Letters From a Stoic (23 page)
Read Letters From a Stoic Online
Authors: Seneca
Shapes frightening to the sight, Hardship and Death
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are not so at all if one can break through the surrounding darkness and look directly at them.
Many are the things that have caused terror during the night and been turned into matters of laughter with the coming of daylight.
Shapes frightening to the sight, Hardship and Death.
Our Virgil perfectly rightly says that they are frightening, not in reality, but ‘to the sight’, in other words that they seem so but in fact are not.
Just what is there about them that is as terrifying as legend would have us believe?
Why, Lucilius, I ask you why should any real man be afraid of hardship, or any human being be afraid of death?
I constantly meet people who think that what they themselves can’t do can’t be done, who say that to bear up under the things we Stoics speak of is beyond the capacity of human nature.
How much more highly I rate these people’s abilities than they do themselves !
I say that they are just as capable as others of doing these things, but won’t.
In any event what person actually trying them has found them prove beyond him?
Who hasn’t
noticed how much easier they are in the actual doing?
It’s not because they’re hard that we lose confidence; they’re hard because we lack the confidence.
If you still need an example, take Socrates, an old man who had known his full share of suffering, who had taken every blow life could inflict, and still remained unbeaten either by poverty, a burden for him aggravated by domestic worries, or by constant hardships, including those endured on military service.
Apart from what he had to contend with at home – whether one thinks of his wife with her shrewish ways and nagging tongue, or his intractable children, more like their mother than their father – his whole life was lived either in war-time or under tyranny or under a ‘democracy’ that outdid even wars and tyrants in its cruelties.
The war went on for twenty-seven years.
After the fighting was ended, the state was handed over to the mercy of the Thirty Tyrants, a considerable number of whom were hostile to him.
The final blow was his conviction and sentence on the most serious of charges: he was accused of blasphemy and of corrupting the younger generation, whom, it was alleged, he turned into rebels against God, their fathers and the state.
After that came the prison and the poison.
And so little effect did all this have on Socrates’ spirit, it did not even affect the expression on his face.
What a rare and wonderful story of achievement!
To the very last no one ever saw Socrates in any particular mood of gaiety or depression.
Through all the ups and downs of fortune his was a level temperament.
Would you like another example?
Take the modern one of Marcus Cato, with whom fortune dealt in an even more belligerent and unremitting fashion.
At every point she stood in his way, even at the end, at his death; yet he demonstrated that a brave man can live in defiance of fortune and can the in defiance of fortune.
The whole of his life was passed either in civil war or in conditions of developing civil conflict.
And of
him no less than of Socrates it is possible to say that he carried himself clear of slavery
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(unless, perhaps, you take the view that Pompey, Caesar and Crassus were friends of freedom).
When his country was in a state of constant change, no one ever saw a change in Cato.
In every situation he was placed in, he showed himself always the same man, whether in office as praetor, in defeat at the polls, under attack in court, as governor in his province, on the public platform, in the field, or in death itself.
In that moment, too, of panic for the Republic, when Caesar stood on the one side, backed by ten legions of the finest fighting men and the entire resources and support of foreign countries as well, and on the other stood Pompey, by himself a match for all comers, and when people were moving to join either the one or the other, Cato all on his own established something of a party pledged to fight for the Republic.
If you try to picture the period to yourself you will see on the one side the populace, the mob all agog for revolution, on the other the time-honoured elect of Rome, the aristocracy and knighthood; and two forlorn figures, Cato and republicanism, between them.
You will find it an impressive sight, I can assure you, as you watch
The Son of Atreus and King Priam with
Achilles wroth with both.
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For there is Cato denouncing each of them, trying to disarm the pair of them.
And the way he casts his vote between them is: ‘If Caesar wins, I kill myself; if Pompey, I go into exile’ What had a man to fear who, win or lose, had dictated to himself such a choice of fates as might have been decreed him by an utterly exasperated enemy?
And that is how he came to die, carrying out his own self-sentence.
You will see, too, the capacity of man for hardship: on foot at the head of his troops he crossed the deserts of North Africa.
You see that thirst can be endured as well: always in armour, trailing over a sun-baked plateau the remnants of a beaten army, an army without supplies, he was invariably the last to drink whenever they came upon water.
You see that a man can think equally little of either the distinction of office or the stigma of rejection: on the day of his election defeat he played fives at the place of polling.
You see that men can defy the might of their superiors: for, with no one daring offend either Caesar or Pompey except to curry favour with the other, Cato challenged the pair of them simultaneously.
You see that a man can think as little of death as of exile: he condemned himself to both, and war in the meantime.
We, then, can show as spirited an attitude to just the same things if we will only choose to slip the yoke from our necks.
But first we have to reject the life of pleasures; they make us soft and womanish; they are insistent in their demands, and what is more, require us to make insistent demands on fortune.
And then we need to look down on wealth, which is the wage of slavery.
Gold and silver and everything else that clutters our prosperous homes should be discarded.
Freedom cannot be won without sacrifice.
If you set a high value on her, everything else must be valued at little.
Y
ES
, I’ll give you some rules to observe that will enable you to live in greater safety.
You for your part I suggest should listen as carefully to the advice I give you as you would if I were advising you on how to look after your health at Ardea.
Now think of the things which goad man into destroying man: you’ll find that they are hope, envy, hatred, fear and contempt.
Contempt is the least important of the lot, so much so that a number of men have actually taken shelter behind it for protection’s sake.
For if a person feels contempt for someone, he tramples on him, doubtless, but he passes on.
No one pursues an unremitting and persistent policy of injury to a man for whom he feels nothing but contempt.
Even in battle the man on the ground is left alone, the fighting being with those still on their feet.
Coming to hope, so long as you own nothing likely to arouse the greed or grasping instincts of others, so long as you possess nothing out of the ordinary (for people covet even the smallest things if they are rare or little known),
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you’ll have nothing to worry about from the hopes of grasping characters.
Envy you’ll escape if you haven’t obtruded yourself on other people’s notice, if you haven’t flaunted your possessions, if you’ve learnt to keep your satisfaction to yourself.
Hatred either comes from giving offence, and that you’ll avoid by refraining from deliberately provoking anyone, or is quite uncalled for: here your safeguard will be ordinary tact.
It is a kind of hatred that has been a source of danger to a lot of people; men have been hated without having any actual enemy.
As regards not being feared, a moderate fortune and an easy-going nature will secure you that.
People should see that you’re not a person it is dangerous to offend: and with you a reconciliation should be both easy and dependable.
To be feared inside your own home, it may be added, is as much a source of trouble as being feared outside it – slave or free, there isn’t a man who hasn’t power enough to do you injury.
Besides, to be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind himself.
There remains contempt.
The person who has made contempt his ally, who has been despised because he has chosen to be despised, has the measure of it under his control.
Its disadvantages are negatived by the possession of respected qualities and of friends having influence with some person with the necessary influence.
Such influential friends are people with whom it is well worth having ties, without being so tied up with them that their protection costs you more than the original danger might have done.
But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible.
For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor.
Nobody will keep the things he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more.
Neither will anyone who has failed to keep a story to himself keep the name of his informant to himself.
Every person without exception has someone to whom he confides everything that is confided to himself.
Even supposing he puts some guard on his garrulous tongue and is content with a single pair of ears, he will be the creator of a host of later listeners – such is the way in which what was but a little while before a secret becomes common rumour.
Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind.
People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.
After every act they tremble, paralysed, their consciences continually demanding an answer, not allowing them to get on with other things.
To expect punishment is to suffer it; and to earn it is to expect it.
Where there is a bad conscience, some circumstance or other may provide one with impunity, but never with freedom from anxiety; for a
person takes the attitude that even if he isn’t found out, there’s always the possibility of it.
His sleep is troubled.
Whenever he talks about someone else’s misdeed he thinks of his own, which seems to him all too inadequately hidden, all too inadequately blotted out of people’s memories.
A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.
W
HERE
’s that moral insight of yours?
Where’s that acuteness of perception?
Or magnanimity?
Does something as trivial as that upset you?
Your slaves have seen your absorption in business as their chance to run away.
So be it, you have been let down by friends – for by all means let them keep the name we mistakenly bestowed on them and be called such just to heighten their disgrace; but the fact is that your affairs have been freed for good and all of a number of people on whom all your trouble was being wasted and who considered you insufferable to anyone but yourself.
There’s nothing unusual or surprising about it all.
To be put out by this sort of thing is as ridiculous as grumbling about being spattered in the street or getting dirty where it’s muddy.
One has to accept life on the same terms as the public baths, or crowds, or travel.
Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you.
Life’s no soft affair.
It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired, and openly wish – a lie – for death.
At one place you will part from a companion, at another bury one, and be afraid of one at another.
These are the kind of things you’ll come up against all along this rugged journey.
Wanting to die?
Let the personality be made ready to face everything; let
it be made to realize that it has come to terrain on which thunder and lightning play, terrain on which
Grief and vengeful Care have set their couch,
And pallid Sickness dwells, and drear Old Age.
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This is the company in which you must live out your days.
Escape them you cannot, scorn them you can.
And scorn them you will if by constant reflection you have anticipated future happenings.
Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even; being withstood if they have been trained for in advance.
Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.
We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise.
And since it is invariably unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection will ensure that no form of adversity finds you a complete beginner.