Seneca permits tears while disciplining grief
The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears.
Seneca supplies a useful qualification to this broad contrast. In Letter 63, consoling Lucilius after Flaccus's death, he presents freedom from mourning as the higher ideal, but recognizes the sting of loss even in an exceptionally steadfast person. For ordinary mourners he permits tears, provided they remain limited and are brought under control: ‘We may weep, but we must not wail’ (§1). In §2 he criticizes grief performed for an audience. His distinction is therefore between controlled sorrow and excessive or demonstrative lamentation, rather than between concealed and visible tears.
Chesterton's antithesis captures the Stoic valuation of self-command, but makes it look more like mere emotional concealment than this Stoic witness warrants. Seneca's ideal concerns the condition of the soul as well as its public appearance. This comparison uses Richard M. Gummere's English translation as transcribed by Wikisource; its collected title page gives a 1925 reprint and records a first printing in 1918. Those are dates of the modern translation witness, not of Seneca's ancient letters, and the translation cannot have supplied Chesterton's wording in Orthodoxy (first published in 1908).
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