🏛️ Sundays with Seneca
Sundays with Seneca is a weekly series exploring Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s writings and Stoic philosophy. Each meditation includes selected passages from one of Seneca’s letters, searching for ancient lessons on the art of living.
Seneca — On the Happy Life (Pt II)
This week, we continue our exploration of a letter known today as On the Happy Life, where Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius,
‘What, then,’ comes the retort, ‘if good health, rest, and freedom from pain are not likely to hinder virtue, shall you not seek all these?’ Of course, I shall seek them, but not because they are goods—I shall seek them because they are according to nature and because they will be acquired through the exercise of good judgment on my part. What, then, will be good in them? This alone—that it is a good thing to choose them. For when I don suitable attire, or walk as I should, or dine as I ought to dine, it is not my dinner, or my walk, or my dress that are goods, but the deliberate choice which I show in regard to them, as I observe, in each thing I do, a mean that conforms with reason. …
