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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn the Constancy of the Wise Man
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On the Constancy of the Wise Man

1 I might say, Serenus,1 and not without reason, that there is as great a difference between the Stoics and the other schools that profess wisdom as between women and men; for though each group contributes as much to the partnership of life, one was born to obey and the other to command. The other philosophers treat us softly and coaxingly, the way family doctors, friends of the house, usually treat sick bodies: not by the best and quickest way, but by the way they are allowed. The Stoics have set out on a manly road, and they do not care whether it looks pleasant to those who enter on it, but only that it should rescue us as soon as possible and lead us up to that lofty summit which rises so far beyond the range of any missile that it towers above Fortune. “But the way we are called to is steep and rugged.” Well? Does anyone reach a height on level ground? Yet it is not even as sheer as some think. Only the first part has rocks and cliffs and looks pathless, just as many things seen from far off tend to look broken off or run together, because distance deceives the eye; then, as you come nearer, those same things that the error of the eyes had massed into one gradually open up, and what looked like precipices from a distance turns back into a gentle slope. Not long ago, when Marcus Cato happened to be mentioned, you were indignant, impatient of injustice as you are, that his own age had understood Cato so little, that when he rose above the Pompeys and Caesars, it had placed him below the Vatiniuses; and it seemed outrageous to you that his toga had been torn from him in the forum when he was about to speak against a law, and that he had been passed from hand to hand by a seditious faction all the way from the rostra to the Arch of Fabius, enduring foul words and spitting and all the other insults of a frenzied mob.2

2 I replied then that you had reason to be moved on behalf of the commonwealth, which Publius Clodius on one side, and Vatinius and every scoundrel on the other, were putting up for sale; and in the grip of blind greed they did not understand that while they were selling, they were being sold.3 As for Cato himself, I told you to be free of care; for no wise man can suffer either a wrong or an insult, and in Cato the immortal gods have given us a surer model of the wise man than earlier ages had in Ulysses and Hercules. For our Stoics declared these two wise men, unconquered by labors, despisers of pleasure, and victors over all terrors. Cato did not grapple with wild beasts, which is work for the hunter and the countryman; he did not pursue monsters with fire and sword; he did not happen to live in times when it could be believed that the sky rested on one man’s shoulders. In an age that had shaken off the old credulity and had been brought to the height of sophistication, he came to grips with corrupt ambition, an evil of many shapes, and with that boundless lust for power which the whole world divided among three men could not satisfy. He stood alone against the vices of a degenerate state sinking under its own weight, and he held up the falling commonwealth as far as one hand could drag it back, until he was torn away and gave himself as a companion to the ruin he had so long held off; and so two things were extinguished together that it would have been a sin to part. For Cato did not outlive freedom, nor freedom Cato. Do you think the people could have done a wrong to such a man because they took from him a praetorship or a toga, because they spattered that sacred head with the filth of their mouths? The wise man is safe; no wrong and no insult can touch him.

3 I seem to see your mind blazing and seething; you are getting ready to cry out: “These are the things that strip your precepts of their authority. You promise great things, things that cannot even be wished for, much less believed. Then, after all your grand talk, when you have denied that the wise man is poor, you do not deny that he often lacks a slave, a roof, and food. When you have denied that the wise man goes mad, you do not deny that he loses his mind, utters words that are hardly sane, and dares whatever the force of his illness drives him to. When you have denied that the wise man is a slave, you do not dispute that he will be sold, will do what he is told, and will perform slavish services for his master. So, with your eyebrows raised high, you come down to the same place as everyone else, only with the names of things changed. I suspect, then, that there is something of the kind in this too, which at first sight is fine and magnificent: that the wise man will suffer neither wrong nor insult. But it makes a great difference whether you place the wise man beyond indignation or beyond wrong. For if you say that he will bear it calmly, he has no special privilege; he has come by a common thing, one learned from the very frequency of wrongs: endurance. If you deny that he will suffer a wrong, meaning that no one will try to do him one, I am dropping all my business and becoming a Stoic.” For my part, I have resolved not to dress the wise man in an imaginary honor of words, but to set him in a place where no wrong is allowed to reach him. “What, then? Will there be no one to provoke him, no one to try?” Nothing in Nature is so sacred that it does not find someone to commit sacrilege; but divine things are no less on high because there are men who aim at a greatness set far above them, which they will never touch. What is invulnerable is not what is never struck, but what is never hurt: by this mark I will show you the wise man. Can there be any doubt that strength which is not conquered is surer than strength which is not provoked? For untested powers are doubtful, while the firmness that throws back every assault is rightly held to be the surest. In the same way, you may know that the wise man is of a better nature if no wrong harms him than if none is done to him; and I will call that man brave whom wars do not subdue and the approach of an enemy’s force does not terrify, not the one who enjoys a fat leisure among idle peoples. This, then, is what I say: the wise man is exposed to no wrong. So it does not matter how many weapons are hurled at him, since none can pierce him. As some stones have a hardness that steel cannot conquer, and adamant cannot be cut or hewn or worn down but blunts whatever strikes it; as certain things cannot be consumed by fire but keep their firmness and their shape with the flames all around them; as certain cliffs jutting out into the deep break the sea and show no trace of its fury though they have been lashed for so many ages: so the mind of the wise man is solid, and has gathered such strength that it is as safe from wrong as the things I have named.

4 “What, then? Will there be no one who tries to do the wise man a wrong?” Someone will try, but the wrong will not reach him; for he has been removed too far from contact with lower things for any harmful force to carry its power all the way to him. Even when the powerful, raised high by command and strong in the consent of those who serve them, set out to harm him, all their attacks will fall short of wisdom, just as missiles shot up by bowstring or catapult, though they leap out of sight, still turn back short of the sky. Well? Do you think that when that stupid king darkened the daylight with his cloud of arrows, any arrow struck the sun? or that when he let chains down into the deep, he could lay hold of Neptune?4 As heavenly things escape human hands, and no harm is done to the divine by those who tear down temples and melt down statues, so whatever is done against the wise man insolently, wantonly, arrogantly, is attempted in vain. “But it would be better if there were no one who wanted to do it.” You are wishing the human race something hard: innocence. And it is for the sake of those who would do it that it should not be done, not for the man who cannot suffer it even when it is done. Indeed, I am not sure that calm amid provocation does not show the strength of wisdom better, just as the strongest proof of a general powerful in arms and men is his safe freedom from care in the enemy’s country.

5 Let us distinguish, Serenus, if you agree, between wrong and insult. The first is by nature heavier; the second is lighter and heavy only to the thin-skinned, for it does not hurt people but offends them. Yet such is the slackness and emptiness of men’s minds that some think nothing more bitter. So you will find a slave who would rather be flogged than slapped, and who thinks death and the lash more bearable than insulting words. We have come to such absurdity that we are troubled not only by pain but by the idea of pain, like children, who are frightened by a shadow, by ugly masks, by a distorted face, and are brought to tears by names unpleasant to their ears, by movements of the fingers, and by other things they run from in a kind of blind and mistaken panic. A wrong has this aim: to bring evil on someone. But wisdom leaves no room for evil (for the only evil it knows is shamefulness, which cannot enter where virtue and the honorable already dwell). Therefore, if there is no wrong without evil, and no evil except what is shameful, and the shameful cannot reach a man occupied with the honorable, then no wrong reaches the wise man. For if a wrong is the suffering of some evil, and the wise man suffers no evil, then no wrong touches the wise man. Every wrong is a lessening of the one it strikes, and no one can suffer a wrong without some loss of dignity, or of body, or of the things placed outside us. But the wise man can lose nothing. He has stored everything within himself, trusts nothing to Fortune, and holds his goods on solid ground, content with virtue, which needs nothing from chance and therefore can be neither increased nor diminished. For things brought to their peak have no room to grow, and Fortune takes away nothing but what she gave; but she does not give virtue, and so she does not take it away. Virtue is free, inviolable, unmoved, unshaken, so hardened against misfortune that it cannot even be bent, much less overcome. It looks straight at the apparatus of terror and does not change its expression whether harsh things or prosperous ones are paraded before it. So the wise man will lose nothing whose loss he will feel. For he is in possession of virtue alone, from which he can never be driven; everything else he holds on loan. And who is moved by the loss of what belongs to another? But if a wrong can harm none of the things that are the wise man’s own, since they are safe as long as his virtue is safe, then no wrong can be done to the wise man. Demetrius, the one surnamed Poliorcetes, had taken Megara. When he asked the philosopher Stilpo whether he had lost anything, Stilpo said, “Nothing: I have all that is mine with me.”5 And yet his estate had gone as plunder, his daughters had been carried off by the enemy, his country had passed under foreign rule, and the king himself, ringed by the arms of his victorious army, was questioning him from a higher place. But Stilpo shook the victory out of his hands and bore witness that, though his city was taken, he was not only unconquered but unharmed. For he had his true goods with him, on which no one can lay hands; and the things that were being scattered and plundered and carried off he did not judge to be his, but things that had come from outside and followed Fortune’s nod. So he had not loved them as his own; for the possession of all that flows in from outside is slippery and uncertain.

6 Consider now whether a thief, or a false accuser, or a high-handed neighbor, or some rich man wielding the power that a childless old age gives, could do a wrong to this man, from whom war and an enemy, and that man who professed the splendid art of battering cities, could take nothing. Amid swords flashing everywhere and soldiers rioting in plunder, amid flames and blood and the slaughter of the stricken city, amid the crash of temples falling on their gods, one man had peace. So there is no reason to judge my promise rash; and if you do not trust me enough, I will give you a guarantor. For you hardly believe that so much firmness or such greatness of mind can fall to a human being; but here a man comes forward to say: “There is no reason for you to doubt that one born a man can raise himself above human things; that he can look on pains and losses, sores and wounds, and the great upheavals of the world roaring around him, free of care; that he can bear hardship calmly and prosperity with moderation, neither yielding to the one nor relying on the other, and remain one and the same amid opposites; that he can think nothing his own but himself, and himself only in the part that is better. Here I am to prove it to you. Under this destroyer of so many cities, walls are shaken by the blows of the ram, high towers suddenly sink into mines and hidden trenches, and the siege mound grows until it will match the loftiest citadels; but no engines can be found that will shake a well-founded mind. I have just crept out of the ruins of my house, and with fires blazing on every side I have fled the flames through blood. What has become of my daughters, whether something worse than the common lot, I do not know. Alone and old, and seeing everything around me in enemy hands, I still declare that my estate is whole and unharmed: I keep, I have, whatever of mine I ever had. There is no reason for you to think me conquered and yourself the conqueror: your fortune has conquered my fortune. Where those perishable things are that change their masters, I do not know; as for what is mine, it is with me and will be with me. The rich have lost their estates, the lustful their loves and the harlots they cherished at a great cost to their honor, the ambitious the senate house and the forum and the places set aside for practicing their vices in public; the moneylenders have lost their account books, in which avarice, falsely glad, imagines its riches. But I have everything whole and untouched. So go and ask those who are weeping and wailing, who set their bare bodies against drawn swords for the sake of money, who flee the enemy with their clothes stuffed with valuables.” Take it, then, Serenus, that this perfect man, full of human and divine virtues, loses nothing. His goods are girded by solid and insurmountable defenses. Do not compare them with the walls of Babylon, which Alexander entered, nor with the walls of Carthage or Numantia, taken by a single hand,6 nor with the Capitol or the citadel: those bear the enemy’s footprint. The defenses that guard the wise man are safe from flame and from assault; they offer no way in; they are lofty, impregnable, equal to the gods.

7 There is no reason for you to say, as you usually do, that this wise man of ours is nowhere to be found. We are not inventing an empty ornament of human talent, nor conceiving a huge image of something unreal; we have shown, and will show, such a man as we portray, rarely perhaps, and only one in many ages; for great things that surpass the usual and common measure are not often produced. But this very Marcus Cato, with whose mention this discussion began, may, I fear, even be above our model. Then, too, what does harm must be stronger than what is harmed; but wickedness is not stronger than virtue; so the wise man cannot be harmed. A wrong against the good is attempted only by the bad; the good are at peace with one another, while the bad are as destructive to the good as to one another. But if only the weaker can be harmed, and the bad man is weaker than the good, and the good need fear wrong only from those unlike them, then wrong does not befall the wise man. For by now you need not be reminded that no one is good except the wise man. “If Socrates,” someone says, “was unjustly condemned, he suffered a wrong.” Here we must understand that it can happen that someone does me a wrong and yet I do not suffer it: as if someone stole a thing from my country house and put it in my town house, he would have committed theft, but I would have lost nothing. A man can become guilty even though he has done no harm. If a man lies with his own wife as though she were another man’s, he will be an adulterer, though she will not be an adulteress. Someone has given me poison, but it lost its strength when mixed with food: by giving the poison he bound himself to the crime, even though he did no harm. A man is no less a brigand because his blade was foiled by the clothing in its way. All crimes are complete, as far as guilt is concerned, even before the deed is done. Some things are so constituted and linked in such a relation that one can exist without the other, but the other cannot exist without the first. I will try to make clear what I mean. I can move my feet without running; I cannot run without moving my feet. I can be in water without swimming; if I swim, I cannot help being in water. What we are discussing is of this sort: if I have suffered a wrong, it must have been done; if it has been done, I need not have suffered it. For many things can intervene to ward off a wrong. As some chance can strike down a raised hand and turn aside weapons already thrown, so something can repel wrongs of any kind and intercept them midway, so that they have been done and yet not suffered.

8 Besides, justice can suffer nothing unjust, since opposites do not come together; but a wrong cannot be done except unjustly; therefore a wrong cannot be done to the wise man. Nor should you wonder that no one can do him a wrong: no one can do him good either. The wise man lacks nothing that he could accept as a gift, and the bad man can give nothing worthy of the wise man; for he must have before he can give, and he has nothing that the wise man would be glad to have passed on to him. So no one can either harm the wise man or help him, since divine things neither need help nor can be hurt, and the wise man stands next to the gods, their close neighbor, like god except for his mortality. Striving and pressing toward those things that are lofty, ordered, fearless, flowing in an even and harmonious course, free of care, kindly, born for the public good, and wholesome to himself and to others, he will desire nothing base and weep for nothing. The man who leans on reason and walks through human misfortunes with a divine mind has no place where he can receive a wrong—from man only, do you think I mean? Not even from Fortune, who has never left the field an equal whenever she has met virtue. If we accept with a calm and peaceful mind that greatest thing, beyond which angry laws and the cruelest masters have nothing to threaten, in which Fortune uses up her power, and if we know that death is not an evil, and therefore not even a wrong, we will much more easily bear the rest: losses and pains, disgraces, changes of place, the loss of children, separations. These do not overwhelm the wise man even if they surround him all at once, much less make him grieve at their blows one by one. And if he bears the wrongs of Fortune with moderation, how much more those of powerful men, whom he knows to be Fortune’s hands!

9 So he endures everything as he endures the cold of winter and bad weather, fevers and diseases and the other things that happen by chance; and he does not think so well of anyone as to believe he has done anything by deliberate purpose, which is found in the wise man alone. In all others there are no purposes, only frauds and plots and disorderly movements of the mind, and he counts these among accidents; and everything that comes by chance rages only around us, and against what is of little worth. Consider this too: the widest field for wrongs lies in the means by which danger is sought for us, as by a suborned accuser, a false charge, the stirring up of powerful men’s hatred against us, and all the other kinds of highway robbery practiced among men in togas. Another frequent wrong is when someone has had a profit knocked out of his hands, or a reward he has long angled for, when an inheritance pursued with great effort has been diverted, or the favor of a lucrative house has been snatched away. The wise man escapes these, for he does not know how to live for hope or for fear. Add now that no one suffers a wrong with his mind unmoved; he is thrown into turmoil when he feels it. But the man rescued from errors, master of himself, in deep and peaceful calm, is free of turmoil. For if a wrong touches him, it moves and pushes him; but the wise man is free of anger, which is roused by the impression of having been wronged, and he could not be free of anger unless he were also free of wrong, which he knows cannot be done to him. That is why he is so upright and cheerful, why he is lifted up by constant joy. And so far is he from shrinking at the blows of circumstances and of men that wrong itself is useful to him, since through it he puts himself to the proof and tests his virtue. Let us, I beg you, favor this proposition and lend it fair minds and ears while the wise man is being exempted from wrong. Nothing is taken away on that account from your insolence, or from your most rapacious desires, or from your blind rashness and pride: this freedom is sought for the wise man with your vices left untouched. We are not trying to make it impossible for you to do wrong, but to have him sink all wrongs deep and defend himself by endurance and greatness of mind. So in the sacred games many have won by wearing out the hands of those who struck them, through stubborn endurance. Think of the wise man as one of this kind, those who by long and faithful training have gained the strength to endure and to tire out every hostile force.

10 Since we have run through the first part, let us pass to the second, in which we will refute insult with some arguments of its own, though most are shared with the first. Insult is a lesser wrong, one we can complain of rather than prosecute, and which even the laws have thought deserving of no penalty. This passion is stirred by a lowness of mind that shrinks at some act or word that does it dishonor: “He did not admit me today, though he admitted others”; “He turned away haughtily from what I was saying,” or “He laughed at it openly”; “He put me not on the middle couch but on the lowest”; and other things of this stamp. What should I call these but the complaints of a queasy mind? It is mostly the pampered and prosperous who fall into them; for a man pressed by worse things has no time to notice these. Minds that are weak by nature and womanish, running riot from too much leisure and the lack of any real wrong, are stirred by these things, most of which consist in the fault of the one who interprets them. So the man who is affected by insult shows that he has neither prudence nor confidence in himself; for he has no doubt that he has been despised, and this sting does not come without a certain lowness in a mind that abases and lowers itself. But the wise man is despised by no one. He knows his own greatness and tells himself that no one has such license over him; and all these things, which I would call not miseries of the mind but annoyances, he does not overcome; he does not even feel them. There are other things that strike the wise man, even if they do not overthrow him, such as bodily pain and infirmity, the loss of friends and children, and the calamity of his country ablaze with war. I do not deny that the wise man feels these; for we do not claim for him the hardness of stone or iron. It is no virtue to endure what you do not feel. What, then? He takes some blows, but once he has taken them he overcomes them, heals them, and checks them; these lesser things, however, he does not even feel, nor does he use against them his usual virtue of enduring hardship; he either does not notice them or thinks them laughable.

11 Besides, since a great part of insults come from the proud and insolent and from those who carry good fortune badly, he has something with which to spurn this puffed-up passion: the most beautiful of all the virtues, magnanimity. It passes over everything of this sort like the empty shapes of dreams and visions of the night that have nothing solid or real in them. At the same time he reflects that all men are too low to dare to look down on things so far above them. Insult (contumelia) takes its name from contempt (contemptus), because no one brands a man with such a wrong unless he has despised him; but no one despises a greater and better man, even if he does something that despisers usually do. For children strike their parents in the face, and a baby has tousled and torn its mother’s hair, spat on her, or exposed before the family what should be covered, and has not spared obscene words; and we call none of these things insult. Why? Because the one who does them is incapable of contempt. It is for the same reason that the wit of our slaves, insolent toward their masters, delights us; their boldness wins its license against the guests only if it has begun with the master; and the more despised a slave is, the looser his tongue. Some people buy impudent boys for this very purpose, sharpen their impudence, and keep them under a teacher so that they may pour out studied abuse; and we call these not insults but witticisms. But what madness it is to be delighted one moment and offended the next by the same things, and to call a remark slander when a friend says it, and playful raillery when a little slave says it!

12 The attitude we have toward children the wise man has toward all those whose childishness persists even after youth and gray hair. Have such people made any progress, whose minds are diseased and whose errors have grown larger, who differ from children only in the size and shape of their bodies, but are otherwise no less flighty and unsettled, grasping at pleasures without discrimination, fearful, and quiet not by nature but from fright? No one could say there is any difference between them and children on the grounds that children are greedy for knucklebones and nuts and copper coins, and these men for gold and silver and costly tables; that children play at being magistrates among themselves and imitate the purple-bordered toga, the fasces, and the tribunal, while these men play the same games in earnest in the Campus, the forum, and the senate house; that children on the shore pile up sand into the likeness of houses, while these men, as if engaged in something great, busy themselves heaping up stones and walls and roofs, and have turned what was invented to protect the body into a danger. So children and those who have gone further in years are alike, but the error of the latter concerns other and larger things. Not without reason, then, does the wise man take their insults as jokes; and sometimes he corrects them, as one would children, with pain and punishment, not because he has suffered a wrong, but because they have done one, and so that they may stop doing it. For so beasts too are tamed with the whip; we do not get angry with them when they have refused a rider, but we restrain them, so that pain may overcome stubbornness. So you will see that this objection made against us is also answered: “Why, if the wise man has suffered neither wrong nor insult, does he punish those who did them?” For he is not avenging himself; he is correcting them.

13 Why, then, should you not believe that this firmness of mind belongs to the wise man, when you are allowed to observe the same thing in others, though not from the same cause? What doctor gets angry with a madman? Who takes in bad part the curses of a man in a fever who has been denied cold water? The wise man has the same attitude toward all men that a doctor has toward his patients: he does not disdain to handle their private parts if they need treatment, or to inspect their excrement and discharges, or to take abuse from those raging in delirium. The wise man knows that all those who strut about in togas and purple, healthy and with good color, are unsound, and he sees them as nothing but sick men without self-control. So he is not even annoyed if in their sickness they have dared some impudence against their healer; and with the same mind with which he sets no value on their honors, he sets none on their dishonoring acts. Just as he will not be pleased with himself if a beggar pays him respect, nor judge it an insult if a man of the lowest class does not return his greeting, so he will not be impressed either if many rich men look up to him (for he knows that they differ in nothing from beggars, and are even more wretched, since beggars need little and they need much); and again, he will not be touched if the king of the Medes, or Attalus of Asia, passes him by in silence and with an arrogant look when he greets him. He knows that the king’s position has nothing more to envy in it than that of the man whose charge in a large household is to keep the sick and the insane in order. Shall I be annoyed if one of those who do business at the temple of Castor, buying and selling worthless slaves, whose shops are crammed with a crowd of the worst slaves, does not return my greeting? I think not; for what good is there in a man who has no one under him who is not bad? So as the wise man disregards this man’s courtesy or rudeness, so he disregards a king’s: “You have under you Parthians and Medes and Bactrians; but you hold them by fear; but because of them you have never been free to unstring your bow; but they are the foulest of enemies; but they are for sale; but they are on the lookout for a new master.” So he will not be moved by anyone’s insult; for though all men differ from one another, the wise man considers them all equal because of their equal folly. For if he once lowered himself so far as to be moved by either wrong or insult, he could never be free of care; and freedom from care is the wise man’s own special good. Nor will he let himself, by judging that an insult has been done to him, pay honor to the one who did it; for whoever is upset at being despised by someone must be glad to be looked up to by him.

14 Some people are possessed by such madness that they think an insult can be done to them by a woman. What does it matter how well-off they consider her, how many litter-bearers she has, how weighed down her ears, how roomy her sedan chair? She is just as thoughtless a creature, and unless knowledge and much learning have come to her, a wild one, with no control over her desires. Some are upset at being jostled by a hair-curler, and they call it an insult when the doorkeeper is difficult, the slave who announces names is haughty, the chamberlain supercilious. Oh, what laughter should be raised at such things, with how much pleasure the mind should be filled as it contemplates its own calm amid the turmoil of other people’s errors! “What, then? Will the wise man not approach doors guarded by a surly porter?” Certainly he will, if necessary business calls him; he will try even that porter, whoever he is, and will soothe him, like a fierce dog, by tossing him food, and will not resent paying something to get across the threshold, reflecting that on some bridges, too, a toll is paid for crossing. So he will also tip whoever it is that runs this public business of morning calls: he knows that what is for sale is bought with cash. It is a petty mind that is pleased with itself for having answered a doorkeeper boldly, broken his staff, gone in to his master and asked to have him flogged. The man who contends makes himself an adversary, and even if he wins, he has been an equal. “But what will the wise man do when he is struck with a fist?” What Cato did when he was hit in the face: he did not flare up, he did not avenge the wrong, he did not even pardon it; he denied it had been done. It took a greater spirit not to recognize it than to have forgiven it. We will not dwell on this long; for who does not know that none of the things believed to be evils or goods appear to the wise man as they do to everyone else? He does not consider what men judge shameful or wretched; he does not go where the people go; but as the stars set their course against the turning of the heavens, so he goes against the opinion of all.

15 Stop saying, then: “So the wise man will not suffer a wrong if he is beaten, if his eye is gouged out? He will not suffer an insult if he is driven through the forum amid the foul cries of obscene men? if at a king’s banquet he is ordered to recline below the table and eat with the slaves assigned to degrading duties? if he is forced to bear anything else that can be devised to wound a freeborn sense of shame?” However much these things grow, in number or in size, they will be of the same nature: if small ones do not touch him, neither will larger ones; if a few do not touch him, neither will more. But you judge a vast mind from your own weakness, and when you have reckoned how much you think you could bear, you set the limit of the wise man’s endurance a little farther out. But his virtue has placed him in another region of the universe, with nothing in common with you. Seek out harsh things and everything that is heavy to bear, from which ear and eye recoil: he will not be overwhelmed by their massed attack, and as he resists them one by one, so he will resist them all together. The man who says that this is bearable for the wise man and that unbearable, and keeps greatness of mind within fixed bounds, is mistaken: Fortune conquers us unless she is wholly conquered. Do not think this is mere Stoic hardness. Epicurus, whom you adopt as the patron of your sloth, and whom you suppose to teach soft and lazy doctrines that lead to pleasures, says: “Fortune seldom gets in the wise man’s way.”7 How close he came to uttering a man’s word! Will you speak more bravely, and remove her altogether? This house of the wise man is narrow, without adornment, without noise, without trappings; it is guarded by no doorkeepers sorting the crowd with a disdain that can be bought; but over this threshold, empty and free of porters, Fortune does not pass: she knows there is no place for her where nothing is hers.

16 But if even Epicurus, who indulged the body most, rises up against wrongs, what can seem incredible among us, or beyond the measure of human nature? He says that wrongs are bearable for the wise man; we say there are no wrongs. Nor is there any reason for you to say that this is against nature. We do not deny that it is an unpleasant thing to be beaten and shoved and to lose a limb; but we deny that any of these things are wrongs. We do not take from them the feeling of pain, but the name of wrong, which cannot be admitted while virtue is unharmed. Which of the two speaks more truly we shall see; on contempt for wrong, at any rate, both agree. Do you ask what the difference between them is? The same as between two very brave gladiators, one of whom presses his hand to his wound and holds his ground, while the other turns to the shouting crowd, signals that it is nothing, and will not let the fight be stopped. There is no reason to think our disagreement is great. On the point at issue, the only one that concerns you, both examples urge the same thing: to despise wrongs, and insults too, which I might call the shadows and suspicions of wrongs. To despise these one does not need a wise man, only a man in his senses, who can say to himself: “Do these things happen to me deservedly or undeservedly? If deservedly, it is not an insult, it is a verdict; if undeservedly, it is the one who acts unjustly who should blush.” And what is it that is called an insult? Someone has joked about my bald head, my weak eyes, my thin legs, my height. What insult is there in hearing what is plain to see? We laugh at something said in front of one person and are indignant at it in front of several, and we do not allow others the freedom to say what we ourselves are used to saying about ourselves. Moderate jokes delight us; immoderate ones make us angry.

17 Chrysippus says that a certain man was indignant because someone had called him a sea-sheep. We saw Cornelius Fidus, Ovid’s son-in-law, weeping in the senate when Corbulo called him a plucked ostrich.8 Against other abuse that wounded his character and his life, his face held firm; at this absurd jibe the tears came pouring out: so great is the weakness of minds once reason has left them. What of the fact that we take offense if someone imitates our speech or our walk, or mimics some defect of our body or our tongue? As if these became better known when another imitates them than when we do them ourselves! Some people do not like to hear about their old age and gray hair and the other things men pray to reach. The taunt of poverty has burned some deeply, though whoever hides his poverty makes it a reproach against himself. So you take the material away from the impudent and from those who are witty at others’ expense if you seize on it first, of your own accord; no one has given cause for laughter who laughed at himself first. It has been handed down that Vatinius, a man born for both laughter and hatred, was a buffoon, and a charming and witty one. He made a great many jokes himself about his feet and his scarred neck; and so he escaped the wit of his enemies, of whom he had more than diseases, and above all of Cicero. If he could do this, a man so brazen-faced that constant abuse had made him unlearn shame, why should not a man who has made some progress through liberal studies and the cultivation of wisdom? Add that it is a kind of revenge to rob the one who insulted you of the pleasure of his insult. People like that usually say: “Too bad for me! I don’t think he got it.” So much does the fruit of an insult lie in the feeling and indignation of the victim. Besides, the insulter will someday meet his match; someone will be found to avenge you as well.

18 Gaius Caesar,9 who among the other vices in which he abounded was given to insult, was carried away by a strange passion for branding everyone with some mark of ridicule, though he himself was the richest material for laughter: such was the ugliness of his pallor, which bore witness to his madness, such the savagery of his eyes lurking under an old woman’s brow, such the deformity of his bald head sprinkled with a few borrowed hairs;10 add to this a neck overgrown with bristles, the thinness of his legs, and the enormity of his feet. It would be an endless task if I wished to recount each of the ways he insulted his parents and grandparents, and every rank of society; I will recount those that brought him to his end. He counted Valerius Asiaticus among his foremost friends, a fierce man and one hardly likely to bear another’s insults calmly. At a banquet, that is, before a public assembly, Gaius in a very loud voice taunted this man with what his wife was like in bed. Good gods! That a husband should hear this, that the emperor should know it, and that license should have gone so far that the emperor should tell, I do not say a former consul, I do not say a friend, but simply a husband, of his own adultery and his disappointment! Chaerea,11 on the other hand, a military tribune, had a way of speaking that did not match his hand: his voice was languid and, if you did not know his deeds, rather suspect. When he asked for the watchword, Gaius would give him now “Venus,” now “Priapus,” taunting the armed man with effeminacy in one way after another; and this from a man himself in see-through clothes, sandals, and gold ornaments. So he forced Chaerea to use the sword, so as not to have to ask for the watchword any more. He was the first of the conspirators to raise his hand; he cut through the middle of Gaius’s neck with one blow. After that, many swords were thrust in from every side by men avenging public and private wrongs; but the first to act like a man was the one who least seemed to be one. Yet this same Gaius took everything as an insult, as those who most desire to inflict insults are least able to bear them. He was angry with Herennius Macer for having greeted him as Gaius; and a chief centurion did not go unpunished for having called him Caligula. For that was what he used to be called, born as he was in the camp and the nursling of the legions, and by no name had he ever been better known to the soldiers; but now that he wore the high boots of tragedy, he judged “Caligula” an abuse and a disgrace.12 So this very thing will be a comfort, even if our own easygoing nature has let revenge go: there will be someone who will exact punishment from the impudent, arrogant, insulting man, for these vices are never used up on one person or in one insult. Let us look back at the examples of those whose endurance we praise, such as Socrates, who took in good part the jokes made public against him in comedies and watched by the crowd, and laughed no less than when his wife Xanthippe drenched him with dirty water. Antisthenes was taunted with having a barbarian mother, a Thracian; he replied that the mother of the gods also came from Mount Ida.13

19 We must not get into brawls and wrestling matches. We must keep our feet far away and ignore whatever of this kind is done by the unwise (and it can be done only by the unwise), and hold the honors and the wrongs of the crowd to be all one. We must not grieve at the one or rejoice at the other. Otherwise, out of fear of insults or weariness of them, we will leave many necessary things undone and fail to attend to public and private duties, some of them even beneficial, while a womanish anxiety torments us about hearing something we dislike. Sometimes, too, in anger at the powerful, we will betray this passion by speaking our minds without restraint. But freedom is not suffering nothing; we are mistaken there. Freedom is setting the mind above wrongs and making oneself the only source of one’s joys, separating oneself from external things, so as not to lead an anxious life, fearing everyone’s laughter and everyone’s tongue. For who is there who could not offer an insult, if anyone can? The wise man and the one who aspires to wisdom will use different remedies. To those who are not yet perfect and who still steer by the judgment of the public, this must be put forward: they must spend their lives amid wrongs and insults; everything comes more lightly to those who expect it. The more honorable a man is by birth, reputation, and fortune, the more bravely he should conduct himself, remembering that the highest ranks stand in the front line. Insults, abusive words, disgraces, and other dishonors he should bear like the shouting of the enemy, like spears flung from far off and stones rattling harmlessly around his helmet; wrongs he should bear like wounds, some taken on his armor, some in his breast, without being thrown down, without even being moved from his position. Even if you are hard pressed and driven by hostile force, it is still shameful to yield: guard the post that nature assigned you. Do you ask what that post is? The post of a man. The wise man has a different help, the opposite of this; for you are still fighting, while he has already won the victory. Do not resist your own good; nourish this hope in your minds until you reach the truth, gladly welcome what is better, and help it along with belief and prayer. That there should be something unconquered, that there should be someone against whom Fortune has no power, is in the interest of the commonwealth of the human race.

Notes

  1. 1. Annaeus Serenus: Seneca’s younger friend and kinsman, later prefect of the watch under Nero; Seneca also addressed On Tranquility of Mind and On Leisure to him.

  2. 2. Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger, 95–46 BC). In 55 BC he was manhandled and driven from the forum while opposing a law that gave Pompey and Crassus long provincial commands. The Arch of Fabius stood at the east end of the forum.

  3. 3. Publius Clodius, the demagogue tribune of 58 BC, and Publius Vatinius, Caesar’s partisan, who defeated Cato for the praetorship of 55 BC. The three among whom the world was divided were Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus.

  4. 4. Xerxes, king of Persia, whose archers were said to darken the sun with their arrows, and who had chains thrown into the Hellespont to punish the sea.

  5. 5. Demetrius Poliorcetes (“the Besieger”), a Macedonian king, took Megara in 307 BC; Stilpo was a philosopher of the Megarian school.

  6. 6. Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage in 146 BC and Numantia, in Spain, in 133 BC.

  7. 7. Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 16.

  8. 8. Chrysippus was the third head of the Stoic school. Cornelius Fidus and the senator Domitius Corbulo were Seneca’s contemporaries.

  9. 9. Gaius Caesar: the emperor known as Caligula (reigned AD 37–41), killed by officers of his guard in AD 41.

  10. 10. The text is corrupt here; read as “borrowed hairs.”

  11. 11. Decimus Valerius Asiaticus was twice consul; Cassius Chaerea, a tribune of the praetorian guard, led the conspiracy that killed Gaius.

  12. 12. “Caligula” (“Little Boot”) was the soldiers’ pet name for him as a child in the camp of his father, Germanicus, after the soldier’s boot (caliga). The high boots (buskins) were worn by tragic actors. Herennius Macer is otherwise unknown.

  13. 13. Socrates was mocked on the stage, above all in Aristophanes’ Clouds. Antisthenes was a pupil of Socrates. The mother of the gods, Cybele, was worshiped on Mount Ida in Phrygia, a barbarian land to the Greeks.