Early in the morning on Feb. 5, 62 AD, a gigantic earthquake rippled beneath the Roman province of Campania and, in seconds, killed thousands of unsuspecting inhabitants. Large sections of Pompeii collapsed on top of people in their beds. Attempts to rescue them were stopped when fires broke out. The survivors were left destitute with only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their noble buildings shattered into rubble.
Horror, disbelief and anger swept through the empire. How, it was asked, could the Romans, the world’s mightiest, most technologically sophisticated people, who had built aqueducts and tamed barbarian hordes, be so vulnerable to the insane tempers of nature? The suffering and confusion — only too familiar today in the wake of the earthquake off Indonesia — attracted the notice of the Roman stoic philosopher, Seneca. He wrote a succession of essays to comfort his readers, but, typically for Seneca, the consolation on offer was of the stiffest, darkest sort: “You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened?” Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them — in the spring of 62 AD — that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become. We must therefore, in our times too, expect the unexpected. Calm is only an interval between chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the ground we stand on.
If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden giant waves and consequently pay a price for our willful innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: On the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across generations, on the other, unheralded cataclysms.
We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today, and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again.
It is because we have powerful incentives to neglect the latter scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the unknown. This unknown can scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed watch us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear along with our hotel in a tsunami.
The Asian earthquake has acquired a particular poignancy because so many of the devastated places were tourist areas — where people went explicitly in search of happiness, only to find death and chaos. Look up the websites of the hotels that have now been destroyed, and you can still see pictures of sunny beaches and beautiful rooms, promises of beachside barbecues and scuba diving trips.
Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (“There is nothing which Fortune does not dare”), we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs or say goodbye to a friend without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.
Given our technological prowess, it has become natural to think of ourselves as controlling our destiny. Man does not any longer have to be a plaything of random forces, and, with the application of reason, all our problems may be solved. Nothing could be further from a Stoic mindset.
We must, stressed Seneca, expand our sense of what may at any time go wrong in our lives: “Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile.”
In the wake of the Calabria earthquake, many people argued that the whole area should be evacuated, and nothing more built on earthquake zones. But Seneca disagreed with the underlying belief that there might be somewhere on earth, in Liguria perhaps, where someone could be wholly safe, out of the reach of nature’s will: “Who promises them better foundations for this or that soil to stand on? All places have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they can nonetheless have quakes. We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe ... Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile.”
To try to prepare ourselves psychologically for disaster, Seneca asked us to think of ourselves like dogs who have been tied to a charriot driven by an unpredictable driver. Our leash is long enough to give us a degree of leeway, but is not long enough to allow us to wander wherever we please.
A dog will naturally hope to roam about as it wants. But as Seneca’s metaphor implies, if it can’t, then it’s better for the animal to follow obediently behind the cart rather than be dragged and strangled by it. As Seneca put it: “An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it ... there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The best alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.” By turning back to the wisdom of the Stoic philosophers, we may find a helpful way of tempering some of our expectations and dampening our shock at disasters and bloodshed.
When, in 65 AD, Seneca was ordered to kill himself by the crazed Emperor Nero, his wife and family collapsed in tears, but Seneca had learned to follow the charriot of life with resignation. As he calmly took the knife to his veins, he remarked — in a sentence we may be wise to repeat to ourselves as we read the news on certain particularly sad mornings — “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”
