Letters From a Stoic (24 page)

‘I’ve been deserted by my slaves!’ Others have been plundered, incriminated, set upon, betrayed, beaten up, attacked with poison or with calumny – mention anything you like, it has happened to plenty of people.
A vast variety of missiles are launched with us as their target.
Some are planted in our flesh already, some are hurtling towards us at this very moment, others merely grazing us in passing on their way to other targets.
Let’s not be taken aback by any of the things we’re born to, things no one need complain at for the simple reason that they’re the same for everybody.
Yes, the same for everybody; for even if a man does escape something, it was a thing which he might have suffered.
The fairness of a law does not consist in its effect being actually felt by all alike, but in its having been laid down for all alike.
Let’s get this sense of justice firmly into our heads and pay up without
grumbling the taxes arising from our mortal state.
Winter brings in the cold, and we have to shiver; summer brings back the heat and we have to swelter.
Bad weather tries the health and we have to be ill.
Somewhere or other we are going to have encounters with wild beasts, and with man, too, – more dangerous than all those beasts.
Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another.
These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change.
What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature’s; reversals, after all, are the means by which nature regulates this visible realm of hers: clear skies follow cloudy; after the calm comes the storm; the winds take turns to blow; day succeeds night; while part of the heavens is in the ascendant, another is sinking.
It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.

This is the law to which our minds are needing to be reconciled.
This is the law they should be following and obeying.
They should assume that whatever happens was bound to happen and refrain from railing at nature.
One can do nothing better than endure what cannot be cured and attend uncomplainingly the God at whose instance all things come about.
It is a poor soldier that follows his commander grumbling.
So let us receive our orders readily and cheerfully, and not desert the ranks along the march – the march of this glorious fabric of creation in which everything we shall suffer is a strand.
And let us address Jupiter, whose guiding hand directs this mighty work, in the way our own Cleanthes did, in some most expressive lines which I may perhaps be pardoned for translating in view of the example set here by that master of expressiveness, Cicero.
If you like them, so much the better; if not, you will at least know that I was following Cicero’s example.

I remember a piece of advice which Attalus gave me in the days when I practically laid siege to his lecture hall, always first to arrive and last to go, and would draw him into a discussion of some point or other even when he was out taking a walk, for he was always readily available to his students, not just accessible.
‘A person teaching and a person learning,’ he said, ‘should have the same end in view: the improvement of the latter.’ A person who goes to a philosopher should carry away with him something or other of value every day; he should return home a sounder man or at least more capable of becoming one.
And he will: for the power of philosophy is such that she helps not only those who devote themselves to her but also those who come into contact with her.
A person going out into the sun, whether or not this is what he is going out for, will acquire a tan.
Customers who sit around rather too long in a shop selling perfumes carry the scent of the place away with them.
And people who have been with a philosopher are bound to have derived from it something of benefit even to the inattentive.
Note that I say the inattentive, not the hostile.

‘That’s all very well, but don’t we all know certain people who have sat at a philosopher’s feet year after year without acquiring even a semblance of wisdom?’ Of course I do – persevering, conscientious people, too.
I prefer to call them a philosopher’s squatters, not students.
Some come not to learn but just to hear him, in the same way as we’re drawn to a theatre, for the sake of entertainment, to treat our ears to a play, or music, or an address.
You’ll find that a large proportion
of the philosopher’s audience is made up of this element, which regards his lecture-hall as a place of lodging for periods of leisure.
They’re not concerned to rid themselves of any faults there, or acquire any rule of life by which to test their characters, but simply to enjoy to the full the pleasures the ear has to offer.
Admittedly some of them actually come with notebooks, but with a view to recording not the content of the lecture, but words from it – to be passed on to others with the same lack of profit to the hearer as they themselves derived from hearing them.
Some of them are stirred by the noble sentiments they hear; their faces and spirits light up and they enter into the emotions of the speaker, going into a transport just like the eunuch priests who work themselves into a frenzy, to order, at the sound of a Phrygian flute.
They are captivated and aroused not by a din of empty words, but by the splendour of the actual content of the speaker’s words – any expression of bold or spirited defiance of death or fortune making you keen to translate what you’ve heard into action straight away.
They are deeply affected by the words and become the persons they are told to be – or would if the impression on their minds were to last, if this magnificent enthusiasm were not immediately intercepted by that discourager of noble conduct, the crowd: very few succeed in getting home in the same frame of mind.

It is easy enough to arouse in a listener a desire for what is honourable; for in every one of us nature has laid the foundations or sown the seeds of the virtues.
We are born to them all, all of us, and when a person comes along with the necessary stimulus, then those qualities of the personality are awakened, so to speak, from their slumber.
Haven’t you noticed how the theatre murmurs agreement whenever something is spoken the truth of which we generally recognize and unanimously confirm?

For my part, at any rate, when I heard Attalus winding up the case against the faults of character, the mistaken attitudes and the evils generally of the lives we lead, I frequently felt a sense of the sorry plight of the human race and looked on him as a kind of sublime being who had risen higher than the limits of human aspiration.
He himself would use the Stoic term ‘king’ of himself; but to me he seemed more than a king, as being a man who had the right to pass judgement on the conduct and the character of monarchs.
And when he began extolling to us the virtues of poverty and showing us how everything which went beyond our actual needs was just so much unnecessary weight, a burden to the man who had to carry it, I often had a longing to walk out of that lecture hall a poor man.
When he started exposing our pleasures and commending to us, along with moderation in our diet, physical purity and a mind equally uncontaminated, uncontaminated not only by illicit pleasures but by unnecessary ones as well, I would become enthusiastic about keeping the appetites for food and drink firmly in their place.
With the
result that some of this, Lucilius, has lasted with me right through life.
For I started out on it all with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, and later, after my return to public life, I managed to retain a few of the principles as regards which I had made this promising beginning.
This is how I came to give up oysters and mushrooms for the rest of my life (for they are not really food to us but titbits which induce people who have already had as much as they can take to go on eating – the object most desired by gluttons and others who stuff themselves with more than they can hold – being items which will come up again as easily as they go down).
This too is why throughout life I have always abstained from using scent, as the best smell a body can have is no smell at all.
This is why no wine ever finds its way into my stomach.
This is the reason for my life-long avoidance of hot baths, believing as I do that it is effeminate as well as pointless to stew one’s body and exhaust it with continual sweating.
Some other things to which I once said good-bye have made their reappearance, but nevertheless, in these cases in which I have ceased to practise total abstinence, I succeed in observing a limit, which is something hardly more than a step removed from total abstinence (and even perhaps more difficult – with some things less effort of will is required to cut them out altogether than to have recourse to them in moderation).

Now that I’ve started disclosing to you how much greater my enthusiasm was in taking up philosophy as a young man than it is when it comes to keeping it up in my old age, I shan’t be ashamed to confess the passionate feelings which Pythagoras inspired in me.
Sotion used to tell us why Pythagoras, and later Sextius, was a vegetarian.
Each had a quite different reason, but each was a striking one.
Sextius believed that man had enough food to sustain him without shedding blood, and that when men took this tearing of flesh so far that it became a pleasure a habit of cruelty was formed.
He
argued in addition that the scope for people’s extravagance was in any case something that should be reduced; and he gave reasons for inferring that variety of diet was incompatible with our physical make-up and inimical to health.
Pythagoras, on the other hand, maintained that all creatures were interrelated and that there was a system of exchange of souls involving transmigration from one bodily form to another.
If we are to believe Pythagoras, no soul ever undergoes death, or even a suspension of its existence except perhaps for the actual moment of transfusion into another body.
This is not the moment for inquiring by what stages or at what point a soul completes its wanderings through a succession of other habitations and reverts to human form.
It is enough for our present purposes that he has instilled into people a dread of committing the crime of parricide, in view of the possibility that they might, all unknowing, come across the soul of an ancestor and with knife or teeth do it dreadful outrage, assuming that the spirit of a relative might be lodging in the flesh concerned.
After setting out this theory and supplementing it with arguments of his own, Sotion would say, ‘You cannot accept the idea of souls being assigned to one body after another, and the notion that what we call death is only a move to another home?
You cannot accept that the soul which was once that of a man may sojourn in wild beasts, or in our own domestic animals, or in the creatures of the deep?
You cannot accept that nothing ever perishes on this earth, instead merely undergoing a change in its whereabouts?
And that the animal world, not just the heavenly bodies that revolve in their unalterable tracks, moves in cycles, with its souls propelled along an orbital path of their own?
Well, the fact that these ideas are ones which have been accepted by great men should make you suspend judgement.
You should preserve an open mind on the whole subject anyway.
For if these ideas are correct, to
abstain from eating the flesh of animals will mean guiltlessness; and even if they are not, it will still mean frugal living.
What do you lose by believing in it all?
All I am depriving you of is what the lions and the vultures feed on.’

Fired by this teaching I became a vegetarian, and by the time a year had gone by was finding it an enjoyable as well as an easy habit.
I was beginning to feel that my mind was more active as a result of it – though I would not take my oath to you now that it really was.
I suppose you want to know how I came to give up the practice.
Well, my years as a young man coincided with the early part of Tiberius’ reign, when certain religious cults of foreign origin were being promoted, and among other things abstinence from certain kinds of animal food was regarded as evidence of adherence to such superstitions.
So at the request of my father, who did not really fear my being prosecuted, but who detested philosophy, I resumed my normal habits.
And in fact he had little difficulty in persuading me to adopt a fuller diet.
Another thing, though, which Attalus used to recommend was a hard mattress; and that is the kind I still use even in my old age, the kind which shows no trace of a body having slept on it.
I tell you all this just to show you the tremendous enthusiasm with which the merest beginner will set about attaining the very highest goals provided someone gives him the necessary prompting and encouragement.
Things tend, in fact, to go wrong; part of the blame lies on the teachers of philosophy, who today teach us how to argue instead of how to live, part on their students, who come to the teachers in the first place with a view to developing not their character but their intellect.
The result has been the transformation of philosophy, the study of wisdom, into philology, the study of words.

The object which we have in view, after all, makes a great deal of difference to the manner in which we approach
any subject.
If he intends to become a literary scholar, a person examining his Virgil does not say to himself when he reads that magnificent phrase