SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

EPISTLE LXXVIII.
desire are wearied and forsake us ;
then the stomach
becomes petulant, then the food which we craved
before becomes hateful. Our very wants die away.
But there is no bitterness in doing without that
which you have ceased to desire. Moreover, every
pain sometimes stops, or at any rate slackens ;
moreover, one may take precautions against its
return, and, when it threatens, may check it by
means of remedies. Every variety of pain has its
premonitory symptoms this is true, at any rate, of
;
pain that is habitual and recurrent. One can endure
the suffering which disease entails, if one has come to
regard its results with scorn. But do not of your
own accord make your troubles heavier to bear and
burden yourself with complaining. Pain is slight if
opinion has added nothing to it but
; if, on the
other hand, you begin to encourage yourself and say,
" It is
nothing, a trifling matter at most ; keep a
stout heart and it will soon cease" ;
then in thinking
it slight, you will make it slight. Everything
depends on opinion ; ambition, luxury, greed, hark
back to opinion. It is
according to opinion that we
suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced
himself that he is. I hold that we should do away
with complaint about past sufferings and with all
language like this " : None has ever been worse off
than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!
No one has thought that I shall recover. How
often have my family bewailed me, and the physicians
given me over! Men who are placed on the rack
are not torn asunder with such "
agony However,
!
even if all this is true, it is over and gone.
What
benefit is there in reviewing past sufferings, and
in being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy
? Besides, every one adds much to his own
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