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Monday 30 August 2010

Death glorified Seneca and made one generation forget his poses and his inconsistencies. Like all Stoics he underestimated the power and value of feeling and passion, exaggerated the worth and reliability of reason, and trusted too much to a nature in whose soil grow all the flowers of evil as well as of good. But he made Stoicism human, brought it down livably within the scope of men, and formed it into a spacious vestibule to Christianity. His pessimism, his condemnation of the immorality of his time, his counsel to return anger with kindness, and his preoccupation with death made Tertullian call him “ours,” and led Augustine to exclaim, “What more could a Christian say than this pagan has said?” He was not a Christian; but at least he asked for an end to slaughter and lechery, called men to a simple and decent life, and reduced the distinctions between freeman, freedman, and slave to “mere titles born of ambition or of wrong.” It was a slave in Nero’s court, Epictetus, who profited most from his teaching. Nerva and Trajan were in some measure molded by his writings and inspired by his example to conscientious and humanitarian statesmanship. To the end of antiquity and through the Middle Ages he remained popular; and when the rebirth came Petrarch placed him next to Virgil and upon Seneca’s prose devotedly modeled his own. Montaigne’s brother-in-law translated him into French, and Montaigne quoted him as fondly as Seneca quoted Epicurus. Emerson read him again and again and became an American Seneca. There are few original ideas in him; but that may be forgiven, for in philosophy all truth is old, and only error is original. With all his faults he was the greatest of Rome’s philosophers and, at least in his books, one of the wisest and kindliest of men. Next to Cicero he was the most lovable hypocrite in history. Will Durant

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