8.Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 1.5. Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia was written during the reign of Caligula, which probably makes it his earliest surviving prose work.
9.Seneca, Letters 99.16.
10.For these two arguments, see Seneca, Consolation to Polybius 18.6 and Consolation to Helvia 16.1.
11.Seneca, Consolation to Polybius 18.6.
12.Seneca, Letters 63.12.
13.Seneca, Consolation to Polybius 11.2.
14.Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 9.5.
15.Seneca, Letters 63.14–15.
16.Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 10.1.
17.Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 10.3.
18.Epictetus, Handbook 11.
19.Seneca, Consolation to Polybius 11.3.
20.Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind 11.1.
21.For a similar view from someone who has also experimented with looking at life from a Stoic perspective, see Scott LaBarge, “How (and Maybe Why) to Grieve Like an Ancient Philosopher,” in Virtue and Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas, edited by Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 320–42.
22.Seneca, Letters 99.4.
23.Seneca, Letters 99.4.
24.Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 3.4.
25.Seneca, Consolation to Marcia 5.4. Marcia’s son Metilius had two daughters, so he was not a child when he died. But as Seneca illustrates, even very young children can be a source of happy memories.
CHAPTER 13: LOVE AND GRATITUDE
1.Seneca, On Anger 2.31.7.
2.Anna Lydia Motto, “Seneca on Love,” Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios Latinos 27, no. 1 (2007): 80.
3.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.39.
4.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1.9.
5.William O. Stephens, Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom (New York: Continuum, 2007), 154.
6.Cicero, Pro Plancio 80.
7.Seneca, On Benefits 1.1.2.
8.Edward J. Harpham, “Gratitude in the History of Ideas,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, eds. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 22.
9.Seneca was often critical of this system. But he was also part of it: his relationship with Nero could be described as a patron–client relationship.
10.Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Philosophies of Gratitude (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 46–47.
11.The only scholarly article I’ve been able to find devoted to gratitude in Stoicism is by my friend Aldo Dinucci, a scholar of Stoicism in Brazil. It’s about gratitude in Epictetus and is written in Portuguese. See Antônio Carlos Rodrigues and Aldo Dinucci, “A eucharistia em Epicteto,” in Epistemologias da religião e relações de religiosidade, eds. Celma Laurinda Freitas Costa, Clóvis Ecco, and José Reinaldo F. Martins Filho (Curitiba: Editora Prismas, 2017), 17–44.
12.Donald Robertson, “Stoicism and Love,” presentation from Stoicism Today Conference 2014. Video at https://youtu.be/W4sawA20hdE.
13.On the Stoic approach to loving others with an awareness of their mortality, see William O. Stephens, “Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 14 (1996): 193–210.
14.Several modern philosophers have explored this topic. These are some of the writings I studied while writing this chapter, listed in order of their publication dates. On the gratitude of Epicurus toward nature but not toward the gods: N. W. De Wit, “The Epicurean Doctrine of Gratitude,” American Journal of Philology 58, no. 3, (1937): 320–28. On why the experience of “cosmic gratitude” or “transpersonal gratitude” does not call for belief in God: George Naknikian, “On the Cognitive Import of Certain Religious States,” in Religious Experience and Truth: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 156–64. On nonpersonal gratitude, gratitude toward nature, and “free-floating gratitude”: E. R. Loder, “Gratitude and the Environment: Toward Individual and Collective Ecological Virtue,” Journal Jurisprudence (2011): 383–435. On gratitude toward nature: Nathan Wood, “Gratitude and Alterity in Environmental Virtue Ethics,” Environmental Values 29, no. 4 (2020): 481–98. A recent exploration of cosmic gratitude: chapter 8, “Cosmic Gratitude,” in Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Philosophies of Gratitude (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 219–53.
15.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.27.
16.Robert C. Solomon, foreword, in The Psychology of Gratitude, eds. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), v.
17.Philip C. Watkins, Gratitude and the Good Life: Toward a Psychology of Appreciation (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 3.
18.Watkins, Gratitude and the Good Life, 5.
19.Watkins, Gratitude and the Good Life, 7.
20.Watkins, Gratitude and the Good Life, 8.
21.Robert A. Emmons, “The Psychology of Gratitude: An Introduction,” in The Psychology of Gratitude, eds. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5.
22.For a list of well-known pantheists, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pantheists. Philosopher Michael Levine believes that “there are probably more (grass-root) pantheists than Protestants, or theists in general, and pantheism continues to be the traditional religious alternative to theism for those who reject the classical theistic notion of God.” Levine, Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994), 14.
23.Carl Sagan’s son, the science writer Dorion Sagan, wrote, “My father believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature, but as nature, equivalent to it.” Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2007), 14.
24.See the discussion in David Fideler, Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2014), 32.
25.For “Nature” as a term for “God,” see Seneca, On Benefits 4.7.1–2 and 4.8.3 and Natural Questions 2.45.3.
26.These words appear at the beginning of Rumi’s discourses. Jalaluddin Rumi, Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rumi, translated by W. M. Thackston, Jr. (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 1.
27.Seneca, On Benefits 4.25.2. Similarly, when Marcus Aurelius referred to the gods as being “visible,” he was referring to the celestial bodies (Meditations 12.28).
28.For some examples of this, see Mikolaj Domaradzki, “Theological Etymologizing in the Early Stoa,” Kernos 25 (2012): 125–48. https://journals.openedition.org/kernos/2109.
29.As philosopher Michael P. Levine stresses, pantheism is not a form of theism and it’s not a form of atheism either. Instead, it’s an alternative to them. While pantheism doesn’t posit the existence of a personal God, it does suggest that there is a unifying force in nature: everything that exists constitutes a unity, and this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine. See Levine, Pantheism, 25.