Tacitus,

The Death of Seneca

    Unperturbed, Seneca asked for his will.  But the officer [sent by Nero] refused.  Then Seneca turned to his friends.  "Being forbidden," he said, "to show gratitude for your services, I leave you with my one remaining possession, and my best: the pattern of my life.  If you remember it, your devoted friendship will be rewarded by a name for virtuous accomplishments."  As he talked---and sometimes in sterner and more imperative terms---he checked their tears and sought to revive their courage.  Where had their philosophy gone, he asked, and that resolution against impending misfortunes which they had devised over so many years?  "Surely nobody was unaware that Nero was cruel!" he added.  "After murdering his mother and brother, it only remained for him to kill his teacher and tutor."

    These words were evidently intended for public hearing.  Then Seneca embraced his wife [Paulina], with a tenderness very different from his philosophical imperturbability, entreated her to moderate and set a term to her grief, and take just consolation, in her bereavement, from contemplating his well-spent life.  Nevertheless, she insisted on dying with him, and demanded the executioner's stroke.  Seneca did not oppose her brave decision.  In deed, loving her wholeheartedly, he was reluctant to leave her behind to be persecuted.  "Solace in life was what I commended to you,"  he said.  "But you prefer death and glory.  I will not grudge your setting so fine an example.  We can die with equal fortitude.  But yours will be the nobler end."

    Then, each with one incision of the blade, he and his wife cut their arms.  But Seneca's aged body, lean from austere living, released the blood too slowly.  So he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind his knees.  Exhausted by severe pain, he was afraid of weakening his wife's endurance by betraying his agony---or losing his own self-possession at the sight of her suffering.  So he asked her to go into another bedroom....

    Nero did not dislike Paulina personally.  In order, therefore, to avoid increasing his ill-repute for cruelty, he ordered her suicide to be averted.  So, on instructions from the soldiers, slaves and ex-claves bandaged her arms and stopped the bleeding....She lived in for a few years, honorably loyal to her husband's memory, with pallid features and limbs which showed how much vital blood she had lost.

    Meanwhile Seneca's death was slow and lingering.  Poisons, such as formerly used to execute State criminals at Athens, had long been prepared; and Seneca now entreated his experienced doctor Annaeus Statius, who was also an old friend, to supply it.  But when it came, Seneca drank it without effect.  For his limbs were already cold and numbed against the poison's action.  Finally he was placed in a bath of warm water.  He sprinkled a little of it on the attendant slaves, commenting that this was his libation to Jupiter.  He was then carried into a vapor-bath, where he suffocated.  His cremation was without ceremony, in accordance with his own instructions about his death---written at the height of his wealth and power.

Poisons:  The poison drunk by Seneca, as by Socrates, was hemlock

Tacitus.  The Annals of Imperial Rome.  Trans. Michael Grant  (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 375-377.

Seneca, Epistle 74

"On Virtue as a Refuge from Worldly Distractions"

    Your letter has given me pleasure, and has roused me from sluggishness.  It has also prompted my memory, which has been for some time slack and nerveless.

Virtue as the Supreme Good

    You are right, of course, my dear Lucilius, in deeming the chief means of attaining the happy life to consist in the belief that the only good lies in that which is honorable.  For anyone who deems other things to be good, puts himself in the power of Fortune, and goes under the control of another; but he who has in every case defined the good by the honorable, is happy with an inward happiness.

The Passions as the Cause of Misery

    One man is saddened when his children die; another is anxious when they become ill; a third is embittered when they do something disgraceful, or suffer a taint in their reputation.  One man, you will observe, is tortured by passion for his neighbor's wife, another by passion for his own.  You will find men who are completely upset by failure to win an election, and others who are actually plagued by the offices which they have won.  But the largest throng of unhappy men among the host of mortals are those whom the expectation of death, which threatens them on every hand, drives to despair.  For there is no quarter from which death may not approach.  Hence, like soldiers scouting in the enemy's country, they must look about in all directions and turn their heads at every sound; unless the breast be rid of this fear, one lives with a palpitating heart.  You will readily recall those who have been driven into exile and dispossessed of their property.  You will also recall (and this is the most serious kind of destitution) those who are poor in the midst of their riches.  You will recall men who have suffered shipwreck, or those whose sufferings resemble shipwreck; for they were untroubled and at ease, when the anger or perhaps the envy of the populace,--a missile most deadly to those in high places,--dismantled them like a storm which is wont to rise when one is most confident of continued calm, or like a sudden stroke of lightening which even causes the region round about it to tremble.  For just as anyone who stands near the bolt is stunned and resembles one who is struck, so in these sudden and violent mishaps, although but one person is overwhelmed by the disaster, the rest are overwhelmed by fear, and the possibility that they may suffer makes them as downcast as the actual sufferer.

    Every man is troubled in spirit by evils that come suddenly upon his neighbor.  Like birds, who cower even at the whirr of an empty sling, we are distracted by mere sounds as well as by blows.  No man therefore can be happy if he yields himself up to such foolish fancies.  For nothing brings happiness unless it also brings calm; it is a bad sort of existence that is spent in apprehension.  Whoever has largely surrendered himself to the power of Fortune has made for himself a huge web of disquietude, from which he cannot get free; if one would win a way to safety, there is but one road,--to despise externals and to be contented with that which is honorable.  For those who regard anything as better than virtue, or believe that there is any good except virtue, are spreading their arms to gather in that which Fortune tosses abroad, and are anxiously awaiting her favors.  

    Picture now to yourself that Fortune is holding a festival, and is showering down honors,  riches, and influence upon this mob of mortals; some of these gifts have already been torn to pieces in the hands of those who try to snatch them, others have been divided up by treacherous partnerships, and still others have been seized to the great detriment of those into whose possession they have come.  Certain of these favors have fallen to men while they were absent-minded; others have been lost to their seekers because they were snatching too eagerly for them, and, just because they are greedily seized upon, have been knocked from their hands.  There is not a man among them all, however,--even he who has been lucky in the booty which has fallen to him,--whose joy in his spoil has lasted until the morrow....

The Right Way to Use the Things of the World

    Let us limit the Supreme Good to the soul; it loses its meaning if it is taken from the best part of us and applied to the worst, that is, if it is transferred to the senses; for the senses are more active in dumb beasts.  The sum total of our happiness must not be placed in the flesh; the true goods are those which reason bestows, substantial and eternal; they cannot fall away, neither can they grow less or be diminished  Other things are goods according to opinion, and though they are called by the same name as the true goods, the essence of goodness is not in them.  Let us therefore call them "advantages," and, to use our technical term, "preferred" things.  Let us, however, recognize that they are our chattels, not parts of ourselves; and let us have them in our possession, but take heed to remember that they are outside ourselves.  Even though they are in our possession, they are to be reckoned as things subordinate and poor, the possession of which gives no man a right to plume himself.  

    For what is more foolish than being self-complacent about something which  one has not accomplished by one's own efforts?  Let everything of this nature be added to us, and not stick fast to us, so that, if it is withdrawn, it may come away without tearing off any part of us.  Let us use these things, but not boast of them, and let us use them sparingly, as if they were given for safe-keeping and will be withdrawn.  Anyone who does not employ reason in his possession of them never keeps them long;  for prosperity of itself, if uncontrolled by reason, overwhelms itself.  If anyone has put his trust in goods that are most fleeting, he is soon bereft of them, and, to avoid being bereft, he suffers distress.  

    Few men have been permitted to lay aside prosperity gently.  The rest all fall, together with the things amid which they have come into eminence, and they are weighted down by the very things which had before exalted them.  For this reason foresight must be brought into play, to insist upon a limit or upon frugality in the use of these things, since license overthrows and destroys its own abundance.  That which has no limit has never endured, unless reason, which sets limits, has held it in check.  The fate of many cities will prove the truth of this; their sway has ceased at the very prime because they were given to luxury, and excess has ruined all that had been won by virtue.  We  should fortify ourselves against such calamities.  But no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defenses.  If the inner part be safe, man can be attacked, but never captured.

Happiness Comes Though Following Reason

    Do you wish to know what this weapon of defense is?  It is the ability to refrain from chafing over whatever happens to one, of knowing that the very agencies which seem to bring harm are working for the preservation of the world, and are a part of the scheme for bringing to fulfillment the order of the universe and its functions.  Let man be pleased with whatever has pleased God; let him marvel at himself and his own resources for this very reason, that he cannot be overcome, that he has the very powers of evil subject to his control, and that he brings into subjection chance and pain and wrong by means of that strongest of powers--reason.  Love reason!  The love of reason will arm you against the greatest hardships.  Wild beasts dash against the hunter's spear through love of their young, and it is their wildness and their unpremeditated onrush that keep them from being tamed; often a desire for glory has stirred the mind of youth to despise both sword and stake; the mere vision and semblance of virtue impel certain men to a self-imposed death.  In proportion as reason is stouter and steadier than any of these emotions, so much the more forcefully will she make her way through the midst of utter terrors and dangers.

An Aristotelian Objection:  Worldly Advantages as Good

    Men say to us:  "You are mistaken if you maintain that nothing is a good except that which is honorable; a defense like this will not make you safe from Fortune and free from her assaults.  For you maintain that dutiful children, and a well-governed country, and good parents, are to be reckoned as goods; but you cannot see these dear objects in danger and be yourself as ease.  Your calm will be disturbed by a siege conducted against your country, by the death of your children, or by the enslaving of your parents."  I will first state what we Stoics usually reply to these objectors, and then will add what additional answer should, in my opinion, be given.

    The situation is entirely different in the case of goods whose loss entails some hardship substituted in their place; for example, when good health is impaired there is a change to ill-health; when the eye is put out, we are visited with blindness; we not only lose our speed when our leg-muscles are cut, but infirmity takes the place of speed.  But no such danger is involved in the case of the goods to which we referred a moment ago.  And why?  If I have lost a good friend, I have no false friend whom I must endure in his place; nor if I have buried a dutiful son, must I face in exchange unfilial conduct.  In the second place, this does not mean to me the taking-off of a friend or of a child; it is the mere taking-off of their bodies.  But a good can be lost in only one way, by changing into what is bad; and this is impossible according to the law of nature, because every virtue, and every work of virtue, abides uncorrupted.  

    Again, even if friends have perished, or children of approved goodness who fulfill their father's prayers for them, there is something that can fill their place.  Do you ask what this is?  It is that which had made them good in the first place, namely, virtue.  Virtue suffers no space in us to be unoccupied; it takes possession of the whole soul and removes all sense of loss.  It alone is sufficient; for the strength and beginnings of all goods exist in virtue herself.  What does it matter if running water is cut off and flows away, as long as the fountain from which it has flowed is unharmed?  You will not maintain that a man's life is more just if his children are unharmed than if they have passed away, nor yet better appointed, nor more intelligent, nor more honorable; therefore, no better, either.  The addition of friends does not make one wiser, nor does their taking away make one more foolish; therefore, not happier or more wretched, either.  As long as your virtue is unharmed, you will not feel the loss of anything that has been withdrawn from you.  You may say:  "Come now; is not a man happier when girt about with a large company of friends and children?"  Why should this be so?  For the Supreme Good is neither impaired nor increased thereby; it abides within its own limits, no matter how Fortune has conducted herself.  Whether a long old age falls to one's lot, or whether the end comes on this side of old age--the measure of the Supreme Good is unvaried, in spite of the difference in years....

    The other answer, which I promised to make to your objection, follows from this reasoning.  The wise man is not distressed by the loss of children or of friends.  For he endures their death in the same spirit in which he awaits his own.  And he fears the the one as little as he grieves for the other.  For the underlying principle of virtue is conformity; all the works of  virtue are in harmony and agreement with virtue itself.  But this harmony is lost if the soul, which ought to be uplifted, is cast down by grief or a sense of loss  It is ever a dishonor for a man to be troubled and fretted, to be numbed when there is any call for activity.  For that which is honorable is free from care and untrammeled, is unafraid, and stands girt for action.  

Example of the Stoic Wise Man

    "What," you ask, "will the wise man experience no emotion like disturbance of spirit?  Will not his features change color, his countenance be agitated, and his limbs grow cold?  And there are other things which we do, not under the influence of the will, but unconsciously and as the result of a sort of natural impulse."  I admit that this is true; but the sage will retain the firm belief that none of these things is evil, or important enough to make a healthy mind break down.  Whatever shall remain to be done virtue can do with courage and readiness.  For anyone would admit that it is a mark of folly to do in a slothful and rebellious spirit whatever one has to do, or to direct the body in one direction and the mind in another, and thus to be torn between utterly conflicting emotions.  For folly is despised precisely because of the things for which she vaunts and admires herself, and she does not do gladly even those things in which she prides herself.  But if folly fears some evil, she is burdened by it in the very moment of awaiting it, just as if it had actually come,--already suffering in apprehension whatever she fears she may suffer.  Just as in the body symptoms of latent ill-health precede the disease--there is, for example, a certain weak sluggishness, a lassitude which is not the result of any work, a trembling, and a shivering that pervades the limbs,--so the feeble spirit is shaken by its ills a long time before it is overcome by them.  It anticipates them, and totters before its time.

    But what is greater madness than to be tortured by the future and not to save your strength for the actual suffering but to invite and bring on wretchedness?  If you cannot  be rid of it, you ought at least to postpone it.  Will you not understand that no man should be tormented by the future?  The man who has been told that he will have to endure torture fifty years from now is not disturbed thereby, unless he has leaped over the intervening years, and has projected himself into the trouble that is destined to arrive a generation later.  In the same way, souls that enjoy being sick and that seize upon excuses for sorrow are saddened by events long past and effaced from the records.  Past and future are both absent; we feel neither of them.  But there can be no pain except as the result of what you feel.  Farewell.

    honorable:  the term here is being used synonymously with virtuous.  Likewise, when Seneca uses the term dishonorable he means vicious.

    soul:  once again he is referring to the good of the soul or virtue.

    preferred things:  he is throwing a bone here to the traditional stoic concepts of "preferable" and "rejectable" things, although his arguments in this epistle undermine these concepts completely.

Aristotle