“To live, indeed, is not in our power, but to live rightly is.” Quintus Sextius

Seneca writes of Sextius:

“All our senses ought to be trained to endurance. They are naturally long-suffering, if only the mind desists from weakening them. This should be summoned to give an account of itself every day. Sextius had this habit, and when the day was over and he had retired to his nightly rest, he would put these questions to his soul: ‘What bad habits have you cured today? What fault have you resisted? In what respect are you better?’ ... When the light has been removed from sight, and my wife, long aware of my habit, has become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words. I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing.” Seneca, De Ira, III.XXXVI

Here we have another example of the practice of nightly self-examination.

Daily self-examination is a core practice of our wisdom tradition, and I highly recommend incorporating it into your practice. It can be (but doesn't have to be) combined with journaling.

- CWT Admin

"The Pythagoreans also insisted upon a very great exercise of the memory, setting up the following way of giving it practice. They would not arise from their beds until they had frankly disclosed to one another everything they had done the day before, beginning with early dawn and closing with the evening. ... This practice they followed to gain knowledge and judgement in all matters and experience in the ability to call many things to mind."

Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 10.5.1

"Shrill muse, sing of Hephaestus, great inventor.
He and gray-eyed Athena taught all bright works
To mortals on the earth, who made their poor homes,
Like animals, in caverns in the mountains.
But now Hephaestus, glorious in his knowledge,
Has made them skilled. They spend the seasons' circle
In peace and comfort now, in their own houses.
Hephaestus, lend your grace: teach and reward me."

Homeric Hymns 20 "To Hephaestus"

"Every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state; it is always full of body when it departs, so that it soon falls back into another body and grows with it as if it had been sewn into it."

Plato, Phaedo 83d

"Truly, above all I disclosed the stern inevitability of ancient Chaos, and Time, who in his boundless coils, produced Aether, and the twofold, beautiful, and noble Eros, whom the younger men call Phanes, celebrated parent of eternal Night, because he himself first manifested."

From the theogony of the Orphic Argonautica

"I beseech you, Lord, father and guide of the reason in us, remind us of our noble origin, which we were deemed worthy to receive from you. Act with us (as we are self-movers) for our purification from the body and its irrational emotions, that we may be superior to them and rule them, and that we may use them as instruments in the fitting way. Act with us also for the precise correction of the reason in us and its unification with the genuinely existent things through the light of the truth. And the third request to the Saviour: I beseech you, completely remove the mist from the eyes of our souls, 'so that we may clearly know,' as Homer says, 'both God and man.'"

Simplicius, Commentary on Epictetus' Handbook 454

"Still, I would try to teach [Christians] something, slow-witted though they are: If one shuts his eyes to the things of the senses and tries to see with his mind's eye, and if one turns from the flesh to the inner self, the soul, there he will see God and know God. But to begin the journey, you must flee from deceivers and magicians who parade fantasies in front of you. You will be a laughingstock so long as you repeat the blasphemy that the gods of other men are idols, while you brazenly worship as God a man whose life was wretched, who is known to have died (in disgraceful circumstances), and who, so you teach, is the very model of the God we should look to as our Father."

Celsus, The True Doctrine 9

"We ought to learn by heart the hymns in honor of the Gods."

Flavius Claudius Julianus, also known as Julian the Philosopher, died on this day in the year 363. He was the last pagan emperor of Rome.

Julian rejected his Christian upbringing and, returning to his true ancestral faith, sought to re-paganize the empire. Tragically, he did not succeed, but his memory and writings have endured.

In a letter to a priest, Julian explained that priests ought to be beyond reproach and should only study pious philosophers. He named Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics as examples and rejected philosophers such as Epicurus and Pyrrho. While this strict advice was meant for priests, not laymen, it does nevertheless indicate the shape that post-Christian paganism would likely have taken, officially, had the Empire not succumbed to Christianity.

May his memory endure forever!

"After the souls have been freed from generation, according to the ancients they administer the universe together with the gods, while according to the Platonists they contemplate the gods' order. According to the former, in the same way they help the angels with the creation of the universe, while according to the latter they accompany them."

Iamblichus, De Anima 53

"'Heroes' refers also to souls separated from bodies, whose conduct has been good, except that these are located in a lower position than the demons. Pythagoras held the heroes in esteem also, and we honor them by believing them to be eternally existent, and by believing that they requite with evil or good whoever does harm or good to them. For them there are prescribed exaltation, incense and sacrifice on the twenty-fifth day of January."

Proclus(?), Commentary on the Pythagorean Golden Verses 94b

"Or how else are we to become nearer to the One, if we do not rouse up the One of the soul, which is in us as a kind of image of the One, by virtue of which the most accurate of authorities declare that divine possession most especially comes about? And how are we to make this One and flower of the soul shine forth unless we first of all activate our intellect? For the activity of the intellect leads the soul towards a state and activity of calm. And how are we to achieve perfect intellectual activity if we do not travel there by means of logical conceptions, using composite intellections prior to more simple ones? So then, we need demonstrative power in our preliminary assumptions, where as we need intellectual activity in our investigations of being (for the orders of being are denied of the One), and we need inspired impulse in our consciousness of that which transcends all beings, in order that we may not slip unawares from our negations into Not-Being and its invisibility by reason of our indefinite imagination, but rousing up the One within us and, through this, warming the soul we may connect ourselves to the One itself and, as it were find mooring, taking our stand above everything intelligible within ourselves and dispensing with every other one of our activities, in order that we may consort with it alone and perform a dance around it, leaving behind all the intellections of the soul which are directed to secondary things."

Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Parmenides 1071 - 1072

"The moment you find yourself offended by a flaw in someone, you should stop and consider whether you have similar flaws."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.30

"You must hasten toward the light and toward the rays of the Father, from where the soul, clothed in mighty intellect, has been sent to you."

The Chaldean Oracles fr. 115

"Then, at the age of fifty, those who've survived the tests and been successful both in practical matters and in the sciences must be led to the goal and compelled to lift up the radiant light of their souls to what itself provides light for everything. And once they've seen the good itself, they must each in turn put the city, its citizens, and themselves in order, using it as their model. Each of them will spend most of his time with philosophy, but, when his turn comes, he must labor in politics and rule for the city's sake, not as if he were doing something fine, but rather something that has to be done. Then, having educated others like himself to take his place as guardians of the city, he will depart for the Isles of the Blessed and dwell there."

Plato, The Republic 540a

"What are we to do, then? To make the best of what lies within our power, and deal with everything else as it comes. 'How does it come, then?' As God wills."

Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.17

"In short, the philosophers began only by so to speak contrary principles; but above these elements they knew another superior one, as is testified by Philolaus, who says that God has produced, and realized the Limited and the Unlimited, and shown that at the Limit is attached the whole series which has a greater affinity with the One, and to the Unlimited, the series that is below."

Archytas the Pythagorean, fragments 2 (quoted from Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library p. 179)

"For all things to produce with ease thro' mind is thine.
Hence mother Earth and mountains swelling high
Proceed from thee, the deep and all within the sky.
Saturnian king, descending from above,
Magnanimous, commanding, sceptred Jove;
All-parent, principle and end of all"

The Orphic Hymns, "To Jupiter" 3-9 (Thomas Taylor translation)

"The third type of property that has come from the intellectual level of being to all things and proceeds all the way to us is the divine names, through which we call upon the gods and by which they are praised. They have been revealed by the gods themselves, cause reversion back to them and, to the extent that there is something luminous in them, lead to human understanding. ... Different peoples partake of these names in different ways: the Egyptians, for instance, have taken such names from the gods in accordance with their native tongue, but the Chaldaeans and Indians have taken their own differently in accordance with their own languages, and in the same way the Greeks have taken theirs in accordance with their own idiom. Thus, even if the Greeks, with divine guidance, call a certain God ‘Briareos’ while the Chaldaeans call him something else, we must suppose that both names are products of the gods and indicate the [same] essence."

Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Cratylus 32.1-10