Blocking Out the Noise — Letters from a Stoic

Ulysses had his sailors' ears stopped with wax to protect them from the Sirens' song. Letter 31 opens by telling Lucilius he needs thicker protection, because the songs he has to resist don't come from a single headland but from every direction at once. Well-meaning friends, family hoping for his success, people who love him and therefore wish on him the things the world calls good: all of them are singing. Seneca's warning is precise, their prayers are bad prayers made with good intentions. Entreat the gods, he says, that none of their fond desires for you may come to pass. The letter then builds toward its real argument.

What is the one genuine good? Trust in oneself, but not the ordinary kind. The self-sufficiency Seneca means requires having risen above the desire for external things: rank, property, applause, a name that spreads across the world. None of these put a man on level with God. God has no property, wears no robes, carries no litter. What does God have?

He carries everything on his own shoulders. And what is the one thing a man possesses that can, if properly cultivated, bring him level with that? The soul, upright, good, and great. A soul like that is a god dwelling in a human body. It can appear in a Roman knight or a slave with equal likelihood. The letter's last line is the instruction: rise, and mould yourself to kinship with your God.

That moulding isn't done in gold or silver. The gods themselves, when they were kind to men, were moulded in clay.