Seneca

You will ask, perhaps, what I myself do, who lay these precepts upon you.

Still, I would rather you kept your own, and you will be making a good start in time.

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, and chiefly from my own affairs;

Seneca is of the same opinion, any thing, says he, appearing the same to all men is a proof of its truth.

On this subject, Seneca remarks that, as all the members of the human body agree among themselves, because the preservation of each conduces to the welfare of the whole, so men should forbear from mutual injuries, as they were born for society, which cannot subsist unless all the parts of it are defended by mutual forbearance and good will.

” Seneca thus describes the three forms of government, “Sometimes the supreme power is lodged in the people, sometimes in a senate composed of the leading men of the state, sometimes this power of the people, and dominion over the people themselves is vested in a single person.

Hoc Seneca summum Naturae beneficium putat, quod et vento gentes locis dissipatas miscuit, et sua omnia in regiones ita descripsit, ut necessarium mortalibus esset inter ipsos commercium.

Seneca:

quo Seneca Tragicus alludit:

The arguments of Plutarch, of Seneca, of Montaigne, and a hundred others, are well known.

Seneca.

Never did I trust Fortune, even when she seemed to be keeping the peace;

And I will add, to make you yet more secure, that I cannot even be made wretched.

Nature's design was that there should be no need of great equipment for living well:

SENECA:

I call it tranquillity.

That will be tranquillity.

You are the same men who applauded a certain Seneca when he held forth at greater length and more bitterly upon your superstition.

Cicero in the Tusculans, Seneca in his work On Chance, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus.

‘There are implanted in us the seeds of all arts and ages, and God the Master brings out our talents from the hidden,’ namely from seeds implanted and hidden through infancy, which are also the seeds of the intellect.

Much more forced is Seneca, who says, ‘After death all things are finished, even death itself.

against what is inveterate one must fight more vigorously.

I have recalled to memory ancient sorrows, and, that you might know that this wound too must be healed, I have shown you the scar of a hurt as great.

Nor will I lead you to the harsher precepts, so as to bid you bear what is human after an inhuman fashion, or to dry a mother's eyes on the very day of the funeral.

3 If, what you had received from Seneca, you should say that you owed to Annaeus or to Lucius, you would not be changing your creditor, but his name, since, whether you had named his praenomen or his nomen or his cognomen, he would still be the same man.

"What are you doing, Seneca?

Now I shall prove to you that I am not deserting the precepts of the Stoics;

Now Nature willed that I should do both—both act and have leisure for contemplation.

I will plead the cause of the gods.

I will reconcile you with the gods, who are best toward the best of men.

For the present it is needless to show that so great a work does not stand without some guardian;

Seneca too says that all things end after death, even death itself.

Shipwrecked on a desert island well tenanted by wild beasts, who would be the fittest in the following crew—Socrates, Seneca, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sykes (the world-renowned Bill)?