The worst of all is to leave the ranks of the living before dying

THE SKILL OF BEING ALIVE UNTIL WE DIE

Key ideas

1. Sometimes circumstances can place us in miserable conditions.
2. We can be free even in an oppressive society and be oppressed in a free society.
3. The most important thing is not to leave the rank of the living before dying. However, we must adjust what we do based on circumstances.

Living in miserable times

Could you find any place more miserable than Athens when it was being torn to pieces by the thirty tyrants? [Thirty tyrants were oligarchs who ruled Athens during the Peloponnesian war around 404 BCE.] They killed thirteen hundred citizens, all the best men. They did not leave after this. Their cruelty was sustained by its own momentum.

In the city that had the most revered court, the Court of the Areopagus, where there was a Senate, and a popular assembly like the Senate, there met daily a miserable crew of butchers. The unhappy Senate House was full of tyrants. Could that city, in which there were as many tyrants as there were onlookers, reach a state of peace? People could not even be offered any hope of regaining their liberty. They could see no room for a remedy in such a mass of evil. Where was this unhappy city to look for enough people like Harmodius [one of the three men who plotted to kill the tyrant Hippias] it would need to slay so many tyrants?

Being free among cruel masters

Yet Socrates was in their midst, offering comfort to the city fathers in their grief and encouraging those who despaired of the republic; he admonished the rich, who were now afraid that their wealth would be their ruin, showing late repentance of their greed. He moved about as a great example to those who wished to copy him because he walked a free man among thirty masters. Yet this was the man Athens itself put to death in prison. Freedom could not tolerate the freedom of the one who had mocked an entire group of tyrants.

Being deprived of freedom by the free

From this, you may learn that a wise person can make his mark even when oppressed. And that, even in a prosperous and flourishing city, willful imprudence, jealousy, and a thousand other cowardly vices reign. We must, therefore, expand or contract our efforts depending on how the state accommodates us or circumstances dictate. But, in any case, we should continue to move and not become frozen by fear. No, the best person is one who, though danger threatens on every side and weapons and chains rattle the path, will not damage or conceal their virtue. To keep oneself safe does not mean to bury oneself.

Leaving the rank of living before dying

I think that Curius Dentatus [a Roman general around the third century BCE] said it right when he said that he would rather be dead than to live like a dead person. The worst of all is to leave the ranks of the living before dying. Yet it is your duty, if you happen to live at a time when it is not easy to serve the state, to devote more time to leisure and literature. It is like making a dangerous voyage: you may, from time to time, make for harbour and set yourself free from public affairs without waiting for it to do so.

Think about this

The worst of all is to leave the ranks of the living before dying.

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This is an excerpt from Stoic Tranquility (https://amzn.to/3doERNk) which is a plain English version of Seneca’s On Tranquility.

 

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