SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

EPISTLE LXXIV.
governed country, and good parents, are to be
reckoned as goods ; but you cannot see these dear
objects in danger and be yourself at ease. Your
calm will be disturbed by a siege conducted against
your country, by the death of your children, or by
the enslaving of your parents." I will first state
what we Stoics usually re ply a to these objectors,
and then will add what additional answer should, in
my opinion, be given.
The situation is entirely different in the case of
o-oods whose loss entails some hardship substituted
in their place for example, when good health is
;
impaired there is a change to ill-health ;
when the
eye is put out, we are visited with blindness ;
we
not only lose our speed when our leg-muscles are
cut, but infirmity takes the place of speed. But no
such danger is involved in the case of the goods to
which we referred a moment ago. And why
? If I
have lost a good friend, I have no false friend whom
I must endure in his place ; nor if I have buried a
dutiful son, must I face in exchange
unfilial conduct.
In the second place, this does not mean to me the
taking-off of a friend or of a child ;
it is the mere
taking-off of their bodies. But a good can be lost in
only one way, by changing into what is bad ;
and
this is
impossible according to the law of nature,
because every virtue, and every work of virtue,
abides uncorrupted. Again, even if friends have
perished, or children of approved goodness who fulfil
their father's prayers for them, there is
something
that can fill their place.
Do you ask what this is ?
It is that which had made them good in the first
place, namely, virtue. Virtue suffers no space in us
to be it
unoccupied takes possession of the whole
;
soul and removes all sense of loss. It alone is
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