SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

EPISTLE LXXXIII.
many, but one will be '
enough No one entrusts a
:
secret to a man when he is asleep but one entrusts a
;
secret to a good man ; therefore, the good man does
not go to sleep." a Posidonius pleads the cause of our
master Zeno in the only possible way ;
but it cannot,
I hold, be pleaded even in this way. For Posidonius
maintains that the word "drunken" is used in two
ways, in the one case of a man who is loaded with
wine and has no control over himself; in the other,
of a man who is accustomed to get drunk, and is a
slave to the habit.
Zeno, he says,
meant the latter,
the man who is accustomed to get drunk, not the
man who is drunk ;
and no one would entrust to this
person any secret, for it might be blabbed out when
the man was in his cups. This is a fallacy. For the
first syllogism refers to him who is actually drunk and
not to him who is about to get drunk. You will
surely admit that there is a great difference between a
man who is drunk and a drunkard. He who is
drunk actually
may be in this state for the first time and may
not have the habit, while the drunkard is often free
from drunkenness. I therefore interpret the word in
its usual meaning, especially since the syllogism is set
up by a man who makes a business of the careful use of
words, and who weighs his language. Moreover, if this
is what Zeno meant, and what he wished it to mean
to us, he was trying to avail himself of an equivocal
word in order to work in a fallacy and no man
;
ought
to do this when truth is the object of inquiry.
But let us admit, indeed, that he meant what
Posidonius says
;
even so, the conclusion is false,
that secrets are not entrusted to an habitual drunkard.
Think how many soldiers who are not always sober
have been entrusted by a general or a captain or a
centurion with messages which might not be divulged
!
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