Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
be, since sometimes they {19} leave their country of their own free
will, never to return? They are slain: why not, since sometimes
they choose to lay violent hands on themselves? Why do they suffer
certain miseries? it is that they may teach others how to do so.
They are born as patterns. Conceive, therefore, that God says:—“You,
who have chosen righteousness, what complaint can you make of me?
I have encompassed other men with unreal good things, and have
deceived their inane minds as it were by a long and misleading
dream: I have bedecked them with gold, silver, and ivory, but within
them there is no good thing. Those men whom you regard as fortunate,
if you could see, not their outward show, but their hidden life,
are really unhappy, mean, and base, ornamented on the outside like
the walls of their houses: that good fortune of theirs is not sound
and genuine: it is only a veneer, and that a thin one. As long,
therefore, as they can stand upright and display themselves as they
choose, they shine and impose upon one; when something occurs to
shake and unmask them, we see how deep and real a rottenness was
hidden by that factitious magnificence. To you I have given sure
and lasting good things, which become greater and better the more
one turns them over and views them on every side: I have granted
to you to scorn danger, to disdain passion. You do not shine
outwardly, all your good qualities are turned inwards; even so does
the world neglect what lies without it, and rejoices in the
contemplation of itself. I have placed every good thing within your
own breasts: it is your good fortune not to need any good fortune.
‘Yet many things befall you which are sad, dreadful, hard to be
borne.’ Well, as I have not been able to remove these from your
path, I have given your minds strength to combat all: bear them
bravely. In this you can surpass God himself; He is beyond suffering
evil: you are above it. Despise poverty; no man lives as poor as
he was born: {20} despise pain; either it will cease or you will
cease: despise death; it either ends you or takes you elsewhere:
despise fortune; I have given her no weapon that can reach the mind.
Above all, I have taken care that no one should hold you captive
against your will: the way of escape lies open before you: if you
do not choose to fight, you may fly. For this reason, of all those
matters which I have deemed essential for you, I have made nothing
easier for you than to die. I have set man’s life as it were on a
mountain side: it soon slips down.[8] Do but watch, and you will
see how short and how ready a path leads to freedom. I have not
imposed such long delays upon those who quit the world as upon those
who enter it: were it not so, fortune would hold a wide dominion
over you, if a man died as slowly as he is born. Let all time, let
every place teach you, how simple it is to renounce nature, and to
fling back her gifts to her: before the altar itself and during the
solemn rites of sacrifice, while life is being prayed for, learn
how to die. Fat oxen fall dead with a tiny wound; a blow from a
man’s hand fells animals of great strength: the sutures of the neck
are severed by a thin blade, and when the joint which connects the
head and neck is cut, all that great mass falls. The breath of life
is not deep seated, {21} nor only to be let forth by steel—the
vitals need not be searched throughout by plunging a sword among
them to the hilt: death lies near the surface, I have not appointed
any particular spot for these blows—the body may be pierced wherever
you please. That very act which is called dying, by which the breath
of life leaves the body, is too short for you to be able to estimate
its quickness: whether a knot crushes the windpipe, or water stops
your breathing: whether you fall headlong from a height and perish
upon the hard ground below, or a mouthful of fire checks the drawing
of your breath—whatever it is, it acts swiftly. Do you not blush
to spend so long a time in dreading what takes so short a time to
do?”
[1] _honestior_ opposed to the gladiator—the loftier the station
of the combatant. The Gracchus of Juvenal, Sat. ii. and viii.,
illustrates, the passage.
[2] _par_, a technical term in the language of sport (_worthy_ of
such a spectator).
[3] _viderint_—Let them see to it: it is no matter of mine.
[4] That is, to triumph over. “Two spears were set upright ... and
a third was fastened across them at the top; and through this gateway
the vanquished army marched out, as a token that they had been
conquered in war, and owed their lives to the enemy’s mercy. It was
no peculiar insult devised for this occasion, but a common usage,
so far as appears, in similar cases; like the modern ceremony of
piling arms when a garrison or army surrender themselves as prisoners
of war.”— Arnold’s _History of Rome_, ch. xxxi.
[5] He was a “mirmillo,” a kind of gladiator who was armed with a
Gaulish helmet.
[6] _e lorica_.
[7] The lines occur in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ii. 63. Phoebus is
telling Phaethon how to drive the chariot of the Sun.
[8] Compare Walter Scott: “All. . . . must have felt that but for
the dictates of religion, or the natural recoil of the mind from
the idea of dissolution, there have been times when they would have
been willing to throw away life as a child does a broken toy. I am
sure I know one who has often felt so. O God! what are we?—Lords
of nature?—Why, a tile drops from a house-top, which an elephant
would not feel more than a sheet of pasteboard, and there lies his
lordship. Or something of inconceivably minute origin, the pressure
of a bone, or the inflammation of a particle of the brain takes
place, and the emblem of the Deity destroys himself or some one
else. We hold our health and our reason on terms slighter than any
one would desire, were it in their choice, to hold an Irish
cabin.”—Lockhart’s _Life of Sir Walter Scott_, vol. vii., p. 11.
{22}
THE SECOND BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED
TO SERENUS.
“THAT THE WISE MAN CAN NEITHER RECEIVE INJURY NOR INSULT,” OR, AN
ESSAY ON THE FIRMNESS OF THE WISE MAN.
I. I might truly say, Serenus, that there is as wide a difference
between the Stoics and the other sects of philosophers as there is
between men and women, since each class contributes an equal share
to human society, but the one is born to command, the other to obey.
The other philosophers deal with us gently and coaxingly, just as
our accustomed family physicians usually do with our bodies, treating
them not by the best and shortest method, but by that which we allow
them to employ; whereas the Stoics adopt a manly course, and do not
care about its appearing attractive to those who are entering upon
it, but that it should as quickly as possible take us out of the
world, and lead us to that lofty eminence which is so far beyond
the scope of any missile weapon that it is above the reach of Fortune
herself. “But the way by which we are asked to climb is steep and
uneven.” What then? Can heights be reached by a level path? Yet
they are not so sheer and precipitous as some think. It is only the
first part that {23} has rocks and cliffs and no apparent outlet,
just as many hills seen from a long way off appear abruptly steep
and joined together, because the distance deceives our sight, and
then, as we draw nearer, those very hills which our mistaken eyes
had made into one gradually unfold themselves, those parts which
seemed precipitous from afar assume a gently sloping outline. When
just now mention was made of Marcus Cato, you whose mind revolts
at injustice were indignant at Cato’s own age having so little
understood him, at its having allotted a place below Vatinius to
one who towered above both Caesar and Pompeius; it seemed shameful
to you, that when he spoke against some law in the Forum his toga
was torn from him, and that he was hustled through the hands of a
mutinous mob from the Rostra as far as the arch of Fabius, enduring
all the bad language, spitting, and other insults of the frantic
rabble.
II. I then answered, that you had good cause to be anxious on behalf
of the commonwealth, which Publius Clodius on the one side, Vatinius
and all the greatest scoundrels on the other, were putting up for
sale, and, carried away by their blind covetousness, did not
understand that when they sold it they themselves were sold with
it; I bade you have no fears on behalf of Cato himself, because the
wise man can neither receive injury nor insult, and it is more
certain that the immortal gods have given Cato as a pattern of a
wise man to us, than that they gave Ulysses or Hercules to the
earlier ages; for these our Stoics have declared were wise men,
unconquered by labours, despisers of pleasure, and superior to all
terrors. Cato did not slay wild beasts, whose pursuit belongs to
huntsmen and countrymen, nor did he exterminate fabulous creatures
with fire and sword, or live in times when it was possible to believe
that the heavens could be supported on the shoulders of one man.
In an age which had thrown {24} off its belief in antiquated
superstitions, and had carried material knowledge to its highest
point, he had to struggle against that many-headed monster, ambition,
against that boundless lust for power which the whole world divided
among three men could not satisfy. He alone withstood the vices of
a worn-out State, sinking into ruin through its own bulk; he upheld
the falling commonwealth as far as it could be upheld by one man’s
hand, until at last his support was withdrawn, and he shared the
crash which he had so long averted, and perished together with that
from which it was impious to separate him—for Cato did not outlive
freedom, nor did freedom outlive Cato. Think you that the people
could do any wrong to such a man when they tore away his praetorship
or his toga? when they bespattered his sacred head with the rinsings
of their mouths? The wise man is safe, and no injury or insult can
touch him.
III. I think I see your excited and boiling temper. You are preparing
to exclaim: “These are the things which take away all weight from
your maxims; you promise great matters, such as I should not even
wish for, let alone believe to be possible, and then, after all
your brave words, though you say that the wise man is not poor, you
admit that he often is in want of servants, shelter, and food. You
say that the wise man is not mad, yet you admit that he sometimes
loses his reason, talks nonsense, and is driven to the wildest
actions by the stress of his disorder. When you say that the wise
man cannot be a slave, you do not deny that he will be sold, carry
out orders, and perform menial services at the bidding of his master;
so, for all your proud looks, you come down to the level of every
one else, and merely call things by different names. Consequently,
I suspect that something of this kind lurks behind this maxim, which
at first sight appears so beautiful and noble, ‘that the wise man
can neither receive {25} injury nor insult.’ It makes a great deal
of difference whether you declare that the wise man is beyond feeling
resentment, or beyond receiving injury; for if you say that he will
bear it calmly, he has no special privilege in that, for he has
developed a very common quality, and one which is learned by long
endurance of wrong itself, namely, patience. If you declare that
he can never receive an injury, that is, that no one will attempt
to do him one, then I will throw up all my occupations in life and
become a Stoic.”
It has not been my object to decorate the wise man with mere imaginary
verbal honours, but to raise him to a position where no injury will
be permitted to reach him. “What? will there be no one to tease