SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

EPISTLE XC.
But Posidoiiius again remarks
"
: Democritus is
said to have discovered the arch/ whose effect was
that the curving line of stones, which gradually lean
toward each other, is bound together by the keystone."
I am inclined to pronounce this statement
false. For there must have been, before Democritus,
bridges and gateways in which the curvature did not
begin until about the top. It seems to have quite
slipped your memory that this same Democritus discovered
how ivory could be softened, how, by boiling,
a pebble could be transformed into an emerald, 6
-the same process used even to-day for colouring
stones which are found to be amenable to this treatment
! It
may have been a wise man who discovered
all such things, but he did not discover them by
virtue of being a wise man ;
for he does many things
which we see done just as well, or even more skilfully
and dexterously, by men who are utterly lacking
in sagacity.
Do you ask what, then, the wise man has found
out and what he has brought to ?
light First of all
there is truth, and nature ;
and nature he has not
followed as the other animals do, with eyes too dull
to perceive the divine in it. In the second place,
there is the law of life, and life he has made to
conform to universal principles and he has
; taught
us, not merely to know the gods, but to follow them,
and to welcome the gifts of chance precisely as if
they were divine commands. He has forbidden us
to give heed to false opinions, and has weighed the
value of each thing by a true standard of appraisement.
He has condemned those pleasures with
which remorse is intermingled, and has praised those
goods which will always satisfy
and he has published
;
the truth abroad that he is most happy who has no
421