L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits
you should have wished to confer a benefit upon me is not sufficient
to render me grateful; but that you should have wished not to do so is
enough to set me free from any obligation to you. A mere wish does not
constitute a benefit; and just as the best and heartiest wish is not a
benefit when fortune prevents its being carried into effect, neither is
what fortune bestows upon us a benefit, unless good wishes preceded
it. In order to lay me under an obligation, you must not merely do me a
service, but you must do so intentionally.
XI. Cleanthes makes use of the following example:--"I sent," says he,
"two slaves to look for Plato and bring him to me from the Academy. One
of them searched through the whole of the colonnade, and every other
place in which he thought that he was likely to be found, and returned
home alike weary and unsuccessful; the other sat down among the audience
of a mountebank close by, and, while amusing himself in the society of
other slaves like a careless vagabond as he was, found Plato, without
seeking for him, as he happened to pass that way. We ought," says he,
"to praise that slave who, as far as lay in his power, did what he was
ordered, and we ought to punish the other whose laziness turned out so
fortunate." It is goodwill alone which does one real service; let us
then consider under what conditions it lays us under obligations. It is
not enough to wish a man well, without doing him good; nor is it enough
to do him good without wishing him well. Suppose that some one wished to
give me a present, but did not give it; I have his good will, but I
do not have his benefit, which consists of subject matter and goodwill
together. I owe nothing to one who wished to lend me money but did not
do so, and in like manner I shall be the friend of one who wished but
was not able to bestow a benefit upon me, but I shall not be under any
obligation to him. I also shall wish to bestow something upon him, even
as he did upon me; but if fortune be more favorable to me than to him,
and I succeed in bestowing something upon him, my doing so will be a
benefit bestowed upon him, not a repayment out of gratitude for what he
did for me. It will become his duty to be grateful to me; I shall have
begun the interchange of benefits; the series must be counted from my
act.
XII. I already understand what you wish to ask; there is no need for you
to say anything, your countenance speaks for you. "If any one does us
good for his own sake, are we," you ask, "under an obligation to him? I
often hear you complain that there are some things which men make use
of themselves, but which they put down to the account of others." I will
tell you, my Liberalis; but first let me distinguish between the two
parts of your question, and separate what is fair from what is unfair.
It makes a great difference whether any one bestows a benefit upon us
for his own sake, or whether he does so partly for his own sake and
partly for ours. He who looks only to his own interests, and who does us
good because he cannot otherwise make a profit for himself, seems to
me to be like the farmer who provides winter and summer fodder for his
flocks, or like the man who feeds up the captives whom he has bought
in order that they may fetch a better price in the slave market, or who
crams and curry-combs fat oxen for sale; or like the keeper of a
school of arms, who takes great pains in exercising and equipping his
gladiators. As Cleanthes says, there is a great difference between
benefits and trade.
XIII. On the other hand, I am not so unjust as to feel no gratitude to
a man, because, while helping me, he helped himself also; for I do
not insist upon his consulting my interests to the exclusion of his
own--nay, I should prefer that the benefit which I receive may be of
even greater advantage to the giver, provided that he thought of us
both when giving it, and meant to divide it between me and himself. Even
should he possess the larger portion of it, still, if he admits me to
a share, if he meant it for both of us, I am not only unjust but
ungrateful, if I do not rejoice in what has benefited me benefiting him
also. It is the essence of spitefulness to say that nothing can be a
benefit which does not cause some inconvenience to the giver.
As for him who bestows a benefit for his own sake, I should say to him,
"You have made use of me, and how can you say that you have bestowed a
benefit upon me, rather than I upon you?" "Suppose," answers he, "that I
cannot obtain a public office except by ransoming ten citizens out of a
great number of captives, will you owe me nothing for setting you free
from slavery and bondage? Yet I shall do so for my own sake." To this I
should answer, "You do this partly for my sake, partly for your own.
It is for your own sake that you ransom captives, but it is for my sake
that you ransom me; for to serve your purpose it would be enough for you
to ransom any one. I am therefore your debtor, not for ransoming me
but for choosing me, since you might have attained the same result by
ransoming some one else instead of me. You divide the advantages of the
act between yourself and me, and you confer upon me a benefit by which
both of us profit. What you do entirely for my sake is, that you choose
me in preference to others. If therefore you were to be made praetor for
ransoming ten captives, and there were only ten of us captives, none of
us would be under any obligation to you, because there is nothing for
which you can ask any one of us to give you credit apart from your own
advantage. I do not regard a benefit jealously and wish it to be given
to myself alone, but I wish to have a share in it."
XIV. "Well, then," says he, "suppose that I were to order all your names
to be put into a ballot-box, and that your name was drawn among those
who were to be ransomed, would you owe me nothing?" Yes, I should owe
you something, but very little: how little, I will explain to you. By so
doing you do something for my sake, in that you grant me the chance of
being ransomed; I owe to fortune that my name was drawn, all I owe
to you is that my name could be drawn. You have given me the means
of obtaining your benefit. For the greater part of that benefit I am
indebted to fortune; that I could be so indebted, I owe to you.
I shall take no notice whatever of those whose benefits are bestowed
in a mercenary spirit, who do not consider to whom, but upon what terms
they give, whose benefits are entirely selfish. Suppose that some one
sells me corn; I cannot live unless I buy it; yet I do not owe my life
to him because I have bought it. I do not consider how essential it was
to me, and that I could not live without it; but how little thanks are
due for it, since I could not have had it without paying for it, and
since the merchant who imported it did not consider how much good he
would do me, but how much he would gain for himself, I owe nothing for
what I have bought and paid for.
XV. "According to this reasoning," says my opponent, "you would say
that you owe nothing to a physician beyond his paltry fee, nor to your
teacher, because you have paid him some money; yet these persons are all
held very dear, and are very much respected." In answer to this I should
urge that some things are of greater value than the price which we pay
for them. You buy of a physician life and good health, the value of
which cannot be estimated in money; from a teacher of the liberal
sciences you buy the education of a gentleman and mental culture;
therefore you pay these persons the price, not of what they give us, but
of their trouble in giving it; you pay them for devoting their attention
to us, for disregarding their own affairs to attend to us: they receive
the price, not of their services, but of the expenditure of their time.
Yet this may be more truly stated in another way, which I will at once
lay before you, having first pointed out how the above may be confuted.
Our adversary would say, "If some things are of greater value than the
price which we pay for them, then, though you may have bought them, you
still owe me something more for them." I answer, in the first place,
what does their real value matter, since the buyer and seller have
settled the price between them? Next, I did not buy it at it's own
price, but at yours. "It is," you say, "worth more than its sale price."
True, but it cannot be sold for more. The price of everything varies
according to circumstances; after you have well praised your wares, they
are worth only the highest price at which you can sell them; a man who
buys things cheap is not on that account under any obligation to the
seller. In the next place, even if they are worth more, there is no
generosity in your letting them go for less, since the price is settled
by custom and the rate of the market, not by the uses and powers of the
merchandise. What would you state to be the proper payment of a man who
crosses the seas, holding a true course through the midst of the waves
after the land has sunk out of sight, who foresees coming storms, and
suddenly, when no one expects danger, orders sails to be furled, yards
to be lowered, and the crew to stand at their posts ready to meet the
fury of the unexpected gale? and yet the price of such great skill is
fully paid for by the passage money. At what sum can you estimate the
value of a lodging in a wilderness, of a shelter in the rain, of a bath
or fire in cold weather? Yet I know on what terms I shall be supplied
with these when I enter an inn. How much the man does for us who props
our house when it is about to fall, and who, with a skill beyond belief,
suspends in the air a block of building which has begun to crack at the
foundation; yet we can contract for underpinning at a fixed and cheap
rate. The city wall keeps us safe from our enemies, and from sudden
inroads of brigands; yet it is, well known how much a day a smith
would earn for erecting towers and scaffoldings [Footnote: See
Viollet-le-Duc's "Dictionnaire d'Architecture," articles "Architecture
Militaire" and "Hourds," for the probable meaning of "Propugnacula."]to
provide for the public safety.
XVI. I might go on for ever collecting instances to prove that valuable
things are sold at a low price. What then? why is it that I owe
something extra both to my physician and to my teacher, and that I do
not acquit myself of all obligation to them by paying them their fee? It
is because they pass from physicians and teachers into friends, and lay
us under obligations, not by the skill which they sell to us, but by
kindly and familiar good will. If my physician does no more than feel
my pulse and class me among those whom he sees in his daily rounds,
pointing out what I ought to do or to avoid without any personal
interest, then I owe him no more than his fee, because he views me with
the eye not of a friend, but of a commander. [Footnote: I read "Nbn
tamquam amicus videt sed tamquam imperator."] Neither have I any reason
for loving my teacher, if he has regarded me merely as one of the mass
of his scholars, and has not thought me worthy of taking especial pains
with by myself, if he has never fixed his attention upon me, and if when
he discharged his knowledge on the public, I might be said rather to
have picked it up than to have learnt it from him. What then is our
reason for owing them much? It is, not that what they have sold us is
worth more than we paid for it, but that they have given something to us
personally. Suppose that my physician has spent more consideration upon
my case than was professionally necessary; that it was for me, not for
his own credit, that he feared: that he was not satisfied with pointing
out remedies, but himself applied them, that he sat by my bedside among