What this state of weakness really is, when the mind halts between two opinions without any strong inclination towards either good or evil, I shall be better able to show you piecemeal than all at once. What you desire, to be undisturbed, is a great thing, nay, the greatest thing of all, and one which raises a man almost to the level of a god. "You are able to please yourself," he answered, "my half pint of blood is in your power: for, as for burial, what a fool you must be if you suppose that I care whether I rot above ground or under it." There are many miracle formulas, and magnificent gurus and coaches, but the truth is that there are no shortcuts. But why should it not? This is why we say that nothing befalls the wise man which he did not expectwe do not make him exempt from the chances of human life, but from its mistakes, nor does everything happen to him as he wished it would, but as he thought it would: now his first thought was that his purpose might meet with some resistance, and the pain of disappointed wishes must affect a man's mind less severely if he has not been at all events confident of success. Two millennia before Holocaust survivor and humanitarian Viktor Frankl proffered his hard-earned conviction that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, Seneca writes: Nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it. The letter begins with Serenus "taking stock . - Seneca. If any one doubts the happiness of Diogenes, he would doubt whether the position of the immortal gods was one of sufficient happiness, because they have no farms or gardens, no valuable estates let to strange tenants, and no large loans in the money market. Many men spend their lives in exactly the same fashion, which one may call a state of restless indolence. Seneca's "On Tranquillity of Mind" is a profound examination of the nature of the mental realm . "Now let us make for Campania: now I am sick of rich cultivation: let us see wild regions, let us thread the passes of Bruttii and Lucania: yet amid this wilderness one wants some thing of beauty to relieve our pampered eyes after so long dwelling on savage wastes: let us seek Tarentum with its famous harbour, its mild winter climate, and its district, rich enough to support even the great hordes of ancient times. Well, but see how each of them endured his fate, and if they endured it bravely, long in your heart for courage as great as theirs; if they died in a womanish and cowardly manner, nothing was lost: either they deserved that you should admire their courage, or else they did not deserve that you should wish to imitate their cowardice: for what can be more shameful than that the greatest men should die so bravely as to make people cowards. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. Seneca, translated here by classics scholar Moses Hadas, admonishes against the trap of power and prestige: We are all chained to fortune: the chain of one is made of gold, and wide, while that of another is short and rusty. There are no comments. Bohn's Classical Library Edition; London, George Bell and Sons, 1900; Scanned and digitized by Google from a copy maintained by the University of Virginia. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your The square at the lower left stretches or shrinks the entire grid, but keeps the number of rows the same. Thus, it is never possible for so many outlets to be closed against your ambition that more will not remain open to it: but see whether the whole prohibition does not arise from your own fault. nay, he went away from me as a free man." probably be peeved if someone else posted them and claimed that they had done the proofreading work. What excuses can you find for a man who is eager to buy bookcases of ivory and citrus wood, to collect the works of unknown or discredited authors, and who sits yawning amid so many thousands of books, whose backs and titles please him more than any other part of them? The Greeks call this calm steadiness of mind euthymia, and Democritus's treatise upon it is excellently written: I call it peace of mind: for there is no necessity for translating so exactly as to copy the words of the Greek idiom: the essential point is to mark the matter under discussion by a name which ought to have the same meaning as its Greek name, though perhaps not the same form. Keeping a tranquil mind has been one of the greatest desires for humans, but one that seemingly few achieve. It will sprout out, and do the best it can, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her abiding ode to perseverance. This would be more fittingly answered in a coherent work designed to prove that a Providence does preside over the universe, and that God concerns himself with us. Reflect, then, how much less a grief it is never to have had any money than to have lost it: we shall thus understand that the less poverty has to lose, the less torment it has with which to afflict us: for you are mistaken if you suppose that the rich bear their losses with greater spirit than the poor: a wound causes the same amount of pain to the greatest and the smallest body. So deeply has this evil of being guided by the opinion of others taken root in us, that even grief, the simplest of all emotions, begins to be counterfeited. Each page is in a separate file. How large a part of mankind never think of storms when about to set sail? He is not able to serve in the army: then let him become a candidate for civic honours: must he live in a private station? We must take a higher view of all things, and bear with them more easily: it better becomes a man to scoff at life than to lament over it. Some suffer from fickleness, continually changing their goals and yet always . Our ancestors, too, forbade any new motion to be made in the Senate after the tenth hour. If I am not mistaken, it is a royal attribute among so many misers, sharpers, and robbers, to be the one man who cannot be injured. There comes now a part of our subject which is wont with good cause to make one sad and anxious: I mean when good men come to bad ends; when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompeius and Cicero to offer their necks to the swords of their own followers, when the great Cato, that living image of virtue, falls upon his sword and rips up both himself and the republic, one cannot help being grieved that Fortune should bestow her gifts so unjustly: what, too, can a good man hope to obtain when he sees the best of men meeting with the worst fates. De Tranquillitate Animi ( On the tranquility of the mind / on peace of mind) is a Latin work by the Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC-65 AD). The most we can do, he argues, is accept every card life deals us, be it winning or losing, as temporarily borrowed from the deck to which it must ultimately return. I then mark where the lines are located by creating a set of grids. (It should be noted that this review refers to the 2005 Penguin Great Ideas edition of ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE, translated by C. D. N. Costa, which includes the three essays, "On the Shortness of Life," "Consolation to Helvia," and "On Tranquility of Mind.") G. Merritt As some remedies benefit us by their smell as well as by their taste and touch, so virtue even when concealed and at a distance sheds usefulness around. The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Let us now consider in a general way how it may be attained: then you may apply as much as you choose of the universal remedy to your own case. While I am well satisfied with this, I am reminded of the clothes of a certain schoolboy, dressed with no ordinary care and splendour, of slaves bedecked with gold and a whole regiment of glittering attendants. "I did not think this would happen," and "Would you ever have believed that this would have happened?" You have filled public offices: were they either as important, as unlooked for, or as all-embracing as those of Sejanus? That is completely true even nowadays. Yet Socrates was in the midst of the city, and consoled its mourning Fathers, encouraged those who despaired of the republic, by his reproaches brought rich men, who feared that their wealth would be their ruin, to a tardy repentance of their avarice, and moved about as a great example to those who wished to imitate him, because he walked a free man in the midst of thirty masters. The same thing applies both to those who suffer from fickleness and continual changes of purpose, who always are fondest of what they have given up, and those who merely yawn and dawdle: add to these those who, like bad sleepers, turn from side to side, and settle themselves first in one manner and then in another, until at last they find rest through sheer weariness: in forming the habits of their lives they often end by adopting some to which they are not kept by any dislike of change, but in the practice of which old age, which is slow to alter, has caught them living: add also those who are by no means fickle, yet who must thank their dullness, not their consistency for being so, and who go on living not in the way they wish, but in the way they have begun to live. Neither ought we always to keep the mind strained to the same pitch, but it ought sometimes to be relaxed by amusement. "Livy himself styled the Alexandrian library, It was the duty of the executioner to fasten a hook to the neck of condemned criminals, by which they were dragged to the Tiber, The Romans reckoned twelve hours from sunrise to sunset. In all cases one should be careful in one's choice of men, and see whether they be worthy of our bestowing a part of our life upon them, or whether we shall waste our own time and theirs also: for some even consider us to be in their debt because of our services to them. We must humour our minds and grant them rest from time to time, which acts upon them like food, and restores their strength. . Influenced by Stoic philosophy, he wrote several philosophical treatises and 124 letters on moral issues, the Epistulae Morales (Moral Epistles). Among such continual topsy-turvy changes, unless you expect that whatever can happen will happen to you, you give adversity power against you, a power which can be destroyed by anyone who looks at it beforehand. To me, my dearest Serenus, Athenodorus seems to have yielded too completely to the times, to have fled too soon: I will not deny that sometimes one must retire, but one ought to retire slowly, at a foot's pace, without losing one's ensigns or one's honour as a soldier: those who make terms with arms in their hands are more respected by their enemies and more safe in their hands. Download On the Tranquility of the Mind Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC - AD 65), fully Lucius Annaeus Seneca and also known simply as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and--in one work--humorist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. What hardship can there be in returning to the place from whence one came? His friends were sad at being about to lose so great a man: "Why," asked he, "are you sorrowful? [15] De Tranquillitate Animi is one of a trio of dialogues to his friend Serenus, which includes De Constantia Sapientis and De Otio. "Silence is a lesson learned through life's many sufferings."-. When working all your life with a decent job and not extra time in-between, it is not living your life. Sort by: best. It will never be perfect, but it doesn't need to be. The letter known today as On the Tranquility of Mind is unique among the dialogues because it provides a genuine exchange between Serenus and Seneca. In chapter 11, Seneca introduces the figure of the Stoic sage, whose peace of mind (ataraxia) springs directly from a greater understanding of the world. This pragmatic approach was the perspective Roman society used to analyze their material reality Seneca Philosophus - Jula Wildberger 2014-08-20 Addressing classicists, philosophers, students, and general readers alike, this volume emphasizes the unity of Seneca's work and his originality as a translator of Stoic ideas in the literary forms of imperial Rome. then let him help his countrymen with silent counsel. The proofreading went pretty quickly and painlessly. They had become sick of life and of the world itself, and as all indulgences palled upon them they began to ask themselves the question, "How long are we to go on doing the same thing? The Stoic writings of the philosopher Seneca, who lived from c. 5 BC to AD 65, offer powerful insights into the art of living, the importance of reason and morality, and continue to provide . do you think that the example of one who can rest nobly has no value? Serenity may be the key: it implies a certain detachment from the details and pressures of our usual preoccupations with . Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind Seneca's dialogue with Serenus, more of an essay than a dialogue, is essentially comprised of the many tenets of Stoic morals and virtues. The code depends on the The archive.org website has a collection of scanned, copyright-free books (with raw OCR text for each page), including Of Peace of Mind (1900) by Seneca, translated by Aubrey Stewart. The founders of our laws appointed festivals, in order that men might be publicly encouraged to be cheerful, and they thought it necessary to vary our labours with amusements, and, as I said before, some great men have been wont to give themselves a certain number of holidays in every month, and some divided every day into play-time and work-time. Call good sense to your aid against difficulties: it is possible to soften what is harsh, to widen what is too narrow, and to make heavy burdens press less severely upon one who bears them skillfully. Cato is reproached with drunkenness: but whoever casts this in his teeth will find it easier to turn his reproach into a commendation than to prove that Cato did anything wrong: however, we ought not to do it often, for fear the mind should contract evil habits, though it ought sometimes to be forced into frolic and frankness, and to cast off dull sobriety for a while. A philosophicall treatise concerning the quietnes of the mind. size and horizontally aligned. Of Peace of Mind by Lucius Annaeus SENECA. The most we can do, he argues, is accept every card life deals us, be it winning or losing, as temporarily borrowed from the deck to which it must ultimately return. When you reflect how rare simplicity is, how unknown innocence, how seldom faith is kept, unless it be to our advantage, when you remember such numbers of successful crimes, so many equally hateful losses and gains of lust, and ambition so impatient even of its own natural limits that it is willing to purchase distinction by baseness, the mind seems as it were cast into darkness, and shadows rise before it as though the virtues were all overthrown and we were no longer allowed to hope to possess them or benefited by their possession.