Read Dialogues and Letters Online
Authors: Seneca
Dialogues and Letters (3 page)
Our three dialogues between them cover most of Seneca's leitmotifs, and illustrate important standpoints of this moral crusader and guru.
On the Shortness of Life
, written some time between 48 and 55 and addressed to Paulinus (possibly a connection by marriage), takes us into one of Seneca's most favourite topics, the right use of our time. People complain that life is too short, yet of all their possessions they are most wasteful of this most precious one, their time. Life is quite long enough if you only know how to use it. Seneca vigorously attacks people who are âpreoccupied' (
occupati
â a constantly repeated word in this treatise), by which he means those who spend their lives in useless or redundant
activities, and sometimes cannot even give a rational account of what they are doing. Here Seneca takes the opportunity of hitting another favourite target, the cultivation of useless literary or historical knowledge (section 13). One of the most learned men of his time clearly had strong views about indiscriminate knowledge for its own sake: the test should be, does it do us any good?
On Tranquillity of Mind
(written some time before 62) is ostensibly a response to a plea for help from Seneca's good friend Serenus. Serenus is suffering from mental weakness and irresolution: he has high standards and knows what course he ought to follow but lacks the required will-power to do so. Seneca offers a detailed and carefully thought-out reply, in which he covers many of his usual moralizing points: we must carefully appraise ourselves, practise thrift, learn to face life's difficulties and accept human failings, avoid superfluous activities (as in
Shortness of Life
), and try to emulate great men who bravely faced disaster (
exempla
again). The work belongs in a tradition of philosophical treatises on tranquillity and peace of mind going back at least to Democritus in the fifth century
BC
: Seneca refers to his work in section 2. The great Stoic teacher Panaetius (second century
BC
) also wrote a treatise on the subject which clearly influenced Seneca. Our treatise has the formal interest of being the only one of Seneca's with a dialogue structure, though this is not sustained beyond the opening sections. Serenus' problem is the trigger, but Seneca's response is for a wider readership.
The
Consolation to Helvia
, addressed to his mother, is one of Seneca's most interesting and attractive works. Here again he is following a traditional literary form: the
consolatio
as a genre went back to the fifth century
BC
, and by Seneca's time had evolved a full repertoire of routine arguments and conventional comforts to soothe the sufferer. Many of these duly appear in the
Helvia
, but what gives it an unusual interest is that the consoler has himself caused the sufferer's grief. (Seneca points out the paradox in the opening section.) There was also a special class of consolation on exile, and Seneca would have been familiar at least with those by
Teles the Cynic (third century
BC
) and his younger contemporary, the Stoic Musonius Rufus. The historical background to the
Helvia
is (as we saw above) that Seneca was relegated to Corsica in 41 on a charge of adultery with Julia Livilla, sister of the emperor Gaius. He was recalled in 49, and the work can be dated to around 42/3. In ringing his own changes on the traditional arguments Seneca makes two main points to his mother: he himself is not feeling wretched, therefore she should not feel pain either. The reasoning is straightforward throughout, and Seneca stresses the conventional points that exile is, after all, only a change of place, and that the poverty and disgrace associated with exile are irrelevant to the wise man. Helvia's own strength of character should help her to bear her affliction, and she can derive support from other members of her family. We do not know how effective the work was in consoling Helvia, but â whatever Seneca's real feelings â he succeeds on his own account in putting up a brave front.
The
Natural Questions
, which is represented by three passages, was dedicated to Lucilius and written from 62 onwards; therefore it dates, like the
Letters
, from the last few years of Seneca's life. The subject matter embraces a wide range of natural phenomena, the province of what we would, roughly speaking, now call physics, and clearly illustrates both Seneca's voracious appetite for knowledge and his eagerness to expound what he knows.
The first passage is from the preface to Book 1 and can be described technically as protreptic in intent: it is an encouragement to the study of philosophy. Seneca urges this as the highest possible activity of the human mind, and he stresses both the benefits and the deep satisfaction that derive from it. The piece belongs to a well-known class of philosophical adjuration and was not pointedly directed at the addressee, Lucilius, who would not have needed persuasion: it appears formally and appropriately at the beginning of a long book that explores the workings of the cosmos. The other passages, on the Nile Cataracts and on earthquakes, are virtuoso descriptive pieces, and should, even in
translation, illustrate Seneca's stylistic versatility being used as a tool for his deep interest in the natural world. Both the Cataracts and earthquakes are dramatic phenomena, and Seneca's descriptive art rises to the challenge in his account of them.
The more brilliant and distinctive an author the harder it is to translate him adequately, and Seneca is no exception. There is in any case the general problem of translating from an inflected into a virtually uninflected language. For example, inflection allows variations in word order for special effects of emphasis or surprise that are difficult to achieve in the far more fixed word order of a language like English. When to this general difficulty are added Seneca's numerous and highly sophisticated stylistic mannerisms â word-play, pungent aphorism, elaborate sentence structure combined with elliptical phraseology â we are faced with sometimes daunting problems. The translations offered here do not claim to have solved all the problems or done full justice to Seneca's multi-faceted effects. The aim has been the humbler one of trying to maintain accuracy while conveying something of the energy of Seneca's prose and the variations of his tone. It is particularly important to retain the impression of the speaking voice that is clearly to be heard in the treatises and particularly in the letters. These works are not just moralizing texts, but personal counsel, frequently conveyed in tones of evangelizing urgency, and at other times just offering friendly sympathy coupled with touches of irony and self-depreciation. I hope that some at least of these varying effects come across in the translations, and that readers with sufficient knowledge of Latin may thereby be encouraged to go back to the originals and see for themselves what Seneca is really like.
1
. For further details of Seneca's influence on English tragedy see F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, Cambridge, 1922.
2
. Good discussions on all this can be found in L. D. Reynolds, The Medieval Tradition of Seneca's Letters, Oxford, 1965, and G. M. Ross in C. D. N. Costa (ed.), Seneca, London, 1974.
3
. See further G. Williamson, The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier, London, 1951.
TEXTS
The Latin texts for this selection can be found as follows:
Letters | Edited by L. D. Reynolds for Oxford Classical Texts, Oxford, 1965. |
Dialogues | Edited by L. D. Reynolds for Oxford Classical Texts, Oxford, 1977 (the ten Ambrosian Dialogues) |
Natural Questions | Edited by A. Gercke, Teubner, Leipzig, 1907 |
Translations that have been consulted are:
Letters | R. M. Gummere (Loeb), London/Cambridge, Mass., 1917â25 |
R. Campbell, | |
Dialogues | J. W. Basore (Loeb), London/Cambridge, Mass., 1928â35 |
Natural Questions | T. H. Corcoran (Loeb), London/Cambridge, Mass., 1971â72 |
Abel, K.,
Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen
, Heidelberg, 1967
Albertini, E., La
Composition dans les ouvrages philosophiques de Sénèque
, Paris, 1923
Costa, C. D. N. (ed.),
Seneca
, London, 1974
Griffin, M. T.,
Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics
, Oxford, 1876
Long, A. A.,
Hellenistic Philosophy
, London, 1974
Lucas, F. L.,
Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy
, Cambridge, 1922
Martha, C.,
Les Moralistes sous l'empire romain
, Paris, 1965
Peter, H.,
Der Brief in der Römischen Literatur
, Leipzig, 1901
Reynolds, L. D.,
The Medieval Tradition of Seneca's Letters
, Oxford 1965
Rist, J. M.,
Stoic Philosophy
, Cambridge, 1969
Sandbach, F. H.,
The Stoics
, London, 1975
Steyns, D.,
Métaphores et comparaisons de Sénèque le philosoph
Ghent, 1906
Summers, W. C.,
Select Letters of Seneca
, London, 1910 (importan introduction)
Trillitzsch, W.,
Seneca im literarischen Urteil der Antike
, Amsterdam 1971
Williamson, G.,
The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier
, London, 1951
CONSOLATION TO HELVIA
[
Seneca consoles his mother for her grief at his exile
]
1Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Dearest mother, I have often had the urge to console you and often restrained it. Many things encouraged me to venture to do so. First, I thought I would be laying aside all my troubles when I had at least wiped away your tears, even if I could not stop them coming. Then, I did not doubt that I would have more power to raise you up if I had first risen myself. Moreover, I was afraid that though Fortune was conquered by me she might conquer someone close to me. So, staunching my own cut with my hand I was doing my best to crawl forward to bind up your wounds. There were, on the other hand, considerations which delayed my purpose. I realized that your grief should not be intruded upon while it was fresh and agonizing, in case the consolations themselves should rouse and inflame it: for an illness too nothing is more harmful than premature treatment. So I was waiting until your grief of itself should lose its force and, being softened by time to endure remedies, it would allow itself to be touched and handled. Moreover, although I consulted all the works written by the most famous authors to control and moderate grief, I couldn't find any example of someone who had comforted his own dear ones when he himself was the subject of their grief. So in this unprecedented situation I hesitated, fearing that I would be offering not consolation but further irritation. Consider, too, that a man lifting his head from the very funeral pyre must need some novel vocabulary not drawn from ordinary everyday condolence to comfort his own dear ones. But every great and overpowering grief must take away the capacity to choose words, since it often
stifles the voice itself. Anyway, I'll try my best, not trusting in my cleverness, but because being myself the comforter I can thereby be the most effective comfort. As you never refused me anything I hope you will not refuse me this at least (though all grief is stubborn), to be willing that I should set a limit to your desolation.
2Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Consider how much I have promised myself from your indulgence. I don't doubt that I shall have more influence over you than your grief, than which nothing has more influence over the wretched. So in order not to join battle with it at once, I'll first support it and offer it a lot of encouragement: I shall expose and reopen all the wounds which have already healed. Someone will object: âWhat kind of consolation is this, to bring back forgotten ills and to set the mind in view of all its sorrows when it can scarcely endure one?' But let him consider that those disorders which are so dangerous that they have gained ground in spite of treatment can generally be treated by opposite methods. Therefore I shall offer to the mind all its sorrows, all its mourning garments: this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife. What shall I achieve? That a soul which has conquered so many miseries will be ashamed to worry about one more wound in a body which already has so many scars. So let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness. Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.
 Fortune has given you no respite from the most woeful sorrows, not even excepting the day of your birth. As soon as you were born, no, even while being born, you lost your mother, and on the threshold of life you were in a sense exposed. You grew up under the care of a stepmother, and you actually forced her to become a real mother by showing her all the deference and devotion which can be seen even in a daughter. Yet even
having a good stepmother costs every child a good deal. You lost your uncle, kindest, best and bravest of men, when you were awaiting his arrival; and lest Fortune should lessen her cruelty by dividing it, within a month you buried your dearest husband by whom you had three children.
1
This sorrow was announced to you when you were already grieving, and when indeed all your children were away, as if your misfortunes were concentrated on purpose into that time so that your grief would have nowhere to turn for relief. I pass over all the dangers, all the fears you endured as they assailed you unceasingly. But recently into the same lap from which you had let go three grandchildren you received back the bones of three grandchildren. Within twenty days of burying my son, who died as you held and kissed him, you heard that I had been taken away. This only you had lacked â to grieve for the living.