Fate Leads the Willing

The story

Seneca is writing to Lucilius about a hard bit of news, and he turns it into a lesson on following the order of things. Seasons change, storms follow calm, day follows night. Whatever happens, he says, assume it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature. A bad soldier grumbles at his commander.

Then he offers a poem. He tells Lucilius to address Jupiter as the Stoic Cleanthes did, “in those most eloquent lines,” and he says he is allowing himself to render them in Latin, after Cicero. Gummere’s 1925 translation ends the rendering with the line quoted here: the willing soul, Fate leads; the unwilling, it drags.

Seneca does not pretend the thought is his. Gummere’s footnote says the verses are assigned to Cleanthes in Epictetus’s Enchiridion 53, which leaves out this last line, while Augustine, in City of God 5.8, quotes them as Seneca’s. The same six lines have been filed under two names because Seneca said, in the letter, that he was translating.

The picture is Rubens in 1617, a double portrait the file only tentatively calls Seneca and Nero. Letter 107 is not a conversation with Nero, and it is not the forced death of 65. Another page on this site takes the letter about fear, which also is not that death. This one is a borrowed hymn, and the curiosity is who gets the credit: Cleanthes in Epictetus, Seneca in Augustine, and Seneca himself pointing back to Cleanthes.