Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
Letter 107: On obedience to the universal will
Letter 107 begins with runaway slaves and refuses to be upset by them: life is a long journey on which one is bound to slip, collide and bury companions.
Whatever happens was bound to happen, and the letter ends with Seneca’s Latin rendering of Cleanthes’ lines on following fate willingly.
From the letter
The programme of life is the same as that of a bathing establishment, a crowd, or a journey: sometimes things will be thrown at you, and sometimes they will strike you by accident.
Everyone approaches courageously a danger which he has prepared himself to meet long before, and withstands even hardships if he has previously practised how to meet them.
Be sure to prescribe for your mind this sense of equity; we should pay without complaint the tax of our mortality.
Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature.
Here is your great soul—the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.
Coverage
Our editions hold 30 letters of 124 in Richard Mott Gummere’s translation (1917–1925); 29 of them have a page here, those that Joseph Baillard’s French translation (1861) also contains.
Seneca and Epictetus are in Stoic+ — 1 passage of this letter, with its reference; Marcus Aurelius is free in the app.