Seneca Moral essays
Seneca: When Fortune has unjustly divided the common…
When Fortune has unjustly divided the common stock, and has given over one man to another, though they were born with equal rights. Death makes them all equal. After Death no one acts any more at another’s bidding: in death no man suffers any more from the sense of his low position.
The passage follows a public-domain translation of Seneca’s moral essays. The reading beside it is ours.
Life assigns unequal roles. One person is born into safety, another into poverty; one gets authority, another spends years answering to it. These differences are real, and we should work to make our shared world more just. Yet Seneca points to the one boundary no status crosses. Death ends the commands, comparisons, humiliations, and privileges that seemed permanent. This is not an excuse to accept injustice now. It is a warning against building your identity on rank, either above or below others. The powerful are not as secure as they appear, and the overlooked are not less human because a system says so. Remembering our common end can make us less impressed by titles and less crushed by them. Today, meet the person in front of you as a fellow mortal, not as a position on a ladder.
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