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    VBO greek philosophy

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    VBO greek philosophy

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    VBO greek philosophy

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    of 2

    ing?

    5 A good conscience welcomes a crowd; a bad one is racked with


    anxiety even in solitude. If your actions are honorable, let everyone
    know them; if shameful, what does it matter that nobody knows? You
    know. Alas for you, if you have no concern for that witness! 129
    Farewell.

    letter 44
    Letter 44

    From Seneca to Lucilius


    Greetings

    1 You are running yourself down again. You tell me you had but a
    scant allowance first from birth and then from fortune, when all the
    while you could be separating yourself from the common crowd and
    rising to the summit of human prosperity.
    If there is any good in philosophy, it is this: it has no regard for ge-
    nealogies. If we trace our lineage back to the beginning, all humankind
    is of divine origins. 2 You are a Roman of equestrian status; your own
    hard work has advanced you to this rank.* But for heaven’s sake, there
    are many who find themselves excluded from the priority seating;*
    some cannot gain entry to the Senate House; even the regiment is
    particular about the men it recruits for toil and danger. Meanwhile, ex-
    cellence of mind is available to all: in this regard we are all nobly born.
    Philosophy neither rejects anyone nor chooses anyone; it shines
    for all. 3 Socrates was no patrician; Cleanthes hauled water, and hired
    himself out to water people’s gardens; Plato did not come to philoso-
    phy a nobleman but was ennobled by it.* Why should you not hope
    perhaps to become their equal? All of them are your ancestors if you
    prove yourself worthy if them. And you will do so if you persuade
    yourself, right now, that no one is superior to you merely by reason
    of noble birth.
    4 Everyone has the same number of ancestors. There is no one
    whose origins lie anywhere but in oblivion. Plato says that every king
    is of servile origin and every slave of kingly origin.* The changes and
    chances of time have mingled all things topsy-turvy. 5 Who has good
    breeding? The one whom nature has given a good disposition toward
    virtue. We must look to that alone. Otherwise, if you cast your mind
    back to ancient times, every person has an origin in that moment
    before which there was nothing. From the beginning of the world
    130 until now, our history is a constant succession of dignity and squalor.
    An atrium full of smoke-stained images does not make one a
    letters on ethics

    nobleman.* No one lived his life just for us to brag about him: what
    happened before our time does not belong to us. It is the mind that
    confers nobility, for the mind has license, regardless of estate, to rise
    above the vagaries of chance. 6 Imagine that you are not a Roman
    of equestrian status but a freedman. You can still attain a condition
    in which you alone are free, even if those around you do not share
    your servile origins.
    “How?” you ask. If you make your own distinctions of what is
    good and bad, without reference to popular notions. You should
    not consider where things come from but where they are headed. If
    something has the capacity to make your life happy, then that thing
    is a good in its own right, for it cannot be turned into a bad thing.*
    7 What, then, is the mistake people make, seeing that everyone
    wants a happy life? They take the instruments used by happiness to
    be happiness itself, and so abandon the very thing they are seek-
    ing.* For the chief point in a happy life is to be solidly secure and
    unshakably confident of that state;* and yet they gather up the causes
    of anxiety and haul, no, drag those burdens behind them on life’s
    treacherous journey. For that reason they recede further and fur-
    ther from what they seek to attain, and the greater their efforts, the
    greater the hindrance they create for themselves. It is like hurrying
    in a maze: their very haste impedes them.
    Farewell.

    Letter 45

    From Seneca to Lucilius


    Greetings

    1 You complain that there is an undersupply of books where you are.


    What matters is not how many you have but how good they are.

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