Stoic gratitude affirmations, in the Stoics’ own words

The first book of the Meditations, in George Long’s 1862 translation, is not a reflection but an inventory. Chapter after chapter, Marcus Aurelius records what he received from each person: good morals and the government of his temper from his grandfather Verus, piety and beneficence from his mother, from his teachers a long list of habits and refusals. The book ends in chapter 17 with the gods, to whom he is indebted for good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good. The gratitude is specific: each debt has a name (Sympatheia). The book has its page: Book I.

Book VI turns the same attention to the living. When he wishes to delight himself, Marcus thinks of the virtues of those who live with him: the activity of one, the modesty of another, the liberality of a third. Nothing delights so much, he writes, as the examples of the virtues in the morals of those around us, and so they must be kept in view. Gratitude here is a way of looking at other people, not a feeling about one’s own luck (Kathekon).

Seneca approaches the subject from its absence, in his fifteenth letter to Lucilius, in Gummere’s 1917 translation. He offers Lucilius a Greek saying and, asked who uttered it, names “the same writer whom I mentioned before”, Epicurus: the fool’s life is empty of gratitude and full of fears, and its course lies wholly toward the future. The fool, he adds, is not some stranger but ourselves, pushed by blind desires into ventures that never satisfy. His remedy is a change of direction: whoever would thank the gods and be grateful for his past life should contemplate how many men he has outstripped, not how many are ahead. The letter is on Letter 15.

The two authors describe gratitude as an exact account of what one has received, turned toward the past and toward others (Eudaimonia).