Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Your letter wandered through several little questions, but it settled on one and wants that one worked out: how did the notion of the good and the honorable first come to us? Among others these two are different things; with us they are only divided. What do I mean by that? Some people think the good is simply what is useful. So they apply that name to wealth as well, and to a horse, a wine, a shoe; among them the good sinks to something so cheap that it descends all the way to the sordid. The honorable, they think, is whatever answers to a rational sense of duty — a pious care for an aging father, help given to a friend's poverty, a brave campaign, a wise and measured judgment. We do make that same distinction, but out of a single thing.
Nothing is good unless it is honorable; and whatever is honorable is certainly good. I judge it unnecessary to add what the difference between these is, since I have often said it. I will say just this one thing: nothing seems good to us that a person can also put to bad use — and you see how many people put wealth, high birth, and strength to bad use. So now let me come back to what you want discussed: how did the first notion of the good and the honorable reach us? Nature could not teach us this: she gave us the seeds of knowledge, not knowledge itself. Some say we stumbled upon the notion — which is hard to believe, that the appearance of virtue fell to anyone by chance. It seems to us instead that observation gathered it, and the frequent comparison of one thing done with another; our people judge both the honorable and the good by analogy. Since Latin grammarians have granted that word citizenship, I do not think it should be condemned — rather, it should be brought fully into its own city. So I will use it not merely as accepted but as customary. Let me tell you what this analogy is. We knew bodily health: from this we conceived that there is some health of the mind as well. We knew bodily strength: from this we gathered that there is a strength of mind too. Certain kind acts, certain humane ones, certain brave ones had struck us with wonder — we began to admire these as though they were perfect. There were, underneath, plenty of flaws that the striking appearance of some deed, its glow, concealed — these we overlooked. Nature bids us magnify what deserves praise, and everyone has carried glory beyond the truth — so from these things we drew our notion of a vast good. Fabricius refused King Pyrrhus's gold, and judged that being able to despise a king's wealth was a greater thing than a kingdom. The same man, when Pyrrhus's own doctor promised to poison his king, warned Pyrrhus to be on his guard against the plot.
It took the same spirit not to be conquered by gold and not to conquer by poison. We admired that enormous man whom neither a king's promises nor promises against a king could bend — a man who held fast to a good example, which is the hardest thing, innocent even in war, who believed that there was such a thing as wrong even against enemies, and who, in the depths of a poverty he had made into his own glory, fled riches exactly as he would flee poison. 'Live, Pyrrhus,' he said, 'by my kindness, and be glad, you who have been grieving all this while, that Fabricius cannot be bought.' Horatius Cocles alone filled the narrow width of the bridge and ordered that his own retreat be cut off from behind him, so long as the enemy's road forward was taken away, and he held off his attackers until, torn loose, the beams crashed down with a great roar. When he looked back and felt, at his own peril, that his country was now out of danger, he said, 'Let whoever wants to, come and follow me on this road,' and flung himself headlong, no less anxious, in that swift channel of the river, to come out armed than to come out alive — and, having kept the honor of his victorious weapons, he returned as safely as if he had come by the bridge. These deeds, and others like them, show us the image of virtue.
I will add something that may perhaps seem strange: sometimes evils have offered the appearance of the honorable, and the best has shone out from its very opposite. For, as you know, vices border on virtues, and even ruined and shameful things bear a resemblance to what is right — so the spendthrift falsely poses as generous, though it matters enormously whether a person knows how to give or simply does not know how to keep. There are many, Lucilius, I tell you, who do not give but throw away; I do not call a man generous who is simply angry at his own money. Carelessness imitates ease, recklessness imitates courage. This resemblance has forced us to pay attention and to distinguish things that are close in appearance but very much at odds in reality. While we were watching those whom some outstanding deed had made conspicuous, we began to notice that a given person had done something with a noble spirit and a great impulse, but only once. We have seen this man brave in war, timid in the forum; bearing poverty with spirit, but disgrace meanly: we praised the deed, and despised the man.
We have seen another kind and generous toward friends, restrained toward enemies, managing both public and private affairs with holiness and care; not lacking patience in what had to be endured, nor good judgment in what had to be done. We have seen him give with a full hand where giving was called for, and where effort was called for, hold firm and press on, lifting his body's weariness with the strength of his mind. Besides this, he was always the same, consistent with himself in every act — no longer good by deliberate choice, but brought by habit to the point where he could not only act rightly but could not act otherwise than rightly. We understood that in him virtue was perfect. We divided this virtue into parts: desires had to be reined in, fears repressed, what must be done foreseen, what is owed distributed fairly — so we gathered together temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice, and gave to each its own proper task. From what, then, did we come to understand virtue? Its order showed it to us, and its grace, and its constancy, and the harmony of all its actions with one another, and a greatness rising above everything else. From this we came to understand that happy life which flows on in an easy course, wholly its own master. How, then, did this itself become clear to us? I will tell you. That perfect man, who had attained virtue, never cursed fortune, never received what befell him with sadness; believing himself a citizen and soldier of the universe, he took up his labors as though they had been ordered of him. Whatever happened to him he did not spurn as an evil, as something dropped on him by chance, but rather as something entrusted to him. 'Whatever this is,' he said, 'it is mine; it is rough, it is hard — let us put our labor into this very thing.'
So he necessarily appeared great, this man who never groaned over misfortunes, never complained of his fate; he made himself understood by many, and shone out exactly like a light in the darkness, and turned everyone's attention onto himself, being at the same time calm and gentle, equally fair to human and to divine affairs. He had a perfect mind, brought to the very summit of itself, above which there is nothing but the mind of god, from which a part has flowed down even into this mortal breast — and that mind is never more divine than when it considers its own mortality, and knows that a human being was born for this, to serve out his life, and that this body is not a home but a lodging, and indeed a brief lodging, one that must be left behind once you see that you have become a burden to your host.
This, my dear Lucilius, is the greatest proof of a mind that comes from a loftier seat: if it judges the things among which it moves to be lowly and confined, if it does not fear to leave them; for one who remembers where he came from knows where he is going to leave for. Do we not see how many troubles harass us, how badly this body suits us? Now we complain of the head, now of the stomach, now of the chest and throat; at one time our nerves torment us, at another our feet; now it is looseness of the bowels, now catarrh; sometimes there is too much blood, sometimes too little — we are attacked and driven out from this side and that. This tends to happen to those living in someone else's house. Yet we, allotted a body so decaying, nonetheless set eternal things before ourselves, and to whatever extent a human lifetime can be stretched out, we fill that whole span with hope, satisfied with no amount of money, no amount of power. What could be more shameless than this, what more foolish? Nothing is enough for people who are going to die — no, who are dying; for every day we stand a little closer to the end, and every hour pushes us toward that place from which we must fall. See in what great blindness our mind lives: this thing I call 'future,' as I speak it, is already happening, and a large part of it has already happened; for the time we have lived stands in the same place it stood before we lived it at all. We are wrong to fear our last day, as if each of the others did not contribute just as much to our death. It is not the last step that produces the exhaustion in which we collapse — it only declares it; every day arrives at death, only the last one gets there. Death does not seize us suddenly, it gathers us bit by bit. So a great mind, conscious of its own better nature, does take care to conduct itself honorably and diligently in the post where it has been stationed, but judges none of the things around it to be its own — using them, rather, as things merely lent, like a traveler passing through in a hurry.
When we saw someone with this kind of steadiness, why should the impression of an unusual nature not have struck us — especially since, as I said, evenness of conduct showed that this greatness was real? The genuine keeps its tenor; the false does not last. Some people are by turns Vatinius and by turns Cato; and now Curius seems to them not stern enough, Fabricius not poor enough, Tubero not frugal or content enough with cheap things, and then, a moment later, they outdo Licinus in riches, Apicius in feasting, Maecenas in luxuries. The greatest sign of a bad character is this wavering, this constant tossing back and forth between a pretense of virtues and a love of vices.
often ten slaves; now kings and tetrarchs,
speaking always of great things, now: 'let me have a three-legged table and
a shell of plain salt, and a toga that can keep off the cold,
however coarse it may be.' Give a million sesterces
to this man content with little, satisfied with few things: within five days
Many people are just like the man Horace describes here — never the same, not even consistent with himself; so far does he stray in different directions. Did I say many? It is nearly true of everyone. There is no one who does not change his plan and his wish every single day; now he wants to have a wife, now a mistress; now he wants to rule, now he works at being no more than a servile drudge; now he swells himself up to the point of being envied, now he sinks and shrinks below the humility of those who are genuinely lowly; one moment he scatters money, the next he snatches it up. In this way an unsteady mind is exposed most clearly of all: it comes out first as one thing, then as another, and — which I judge the most shameful thing of all — it is not even consistent with itself. Consider it a great thing for one man to play a single role. Only the wise person plays one role; the rest of us are many-shaped. At one moment we will seem to you thrifty and serious, at the next wasteful and shallow; we keep changing masks, and put on the opposite of the one we just took off. So this is what I demand of you: whatever character you have set out to display, keep displaying that same one right up to the end. Manage to be praised for it, or failing that, at least to be recognized for it. Of a man you saw yesterday it can rightly be asked, 'who is this?' — so great is the change. Farewell.