Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Who could doubt, my Lucilius, that we owe the bare fact of living to the immortal gods, and the fact of living well to philosophy? So we would owe philosophy more than we owe the gods, by exactly as much as a good life outweighs mere life — that would count as certain, except that the gods gave us philosophy itself. Knowledge of it they gave to no one; the capacity for it they gave to everyone. [2] For if they had made philosophy too a common possession, if we were born already prudent, wisdom would have lost the best thing about it: that it is not part of the lottery. As things stand, this is what makes it precious and splendid — it does not simply arrive; each of us owes it to himself; it cannot be requested from someone else. What would you find to admire in philosophy if it came as a handout? [3] Its one task is to discover the truth about things divine and human. Religious reverence never leaves its side, nor duty, nor justice, nor the whole retinue of virtues linked arm in arm and holding together. Philosophy taught us to worship what is divine and to love what is human, taught that command belongs to the gods and fellowship to mankind. And that fellowship stayed intact for a long while, until greed tore the partnership apart and became the cause of poverty even for those it made richest; for men stopped possessing everything the moment they wanted things of their own. [4] But the first mortals, and those born from them, followed nature uncorrupted; they had one and the same person as leader and as law, having placed themselves in the hands of their better. It is natural for the worse to yield to the stronger. Even among dumb herds, the biggest bodies or the fiercest take the lead: it is no puny bull that walks in front of the cattle, but the one whose size and muscle have beaten the other males; the tallest elephant leads the herd. Among human beings, 'best' takes the place of 'biggest.' So the ruler was chosen for his mind, and the greatest happiness belonged to peoples among whom no one could be more powerful without being better; a man can safely do whatever he wants when he thinks he can do only what he ought.
[5] In that age, then, which they call golden, Posidonius holds that kingship lay with the wise. They kept hands off and held the stronger back from the weaker; they urged and dissuaded, and pointed out what was useful and what was not. Their foresight saw to it that their people lacked nothing; their courage kept dangers away; their generosity made their subjects flourish and gave them dignity. Ruling was a duty, not a reign. No one tested his power against the very men through whom he had come to have any, and no one had either the impulse or the grounds for wrongdoing, since a ruler who commanded well was obeyed well, and a king could make no graver threat against the disobedient than that he would leave the kingdom. [6] But once vices crept in and kingdoms turned into tyrannies, laws became necessary — and in the beginning these too were given by the wise. Solon, who set Athens on a footing of equal justice, was one of the seven famous for wisdom; if the same generation had produced Lycurgus, he would have joined that sacred number as an eighth. The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas are praised; and these men learned the statutes they would lay down for Sicily, then in its prime, and for the Greek settlements across Italy, not in the forum or the anterooms of legal consultants but in Pythagoras's quiet and holy retreat.
[7] Up to this point I agree with Posidonius. But that philosophy invented the crafts daily life makes use of — that I will not grant, nor will I claim the glory of the workshop for it. 'It was philosophy,' he says, 'that taught men who were scattered about, sheltering in huts or a hollowed-out cliff or the trunk of a rotted tree, to build proper roofs.' For my part I think philosophy no more dreamed up these contrivances of roofs rising on top of roofs, of cities pressing down on cities, than it dreamed up fishponds enclosed for one purpose — so the gullet need not run the risk of storms, and luxury, however savagely the sea might rage, could have its own private harbors in which to fatten sorted flocks of fish. [8] What are you saying? Philosophy taught men to keep a lock and key? What was that but handing greed its signal? Was it philosophy that hoisted these overhanging roofs at such peril to the people underneath? As if it were not enough to be covered by whatever came to hand, and to find some natural shelter for oneself without craft and without trouble. [9] Believe me, that was a happy age — before architects, before roof-plasterers. All that came in with luxury, which was being born at the same time: squaring timbers with the axe, and slicing a beam with a steady hand while the saw ran along the marked line;
for the earliest men split their splittable wood with wedges.
They were not building halls to house a banquet, nor for that purpose was pine or fir carted down in a long train of wagons while the streets trembled, so that coffered ceilings heavy with gold could hang from it. [10] Forked poles propped at either end held up the hut; with brushwood packed tight and leaves heaped up and laid on a slope, the rain — however heavy — ran off. Under such roofs they lived without a care. Thatch covered free men; slavery lives under marble and gold.
[11] I part company with Posidonius on this point too, his view that the tools of the smith's trade were thought up by wise men. On that logic he might as well say it was wise men through whom
men learned in those days to trap wild beasts with snares, to cheat them with birdlime,
and to ring the great woodland glades with dogs.
All of that was discovered by human shrewdness, not by wisdom. [12] I disagree here as well — that it was wise men who discovered the ores of iron and copper when forest fires scorched the earth and the surface veins melted and ran out. Such things are discovered by the kind of men who prize them. [13] Nor does the question strike me as being as subtle as it strikes Posidonius: whether the hammer or the tongs came into use first. Both were invented by someone with a lively, sharp mind — not a great or lofty one — and so was everything else that has to be hunted for with the body bent over and the mind staring at the ground. The wise man was easy to feed. How not? Even in our own age he wants to travel as light as possible. [14] How, I ask you, can it be consistent to admire both Diogenes and Daedalus? Which of the two looks wise to you: the man who devised the saw, or the man who, on seeing a boy drinking water from a cupped hand, immediately pulled his cup out of his knapsack and broke it, telling himself off with the words, 'What a fool I've been, carrying superfluous baggage all this time!' — the man who folded himself into a storage jar and slept there? [15] Which do you think the wiser today: the one who worked out how to shoot saffron spray to an astonishing height out of concealed piping, who floods or empties channels with a sudden rush of water, who fits together revolving ceilings for dining rooms so that one face follows another and the ceiling changes as often as the courses — or the one who demonstrates to others and to himself how nature has commanded us nothing harsh or difficult, that we can house ourselves without the marble-cutter and the joiner, clothe ourselves without trade in silks, and have what our needs require if we will be content with what the earth has laid on its surface? If the human race were willing to listen to him, it would learn that a cook is as superfluous to it as a soldier.
[16] Those men were wise, or at any rate like the wise, for whom the care of the body was a simple business. Necessities cost simple effort; it is for luxuries that we sweat. You will feel no need of craftsmen: follow nature. She did not want us stretched thin; whatever she made compulsory, she equipped us for. 'Cold is unbearable to a naked body.' Well then — can't the skins of wild beasts and other animals ward off cold fully and to spare? Don't plenty of peoples cover their bodies with tree bark? Aren't birds' feathers stitched together to serve as clothing? Even today, doesn't a large part of the Scythians dress in the pelts of foxes and mice — soft against the skin, and proof against any wind? Well then — hasn't anyone you like woven a wicker hurdle by hand, daubed it with cheap mud, roofed the ridge with straw and other wild stuff, and passed the winter unworried while the rain slid down the slopes? [17] 'Still, one needs a thicker shade to beat back the heat of the summer sun.' Well then — hasn't the passage of time hidden away many places which, hollowed out by weathering or some other accident, have receded into caves? Well then — don't the peoples of the Syrtes burrow into the ground and hide there — they for whom, given the sun's excessive blaze, no covering is solid enough to repel the heat except the parched earth itself? [18] Nature was not so unjust that, while granting every other animal an easy passage through life, man alone should be unable to live without all these crafts. Nothing harsh has been commanded of us by her, nothing that must be painfully hunted down for life to be sustained. We were born into a world already furnished; the difficulty is our own manufacture — we made it by disdaining what is easy. Shelter, coverings, ways to warm the body, food — all the things that have now become a massive industry — lay ready to hand, free, obtainable with light effort; for the measure of everything matched the need. We are the ones who made these things expensive, made them marvels, made them obtainable only through many elaborate arts. [19] Nature is sufficient for what nature demands. Luxury has deserted nature; it spurs itself on daily, grows through all these centuries, and uses ingenuity to abet vice. First it began to crave the superfluous, then the harmful; at last it sold the mind into bondage to the body and ordered it to be the slave of the body's appetite. All those trades that keep the city in a whirl or a din are doing business for the body — the body which once was given its due as a slave, and now is provisioned as a master. So from this come the weavers' shops, from this the carpenters', from this the perfume-boilers, from this the teachers of effeminate posturings of the body and of songs effeminate and limp. The natural measure, which capped desire at what need supplied, has retreated; by now it counts as boorishness and misery to want only as much as is enough.
[20] It is unbelievable, my Lucilius, how easily the sweetness of eloquence draws even great men away from the truth. Take Posidonius, who ranks, as I see it, among philosophy's greatest benefactors. He wants to describe, first, how certain fibers get their twist while others are pulled from the loose, yielding mass; then how the loom, with hanging weights, stretches the warp straight; how the weft, inserted to soften the stiffness of the web pressing it on both sides, is forced by the batten to close up and bind — and he declared that the weaver's art too was invented by the wise, forgetting that this more refined kind was discovered later, in which
the web is bound to the beam, the reed parts the warp,
the weft is threaded through the middle by pointed shuttles,
and the broad comb's notched teeth beat it home.
What if he had had the chance to see the looms of our day, which produce clothing that will conceal nothing — clothing that offers no help, I won't say to the body, but even to modesty? [21] He then passes to farmers, and no less eloquently describes the soil broken open by the plough and worked a second time, so that the loosened earth lies more open to the roots; then the seed scattered, and the weeds pulled by hand so that nothing random and wild springs up to kill the crop. This too, he says, is the work of wise men — as if farmers were not even now discovering plenty of new ways to increase the yield. [22] Then, not content with these arts, he sends the wise man down into the mill. He relates how, by imitating nature, he began to make bread: 'The grain taken into the mouth,' he says, 'is broken by the hardness of the teeth meeting; whatever falls away is carried back to those same teeth by the tongue; then it is mixed with moisture so that it slips more easily down the slippery throat; when it reaches the stomach, it is cooked by the stomach's even heat; and only then does it pass into the body. [23] Following this model, someone set a rough stone on top of a rough stone, in the likeness of the teeth, one set of which stays still and waits on the motion of the other; then, by the rubbing of the two, the grains are broken and fed back again and again until, ground repeatedly, they are reduced to fineness. Then he sprinkled the flour with water, tamed it with steady kneading, and shaped a loaf, which at first hot ash and a glowing tile baked through; later ovens were gradually discovered, and other devices whose heat obeys the will.' He came within an inch of saying that shoemaking too was invented by the wise.
[24] All of that was devised by reason, certainly — but not by right reason. They are the inventions of man, not of the wise man; just as much, by god, as the ships in which we cross rivers and seas, their sails rigged to catch the driving winds, with steering-oars added at the stern to twist the vessel's course this way and that. The model was taken from fish, which are steered by the tail and by its slight flick to either side turn their own speed. [25] 'The wise man,' he says, 'did indeed invent all this, but it was beneath his own handling, so he gave it over to humbler workmen.' On the contrary — these things were thought up by exactly the same sort of people who look after them today. Some of them, we know, appeared only within living memory: the use of window-panes that transmit clear light through translucent shell, the raised floors of baths and the pipes set into the walls to spread the heat around and warm bottom and top evenly. Need I mention the marbles that make temples and houses gleam? Or the masses of stone shaped round and smooth, on which we set colonnades and halls big enough to hold whole populations? Or the shorthand signs by which even a rapid speech is taken down and the hand keeps pace with the tongue? These are the inventions of the cheapest slaves. [26] Wisdom sits higher; it does not train hands: it is the teacher of minds. Do you want to know what it has unearthed, what it has accomplished? Not graceful movements of the body, nor varied tunes on horn and pipe, in which the breath is caught and shaped into a note as it leaves or passes through. It builds no weapons, no walls, nothing of use in war: it stands for peace and calls the human race to concord. [27] It is not, I insist, a manufacturer of tools for everyday needs. Why assign it such trifles? What you are looking at is the craftsman of life. Other arts it does hold in subjection — for where life belongs to it, life's furnishings serve it too. But its aim is the state of happiness: there it leads, there it opens the roads. [28] It shows what things are evils and what merely look like evils. It strips vanity from minds; it gives a greatness that is solid, and deflates the kind that is puffed up and showy from sheer emptiness; nor does it allow the difference between the great and the swollen to go unrecognized. It hands on the knowledge of nature as a whole and of its own nature. It declares what the gods are and of what kind; what the underworld powers are, what the household spirits and guardian geniuses, what the souls that have endured into the second rank of divinities, where they dwell, what they do, what they can do, what they want. These are its rites of initiation, through which is unlocked no parochial shrine but the vast temple of all the gods — the universe itself — whose true images and true faces it has brought forth for minds to gaze on; for eyesight is too dull for spectacles so great. [29] Then it goes back to the beginnings of things, to the eternal reason infused through the whole and the force in all seeds that shapes each thing to its proper form. Then it begins to inquire into the soul: where it comes from, where it resides, how long it lasts, into how many parts it is divided. Then it crosses from bodies to the bodiless, and sifts truth and the proofs of truth; after that, how ambiguities in life or in language are to be sorted out — for in both, the false is mixed in with the true.
[30] The wise man did not, I say, withdraw from these crafts, as Posidonius thinks: he never came near them at all. He would have judged nothing worth inventing that he was not going to judge worth using forever; he would not take up what would have to be put down. [31] 'Anacharsis,' he says, 'invented the potter's wheel, by whose turning vessels are shaped.' Then, because the potter's wheel is found in Homer, he preferred to have the verses look spurious rather than the story. I for my part do not insist that Anacharsis was not the author of this thing; but if he was, then a wise man invented it, yet not in his capacity as wise — just as the wise do many things as human beings, not as wise men. Suppose the wise man is a very fast runner: he will outstrip everyone in a race insofar as he is fast, not insofar as he is wise. I could wish I might show Posidonius a glassblower, who with his breath shapes glass into a multitude of forms that could scarcely be fashioned by the most careful hand. These things were invented after we stopped finding the wise man. [32] 'Democritus,' he says, 'is reported to have invented the arch, so that a curve of stones leaning gradually inward is locked by the keystone.' This I will call false; for there must have been bridges and gateways before Democritus, and their tops are generally curved. [33] And you have both forgotten, it seems, that this same Democritus discovered how ivory could be softened, and how a pebble could be boiled down and turned into an emerald — the very firing by which, even today, stones found suitable for it are colored. A wise man may well have invented such things, but he did not invent them insofar as he was wise; for he does many things which we see done just as well by the most unphilosophical of men, or with more skill and practice.
[34] You ask what the wise man has tracked down, what he has dragged into the light? First, truth and nature — which he pursued not, like the other animals, with eyes too slow for things divine; then the law of life, which he aligned with the universe, and he taught us not merely to know the gods but to follow them, and to receive what befalls us exactly as we would receive orders. He forbade obedience to false opinions, and weighed the worth of each thing on a true scale; he condemned pleasures that come mixed with regret, praised goods that will please forever, and made it public knowledge that the happiest man is the one who has no need of happiness, and the most powerful the one who has power over himself. [35] I am not speaking of that philosophy which set the citizen outside his country and the gods outside the universe, which handed virtue over to pleasure — but of the philosophy which counts nothing good except the honorable, which cannot be sweet-talked by the gifts of man or of fortune, whose price is precisely this: that it cannot be bought for a price.
That this philosophy existed in that rough age, when crafts were still lacking and useful things were learned by use itself, I do not believe. [36] Then came those fortunate times, when nature's benefits lay in common, open for all to use alike — before greed and luxury broke the partnership of mortals and taught them to scatter from fellowship into plunder. The men of that age were not wise, even if they were doing what the wise should do. [37] Certainly no one could look with more admiration on any other condition of the human race; and if a god allowed someone to shape earthly affairs and give peoples their ways of life, he would approve nothing other than what is recorded of those among whom
no tenant farmers subdued the fields;
even to mark the plain or divide it with a boundary
was forbidden: men sought all things for the common store, and the earth herself
gave everything more freely with no one demanding it.
[38] What race of men was ever happier than that one? They enjoyed nature in common; she sufficed, like a parent, as guardian of all; and what they had was the untroubled possession of public wealth. Why shouldn't I call that the richest race of mortals, in which you could not find a poor man? Into this best of arrangements burst greed, and in its eagerness to set something apart and turn it to its own use, it made everything belong to someone else, and shrank itself from boundless to cramped. Greed brought in poverty: by craving much it lost everything. So now, though it try to recover what it lost, though it pile field on field, driving out the neighbor by purchase or by force, though it stretch estates to the size of provinces and call a long journey through one's own land 'ownership' — no extension of boundaries will bring us back to where we started. When we have done everything, we will possess much: we used to possess the universe. [39] The earth itself was more fertile untilled, and generous toward peoples who did not plunder her. Whatever nature produced, it was as much a pleasure to show one's find to another as to have found it; no one could have too much or too little: everything was shared out among people in accord. [40] The stronger had not yet laid a hand on the weaker; the miser had not yet, by hoarding away what would lie idle for him, shut another man off even from necessities. Each cared for the other as much as for himself. [41] Weapons lay unused, and hands unstained by human blood had turned all their hostility against wild beasts. Those men, whom some dense grove sheltered from the sun, who lived safe under leaves in a cheap refuge against the savagery of winter or rain, passed peaceful nights without a sigh. Anxiety tosses us about on our purple and jabs us awake with the sharpest goads: but what soft sleep the hard earth gave them! [42] No carved ceiling panels hung over them; they lay in the open with the stars gliding above, and — the glorious spectacle of the nights — the heavens swept along headlong, conducting that great work in silence. By day as by night they had the vistas of this most beautiful of houses open to them; they loved to watch the constellations sinking from mid-sky, and others rising again from hiding. [43] How could it fail to delight, to wander among wonders scattered so wide? But you people panic at every creak of your roofs, and if anything snaps among your painted walls, you run for it, terrified. They had no houses the size of cities: the open air, the breeze blowing free through unenclosed space, the light shade of a rock or a tree, clear springs and streams unspoiled by engineering works or piping or any forced channel, running of their own accord, and meadows lovely without artifice — and among all this a rustic dwelling, finished by a country hand. That was a home in accord with nature, in which it was a pleasure to live, fearing neither the house itself nor for it: today our houses are a great part of what we are afraid of.
[44] But however splendid their life was, and however free of deceit, they were not wise men, since that name is now reserved for the greatest of achievements. Still, I would not deny that they were men of high spirit and, so to speak, fresh from the gods; there is no doubt that the world, before it was worn out, produced better stock. But though their native temper was stronger in all of them and readier for hard work, their capacities were not perfected in all. Nature does not give virtue: becoming good is an art. [45] They, at least, did not go hunting for gold or silver or translucent stones in the lowest dregs of the earth, and they still spared even the dumb animals. So far were they from a man killing a man — not out of anger, not out of fear, but just to watch. They had no embroidered clothing yet; gold was not yet woven — was not, so far, even being mined. [46] What follows, then? They were innocent through ignorance; and there is a great difference between refusing to do wrong and not knowing how. They lacked justice, they lacked prudence, they lacked self-control and courage. Their rough life had certain things resembling all these virtues; but virtue comes only to a mind trained, taught, and brought to its peak by unremitting practice. We are born for virtue, not born possessing it; even the finest natures, until you train them, hold virtue's raw material rather than virtue itself. Farewell.