Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Seneca on the Shortness of Life - Part 2 About this episode Today’s episode features another section from James Romm’s How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life. How To Die is a modern translation and collection of Seneca’s musings on the shortness of life. James Romm is an author and professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. His specialty is in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and more. This episode is also brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow James Romm:Homepage: http://www.jamesromm.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamesromm See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare
0:47 Speaker 00 for what the future will bring. Hey, everyone. It's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I have raved about the works of James Rahm many times. His book, Dying Every Day: A Biography of Seneca, incredible. And I've had him on the podcast before, so check that out. But his translation of Seneca for Princeton University Press's Ancient Wisdom series, How to Die, is just the best. It is the ultimate collection of Seneca's musings on the shortness of life. Look, Seneca talked about death so much, it feels almost a 300-page book. But it's just fire. Just all of it is so good.
1:31 Speaker 00 And that's why we have this episode. Seneca believed that life is a journey toward death. But he also was saying that death is happening right now. You're dying even as you listen to this. This time you spent, you cannot get back. And so, we have to practice death. We have to be aware of death. We can't let time slip by. And we have to, even as Seneca finds, we have to go out well. It's the final act of our life, and how are we going to do that? So today's episode is an excerpt from the audiobook of that Ancient Wisdom series, How to Die, translated by James Rahm. James Rahm, thank you to the folks at Tantor Media, Hybridge Audio,
2:14 Speaker 00 which are both a division of Recorded Books. They were nice enough to share this with us. So you can get a sample of it. If you want to check out the book, you can get it on Amazon, Audible, anywhere books are sold. But really, I love this series of books. I'm a big fan. I recommend reading the Stoics in multiple translations, and I've read all of Seneca's works, but to be able to go back and see James Rahm, who's such a wise sort of student and biographer of Seneca, pick the things that really jumped out to him, render them in his own translations, it's just a rare treat. Again, I recommend you listen to my interview with James, "Re-Dying Every Day," and check this out. We're going to focus
2:55 Speaker 00 on the fear of death. We're going to focus on becoming part of the whole. And there's just a lot here. Check this out. Seneca's "How to Die," from Princeton University Press, translated by James Rahm. Of course, the audiobook brought to us from Tantor Media, who, as it happens, also published the audiobooks of a few of my books. So anyways, let's get right into it.
3:17 Speaker 01 Five. Become a Part of the Whole. Seneca found great comfort in the universality of death and decay, not only for humanity, but for all things. The earth itself would die and be renewed in a regular cycle repeating throughout time, according to Stoic cosmologic precepts that Seneca shared. In the two passages which follow, Seneca offers ideas of death's universality as consolations to grieving friends. The first is addressed to Marcia, who had lost a son. The second to Polybius, a powerful freedman at the court of Emperor Claudius, who had lost a brother.
4:02 Speaker 01 Imagine, Marcia, that your father is speaking to you from that citadel in the sky. "Why," he says, "does mourning hold you in its grip for so long, my daughter? Why do you linger in such great ignorance of the truth, that you think your son has been unfairly dealt with, when he has gone whole and sound to join his ancestors, leaving his household also whole and sound? Don't you realize what great whirlwinds Fortune uses to royal all things? Or that she shows a kind and gentle face to no one, except those who have the least dealings with her?
4:44 Speaker 01 Should I list for you those kings who would have been supremely happy if death had only removed them from looming evils a bit sooner? Or the Roman leaders whose greatness will lack nothing if you only take away a portion of their lifespan? Or the very noble and brilliant men who have bent down with their necks laid bare for the blow of the soldier's sword? Just look at your father and grandfather. He came into the power of an attacker he did not know, while I, allowing no one to act against me, abstaining from food, showed the world I possessed as lofty a mind as had appeared from my writings.
5:26 Speaker 01 Why should one who died most fortunately be mourned in our house for an extreme length of time? We all come together into one place, from where, no longer enveloped in deep night, we perceive that nothing in your world is as desirable as you thought, nor lofty, nor brilliant. Rather, it's all lowly, leaden, fraught, and lit by only a tiny portion of our light. I could tell you more, that here there are no weapons of war clashing in mutual rage, no fleets being smashed by fleets, no parasides either enacted or plotted,
6:08 Speaker 01 no forums roaring with lawsuits day in, day out. Nothing lies hidden, but thoughts are revealed, hearts are open, and life stands where all can see, along with the overview of every age and of things yet to come.
6:26 Speaker 01 It was once a joy to me to write about the deeds of a single era, done in a remote part of the world, among a tiny group of people. Now I can contemplate so many centuries, such a chain and sequence of ages, the limitless series of years. I can look ahead to the empires that will arise and fall to ruin, the declines of great cities, the new ebbs and flows of the sea. If our common fate can help relieve your grief, then no, nothing will stand where it now stands, but the march of age will level all things, and drag everything away with it.
7:09 Speaker 01 It makes a sport not just of humankind, for how small a portion they are of fortune's power, but of places, regions, segments of the world. It will level whole mountains, and elsewhere push new crags toward the sky. It will drain the seas, turn aside rivers, and dissolve the unity and fellowship of the human race, the connections between peoples cut off. Elsewhere, it will drag down cities into vast chasms, shake them with earthquakes, send plague-filled gusts up from the bottom, drown with inundations every dwelling, kill off all life on the flooded earth,
7:54 Speaker 01 scorch and burn up mortality with huge tongues of flame. And when the time comes when the world, on its way to renewal, destroys itself, these things will strike themselves down with their own strength, and stars will crash into stars, and whatever now shines in an ordered array will blaze with a single fire, all matter set aflame.
8:22 Speaker 01 We too, the blessed souls who have been granted eternity, when God decides to fashion these things over again, will be a small addition to the enormous collapse. With all things sliding into ruin, we shall be changed back into our ancient components.
8:43 Speaker 01 To Marcia Letter Twenty-Six, Verse One
8:48 Speaker 01 You may complain, but he was snatched away when I didn't expect it. Thus all are deceived by their own trust and a willed forgetfulness of mortality in the case of things they cherish. Nature promised no one that it would make an exception to necessity. Every day there pass before our eyes, the funerals of the famous and the obscure, yet we are busy with other things, and we find a sudden surprise in the thing that, our whole life long, we were told was coming. It's not the unfairness of the fates, but the warped inability of the human mind to
9:30 Speaker 01 get enough of all things, that makes us complain of leaving that place to which we were admitted as a special favor. How much more just was he who, having learned of his son's death, spoke a word worthy of a great man? I knew then, when I fathered him, that he would die. His son's death came as no news to him; for what news is it, that someone has died whose whole life was nothing else than a journey toward death? I knew then, when I fathered him, that he would die.
10:11 Speaker 01 Then he added something of even greater sagacity and insight. And it was for that, that I raised him. It's for that, that we are all brought up. Whoever is brought into life, is destined for death. Let's rejoice in what will be given, but let's return it, when we're asked for it back. The fates will seize hold of one person now, another later, but they will overlook no one.
10:47 Speaker 01 Let the soul stand girded for battle; let it never fear what must be; let it always expect what's unknown. There's no single end fixed for all. For one, life departs in mid-course, but abandons another at its very beginning, and barely dispatches a third, who is already worn out with extreme old age and longing to go. Each in his or her own time, we all bend our course to the same place. Is it more stupid to ignore the law of mortality, or more impudent to reject it? I don't know.
11:32 Speaker 01 To Polybius, Letter XI, verses 1 through 4.
11:39 Speaker 01 Despite his stoic orientation, Seneca was interested in Epicurean theories about the atomic basis of the physical world. He sounds an Epicurean note in passages, like the one that follows, in which he imagines that the particles out of which human bodies are formed are indestructible, and after those bodies decay, will go on to form other substances.
12:06 Speaker 01 There are fixed seasons by which all things progress. They must be born, grow, and perish. All the things that whirl through the sky above us and the things below, on which we lean and take our place as though they were firm, will cease and be severed. There is nothing that does not grow old. Nature disperses these things, all to the same end, though after different intervals. Whatever is, will no longer be. It won't die, but will be undone.
12:43 Speaker 01 For us, death is merely dissolution. We see only the things just before us. The dull mind, or one which has enslaved itself to the body, doesn't look ahead to what lies further off. We would more bravely endure our own end, and the ends of our kin, if we were anticipating that, just like everything else, so life and death change places by turns, and that the endless craft of the God who sets proper bounds to all things, is turned toward this goal: to separate things that were bound together, and bind together those that became separated.
13:27 Speaker 01 And so we will say, as Marcus Cato did, after he had raced across time with his mind: "The whole human race, whatever is or will be, is condemned to death. All the cities that ever obtain wealth, or become the pride of foreign empires, will be razed by various sorts of destruction. Some day people will wonder where they were. Wars will destroy some; others will succumb to idleness, and peace that has turned into sloth, and that thing that is lethal to great power: luxury. A tidal wave of the unforeseen sea will swamp all those fertile fields; or a slide of settling
14:12 Speaker 01 soil will drag them down into a chasm that suddenly yawns. What reason, then, for me to grieve or complain, if I depart just a short moment before these global ends? Let the great mind bow to the will of God, and bear without hesitation whatever the law of the universe decrees. Either it will be released into a better life, to abide with divine things in a clearer and more peaceful way than before, or else it will surely exist, without anything to trouble it, if it gets mingled into nature, and sent back to be part of the whole." Ep. 71, verses 13 through 16.
15:02 Speaker 01 The idea that death waited around every corner, ready to spring at every moment, might be disturbing to some, but to Seneca, gave peace of mind. Why worry about what is wholly outside your control? These two final readings, both addressed to Seneca's friend Lucilius, develop that train of thought. The first comes from The Moral Epistles, the great compilation of letters Seneca produced in his mid-sixties, just before his death. The second, from Natural Questions, a study of earth science also composed in Seneca's last year or two of life.
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15:51 Speaker 01 You will soon see, that some things are less to be feared, precisely because they carry so much fear with them. Nothing is bad, if it is final. Death is coming to you. It would be fearsome if it were able to abide with you, but it must either fail to find you, or come and then leave. "It's hard," you say, "to bring my mind to the disregard of my life." But don't you see how trivial are the reasons that others disregard theirs? One man has hanged himself outside the doors of his mistress; another has hurled himself
16:32 Speaker 01 from a roof, so that he might no longer hear his master shouting; another has plunged a sword in his innards, lest he be recaptured after an escape. Don't you suppose that virtue can produce the same result as does an excess of fear? Life cannot be free from worry, for any man who thinks too much about extending it, or who counts many consulships among his great boones.
17:01 Speaker 01 Think on this every day, so that you may depart life with an untroubled mind. Life, which many clutch at and hold just like those who, swept away by a gush of water, clutch even at thorny plants and other rough things. Indeed, most are tossed about wretchedly between their fear of death and the tortures of life. They don't want to live, but don't know how to die. Make your life joyful, by putting aside all your anxiety about keeping it. No good thing benefits its possessor, unless his mind is prepared to let go of it.
17:44 Speaker 01 And nothing is easier let go of, than things which can't be longed for once they are gone. Therefore fortify and harden yourself against the things that can befall even the most powerful. The fate of Pompey's head was decided by a little boy and a eunuch. Crassus's fate, by the cruel proud Parthian. Caligula ordered Lepidus to bear his neck to the sword of a mere tribune, Dexter, and then offered his own to Cirea. Fortune has advanced no one so far, that her threats are not as great as her promises. Don't trust in the present stretch of calm sailing.
18:29 Speaker 01 The sea is stirred up in a moment. Ships sport on it, then are sunk, in the same day. Believe that both the thief and the foe can put a sword to your throat. There is no slave that does not hold the power of life and death over you, to say nothing of even greater authorities. Take account of the examples of those destroyed by treachery in their own home, whether by open attack or secret plot, and you will understand that no fewer have fallen to the hatred of slaves, than to that of kings. What matter then how high sits the man whom you fear, when that which you fear can be done by any one at all?
19:14 Speaker 01 If by chance you are taken captive by an enemy squadron, your captor will order you to be led away to the very place you are already going. Why do you deceive yourself, and only now, for the first time, recognize what your condition has been for a long time? I put it thus: From the time you are born, you are being led to death.
19:44 Speaker 01 Epistle IV, verses 3 through 9. I've heard, Lucilius, best of men, that Pompeii, that renowned Campanian city, has been leveled by an earthquake, and that some regions near it were shaken. This happened in winter time, a time our elders used to assure us that is free from such dangers.
20:11 Speaker 01 We must seek comforts for the fearful and take away their great terror. What can ever seem safe enough if the very earth is violently shaken and its most stable segments start sliding around? If the one thing about it that seems permanent and fixed, so that it holds up everything that tends toward it, becomes mobile, if the ground loses its characteristic stability, then where will our fears find a place to settle? What refuge will our bodies escape to when anxious if our fear springs from the inmost regions and is drawn up from the depths?
20:53 Speaker 01 What solace, never mind aid, can there be when dread has lost any hope of escape? What, I ask, is fortified strongly enough? What is steady enough to protect someone else or itself? I can repel an enemy with a wall. Fortresses of towering height will stop even great armies with their impediments to entry. A harbor redeems us from the storm, and roofs ward off the cascading force of the clouds and rains that fall without end. A raging fire will not pursue those who flee it. Underground shelters and caverns dug down into the depths
21:36 Speaker 01 give remedies for the attacks of thunderstorms and threats from the sky, for that sky-sent fire does not blast through solid earth, but is blunted by even a small barrier of it. One can change one's abode during an outbreak of plague. No evil lacks a path of escape. Never have thunderbolts burned up whole peoples. Plague has diminished cities, but not blotted them out. But this evil spreads out far and wide as something inescapable, insatiable, destructive on a public scale. The ground swallows up not just homes and families and cities,
22:21 Speaker 01 but overwhelms entire nations and regions. At one moment, it covers over their ruins; at the next, it buries them in its deep abyss and leaves no remains by which that which no longer is can be seen to have once existed. Bare ground stretches over the most exalted cities, with no trace left of the fact that people once dwelled there. There are some who are more afraid of this kind of death, because they go into the chasm homes and all, and, while living, are removed from the company of the living, as though every fate did not arrive at the very same end.
23:07 Speaker 01 Nature has this one particular point among other instances of its justice. When the time arrives to leave this world, we're all in the same condition. There's no difference whether a single stone smashes me to bits, or I'm crushed by a whole mountain. Whether the weight of a single house collapses on me and I'm killed by its small mass and the dust it raises, or the entire known world buries my head. Whether I give up the ghost in broad daylight, or in a vast cavern of yawning land masses. Whether I am born alone into that chasm, or a huge throng of nations falls with me.
23:52 Speaker 01 It doesn't matter to me how great a commotion attends my death. Death is the same everywhere. Therefore, let's gird up our courage against that disaster that can neither be evaded nor foreseen. And let's cease to listen to those who have quitted Campania and who have moved away in the wake of this event, and who say they will never come near that region again. Who can assure them that this ground or that one stands on any better foundations?
24:26 Speaker 01 All things share the same destiny. If they have not yet moved, they're still mobile. Perhaps this place where you now stand more safely will be torn apart by this next night, or by the day that precedes the night. How do you know whether these places stand in a better condition? Places in which fortune has already used up its strength, places propped up henceforth only by their own ruin. We are wrong to think any part of the world is excused or immune from these perils. All regions are under the same law. Nature shaped nothing to be unmoved.
25:11 Speaker 01 Some things fall now, others at other times. Just as in great cities, one house collapses now, another later, so on this globe. But what am I doing? I had promised a comfort for dangers that afflict us rarely, and here I am, warning of things to be feared on every side. Imagine then that this sentence, spoken for those who were struck dumb by their sudden enslavement, as they stood between flames and enemies, was spoken to the whole human race.
25:49 Speaker 01 The only salvation for the conquered is to hope for no salvation. If you want to fear nothing, believe that all things are to be feared. Look around you; see how small are the causes of our destruction. Neither food, nor drink, nor waking, nor sleep helps keep us healthy, unless done in moderation. You'll soon understand that we are mere trifles and feeble little bodies, insubstantial, to be undone by no great effort. No doubt this alone poses a danger to us: the trembling of the earth, its sudden breakup
26:34 Speaker 01 and engulfing of what stands above it. The man who fears lightnings and the tremors and gapings of the earth sets himself at great value. Would he be willing, if aware of his own frailty, to fear a gob of phlegm? Clearly we were shaped thus from birth, got such well-framed limbs, grew up so tall and strong. And as a result, if the portions of the earth did not move, if the sky did not thunder, if the ground did not give way, we could not die. The pain from a little fingernail, not even the whole nail, but a hangnail about to split
27:19 Speaker 01 off from its side, finishes us off. So should I fear earthquakes when an excess of saliva can choke me? Should I dread waves roused from the sea's depths, or worry that a flood-tide, drawing up more water than usual, will sweep in, when a drink that goes down the wrong way has killed men off by suffocation? How foolish to fear the sea, when you know that a droplet can destroy you! There's no greater comfort in the face of death than mortality itself. No greater comfort for all those external things that terrify us
28:01 Speaker 01 than the fact that numberless dangers lie within. What is more insane than to shrink from thunderbolts and to crawl underground in fear of lightning flashes? What is more foolish than to dread the trembling of the earth, or the sudden slides of the mountains, or the inundations of a sea that has been hurled past its shores, when death is at hand everywhere, popping up all around us, and nothing is so trivial as to lack sufficient force to ruin the whole human race? So there's no reason those things should throw us into confusion as if they held greater pain than ordinary death.
28:44 Speaker 01 Indeed, it's just the reverse. Since we must of necessity depart from life at some point and breathe our last, dying for some larger reason is a kind of joy. We must die, sometime, someplace. Though the ground stand firm and stay within its own boundaries, not tossed about by any harmful force, still it will lie on top of me at some point. What matter if I thrust it on myself, or it thrusts itself on me? It's cleft and smashed apart by the immense power of some unknown evil and drags me down into its vast depths.
29:30 Speaker 01 So what? Is death more bearable on a level field? What do I have to complain of if nature does not want me to perish by an inglorious death, but heaves a part of itself on to me? My friend Vagelius expresses it superbly in that famous poem of his: "If fall I must, then let me fall from heaven."
29:57 Speaker 01 One could say in similar fashion: "If fall I must, let me fall amid the smashing of the world." Not because it's right to wish for a national disaster, but because it's a great comfort in the face of death to see that the earth too is mortal.
30:18 Speaker 01 Natural Questions. Book Six. Chapter One, Verse One, through Chapter Two, Verse Nine.
30:27 Speaker 00 Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.
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