"But it does not even need philosophy to enable us to despise poverty. Look at the poor: are they not often obviously happier than the rich? And the times are so changed that what we would now consider the poverty of an exile would then have been regarded as the patrimony of a prince. Protected by such precedents as those of Homer, and Zeno, and Menenius Agrippa, and Regulus, and Scipio, poverty becomes not only safe but even estimable.
"And if you make the objection that the ills which assail me are not exile only, or poverty only, but disgrace as well, I reply that the soul which is hard enough to resist one wound is invulnerable to all. If we have utterly conquered the fear of death, nothing else can daunt us. What is disgrace to one who stands above the opinion of the multitude? what was even a death of disgrace to Socrates, who by entering a prison made it cease to be disgraceful? Cato was twice defeated in his candidature for the praetorship and consulship: well, this was the disgrace of those honours, and not of Cato. No one can be despised by another until he has learned to despise himself. The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow, and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched. Such men inflict disgrace upon disgrace itself. Some indeed say that death is preferable to contempt; to whom I reply that he who is great when he falls is great in his prostration, and is no more an object of contempt than when men tread on the ruins of sacred buildings, which men of piety venerate no less than if they stood.
"On my behalf therefore, dearest mother; you have no cause for endless weeping: nor have you on your own. You cannot grieve for me on selfish grounds, in consequence of any personal loss to yourself; for you were ever eminently unselfish, and unlike other women in all your dealings with your sons, and you were always a help and a benefactor to them rather than they to you. Nor should you give way out of a regret and longing for me in my absence. We have often previously been separated, and, although it is natural that you should miss that delightful conversation, that unrestricted confidence, that electrical sympathy of heart and intellect that always existed between us, and that boyish glee wherewith your visits always affected me, yet, as you rise above the common herd of women in virtue, the simplicity, the purity of your life, you must abstain from feminine tears as you have done from all feminine follies. Consider how Cornelia, who had lost ten children by death, instead of wailing for her dead sons, thanked fortune that had made her sons Gracchi. Rutilia followed her son Cotta into exile so dearly did she love him, yet no one saw her shed a tear after his burial. She had shown her affection when it was needful, she restrained her sorrow when it was superflous. Imitate the example of these great women as you have imitated their virtues. I want you not to beguile your sorrow by amusements or occupations, but to conquer it. For you may now return to those philosophical studies in which you once showed yourself so apt a proficient, and which formerly my father checked. They will gradually sustain and comfort you in your hour of grief.
"And meanwhile consider how many sources of consolation already exist for you. My brothers are still with you; the dignity of Gallio, the leisure of Mela, will protect you; the ever-sparkling mirth of my darling little Marcus will cheer you up; the training of my little favourite Novatilla will be a duty which will assuage your sorrow. For your father's sake, too, though he is absent from you, you must moderate your lamentations. Above all, your sister--that truly faithful, loving, and high-souled lady, to whom I owe so deep a debt of affection for her kindness to me from my cradle until now,--she will yield you the fondest sympathy and the truest consolation.
"But since I know that after all your thoughts will constantly revert to me, and that none of your children will be more frequently before your mind than I,--not because they are less dear to you than I, but because it is natural to lay the hand most often upon the spot which pains,--I will tell you how you are to think of me. Think of me as happy and cheerful, as though I were in the midst of blessings; as indeed I am, while my mind, free from every care, has leisure for its own pursuits, and sometimes amuses itself with lighter studies, sometimes, eager for truth, soars upwards to the contemplation of its own nature, and the nature of the universe. It inquires first of all about the lands and their situation; then into the condition of the surrounding sea, its ebbings and flowings; then it carefully studies all this terror-fraught interspace between heaven and earth, tumultuous with thunders and lightnings, and the blasts of winds, and the showers of rain, and snow and hail; then, having wandered through all the lower regions, it bursts upwards to the highest things, and revels in the most lovely--spectacle of that which is divine, and, mindful of its own eternity, passes into all that hath been and all that shall be throughout all ages."
Such in briefest outline, and without any of that grace of language with which Seneca has invested it, is a sketch of the little treatise which many have regarded as among the most delightful of Seneca's works. It presents the picture of that grandest of all spectacles--
"A good man struggling with the storms of fate."
So far there was something truly Stoical in the aspect of Seneca's exile. But was this grand attitude consistently maintained? Did his little raft of philosophy sink under him, or did it bear him safely over the stormy waves of this great sea of adversity.