When Running Away Won't Work — Letters from a Stoic

He has fled the city for his country villa, not to escape it, but to escape a fever that was working its way in. Letter 104 opens with that domestic detail and the image of his wife Paulina's worry, which has made him more careful of his own life than he would otherwise be. The letter then makes its real move: all this running away from external troubles is futile unless you have first done the harder work of running away from yourself.

What ails most people is not their city or their circumstances but their own vices, which travel with them everywhere. You cannot escape by going to the sea or to the mountains if you bring anger, fear, and greed in your luggage. His catalogue of Stoic heroes, Cato, Laelius, Tubero, is not nostalgia.

These men had a quality Seneca wants to identify and pass on: they did not merely resist Fortune's blows, they anticipated them. And first among the preparations for a free life is rejecting pleasures that make demands, and then rejecting wealth, which is, he says without softening it, the diploma of slavery.

Liberty cannot be gained for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else.