself. Virtues are not practiced for a prize; the wages of a right act is to have done it. [20] I am grateful not so that someone else, provoked by my example, will more readily do me a good turn, but so that I may do the most pleasant and most beautiful of things; I am grateful not because it is expedient, but because it is a joy. And to show you that this is so: if I cannot be grateful except by appearing ungrateful, if I can repay a benefit only by way of what looks like an injury, I will proceed with perfect calm toward the honorable course even through the middle of disgrace. No one, it seems to me, values virtue more highly, no one is more devoted to it, than the man who has sacrificed his reputation as a good man rather than sacrifice his conscience. [21] So, as I said, you are grateful more for your own good than for the other person's; for what happened to him is a common, everyday thing -- getting back what he had given -- but what happened to you sprang from a great and supremely blessed state of mind: having been grateful. For if wickedness makes men wretched and virtue makes them happy, and being grateful is a virtue, then what you gave back was an ordinary thing, but what you gained was beyond price: the awareness of having been grateful, which comes only to a soul that is godlike and fortunate.
The opposite disposition, however, is pursued by the utmost misery: no one who has not been grateful to another can be pleased with himself. Do you think I mean that the ungrateful man will be wretched? I am not putting it off to some future time: he is wretched right now. [22] So let us avoid ingratitude not for another's sake but for our own. Only the smallest and lightest part of wickedness spills over onto others; the worst of it, the thickest sediment, so to speak, stays at home and weighs down the one who holds it, just as our friend Attalus used to say: 'malice drinks off the greatest part of its own poison.' That poison which snakes bring forth for another's destruction, without harming themselves, is not like this one: this poison is at its worst for those who carry it. [23] The ungrateful man torments and wastes himself; he hates what he has received, because he will have to repay it, and he minimizes it, while he magnifies and exaggerates the injuries done to him. What could be more wretched than a man for whom benefits slip away while injuries stick fast? But wisdom, on the contrary, adorns every benefit and commends it to itself, and takes pleasure in constantly recalling it. [24] The wicked have only one pleasure, and a brief one at that -- the moment of receiving benefits -- whereas for the wise man a lasting and perpetual joy remains from them. For it is not the receiving that delights him but the having received, which is immortal and constant. He scorns the things by which he has been injured, and forgets them not through carelessness but on purpose. [25] He does not turn everything toward the worse, nor does he look for someone to blame for misfortune, and he attributes men's wrongdoings to chance rather than malice. He does not read the worst into words or looks; whatever happens, he lightens it by interpreting it kindly. He remembers services rendered rather than offenses given; as far as he can, he keeps himself fixed in an earlier and better memory, and he does not change his attitude toward those who have earned his good will unless their bad deeds far outweigh the good, and the difference is unmistakable even to one who is willing to overlook it -- and even then, only to the extent of being, after the greater injury, the same as he was before the benefit. For when the injury is exactly equal to the benefit, some measure of good will still remains in his mind. [26] Just as a defendant is acquitted when the votes are equal, and humanity always tips the balance toward the better verdict whenever there is doubt, so the mind of the wise man, when the wrongs done to him exactly balance the merits, ceases indeed to owe anything, but does not cease to want to owe it -- doing just what debtors do who pay off old obligations even after new laws have cancelled the need to.
[27] No one, however, can be grateful unless he has learned to despise the things the crowd goes mad over: if you want to return a favor, you must be ready to go into exile, to shed your blood, to take up poverty, and often to stain your very innocence and expose it to undeserved rumors. Being a grateful man does not come cheap. [28] We value nothing more highly than a benefit while we are still seeking it, nothing more cheaply once we have received it. Do you ask what makes us forget the benefits we have received? The desire for more benefits; we think not about what we have already obtained but about what we still need to seek. Wealth, honors, power, and everything else our own opinion holds dear -- worthless at their real price -- draw us away from what is right. [29] We do not know how to assess the value of things that must be judged not by reputation but by their nature; those things have nothing splendid in them to draw our minds toward them, except the fact that we have grown accustomed to admiring them. They are not praised because they deserve to be desired; rather, they are desired because they have been praised, and once the error of individuals has become the common error, the common error in turn creates the error of each individual. [30] But just as we have trusted the crowd about those things, so let us trust that same crowd on this one point too: that nothing is more honorable than a grateful spirit. Every city, every nation, even among the barbarians, will proclaim this with one voice; on this point good and bad alike will agree. [31] There will be those who praise pleasure, and those who prefer hard work; there will be those who call pain the greatest evil, and those who do not even call it an evil; some will admit wealth among the highest goods, others will say it was invented for the ruin of human life, and that nothing is richer than the man for whom fortune can find nothing left to give: yet amid such disagreement of opinions, all will affirm to you, as they say, with one voice, that gratitude must be returned to those who have deserved well of us. On this one point this so discordant crowd will agree -- while all the while we repay benefits with injuries, and the first reason a man becomes ungrateful is that he could not manage to be grateful enough. [32] Madness has reached such a point that it has become a genuinely dangerous thing to confer great benefits on someone; for since he thinks it shameful not to repay them, he comes to wish there were no one for him to repay. Keep what you received from me; I do not ask for it back, I do not demand it; let it be safe merely to have helped you. No hatred is more destructive than one born of shame over a violated benefit. Farewell.