Letters From a Stoic (6 page)

The difference here between the Epicurean and our own school is this: our wise man feels his troubles but overcomes them, while their wise man does not even feel them.
We share with them the belief that the wise man is content with himself.
Nevertheless, self-sufficient though he is, he still desires a friend, a neighbour, a companion.
Notice how self-contented he is: on occasion such a man is content with a mere partial self – if he loses a hand as a result of war or disease, or has one of his eyes, or even both, put out in an accident, he will be satisfied with what remains of himself and be no less pleased with his body now that it is maimed and incomplete than he was when it was whole.
But while he does not hanker after what he has lost, he does prefer not to lose them.
And this is what we mean when we say the wise man is self-content; he is so in the sense that he is able to do without friends, not that he desires to do without them.
When I speak of his being ‘able’ to do this, what I am saying in fact amounts to this: he bears the loss of a friend with equanimity.

Not that he will then be without a friend, for it is his to decide how soon he makes good the loss.
Just as Phidias can carve another statue straight away if he loses one, so our wise man with his skill in the art of making friends will fill the place of someone he has lost.
I suppose you will want to know how he will be able to make a friend so quickly.
Well, I shall tell you (provided we agree that I may make this the moment to pay my debt and square my account so far as this letter is concerned).
‘I shall show you,’ said Hecato, ‘a
love philtre compounded without drug or herb or witch’s spell.
It is this: if you wish to be loved, love.’

Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building up a new one.
There is the same difference between having gained a friend and actually gaining a friend as there is between a farmer harvesting and a farmer sowing.
The philosopher Attalus used to say that it was more of a pleasure to make a friend than to have one, ‘in the same way as an artist derives more pleasure from painting than from having completed a picture’.
When his whole attention is absorbed in concentration on the work he is engaged on, a tremendous sense of satisfaction is created in him by his very absorption.
There is never quite the same gratification after he has lifted his hand from the finished work.
From then on what he is enjoying is the art’s end product, whereas it was the art itself that he enjoyed while he was actually painting.
So with our children, their growing up brings wider fruits but their infancy was sweeter.

To come back to the question, the wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle.
Not, as Epicurus put it in the same letter, ‘for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains’, but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands.
Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake.
Things will end as they began; he has secured a friend who is going to come to his aid if captivity threatens: at the first clank of a chain that friend will disappear.
These are what are commonly called fair-weather friendships.
A person adopted as a friend
for the sake of his usefulness will be cultivated only for so long as he is useful.
This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined – their friends running away when it comes to the testing point; it explains the countless scandalous instances of people deserting or betraying others out of fear for themselves.
The ending inevitably matches the beginning: a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so.
If there is anything in a particular friendship that attracts a man other than the friendship itself, the attraction of some reward or other will counterbalance that of the friendship.
What is my object in making a friend?
To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well.
The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal.
There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad.
Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity?
Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual.
How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

You may say we are not at present concerned with the question whether friendship is something to be cultivated for its own sake.
But this, on the contrary, is exactly what needs proving most; for if friendship is something to be sought out for its own sake, the self-contented man is entitled to pursue it.
And how does he approach it?
In the same way as he would any object of great beauty, not drawn by gain, not
out of alarm at the vicissitudes of fortune.
To procure friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity.

‘The wise man is content with himself.’ A lot of people, Lucilius, put quite the wrong interpretation on this statement.
They remove the wise man from all contact with the world outside, shutting him up inside his own skin.
We must be quite clear about the meaning of this sentence and just how much it claims to say.
It applies to him so far as happiness in life is concerned: for this all he needs is a rational and elevated spirit that treats fortune with disdain; for the actual business of living he needs a great number of things.
I should like to draw your attention to a similar distinction made by Chrysippus.
The wise man, he said, lacked nothing but needed a great number of things, whereas ‘the fool, on the other hand, needs nothing (for he does not know how to use anything) but lacks everything.’ The wise man needs hands and eyes and a great number of things that are required for the purposes of day-to-day life; but he lacks nothing, for lacking something implies that it is a necessity and nothing, to the wise man, is a necessity.

Self-contented as he is, then, he does need friends – and wants as many of them as possible – but not to enable him to lead a happy life; this he will have even without friends.
The supreme ideal does not call for any external aids.
It is homegrown, wholly self-developed.
Once it starts looking outside itself for any part of itself it is on the way to being dominated by fortune.

‘But what sort of life,’ people may say, ‘will the wise man have if he is going to be left without any friends when he is thrown into prison or stranded among foreigners or detained in the course of a voyage in distant parts or cast away on some desert shore?’ It will be like that of Jove while nature takes her rest, of brief duration, when the universe is dissolved
and the gods are all merged in one, finding repose in himself, absorbed in his own thoughts.
Such is more or less the way of the wise man: he retires to his inner self, is his own company.
So long in fact as he remains in a position to order his affairs according to his own judgement, he remains self-content even when he marries, even when he brings up his children.
He is self-content and yet he would refuse to live if he had to live without any human company at all.
Natural promptings (not thoughts of any advantage to himself) impel him towards friendship.
We are born with a sense of the pleasantness of friendship just as of other things.
In the same way as there exists in man a distaste for solitude and a craving for society, natural instinct drawing one human being to another, so too with this there is something inherent in it that stimulates us into seeking friendships.
The wise man, nevertheless, unequalled though he is in his devotion to his friends, though regarding them as being no less important and frequently more important than his own self, will still consider what is valuable in life to be something wholly confined to his inner self.
He will repeat the words of Stilbo (the Stilbo whom Epicurus’ letter attacks), when his home town was captured and he emerged from the general conflagration, his children lost, his wife lost, alone and none the less a happy man, and was questioned by Demetrius.
Asked by this man, known, from the destruction he dealt out to towns, as Demetrius the City Sacker, whether he had lost anything, he replied, ‘I have all my valuables with me.’ There was an active and courageous man – victorious over the very victory of the enemy!
‘I have lost,’ he said, ‘nothing.’ He made Demetrius wonder whether he had won a victory after all.
‘All my possessions,’ he said, ‘are with me’, meaning by this the qualities of a just, a good and an enlightened character, and indeed the very fact of not regarding as valuable anything that is capable of being taken away.
We are impressed at the way some creatures
pass right through fire without physical harm: how much more impressive is the way this man came through the burning and the bloodshed and the ruins uninjured and unscathed.
Does it make you see how much easier it can be to conquer a whole people than to conquer a single man?
Those words of Stilbo’s are equally those of the Stoic.
He too carries his valuables intact through cities burnt to ashes, for he is contented with himself.
This is the line he draws as the boundary for his happiness.

In case you imagine that we Stoics are the only people who produce noble sayings, let me tell you something – see that you put this down to my credit, even though I have already settled my account with you for today – Epicurus himself, who has nothing good to say for Stilbo, has uttered a statement quite like this one of Stilbo’s.
‘Any man,’ he says, ‘who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world.’ Or if you prefer to see it expressed like this (the point being that we should be ruled not by the actual words used but by the sense of them), ‘a man is unhappy, though he reign the world over, if he does not consider himself supremely happy.’ To show you, indeed, that these are sentiments of a universal character, prompted, evidently, by nature herself, you will find the following verse in a comic poet: