How to give with Seneca

Part XIX of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series

[Based on How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving, by Seneca, translated by James M. Romm. Full book series here.]

I bet you didn’t realize that gift giving and receiving has a moral dimension, did you? At least, most of us nowadays are used to think of morality, or ethics, as having a rather specific and narrow domain: it is concerned with whether a particular action is right or wrong, and gifts rarely, if ever, seem to deserve that much attention.

But the ancient Greco-Romans understood the realm of ethics as far more encompassing, indeed it was concerned with pretty much everything a human being does, especially when it comes to how we treat other human beings. So giving and receiving gifts, being a common act of social intercourse, very much has an ethical dimension, which is why the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger wrote a whole book about it, entitled On Benefits, which James Romm has translated anew under the title How to Give, as part of the ongoing Princeton University Press’s series “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers.”

According to Seneca, humanity survives by means of two attributes: reason and what he calls societas, or sociability, that is, prosocial behavior. Nature has designed us to be sociable, which implies that we ought not to get angry with our fellow human beings, and generally speaking that we ought to behave virtuously, as for Seneca and the Stoics virtue is essentially synonymous with a prosocial attitude.

In modern parlance, we would say that humans evolved as highly intelligent and social animals, and that those attributes, built into us by natural selection, are fundamental for our very survival. Individual human beings don’t do very well in nature, they need coordination with and reciprocal help from other human beings. And reason is our chief evolutionary weapon, as the problem solving ability that it allows is our species’ equivalent of large muscles, running, flying, or fast swimming in other species.

Back to “benefits,” a word that sounds a bit strange to us moderns, but that represents a broad array of gift giving and receiving. Seneca warns us that if we expect something in return when we give a gift, then we are not giving anymore, we are engaging in a commercial transaction, or offering a bribe, depending on the circumstances. Likewise, when it comes to receiving, we ought to do it gracefully, with true gratitude, not with the ulterior motive of ingratiating the other person for future advantage.

It is an indication of how much Seneca valued the topic at hand that On Benefits is the longest of his books, longer even than On Anger, arguably his most famous one. Moreover, he also wrote a letter to Lucilius (n. 81) on the same topic. The letter may be considered an update to the book, and the last word by Seneca on the matter, since he died shortly thereafter.