On the Firmness of the Wise Man

Introduction

On the Firmness of the Wise Man.

This is a modern-English reading of Seneca's 'On the Firmness of the Wise Man', based on Aubrey Stewart’s 1889 English translation.

In the first century, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca lived through exile and rose to advise the emperor Nero. In this essay, addressed to his friend Serenus, he defends one of Stoicism’s boldest claims: that the wise man cannot be harmed by injury or insult. Pain, loss, and public humiliation remain possible. What stands beyond an enemy’s reach, Seneca argues, is the virtue that gives a life its worth. Through the example of Cato and the rivalries of Roman society, he explores what it means to preserve one’s character under the pressure of cruelty and contempt. He asks how far another person’s power can reach—and what within us can remain beyond it.

This is On the Firmness of the Wise Man.

Section One

I could truly say, Serenus, that the difference between the Stoics and the other schools of philosophy is as great as the difference between men and women. Each contributes an equal share to human society, but one is born to command, the other to obey. The other philosophers treat us gently and coax us, just as our familiar family doctors usually treat our bodies. They use the treatment we allow them to use, rather than the best and quickest one. The Stoics, however, take a manly course. They do not care whether it looks attractive to those beginning it. They care that it should lift us out of the world as quickly as possible and lead us to a height so far beyond the range of any missile that it is beyond the reach of Fortune herself.

"But the path we are asked to climb is steep and uneven." What of it? Can you reach the heights by a level path? Yet the ascent is not as sheer and precipitous as some think. Only the beginning has rocks and cliffs, with no apparent way through. Many hills, seen from far away, look abruptly steep and joined together because distance deceives our eyes. As we come closer, those very hills that our mistaken sight had made into one gradually open out. The places that looked so steep from a distance reveal a gentle slope.

Just now, when Marcus Cato was mentioned, you, whose mind recoils from injustice, were indignant that his own age understood him so little. It had placed below Vatinius a man who towered above both Caesar and Pompey. You thought it shameful that, when he spoke against a law in the Forum, his toga was torn from him. A rebellious crowd pushed him from hand to hand all the way from the Rostra to the Arch of Fabius, while he endured the abuse, the spitting, and all the other insults of that frenzied mob.

Section Two

I answered that you had good reason to be anxious for the commonwealth. Publius Clodius on one side, and Vatinius and all the worst scoundrels on the other, were putting it up for sale. Carried away by blind greed, they did not understand that, in selling it, they were selling themselves as well. But I told you to have no fear for Cato himself, because the wise man can receive neither injury nor insult. We have more certain grounds for saying that the immortal gods gave us Cato as a model of the wise man than for saying that they gave Ulysses or Hercules to earlier ages. Our Stoics have declared those two to be wise men, unconquered by hardship, contemptuous of pleasure, and above every terror.

Cato did not kill wild beasts, whose pursuit is the business of hunters and country people. He did not destroy fabulous creatures with fire and sword. Nor did he live in an age when people could believe that one man's shoulders could support the heavens. His age had cast off its belief in antiquated superstitions and brought knowledge of the material world to its highest point. In that age, he had to struggle against ambition, that monster with many heads, and against a limitless hunger for power that even the whole world, divided among three men, could not satisfy.

He alone stood against the vices of an exhausted state, collapsing under its own weight. He held up the falling commonwealth as far as one man's hand could hold it. At last his support was withdrawn, and he shared the collapse that he had kept at bay for so long. He perished with that from which it would have been impious to separate him. For Cato did not outlive freedom, and freedom did not outlive Cato. Do you think the people could do any wrong to such a man when they stripped him of his praetorship or his toga, or splashed his sacred head with the filthy contents of their mouths? The wise man is safe. No injury or insult can touch him.

Section Three

I think I can see your temper rising and boiling over. You are about to exclaim: "These are the claims that rob your maxims of all authority. You promise great things that I would not even wish for, much less believe possible. Then, after all your bold words, you say that the wise man is not poor, yet admit that he often lacks servants, shelter, and food. You say that the wise man is not mad, yet admit that he sometimes loses his reason, talks nonsense, and is driven to the wildest actions by the force of his disorder.

"When you say that the wise man cannot be a slave, you do not deny that he will be sold, obey orders, and perform menial work at his master's command. So, for all your proud looks, you come down to everyone else's level and merely give things different names. That is why I suspect that something similar lies hidden in this maxim, which at first seems so beautiful and noble: that the wise man can receive neither injury nor insult.

"There is a great difference between saying that the wise man is beyond feeling resentment and saying that he is beyond receiving injury. If you say he will bear injury calmly, that gives him no special privilege. He has developed a very common quality, patience, which is learned by long endurance of wrong itself. But if you say that he can never receive an injury, meaning that no one will try to do him one, then I will abandon every occupation in my life and become a Stoic."

My aim has not been to decorate the wise man with imaginary honors made of words, but to raise him to a position where no injury can reach him. "What? Will no one tease him or try to wrong him?" Nothing on earth is so sacred that it is safe from sacrilege. Yet holy things remain on high, even though men strike at a greatness far above them with no hope of reaching it. To be invulnerable is not to be never struck, but to be never wounded. I will show you that the wise man belongs in this class.

Can we doubt that strength never overcome in battle is more dependable than strength never challenged? Untested power cannot be trusted, while a firmness that throws back every attack rightly earns the greatest trust. In the same way, the wise man is greater if no injury hurts him than if none is offered to him. I would call a man brave if war cannot subdue him and the enemy's violence cannot frighten him, not if he enjoys luxurious ease among an idle people. I say, then, that the wise man is invulnerable to every injury. It does not matter how many darts are thrown at him, since none can pierce him.

Some stones are so hard that steel cannot penetrate them. Adamant can be neither cut, broken, nor ground down, but blunts every tool used against it. Some substances cannot be destroyed by fire: surrounded by flames, they still keep their hardness and their shape. Some tall, jutting cliffs break the sea's waves and, though lashed by them for centuries, show no trace of their fury. In just the same way, the wise man's mind is firm and gains such strength that it is as safe from injury as any of these things I have named.

Section Four

"What then? Will no one try to injure the wise man?" Yes, someone will try, but the injury will not reach him. So great a distance separates him from contact with his inferiors that no evil impulse can keep its power to harm until it reaches him. Even when powerful men, raised to high office and strengthened by the obedience of their followers, try to injure him, all their darts fall short of his wisdom. They are like missiles shot upward from bows or catapults: they may rise so high that they disappear from sight, but they fall back without reaching the heavens.

Do you suppose that, when that foolish king darkened the daylight with a multitude of arrows, any one of them entered the sun? Or that, when he threw his chains into the sea, he could reach Neptune? Sacred things escape the hands of men. Those who destroy temples and melt down statues do no injury to the godhead. In the same way, anyone who tries to treat the wise man with impertinence, insolence, or contempt does so in vain.

"It would be better," you say, "if no one wished to do so." You are wishing for the whole human race to be harmless, and that can hardly be. Besides, those who would benefit if such wrongs were not done are the people who would do them, not the man who could not suffer from them even if they were done. Indeed, perhaps wisdom is best displayed in calmness amid annoyances, just as a general gives the greatest proof of his strength in weapons and men by remaining calm and confident in the middle of enemy territory.

Section Five

If you agree, my Serenus, let us distinguish injury from insult. Injury is naturally the more serious; insult is less important and troubles only those who are thin-skinned, since it angers people but does not wound them. Yet people's minds are so weak that many think nothing is more bitter than insult. You will find slaves who would rather be flogged than slapped, and who think lashes and death easier to bear than insulting words. We have reached such a pitch of absurdity that we suffer not only from pain, but from the idea of pain. We are like children terrified by darkness, misshapen masks, and distorted faces. They burst into tears at names unpleasant to their ears, at movements of our fingers, and at other things from which, in ignorance, they shrink with an unfounded shudder.

The aim of injury is to do evil to someone. But wisdom leaves no room for evil. In its eyes, the only evil is moral baseness, and baseness cannot enter a place already filled by virtue and honor. If there can be no injury without evil, and no evil without baseness, and baseness can find no place in a man already filled with honor, then no injury can reach the wise man. For if injury means suffering some evil, and the wise man can suffer no evil, it follows that no injury takes effect upon him.

Every injury diminishes what it affects. No one can suffer an injury without losing something: some part of his dignity, some part of his body, or something external to himself. But the wise man can lose nothing. He has invested everything in himself and entrusted nothing to Fortune. His property is secure. He is content with virtue, which needs no chance additions and therefore can neither be increased nor diminished. Virtue has reached the highest point and has no room for anything further. Fortune can take away only what she has given. But Fortune does not give virtue, and therefore she does not take it away.

Virtue is free, inviolable, immovable, unshakable. She is so hardened against misfortunes that they cannot bend her, much less overcome her. She looks on without flinching while tortures are prepared for her. Her expression does not change, whether misery or pleasure is offered to her. The wise man, then, can lose nothing whose loss he will feel, for he belongs to virtue alone, and he can never be taken from her. He enjoys everything else at Fortune's pleasure. But who grieves at losing what is not his own? If injury cannot harm anything that truly belongs to the wise man, because all of it remains safe while his virtue remains safe, then it is impossible to do an injury to a wise man.

Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, captured Megara. When he asked the philosopher Stilpo whether he had lost anything, Stilpo answered, "No. I carry all my property with me." Yet his inheritance had been given over to plunder, his daughters had been violated by the enemy, and his country had fallen under foreign rule. The man putting the question was the king himself, seated high on his throne and surrounded by the spears of his victorious soldiers. Yet Stilpo struck the victory out of the king's hands. He proved that, although the city had been taken, he himself was not only unconquered but unharmed, because he carried with him those true goods upon which no one can lay hands.

He did not regard the things being plundered and carried off in every direction as his own. He thought of them only as things that come and go at Fortune's whim. That was why he had not loved them as possessions of his own. For our hold on everything that comes to us from outside ourselves is slippery and insecure.

Section Six

Now consider whether any thief, false accuser, overbearing neighbor, or rich man enjoying the power that comes with a childless old age could injure this man. Neither war nor an enemy who practiced the noble art of battering down city walls could take anything from him. Swords flashed on every side. Plundering soldiers ran riot. Flames, blood, and ruins filled the fallen city, and temples crashed down upon their gods. Amid it all, one man was at peace. So you need not call this a reckless boast. If my words count for nothing, I will give you someone to guarantee them.

Indeed, you might hardly believe that any man could have such constancy or greatness of mind. But here is a man who comes forward to prove that you need not doubt it. Someone of merely human birth can rise above human necessities. He can calmly watch pains, losses, diseases, wounds, and great upheavals of nature roaring around him. He can bear adversity calmly and prosperity moderately, neither yielding to the one nor trusting the other. He can remain the same through every change of fortune and regard nothing as his own except himself, and even himself only in his better part.

"Look," he says, "I am here to prove this to you. Under the direction of that destroyer of so many cities, walls may shake beneath the battering ram. Lofty towers may suddenly fall, undermined by galleries and hidden tunnels. Siege mounds may rise as high as the highest citadel. Yet no siege engine can be found that will shake a firmly established mind. I have just crawled out of the ruins of my house. With fires blazing all around me, I escaped from the flames through blood. What has happened to my daughters, and whether their fate is worse than their country's, I do not know.

"I am alone and old. I see everything around me in the enemy's hands, yet I declare that my property is whole and untouched. I have, I hold, everything of mine that I have ever had. You have no reason to think of me as conquered or yourself as my conqueror. Your fortune has overcome mine. As for those fleeting possessions that change their owners, I do not know where they are. What belongs to me is with me, and always will be.

"I see rich men who have lost their estates; lustful men who have lost their loves, the courtesans they cherished at the cost of so much shame; ambitious men who have lost the senate and the law courts, those places set apart for the public display of men's vices; and moneylenders who have lost their account books, in which greed vainly enjoyed an unreal wealth. But I possess everything whole and uninjured. Leave me. Go and question those who are weeping and lamenting over the loss of their money, who are baring their chests to drawn swords in its defense, or who are fleeing the enemy with heavy pockets."

You see, then, Serenus, that the perfect man, full of human and divine virtues, can lose nothing. His goods are surrounded by strong, impassable walls. You cannot compare them with the walls of Babylon, which Alexander entered, or the defenses of Carthage and Numantia, captured by one and the same hand. Nor can you compare them with Rome's Capitol and citadel, which bear the marks of their conquerors' insults. The ramparts protecting the wise man are safe from fire and hostile invasion. They offer no way through. They are lofty, impregnable, divine.

Section Seven

You have no reason to say, as you often do, that this wise man of ours is nowhere to be found. We do not invent him as an imaginary glory of the human race, or conjure up the mighty shadow of a falsehood. We have shown men just as we describe him, and we will show them again. He may indeed be uncommon, appearing only at long intervals, for what is great and rises above the ordinary is seldom produced. Yet Marcus Cato himself, whose name began this discussion, was a man who, I think, even surpassed our model.

Besides, whatever does harm must be stronger than what is harmed. But wickedness is not stronger than virtue. Therefore the wise man cannot be harmed. Only bad men try to injure good men. Good men are at peace with one another; bad men are equally harmful to the good and to one another. If a man cannot be harmed by someone weaker than himself, if a bad man is weaker than a good one, and if the good have no injury to fear except from someone unlike themselves, then no injury takes effect upon the wise man. By now I need not remind you that no one but the wise man is good.

"If Socrates was unjustly condemned," our opponent says, "he received an injury." Here we must remember that someone can do me an injury without my receiving it. Suppose someone stole something from my country house and left it in my house in town. He would have committed theft, yet I would have lost nothing. A man may become a wrongdoer without doing any actual harm. If he sleeps with his own wife as though she were another woman, he commits adultery, but his wife does not. If he gives me poison, and the poison loses its strength when mixed with food, administering it makes him a criminal even though he has done no harm.

A man is no less a robber because his sword catches in his victim's clothes and misses its mark. All crimes, as far as their criminality is concerned, are complete before the actual deed is accomplished. Some crimes have such a nature, and depend on such conditions, that the first part can happen without the second, though the second cannot happen without the first. Let me explain what I mean. I can move my feet without running, but I cannot run without moving my feet. I can be in the water without swimming, but if I swim, I must be in the water.

The matter we are discussing is of the same kind. If I have received an injury, someone must have done it to me. But if someone has done me an injury, it does not follow that I must have received one. Many circumstances may intervene to avert it. Chance may strike the hand aiming at us, or a dart may swerve aside after it has been thrown. In the same way, injuries of every kind can be turned back or intercepted on their way by particular circumstances, so that they are done but not received.

Section Eight

Moreover, justice cannot suffer anything unjust, because opposites cannot exist together. But an injury can only be done unjustly. Therefore, an injury cannot be done to the wise man. Nor should you wonder that no one can do him an injury, for no one can do him a good service either. The wise man lacks nothing that he could accept as a gift, and the bad man can offer nothing worthy of his acceptance. Before he can give it, he must possess it, and he possesses nothing that the wise man would rejoice to receive.

Consequently, no one can do either harm or good to the wise man, because divine things neither need help nor can be hurt. And the wise man is near, indeed very near, to the gods. He resembles a god in every respect except that he is mortal. He presses forward toward a life that is lofty, well ordered, and without fear; that moves in a regular and harmonious course; that is tranquil and does good, made for the good of mankind, and useful both to itself and to others. As he advances toward this life, he will neither long nor weep for anything low and groveling.

The man who trusts in reason and passes through human affairs with a godlike mind can receive injury from no direction. Do you suppose I mean only that no man can injure him? He cannot receive an injury even from Fortune. Whenever she contends with virtue, she always retreats defeated. Consider the greatest terror of all, beyond which angry laws and the cruelest masters have nothing left to threaten us with, and in which Fortune's dominion is contained. If we accept it with an undisturbed and tranquil mind, if we know that death is not an evil and therefore is not an injury either, we shall endure everything else far more easily.

These other things include losses, pains, disgraces, changes of home, bereavements, and partings. They do not overwhelm the wise man even if they all fall upon him at once. Still less does he grieve when they attack him one by one. And if he calmly bears the injuries of Fortune, how much more calmly will he bear those of powerful men, whom he knows to be Fortune's hands?

Section Nine

He therefore endures everything in the same spirit in which he endures winter cold and harsh weather, fevers, diseases, and other accidents of chance. Nor does he think so highly of any man as to suppose that he acts with a settled purpose, for that belongs to the wise man alone. All other men have no plans, only plots, deceits, and irregular impulses of the mind. He considers these no different from pure accident. And what depends on pure accident cannot rage around us by design.

He also reflects that the greatest sources of injury lie in the means used to put us in danger: an accuser bribed to lie, a false charge, the anger of powerful men stirred up against us, and the other forms of robbery practiced in civilized life. Another common kind of injury occurs when a man loses some profit or prize for which he has long been angling. An inheritance that he has taken great pains to secure is left to someone else. Or he loses the favor of some noble household from which he has made great gains. The wise man escapes all this, because he does not know what it is to live for hope or for fear.

Add to this that no one receives an injury without being moved: the feeling of it disturbs him. Yet the man who is free from error has no such disturbance. He is master of himself and enjoys a deep, tranquil peace of mind. If an injury reaches him, it moves and rouses him. But the wise man is free from anger, which arises from the appearance of injury. He could not be free from anger unless he were also free from injury, which he knows cannot be done to him. This is why he is so upright and cheerful, why he is lifted up by constant joy. Yet he is so far from avoiding encounters with circumstances or with men that he uses injury itself to test himself and put his own virtue to the proof.

Let us, I beg you, give this argument a favorable hearing. Listen with impartial ears and minds as the wise man is made exempt from injury. This takes nothing away from your insolence, your greediest lusts, your blind rashness, or your pride. We seek this freedom for the wise man without interfering with your vices. We do not strive to prevent you from doing an injury. We strive to enable him to place all injuries beneath himself and protect himself from them through his own greatness of mind.

In the same way, many men have won victory in the sacred games by patiently enduring their opponents' blows and so wearing them out. Think of the wise man as belonging to this class of men: those who, through long and faithful practice, have acquired the strength to endure all the violence of their enemies and exhaust it.

Section Ten

Now that we have discussed the first part of our subject, let us move on to the second. Here we will prove that the wise man cannot be insulted. Some of our arguments will be our own, but most are familiar teachings of the Stoics. There is a lesser kind of injury, something to complain of rather than avenge, which the laws have also considered unworthy of any special punishment. The feeling it arouses comes from a smallness of mind that shrinks from any act or deed that treats it with disrespect.

"He did not admit me to his house today, although he admitted others. When I spoke, he either turned away haughtily or laughed openly." Or: "At dinner he did not place me on the middle couch, the place of honor, but on the lowest one." These and other matters of the same kind can only be called the whining of an oversensitive spirit. They chiefly affect those brought up in luxury and prosperity. People weighed down by worse evils have no time to notice such things. Excessive idleness leaves dispositions that are naturally weak and womanish, and prone to fancies for lack of real injuries, disturbed by these things, most of which arise from misunderstanding.

The man affected by insult therefore shows that he possesses neither good sense nor trust. He takes it as certain that he is being scorned, and this vexation brings with it a feeling of degradation as he diminishes himself and takes a lower place. Yet the wise man is scorned by no one. He knows his own greatness and reminds himself that he allows no one such power over him. As for this feeling, which I would call uneasiness of mind rather than distress, he does not overcome it. He never even feels it.

There are other things that strike the wise man, though they cannot shake his principles: bodily pain and weakness, the loss of friends and children, and the ruin of his country in war. I do not say that he fails to feel these things. We do not attribute to him the hardness of stone or iron. There is no virtue that is not conscious of what it endures. What, then, does he do? He receives some blows, but after receiving them he rises above them, heals them, and brings them to an end. These more trivial things he does not even feel. He does not bring his usual fortitude in enduring evil to bear against them. He either takes no notice of them or thinks they deserve to be laughed at.

Section Eleven

Besides, most insults come from people who are haughty and arrogant, and who bear their prosperity badly. The wise man has something with which to repel this haughty passion: magnanimity, the noblest of all virtues. It passes over everything of this kind as though it were an unreal apparition in a dream or a vision of the night, with nothing substantial or true in it. At the same time, he reflects that all men are too low to venture to look down on what stands so far above them.

The Latin word contumelia is derived from the word contempt, because no one does this injury to another unless he regards him with contempt. And no one can treat his elders and betters with contempt, even if he does the things that contemptuous people usually do. Children strike their parents' faces. Infants tangle and tear their mother's hair, spit on her, expose before her what ought to be covered, and do not hesitate to use dirty language. Yet we call none of these things contemptuous. Why? Because the person doing them is not capable of showing contempt.

For the same reason, we are amused by the abusive jokes our slaves make about their masters. Their boldness is only given license to make fun of the guests if they begin with the master. The more contemptible and ridiculous each slave is, the more freedom he gives his tongue. Some men buy impudent slave boys for this purpose, cultivate their vulgarity, and send them to school so that they can deliver rehearsed slanders. We call these clever sayings, not insults. Yet what madness it is to be amused at one time and offended at another by the same thing; to call a phrase an outrage when a friend speaks it, and an amusing joke when a slave boy uses it!

Section Twelve

The wise man deals with all those whose childhood lasts beyond their youth, even after their hair has turned gray, in the same spirit in which we deal with boys. What do men gain from age when their minds retain every fault of childhood and time only makes their defects worse? They differ from children only in the size and appearance of their bodies. They are just as unsteady and capricious, eager for pleasure without discrimination, timid, and quiet through fear rather than through their natural disposition.

Can we say that such men differ from children because children are greedy for knucklebones, nuts, and copper coins, while men are greedy for gold, silver, and cities? Children play at being magistrates among themselves, imitating the purple-edged robe of office, the lictors' axes, and the judgment seat. Men play with the same things in earnest in the Campus Martius and the courts of justice. Children pile up sand on the seashore to make houses. Men, with an air of being busy with important affairs, pile up stones, walls, and roofs until they turn what was intended to protect the body into a danger to it.

Children and those more advanced in age make the same mistake, but the older people deal with different and more important things. The wise man is therefore quite justified in treating the affronts he receives from such men as jokes. Sometimes he corrects them as he would children, through pain and punishment. He does so, not because he has received an injury, but because they have done one, and so that they will do it no more. In the same way, we break in animals with blows. Yet we are not angry with them when they refuse to carry a rider. We restrain them so that pain may overcome their obstinacy.

Now, therefore, you know the answer to the question put to us: "If the wise man receives neither injury nor insult, why does he punish those who do these things?" He does not take revenge. He corrects them.

Section Thirteen

What, then, prevents you from believing that the wise man possesses this strength of mind, when you can see the same thing in others, though it comes from a different cause? What physician is angry with a mad patient? Who takes to heart the curses of a feverish patient denied cold water? In his dealings with all men, the wise man keeps the same attitude that the physician takes toward his patients. The physician does not disdain to handle their private parts when treatment is needed, to examine their solid and liquid waste, or to endure their reproaches when disease drives them into a frenzy.

The wise man knows that all those who strut about in purple-edged togas, looking healthy and sun-browned, are sick in mind. He regards them as ill and full of follies. He is therefore not angry if, in their sickness, they presume to behave somewhat impertinently toward their physician. In the same spirit in which he sets no value on their titles of honor, he sets little value on their acts of disrespect toward himself. His opinion of himself does not rise when a beggar pays court to him, and he does not consider it an affront if someone from the dregs of the people fails to return his greeting.

Likewise, he will not admire himself even if many rich men admire him. He knows that they are no different from beggars; indeed, they are even more wretched. Beggars want only a little, while rich men want a great deal. Again, he will not be moved if the King of the Medes, or Attalus, King of Asia, passes him in silence with a scornful air when he offers a greeting. He knows that such a man's position is no more enviable than that of someone in a great household whose duty is to keep the sick and mad servants in order.

Shall I be upset if one of those who does business at the temple of Castor, buying and selling worthless slaves, does not return my greeting—a man whose shops are crowded with throngs of the worst slaves? I think not. What good can there be in a man whose slaves are all bad men? Just as the wise man is indifferent to the courtesy or rudeness of such a man, so he is to that of a king.

"You own the Parthians and Bactrians," he says, "but they are men whom you keep in order through fear. They are people whose possession never allows you to unstring your bow. They are fierce enemies, offered for sale, and eagerly looking out for a new master." The wise man, then, will not be moved by an insult from any man. Although all men differ from one another, he regards them as alike because their folly is equal.

If he once lowered himself to the point of being affected by either injury or insult, he could never feel safe afterward, and safety is the special advantage of the wise man. He will not make the mistake of showing respect to the man who has done him an injury by admitting that he has received one. For it necessarily follows that a man disturbed by someone's scorn would value that same person's admiration.

Section Fourteen

Some men are so foolish that they imagine a woman can affront them. What does it matter who she is, how many slaves carry her litter, how heavily her ears are laden with jewels, or how soft her seat is? She remains the same thoughtless creature. Unless she has acquired knowledge and considerable learning, her desires are fierce and passionate. Some men are annoyed at being jostled by a servant who heats curling irons. They call it an insult when a great man's porter is slow to open the door, when the servant who announces visitors' names is proud, or when his chamberlain is disdainful.

What laughter such things can provide! How amused the mind can be when it compares the frantic follies of others with its own peace! "What then? Will the wise man refuse to approach a door guarded by a surly porter?" No. If he needs to go there, he will try the porter, however fierce he may be. He will tame him as one tames a dog by offering it food. Nor will he become angry at having to pay for admission. He will reflect that certain bridges also charge a toll, and pay his fee in the same way to whoever collects this revenue from admitting visitors. He knows that people buy whatever is offered for sale.

A man shows a poor spirit if he congratulates himself on having answered the porter insolently, broken his staff, forced his way into the master's presence, and demanded that the porter be whipped. Anyone who contends with another makes himself that man's rival. Before he can defeat him, he must put himself on the same level.

But what will the wise man do if he is slapped? He will do what Cato did when someone struck him in the face. Cato did not flare up and avenge the outrage. He did not even pardon it. He ignored it, showing greater generosity of spirit by refusing to acknowledge it than he would have shown by forgiving it.

We need not dwell on this. Everyone knows that the wise man and people in general do not judge in the same way any of the things considered good or evil. He pays no attention to what everyone else considers low or miserable. He does not follow the crowd's path. Just as the stars move along a path opposite to the earth's, he moves against everyone's prejudices.

Section Fifteen

Stop asking, then, "Will the wise man not suffer an injury if he is beaten, or if his eye is knocked out? Will he not suffer an insult if he is driven through the Forum by the filthy shouts of ruffians? What if, at a banquet at court, he is ordered away from the table to eat with slaves assigned to degrading duties? What if he is forced to endure anything else that could wound a proud spirit?"

However numerous or severe these hardships may be, they are all of the same kind. If small ones do not affect him, greater ones will not either. If a few do not affect him, neither will many. You use your own weakness to form an idea of his enormous strength of mind. Having considered how much suffering you could endure, you place the limit of the wise man's endurance a little beyond that. But his virtue has placed him in another region of the universe, with nothing in common with yours.

Gather together sufferings and everything that is hard to bear, or repulsive to hear or see. Their combined force will not overwhelm him. He will bear them all as he bears each one. Anyone who says that the wise man can bear this but cannot bear that, and sets limits on his greatness of spirit, is wrong. Fortune overcomes us unless she is entirely overcome.

Do not think that this is merely Stoic severity. Epicurus, whom you adopt as the patron of your laziness, and whom you imagine always to have taught softness, idleness, and pleasure, said, "Fortune seldom stands in a wise man's way." How close he came to a manly thought! Dare to speak more boldly, and clear her out of the way altogether!

Here is the wise man's house: small and plain, without bustle or splendor. No porters guard its threshold, arranging the crowd of visitors with an arrogance proportionate to their bribes. Yet Fortune cannot cross this open, unguarded threshold. She knows there is no room for her where nothing belongs to her.

Section Sixteen

Now if even Epicurus, who made more concessions to the body than anyone, speaks spiritedly about injuries, what in our Stoic teaching can seem beyond belief or beyond human nature? He says that the wise man can endure injuries. We say that, for him, they do not exist. There is no reason to declare this contrary to nature. We do not deny that being beaten or struck, or losing a limb, is unpleasant. But we say that none of these things is an injury. We do not take away the feeling of pain, but the name "injury," which cannot apply while our virtue remains unimpaired.

We shall see which of the two views is nearer the truth. Both agree in treating injury with contempt. You ask what difference there is between them? The same difference as between two very brave gladiators: one conceals his wound and stands his ground; the other turns toward the shouting crowd, makes them understand that his wound is nothing, and refuses to let them intervene on his behalf.

You need not think that our disagreement is about anything very great. The whole point, the one thing that concerns you, is what both schools urge you to do: despise injuries, and despise insults, which I might call the shadows and outlines of injuries. To despise insults takes no wise man, but only a sensible one, who can say to himself, "Do I deserve what is happening to me, or not? If I deserve it, it is not an insult but a judicial sentence. If I do not deserve it, the person who acts unjustly should blush, not I.

"And what is this thing called an insult? Someone has joked about my bald head, my weak eyes, my thin legs, or my short stature. What insult is there in telling me what everyone can see? In private we laugh at the very thing that makes us angry when it is said before a crowd. We deny others the freedom to say what we habitually say about ourselves. We enjoy jokes within the bounds of decency, but grow angry when they go too far."

Section Seventeen

Chrysippus says that a man became enraged when someone called him a sea sheep. We have seen Fidus Cornelius, the son-in-law of Ovid, weeping in the Senate house because Corbulo called him a plucked ostrich. Other abusive accusations, which damaged his character and way of life, had not disturbed his expression. At this ridiculous remark, he burst into tears. Such is the wretched weakness of the human mind when reason no longer guides it.

What about the way we take offense when someone imitates our speech or our walk, or mimics some defect in our body or pronunciation? As though another person's imitation could make these things more conspicuous than our own behavior already does! Some people will not hear of their age, their gray hair, or the other things people pray to live long enough to have. Others are tormented by taunts about their poverty. Yet anyone who conceals his poverty makes it a reproach to himself. If you freely admit it first, you take away the footing of those who would sneer or insult you politely. No one becomes a laughingstock if he begins by laughing at himself.

We are told that Vatinius, a man born to be both laughed at and hated, was a witty and clever joker. He made many jokes about his feet and his short neck. In this way he escaped the sarcasm of Cicero above all, and of his other enemies, of whom he had more than he had diseases. If a man who had forgotten how to blush through constant abuse could do this by sheer shamelessness, why should someone who has made progress in a gentleman's education and the study of philosophy not do the same?

Besides, spoiling the pleasure someone takes in insulting us is itself a kind of revenge. Such a person says, "Dear me, I suppose he did not understand." An insult succeeds through the victim's sensitivity and anger. In time, the person who insults others will sometimes meet his match. Someone will be found to avenge you too.

Section Eighteen

Among his overflowing vices, Gaius Caesar had a strange and insolent passion for branding everyone with some mark of ridicule, although he himself offered the most tempting target for mockery. There was his ugly pallor, a sign of madness; the savage glare of his eyes beneath an old woman's brow; his hideous, misshapen head, bald except for a few cherished hairs. There were also his bristly neck, his thin legs, and his monstrous feet. It would take forever to list all the insults he heaped on his parents and ancestors, and on people of every rank. I will mention those that brought about his ruin.

One of his close friends was Asiaticus Valerius, a proud-spirited man unlikely to bear another's insults quietly. At a drinking party, which amounted to a public assembly, Gaius loudly mocked the way this man's wife behaved in bed. Good gods! That a man should have to hear that the emperor knew such things! That the emperor should describe his adultery and his disappointment to the woman's husband, even without considering that the husband was a man of consular rank and his own friend!

Chaerea, the military tribune, had a voice that did not match his courage. It was weak and, unless you knew his achievements, might have made you suspicious. When he asked for the watchword, Gaius would give him "Venus" at one time and "Priapus" at another. He found various ways to accuse this fighting man of effeminate vice, while he himself wore transparent clothes, sandals, and jewelry. In this way he drove Chaerea to use his sword so that he would no longer have to ask for the watchword. Chaerea was the first of the conspirators to strike. With one blow he cut through the middle of Caligula's neck. Afterward many swords were thrust into his body by men avenging public or private injuries. But the man who had seemed least manly was the first to prove himself a man.

This same Gaius took everything as an insult, since those most eager to affront others are least able to bear affronts themselves. He was angry with Herennius Macer for greeting him as Gaius. Nor did the chief centurion of the triarii escape punishment for addressing him as Caligula. Born in camp and brought up as the child of the legions, he had long been called by that name. None was more familiar to the troops. By then, however, he regarded "Caligula" as a reproach and a disgrace.

Let wounded spirits take comfort in this thought: even if our easy temper has left an insult unavenged, someone will punish the insolent, proud, insulting man. He never confines these vices to one victim or one offensive act. Let us turn to the examples of men whose endurance we admire. Socrates took in good part the comedians' jokes about him, both in writing and on the stage. He laughed at them just as he laughed when his wife Xanthippe drenched him with dirty water. When Antisthenes was reproached because his mother was a barbarian and a Thracian, he answered that the mother of the gods also came from Mount Ida.

Section Nineteen

We should not become involved in quarrels and wrangling. We should withdraw far from them and disregard everything of this kind that thoughtless people do. Indeed, only thoughtless people do it. We should place the same value on the crowd's honors and its reproaches, neither hurt by one nor pleased by the other. Otherwise, through excessive fear of insults or weariness of them, we will neglect many essential things and abandon our duties in both public and private life. Sometimes we will even miss what would benefit us, tormented by this womanish distress at hearing something we dislike.

Sometimes, too, anger with powerful men will lead us to expose this weakness through reckless freedom of speech. But we are mistaken if we think freedom means putting up with nothing. Freedom means raising the mind above injuries and becoming someone whose pleasure comes from himself alone. It means separating oneself from external circumstances, so that life is not disturbed by fear of everyone's laughter and gossip. For if anyone can offer an insult, who is there who cannot?

The wise man and the man who wishes to become wise will use different remedies. Only those whose philosophical education is incomplete, and who still let public opinion guide them, would imagine that they must spend their lives amid insults and injuries. Yet everything becomes more bearable to those who are prepared for it. The nobler a man is by birth, reputation, or inheritance, the more bravely he should conduct himself. Let him remember that the tallest men stand in the front rank in battle.

He should bear insults, offensive language, marks of disgrace, and similar disfigurements as he would bear the enemy's shouts, or darts and stones thrown from a distance that rattle against his helmet without wounding him. He should regard injuries as wounds, some received on his armor and others on his body, which he endures without falling or even leaving his place in the ranks. Even if you are hard pressed and violently attacked, it is still shameful to give way. Hold the post nature has assigned you. You ask what that post is? It is to be a man.

The wise man has another kind of help, opposite to this. You are still struggling; he has already won. Do not fight against your own advantage. Until you have made your way to the truth, keep this hope alive in your minds. Be willing to welcome the news of a better life, and encourage it with your admiration and your prayers. It serves the commonwealth of humanity that someone should remain unconquered, someone over whom Fortune has no power.