Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
Letter 18: On festivals and fasting
Letter 18 is written in December, during the Saturnalia, and asks whether to join the festivities or to stay apart; Seneca prefers to do what the crowd does, but differently.
He recommends set days of real poverty, hard bread and a pallet, so that Fortune may never catch us unprepared.
From the letter
It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting; but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way,—thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd.
It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.
If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.
Let us practise our strokes on the “dummy”; let us become intimate with poverty, so that Fortune may not catch us off our guard.
We shall be rich with all the more comfort, if we once learn how far poverty is from being a burden.
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+ — 2 passages of this letter, each with its reference; Marcus Aurelius is free in the app.