Seneca

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

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, and chiefly from my own affairs;

I will therefore send you the books themselves, and, that you may not spend much labour in tracking down here and there the things that profit, I will set marks upon them, so that you may come at once to the very passages I approve and admire.

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

” 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.

quo Seneca Tragicus alludit:

Seneca:

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

Seneca.

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

for if indeed I could profess that, I would not only deny that I am wretched, but would proclaim myself the most fortunate of all men and one brought near to god.

Often already, dearest mother, I have felt the impulse to console you, and as often I have checked it.

If fortune has removed you from the front rank of public life, stand your ground nonetheless and help with your shout;

Is the tribunal closed to you, are you barred from the rostra or the assemblies?

To my mind, dearest Serenus, Athenodorus seems to have given in to the times too much, to have retreated too soon.

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.

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.

If I did not know, Marcia, that you have withdrawn as far from weakness of a woman's mind as from the other vices, and that your character is looked upon as a kind of model from antiquity, I would not dare to confront your grief—the grief to which even men willingly cling and lie brooding—nor would I have conceived the hope that, at so unfavourable a time, before so hostile a judge, on a charge so …

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.

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.

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

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

"But it makes a difference," you say, "whether you have approached contemplation for the sake of pleasure, seeking nothing from it but unbroken contemplation with no outcome;

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

And again, if one were to observe how the shores are laid bare as the sea draws back into itself, and then within a short time are covered over again, he would suppose that by some blind rolling the waves are now contracted and driven inward, now burst forth and in a great rush return to their place—whereas in fact they grow by fixed measures, and at their appointed hour and day come on greater or …

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)?