“Would you like to know what the actual difference between you and the gods will be? They will exist for longer. And yet to me what an indisputable mark it is of a great artist to have captured everything in a tiny compass; a wise man has as much scope before him as a god with all eternity in front of him.”
Letter LIII to Lucilius
Remarking on the breadth of wisdom and brevity of life, Seneca offers Lucilius some consolation: for humanity, dust in the wind though we may be, any fragment of wisdom is a miracle and a testament to our fortitude. Perhaps we ought to be looking down on such hacks as the gods’ perpetuity. It is an emboldening statement for an aspiring philosopher.
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