WISDOM OF THE STOICS • ' Frances and Henry Hazlitt UNIVERSITY PRESSOF AMERICA Copyright 1984, by Frances and Henry Hazlitt University Press of America, ™ Inc. 4720 Boston Way Lanham. MD 20706 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU England All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Wisdom of the Stoics. 1. Stoics—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Hazlitt, Frances Kanes. II. Hazlitt, Henry, 1894- III. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca. 4 B.C.-65. Selections. English. 1984. IV. Epictetus. Selections. English. 1984. V. Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, 121-180. Selections. English. 1984. B528.W54 1984 188 84-3493 ISBN 0-8191-3870-3 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8191-3871-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) All University Press of America books are produced on acid-free paper which exceeds the minimum standards set by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2. Seneca 3. Epictetus 4. Epictetus: The Enchiridion 5. Marcus Aurelius INTRODUCTION The Stoic philosophy was founded by Zeno, a Phoenician (c, 320-c. 250 B.C.), but nothing by him has come down to us except a few fragmentary quotations. He was followed by Cleanthes, then by Chrysippus, and still later by Panaetius and Posidonus. But though Chrysippus, for example, is said to have written 705 books, practically nothing is extant by any of these philosophers except in second-hand accounts. Only three of the ancient Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, survive in complete books. None of the three has ever had a large audience. The history of their reputations is curious. In the seventeenth century Seneca was certainly the best known. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he was almost completely forgot- ten, and popularity alternated between Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Under the influence of Matthew Arnold, the latter became a sort of cultural "must" for mid-Victorians. As an example of what was being written in the early years of this century, I quote from one of the self-improvement books written by the novelist Arnold Bennett: I suppose there are some thousands of authors who have written with more or less sincerity on the management of the human machine. But the two which, for me, stand out easily above all the rest are Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Epictetus.... Aurelius is assuredly regarded as the greatest of writers in the human machine school, and not to read him daily is considered by many to be a bad habit. As a confession his work stands alone. But as a practical 'Bradshaw' of existence, I would put the discourses of Epictetus before M. Aurelius....He is brimming over with actuality for readers of the year 1908. Nevertheless [Aurelius] is of course to be read, and re-read continually. When you have gone through Epictetus --a single page or paragraph per day, well masticated and digested, suffices -- you can go through M. Aurelius, and then you can return to Epictetus, and so on, morning by morning, or night by night, till your life's end. 1 Two things are worth remarking about this passage. First, it presents both writers simply as guides to living; it nowhere mentions their Stoic philosophy or its implications. And second, it nowhere mentions Seneca. In this it was typical not only of Arnold Bennett's own frequent references to the two later Stoics but to the references of his contemporaries and those of other writers down to the present day. Yet Seneca was the first of the three great Stoic philosophers whose writings are still extant. He lived half a century before Epictetus and more than a century before Marcus. His output was far greater than that of either of his successors, and he surpassed them in purely literary gifts. In his writings on philosophy one memorable aphorism follows another. There are almost none of the obscurities that one so often encounters in Epictetus and Marcus. His long neglect seems all but unaccountable. It is the purpose of this volume to make available generous selections from all three of the great Stoic philosophers. So far as the editors know, this has not been done elsewhere. There are only one or two books that even bring reasonably adequate excerpts of Epictetus and Marcus together; most often readers have had to find them in separate volumes. And adequate selections from Seneca's writings on Stoicism do not seem to exist in any book at present in print. Moreover, most readers today, we are convinced, will much prefer to read selections from each of the 1 The Human Machine, 1908. great Stoics rather than have to confront their output in its entirety. Because of the very way in which their work was composed or reported, it is full of repetitions. The Meditations of Marcus, for example, were apparently a journal, kept solely for his own eyes, in which he put down each evening or morning some reflection, resolve, or piece of advice to himself, without looking back to see whether he had written substantially the same thing a week or a month before. Again, nothing that has come down to us from Epictetus was written by him directly; it is the record of his discourses taken down by his disciple Arrian. In consequence, when Epictetus delivered very similar harangues to different audiences on different occasions, we have the record of each. Seneca, finally, repeated himself again and again and was conscious of it. He excused himself by remarking that "he does but inculcate over and over the same counsels to those that over and over commit the same faults." So selection seemed to the present editors both necessary and desirable, not only greatly to reduce repetition or to minimize obscurities but in order to concentrate on what is most representative or most memorable. Of course there is no way of selecting "the best" objectively. Selection must necessarily depend to a large extent on the judgment and taste of the editors; and with so much richness to choose from, many decisions on what to put in or leave out had to be arbitrary. We can only plead that we have been as conscientious and "objective" as we know how. We have taken approximately equal selections from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but a slightly greater amount from Seneca, to compensate for the comparative inaccessibility of his work and for the previous undeserved neglect into which it has fallen. The three great Stoics came from astonishingly different backgrounds. Seneca (c. 4 B.C. to A.D. 65) was a Spaniard who was brought to Rome at an early age. He studied rhetoric and philosophy, and soon gained a reputation at the Bar. He was banished in A.D. 41 by the Emperor Claudius, but recalled eight years later by Agrippina to become tutor to her son Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero, then 11 years old. When Nero came to the throne at 17, Seneca's power was still further increased. Though a Stoic, professedly despising riches, he amassed a huge fortune. This was probably a mistake. His presence in time became irksome to Nero, and his enormous wealth excited his cupidity. Finally, in A.D. 65 Nero charged Seneca with complicity in a conspiracy against him, and ordered him to commit suicide. Tactitus describes the scene: "Undismayed, he asked for tablets to make his will. When this was refused by the centurion, he turned to his friends and said that, since he was prevented from rewarding their services, he would leave them the only thing, and yet the best thing, that he had to leave -- the pattern of his life....At the same time he reminded his weeping friends of their duty to be strong....asking them what had become of the precepts of wisdom, of the philosophy which for so many years they had studied in the face of impending evils....Then he embraced his wife" -- and slit his wrists. He was very prolific, and wrote altogether the equivalent of more than twenty volumes, including, in addition to his essays on practical ethics and other works on philosophy, nine tragedies, many satires and epigrams, and books on natural science, astronomy and meteorology. Little is known about Epictetus. There is no agreement even about the years of his birth or death. The first has been set by various writers anywhere between A.D. 50 and 60, and the second between A.D. 100 and 135. He was probably from Hierapolis in Phrygia. As a boy he was a slave in Rome in the house of Epaphroditus, a favorite of Nero's. On receiving his freedom, he became a professor of philosophy, which he had learned from attending the lectures of the Stoic Musonius Rufus. He taught at Rome, but was expelled with other philosophers by Domitian in A.D. 90, and then went to Nicopolis in Epirus, where he appears to have spent the rest of his life. He was lame, weak, and chronically poor. A story has it that one day his master started to twist his leg. Epictetus, smiling, told him: "If you go on, you will break my leg." This happened; and Epictetus continued, just as calmly: "Did I not tell you that you would break my leg?" Whether this actually happened we do not know; but it would be fully in accord with what we do know of the philos- opher's character. Epictetus wrote nothing. His teaching was transmitted by a pupil, Arrian, who recorded his discourses and compiled the short manual, the Enchiridion. Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121 to 180) was at the other end of the social scale.