Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
I think you and I will agree that external things are acquired for the body, and the body is cared for out of respect for the soul; and that within the soul there are subordinate parts, through which we move and are nourished, given to us for the sake of the ruling part itself. In this ruling part there is something irrational, and something rational; the former serves the latter, and the latter is the one thing that is not referred to anything else, but refers everything to itself. For that divine reason, too, is set over all things, and is itself under nothing; and this reason of ours is the very same reason, since it comes from that one.
If we agree on this, it follows that we agree on the next point too: that the happy life consists in this one thing alone, that reason be perfected in us. For reason alone does not bow the mind down; it stands firm against fortune; in every condition of circumstance it preserves itself. This alone is the one good that is never broken off. The happy man, I say, is the one whom nothing can make lesser: he holds the summit, and leans on nothing but himself; for whoever is propped up by some outside support can fall. If it were otherwise, things that are not truly ours would begin to have great power over us. But who wants to depend on fortune's constancy, or what wise man marvels at himself on account of things that belong to someone else? What is the happy life? Security, and unbroken tranquility. Greatness of soul will give us this, and a steadfast constancy that holds firm to sound judgment once formed. How is this reached? If the whole truth has been clearly seen; if, in our conduct, order, measure, and decency have been kept, along with a will that is harmless and kind, intent on reason and never departing from it — a will lovable and admirable at once. In short, to give you a brief formula: the soul of a wise man ought to be such as would befit a god. What can the man to whom every honorable thing belongs still want? For if things that are not honorable could add anything to the highest state, then the happy life would depend on things it can in fact do without. And what is more shameful, or more foolish, than to weave the good of a rational soul out of irrational things?
And yet some think the highest good can be increased, because it is not full enough when opposed by chance events. Even Antipater, among the great founders of this school, says that he allows some weight to external things — though very little. But you see what it means not to be content with daylight unless some little flame is added to it: what can a spark contribute, in the brightness of full sunlight? If you are not content with honor alone, you must want either freedom from trouble — what the Greeks call aochlēsia — or pleasure. The first of these can, in some fashion, be accepted; for a mind free of distress is unburdened and able to contemplate the universe, and nothing calls it away from the study of nature. But the other, pleasure, is a good fit for cattle: we are adding the irrational to the rational, the dishonorable to the honorable, to something great... does a tickling of the flesh make a life? Why, then, do you hesitate to say that a man is well off, if his palate is well off? And do you count this person — I will not say among men, but among human beings at all — whose highest good consists in flavors, colors, and sounds? Let him be removed from the ranks of animals, the most beautiful of them, second only to the gods; let him be herded in with the dumb beasts that rejoice in their feed. The irrational part of the soul has two divisions: one spirited, ambitious, unruly, given over to the passions; the other lowly, sluggish, devoted to pleasures. The first, though unbridled, they at least left as the better one, certainly the stronger and more worthy of a man; the second they judged necessary to the happy life — feeble and degraded as it is. They ordered reason to serve this one, and so made the highest good of the noblest of creatures something base and ignoble — worse still, a mixture, a monstrosity, patched together out of mismatched limbs. For as our Virgil says of Scylla:
a woman's face and lovely breast in front,
below the waist a monstrous sea-beast's form,
joined to the tails of dolphins and of wolves.
And yet to this Scylla they attached wild creatures, terrifying and swift; but what monstrous pieces have these men used to assemble their wisdom? The first part of a man is virtue itself; to this they attach useless, sagging flesh, fit only for taking in food, as Posidonius says. That divine virtue trails off into something slippery, and to its higher, venerable, celestial parts they stitch on a sluggish, wasting creature. Even that other thing, rest, contributed nothing itself to the soul, but merely removed obstacles; pleasure, on the other hand, actively dissolves and softens all strength. What union of parts could be found more discordant with itself? To the strongest of things they attach the feeblest; to the most solemn, something scarcely serious; to the most sacred, something unrestrained to the point of incest.
'What then?' someone says. 'If good health, calm, and freedom from pain will not hinder virtue in any way, will you not seek them?' Of course I will seek them — not because they are goods, but because they are in accordance with nature, and because I will take them up with sound judgment. What good, then, will there be in them? This one thing alone: choosing well. For when I put on the clothing that suits me, when I walk as I ought, when I dine as I should, it is not the dinner or the walk or the clothing that is good, but my own purpose in these things, keeping, in each case, the measure that agrees with reason. I will add still further: a man should aim to choose clean clothing, for by nature man is a clean and refined creature. And so it is not clean clothing itself that is good, but the choosing of clean clothing, because the good lies not in the thing but in the quality of the choice; our actions are honorable, not the things acted upon. What I have said of clothing, take me to be saying of the body as well. For nature has thrown this too around the soul like a kind of garment; it is its covering. But who has ever valued clothing by its storage chest? Neither does the scabbard make the sword good or bad. So I give you the same answer about the body too: I would indeed choose health and strength, if the choice were offered me, but what will be good is my own judgment about them, not the things themselves. 'The wise man,' someone says, 'is indeed happy; but he does not attain that highest good unless the instruments of nature also cooperate with him. Thus a man who has virtue cannot be wretched, but he is not most happy either, if he is deprived of natural goods, such as health, such as bodily wholeness.' What seems more incredible, you concede — that a man in the greatest and most constant pain is not wretched, and is even happy; what is easier to grant, you deny — that he is most happy. And yet if virtue can bring it about that someone is not wretched, it will more easily bring it about that he is most happy; for there is less distance from happy to most happy than from wretched to happy. Can the thing that has enough power to rescue a man from calamity and place him among the happy not have enough power left over to add what remains, and make him most happy? Does it fail on the last stretch of the climb? There are advantages and disadvantages in life, and both lie outside us. If the good man is not wretched, however much he is weighed down by disadvantages, how is he not most happy, if he lacks a few advantages? Just as he is not dragged down to wretchedness by the burden of disadvantages, so he is not led away from being most happy by a want of advantages; rather, he is as much most happy without advantages as he is not wretched under disadvantages — unless, of course, his own good can be snatched from him, if it can be diminished. I said a little earlier that a small flame adds nothing to the light of the sun; for whatever would shine without it is hidden in the sun's brightness. 'But some things,' one objects, 'block the sun too.' Yet the sun remains whole even when something stands in its way; and though something may come between it and us that blocks our view of it, the sun is still at its work, still carried on in its course; whenever it shines out from among the clouds, it is no less bright than in clear weather, nor even slower, since it makes a great difference whether something merely stands in the way or actually hinders. In the same way, things set against virtue take nothing away from it: it is not lessened, it merely shines less brightly to us. To us, perhaps, it appears and gleams less clearly, but to itself it is the same, and, like the sun when obscured, exercises its power in secret. This, then, is what calamities, losses, and injuries can do against virtue — exactly what a cloud can do against the sun.
There is someone who says that the wise man, if his bodily state is not favorable, is neither wretched nor happy. He too is mistaken; for he makes chance events equal to the virtues, and gives as much weight to honorable things as to things that lack honor altogether. But what is more disgraceful, more unworthy, than to compare things worthy of reverence with things beneath contempt? For justice, devotion, good faith, courage, and prudence are worthy of reverence; on the other hand, cheap are the things that often come to those least worthy of them — a sound leg, a strong arm, good teeth, and the health and firmness of such parts. Further, if the wise man whose body troubles him is to be considered neither wretched nor happy, but left in some middle state, then his life too will be neither to be sought nor to be avoided. But what is more absurd than saying the wise man's life is not to be sought? Or what is more incredible than that there should be some life neither to be sought nor avoided? Again, if bodily losses do not make him wretched, they allow him to remain happy; for things that have no power to shift a man into a worse condition have no power, either, to interrupt him from his best condition.
'We know something is cold and something is hot,' one says, 'and between the two is the lukewarm; likewise one man is happy, another wretched, another neither happy nor wretched.' I want to shake apart this image set up against us. If I pour more cold into the lukewarm thing, it will become cold; if I pour on more heat, it will eventually become hot. But to this man who is, as you say, neither wretched nor happy, however much misery I add, he will not become wretched — as you yourselves claim; so the image does not hold. Again, suppose I hand you a man neither wretched nor happy. I add blindness to him: he does not become wretched. I add disability: he does not become wretched. I add constant, severe pain: still he does not become wretched. If so many evils do not carry him down into a wretched life, neither do they draw him out of a happy one. If, as you say, the wise man cannot fall from happy into wretched, then he cannot fall into the not-happy either. For why should someone, once he has begun to slip somewhere, come to a stop partway? Whatever keeps him from rolling all the way to the bottom keeps him at the top as well. Why should the happy life not be capable of being torn away? Because it cannot even be slackened, and for that reason virtue by itself is sufficient for it. 'What then?' one asks. 'Is not the wise man who has lived longer, whom no pain has ever distracted, happier than the one who has always had to struggle against bad fortune?' Answer me this: is he also better and more honorable? If not, then he is not happier either. To live more happily, one must live more rightly; if he cannot live more rightly, he cannot live more happily either. Virtue admits of no increase, and so neither does the happy life that comes from virtue. For virtue is so great a good that it does not even feel these petty additions — the brevity of a lifetime, pain, and the various injuries done to the body; for pleasure is not even worth its notice. What is the chief thing in virtue? Not needing the future, and not counting up one's days. In however small a span of time is allotted, it brings eternal goods to completion. This seems incredible to us, and beyond the reach of human nature; for we measure its greatness by our own weakness, and give the name of virtue to our own vices. And yet is it not just as incredible that a man in the depths of torment should say, 'I am happy'? And yet this very voice was heard in the workshop of pleasure itself. 'This is the happiest day, and the last, that I am living,' said Epicurus, even as difficulty of urination tortured him on one side and the incurable pain of an ulcerated stomach on the other. Why, then, should this seem incredible among those who cultivate virtue, when it is found even among those ruled by pleasure? These same degraded, low-minded people say that in the depths of pain, in the depths of calamity, the wise man will be neither wretched nor happy. And yet this too is incredible — more incredible, in fact; for I cannot see how virtue, once cast down from its own height, is not driven all the way to the bottom. Either it must guarantee happiness, or, if it has been driven from that, it will not prevent a man from becoming wretched. What stands firm cannot be half-toppled: it must either be overcome, or it prevails.
'Only to the immortal gods,' one says, 'has virtue and the happy life been given outright; to us belongs only some shadow and likeness of those goods; we approach them, we do not reach them.' But reason is common to gods and men alike: in the gods it is already complete, in us it is capable of completion. It is our own vices that drive us to despair. For man in his second, imperfect state is like someone not steady enough to hold on to the best things, whose judgment still wavers and is uncertain. He may still lack the use of eyes and ears, good health, an unmarred bodily appearance, and, along with a body that stays as it is, a longer span of years besides. Through these things he can live a life he need not regret; and yet in the imperfect man there remains a certain power of wickedness, because his mind is still inclined to what is wrong — that active, agitated wickedness is absent only from the good man. He is not yet good, but he is being shaped toward the good; and whoever still lacks anything needed for goodness is, in fact, bad. But 'if anyone has virtue and a soul truly present in the body, he matches the gods,' and strives toward that source he remembers as his own. No one struggles shamefully to climb back to the place he came down from. Why should you not think there is something divine in a being who is a part of god? This whole universe that contains us is one, and is god; we are its partners and its members. Our soul has the capacity, and is carried through to that height, if vices do not weigh it down. Just as the posture of our bodies stands upright and looks toward the sky, so the soul, which is free to stretch as far as it wishes, has been shaped by the nature of things for this very purpose: to desire what is equal to the gods; and if it uses its own strength and stretches out into its proper space, it strives toward the heights by no foreign path. It was a great labor to go up to heaven; now it is only a return. Once the soul has found this road, it walks it boldly, scorning everything; it does not look back at money, at gold and silver — things most fit for the darkness in which our greed once buried and dug them up. It knows, I say, that riches are stored elsewhere than where men pile them up; that the soul, not the strongbox, ought to be filled. It is permitted for such a soul to be set over the dominion of all things, to be led into possession of the whole of nature, so that it marks out its boundaries by the limits of sunrise and sunset, and, in the manner of the gods, possesses all things, looking down from above on the wealthy in their riches — none of whom is as glad of his own fortune as he is grieved by someone else's. Once it has raised itself to this height, it treats even the body — as a necessary burden — not as something to love but as something to manage, and does not subject itself to the thing it has been placed in charge of. No one is free who is a slave to his body; for, setting aside other masters that excessive anxiety over the body creates, its own rule is fussy and demanding. From this the soul departs, sometimes with an even mind, sometimes leaping forth greatly, and afterward does not ask what will become of what it has left behind. Just as we pay no mind to hair or beard once cut away, so that divine soul, on its way out of the man, does not consider it any more its concern what becomes of the vessel that held it — whether fire consumes it, or earth covers it, or wild beasts tear it apart — than a newborn child concerns itself with its afterbirth. Whether birds scatter the discarded body, or it is 'given as prey to dogs and to sea creatures,' what does it matter to one who no longer exists? But even while he is still among the living, he does not fear any threats made after death by those for whom it is not enough to be feared only up until death. 'I am not terrified,' he says, 'neither by the hook, nor by the foul mutilation of a corpse thrown out for public disgrace, in the sight of those who will see it. I ask no one for the last rites; I entrust my remains to no one. Nature has taken care that no one goes unburied: the day that abandons a body to cruelty will bury it in time.' Maecenas put it eloquently: 'I care nothing for a tomb: nature buries those left behind.' You would think he spoke with his belt cinched tight; for he had a great and manly talent, if only good fortune had not loosened it. Farewell.