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…