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.
---
(†)
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.