Beware of gifts—not just Greeks bearing them

Beware, says Seneca, for gifts can possess you. Seneca’s claim here is more subtle than the typical Stoic injunction to avoid attachment to “externals" (though of course this is assumed). Indeed, his warning to “other men” is that gifts draw us in and accustom us to their presence, thus creating a set of dependencies that fundamentally determine us away from the happy life. Through our fear of the gift’s potential absence or the experience of grief at its departure—the loss of a fleet of grain ships, say, or a crash in the stock market—our lives reveal a basic conditioning by the presence of the gift and the existential vulnerability that is its direct result. We fear, we grieve, we damage our chance to live well. Over time, Seneca's logic suggests, our dependency on the gift is deepened, and we have learned to move within the gifts ambit. We have thus been ensnared by Fortuna, and we now belong to her. By giving us what we believed was a gift, Fortuna has in the end come to possess us. While we thought we held the gifts in our hands, she was holding us in her grasp. Fortuna’s gifts, says Seneca, make us vulnerable to defeat precisely because they are not gifts. Remember your own line, Lucilius, “What Fortune has made yours is not really yours” (Ep. 8.10). Don't be fooled, my friend, it's still the ol’ bait and switch.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 23–24

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It's lines like this that enabled the early Christians to say that Stoicism was a tutor—handmaiden is the word Rowe uses, I think—leading to Christianity.

It sounds almost Christian, doesn't it? "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be," as Jesus said. But, if you know much about Stoicism, you know that the theological presuppositions are diametrically opposed to Christianity. Their concept of God is pantheistic and impersonal.
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