Compassion Is Available to All Just by Thinking

Seneca, while contending that memorizing historical trivia is useless, notes:

Perhaps you will permit someone to be interested also in this—the fact that Lucius Sulla was the first to exhibit loosed lions in the Circus, though at other times they were exhibited in chains, and that javelin-throwers were sent by King Bocchus to despatch them? And, doubtless, [knowing facts like this] too may find some excuse—but does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human.

The emphasis is mine. The passage is taken from a version of On the Shortness of life, here. This sounds thoroughly modern, doesn't it? 

I would say that "modern" isn't quite it. It's not that Seneca was ahead of his time. It sounds so familiar, like something we would say, because it's timeless. People from any era could 'get it' because it appeals intuitively to our basic humanity. 

Compassion is available to all just by thinking, regardless of the fashions or trends of the historical era in which we find ourselves, regardless of the religion or philosophy whose label we attach to ourselves, and so forth--all of those things that we buy into unnecessarily as constraints on our hearts and minds.