L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits
one time comes the loss of childhood's teeth, at another, when our age
is advancing and growing into robuster manhood, puberty and the last
wisdom-tooth marks the end of our youth. "We have implanted in us the
seeds of all ages, of all arts, and God our master brings forth our
intellects from obscurity."
VII. "Nature," says my opponent, "gives me all this." Do you not
perceive when you say this that you merely speak of God under another
name? for what is nature but God and divine reason, which pervades the
universe and all its parts? You may address the author of our world
by as many different titles as you please; you may rightly call him
Jupiter, Best and Greatest, and the Thunderer, or the Stayer, so called,
not because, as the historians tell us, he stayed the flight of the
Roman army in answer to the prayer of Romulus, but because all things
continue in their stay through his goodness. If you were to call this
same personage Fate, you would not lie; for since fate is nothing more
than a connected chain of causes, he is the first cause of all upon
which all the rest depend. You will also be right in applying to him any
names that you please which express supernatural strength and power: he
may have as many titles as he has attributes.
VIII. Our school regards him as Father Liber, and Hercules, and
Mercurius: he is Father Liber because he is the parent of all, who first
discovered the power of seed, and our being led by pleasure to plant it;
he is Hercules, because his might is unconquered, and when it is wearied
after completing its labours, will retire into fire; he is Mercurius,
because in him is reasoning, and numbers, and system, and knowledge.
Whither-soever you turn yourself you will see him meeting you:
nothing is void of him, he himself fills his own work. Therefore, most
ungrateful of mortals, it is in vain that you declare yourself indebted,
not to God, but to nature, because there can be no God without nature,
nor any nature without God; they are both the same thing, differing only
in their functions. If you were to say that you owe to Annaeus or
to Lucius what you received from Seneca, you would not change your
creditor, but only his name, because he remains the same man whether you
use his first, second, or third name. So whether you speak of nature,
fate, or fortune, these are all names of the same God, using his power
in different ways. So likewise justice, honesty, discretion, courage,
frugality, are all the good qualities of one and the same mind; if you
are pleased with any one of these, you are pleased with that mind.
IX. However, not to drift aside into a distinct controversy, God bestows
upon us very many and very great benefits without hope of receiving any
return; since he does not require any offering from us, and we are
not capable of bestowing anything upon him: wherefore, a benefit is
desirable in itself. In it the advantage of the receiver is all that
is taken into consideration: we study this without regarding our own
interests. "Yet," argues our opponent, "you say that we ought to choose
with care the persons upon whom we bestow benefits, because neither do
husbandmen sow seed in the sand: now if this be true, we follow our own
interest in bestowing benefits, just as much as in ploughing and sowing:
for sowing is not desirable in itself. Besides this you inquire where
and how you ought to bestow a benefit, which would not need to be
done if the bestowal of a benefit was desirable in itself: because in
whatever place and whatever manner it might be bestowed, it still would
be a benefit." We seek to do honourable acts, solely because they are
honourable; yet even though we need think of nothing else, we consider
to whom we shall do them, and when, and how; for in these points the act
has its being. In like manner, when I choose upon whom I shall bestow
a benefit, and when I aim at making it a benefit; because if it were
bestowed upon a base person, it could neither be a benefit nor an
honourable action.
X. To restore what has been entrusted to one is desirable in itself; yet
I shall not always restore it, nor shall I do so in any place or at any
time you please. Sometimes it makes no difference whether I deny that I
have received it, or return it openly. I shall consider the interests
of the person to whom I am to return it, and shall deny that I have
received a deposit, which would injure him if returned. I shall act in
the same manner in bestowing a benefit: I shall consider when to give
it, to whom, in what manner, and on what grounds. Nothing ought to be
done without a reason: a benefit is not truly so, if it be bestowed
without a reason, since reason accompanies all honorable action. How
often do we hear men reproaching themselves for some thoughtless gift,
and saying, "I had rather have thrown it away than have given it to
him!" What is thoughtlessly given away is lost in the most discreditable
manner, and it is much worse to have bestowed a benefit badly than to
have received no return for it; that we receive no return is the fault
of another; that we did not choose upon whom we should bestow it, is our
own. In choosing a fit person, I shall not, as you expect, pay the
least attention to whether I am likely to get any return from him, for
I choose one who will be grateful, not one who will return my goodness,
and it often happens that the man who makes no return is grateful, while
he who returns a benefit is ungrateful for it. I value men by their
hearts alone, and, therefore, I shall pass over a rich man if he be
unworthy, and give to a good man though he be poor; for he will be
grateful however destitute he may be, since whatever he may lose, his
heart will still be left him.
XI. I do not fish for gain, for pleasure, or for credit, by bestowing
benefits: satisfied in doing so with pleasing one man alone, I shall
give in order to do my duty. Duty, however, leaves one some choice; do
you ask me, how I am to choose? I shall choose an honest, plain, man,
with a good memory, and grateful for kindness; one who keeps his hands
off other men's goods, yet does not greedily hold to his own, and who is
kind to others; when I have chosen such a man, I shall have acted to my
mind, although fortune may have bestowed upon him no means of returning
my kindness. If my own advantage and mean calculation made me liberal,
if I did no one any service except in order that he might in turn do a
service to me, I should never bestow a benefit upon one who was setting
out for distant and foreign countries, never to return; I should not
bestow a benefit upon one who was so ill as to be past hope of recovery,
nor should I do so when I myself was failing, because I should not live
long enough to receive any return. Yet, that you may know that to do
good is desirable in itself, we afford help to strangers who put into
our harbour only to leave it straightway; we give a ship and fit it out
for a shipwrecked stranger to sail back in to his own country. He leaves
us hardly knowing who it was who saved him, and, as he will never return
to our presence, he hands over his debt of gratitude to the gods, and
beseeches them to fulfil it for him: in the meanwhile we rejoice in the
barren knowledge that we have done a good action. What? when we stand
upon the extreme verge of life, and make our wills, do we not assign to
others benefits from which we ourselves shall receive no advantage? How
much time we waste, how long we consider in secret how much property we
are to leave, and to whom! What then? does it make any difference to us
to whom we leave our property, seeing that we cannot expect any return
from any one? Yet we never give anything with more care, we never take
such pains in deciding upon our verdict, as when, without any views of
personal advantage, we think only of what is honourable, for we are bad
judges of our duty as long as our view of it is distorted by hope and
fear, and that most indolent of vices, pleasure: but when death has shut
off all these, and brought us as incorrupt judges to pronounce sentence,
we seek for the most worthy men to leave our property to, and we never
take more scrupulous care than in deciding what is to be done with what
does not concern us. Yet, by Hercules, then there steals over us a
great satisfaction as we think, "I shall make this man richer, and by
bestowing wealth upon that man I shall add lustre to his high position."
Indeed, if we never give without expecting some return, we must all die
without making our wills.
XII. It may be said, "You define a benefit as a loan which cannot be
repaid: now a loan is not a desirable thing in itself." When we speak of
a loan, we make use of a figure, or comparison, just as we speak of law
as; the standard of right and wrong, although a standard is not a thing
to be desired for its own sake. I have adopted this phrase in order to
illustrate my subject: when I speak of a loan, I must be understood to
mean something resembling a loan. Do you wish to know how it differs
from one? I add the words "which cannot be repaid," whereas every loan
both can and ought to be repaid. It is so far from being right to bestow
a benefit for one's own advantage, that often, as I have explained, it
is one's duty to bestow it when it involves one's own loss and risk: for
instance, if I assist a man when beset by robbers, so that he gets away
from them safely, or help some victim of power, and bring upon myself
the party spite of a body of influential men, very, probably incurring
myself the same disgrace from which I saved him, although I might have
taken the other side, and looked on with safety at struggles with
which I have nothing to do: if I were to give bail for one who has been
condemned, and when my friend's goods were advertised for sale I were
to give a bond to the effect that I would make restitution to the
creditors, if, in order to save a proscribed person I myself run the
risk of being proscribed. No one, when about to buy a villa at Tusculum
or Tibur, for a summer retreat, because of the health of the locality,
considers how many years' purchase he gives for it; this must be looked
to by the man who makes a profit by it. The same is true with benefits;
when you ask what return I get for them, I answer, the consciousness
of a good action. "What return does one get for benefits?" Pray tell
me what return one gets for righteousness, innocence, magnanimity,
chastity, temperance? If you wish for anything beyond these virtues, you
do not wish for the virtues themselves. For what does the order of the
universe bring round the seasons? for what does the sun make the day
now longer and now shorter? all these things are benefits, for they take
place for our good. As it is the duty of the universe to maintain the
round of the seasons, as it is the duty of the sun to vary the points of
his rising and setting, and to do all these things by which we profit,
without any reward, so is it the duty of man, amongst other things, to
bestow benefits. Wherefore then does he give? He gives for fear that
he should not give, lest he might lose an opportunity of doing a good
action.
XIII. You Epicureans take pleasure in making a study of dull torpidity,
in seeking for a repose which differs little from sound sleep, in
lurking beneath the thickest shade, in amusing with the feeblest
possible trains of thought that sluggish condition of your languid minds
which you term tranquil contemplation, and in stuffing with food and
drink, in the recesses of your gardens, your bodies which are pallid
with want of exercise; we Stoics, on the other hand, take pleasure in
bestowing benefits, even though they cost us labour, provided that they
lighten the labours of others; though they lead us into danger, provided