If you lose this case, can anything more severe happen to you than being sent into exile or led to prison?… ‘I may become a poor man’; I shall then be one among many. ‘I may be exiled’; I shall then regard myself as though I had been born in the place to which I’ll be sent. ‘They may put me in chains.’ What then? Am I free from bonds now?
Prison and exile were bad, but – the linchpin of the argument – not as bad as the desperate Lucilius might have feared before scrutinizing the anxiety.
4. It follows that wealthy individuals fearing the loss of their fortune should never be reassured with remarks about the improbability of their ruin. They should spend a few days in a draughty room on a diet of thin soup and stale bread. Seneca had taken the counsel from one of his favourite philosophers:
The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during which he would be niggardly in satisfying hunger, with the object of seeing … whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the deficit good.
The wealthy would, Seneca promised, soon come to an important realization:
‘Is this really the condition that I feared?’ … Endure [this poverty] for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more … and I assure you … you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune.
5. Many Romans found it surprising, even ridiculous, to discover that the philosopher proffering such advice lived in considerable luxury himself. By his early forties, Seneca had accumulated enough money through his political career to acquire villas and farms. He ate well, and developed a love of expensive furniture, in particular, citrus-wood tables with ivory legs.
He resented suggestions that there was something unphilosophical in his behaviour:
Stop preventing philosophers from possessing money; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty.
And with touching pragmatism:
I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half.
6. It wasn’t hypocrisy. Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. It considers wealth to be, in the technical formulation, a
productum
, a preferred thing – neither an essential one nor a crime. Stoics may live with as many gifts of Fortune as the foolish. Their houses can be as grand, their furniture as beautiful. They are identified as wise by only one detaiclass="underline" how they would respond to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and the servants without rage or despair.
7. The idea that a wise person should be able to walk away from
all
Fortune’s gifts calmly was Stoicism’s most extreme, peculiar claim, given that Fortune grants us not only houses and money but also our friends, our family, even our bodies:
The wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself.
The wise man is self-sufficient … if he loses a hand through disease or war, or if some accident puts out one or both of his eyes, he will be satisfied with what is left.
Which sounds absurd, unless we refine our notion of what Seneca meant by ‘satisfied’. We should not be happy to lose an eye, but life would be possible even if we did so. The right number of eyes and hands is a
productum
. Two examples of the position:
The wise man will not despise himself even if he has the stature of a dwarf, but he nevertheless wishes to be tall.
The wise man is self-sufficient in that he
can
do without friends, not that he
desires
to do without them.
8. Seneca’s wisdom was more than theoretical. Exiled to Corsica, he found himself abruptly stripped of all luxuries. The island had been a Roman possession since 238
BC
, but it had not enjoyed the benefits of civilization. The few Romans on the island rarely settled outside two colonies on the east coast, Aleria and Mariana, and it was unlikely that Seneca was allowed to inhabit them, for he complained of hearing only ‘barbaric speech’ around him, and was associated with a forbidding building near Luri at the northern tip of the island known since ancient times as ‘Seneca’s Tower’.
Conditions must have contrasted painfully with life in Rome. But in a letter to his mother, the former wealthy statesman explained that he had managed to accommodate himself to his circumstances, thanks to years of morning premeditations and periods of thin soup:
Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be offering peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place from which she could take them back without disturbing me. Between them and me, I have kept a wide gap, and so she has merely
taken
them, not
torn
them from me.
(Ill. 13.13)
Feelings of being mocked by
(i) inanimate objects
A sense that one’s wishes are being purposefully frustrated by a pencil which drops off a table or a drawer that refuses to open. The frustration caused by the inanimate object is compounded by a sense that it holds one in contempt. It is acting in a frustrating way in order to signal that it does not share the view of one’s intelligence or status to which one is attached and to which others subscribe
.
(ii) animate objects
A similarly acute pain arising from the impression that other people are silently ridiculing one’s character
.
On arrival at a hotel in Sweden I am accompanied to my room by an employee who offers to carry my luggage. ‘It will be far too heavy for a man like you,’ he smiles, emphasizing ‘man’ to imply its opposite. He has Nordic blond hair (perhaps a skier, a hunter of elk; in past centuries, a warrior) and a determined expression. ‘Monsieur will enjoy the room,’ he says. It is unclear why he has called me ‘Monsieur’, knowing that I have come from London, and the use of ‘will’ smacks of an order. The suggestion becomes plainly incongruous, and evidence of conspiracy, when the room turns out to suffer from traffic noise, a faulty shower and a broken television
.
In otherwise shy, quiet people, feelings of being slyly mocked may boil over into sudden shouting and acts of cruelty – even murder
.
1. It is tempting, when we are hurt, to believe that the thing which hurt us
intended
to do so. It is tempting to move from a sentence with clauses connected by ‘and’ to one with clauses connected by ‘in order to’; to move from thinking that ‘The pencil fell off the table
and
now I am annoyed’ to the view that ‘The pencil fell off the table
in order to
annoy me.’
2. Seneca collected examples of such feelings of persecution by inanimate objects. Herodotus’s
Histories
provided one. Cyrus,
the king of Persia and the founder of its great empire, owned a beautiful white horse which he always rode into battle. In the spring of 539
BC
King Cyrus declared war on the Assyrians in hope of expanding his territory, and set off with a large army for their capital, Babylon, on the banks of the Euphrates river. The march went well, until the army reached the river Gyndes, which flowed down from the Matienian mountains into the Tigris. The Gyndes was known to be perilous even in the summer, and at this time of year was brown and foaming, swollen with the winter rains. The king’s generals counselled delay, but Cyrus was not daunted and gave orders for an immediate crossing. Yet as the boats were being readied, Cyrus’s horse slipped away unnoticed and attempted to swim across the river. The current seized the beast, toppled it and swept it downstream to its death.