SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

EPISTLE LXXXI.
in order that I
may perform a most pleasant and
beautiful act ;
I feel grateful, not because it profits
me, but because it pleases me. And, to prove the
truth of this to you,
I declare that even if I
may
not be grateful without seeming ungrateful, even if
I am able to return a benefit only by an act which
resembles an injury even
; so, I shall strive in the
utmost calmness of spirit toward the purpose which
honour demands, in the very midst of disgrace. No
one, I think, rates virtue higher or is more consecrated
to virtue than he who has lost his reputation
for being a good man in order to keep from
losing the approval of his conscience. Thus, as I
have said, your being grateful is more conducive to
your own good than to your neighbour's good. For
while your neighbour has had a common, everyday
experience, namely, receiving back the gift which
he had bestowed, you have had a great experience
which is the outcome of an utterly happy condition
of soul, to have felt gratitude. For if wickedness
makes men unhappy and virtue makes men blest,
and if it is a virtue to be grateful, then the return
which you have made is only the customary thing,
but the thing to which you have attained is priceless,
the consciousness of gratitude, which comes
only to the soul that is divine and blessed. The
opposite feeling to this, however, is immediately
attended by the greatest un happiness no
; man,
if he be ungrateful,
wr
ill be unhappy
in the future.
I allow him no day of grace ;
he is
unhappy
forthwith.
Let us therefore avoid being ungrateful, not for
the sake of others, but for our own sakes. When
we do wrong, only the least and lightest portion of
it flows back upon our neighbour ;
the worst and, if
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