Seneca to Lucilius: 49, on the shortness of life

Seneca wrote a whole book “On the shortness of life,” on which I have commented before. But he addresses the same topic also in the much shorter letter XLIX to his friend Lucilius, as part of what Liz Gloyn has called Seneca’s informal curriculum for the study of Stoicism.

This letter includes another jab at those who mis-spend their life studying logic for logic’s sake, which — as we have seen — was the major subject matter of Letter XLVIII. Seneca here is downright sarcastic, providing us with echoes of the later writings of Epictetus:

“When the spears of the foeman were quivering in our gates and the very ground was rocking with mines and subterranean passages — I say, they would rightly think me mad if I were to sit idle, putting such pretty posers as this: ‘What you have not lost, you have. But you have not lost any horns. Therefore, you have horns,’ or other tricks constructed after the model of this piece of sheer silliness.” (XLIX.8)

The not so subtle reference is to the sophists, as the piece of “reasoning” concerning horns cannot fail but to remind us of Plato’s Euthydemus, an important dialogue in which Socrates battles it out with two sophist brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. Even though Seneca does not refer to the dialogue, it is noteworthy that it’s there that Socrates advances the argument that wisdom — or virtue — is the only true good, because nothing else has positive value unless it is used wisely, and because wisdom cannot be used for ill, by definition. That argument was incorporated and elaborated upon by the Stoics, as we can see, for instance, in Cicero’s De Finibus, book III (see here and here).

Shortly thereafter, Seneca returns to the main topic of the letter: not just the shortness of life, but the contrast between quality and quantity of life:

“The good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, it is possible, or rather usual…