Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
Letter 78: On the healing power of the mind
Letter 78 answers a sick friend from Seneca’s own experience of illness: what saved him was philosophy and the affection of his friends.
The three hardships of disease, fear of death, pain and lost pleasures, are examined in turn, and pain is found slight when opinion adds nothing to it.
From the letter
Nothing, my excellent Lucilius, refreshes and aids a sick man so much as the affection of his friends; nothing so steals away the expectation and the fear of death.
You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped.
No man can suffer both severely and for a long time; Nature, who loves us most tenderly, has so constituted us as to make pain either endurable or short.
Pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it; but if, on the other hand, you begin to encourage yourself and say, “It is nothing,—a trifling matter at most; keep a stout heart and it will soon cease”; then in thinking it slight, you will make it slight.
It is not only the sword and the battle-line that prove the soul alert and unconquered by fear; a man can display bravery even when wrapped in his bed-clothes.
Quotes checked against this letter
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.