Philosophical Nobility. Seneca, Epistles 5.44.3-5

Seneca encourages Lucilius to pursue philosophy without thinking himself less than the great philosophers. Philosophy consists in expressing noble character, which for Seneca means cultivating virtue without regard to fortune. Anyone can cultivate virtue and become noble thereby, no matter the condition of their birth or the status conferred on them by society. A good philosophical character is not complacent because of success, nor dismayed by failure, and it does not take shame or glory from its ancestors, who cannot be finally responsible for it anymore than it for them. Whenever we do noble deeds, we show our kinship with others who have done such things, though they be not blood relations.

Patricius Socrates non fuit; Cleanthes aquam traxit et rigando horto locavit manus; Platonem non accepit nobilem philosophia sed fecit: quid est quare desperes his te posse fieri parem? Omnes hi maiores tui sunt, si te illis geris dignum; geres autem, si hoc protinus tibi ipse persuaseris, a nullo te nobilitate superari. Omnibus nobis totidem ante nos sunt; nullius non origo ultra memoriam iacet. Platon ait neminem regem non ex servis esse oriundum, neminem non servum ex regibus. Omnia ista longa varietas miscuit et sursum deorsum fortuna versavit.

Quis est generosus? ad virtutem bene a natura compositus. Hoc unum intuendum est: alioquin si ad vetera revocas, nemo non inde est ante quod nihil est. A primo mundi ortu usque in hoc tempus perduxit nos ex splendidis sordidisque alternata series. Non facit nobilem atrium plenum fumosis imaginibus; nemo in nostram gloriam vixit nec quod ante nos fuit nostrum est: animus facit nobilem, cui ex quacumque condicione supra fortunam licet surgere.

Socrates was no patrician. Cleanthes drew his own water, and irrigated his garden with his own hands. Philosophy did not receive Plato as a noble, but made him one, instead. Why ever would you lose hope of your own ability to become a peer to these men? They are all ancestors for you, if you do work worthy of them. You will do such work, if only you can first persuade yourself that none has surpassed your own nobility. All of us carry the prospect of many who came before us. None of these ancestors has an origin beyond the reach of memory. No true king shall ever rise except from the stock of slaves, Plato says, and every true slave must come from a line of kings. All these outcomes are mixed for us by the enduring variety of our experience, as fortune turns the high into low, and vice versa.

Who is truly well-born? The man nature forms well for virtue. This one thing you must know: no matter how you inquire into antiquity, there is no person there before whom nothing existed. From the first dawn of the world to this day, a series of splendid and sordid ancestors has led us forth into the light. The hall full of smoky images does not make our nobility (†). Nobody has lived to grant us glory, nor is anything that happened before us properly ours. Our own mind makes us noble, and it can rise above fortune in any condition, from any ancestry at all.

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(†) Noble Romans would keep wax death-masks of their ancestors, displayed in the halls of their dwellings and donned as part of public funerals (where the great deeds of the past were remembered, along with the humans responsible for them). Over time, these images gathered smoke and dust; hence Seneca describes them as fumosi.