Seneca people

“ It is to people of this class, who still retained some lingering instincts of goodness, weary with indulgence, bewildered and tortured by the conflict of the lower nature with the weak, but still disturbing, protests of the higher, that Seneca addresses his counsels. ”

“ In another lively passage, Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers. After observing that philosophy exercises some influence even over those who do not go deeply in it, just as people sitting in a shop of perfumes carry away with them some of the odour, he adds, "Do we not, however, know some who have been among the audience of a philosopher for many years, and have been even entirely uncoloured by his teaching? ”

“ Rutilius found his virtue rewarded with a hiding-place in Asia; to Cato the Roman people refused the praetorship, and persisted in refusing the consulship. We are ungrateful in public matters; and if every man asks himself, you will find that there is no one who has not some private ingratitude to complain of. Yet it is impossible that all men should complain, unless all were deserving of complaint, therefore all men are ungrateful. ”

“ Men feel gratitude towards you: no one person ever was so dear to another as you are to the people of Rome, whose great and enduring benefit you are. You have, however, taken upon yourself a mighty burden: no one any longer speaks of the good times of the late Emperor Augustus, or the first years of the reign of Tiberius, or proposes for your imitation any model outside yourself: yours is a pattern reign. This would have been difficult had your goodness of heart not been innate, but merely adopted for a time ”

“ For speechmaking at the bar, or any other pursuit that claims the people's attention, wins enemies for a man; but philosophy is peaceful and minds her own business. Men cannot scorn her; she is honoured by every profession, even the vilest among them. Evil can never grow so strong, and nobility of character can never be so plotted against, that the name of philosophy shall cease to be worshipful and sacred.
Philosophy itself, however, should be practised with calmness and moderation. 12. "Very well, then," you retort, "do you regard the philosophy of Marcus Cato as moderate? ”

“ Some of the dialogs are dated from Corsica, Seneca’s place of exile, which he seems to have found peculiarly uncomfortable, although he remarks that there are people who live there from choice. Nevertheless, mournful as they are in tone, these Dialogs have a certain value, because they teach us what was meant by Stoic philosophy in the time of the Twelve Caesars. ”

“ Will these syllogisms help us to bring it about that the Roman people shall demand poverty and praise it – poverty, the foundation and cause of their empire, – and, on the other hand, shall shrink in fear from their present wealth, reflecting that they have found it among the victims of their conquests, that wealth is the source from which office-seeking and bribery and disorder [23] have burst into a city once characterized by the utmost scrupulousness and sobriety, and that because of wealth an exhibition all too lavish is made of the spoils of conquered nations ”

“ We must limit the running to and fro which most men practise, rambling about houses, theatres, and marketplaces. They mind other men's business, and always seem as though they themselves had something to do. If you ask one of them as he comes out of his own door, "Whither are you going?" he will answer, "By Hercules, I do not know: but I shall see some people and do something." They wander purposelessly seeking for something to do, and do, not what they have made up their minds to do, but what has casually fallen in their way. ”

“ Gibbon, making a free translation from Seneca, says, "Religion was regarded by the common people as true, by the philosophers as false, and by the rulers as useful." ”

“ It is because we never expect that any evil will befall ourselves before it comes, we will not be taught by seeing the misfortunes of others that they are the common inheritance of all men, but imagine that the path which we have begun to tread is free from them and less beset by dangers than that of other people. How many funerals pass our houses? yet we do not think of death. ”

“ Already in the last days of his fame, the swine broke into his garden, and it is one of the ironies of fate, that we have to believe a Seneca in favour of Epicurean manliness and loftiness of soul—Seneca, a man to whom one should, on the whole, always lend an ear, but never give one's faith and trust. In Corsica people say: Seneca è un birbone. [80]
Your friend, NIETZSCHE. Nietzsche To His Mother - August, 1883 Sils-Maria, August, 1883. ”

“ But just as we take on faith such estimates of values, so let us take on the faith of the people this truth, that nothing is more honourable than a grateful heart. ”

“ Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people—I mean those who boast of their foresight? ”

“ It is in the kindred of the human reason with the Divine, the Reason of the world, that we must seek the reconciliation of two apparently opposite points of view. At one time the Stoic doctor tells us that we must trust to our own strength in the moral struggle. And again Seneca, in almost Christian phrase, comforts his disciple with the vision of God holding out a succouring hand to struggling virtue, just as he warns the backslider of an eye “that seeth in secret.” ”

“ He was aware that in the existing state of society at Rome, wealth was necessary to men high in station; wealth alone could retain influence, and a poor minister became at once contemptible. The distributor of the Imperial favours must have his banquets, his receptions, his slaves and freedmen; he must possess the means of attracting if not of bribing; he must not seem too virtuous, too austere, among an evil generation; in order to do good at all he must swim with the stream, however polluted it might be. All this inconsistency Seneca must have contemplated without blenching ”

“ Which does the most good, he who decides between foreigners and citizens (as praetor peregrinus) , or, as praetor urbanus, pronounces sentence to the suitors in his court at his assistant's dictation, or he who shows them what is meant by justice, filial feeling, endurance, courage, contempt of death and knowledge of the gods, and how much a man is helped by a good conscience? If then you transfer to philosophy the time which you take away from the public service, you will not be a deserter or have refused to perform your proper task. ”

“ When we remember the sins of Seneca's life, let us recall also the constancy of his death; while we admit the inconsistencies of his systematic philosophy, let us be grateful for the genius, the enthusiasm, the glow of intense conviction, with which he clothes his repeated utterance of truths, which, when based upon a surer basis, were found adequate for the moral regeneration of the world. Nothing is more easy than to sneer at Seneca, or to write clever epigrams on one whose moral attainments fell infinitely short of his own great ideal. ”

“ For men craving for self-help and the complete training of the faculties, eager to escape from the fixed types of medieval manhood, minted by authority, and taught to distrust conscience, when it was their own, and to trust it only in others, Seneca was an oracle. ”

“ It seems to me erroneous to believe that those who have loyally dedicated themselves to philosophy are stubborn and rebellious, scorners of magistrates or kings or of those who control the administration of public affairs. For, on the contrary, no class of man is so popular with the philosopher as the ruler is; and rightly so, because rulers bestow upon no men a greater privilege than upon those who are allowed to enjoy peace and leisure. ”

“ Repellent attire, unkempt hair, slovenly beard, open scorn of silver dishes, a couch on the bare earth, and any other perverted forms of self-display, are to be avoided. The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men? Inwardly, we ought to be different in all respects, but our exterior should conform to society. ”

“ Take that of the younger Marcus Cato, with whom Fortune dealt in a more hostile and more persistent fashion. But he withstood her, on all occasions, and in his last moments, at the point of death, showed that a brave man can live in spite of Fortune, can die in spite of her. His whole life was passed either in civil warfare, or under a political regime which was soon to breed civil war. And you may say that he, just as much as Socrates, declared allegiance to liberty in the midst of slavery – unless perchance you think that Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus [13] were the allies of liberty! ”

“ We find these sentiments in every writer of the first two centuries of our era who deals with contemporary society. Seneca feels that the world is lost and helpless; that life itself is a fatal gift compared with which nothing is so deceitful and treacherous. Filled with ardour for his philosophy and with confidence in the efficacy of its moral teachings, he nevertheless at times loses heart. ”

“ Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him.’ He has not only the same absolute command over our laughter and our tears, all the resources of passion, of wit, of thought, of observation, but he has the most unbounded range of fanciful invention, whether terrible or playful, the same insight into the world of imagination that he has into the world of reality; and over all there presides the same truth of character and nature, and the same spirit of humanity. ”

“ But, for all that, he touches the great and eternal commonplaces of human occasion—friendship, health, bereavement, riches, poverty, death—with a hand that places him high among the wise masters of life. All through the ages men, tossed in the beating waves of circumstance, have found more in the essays and letters of Seneca than in any other secular writer, words of good counsel and comfort. ”

“ On the day on which Caesar devoted his services to the universe, he lost them for himself, and like the planets which ever unrestingly pursue their course, he can never halt or attend to any affair of his own. After a certain fashion this prohibition is imposed upon you also; you may not consider your own interests, or devote yourself to your own studies: while Caesar owns the world, you cannot allow either joy or grief, or anything else to occupy any part of you: you owe your entire self to Caesar. ”

“ Now the writings of Seneca show, in their way, a real anxiety among this class to raise the moral tone of mankind around them; a spirit of reform, a zeal for the conversion of souls, which, though it never rose, indeed, under the teaching of the philosophers, to boiling heat, still simmered with genial warmth on the surface of society. ”

“ At length the noble house of Inachus, that ancient lineage, has seen the rancorous feud of the brothers calmed down; what fury agitates thy breasts, that thou shouldst have carried on such mutual carnage, merely to gain a sceptre, wading to it in crime! Thou art ignorant. Thou who art greedy of attaining power, of what does a kingdom really consist? Riches do not constitute a king, nor gaudy vestments dyed with Tyrian hues, nor the blazing crown on a royal head, nor gorgeous ceilings (of a palace) shining with their rich gilding. ”

“ Though all unguarded, is from danger free;
For poverty alone may be at peace.
And this I hold: the mightiest king is he,
Who from the lust of sovereignty is free. 470
Tantalus: But if some god a kingdom should bestow,
It is not meet for mortal to refuse:
Behold, thy brother bids thee to the throne.
Thyestes: He bids? 'Tis but a cloak for treachery.
Tantalus: But brotherly regard oft times returns
Onto the heart from which it has been driven;
And righteous love regains its former strength. 475
Thyestes: And dost thou speak of brother's love to me? ”

“ I mean when good men come to bad ends; when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompeius and Cicero to offer their necks to the swords of their own followers, when the great Cato, that living image of virtue, falls upon his sword and rips up both himself and the republic, one cannot help being grieved that Fortune should bestow her gifts so unjustly: what, too, can a good man hope to obtain when he sees the best of men meeting with the worst fates. ”

“ Marcus Brutus thought that there was sufficient comfort in the thought that those who go into exile are permitted to carry their virtues thither with them. Though one might think that neither of these alone were able to console an exile, yet it must be confessed that when combined they have great power: for how very little it is that we lose! whithersoever we betake ourselves two most excellent things will accompany us, namely, a common Nature and our own especial virtue. ”

“ In that period of luxury and dissipation, when the rage for new inventions was grown epidemic, Seneca arose. His talents were of a peculiar sort, acute, refined and polished; but polished to a degree that made him prefer affectation and wit to truth and nature. The predominance of his genius was great, and, by consequence, he gave the mortal stab to all true eloquence [a] . When I say this, let me not be suspected of that low malignity which would tarnish the fame of a great character. I admire the man, and the philosopher. ”