Letters From a Stoic (21 page)

Sturdy and resolute though he is when it comes to facing his own troubles, our Liberalis has been deeply shocked by the whole thing.
And he has some reason to be shaken.
What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster.
The fact that it was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person’s grief.
This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise.
We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.
For what is there that fortune does not when she pleases fell at the height of its powers?
What is there that is not the more assailed and buffeted by her the more lustrous its attraction?
What is there that is troublesome or difficult for her?
Her assaults do not always come along a single path, or even a well-recognized path.
At one time she will call in the aid of our own hands in attacking us, at another she will be content with her own powers in devising for us dangers for which no one is responsible.
No moment is exempt: in the midst of pleasures there are found the springs of suffering.
In the middle of peace war rears its head, and the bulwarks of one’s security are transformed into sources of alarm, friend turning foe and ally turning enemy.
The summer’s calm is upset by sudden storms more severe than those of winter.
In the absence of any enemy we suffer all that an enemy might wreak on us.
Overmuch prosperity if all else fails will hit on the instruments of its own destruction.
Sickness assails those leading the most sensible lives, tuberculosis those with the strongest constitutions, retribution the utterly guiltless, violence the
most secluded.
Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it.
A single day strews in ruins all that was raised by a train of construction extending over a long span of time and involving a great number of separate works and a great deal of favour on the part of heaven.
To say a ‘day’, indeed, is to put too much of a brake on the calamities that hasten down upon us: an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
It would be some relief to our condition and our frailty if all things were as slow in their perishing as they were in their coming into being: but as it is, the growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid matter.

Nothing is durable, whether for an individual or for a society; the destinies of men and cities alike sweep onwards.
Terror strikes amid the most tranquil surroundings, and without any disturbance in the background to give rise to them calamities spring from the least expected quarter.
States which stood firm through civil war as well as wars external collapse without a hand being raised against them.
How few nations have made of their prosperity a lasting thing!
This is why we need to envisage every possibility and to strengthen the spirit to deal with the things which may conceivably come about.
Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck.
Misfortune may snatch you away from your country, or your country away from you, may banish you into some wilderness – these very surroundings in which the masses suffocate may become a wilderness.
All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes; we should be anticipating not merely all that commonly happens but all that is conceivably capable of happening, if we do not want to be overwhelmed and struck numb by rare events as if they were unprecedented ones; fortune needs envisaging in a thoroughly
comprehensive way.
Think how often towns in Asia or in Greece have fallen at a single earth tremor, how many villages in Syria or Macedonia have been engulfed, how often this form of disaster has wrought devastation in Cyprus, how often Paphos has tumbled about itself!
Time and again we hear the news of the annihilation of a whole city, and how small a fraction of mankind are we who hear such news this often!
So let us face up to the blows of circumstance and be aware that whatever happens is never as serious as rumour makes it out to be.

So a city has burned, a wealthy city and the glory of the provinces of which it was a feature though it stood in a class of its own, perched as it was on a single hill and that not a hill of very great dimensions.
But time will sweep away the very traces of every one of those cities of whose splendour and magnificence you nowadays hear.
Look at the way the very foundations of once famous cities of Greece have been eroded by now to the point where nothing is left to show that they ever even existed.
And it is not only the works of human hands that waste away, nor only structures raised by human skill and industry that the passing days demolish.
Mountain massifs crumble away, whole regions have subsided, the waves have covered landmarks once far out of sight of the sea.
The immense force of volcanic fires that once made the mountain-tops glow has eaten them away and reduced to lowly stature what once were soaring peaks, reassuring beacons to the mariner.
The works of nature herself suffer.
So it is only right that we should bear the overthrow of cities with resignation.
They stand just to fall.
Such is the sum total of the end that awaits them, whether it be the blast of a subterranean explosion throwing off the restraining weight above it, or the violence of floodwaters increasing to a prodigious degree underground until it breaks down everything in its way, or a volcanic outburst
fracturing the earth’s crust, or age (to which nothing is immune) overcoming them little by little, or plague carrying off its population and causing the deserted area to decay.
It would be tedious to recount all the different ways by which fate may overtake them.
One thing I know: all the works of mortal man lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.

Such, then, are the comforting reflections which I would offer our Liberalis, who burns with a kind of passion beyond belief for his birthplace – which it may be has only been consumed so as to be called to higher things.
A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity.
Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.
That opponent of affluence in the capital, Timagenes, used to declare that the one reason fires distressed him was the knowledge that what would rise up afterwards would be of a better standard than what had burned.
In the city of Lyons, too, one may presume that everyone will endeavour to make the work of restoration a greater, more noble achievement than what they have lost.
May that work be of lasting duration, and may the new foundation be attended by happier auspices with a view to its lasting for a longer and indeed for all time!
This is the hundredth year since the town came into being, and even for a human being such an age is by no means the uttermost limit.
Founded by Plancus in an area of concentrated population, it owes its growth to its favourable situation: yet how many grievous blows it has had to suffer in the time it takes for a man to grow old.

So the spirit must be trained to a realization and an acceptance of its lot.
It must come to see that there is nothing fortune will shrink from, that she wields the same authority over emperor and empire alike and the same power over cities as over men.
There’s no ground for resentment in all this.
We’ve entered into a world in which these are the terms life
is lived on – if you’re satisfied with that, submit to them, if you’re not, get out, whatever way you please.
Resent a thing by all means if it represents an injustice decreed against yourself personally; but if this same constraint is binding on the lowest and the highest alike, then make your peace again with destiny, the destiny that unravels all ties.
There’s no justification for using our graves and all the variety of monuments we see bordering the highways as a measure of our stature.
In the ashes all men are levelled.
We’re born unequal, we the equal.
And my words apply as much to cities as to those who live in them.
Ardea was taken, and so was Rome.
The great lawgiver draws no distinctions between us according to our birth or the celebrity of our names, save only while we exist.
On the reaching of mortality’s end he declares, ‘Away with snobbery; all that the earth carries shall forthwith be subject to one law without discrimination.’ When it comes to all we’re required to go through, we’re equals.
No one is more vulnerable than the next man, and no one can be more sure of his surviving to the morrow.

King Alexander of Macedon once took up the study of geometry – poor fellow, inasmuch as he would this find out how minute the earth really was, the earth of which he had possessed himself of a tiny part; yes, ‘poor fellow’ I call him, for the reason that he was bound to discover that his title was a false one; for who can be ‘Great’ in an area of minute dimensions?
Anyway, the points he was being instructed in were of some subtlety and such that the learning of them demanded the closest concentration, not the sort of thing that would be grasped by a crazed individual projecting his thoughts across the seas.
‘Teach me,’ he said, ‘the easy things,’ to which his instructor answered, ‘These things are the same for everyone, equally difficult for all.’ Well, imagine that nature is saying to you, “Those things you grumble about are the same for everyone.
I can give no one anything easier.
But anyone who likes may make them easier for himself.’ How?
By viewing them with equanimity.

You must needs experience pain and hunger and thirst, and grow old (assuming that you are vouchsafed a relatively long stay among men) and be ill, and suffer loss, and finally perish.
But you needn’t believe the chatter of the people around you: there’s nothing in all this that’s evil, insupportable or even hard.
Those people are afraid of these things by a kind of general consent.
Are you going to feel alarm at death, then, in the same way as you might at some common report?
What could be more foolish than a man’s being afraid of people’s words?
My friend Demetrius has a nice way of putting things when he says, as he commonly does, that to him the utterances of the unenlightened are as noises emanating from the belly.
‘What difference does it make to me,’ he asks, ‘whether their rumblings come from their upper or their nether regions?’

What utter foolishness it is to be afraid that those who have a bad name can rob you of a good one.
Just as the dread aroused in you by some common report has proved groundless, so too is the dread of things of which you would never be afraid if common report did not tell you to be.
What harm could ever come to a good man from being besmirched by unwarranted gossip?
We shouldn’t even let it prejudice us against death, which itself has an evil reputation.
Yet none of the people who malign it has put it to the test.
Until one does it’s rather rash to condemn a thing one knows nothing about.
And yet one thing you do know and that is this, how many people it’s a blessing to, how many people it frees from torture, want, maladies, suffering, weariness.
And no one has power over us when death is within our own power.