Week #6 Daily #1

Assignment: Required Daily: Read Tacitus' description of the Death of Seneca and Book One of M. Aurelius' Meditations. Find quotes within those two texts that help explain what Stoicism is all about.


Response: "Seneca, quite unmoved, asked for tablets on which to inscribe his will, and, on the centurion's refusal, turned to his friends, protesting that as he was forbidden to requite them, he bequeathed to them the only, but still the noblest possession yet remaining to him, the pattern of his life, which, if they remembered, they would win a name for moral worth and steadfast friendship. At the same time he called them back from their tears to manly resolution, now with friendly talk, and now with the sterner language of rebuke."


He wanted to die because Nero thought he was plotting against him and his enemy was far too big.


"Seneca meantime, as the tedious process of death still lingered on, begged Statius Annaeus, whom he had long esteemed for his faithful friendship and medical skill, to produce a poison with which he had some time before provided himself, same drug which extinguished the life of those who were condemned by a public sentence of the people of Athens. It was brought to him and he drank it in vain, chilled as he was throughout his limbs, and his frame closed against the efficacy of the poison."


Marcus Aurelius Antonius: Meditations
  
"FROM my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper."


A Stoic would know how to control his emotion and not let them get in the way of decision.


"From Apollonius I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of the loss of a child, and in long illness; and to see clearly in a living example that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding, and not peevish in giving his instruction; and to have had before my eyes a man who clearly considered his experience and his skill in expounding philosophical principles as the smallest of his merits; and from him I learned how to receive from friends what are esteemed favours, without being either humbled by them or letting them pass unnoticed."


A Stoic knows that one you have your mind set on something, then you have to accomplish it.  You need to have a high pain tolerance and resist the urge to change your mind.  Mentally, you have to know that your decision will have a good or bad outcome.