Ancient & modern
BRITISH youth has every right to be angry about the A-level grading fiasco, but their self-pitying sobs — 'What of the effect on our future careers, income, quality of life and happiness?' moans one tragic whinger — have not impressed. Is taking a year out really that awful? But then, they have been raised in a victim culture. Even more disgusting has been the chorus of sympathy from adults encouraging them. Seneca has the answer.
In about At 60, Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius about their mutual acquaintance Liberalis, who had been much downcast at the news of a great fire that had completely wiped out the proud Roman colony of Lugdunum (Lyon) in two days. Seneca starts by observing that fires, like earthquakes, damage but rarely destroy a whole town at one go, as had happened on this occasion. So this event has been, he goes on, a serious test of Liberalis' usually steadfast will, especially as it was so unexpected, 'for the unexpected exacts the heaviest toll on us'.
Therefore, Seneca concludes, 'We must ensure that nothing is unexpected by us. Our minds must look ahead at all times and think about not what usually happens, but what can possibly happen.' He points out that Fortuna is able to strike in any number of ways; she can turn our own hands against us or produce disasters out of top hats; one is never safe from her, especially at times of greatest hopes and happiness, and when she strikes, it is with terrifying rapidity. Cities, like mountains, casurae stant, 'stand but to fall'.
The consolation in all this is that reverses often lead to a more prosperous outcome. Seneca quotes a friend of Augustus with such a grudge against Rome that the only reason he felt aggrieved when buildings there burned down was because he knew far better ones would replace them. But at all events the mind must be disciplined to understand and endure a human's lot: 'Into such a world have we entered, under such laws do we live.'
Plato pointed out that in democracies the old are always tempted to suck up to the young because they do not want to be thought tyrants. The young could extract some good out of this whole mess if they read their Seneca, took the lessons on board, and then expressed their feelings about those politicians and commentators who fell over themselves to outdo each other in their ever more lurid assessments of the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen 'our young people today' — the patronising creeps.
Peter Jones
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