This ideal figure seemed, from the way the Stoic lecturers talked, to have somehow become perfect in some sudden transformation long ago; gradual self-improvement was hardly discussed.
The target it set seemed too high for ordinary men. It stifled and repressed ordinary human emotions in striving after apatheia, immunity to feeling; Cato, the great Stoic saint, is reported to have expressed regret at having kissed his wife in a moment of danger.
Altogether the impression it conveyed, for all its idealism and sincerity, could be cold, dogmatic and unrealistic. Seneca’s contribution to ancient philosophy lay in the humanization of this creed, continuing a process begun long before in Rhodes and Rome by Panaetius and Posidonius.
The religious hunger of the masses of his day was to be met not by philosophy but by the cults of Isis and Mithras and Christianity.
Why are people so bitter, Paulinus? Nature has been good to us, not cruel. A life well spent can truly be a long life.
His tremendous faith in philosophy as a mistress was grounded on a belief that her end was the practical one of curing souls, of bringing peace and order to the feverish minds of men pursuing the wrong aims in life.
To Seneca, as Letter XC and other letters plainly show, the philosopher and the wise man were the same person.
Is it really so pleasant to die in harness? That is the feeling of many people: their desire for their work outlasts their ability to do it. They fight against their own bodily weakness, and they regard old age as a hardship on no other grounds than that it puts them on the shelf. The law does not make a man a soldier after fifty or a senator after sixty: men find it more difficult to gain leisure from themselves than from the.
The default mood of the busy man is misery. He lives a wretched existence. He walks with strangers in a world somewhere between love and hate.
No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life!
The ‘teaching’ is generously eclectic; the first thirty letters each contain some quotation from or reference to writings of the main rival philosophical school, the Epicureans.
Notwithstanding his own condemnation42 of people who give less attention to what they have to say than to how they will say it, he is a signal example of a writer to whom form mattered as much as content.
For life should be provided with conspicuous illustrations. Let us not always be harking back to the dim past.
The result may read more naturally in Latin than it ever could in English, but is none the less apt to leave the reader ‘dazzled and fatigued’.
Bion’s dictum, that all the activities of men are like their beginnings, and their life is not more high-souled or serious than their conception, and that being born from nothing they are reduced to nothing.
All the wealth and ingenuity of epigram and illustration does not prevent us from feeling that the sentences often simply ‘repeat the same thought, clothed in constantly different guises, over and over again’, as Fronto complained in the century following.
There are no fixed rules of style.’45.
A few is enough for me; so is one; and so is none.
When the strength of wine has become too great and has gained control over the mind, every lurking evil comes forth from its hiding-place.
I would not venture as yet to assure you, or even to hope, that there is nothing left in me needing to be changed.