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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Providence
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On Providence

1 You have asked me, Lucilius,1 why, if the universe is governed by providence, so many bad things happen to good men. This would be answered more fittingly in the course of a larger work, once we had proved that providence presides over all things and that god takes part in our lives. But since you want one small piece torn from the whole, and one objection settled while the main case stays open, I will do something not difficult: I will plead the cause of the gods. For the present it is unnecessary to show that so vast a work does not stand without some guardian; that this gathering and wandering of the stars is not the work of random impulse; that what chance sets in motion is often thrown into disorder and quickly collides, whereas this unobstructed speed moves on under the command of an eternal law, carrying with it so much on land and sea, so many brilliant lights shining in their appointed order; that this order does not belong to drifting matter, and that things thrown together at random could not hang in the balance with such art that the earth, heaviest of weights, sits unmoved and watches the flight of the sky as it hurries around it; that the seas, poured into the valleys, soften the lands and feel no swelling from the rivers; that enormous things are born from the tiniest seeds. Not even those things that seem confused and irregular (I mean rains and clouds, the strokes of hurled lightning, fires pouring from the shattered peaks of mountains, tremors of the sliding ground, and the other things that the turbulent part of the world stirs up around the earth) happen without reason, however sudden they may be. They too have their causes, no less than the things seen in foreign places and taken for marvels, such as hot springs in the middle of the waves and new stretches of island leaping up in the vast sea. And again, if someone watches the shore laid bare as the sea draws back into itself and then, within a short time, covered once more, he will believe that some blind tossing now draws the waves together and drives them inward, now makes them burst out and rush back at great speed to their place; when all the while they grow by measured portions and come in at their hour and day, larger or smaller as the moon has drawn them, the star at whose pleasure the ocean overflows. These matters must be kept for their own time, all the more because you do not doubt providence; you complain of it. I will bring you back into favor with the gods, who are best to the best. For Nature never allows good things to harm the good. Between good men and the gods there is friendship, and virtue is the bond. Friendship, do I say? No, kinship and likeness, since the good man differs from god only in time: he is god’s pupil and imitator and true offspring, and that magnificent parent, no lenient taskmaster where virtue is concerned, brings him up rather hard, as strict fathers do. So when you see good men, men dear to the gods, toiling, sweating, climbing a steep road, while bad men run riot and wallow in pleasures, remember that we take delight in our sons’ modesty and in the impudence of our home-born slave boys; that the sons are kept in check by a sterner discipline, while the slaves’ boldness is encouraged. Let the same be clear to you about god: he does not pamper the good man; he tests him, hardens him, and makes him ready for himself.

2 “Why do so many adversities befall good men?” No evil can happen to a good man: opposites do not mix. Just as all those rivers, all the rain pouring down from above, and the great mass of mineral springs do not change the taste of the sea, or even dilute it, so the onrush of adversity does not overturn the mind of a brave man. He holds his ground and draws whatever happens into his own color, for he is stronger than everything outside him. I do not say he does not feel these things, but he overcomes them; and though at other times he is quiet and calm, he rises to meet whatever attacks him. He thinks all adversities are exercises. And who, if only he is a man and alert to what is honorable, does not long for toil that is fitting and stand ready for duties that carry danger? To what industrious man is idleness not a punishment? We see athletes, whose concern is their strength, fighting with all the strongest opponents and demanding of those who train them for the contest that they use their full strength against them; they let themselves be struck and battered, and if they cannot find single men to match them, they take on several at once. Virtue withers without an adversary: its greatness and its power appear only when it shows by enduring what it can do. You may be sure that good men must do the same: not shrink from what is hard and difficult, not complain of fate, take whatever happens in good part and turn it to good. What matters is not what you bear but how you bear it. Do you not see how differently fathers and mothers indulge their children? Fathers have them roused early to get on with their studies; even on holidays they do not let them be idle, and they wring sweat out of them, and sometimes tears. But mothers want to cuddle them in their laps and keep them in the shade, never sad, never crying, never toiling. God has a father’s mind toward good men; he loves them sternly, and he says, “Let them be harried by toil, by pain, by loss, so that they may gather true strength.” Things fattened on idleness grow sluggish, and they give out not only under toil but under mere movement and their own weight. Good fortune that has never been bruised cannot take a single blow; but the man who has been in a constant brawl with his troubles has grown calluses from his injuries, yields to no evil, and even if he falls, fights on from his knees. Are you surprised if that god, who loves good men most dearly and wants them to be as good and excellent as possible, assigns them a fortune to train against? I, for my part, am not surprised if the gods are sometimes seized by a desire to watch great men wrestling with some calamity. We ourselves sometimes take pleasure when a young man of steady spirit meets a charging beast with his hunting spear, or stands the rush of a lion without fear; and the spectacle is the more welcome the more respectable the man who performs it. But these are not things that could turn the gods’ eyes toward them; they are childish things, the amusements of human frivolity. Here is a spectacle worth the attention of god, even when he is intent on his own work; here is a pair worthy of god: a brave man matched with bad fortune, above all if he himself issued the challenge. I do not see, I say, what Jupiter has on earth more beautiful, should he wish to turn his mind there, than the sight of Cato,2 his party broken more than once, still standing upright among the ruins of the commonwealth. “Though all things,” he says, “have fallen under one man’s rule, though the lands are guarded by legions and the seas by fleets, though Caesar’s soldiers besiege the gates, Cato has a way out: with one hand he will open a broad road to freedom. This sword, kept clean and guiltless even in civil war, will at last do good and noble work: the freedom it could not give to his country it will give to Cato. Take up, my soul, the work you have long rehearsed; snatch yourself from human affairs. Petreius and Juba3 have already met and lie dead, each struck down by the other’s hand: a brave and noble pact with fate, but one unfit for my greatness. It is as shameful for Cato to ask anyone for death as to ask for life.” I am sure the gods watched with great joy while that man, his own fiercest avenger, saw to the safety of others and arranged the escape of those who were leaving; while even on his last night he kept at his studies; while he drove the sword into his sacred breast; while he scattered his entrails and drew out with his own hand that most holy soul, too good to be defiled by steel. That, I would like to believe, is why the wound was not sure and effective enough: it was not enough for the immortal gods to watch Cato once. His virtue was held back and called back, so that it might show itself in the harder part; for it takes less spirit to meet death than to seek it a second time. Why should they not gladly watch their pupil escaping by so glorious and memorable an end? Death makes sacred those whose end is praised even by those who fear it.

3 But as my discourse goes on I will show how far the things that seem evils are from being evils. For now I say this: these things you call harsh, adverse, and abominable are, first, for the good of the very people they happen to; second, for the good of all, whom the gods care for more than for individuals; next, they come to those who are willing, and those who are unwilling deserve evil. To this I will add that these things come by fate, and that they befall good men by the same law that makes them good. Then I will persuade you never to pity a good man; for he can be called wretched, but he cannot be wretched. Of all I have proposed, the hardest seems to be the first: that the things we shudder and tremble at are for the good of those to whom they happen. “Is it for their good,” you say, “to be driven into exile, to be brought down to poverty, to bury children and wife, to be disgraced, to be crippled?” If you are surprised that these things can be for anyone’s good, you will be surprised that some people are cured by knife and fire, and no less by hunger and thirst. But if you reflect that for the sake of a cure some people have their bones scraped and pieces taken out, their veins drawn, and limbs cut off that could not stay attached without ruining the whole body, you will also let it be proved to you that some troubles are for the good of those they happen to; just as surely, by Hercules, as some things that are praised and sought after are harmful to those who enjoyed them, very like indigestion, drunkenness, and all the other things that kill through pleasure. Among the many splendid sayings of our friend Demetrius4 is this one, which I heard only lately; it still rings and vibrates in my ears: “Nothing,” he says, “seems to me more unfortunate than a man to whom nothing adverse has ever happened.” For he has never been allowed to test himself. Though everything has flowed to him as he wished, even before he wished it, the gods have judged badly of him: he seemed unworthy ever to defeat Fortune. She shuns all the most cowardly, as if to say: “What, then? Shall I take this man for my opponent? He will lay down his arms at once. I do not need all my power against him; a light threat will rout him; he cannot bear my look. Let someone else be found with whom I can come to blows. I am ashamed to fight a man who is ready to be beaten.” A gladiator thinks it a disgrace to be matched with an inferior, and knows that to win without danger is to win without glory. Fortune does the same: she seeks out the bravest as her equals and passes others by with disdain. She attacks the most defiant and upright, so that she can bend her strength against them: she tries fire on Mucius, poverty on Fabricius, exile on Rutilius, torture on Regulus,5 poison on Socrates, death on Cato. Only bad fortune finds a great example. Is Mucius unfortunate because he presses his right hand into the enemy’s fire and exacts from himself the penalty for his mistake? because with his hand burned away he puts to flight the king he could not put to flight with that hand armed? What, then? Would he be more fortunate if he were warming his hand in his mistress’s bosom? Is Fabricius unfortunate because he digs his own field whenever the state leaves him free? because he wages war on riches as much as on Pyrrhus? because by his hearth he dines on the very roots and herbs that he, an old man who had celebrated a triumph, pulled while weeding his land? What, then? Would he be more fortunate if he were stuffing his belly with fish from distant shores and birds caught in foreign lands, if he roused the sluggishness of his queasy stomach with shellfish from the seas on both sides of Italy, if he banked game of the finest kind, taken with great slaughter of huntsmen, with huge heaps of fruit? Is Rutilius unfortunate because those who condemned him will be defending themselves before every age to come? because he bore being torn from his country more calmly than having his exile torn from him? because he alone refused Sulla the dictator something, and when recalled all but walked backward and fled farther away? “Let them see to it,” he says, “those whom your good fortune caught at Rome: let them see the forum running with blood, and above the Servilian Pool (for that is the stripping room of Sulla’s proscriptions)6 the heads of senators, and gangs of assassins roaming all over the city, and many thousands of Roman citizens butchered in one place after a pledge of safety, no, by means of that very pledge. Let those see these things who cannot go into exile.” What, then? Is Lucius Sulla fortunate because a sword clears the way for him when he goes down to the forum, because he lets the heads of former consuls be shown to him and counts out the price of murder through the quaestor and the public accounts? And all this is done by the man, the very man, who carried the Cornelian Law.7 Let us come to Regulus: what harm did Fortune do him in making him a model of good faith, a model of endurance? Nails pierce his skin, and wherever he leans his exhausted body, he lies on a wound; his eyelids are propped open for an endless waking. The more torment, the more glory. Do you want to know how little he regrets having valued virtue at this price? Pull out the nails and send him into the senate: he will give the same advice. Do you then think Maecenas8 more fortunate? Anxious in love, weeping over the daily divorces of a sulky wife, he seeks sleep in the music of an orchestra playing softly far away. Though he drug himself with wine, divert himself with the roar of waters, and beguile his anxious mind with a thousand pleasures, he will lie as wakeful on his feathers as Regulus on his cross. But Regulus has the comfort of enduring hardship for the sake of the honorable, and he looks away from his suffering to its cause; Maecenas, wilted by pleasures and sick with too much good fortune, is tormented more by the cause of his suffering than by what he suffers. The vices have not yet taken so complete possession of the human race that there can be any doubt whether, given the choice of their fate, more people would want to be born a Regulus than a Maecenas; or if anyone dared to say he would rather have been born Maecenas than Regulus, that same man, though he keep it to himself, would rather have been born Terentia. Do you judge that Socrates was badly treated because he drained that potion mixed by the state as if it were a drug of immortality, and argued about death right up to death itself? Did he fare badly because his blood froze and, as the cold crept in little by little, the vigor of his veins came to a stop? How much more is he to be envied than those who are served from jeweled cups, for whom a boy trained to submit to anything, gelded or of doubtful manhood, melts snow held in a golden strainer! These men will measure out again in vomit whatever they have drunk, gloomy, tasting their own bile; but Socrates will drink down the poison gladly and willingly. As for Cato, enough has been said, and the agreement of mankind will admit that the highest good fortune fell to him, the man Nature chose as the one against whom to dash all that is fearsome. “The enmities of the powerful are heavy: let him be pitted against Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus at once. It is heavy to be passed over for office by worse men: let him be ranked below Vatinius.9 It is heavy to take part in civil wars: let him fight all over the world for the good cause, as unluckily as stubbornly. It is heavy to lay hands on oneself: let him do it. What will I gain by all this? That all may know these are not evils, since I thought Cato worthy of them.”

4 Prosperity comes even to the common people and to petty minds; but to send the calamities and terrors of mortals under the yoke is the mark of a great man. To be always fortunate and to pass through life without a pang of the mind is to be ignorant of one half of Nature. You are a great man: but how do I know it, if Fortune gives you no chance to show your virtue? You have gone down to Olympia, but no one else did: you have the crown, but not the victory. I congratulate you, not as a brave man, but as one who has won a consulship or a praetorship: you have been raised in rank. I can say the same to a good man too, if no harder lot has given him an occasion to show the strength of his mind: “I judge you wretched, because you have never been wretched. You have gone through life without an adversary; no one will know what you could have done, not even you.” For self-knowledge needs a test; no one learns what he can do except by trying. That is why some men have offered themselves of their own accord to misfortunes that were slow in coming, and sought for their virtue, which was about to sink into obscurity, a chance to shine. Great men, I say, sometimes rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers rejoice in war. Under the emperor Tiberius I heard Triumphus, a murmillo,10 complain that there were so few games: “What a fine age,” he said, “is going to waste!” Virtue is greedy for danger and thinks of where it is going, not of what it will suffer, since even what it will suffer is part of its glory. Soldiers boast of their wounds and gladly show off the blood flowing from a lucky cut: those who come back from the battle unharmed may have done as much, but the one who returns wounded draws more eyes. God, I say, is looking after the very men he wants to be as honorable as possible whenever he gives them the material for some act of spirit and courage, and for that some difficulty is needed. You know a pilot in a storm, a soldier in the battle line. How can I know how much spirit you have against poverty if you are swimming in wealth? How can I know how much constancy you have against disgrace, infamy, and the hatred of the people, if you grow old amid applause, if a popularity follows you that nothing can storm, the favor of minds already leaning your way? How do I know how calmly you would bear the loss of children, if you see around you all the children you have raised? I have heard you consoling others; then I would have had a real look at you, if you had consoled yourself, if you had forbidden yourself to grieve. Do not, I beg you, be terrified of the things the immortal gods apply to our minds like spurs: calamity is virtue’s opportunity. Those might rightly be called wretched who are numb with too much good fortune, whom a sluggish calm holds fast as if on a dead sea: whatever befalls them will come as something new. Cruel things press hardest on the inexperienced; the yoke is heavy on a tender neck. The recruit goes pale at the mere thought of a wound; the veteran looks boldly at his own blood, knowing that he has often won after bleeding. So god hardens, inspects, and exercises those he approves and loves; but those he seems to indulge and spare, he is keeping soft for the ills to come. You are wrong if you think anyone exempted: the man long fortunate will get his share too; whoever seems to have been let off has only been put off. Why does god afflict all the best men with ill health or mourning or other troubles? Because in the army, too, the dangerous tasks are assigned to the bravest: the general sends picked men to attack the enemy by a night ambush, or to scout the road, or to dislodge a garrison from its position. None of those who go out says, “The general has treated me badly,” but, “He judged well of me.” Let all who are ordered to suffer what makes the timid and cowardly weep say the same: “God thought us worthy to test how much human nature can endure.” Flee luxuries, flee the enervating good fortune that soaks the mind through and, unless something comes along to remind it of the human lot, leaves it wilting as if lulled in endless drunkenness. The man whose windowpanes have always shielded him from a draft, whose feet have been kept warm by poultices changed again and again, whose dining rooms have been tempered by heat from under the floor and all around the walls, will not be grazed by a light breeze without danger. Since all things that pass the limit do harm, the most dangerous of all is excess of good fortune: it addles the brain, calls the mind up into empty fantasies, and spreads a thick fog between false and true. Why would it not be better to endure lasting misfortune with the help of virtue than to burst with endless, unmeasured blessings? Starvation brings a gentler death; overeating makes men split apart. The gods therefore follow the same principle with good men as teachers with their pupils: they demand more work from those in whom their hope is surer. Do you suppose the Spartans hate their children because they test their mettle by public floggings? The fathers themselves urge them to bear the blows of the whip bravely, and when they are torn and half-dead, they beg them to keep offering their wounds to fresh wounds. What wonder, then, if god tests noble spirits harshly? The proof of virtue is never gentle. Fortune lashes and tears us: let us endure it. It is not cruelty; it is a contest, and the more often we enter it, the stronger we will be. The firmest part of the body is the one that frequent use has kept at work. We must offer ourselves to Fortune, so that she herself may harden us against her: little by little she will make us her match, and constant exposure to danger will give us contempt for danger. So sailors’ bodies are toughened by bearing the sea, farmers’ hands are calloused, soldiers’ arms are strong for hurling spears, runners’ legs are nimble: in each, what is strongest is what he has exercised. By endurance the mind comes to scorn the endurance of ills; and you will learn what endurance can do in us if you look at how much toil does for peoples who go unclothed and are made stronger by want. Look at all the nations where the Roman peace ends: I mean the Germans and all the roving tribes one meets along the Danube. Endless winter and a gloomy sky weigh on them; a barren soil grudgingly feeds them; they keep off the rain with thatch or leaves, they bound across frozen marshes, and they hunt wild beasts for food. Do they seem wretched to you? Nothing is wretched that habit has turned into nature; for little by little what began from necessity becomes a pleasure. They have no homes and no settled places except those that weariness fixes for the day; their food is poor and must be won by hand, their climate dreadfully harsh, their bodies uncovered. What seems a calamity to you is the life of so many nations. Why are you surprised that good men are shaken so that they may be made firm? No tree is solid and strong unless the wind often falls on it; the very buffeting tightens it and fixes its roots more surely. Those that have grown up in a sunny valley are brittle. It is for the good of good men themselves, then, so that they may be fearless, to live much among frightening things and to bear calmly what is not bad except to one who bears it badly.

5 Add now that it is for the good of all that the best men should serve, so to speak, as soldiers and do their work. God’s purpose is the same as the wise man’s: to show that the things the crowd covets and dreads are neither goods nor evils. Yet they will appear to be goods if he grants them only to good men, and evils if he inflicts them only on bad men. Blindness will be detestable if no one loses his eyes except those who deserve to have them gouged out; so let Appius and Metellus11 lack the light. Riches are not a good; so let even Elius the pimp have them, so that men who have consecrated money in temples may see it in the brothel too. In no way can god discredit the objects of desire more than by bestowing them on the most shameful men and keeping them from the best. “But it is unjust that a good man should be crippled or pierced or chained, while bad men walk about with their bodies whole, free and pampered.” What next? Is it not unjust that brave men take up arms, spend the night in camp, and stand guard at the rampart with their wounds bandaged, while in the city the gelded and the professional debauchees are free of care? What next? Is it not unjust that maidens of the noblest families are roused at night to perform the sacred rites, while defiled women enjoy the deepest sleep? Toil calls up the best. The senate often sits all day long, while at that very time every worthless fellow is amusing himself at leisure on the Campus, or hiding in a tavern, or wasting time in some knot of idlers. The same thing happens in this great commonwealth of the world: good men toil, they spend and are spent, and willingly at that; they are not dragged by Fortune, they follow her and keep pace; had they known, they would have gone ahead. I remember hearing this spirited saying too from Demetrius, the bravest of men: “Immortal gods,” he said, “this is the one complaint I can make of you: you did not make your will known to me sooner. For I would have gone first of my own accord to the things I now come to at your summons. Do you want to take my children? It was for you I raised them. Do you want some part of my body? Take it: it is no great thing I promise, for I will soon leave the whole of it. Do you want my breath? Why should I make any delay in your taking back what you gave? Whatever you ask for, you will have from a willing man. What, then, is my complaint? I would rather have offered than handed over. What need was there to take it away? You could have received it. But even now you will not take it away, because nothing is snatched from a man unless he holds on to it.” I am forced into nothing, I suffer nothing against my will; I do not serve god, I agree with him, all the more because I know that all things run their course by a law that is fixed and laid down for eternity. The fates lead us, and how much time remains for each of us was settled in the first hour of our birth. Cause hangs on cause; a long chain of events drags private and public affairs along alike. Therefore everything must be borne bravely, because things do not, as we think, fall upon us; they come by appointment. Long ago it was settled what you would rejoice at and what you would weep at; and though the lives of individuals seem marked off by great variety, the sum comes to one thing: perishable ourselves, we receive what will perish. Why, then, are we indignant? Why do we complain? This is what we were made ready for. Let Nature use her bodies as she wishes; let us, cheerful and brave in the face of everything, reflect that nothing that is ours perishes. What is the good man’s part? To offer himself to fate. It is a great comfort to be swept along with the universe. Whatever it is that ordered us to live thus and die thus binds the gods too by the same necessity. An irrevocable course carries human and divine things alike. The very founder and ruler of all things wrote the fates, but he follows them: he obeys always; he commanded once. “Why, though, was god so unjust in apportioning fate as to assign poverty, wounds, and bitter deaths to good men?” The craftsman cannot change his material: this is what it allowed. Some things cannot be separated from others; they cling together; they are indivisible. Feeble natures, made for sleep or for a waking very like sleep, are woven of sluggish elements; to make a man worth speaking of with respect, a stronger fate is needed. His road will not be level: he must go up and down, be tossed about, and steer his boat through rough water. He must hold his course against Fortune. Many hard and rough things will happen to him, but things he must soften and smooth himself. Fire tests gold; misfortune tests brave men. See how high virtue must climb: you will know that it cannot travel by safe ways.

“The first stretch of the road is steep, and my horses, fresh in the morning,
can barely struggle up it; at midheaven it is highest,
where I myself am often afraid to look down
on sea and land, and my heart trembles with dread.
The last stretch falls away and needs a sure hand on the reins;
then even Tethys, who receives me in her waves below,
is often afraid that I will be hurled headlong.”12

When that high-born youth had heard this, he said, “I like the road; I am climbing. It is worth going through all that, even to fall.” His father does not stop trying to frighten that fierce spirit:

“And even though you keep to the road and no mistake draws you off,
still you will pass through the horns of the Bull that faces you,
the Haemonian Bow, and the jaws of the raging Lion.”13

After this he says, “Yoke the chariot you have given me. The very things you think will deter me spur me on. I want to stand where the Sun himself trembles.” It is for the low and sluggish to chase after safety: virtue goes by the heights.

6 “But why does god allow anything bad to happen to good men?” In fact he does not allow it. He has removed all evils from them: crimes and disgraceful acts, wicked thoughts, greedy schemes, blind lust, and avarice that reaches for what is another’s. He protects and defends good men themselves: does anyone also demand of god that he look after good men’s baggage too? They themselves release god from this care: they despise external things. Democritus14 threw away his riches, thinking them a burden to a sound mind: why, then, are you surprised if god allows to happen to a good man what a good man sometimes wants to happen to himself? Good men lose their sons: why not, since sometimes they even put them to death? They are sent into exile: why not, since sometimes they leave their country of their own accord, never to return? They are killed: why not, since sometimes they lay hands on themselves? Why do they suffer certain hardships? To teach others to suffer them; they were born to be examples. Imagine, then, that god is saying: “What complaint can you have against me, you who have chosen what is right? Others I have surrounded with false goods, and I have mocked their empty minds as if with a long, deceitful dream. I have adorned them with gold and silver and ivory; inside there is nothing good. Those men you look on as fortunate, if you saw them not from the side they show but from the side they hide, are wretched, squalid, shameful, decorated on the outside like the walls of their houses. That is not solid and genuine good fortune: it is a veneer, and a thin one at that. So as long as they can stand and be displayed as they please, they shine and they deceive; but when something happens that shakes and uncovers them, then it becomes clear how much deep and real ugliness a borrowed splendor was hiding. To you I have given goods that are sure and lasting, and the more anyone turns them over and examines them from every side, the better and greater they are. I have let you despise what is feared and disdain desires. You do not shine on the outside; your goods are turned inward. So the universe has scorned what lies outside, glad in the spectacle of itself. I have placed every good within you: your good fortune is not to need good fortune. ‘But many things happen that are sad, dreadful, hard to bear.’ Since I could not take you out of their way, I have armed your minds against them all: bear them bravely. In this you can surpass god: he is beyond the endurance of ills, you are above it. Despise poverty: no one lives as poor as he was born. Despise pain: either it will end, or it will end you. Despise death: it either finishes you or takes you elsewhere. Despise Fortune: I have given her no weapon that can strike the mind. Above all, I have taken care that no one should hold you against your will: the way out lies open. If you do not want to fight, you may flee. That is why, of all the things I wanted to be necessary for you, I have made nothing easier than dying. I have set life on a downward slope. If it drags on,15 only look closely and you will see how short and how clear is the road that leads to freedom. I have not set such long delays for you on the way out as on the way in; otherwise Fortune would have held great power over you, if a man died as slowly as he is born. Let every time and every place teach you how easy it is to renounce Nature and throw her gift back in her face. At the very altars, amid the solemn rites of those who sacrifice, while life is being prayed for, learn death. The fat bodies of bulls fall from a tiny wound, and a blow from a human hand fells animals of great strength; a thin blade severs the joint of the neck, and once that joint that links head and neck is cut, that whole great mass collapses. The breath does not lie hidden deep, nor must it be dug out with steel; the vitals need not be searched by a wound driven deep: death is close at hand. I have fixed no particular place for these blows: wherever you like, the way is open. That very thing called dying, by which the soul leaves the body, is too short for such speed to be felt: whether a noose has crushed the throat, or water has stopped the breathing, or the hard ground below has shattered the head of one who fell on it, or fire breathed in has cut off the breath on its way back, whatever it is, it is quick. Do you not blush? You spend so long fearing a thing that happens so fast!”

Notes

  1. 1. Lucilius: Seneca’s younger friend, a Roman knight and imperial official, to whom he also addressed his Moral Letters and Natural Questions.

  2. 2. Cato the Younger, the leading Stoic opponent of Julius Caesar, killed himself at Utica in 46 BC after Caesar’s victory at Thapsus; when his first wound was dressed, he tore it open.

  3. 3. Marcus Petreius, a Pompeian general, and Juba, king of Numidia, fled after Thapsus and died in a duel they had agreed on, each meaning to die by the other’s hand.

  4. 4. Demetrius the Cynic, a philosopher at Rome and a friend of Seneca.

  5. 5. Gaius Mucius Scaevola burned his right hand before the Etruscan king Porsenna after failing to kill him; Gaius Fabricius, consul in 282 and 278 BC, refused Pyrrhus’s bribes and lived in poverty; Publius Rutilius Rufus, unjustly convicted of extortion in 92 BC, lived in exile and declined to return; Marcus Atilius Regulus, captured by the Carthaginians, advised the senate against a peace, went back to Carthage, and was tortured to death.

  6. 6. The Servilian Pool was a basin in the forum where the heads of those killed in Sulla’s proscriptions (82–81 BC) were displayed.

  7. 7. Sulla’s Cornelian Law against assassins and poisoners.

  8. 8. Maecenas, Augustus’s minister and patron of poets; his marriage to Terentia was famously stormy, with repeated divorces and reconciliations.

  9. 9. Cato opposed the alliance of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus, and lost the praetorship of 55 BC to Publius Vatinius, a creature of Caesar.

  10. 10. A murmillo was a heavily armed gladiator; Tiberius gave few gladiatorial games.

  11. 11. Appius Claudius Caecus, censor in 312 BC, was blind in old age; Lucius Caecilius Metellus, chief pontiff, lost his sight rescuing sacred objects from the burning temple of Vesta in 241 BC.

  12. 12. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.63–69: the Sun warns his son Phaethon, who has asked to drive his chariot.

  13. 13. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.79–81. The Bull, the Bow (of the Thessalian centaur, Sagittarius), and the Lion are constellations of the zodiac.

  14. 14. Democritus of Abdera, the Greek philosopher of atoms, who was said to have given away his inheritance.

  15. 15. The text is corrupt here; read as “if it drags on.”