Chapter 5 - On the Shortness of Life, by Seneca the Younger
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Transcript
Marcus Cicero, long associated with men like Catiline and Clodius and Pompey and Crassus, some avowed enemies, others dubious friends, was tossed to and fro along with the state as he sought to keep it from destruction. He was at last swept away, unable as he was to be happy in success or patient during conflict. How many times must he have cursed that very consulship of his, which he had once praised so lavishly, though not without reason!
How pathetic the language he uses in a letter to Atticus, when Pompey the elder had been vanquished, and his son was still trying to restore his decimated troops in Spain!
“Do you wonder,” he said, “what I am doing here? I am languishing in my Tuscan villa half a prisoner.”
He then goes on to make other statements, in which he complains about his former life and moans about the present and despairs of the future.
Cicero said that he was “half a prisoner.” But, truthfully, the wise man will never stoop to such a term, never will he be half a prisoner – he who possesses an undiminished and stable liberty, being free and his own master, towers over all others. For what can possibly be above a man who has mastered his life and is thus above Fortune?
