Letters From a Stoic Read online

  This is why I look on people like this as a spiritless lot – the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else’s shadow. They never venture to do for themselves the things they have spent such a long time learning. They exercise their memories on things that are not their own. It is one thing, however, to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to your memory, whereas to know, by contrast, is actually to make each item your own, and not to be dependent on some original and be constantly looking to see what the master said. ‘Zeno said this, Cleanthes that.’ Let’s have some difference between you and the books! How much longer are you going to be a pupil? From now on do some teaching as well. Why, after all, should I listen to what I can read for myself? ‘The living voice,’ it may be answered, ‘counts for a great deal.’ Not when it is just acting in a kind of secretarial capacity, making itself an instrument for what others have to say.

  A further point, too, is that these people who never attain independence follow the views of their predecessors, first, in matters in which everyone else without exception has abandoned the older authority concerned, and secondly, in matters in which investigations are still not complete. But no new findings will ever be made if we rest content with the findings of the past. Besides, a man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking. ‘But surely you are going to walk in your predecessors’ footsteps?’ Yes indeed, I shall use the old road, but if I find a shorter and easier one I shall open it up. The men who poineered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone. There has yet to be a monopoly of truth. And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.

  LETTER XXXVIII

  You are quite right in urging that we should exchange letters oftener. The utmost benefit comes from talk because it steals little by little into the mind. Lectures prepared beforehand and delivered before a listening audience are more resounding but less intimate. Philosophy is good advice, and no one gives advice at the top of his voice. Such harangues, if I may call them that, may need to be resorted to now and then where a person in a state of indecision is needing a push. But when the object is not to make him want to learn but to get him learning, one must have recourse to these lower tones, which enter the mind more easily and stick in it. What is required is not a lot of words but effectual ones.

  Words need to be sown like seed. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when it lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size. Reason does the same; to the outward eye its dimensions may be insignificant, but with activity it starts developing. Although the words spoken are few, if the mind has taken them in as it should they gather strength and shoot upwards. Yes, precepts have the same features as seeds: they are of compact dimensions and they produce impressive results – given, as I say, the right sort of mind, to grasp at and assimilate them. The mind will then respond by being in its turn creative and will produce a yield exceeding what was put into it.

  LETTER XL

  THANK you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we’re together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters, which carry marks and signs of the absent friend that are real. For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition.

  You say in your letter that you went and heard the philosopher Serapio when his ship put in where you are. ‘His words,’ you say, ‘tend to be tumbled out at a tremendous pace, pounded and driven along rather than poured out, for they come in a volume no one voice could cope with.’ I do not approve of this in a philosopher, whose delivery – like his life – should be well-ordered; nothing can be well-regulated if it is done in a breakneck hurry. That is why in Homer the impetuous type of eloquence which he compares to snow that keeps on coming down without a break, is given to the orator, while from the old man there comes a gentle eloquence that ‘flowed sweeter than honey’.* You should take the view, then, that this copious and impetuous energy in a speaker is better suited to a hawker than to someone who deals with a subject of serious importance and is also a teacher.

  Yet I am just as much against his words coming in a trickle as in a stream. He should not keep people’s ears on the stretch any more than he should swamp them. For the other extreme of thinness and poverty means less attentiveness on the part of the listener as he becomes tired of this slowness with all its interruptions. Nonetheless what is waited for does sink in more readily than what goes flying past; one speaks in any event of instruction as being handed on to those being taught, and something that escapes them is hardly being handed on.

  Language, moreover, which devotes its attention to truth ought to be plain and unadorned. This popular style has nothing to do with truth. Its object is to sway a mass audience, to carry away unpractised ears by the force of its onslaught. It never submits itself to detailed discussion, is just wafted away. Besides, how can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself? And apart from all this surely language which is directed to the healing of men’s minds needs to penetrate into one? Medicines do no good unless they stop some length of time in one. There is, moreover, a great deal of futility and emptiness about this style of speaking, which has more noise about it than effectiveness. There are my terrors to be quieted, incitements to be quelled, illusions to be dispelled, extravagance to be checked, greed to be reprimanded: which of these things can be done in a hurry? What doctor can heal patients merely in passing? One might add, too, that there is not even any pleasure to be found in such a noisy promiscuous torrent of words. Just as with a lot of things that one would never believe possible one finds it quite enough to have seen them once proved possible, so with these performers with words, to have heard them once is more than enough. What is there in them, after all, that anyone could want to learn or imitate? What view is one likely to take of the state of a person’s mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no restraint?

  This rapidity of utterance recalls a person running down a slope and unable to stop where he meant to, being carried on instead a lot farther than he intended, at the mercy of his body’s momentum; it is out of control, and unbecoming to philosophy, which should be placing her words, not throwing them around, and moving forward step by step. ‘But surely she can move on to a higher plane now and then as well?’ Certainly, but it must be without prejudice to her dignity of character, and this vehement, excessive energy strips her of that. Power she should have, great power, but it should be controlled: she should be a never-failing stream, not a spate. Even in an advocate I should be loth to allow such uncontrollable speed in delivery, all in an unruly rush; how could a judge (who is not uncommonly, too, inexperienced and unqualified) be expected to keep up with it? Even on the occasions when an advocate is carried away by an ungovernable passion or a desire to display his powers, he should not increase his pace and pile on the words beyond the capacity of the ear.

  You will be doing the right thing, therefore, if you do not go to listen to people who are more concerned about the quantity than the quality of what they say, and choose yourself – if you have to – to speak in the manner of Publius Vinicius. When Asellius was asked how Vinicius spoke, he described it as being. ‘at a slow pace’. Geminus Varius in fact remarked, ‘How you can call the man eloquent I simply don’t know – he can’t string three words together.’ Is there any reason why of the two you should not choose Vinicius’ style? You can expect to be interrupted by persons with as little taste as the one who, when Vinicius was jerking the words out one by one, as if he were dictating rather than speaking, exclaimed, ‘I call on the speaker to speak.’ The pace of Quintus Haterius, a celebrated spe
aker of his day, is something I should have a sensible man keep well clear of: with him there was never a hesitation or a pause, only one start and only one stop.

  But I also think that certain styles are suitable in a greater or lesser degree to different nationalities. In a Greek one will tolerate this lack of discipline, while we have acquired the habit of punctuating what we say, in writing as well as speech. Our own Cicero, too, from whom Roman oratory really sprang, was a steady goer. Roman discourse is more given to self-examination, appraising itself and inviting appraisal. Fabianus, who added outstanding oratory to those more important distinctions of his, his way of life and his learning, would discuss a subject with dispatch rather than with haste. You might describe his oratory as being not rapid but fluent. This I am ready to see in a philosopher, but I do not insist on it; his delivery is not to be halting, but I should rather have the words issued forth than flowing forth. And a further reason I have for warning you against that disease is the fact that you can only acquire it successfully if you cease to feel any sense of shame. You really need to give the skin of your face a good rub and then not listen to yourself! For that unguarded pace will give rise to a lot of expressions of which you would otherwise be critical. You cannot, I repeat, successfully acquire it and preserve your modesty at the same time. One needs, moreover, constant daily practice for it. It requires a switch of attention, too, from subject-matter to words. And even if it does transpire that the words come readily to the tongue and are capable of reeling off it without any effort on your part, they will still need to be regulated. A way of speaking which is restrained, not bold, suits a wise man in the same way as an unassuming sort of walk does. The upshot, then, of what I have to say is this: I am telling you to be a slow-speaking person.

  LETTER XLI

  YOU are doing the finest possible thing and acting in your best interests if, as you say in your letter, you are persevering in your efforts to acquire a sound understanding. This is something it is foolish to pray for when you can win it from your own self. There is no need to raise our hands to heaven; there is no need to implore the temple warden to allow us close to the ear of some graven image, as though this increased the chances of our being heard. God is near you, is with you, is inside you. Yes, Lucilius, there resides within us a divine spirit, which guards us and watches us in the evil and the good we do. As we treat him, so will he treat us. No man, indeed, is good without God – is any one capable of rising above fortune unless he has help from God? He it is that prompts us to noble and exalted endeavours. In each and every good man

  A god (what god we are uncertain) dwells.*

  If you have ever come on a dense wood of ancient trees that have risen to an exceptional height, shutting out all sight of the sky with one thick screen of branches upon another, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, your sense of wonderment at finding so deep and unbroken a gloom out of doors, will persuade you of the presence of a deity. Any cave in which the rocks have been eroded deep into the mountain resting on it, its hollowing out into a cavern of impressive extent not produced by the labours of men but the result of processes of nature, will strike into your soul some kind of inkling of the divine. We venerate the sources of important streams; places where a mighty river bursts suddenly from hiding are provided with altars; hot springs are objects of worship; the darkness or unfathomable depth of pools has made their waters sacred. And if you come across a man who is never alarmed by dangers, never affected by cravings, happy in adversity, calm in the midst of storm, viewing mankind from a higher level and the gods from their own, is it not likely that a feeling will find its way into you of veneration for him? Is it not likely that you will say to yourself, ‘Here is a thing which is too great, too sublime for anyone to regard it as being in the same sort of category as that puny body it inhabits.’ Into that body there has descended a divine power. The soul that is elevated and well regulated, that passes through any experience as if it counted for comparatively little, that smiles at all the things we fear or pray for, is impelled by a force that comes from heaven. A thing of that soul’s height cannot stand without the prop of a deity. Hence the greater part of it is situated where it descends from; in the same way as the sun’s rays touch the earth but are really situated at the point from which they emanate, a soul possessed of greatness and holiness, which has been sent down into this world in order that we may gain a nearer knowledge of the divine, associates with us, certainly, but never loses contact with its source. On that source it depends; that is the direction in which its eyes turn, and the direction it strives to climb in; the manner in which it takes part in our affairs is that of a superior being.

  What, then, is this soul? Something which has a lustre that is due to no quality other than its own. Could anything be more stupid than to praise a person for something that is not his? Or more crazy than admiring things which in a single moment can be transferred to another? It is not a golden bit that makes one horse superior to others. Sending a lion into the arena with his mane gilded, tired by the handling he has been given in the process of being forced to submit to this embellishment, is a very different thing from sending in a wild one with his spirit unbroken. Bold in attack, as nature meant him to be, in all his unkempt beauty, a beast whose glory it is that none can look on him without fear, he stands higher in people’s eyes than the other, docile, gold-leaf coated creature.

  No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own. We praise a vine if it loads its branches with fruit and bends its very props to the ground with the weight it carries: would any one prefer the famous vine that had gold grapes and leaves hanging on it? Fruitfulness is the vine’s peculiar virtue. So, too, in a man praise is due only to what is his very own. Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him – they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man’s.

  You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy – that he live in accordance with his own nature. Yet this is turned into something difficult by the madness that is universal among men; we push one another into vices. And how can people be called back to spiritual well-being when no one is trying to hold them back and the crowd is urging them on?

  LETTER XLVI

  THE book you promised me has come. I was intending to read it at my convenience and I opened it on arrival without meaning to do any more than just get an idea of its contents. The next thing I knew the book itself had charmed me into a deeper reading of it there and then. How lucid its style is you may gather from the fact that I found the work light reading, although a first glance might well convey the impression that the writer was someone like Livy or Epicurus, its bulk being rather unlike you or me! It was so enjoyable, though, that I found myself held and drawn on until I ended up having read it right through to the end without a break. All the time the sunshine was inviting me out, hunger prompting me to eat, the weather threatening to break, but I gulped it all down in one sitting.

  It was a joy, not just a pleasure, to read it. There was so much talent and spirit about it – I’d have said ‘forcefulness’, too, if it had been written on a quieter plane now and then and periodically raised on to a higher one; as it was there was no such forcefulness, but instead there was a sustained evenness of style. The writing was pure and virile – and yet not lacking in that occasional entertaining touch, that bit of light relief at the appropriate moment. The quality of nobility, of sublimity, you have; I want you to keep it, and to carry on just the way you’re doing.

  Your subject, also, contributed to the result – which is a reason why you should always select a fertile one, one that will engage the mind’s
attention and stimulate it. But I’ll write and say more about the book when I’ve gone over it again. At the moment my judgement isn’t really a sufficiently settled one – it’s as if I’d heard it all rather than read it. You must let me go into it thoroughly, too. You needn’t be apprehensive, you’ll hear nothing but the truth. How fortunate you are in possessing nothing capable of inducing anyone to tell you a lie over a distance as great as the one that separates us – except that even in these circumstances, when all reason for it is removed, we still find habit a reason for telling lies!

  LETTER XLVII

  I’M glad to hear, from these people who’ve been visiting you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. It is just what one expects of an enlightened, cultivated person like yourself. ‘They’re slaves,’ people say. No. They’re human beings. ‘They’re slaves.’ But they share the same roof as ourselves. ‘They’re slaves.’ No, they’re friends, humble friends. ‘They’re slaves.’ Strictly speaking they’re our fellow-slaves, if you once reflect that fortune has as much power over us as over them.