SENECA - College of Stoic Philosophers

she was the parent, of all ;
EPISTLE XC.
and this her gift consisted
of the assured possession by each man of the common
resources. Why
should I not even call that race
could not find a
the richest among mortals, since you
poor person among them ?
But avarice broke in upon a condition so happily
ordained, and, by its eagerness to lay something
away and to turn it to its own private use, made all
things the property of others, and reduced itself
from boundless wealth to straitened need. It
was avarice that introduced poverty and, by craving
much, lost all. And so, although she now tries to
make good her loss, although she adds one estate to
another, evicting a neighbour either by buying him
out or by wronging him, although she extends her
country-seats to the size of provinces and defines
ownership as meaning extensive travel through one's
own property, in spite of all these efforts of hers,
no enlargement of our boundaries will bring us back
to the condition from which we have departed.
When there is no more that we can do, we shall
possess much ;
but we once possessed the whole
world ! The very soil was more productive when
untilled, and yielded more than enough for peoples
who refrained from despoiling one another. Whatever
gift nature had produced, men found as much
pleasure in revealing it to another as in having discovered
it. It was possible for no man either to
surpass another or to fall short of him ;
what there
was, was divided among unquarrelling friends. Not
yet had the stronger begun to lay hands upon the
weaker; not yet had the miser, by hiding away
what lay before him, begun to shut off his neighbour
from even the necessities of life ;
each cared as
much for his neighbour as for himself. Armour lay
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