Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Our friend Liberalis is downcast just now at the news of the fire that burned the colony of Lyon to the ground. This disaster could shake anyone, let alone a man so devoted to his native city. The event has left him searching for his firmness of mind — the firmness he had trained, evidently, against the things he thought could be feared. But an evil this unexpected, this nearly unheard of — I am not surprised it went unfeared, since it was without precedent. Fire has harassed many cities; it has wiped out none. Even where the flames were flung onto rooftops by an enemy's hand, they die out in many places, and though rekindled again and again, they still rarely devour everything so completely as to leave nothing for the sword. Even an earthquake has scarcely ever been so severe and destructive as to overturn whole towns. Never, in short, has a fire raged anywhere so ruinously that nothing was left for a second fire. [2] So many magnificent works, any one of which could have made a city famous by itself, one night flattened; and in the depths of peace there occurred a thing beyond what could be feared even in war. Who would believe it? While arms are quiet everywhere, while security has spread across the whole world, Lyon — the showpiece of Gaul — is being looked for. Fortune has always allowed those she strikes publicly to fear what they were about to suffer; nothing great has ever failed to get some interval before its own collapse. Here a single night stood between a very great city and none. In short, it takes me longer to tell you the city perished than it took it to perish.
[3] All of this weighs on the spirit of our Liberalis, firm and upright though he is against troubles of his own. Nor was he shaken without cause: the unexpected presses harder. Novelty adds weight to calamities, and there is no mortal whose grief was not increased by his own astonishment. [4] For that reason nothing should catch us unprepared. The mind must be sent ahead to meet everything, and we should consider not what usually happens but what can happen. What is there, after all, that fortune does not pull down from full bloom when she chooses — that she does not attack and batter the more brilliantly it shines? What is steep or difficult for her? [5] She does not always come by one road, or even by a well-worn one: now she calls in our own hands against us; now, content with her own strength, she finds dangers that need no agent. No moment is exempt: in the middle of pleasures the causes of pain spring up. War rises in the depths of peace, and the safeguards of our security turn into things to fear; friend becomes enemy, ally becomes foe. The calm of summer is whipped into sudden storms worse than winter's. Without an enemy we suffer an enemy's work, and if all else fails, excessive prosperity finds the causes of its own ruin. Disease attacks the most temperate, consumption the strongest, punishment the most innocent, riot the most withdrawn. Chance picks out something new by which to force its strength on those who had forgotten it. [6] Whatever a long sequence of years has built with great labor and great indulgence from the gods, a single day scatters and disperses. Whoever said 'a day' has granted a long reprieve to evils in a hurry: an hour, an instant of time, is enough to overturn empires. It would be some consolation for our weakness and our affairs if everything perished as slowly as it comes into being; as it is, growth is a slow exit, but the road to ruin is a sprint. [7] Nothing is stable, private or public. The destinies of men and of cities alike are on the wheel. Amid the profoundest calm, terror arises, and with no disturbing causes outside, evils burst out from where they were least expected. Kingdoms that had stood through civil wars and foreign ones collapse with no one pushing. How few states have carried their prosperity all the way! Everything, then, must be thought through, and the mind fortified against whatever can happen. [8] Rehearse exile, torture, war, shipwreck. Chance can tear you from your country or your country from you; it can drive you into the wilderness; the very place where crowds are suffocating can become a wilderness. Let the whole condition of the human lot be set before your eyes, and let us anticipate in our minds not just as much as often happens but as much as can happen at the utmost, if we do not want to be crushed, or stunned by unusual events as if they were unprecedented. Fortune must be thought through in full. [9] How many times have the cities of Asia, how many times those of Achaia, fallen in a single tremor! How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up! How often has that scourge laid Cyprus waste! How often has Paphos collapsed on itself! Time and again news has reached us of the destruction of whole cities — and we, among whom such news arrives time and again, what fraction of the whole are we? Let us stand up, then, against the accidents of fortune, and know that whatever befalls is never as great as rumor makes it. [10] A rich city has burned, the ornament of provinces into which it had been set and from which it stood apart, perched on a single hill, and not a very broad one. But of all those cities you now hear called magnificent and noble, time will erase even the traces. Don't you see how in Achaia the very foundations of the most famous cities have already crumbled away, and nothing survives to show that they even existed? [11] It is not only what hands have made that falls; it is not only what human art and industry have set up that time overturns. Mountain ridges dissolve; whole regions have subsided; places that stood far from any sight of the sea have been covered by its waves. The vast violence of fire has eaten away the hills through which it once glowed, and has brought low peaks that were once towering — the comfort and the seamark of sailors. The works of nature herself are battered; so we ought to bear the destruction of cities with an even mind. [12] They stand only to fall. This end awaits them all: whether the inner violence of winds, blasts raging through closed spaces, throws off the weight that holds them down; whether the rush of torrents, vaster underground, breaks through what stands in the way; whether the fury of flames ruptures the fabric of the soil; whether age, from which nothing is safe, overpowers them bit by bit; whether an unhealthy climate drives out their populations and neglect rots what is abandoned. To list every road fate can take would be a long business. One thing I do know: everything mortals make stands condemned to mortality; we live surrounded by what must perish.
[13] These, then, and consolations like them are what I offer our Liberalis, who burns with an extraordinary love for his city — which perhaps was consumed only so that it might be raised up better. Often an injury has made room for a greater fortune: many things have fallen in order to rise higher. Timagenes, no friend to the prosperity of Rome, used to say that fires in the city grieved him for one reason only: he knew that what rose would be better than what had burned. [14] In this city too it is likely that everyone will compete to rebuild greater and loftier than what they lost. May the new buildings be long-lasting, and founded under better auspices for a longer age! For this colony is in its hundredth year from its origin — an age not extreme even for a man. Planted by Plancus, it grew to this density of population thanks to the advantages of its site: yet how many grave disasters it has endured within the span of a human old age! [15] So let the mind be shaped to understand and to endure its lot, and let it know that there is nothing fortune has not dared; that she has the same rights against empires as against those who rule them; the same power against cities as against men. There is nothing here to resent: we have entered a world where life is lived under these laws. You accept them: obey. You don't: leave, by whatever exit you please. Be indignant if some injustice has been decreed against you personally; but if this necessity binds highest and lowest alike, make your peace with fate, by which all things are dissolved. [16] There is no reason to measure us by our burial mounds, or by those monuments of unequal size that line the road: the ash makes everyone equal. We are born unequal; we die equal. I say the same of cities as of their inhabitants: Ardea was captured just as Rome was. The founder of human law distinguished us neither by birth nor by the fame of our names — except while we exist. But when the end of mortals is reached, he says: 'Away with ambition; for everything that presses upon the earth, let one and the same law hold.' For enduring everything we are equals; no one is more fragile than another, no one more sure of himself for tomorrow.
[17] Alexander, king of the Macedonians, had begun to study geometry — the poor wretch — because it would teach him how tiny the earth is, of which he had seized only the smallest part. Yes, I call him a wretch on this account, that he was bound to understand he bore a false surname: for who can be Great on something tiny? What was being taught was fine-grained and had to be learned with careful attention — not the sort of thing a madman could take in, a man dispatching his ambitions beyond the ocean. 'Teach me the easy parts,' he says. His teacher replies: 'It is all the same for everybody, and just as hard for everybody.' [18] Imagine that nature is saying this: 'The things you complain of are the same for everyone. I cannot make them easier for anyone; but whoever wishes will make them easier for himself.' How? By evenness of mind. You are bound to feel pain, and thirst, and hunger, and to grow old (if a longer stay among men falls to you), and to be ill, and to lose things, and to die. [19] Still, there is no reason to believe the people making all that noise around you: none of these things is an evil, none unendurable or even hard. Fear of them rests on nothing but consensus. You fear death the way you fear gossip — and what is more foolish than a man afraid of words? Our friend Demetrius puts it neatly: he says the utterances of the ignorant rank with him exactly as high as noises passed from the belly. 'Why should I care,' he says, 'whether the sound comes out above or below?' [20] What madness, to be afraid of being defamed by the infamous! And just as your fear of gossip was groundless, so is your fear of the things you would never fear if gossip had not ordered it. Would a good man take any damage from being spattered with unfair rumors? [21] Then let this not count even against death in our court — for death, too, has a bad reputation. Not one of its accusers has tried it; in the meantime, it is rash to condemn what you do not know. But here is what you do know: to how many people it is useful, how many it frees from torture, from poverty, from complaints, from punishments, from weariness. We are in no one's power, so long as death is in our own. Farewell.