Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I've stopped worrying about you. "Which of the gods," you ask, "did you get to stand surety for me?" The one, of course, who deceives no one: a mind that loves what is right and good. The better part of you is safe. Fortune can do you an injury -- but what matters more is that I'm not afraid you'll do one to yourself. Go on as you've begun, and settle yourself into that way of living calmly, not softly. I'd rather be badly off than softly off -- and take 'badly' the way ordinary people mean it: hard, rough, laborious. We're used to hearing certain people's lives praised by those who envy them: 'he lives softly' -- what they mean is, 'he's soft.' For the mind is gradually made effeminate, and it dissolves into a likeness of the idleness and sloth in which it lies. Well then? Isn't it better even to grow stiff and hard? ... And then these same pampered people fear the very thing -- death -- to which they've made their life so similar. There's a great difference between leisure and a coffin. "Well then," you say, "isn't it better to lie inert like that than to be tossed about on those peaks of public duty?" Both conditions are detestable, the cramped and the numb alike. I think a man lying dead among his perfumes is just as dead as one dragged off by the hook. Leisure without learning is death, and a live burial for a man. What good, then, does withdrawing do? As if the causes of our anxiety didn't follow us across the seas! What hiding place is there that the fear of death doesn't enter? What quiet retreat of life, however well fortified and set up on the heights, does grief not terrify? Wherever you hide yourself, human troubles will clamor around you. Many things from outside surround us, meaning either to deceive or to press us hard; many from within seethe in the midst of our very solitude. Philosophy must be thrown around us like a wall, one that can't be taken -- one that fortune, though she assails it with many engines, cannot get past. The mind that has abandoned externals and asserts its own claim to its own citadel stands in an unconquerable place; every weapon falls short of it. Fortune doesn't have the long reach we imagine: she seizes no one except the man clinging to her. So let us spring back from her as far as we can; only knowledge of ourselves and of nature will grant us that. The mind must know where it's going, where it came from, what is good for it and what is bad, what it should pursue and what avoid, and what that reason is which distinguishes the desirable from the to-be-shunned, by which the madness of our cravings is tamed and the savagery of our fears held in check. Some people think they've suppressed these things by themselves, without philosophy; but when some accident has put the unwary man to the test, a late confession is squeezed out of him. Big words fall away once the torturer demands the hand, once death has drawn nearer. You could say to such a man: 'You easily challenged evils that weren't there. Now here's the pain you called bearable, here's the death against which you spoke so bravely and at such length. The whips are cracking, the sword is flashing --
now, Aeneas, is the time for courage, now for a steady heart.'
That steadiness, though, will be produced only by constant practice, if you exercise not your words but your mind, if you prepare yourself against death -- and no one will exhort or brace you against death by trying to convince you through quibbles that death is not an evil. It amuses me, Lucilius, best of men, to laugh at the little Greek absurdities that I haven't shaken off yet, much as I marvel at them.
Our Zeno uses this piece of reasoning: 'No evil is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not an evil.' Well, you've cured me! I'm freed from fear; after this I won't hesitate to stretch out my neck. Don't you want to speak a little more seriously, and not raise a laugh in a man about to die? I honestly couldn't easily tell you which was more foolish: the man who thought he'd extinguished the fear of death with this syllogism, or the man who tried to refute it as though it actually mattered.
For this second man set up an opposing syllogism, arising from the fact that we class death among the 'indifferents' -- what the Greeks call adiaphora. 'Nothing indifferent,' he says, 'is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not indifferent.' You see where this argument sneaks past you: death itself is not glorious, but dying bravely is glorious. And when you say 'nothing indifferent is glorious,' I grant you that -- provided I can add that nothing is glorious except in connection with indifferent things; I call these things indifferent (that is, neither good nor bad): sickness, pain, poverty, exile, death.
None of these is glorious in itself, yet nothing is glorious without them. For it's not poverty that's praised, but the man whom poverty doesn't bring low or bend; it's not exile that's praised, but the man who went into exile with a bolder face than the one who sent him; it's not pain that's praised, but the man whom pain never forced to yield; no one praises death itself, but the man whose death took his spirit away before it could trouble it.
None of these things is honorable or glorious in itself, but whatever virtue touches and handles becomes honorable and glorious; they lie there in the middle, neutral. It matters whether it's wickedness or virtue that lays a hand on them. The very death that is glorious in Cato is at once shameful and blush-worthy in Brutus. This is the same Brutus who, about to die, looked for delays -- withdrew to relieve his bowels, and when summoned to death and ordered to bare his neck, said, 'I will bare it -- so may I live!' What madness, to flee when you cannot go back! 'I will bare it,' he said, 'so may I live!' He very nearly added, 'even under Antony.' What a man, worthy to have his life spared!
But, as I was starting to say, you see that death itself is neither an evil nor a good: Cato made the most honorable use of it, Brutus the most disgraceful. Every thing takes on the beauty it lacked in itself once virtue is added to it. We call a bedroom bright; the very same room is pitch dark at night;
day pours light into it, night snatches the light away: so too with those things we call indifferent and neutral -- riches, strength, beauty, honors, kingship, and on the other side, death, exile, bad health, pains, and whatever else we fear more or less -- it is either wickedness or virtue that gives them the name of bad or good. A lump of metal is by itself neither hot nor cold; thrown into a furnace it grows hot, dropped into water it cools. Death is made honorable by that which is honorable -- namely, virtue, and a mind that scorns externals.
There is, Lucilius, a great difference even among the things we call 'neutral.' Death isn't indifferent in the way it's indifferent whether your hair is even or uneven in length. Death belongs among those things which, though not actually evils, still have the appearance of evil: there is a love of self, an innate will to persist and preserve oneself, and a recoiling from dissolution ... because death seems to snatch away many good things from us and lead us out of this abundance of things to which we've grown accustomed. This too alienates us from death: that we already know this life, but we don't know what the things are like to which we're about to pass, and we shudder at the unknown. There is, besides, a natural fear of the darkness into which death is believed to lead us.
And so even if death is indifferent, it isn't the kind of thing that can easily be disregarded: the mind must be hardened by great training so that it can bear the sight of death and its approach. Death ought to be held in more contempt than it usually is; for we've believed many things about it -- many minds have vied with one another to increase its ill repute. The prison of the underworld has been described, and a region oppressed by unending night, in which
a beast lies coiled over half-eaten bones in its bloody cave,
barking forever to terrify the bloodless shades.
Even once you've convinced someone that these are just stories, and that the dead have nothing left to fear, another fear creeps in: people are just as afraid of being somewhere among the dead as of being nowhere at all.
Given all this opposition -- the long-standing persuasion that has been poured over us -- why shouldn't it be glorious to bear death bravely, one of the greatest achievements of the human mind? A mind will never rise up to virtue if it believes death is an evil; it will rise up if it thinks death indifferent. Nature doesn't allow anyone to approach with a great spirit something he judges to be an evil: he'll come sluggishly and hesitantly. But nothing done unwillingly, dragging one's feet, is glorious; virtue does nothing because it's compelled to.
Add to this that nothing is done honorably unless the whole mind has thrown itself into it and stood by it, unless no part of the man resisted. But when someone approaches an evil either out of fear of worse things, or out of hope for goods so great that the swallowing of one evil is worth reaching them, the judgments of the one acting are at odds with each other: on one side something bids him carry through what he's set out to do, on the other something pulls him back and makes him flee something suspect and dangerous; so he's torn in different directions. If that's how it is, glory perishes; for virtue carries out its decisions with a mind in harmony with itself, and fears nothing that it does.
Don't yield to evils, but go against them all the more boldly
than your fortune will allow you.
You won't go more boldly if you've believed those things to be evils. This conviction has to be torn out of your breast; otherwise a lingering suspicion will slow down your charge, and you'll be pushed into what you ought to be attacking.
Our Stoics, of course, want it to appear that Zeno's syllogism
is true, and that the other one opposed to it is deceptive and false. I don't reduce these things to the rule of logic and those tangled knots of a stale, worn-out craft; I judge that this whole genre ought to be thrown out -- the kind by which the person being questioned thinks he's being boxed in, and, driven to an admission, answers one thing while thinking another. In defense of the truth we ought to proceed more straightforwardly, against fear more forcefully.
As for these tangles that the Stoics wind up, I would rather untie them and lay them out flat, so as to persuade, not to trap. When a general is about to lead his army into battle, meaning to have them die for their wives and children, how will he exhort them by a syllogism? I give you the Fabii, transferring an entire war of the republic onto a single household. I show you the Spartans stationed in the very narrow pass of Thermopylae: they hope neither for victory nor for return; that place is going to be their tomb. How do you exhort men to receive with their own bodies the ruin of an entire nation, and to give up their lives rather than their ground? Will you say, 'What is an evil is not glorious; death is glorious; therefore death is not an evil'? What a powerful speech that would be! Who, after hearing it, would hesitate to hurl himself onto hostile blades and die standing up? But how bravely Leonidas addressed his men instead! 'Eat your breakfast, comrades,' he said, 'as men who will dine below with the dead.' The food didn't swell in their mouths, didn't stick in their throats, didn't slip from their hands: eagerly they promised themselves both that breakfast and that dinner.
And what of that Roman general who, sending soldiers to seize a position, when they would have to march through a vast enemy army, addressed them like this: 'Go there, comrades, it is necessary; coming back is not necessary.' You see how simple and commanding virtue is: which mortal can your little tricks and syllogisms make braver, which one more upright? They break the spirit down, when the spirit needs least of all to be shrunk and forced into small, thorny matters -- precisely when it is being composed for something great.
It's not from three hundred men but from all mortals that the fear of death must be stripped away. How do you teach them that death is not an evil? How do you overcome the opinions of an entire age, opinions with which infancy itself is steeped from the very start? What help do you find for human weakness? What do you say to set them ablaze so they'll rush into the middle of danger? With what speech, with what powers of intellect, do you turn back this universal agreement in fear, this conviction of the human race standing braced against you? Are you putting together for me tricky little words and stringing together petty questions? Great monsters are struck down with great weapons. That savage serpent in Africa, more terrifying to the Roman legions than the war itself, they tried in vain to bring down with arrows and slingstones: it couldn't even be wounded by the Pythian bow. Since its enormous size, matching the vastness of its body, threw back iron and whatever weapons human hands had hurled, it was finally broken by boulders flung from millstones. And against death you hurl such tiny darts? Do you meet a lion with an awl? What you say is sharp enough -- nothing is sharper than a blade of grass -- but excessive sharpness itself renders some things useless and ineffective. Farewell.