IX

Seneca to his Lucilius, greeting. You want to know whether Epicurus is right to criticize, in a certain letter, those who say that the wise man is content with himself and for that reason has no need of a friend. This objection is raised by Epicurus against Stilbo and against those to whom the highest good seemed to be a mind incapable of suffering.

We shall fall into ambiguity if we try to express ἀπάθεια quickly in a single word and call it impatience; for the opposite of what we mean may be understood. We wish to speak of the person who rejects every sensation of evil, but the word may be taken to mean one who cannot endure any evil at all. So consider whether it is better to speak either of an invulnerable mind or of a mind placed beyond all need of endurance.

This is the difference between us and them: our wise man indeed conquers every hardship, but he feels it; theirs does not even feel it. This we share with them, that the wise man is content with himself. And yet he still wants to have a friend, a neighbor, and a companion, although he is sufficient for himself.

See how content he is with himself: sometimes he is content with only a part of himself. If disease or an enemy has cut off his hand, if some accident has knocked out one eye or both, what remains of him will satisfy him, and with his body diminished and mutilated he will be as cheerful as he was when it was whole; but if he does not miss the things that are lacking, he does not prefer that they be lacking.

Thus the wise man is content with himself, not in the sense that he wishes to be without a friend, but in the sense that he can be; and what I mean by 'can be' is this: when a friend is lost, he bears it with an even mind. Indeed, he will never be without a friend: he has it in his own power how quickly he replaces one. Just as Phidias, if he had lost a statue, would immediately make another, so this craftsman in the making of friendships will put another in the place of the one lost.

You ask how he will quickly make a friend? I shall tell you, provided that you and I first agree on this: that I should pay you at once what I owe and square the account as far as this letter is concerned. Hecaton says, 'I shall show you a love charm without drug, without herb, without any witch's spell: if you wish to be loved, love.' Yet not only the enjoyment of an old and assured friendship brings great pleasure, but also the beginning and forming of a new one.

The difference between a farmer harvesting and one sowing is the same as the difference between someone who has acquired a friend and someone who is acquiring one. The philosopher Attalus used to say that it is more pleasant to make a friend than to have one, 'just as for an artist it is more pleasant to be painting than to have painted.' That anxious concentration absorbed in its own work has a great delight in the very activity itself: the person who has taken his hand away from a finished work is not delighted in the same way. He now enjoys the fruit of his art; while he was painting, he was enjoying the art itself. The adolescence of one's children is more fruitful, but their infancy is sweeter.

Now let us return to the matter proposed. The wise man, even if he is content with himself, nevertheless wishes to have a friend, if for no other reason than to exercise friendship, so that so great a virtue may not lie idle; not for the purpose Epicurus mentioned in this very letter, 'that he may have someone to sit by him when he is sick, or help him when he is thrown into chains or in need,' but so that he may have someone whom he himself may sit by when sick, someone whom he himself may free when surrounded by hostile guard. The man who looks to himself and for that reason comes to friendship thinks badly. As he began, so he will end: he has acquired a friend who is to bring help against chains; as soon as the chain rattles, he will depart.

These are the friendships that ordinary people call temporary; a person taken on for the sake of advantage will please only so long as he remains useful. For this reason, a crowd of friends surrounds the prosperous, while around the ruined there is solitude, and friends flee from the very place where they are tested; for this reason there are so many shameful examples of people abandoning others out of fear, or betraying them out of fear. Beginnings and endings must correspond to each other: the man who began to be a friend because it was advantageous will also cease because it is advantageous; some price will be pleasing in exchange for friendship, if anything in friendship is pleasing besides friendship itself.

'For what purpose do you acquire a friend?' So that I may have someone for whom I can die, someone whom I may follow into exile, someone whose death I may both confront and spend myself against. What you describe is a transaction, not friendship: it approaches for advantage and looks to see what it will gain.

There is no doubt that the passion of lovers has something resembling friendship; you could call it friendship gone mad. But does anyone love for the sake of profit? For ambition or glory? Love itself, by its own force, careless of all other things, sets souls aflame with desire for beauty, not without the hope of love returned. What then? Does a shameful passion arise from a more honorable cause?

'The question now,' you say, 'is not whether friendship should be sought for its own sake.' On the contrary, nothing needs proving more; for if it is to be sought for its own sake, then the man who is content with himself can approach it. 'How, then, does he approach it?' As one approaches a most beautiful thing: not captured by profit, nor frightened by the changes of fortune. The man who prepares friendship for good circumstances strips friendship of its own majesty.

'The wise man is content with himself.' This, my Lucilius, most people interpret wrongly: they remove the wise man from every side and force him back inside his own skin. But we must distinguish what that phrase promises and how far it goes: the wise man is content with himself for living happily, not for living at all; for the latter he needs many things, but for the former only a sound and upright mind, one that looks down upon fortune.

I also want to point out to you Chrysippus' distinction. He says that the wise man lacks nothing, and yet needs many things: 'by contrast, the fool needs nothing, since he knows how to use nothing, but lacks everything.' The wise man needs hands and eyes and many things necessary for daily use, yet lacks nothing; for lacking belongs to necessity, and nothing is necessary for the wise man.

Therefore, although he is content with himself, he needs friends; he desires to have as many of them as possible, not in order to live happily, for he will live happily even without friends. The highest good does not seek tools from outside; it is cultivated at home and is whole from itself. It begins to be subject to fortune if it seeks any part of itself outside.

'Yet what kind of life will the wise man's life be, if he is left without friends, thrown into prison, or abandoned among some foreign people, or detained on a long voyage, or cast upon a deserted shore?' It will be like Jupiter's life when, the world dissolved and the gods gathered into one, nature pauses for a little while and he rests in himself, entrusted to his own thoughts. The wise man does something of the same kind: he withdraws into himself and is with himself.

So long, indeed, as he is allowed to arrange his affairs by his own judgment, he is content with himself and marries a wife; he is content with himself and raises children; he is content with himself, and yet he would not live if he had to live without any human being. No advantage of his own carries him toward friendship, but a natural impulse does; for just as there is in us an inborn sweetness toward other things, so there is toward friendship. Just as there is hatred of solitude and a desire for society, just as nature joins human being to human being, so there is in this matter too a stimulus that makes us eager for friendships.

Nevertheless, although he is most loving toward his friends, although he compares them with himself and often puts them before himself, he will set the limit of every good within himself and will say what that famous Stilbo said, the Stilbo whom Epicurus attacks in his letter. For when his country had been captured, his children lost, and his wife lost, as he was coming out alone and yet happy from the general conflagration, Demetrius, whose surname Poliorcetes came from the destruction of cities, asked him whether he had lost anything; 'All my goods,' he said, 'are with me.'

Behold a brave and vigorous man! He conquered his enemy's very victory. 'I have lost nothing,' he said: he forced the other man to doubt whether he had conquered. 'All my things are with me': justice, virtue, prudence, and this very conviction, that nothing is good which can be taken away. We marvel at certain animals that pass through the midst of flames without harm to their bodies; how much more marvelous is this man, who escaped through sword, ruins, and fire unharmed and undiminished! You see how much easier it is to conquer a whole people than one man? This saying he shares with the Stoic also: the Stoic too carries his goods untouched through cities burned to ashes; for he is content with himself, and by this boundary he marks out his happiness.

So that you do not think that we alone toss out noble sayings, Epicurus himself, Stilbo's critic, uttered a saying like his; take it in good part, even if I have already crossed off today's account. 'If a man's own possessions do not seem to him most ample,' he says, 'even though he is master of the whole world, he is still wretched.' Or, if it seems better expressed to you in this way, since what we must do is serve meanings, not words: 'Wretched is the man who does not judge himself most happy, even though he rules the world.'

But so that you may know that these thoughts are shared in common, with nature herself, of course, dictating them, you will find this in a comic poet: 'No one is happy who does not think himself so.' For what difference does it make what your condition is, if it seems bad to you?

'What then?' you say. 'If that man, disgracefully rich, and that other man, master of many but slave of still more, calls himself happy, will he become happy by his own verdict?' What matters is not what he says, but what he feels; not what he feels on one day, but what he feels constantly. But there is no reason for you to fear that so great a thing will fall to an unworthy person: only to the wise man are his own things pleasing; every kind of folly suffers from disgust with itself. Farewell.