no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said ‘a day’ has granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.
How often have cities in Asia, how often in Achaia, been laid low by a single shock of earthquake? How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up? How often has this kind of devastation laid Cyprus in ruins?
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die.
Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth.
Reckon on everything, expect everything.
10. The same could naturally have been conveyed in other ways. In more sober philosophical language, one could say that a subject’s agency is only one of the causal factors determining events in the course of his or her life. Seneca resorted instead to continual hyperbole:
Whenever anyone falls at your side or behind you, cry out: ‘Fortune, you will not deceive me, you will not fall upon me confident and heedless. I know what you are planning. It is true that you struck someone else, but you aimed at me.’
(The original ends with a final, more rousing alliteration:
Quotiens aliquis ad latus aut pone tergum ceciderit, exclama: ‘Non decipies me, fortuna, nec securum aut neglegentem opprimes. Scio quid pares; alium quidem percussisti, sed me petisti.’)
11. If most philosophers feel no need to write like this, it is because they trust that, so long as an argument is logical, the style in which it is presented to the reader will not determine its effectiveness. Seneca believed in a different picture of the mind. Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.
The goddess of Fortune, in spite of her unphilosophical, religious roots, was the perfect image to keep our exposure to accident continually within our minds, conflating a range of threats to our security into one ghastly anthropomorphic enemy.
Sense of injustice
A feeling that the rules of justice have been violated, rules which dictate that if we are honourable, we will be rewarded, and that if we are bad, we will be punished – a sense of justice inculcated in the earliest education of children, and found in most religious texts, for example, in the book of Deuteronomy, which explains that the godly person ‘shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water … and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so: but are like chaff which the wind driveth away.’
Goodness → Reward
Evil → Punishment
In cases where one acts correctly but still suffers disaster, one is left bewildered and unable to fit the event into a scheme of justice. The world seems absurd. One alternates between a feeling that one may after all have been bad and this is why one was punished, and the feeling that one truly was not bad and therefore must have fallen victim to a catastrophic failure in the administration of justice. The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an
in
justice
.
1. Justice was not an ideology that had helped Marcia.
2. It had forced her to oscillate between a debilitating feeling that her son Metilius had been taken away from her because she was bad, and at other moments, a feeling of outrage with the world that Metilius had died given that she had always been essentially good.
3. But we cannot always explain our destiny by referring to our moral worth; we may be cursed and blessed without justice behind either. Not everything which happens
to
us occurs with reference to something
about
us.
Metilius hadn’t died because his mother was bad, nor was the world unfair because his mother was good and yet he had died. His death was, in Seneca’s image, the work of Fortune, and the goddess was no moral judge. She did not evaluate her victims like the god of Deuteronomy and reward them according to merit. She inflicted harm with the moral blindness of a hurricane.
(Ill. 13.10)
4. Seneca knew in himself the sapping impulse to interpret failures according to a misguided model of justice. Upon the accession of Claudius in early 41, he became a pawn in a plan by the Empress Messalina to rid herself of Caligula’s sister, Julia Livilla. The empress accused Julia of having an adulterous affair and falsely named Seneca as her lover. He was in an instant stripped of family, money, friends, reputation and his political career, and sent into exile on the island of Corsica, one of the most desolate parts of Rome’s vast empire.
He would have endured periods of self-blame alternating with feelings of bitterness. He would have reproached himself for misreading the political situation with regard to Messalina, and resented the way his loyalty and talents had been rewarded by Claudius.
Both moods were based on a picture of a moral universe where external circumstances reflected internal qualities. It was a relief from this punitive schema to remember Fortune:
I do not allow [Fortune] to pass sentence upon myself.
Seneca’s political failure did not have to be read as retribution for sins, it was no rational punishment meted out after examination of the evidence by an all-seeing Providence in a divine courtroom; it was a cruel but morally meaningless by-product of the machinations of a rancorous Empress. Seneca was not only distancing himself from disgrace. The imperial official he had been had not deserved all the credit for his status either.
The interventions of Fortune, whether kindly or diabolical, introduced a random element into human destinies.
(Ill. 13.11)
Anxiety
A condition of agitation about an uncertain situation which one both wishes will turn out for the best and fears may turn out for the worst. Typically leaves sufferers unable to derive enjoyment from supposedly pleasurable activities, cultural, sexual or social
.
(Ill. 13.12)
Even in sublime settings the anxious will remain preoccupied by private anticipations of ruin and may prefer to be left alone in a room
.
1. The traditional form of comfort is reassurance. One explains to the anxious that their fears are exaggerated and that events are sure to unfold in a desired direction.
2. But reassurance can be the cruellest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst, and unwittingly imply that it would be disastrous if the worst came to pass. Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear.
3. In February 63, Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a civil servant working in Sicily, learned of a lawsuit against him which threatened to end his career and disgrace his name for ever. He wrote to Seneca.
‘You may expect that I will advise you to picture a happy outcome, and to rest in the allurements of hope,’ replied the philosopher, but ‘I am going to conduct you to peace of mind through another route’ – which culminated in the advice:
If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear
may
happen is certainly
going
to happen.
Seneca wagered that once we look rationally at what will occur if our desires are not fulfilled, we will almost certainly find that the underlying problems are more modest than the anxieties they have bred. Lucilius had grounds for sadness but not hysteria: