SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

EPISTLE LXXVIII.
you relieved from feeling it, if you endure it like a
woman ? Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a
retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings
attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our
backs. "But the trouble is serious.'' What? Is it
for this purpose that we are strong, that we may
have light burdens to bear ? Would you have your
illness long-drawn-out, or would you have it quick
and short ? If it is long, it means a respite, allows
you a period for resting yourself, bestows upon you
the boon of time in plenty as it arises, so it must
;
also subside. A short and rapid illness will do one
of two things
: it will quench or be quenched. And
what difference does it make whether it is not or
I am not ? In either case there is an end of pain.
This, too, will help to turn the mind aside to
thoughts of other things and thus to depart from
pain. Call to mind what honourable or brave deeds
you have done consider the ;
good side of your own
life. a Run over in your memory those things which
admired. Then think of all
you have particularly
the brave men who have conquered pain
: of him
who continued to read his book as he allowed the
cutting out of varicose veins of him who
;
did not
cease to smile, though that very smile so enraged
his torturers that they tried upon him every instrument
of their cruelty.
If pain can be conquered by
a smile, will it not be conquered by reason ? You
may tell me now of whatever you like of colds,
hard coughing-spells that bring up parts of our
entrails, fever that parches our very vitals, thirst,
limbs so twisted that the joints protrude in different
directions ; yet worse than these are the stake, the
rack, the red-hot plates, the instrument that reopens
wounds while the wounds themselves are still swollen
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