Free Letters From a Stoic by Séneca Page B

can be said to be in him – they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man’s.
    You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands ofhim? Something very easy – that he live in accordance with his own nature. Yet this is turned into something difficult by the madness that is universal among men; we push one another into vices. And how can people be called back to spiritual well-being when no one is trying to hold them back and the crowd is urging them on?
LETTER XLVI
    T HE book you promised me has come. I was intending to read it at my convenience and I opened it on arrival without meaning to do any more than just get an idea of its contents. The next thing I knew the book itself had charmed me into a deeper reading of it there and then. How lucid its style is you may gather from the fact that I found the work light reading, although a first glance might well convey the impression that the writer was someone like Livy or Epicurus, its bulk being rather unlike you or me! It was so enjoyable, though, that I found myself held and drawn on until I ended up having read it right through to the end without a break. All the time the sunshine was inviting me out, hunger prompting me to eat, the weather threatening to break, but I gulped it all down in one sitting.
    It was a joy, not just a pleasure, to read it. There was so much talent and spirit about it – I’d have said ‘forcefulness’, too, if it had been written on a quieter plane now and then and periodically raised on to a higher one; as it was there was no such forcefulness, but instead there was a sustained evenness of style. The writing was pure and virile – and yet not lacking in that occasional entertaining touch, that bit of light relief at the appropriate moment. The quality of nobility, of sublimity,you have; I want you to keep it, and to carry on just the way you’re doing.
    Your subject, also, contributed to the result – which is a reason why you should always select a fertile one, one that will engage the mind’s attention and stimulate it. But I’ll write and say more about the book when I’ve gone over it again. At the moment my judgement isn’t really a sufficiently settled one – it’s as if I’d heard it all rather than read it. You must let me go into it thoroughly, too. You needn’t be apprehensive, you’ll hear nothing but the truth. How fortunate you are in possessing nothing capable of inducing anyone to tell you a lie over a distance as great as the one that separates us – except that even in these circumstances, when all reason for it is removed, we still find habit a reason for telling lies!
LETTER XLVII
    I ’M glad to hear, from these people who’ve been visiting you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. It is just what one expects of an enlightened, cultivated person like yourself. ‘They’re slaves,’ people say. No. They’re human beings. ‘They’re slaves.’ But they share the same roof as ourselves. ‘They’re slaves.’ No, they’re friends, humble friends. ‘They’re slaves.’ Strictly speaking they’re our fellow-slaves, if you once reflect that fortune has as much power over us as over them.
    This is why I laugh at those people who think it degrading for a man to eat with his slave. Why do they think it degrading? Only because the most arrogant of conventions has decreed that the master of the house be surrounded at his dinner by a crowd of slaves, who have to stand around while he eats more than he can hold, loading an already distendedbelly in his monstrous greed until it proves incapable any longer of performing the function of a belly, at which point he expends more effort in vomiting everything up than he did in forcing it down.