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Repayment of benefits

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Often appears with: gratitude and ingratitude · equity, mercy, and pardon · contracts, oaths, and obligation · veteran dispute · temperance and self-mastery · spain · law vs social convention · julius caesar · duty, conscience, and obligation · character of aebutius liberalis · burying a corpse · bestowing benefits

Usually: detachment (3) · exhortation (2) · argument (1) · letter or document (1) · narrative (1) · betrayal (1) · injustice endured (1)

Quotable
“You yourself are so far from any boastfulness, you are so eager at once to free those whom you serve from any feeling of obligation to you, that you like, when giving anything to any one, to seem not so much to be giving a present as returning one; and therefore what you give in this manner will all the more fully he repaid to you.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca, L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits · observation

L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits primary

Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 59-65 CE (approx.)
BOOK I. The prevalence of ingratitude--How a benefit ought to be bestowed--The three Graces--Benefits are the chief bond of human society--What we owe in return for a benefit received--A benefit consists not of a thing but of the wish to do good--Socrates and > BOOK V. (1/22)

Seneca tells Aebutius Liberalis that true benefits are given willingly and without seeking repayment, so even ungrateful recipients can be steadily made grateful through continued beneficence.

I. In the preceding books I seem to have accomplished the object which I proposed to myself, since in them I have discussed how a benefit ought to be bestowed, and how it ought to be received. These are the limits of this action; when I dwell upon it further I am not obeying the orders, but the caprices of my subject which ought to be followed whither it leads, not whither it allures us to wander; for now and then s…

L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits primary

Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 59-65 CE (approx.)
BOOK I. The prevalence of ingratitude--How a benefit ought to be bestowed--The three Graces--Benefits are the chief bond of human society--What we owe in return for a benefit received--A benefit consists not of a thing but of the wish to do good--Socrates and > BOOK V. (19/22)

Seneca explains that a benefit can be received even unwillingly or with hostile feelings, and gives the example of burying a recognized corpse, then addresses whether repayment may be demanded.

for there follows it this endless chain of people, to whom it is hard to assign bounds, because they join it by degrees, and are always creeping on towards it. XX. A common question is, "Two brothers are at variance. If I save the life of one, do I confer a benefit upon the other, who will be sorry that his hated brother did not perish?" There can be no doubt that it is a benefit to do good to a man, even against th…

L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits primary

Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 59-65 CE (approx.)
BOOK I. The prevalence of ingratitude--How a benefit ought to be bestowed--The three Graces--Benefits are the chief bond of human society--What we owe in return for a benefit received--A benefit consists not of a thing but of the wish to do good--Socrates and > BOOK V. (22/22)

Seneca recounts Julius Caesar and a veteran from Spain, using the story to argue that asking repayment should consider circumstances, legal and practical limits, and the tempering of speech to avoid offense.

bitterness, not in public, or in a reproachful manner, but so that he may think that he himself has remembered it rather than that it has been recalled to him. XXIV. One of Julius Caesar's veterans was once pleading before him against his neighbours, and the cause was going against him. "Do you remember, general," said he, "that in Spain you dislocated your ankle near the river Sucro [Footnote: Xucar]?" When Caesar …