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Wise man

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Often appears with: stoic ethics · pleasure, pain, and the good life · pleasure and virtue · logic, method, and demonstration · greed and the love of money · greed and conquest · demetrius · cyrus and cambyses · conquest, plunder, and captives · alexander

Usually: argument (2) · ambition and its cost (1) · temptation (1) · censure (1) · detachment (1) · exhortation (1) · indignation (1)

Quotable
“Pleasure is uncertain, short, apt to pall upon us, and the more eagerly we indulge in it, the sooner we bring on a reaction of feeling against it.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca, L. Annaeus Seneca on Benefits · insight

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 VII. (3/22)

Seneca, following Demetrius, urges daily internal practice of key ethical rules: nothing is evil except what is base, pleasure is low and uncertain, and the wise man depends on honor not fortune.

merely to amuse our leisure; yet, when once anchored in safety, the mind may consider these matters also, though it can derive no strength, but only culture from their discussion." II. The above are the rules which my friend Demetrius bids him who would make progress in philosophy to clutch with both hands, never to let go, but to cling to them, and make them a part of himself, and by daily meditation upon them to b…

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 VII. (4/22)

He argues greed is common to rulers like Alexander’s imitators and the Persian houses of Cyrus and Cambyses, claiming only the wise man truly has everything without needing conquest or retention.

have seized or given away, or how great a part of the world may pay him tribute; such a man must be in need of as much as he desires. III. This was not the vice of Alexander alone, who followed with a fortunate audacity in the footsteps of Bacchus and Hercules, but it is common to all those whose covetousness is whetted rather than appeased by good fortune. Look at Cyrus and Cambyses and all the royal house of Persi…