9Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. 10For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him who is alone when he falls, and doesn’t have another to lift him up. 11Again, if two lie together, then they have warmth; but how can one keep warm alone? 12If a man prevails against one who is alone, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Most of us like to think we can carry our own loads, but this passage gently points out how much easier life is with someone beside us. A friend lifts us when we stumble, shares warmth when things turn cold, and stands with us when trouble comes. Steadiness is rarely a solo achievement. Today, consider who has been that kind of presence for you, and whom you might be that for in return.
Whether in arms and freedom I should wish To perish, rather than endure a king? Is longest life worth aught? And doth its term Make difference? Can violence to the good Do injury? Do Fortune's threats avail Outweighed by virtue? No Hammon's voice Shall teach us this more surely than we know. Bound are we to the gods; no voice we need; They live in all our acts, although the shrine Be silent... God has his dwelling in all things that be, In earth and air and sea and starry vault, In virtuous deeds; in all that thou canst see, In all thy thoughts contained. Let those who doubt And halting, tremble for their coming fates, Go ask the oracles.
Sir Edward Ridley, 1905 (first published 1896)
Lucan (AD 39–65) was Seneca's nephew and a poet at Nero's court. He was forced to take his own life after the Pisonian conspiracy, and his epic on the Roman civil war was left unfinished. It survived through hundreds of medieval manuscripts, because schoolmasters and readers prized it. This is the Stoic Cato, marching his beaten army across Libya. His officer Labienus urges him to consult the famous oracle of Ammon, and Cato refuses.
Cato's officer wants a prophet to tell him how things will turn out. Cato says the questions that matter were settled long ago: whether to live free, whether a long life is worth more than a good one, whether anyone can truly harm a good person. Most of us do the same thing in smaller ways. We look for a sign or a forecast, or ask a dozen people, when we already know what decent conduct requires. Lucan's point is that the decision depends on character, and character is ours to act on today.
PracticeThink of one decision you have been putting off while you wait for more information or reassurance. Ask yourself whether you already know what an honest, fair person would do. If you do, write that answer in one sentence and take the first step before tonight, without asking anyone else to confirm it.
In 155 BC, Athens sent a philosopher to Rome to plead for a fine to be cancelled. He spent two days arguing for justice and then against it.
In 155 BC Athens had a problem. Rome had fined it 500 talents for wrecking the town of Oropus. The Athenians sent three philosophers to ask for relief: a Stoic, an Aristotelian, and Carneades, the 58-year-old head of Plato's Academy, which had turned sceptical.
While waiting on the Senate, the three lectured, and young Romans crowded in. Tradition says Carneades gave two talks on consecutive days, with Cato the Elder in the audience. On the first day he praised justice, and the Roman version of it in particular, with great eloquence. On the second he took apart everything he had said the day before. He argued that justice was a convenience, a pact that holds a society together. He also argued that if Rome were strictly just, it would have to hand back its empire.
The point was not cynicism. The Academy practiced arguing both sides of a question (in utramque partem). The idea was that you can't judge a position until you have heard the best case against it. Carneades also wrote nothing. What we know of him comes from his pupil Clitomachus, and later from Cicero and others. Scholars today doubt some details of the story, including whether the two lectures happened as told.
The Romans reacted anyway. Cato, who distrusted Greek cleverness, pushed the Senate to settle the embassy's business and send the philosophers home quickly. That didn't work as a ban. Within a few generations Roman aristocrats were studying in Athens, and Cicero wrote Latin philosophy in the Academy's two-sided style. The expulsion mostly advertised the thing it was meant to suppress.
RememberCarneades showed that you only know whether you believe in justice once you have heard the best argument against it, and the Roman Senate's attempt to avoid that argument made it famous.
Read nextCicero, De Re Publica (Book 3, in surviving fragments), or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Carneades