All that is best can neither be given to men nor taken from them.
There are two things, the most precious of all, that attend us whithersoever we turn our steps: common nature and personal virtue. These things are so, believe me, because they were so willed by the creator of the universe, whether it is that God who controls everything, or incorporeal reason, the artificer of great works, or the divine spirit that pervades equally the greatest and the smallest things.
If the dead have any feeling, the soul of my brother, now set free from a long imprisonment, is at length in the full enjoyment of his freedom and his majority; he beholds with delight the nature of things and looks down upon human affairs from his high abode; but things divine, the causes of which he so long sought out in vain, he now beholds at close range. Why then do I pine away in sorrow for him who is either blessed or not all? To mourn for one who is in bliss is envy; for one who is not, folly.
Borne on high, he soars among beatified spirits, and a sanctified company welcomes him—the Scipios, the Catos, released by the beneficence of death. There thy father devotes himself to his grandson, resplendent in the new light even though in that place all are known to each. He explains to him the motions of the stars around him; not from conjectures, but, versed in the knowledge of all things, he gladly inducts him into the arcana of nature.
If you will believe those who have looked more deeply into the truth, our whole life is a punishment.
For those who sail this sea so stormy, so exposed to every tempest, there is no harbor except death.
He now enjoys a serene and cloudless heaven. From this humble and low abode, he has sped swiftly into that region, wherever it may be, where souls, freed from their chains, are received into the abode of the blest. He now roams about at will, and beholds with supremest delight all that is good in the universe.... He has not left us; he has gone before.
DE PROVIDENTIA SIVE QUARE ALIQUA INCOMMODA BONIS VIRIS ACCIDANTCUM PROVIDENTIA SIT.
Note:—This monograph is addressed to the same Lucilius, procurator of Sicily, to whom Seneca also dedicates his letters and his Problems in Physics. The date of composition is not known, but it probably belongs to the later years of the author’s life. The opening sentences seem to make it a part of a larger work on ethics, or rather of a theodicy, which was either never completed or has not come down to us. This is a serious loss both to us and to Seneca: to us, because such a work would doubtless have placed before us a complete theory of human conduct as conceived by a man who was thoroughly conversant with the motives that dominate men; to Seneca, because it would in all probability have explained if not justified some of the inconsistencies that have so sadly marred his career. Indeed the fundamental proposition of the essay is inconsistent, since the conclusion does not follow from the premises. For if the patient endurance of tribulation is the supreme test of a good man, how is he justified in avoiding that test, as our author proposes, by taking his own life?