L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits | Page 6

living
as he had to give. In an age of unbelief and compromise he taught that
Truth was positive and Virtue objective. He conceived, what never
entered Cicero's mind, the idea of improving his fellow-creatures; he
had, what Cicero had not, a heart for conversion to Christianity."
To this eloquent account of Seneca's position and of the tendency of his
writings I have nothing to add. The main particulars of his life, his
Spanish extraction (like that of Lacan and Martial), his father's treatises
on Rhetoric, his mother Helvia, his brothers, his wealth, his exile in

Corsica, his outrageous flattery of Claudius and his satiric poem on his
death--"The Vision of Judgment," Merivale calls it, after Lord
Byron--his position as Nero's tutor, and his death, worthy at once of a
Roman and a Stoic, by the orders of that tyrant, may be read of in "The
History of the Romans under the Empire," or in the article "Seneca" in
the "Dictionary of Classical Biography," and need not be reproduced
here: but I cannot resist pointing out how entirely Grote's view of the
"Sophists" as a sort of established clergy, and Seneca's account of the
various sects of philosophers as representing the religious thought of
the time, is illustrated by his anecdote of Julia Augusta, the mother of
Tiberius, better known to English readers as Livia the wife of Augustus,
who in her first agony of grief at the loss of her first husband applied to
his Greek philosopher, Areus, as to a kind of domestic chaplain, for
spiritual consolation. ("Ad Marciam de Consolatione," ch. iv.)
I take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to the Rev. J. E. B.
Mayor, Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge, for his
kindness in finding time among his many and important literary labours
for reading and correcting the proofs of this work.
The text which I have followed for De Beneficiis is that of Gertz,
Berlin (1876.).
AUBREY STEWART
London, March, 1887.

CONTENTS
BOOK I. The prevalence of ingratitude--How a benefit ought to be
bestowed--The three Graces--Benefits are the chief bond of human
society--What we owe in return for a benefit received--A benefit
consists not of a thing but of the wish to do good--Socrates and
Aeschines--What kinds of benefits should be bestowed, and in what
manner--Alexander and the franchise of Corinth.
BOOK II. Many men give through weakness of character--We ought to
give before our friends ask--Many benefits are spoiled by the manner of
the giver--Marius Nepos and Tiberius--Some benefits should be given
secretly--We must not give what would harm the receiver--Alexander's
gift of a city--Interchange of benefits like a game of ball--From whom
ought one to receive a benefit?-- Examples--How to receive a
benefit--Ingratitude caused by self- love, by greed, or by

jealousy--Gratitude and repayment not the same thing--Phidias and the
statue
BOOK III. Ingratitude--Is it worse to be ungrateful for kindness or not
even to remember it?--Should ingratitude be punished by law?-- Can a
slave bestow a benefit?--Can a son bestow a benefit upon his
father?--Examples
BOOK IV. Whether the bestowal of benefits and the return of gratitude
for them are desirable objects in themselves? Does God bestow
benefits?--How to choose the man to be benefited--We ought not to
look for any return--True gratitude--Of keeping one's promise--Philip
and the soldier--Zeno
BOOK V. Of being worsted in a contest of benefits--Socrates and
Archelaus--Whether a man can be grateful to himself, or can bestow a
benefit upon himself--Examples of ingratitude--Dialogue on
ingratitude--Whether one should remind one's friends of what one has
done for them--Caesar and the soldier--Tiberius.
BOOK VI. Whether a benefit can be taken from one by force-- Benefits
depend upon thought--We are not grateful for the advantages which we
receive from inanimate Nature, or from dumb animals--In order to lay
me under an obligation you must benefit me intentionally--Cleanthes's
story of the two slaves--Of benefits given in a mercenary
spirit--Physicians and teachers bestow enormous benefits, yet are
sufficiently paid by a moderate fee-- Plato and the ferryman--Are we
under an obligation to the sun and moon?--Ought we to wish that evil
may befall our benefactors, in order that we may show our gratitude by
helping them?
BOOK VII. The cynic Demetrius--his rules of conduct--Of the truly
wise man--Whether one who has done everything in his power to return
a benefit has returned it--Ought one to return a benefit to a bad
man?--The Pythagorean, and the shoemaker--How one ought to bear
with the ungrateful.

L. A. SENECA
ON BENEFITS.
DEDICATED TO
AEBUTIUS LIBERALIS.

BOOK I.
I.
Among the numerous faults of those who pass their lives recklessly and
without due reflexion, my good friend Liberalis, I should say that there
is hardly any one so hurtful to society as this, that we neither know how
to bestow or how to receive