Seneca: Letters to Lucilius
The Plainspoken Classics - Scriptorium Press (First Edition, 2026)
An original AI translation made directly from the source language.
https://openscriptorium.com


======== Letter 1 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Do this, my dear Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself, and gather and guard the time that until now was being taken from you, or stolen from you, or simply slipping away. Convince yourself that it is exactly as I write: some of our time is snatched from us, some is quietly siphoned off, some just drains away. But the most shameful loss of all is the loss that comes through carelessness. And if you look closely, you'll see that a great part of life is spent doing wrong, the greatest part doing nothing at all, and the whole of it doing something other than what we should be doing.
Show me the man who puts a real price on his time, who values a day, who understands that he is dying every single day. In this we are mistaken - we look ahead to death as if it lay wholly in the future, when a great part of it has already happened. Whatever years lie behind us, death already holds. So do, my dear Lucilius, what you write that you're doing: hold on to every single hour. This way you'll depend less on tomorrow, if you get a grip on today.
While we put life off, it rushes past. Everything, Lucilius, belongs to someone else; only time is our own. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, so fleeting and slippery, and anyone who wishes can dislodge us from it. And such is human folly that people let themselves be charged for the smallest, cheapest things - things that can always be replaced - once they've gotten hold of them, yet no one who has received time judges himself to owe anything at all, when time is the one debt that not even a grateful man can repay.
You'll ask, perhaps, what I myself am doing, I who preach all this to you. I'll confess it frankly: like a man who is extravagant but careful, I keep an account of my expenses. I can't say I lose nothing, but I can tell you what I lose, and why, and how; I can give you the reasons for my poverty. But what happens to me is what happens to most people reduced to want through no fault of their own: everyone forgives them, no one helps them.
So what follows? I don't consider a man poor if whatever little is left is enough for him. Still, I'd rather you kept what's yours, and you'll start at a good time. For as our ancestors saw it, 'thrift practiced late comes at the bottom of the barrel' - for what remains at the bottom isn't only the least, but the worst. Farewell.

======== Letter 2 ========

[1] From what you write to me, and from what I hear, I'm forming good hopes about you: you aren't running from place to place, unsettling yourself with constant changes of scene. That kind of thrashing about belongs to a sick mind. To my thinking, the first evidence of a well-ordered mind is that it can stand still and keep its own company. [2] But watch out for this: all that reading of many authors and volumes of every sort may carry something drifting and unsteady in it. You have to stay with particular great minds and feed on them, if you want to take away anything that will settle reliably in your soul. The person who is everywhere is nowhere. People who spend life on the road end up with plenty of places to stay and no friendships; the same thing necessarily happens to those who never grow intimate with any single writer's mind but rush through everything at a gallop. [3] Food does no good, adds nothing to the body, if it comes back up the moment it's swallowed. Nothing blocks recovery like constantly switching remedies; a wound never closes over when different dressings keep being tried on it; a plant never takes strength when it's transplanted again and again. Nothing is so useful that it helps in passing. A crowd of books pulls the mind apart. So since you can't read everything you own, it's enough to own what you can read. [4] 'But,' you say, 'sometimes I want to open this book, sometimes that one.' Sampling a bit of everything is the mark of a queasy stomach; foods that are many and mismatched foul the system instead of feeding it. So read the proven authors, always; and if you feel like a detour to the others now and then, come back to the first ones. Lay in some provision every day against poverty, some against death, and no less against the other plagues; and after skimming much, pick out one thing to digest that day. [5] I do this myself: out of the many pages I've read, I seize on something. Today's find is one I came upon in Epicurus — I make a habit of crossing over into the enemy camp too, not as a deserter but as a scout. 'Cheerful poverty,' he says, 'is an honorable thing.' [6] But in fact, if it's cheerful, it isn't poverty. It isn't having little that makes a man poor; it's craving more. And why should it matter how much lies in a man's strongbox, how much in his granaries, how many head he grazes, how much he has out at interest, if he's hungering after his neighbor's property — if his accounting runs not on what he's acquired but on what remains to acquire? You ask what the right measure of wealth is? First, to have what is necessary; next, to have enough. Farewell.

======== Letter 3 ========

[1] You handed your letters, so you write, to a friend of yours to carry to me — and then you warn me not to share with him everything that concerns you, since you don't usually do so yourself. So in one and the same letter you both called him a friend and denied it. If, though, you meant the word loosely, in its everyday public sense — calling him a friend the way we call every candidate a 'fine fellow,' the way we greet people we meet as 'sir' when their name escapes us — let it pass. [2] But if you consider anyone a friend whom you don't trust as much as you trust yourself, you're badly mistaken, and you don't yet understand the force of real friendship. Talk over everything with a friend — but talk him over first. After friendship, trust everything; before friendship, judge everything. Those people get their duties exactly backwards who, against Theophrastus's advice, judge after they've begun to love instead of loving after they've judged. Think long about whether someone should be admitted to your friendship. Once you've decided he should, take him in with your whole heart; speak with him as boldly as with yourself. [3] Live, certainly, in such a way that you confide nothing to yourself you couldn't confide to your enemy; but since things come up that custom makes private, share with a friend all your worries, all your thoughts. Believe him faithful, and faithful you will make him; some men have taught others to deceive by fearing deception — their suspicion handed over the license to do wrong. Why should I hold back any word in the presence of my friend? Why shouldn't I consider myself alone when I'm with him? [4] Some people tell any passerby what should be entrusted only to friends, unloading whatever burns them into whatever ears are handy; others, in turn, flinch even from the knowledge of those dearest to them, and press every secret deeper inside, unwilling to trust it even to themselves if they could help it. Do neither. Both are faults — trusting everyone and trusting no one — though I'd call the first the more honorable fault, the second the safer one. [5] In the same way you should fault both kinds of people: those who are always in motion and those who are always at rest. That delight in bustle isn't industry; it's the scrambling of a driven mind. And that state which counts every movement a nuisance isn't calm; it's slackness and collapse. [6] So commit to memory this line I read in Pomponius: 'Some men have fled so far into their hiding places that they think anything in daylight is a storm.' The two must be blended: the resting man should act, and the acting man should rest. Take counsel with nature: her answer will be that she created day and night alike. Farewell.

======== Letter 4 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Keep on as you have begun, and hurry as much as you can, so that you may enjoy for that much longer a mind that is corrected and well-ordered. You do, in fact, already enjoy something even while you are correcting it, even while you are ordering it; but that is a different pleasure from the one you get from contemplating a mind that is pure of every stain and shining clear.
You surely still remember how much joy you felt when you set aside the boy's purple-bordered toga and put on the plain toga of manhood, and were led down into the forum. Expect something greater still when you've set aside a boyish mind and philosophy has transcribed you into the ranks of men. For what remains in us so far isn't boyhood, but something worse - boyishness; and this is worse precisely because we carry the authority of old men along with the failings of boys, and not just of boys but of infants: children are frightened of trifles, boys of illusions, and we of both.
Just keep making progress: you'll come to understand that certain things are actually less to be feared precisely because they inspire so much fear. No evil is great that is also the last thing that happens. Death is coming toward you: it would be something to fear if it could stay with you; but it must either not arrive at all, or else pass on through.
'It's hard,' you say, 'to bring the mind around to holding life cheap.' Don't you see on what trivial grounds life is held cheap already? One man has hanged himself in front of his mistress's door; another has thrown himself off a roof rather than go on listening to a master's temper; another has driven a blade into his own gut rather than be dragged back from flight. Don't you think that virtue can accomplish what sheer excessive fear accomplishes? No one can have a secure life who thinks too much about prolonging it, who counts among life's great goods the number of consulships he's seen come and go.
Practice this every day, so that you're able to leave life with an even mind - the very life that so many people cling to and clutch the way people swept along by a raging current grab at thorns and jagged rocks. Most people are tossed about miserably between the fear of death and the torments of life: they don't want to live, and they don't know how to die.
So make your whole life pleasant for yourself by setting down all anxiety over it. No good thing brings benefit to the one who holds it unless his mind is prepared for its loss; and nothing is easier to lose than a thing that, once lost, cannot even be missed. So arm and harden yourself against these things that can happen even to the most powerful of men.
It was a mere ward under guardianship and a eunuch who pronounced sentence on Pompey's head; it was a cruel and arrogant Parthian who did the same for Crassus. Gaius Caesar ordered Lepidus to bare his neck to the tribune Dexter, and himself offered his own neck to Chaerea. Fortune has never raised anyone so high that she didn't also threaten him with exactly as much as she had granted him. Don't put your trust in this calm: in a moment the sea is overturned; on the very day ships were at play, they are swallowed up.
Consider that a robber or an enemy can hold a sword to your throat at any moment; and setting aside any greater power, every single slave holds the power of life and death over you. I say this: whoever has come to despise his own life is master of yours. Go back over the accounts of those who perished through plots within their own households, whether by open violence or by treachery, and you'll understand that no fewer have fallen to the anger of their slaves than to the anger of kings. So what does it matter to you how powerful the man you fear is, when the very thing you fear from him is something every single person has the power to do?
But suppose, say, you fall into the hands of an enemy: the victor will order you led away - to exactly the place you were already being led. Why deceive yourself, and only now realize something you've actually been undergoing all along? I say this: from the moment you were born, you have been led toward death. These thoughts, and others like them, must be turned over in the mind, if we want to await that final hour with a calm spirit - since it is the fear of that hour that makes all our other hours restless.
But to bring this letter to a close, take this thought that pleased me today - and this too is plucked from someone else's garden: 'Great wealth is poverty arranged according to the law of nature.' And do you know what limits that law of nature sets for us? Not to hunger, not to thirst, not to feel the cold. To drive off hunger and thirst you don't need to sit at some arrogant man's threshold, or put up with his heavy scowl and even his insulting condescension; you don't need to brave the seas or follow the army camps: what nature demands is easy to come by and lies close at hand.
It's for the superfluous things that we sweat; it's those things that wear out our togas, that force us to grow old under military tents, that drive us onto foreign shores. What's enough is right there at hand. The man who has come to terms with poverty is a rich man. Farewell.

======== Letter 5 ========

[1] That you study with such persistence, dropping everything else to work at this one thing — making yourself better every day — I approve and I rejoice; and I don't merely urge you to keep it up, I beg you to. But here is my warning: don't act like those who want not to make progress but to be noticed, doing things that draw attention to your dress or your way of living. [2] The rough coat, the unbarbered head, the beard let go wild, the declared war on silverware, the bed laid on the ground — avoid these, and everything else that chases prestige by the back road. The very name of philosophy stirs enough resentment even when it's worn quietly; what will happen if we start seceding from ordinary human custom? Inside, let everything be different; on the outside, let our face fit the crowd. [3] The toga shouldn't dazzle — but it shouldn't be dirty either. Let's not own silver plate inlaid with reliefs of solid gold, but let's not imagine that going without gold and silver is proof of the simple life. Our aim should be a life better than the crowd's, not opposed to it; otherwise we drive away and turn off the very people we want to reform — and we achieve this too, that they refuse to imitate anything of ours, for fear they'd have to imitate everything. [4] The first thing philosophy promises is fellow-feeling, humanity, sociability; cutting ourselves off from others will divorce us from that promise. Let's make sure the things by which we hope to win admiration aren't ridiculous and repellent. Our stated aim, after all, is to live according to nature — and it is against nature to torture your own body, to hate cleanliness when it comes easily, to court squalor, and to eat food that is not just cheap but foul and disgusting. [5] Just as craving delicacies is decadence, so shunning ordinary things that cost little to get is madness. Philosophy demands plain living, not penance — and plain living doesn't have to be unkempt. This is the measure that satisfies me: let our life be tempered between good morals and common ones; let everyone look up to our way of life, but recognize it. [6] 'What then? Shall we do just what everyone else does? Will there be no difference between us and them?' A very great difference. Anyone who looks closer should know we're unlike the crowd; anyone who enters our house should marvel at us rather than at our furniture. The great man is the one who uses earthenware as if it were silver — and no less great is the one who uses silver as if it were earthenware. Not being able to bear wealth is the sign of a weak spirit.
[7] But to share with you this day's small profit as well: in our own Hecaton I found that putting an end to desires works as a cure for fear too. 'You will stop fearing,' he says, 'if you stop hoping.' 'How,' you'll ask, 'can two such opposite things go together?' That's how it is, my Lucilius: though they look like enemies, they are yoked. Just as one chain links the prisoner and the guard, so these two, so unlike each other, march in step: fear follows close behind hope. [8] And I'm not surprised they travel this way. Both belong to a mind in suspense, a mind anxious with looking ahead. The chief cause of both is that we don't fit ourselves to the present but send our thoughts far out ahead of us; and so foresight, the greatest blessing of the human condition, has been turned into an evil. [9] Wild animals run from the dangers they see, and once they've escaped, they're at peace. We are tormented by what is coming and by what is past. Many of our advantages do us harm: memory drags the torment of fear back, foresight brings it early. No one is made miserable by the present alone. Farewell.

======== Letter 6 ========

[1] I can tell, Lucilius, that I am not just being corrected — I am being remade. And I don't yet promise, or even hope, that nothing is left in me that needs changing. Of course I have plenty that ought to be pulled together, or trimmed down, or built up. In fact this very thing is proof of a mind that has moved toward the better: it sees faults in itself that it never noticed before. Some sick people get congratulated when they finally realize they are sick. [2] So I wish I could share this sudden change in myself with you. Then I would begin to trust our friendship more firmly — the real kind, which no hope, no fear, no concern for personal advantage can tear apart; the kind people keep until death, the kind they die for. [3] I can name you many men who lacked not a friend but friendship. That cannot happen when a matched will draws two minds into partnership in desiring what is honorable. Of course it can't: such men know they hold everything in common — their troubles most of all.
[4] You cannot imagine how much progress I see each single day bringing me. 'Send me too,' you say, 'these remedies you've found so effective.' Believe me, I want to pour everything I have into you, and part of my joy in learning anything is that I get to pass it on. Nothing will give me pleasure, however outstanding, however wholesome, if I am to be the only one who knows it. If wisdom were offered to me on this condition — that I keep it shut up inside and never speak it — I would refuse it: no good is enjoyable to possess without a partner. [5] So I will send you the books themselves, and to save you the labor of hunting through them for the useful parts, I will mark them, so you can turn at once to the passages I approve of and admire. Still, the living voice and the shared life will do you more good than any written argument. You need to come to where the thing itself is happening — first, because people trust their eyes more than their ears; second, because the road by way of precepts is long, while the road by way of examples is short and works. [6] Merely hearing Zeno lecture would never have made Cleanthes his likeness: he took part in his life, looked into his private conduct, and watched to see whether the man lived by his own rule. Plato and Aristotle and the whole crowd of philosophers who would later scatter in different directions drew less from Socrates' words than from the way the man lived. What made Metrodorus and Hermarchus and Polyaenus great was not Epicurus's classroom but sharing his roof. And I am not calling you here only so that you can improve, but so that you can be of use: we will each give the other a great deal.
[7] Meanwhile, since I owe you your little daily fee, I'll tell you what delighted me today in Hecato. 'You ask what progress I have made?' he says. 'I have begun to be a friend to myself.' Real progress: he will never be alone. Trust me, a man like that is a friend to everyone. Farewell.

======== Letter 7 ========

[1] You ask what I think you should avoid above everything else? A crowd. You are not yet safe to be trusted to one. I'll admit my own weakness, at any rate: I never bring home the character I took out with me. Something of what I had put in order gets shaken loose; something of what I had driven off comes back. What happens to invalids whom a long illness has weakened so far that they can't be taken outdoors without a setback — that is what happens to those of us whose minds are recovering from a long sickness. [2] Mixing with a lot of people is hostile territory: every one of them either recommends some fault to us, or stamps it on us, or smears it on without our noticing. And the danger grows with the size of the crowd we mix into. Nothing, though, wrecks good character like idling in the seats at some spectacle, because that is when vice slips in most easily — on the back of pleasure. [3] What do you suppose I mean? That I come home greedier, more ambitious, more self-indulgent? Worse: crueler and less human, because I have been among human beings. I happened to drop in on the midday show, expecting games, jokes, some relaxation to give men's eyes a rest from human blood. Just the opposite. Whatever fighting had gone on before was mercy by comparison. Now the trifles are dropped and it is pure killing. The men have nothing to shield themselves with; their whole bodies stand open to the blow, and no thrust ever misses. [4] Most spectators prefer this to the regular matched pairs and the bouts by request. And why wouldn't they? No helmet, no shield turns the blade aside. What good is armor? What good is technique? All of that just delays death. In the morning men are thrown to lions and bears; at noon, to their own audience. The crowd orders killers thrown to men who will kill them, and holds the winner back for another slaughter; the way out, for those who fight, is death. Steel and fire do the business. [5] And all this goes on while the arena stands empty. 'But the man was a robber; he killed someone.' So what? Because he killed, he earned this fate — but what did you ever do, poor wretch, to earn watching it? 'Strike him down! Lash him! Put him to the flames! Why does he meet the blade so timidly? Why is his killing so half-hearted? Why is his dying so reluctant? Whip them into the wounds; let them trade blows on bare chests, breast to breast.' The show pauses: 'Cut some throats in the meantime, so something is happening.' Come now — don't you people even grasp that bad examples fall back on those who set them? Thank the immortal gods that the man you are teaching cruelty to is unable to learn.
[6] A tender mind, with a weak grip on the right, has to be pulled away from the public: it is easy to go over to the majority's side. A crowd unlike them might have shaken even Socrates, Cato, and Laelius out of their character — so certain is it that none of us, at the very moment we are polishing our nature, can withstand the assault of vices arriving with so large an escort. [7] One model of extravagance or greed works enormous damage: a pampered housemate slowly softens and unstrings you; a rich neighbor inflames desire; a spiteful companion rubs his rust off on the most candid and straightforward of men. What do you suppose happens to a character under mass assault? [8] You must either imitate them or hate them. Steer clear of both: don't become like the bad because there are many of them, and don't turn hostile to the many just because you are unlike them. Withdraw into yourself as far as you can. Spend your time with people who will make you better; welcome those you can make better. These things work both ways: people learn while they teach. [9] And there is no reason for the glory of showing off your talent to draw you out before the public, to make you want to give readings or hold debates for that lot. I would want you to, if you had merchandise suited to that public — but there is no one there who could understand you. Perhaps one or two individuals will turn up, and even those you will have to shape and train up to the point of understanding you. 'Then who did I learn all this for?' You have nothing to fear: the effort was not wasted, if you learned it for yourself.
[10] But so that today's learning isn't for me alone, I'll share three fine sayings that come to mind, all bearing on much the same point. One of them this letter will pay as its debt; take the other two as an advance. Democritus says: 'One man counts with me as a whole people, and a people as one man.' [11] Well said, too, by whoever it was — the author is disputed — who, when asked why he took such pains over an art that would reach so very few, replied: 'A few are enough for me; one is enough; none is enough.' And this third, splendidly, from Epicurus, writing to one of his companions in study: 'I write this not for the many but for you: you and I are, for each other, theater enough.' [12] Store these away in your mind, my Lucilius, so that you can despise the pleasure that comes from the applause of the majority. Many people praise you — but what grounds have you for self-approval, if you are a man the many can understand? Let your good qualities face inward. Farewell.

======== Letter 8 ========

[1] 'You tell me to avoid the crowd,' you say, 'to withdraw and be content with my own conscience? What happened to those precepts of your school that order a man to die in mid-action?' What — do you think I'm recommending laziness? I have hidden myself away and shut my doors for one purpose: to be useful to more people. No day of mine ends in idleness; I claim part of my nights for study; I don't make time for sleep, I collapse into it, and when my eyes are exhausted with waking and falling shut, I hold them to their task. [2] I have withdrawn not only from people but from affairs, my own affairs first of all: the business I'm conducting belongs to posterity. For them I am writing out things that may help — wholesome advice, like the recipes of useful medicines, which I set down in writing because I have proved them effective on my own sores: even where these are not fully healed, they have stopped spreading. [3] The right road, which I found late and weary from wandering, I point out to others. I shout: 'Avoid whatever pleases the mob, whatever chance hands out. Stop, suspicious and afraid, before every windfall good: it is by some tempting hope that both the wild animal and the fish are taken. You think these are fortune's gifts? They are traps. Whoever among you wants to live a safe life should keep as far as possible from these limed favors — where we most wretchedly deceive ourselves besides: we think we hold them, and we are the ones stuck fast. [4] That course leads over a cliff; the end of this high-perched life is a fall. And once prosperity starts driving you sideways, you can't even stop, or at least go down straight and all at once: fortune doesn't merely turn you over, she pitches you headlong and dashes you against the rocks. [5] So hold to this sound and healthy rule of life: indulge the body only as far as good health requires. Handle it rather roughly, or it will not obey the mind well. Let food settle hunger, drink put out thirst, clothing keep off cold, and a house be a shelter against whatever weather threatens. Whether turf raised that house or the many-colored stone of some foreign land makes no difference: know that a man is roofed as well by thatch as by gold. Despise everything that pointless labor sets up as ornament and show. Keep in mind that nothing is astonishing except the mind — and to a great mind nothing is great.' [6] If this is what I say to myself, and say to posterity, am I not accomplishing more, in your view, than in the days when I went down to court to stand bail, or pressed my seal-ring into a will, or lent a candidate my voice and my hand in the senate? Believe me, those who seem to be doing nothing are doing the greater things: they are dealing with the human and the divine at once.
[7] But now I must stop, and — as I've made my custom — pay something out for this letter. It won't come from my own funds: I'm still plundering Epicurus, in whom I read this line today: 'You must become philosophy's slave if you want to reach real freedom.' The man who has surrendered and handed himself over to her is not put off from day to day: he is freed on the spot, because this very slavery to philosophy is freedom. [8] You may well ask me why I quote so many good sayings from Epicurus rather than from our own school. But why should you regard these sayings as Epicurus's property rather than common property? How many poets say things that philosophers have said, or ought to say! I'll leave aside tragedy, and our Roman drama in the toga too — that genre has its own measure of seriousness and sits halfway between comedy and tragedy. How much of the most eloquent verse lies around in the mime shows! How many lines of Publilius deserve to be delivered not in slippers but in tragic boots! [9] I'll quote one verse of his that bears on philosophy, and on the topic we just had in hand: it denies that what chance brings should be counted as ours:
Whatever comes by wishing is nothing you own.
[10] I remember you putting the same thought considerably better, and tighter:
What fortune has made yours is not yours.
And I won't pass over this other saying of yours, better still:
A good that could be given can be taken away.
This I don't charge against the account: it came to you from your own stock. Farewell.

======== Letter 9 ========

[1] You want to know whether Epicurus was right when, in one of his letters, he criticized those who hold that the wise man, being sufficient to himself, has no need of a friend. This is the charge Epicurus brings against Stilbo and against those for whom the highest good is a mind that feels nothing. [2] We are bound to run into ambiguity if we try to compress 'apatheia' into a single quick word and call it 'impassivity'; it could be taken to mean the opposite of what we intend. We mean a man who rejects any sensation of evil; it will be heard as a man who cannot endure any evil at all. Consider, then, whether it is better to speak of an invulnerable mind, or of a mind set beyond all suffering. [3] Here is the difference between us and them: our wise man conquers every hardship, but he feels it; theirs does not even feel it. What we share with them is this: the wise man is content with himself. Still, he wants a friend, a neighbor, a companion at his side, however sufficient he is to himself. [4] See just how content with himself he is: on occasion he is content with only part of himself. If disease or an enemy costs him a hand, if some accident puts out an eye or both eyes, what is left of him will be enough for him, and with his body diminished and cut back he will be as cheerful as he was when it was whole. But though he does not miss what he lacks, he would rather not lack it. [5] The wise man is content with himself in this sense: not that he wants to be without a friend, but that he is able to be. And this 'able' means the following: he bears the loss with an even mind. He will never actually be without a friend; how quickly he replaces one lies in his own power. If Phidias loses a statue, he will make another at once; in the same way this craftsman of friendships will put a new friend in the place of the one who is gone. [6] You ask how he will make a friend so quickly? I will tell you, if you and I can agree that I pay off my debt to you right now and settle accounts as far as this letter goes. Hecato says: 'I will show you a love-charm without drugs, without herbs, without any witch's incantation: if you want to be loved, love.' Moreover, it is not only the enjoyment of an old, established friendship that carries great pleasure, but also the beginning and the winning of a new one. [7] The difference between the farmer harvesting and the farmer sowing is the difference between the man who has gained a friend and the man who is gaining one. The philosopher Attalus used to say that making a friend is more delightful than having one, 'just as for the artist it is more delightful to paint than to have painted.' That absorbed concentration on the work in hand carries enormous enjoyment in the very absorption; the pleasure is not the same for the one who has taken his hand from the finished piece. Now he enjoys the fruit of his art; while he was painting, he enjoyed the art itself. Children's adolescence yields more, but their infancy is sweeter.
[8] Now back to the point. The wise man, even though he is content with himself, still wants to have a friend—if for nothing else, then to keep friendship in practice, so that so great a virtue does not lie idle. Not for the reason Epicurus gave in that same letter, 'so that he may have someone to sit by his bed when he is sick, to come to his aid when he is thrown in chains or destitute,' but so that he may have someone whose sickbed he himself can sit beside, someone he himself can free from the grip of an enemy's guard. The man who looks to himself and comes to friendship on that account is thinking badly. As he began, so he will end: he acquired a friend to lend a hand against the chains; the moment the chain rattles, he will be off. [9] These are what people call fair-weather friendships; a man taken up for his usefulness will please only as long as he is useful. That is why a crowd of friends sits packed around the prosperous, while around the ruined there is emptiness—friends flee at exactly the point where they are put to the test. That is why there are all those disgraceful cases of men abandoning out of fear, or betraying out of fear. Beginnings and endings must match: the man who became a friend because it paid will also stop because it pays; if anything in friendship pleases him besides friendship itself, some price will please him against it. [10] 'What do you acquire a friend for?' So that I may have someone I could die for, someone I could follow into exile, someone against whose death I would throw myself and spend myself. What you are describing is a business deal, not friendship—an arrangement that moves toward advantage and looks to what it will get out of it. [11] The passion of lovers undoubtedly has something in common with friendship; you might call it friendship gone mad. Well then, does anyone fall in love for profit? For ambition or reputation? Love all by itself, careless of everything else, sets souls on fire with desire for beauty, not without hope of affection returned. What follows? That a shameful passion springs from a more honorable cause than friendship does? [12] 'The question now,' you say, 'is not whether friendship is to be sought for its own sake.' On the contrary, nothing needs proving more; for if it is to be sought for its own sake, then the man who is content with himself can approach it. 'How, then, does he approach it?' The way one approaches a thing of great beauty—not lured by gain, not scared off by the shifts of fortune. Whoever acquires friendship with good times in mind strips it of its dignity.
[13] 'The wise man is content with himself.' Most people, my dear Lucilius, take this the wrong way: they push the wise man away from everything and drive him back inside his own skin. But we must mark what that saying promises, and how far. The wise man is content with himself for living happily, not for living. For living he needs many things; for living happily he needs only a mind that is sound, upright, and looks down on fortune. [14] I want to point out a distinction of Chrysippus as well. He says the wise man lacks nothing, and yet needs many things: 'the fool, on the other hand, has need of nothing, since he has no idea how to use anything, yet he is in want of everything.' Hands, eyes, and the countless items of daily use are things the wise man needs; he is in want of nothing. For lacking implies necessity, and nothing is a necessity to the wise man. [15] So although he is content with himself, he needs friends; he wants to have as many as possible—not in order to live happily, for he will live happily even without friends. The highest good does not go looking for equipment outside; it is cultivated at home, it is entirely from itself. It begins to be subject to fortune the moment it seeks any part of itself abroad. [16] 'But what will the wise man's life be like if he is left without friends—thrown into prison, or stranded among some foreign people, or held up on a long voyage, or cast onto a deserted shore?' Like the life of Jupiter, who, when the world is dissolved and the gods have melted into one, with nature pausing for a while, rests in himself, given over to his own thoughts. Something of that kind is what the wise man does: he withdraws into himself, he is with himself. [17] As long as he is free to arrange his affairs by his own judgment, he is content with himself—and takes a wife; content with himself—and raises children; content with himself—and yet he would not live if living meant living without another human being. No advantage of his own carries him toward friendship, but a natural prompting; for just as we have an inborn sweetness for other things, so for friendship. Just as there is a loathing of solitude and a hunger for company, just as nature binds human being to human being, so in this too there is a spur that makes us seekers of friendship. [18] Nevertheless, though he loves his friends dearly, though he ranks them with himself and often above himself, he will fence all his good inside himself, and he will say what the famous Stilbo said—the Stilbo that Epicurus's letter goes after. When his city had been captured, his children lost, his wife lost, as he walked out of the general conflagration alone and yet happy, Demetrius—the one whose surname, Poliorcetes, came from the destruction of cities—asked him whether he had lost anything. 'All my goods,' he said, 'are with me.' [19] There is a brave and vigorous man! He defeated the very victory of his enemy. 'I have lost nothing,' he said—and forced Demetrius to wonder whether he had won at all. 'All that is mine is with me': justice, courage, good sense—this above all, counting nothing a good that can be torn away. We marvel at certain animals that pass through the middle of fires without harm to their bodies: how much more marvelous is this man, who came through steel and rubble and flames unhurt and unrobbed! Do you see how much easier it is to conquer a whole nation than one man? That saying of his he shares with the Stoic: he too carries his goods intact through burned-out cities, for he is content with himself; that is the boundary he draws around his happiness. [20] And so you don't think we Stoics are the only ones tossing off noble phrases, Epicurus himself, Stilbo's scolder, delivered a saying much like his—take it in good part, even though I have already paid off today's installment. 'Anyone who does not regard what he has as ample,' he says, 'is wretched, even if he is master of the whole world.' Or if you think it comes out better put this way—for our aim should be to serve the meaning, not the words—'wretched is the man who does not judge himself supremely happy, though he rule the world.' [21] And to show you that these judgments belong to everyone, since nature of course dictates them, you will find in the comic poet:
no one is happy who does not think he is.
For what does it matter what your condition is, if in your own eyes it is bad? [22] 'What then?' you say. 'If that man who got rich disgracefully, and that other man, master of many but slave of more, call themselves happy, will their own opinion make them so?' What matters is not what a man says but what he feels—and not what he feels on one day, but what he feels steadily. And you need not worry that so great a possession will fall to the unworthy: no one but the wise man is pleased with what is his own; all foolishness suffers from disgust with itself. Farewell.

======== Letter 10 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. So it stands, I am not changing my judgment: avoid the crowd, avoid the small group, avoid even a single companion. There is no one I would want you to share yourself with. And see what a high opinion I hold of you: I dare to trust you to yourself. Crates, so they say - a student of this very Stilbo I mentioned in my last letter - once saw a young man walking off alone and asked him what he was doing there by himself. 'I am talking with myself,' the young man said. To which Crates replied, 'Be careful, please, and pay close attention: you are talking with a bad man.' We usually keep watch over someone who is grieving or afraid, so that he does not put his solitude to bad use. No fool ought to be left to himself; that is when he stirs up bad plans, when he plots dangers to come, whether for others or for himself, when he lines up shameful desires; that is when the mind lays out in the open whatever it had been hiding out of fear or shame, when it sharpens its recklessness, provokes its lust, stirs up its temper. In short, the one advantage solitude has - entrusting nothing to anyone, not fearing an informer - is wasted on a fool: he betrays himself. So consider what I hope for you - or rather, what I promise myself, since hope is only a name for an uncertain good: I cannot find anyone I would rather have you be with than yourself. I recall from memory how boldly you tossed off certain words of yours, how full of strength they were: I congratulated myself on the spot and said, 'those words did not come from the surface of his lips, they have a foundation; that man is not one of the crowd, he has his eye on his own salvation.' Speak like that, live like that; take care that nothing weighs you down. As for your old prayers, you may thank the gods and let them go, but take up new ones from scratch: pray for a sound mind, for health of soul, and only then for health of body. Why shouldn't you make such prayers often? Ask the gods boldly: you will be asking for nothing that belongs to someone else.
But so that I may send this letter along, as is my custom, with a small gift attached: what I found in Athenodorus is true - 'know that you are free of all cravings once you reach the point where you ask the gods for nothing you would not be willing to ask for in the open.' But as things stand now, what madness there is in people! They whisper the most shameful prayers to the gods; if anyone puts an ear near, they fall silent, and what they do not want a human being to know, they tell a god. So consider whether this could be a wholesome rule: live with human beings as though a god were watching, speak with a god as though human beings were listening. Farewell.

======== Letter 11 ========

[1] Your friend, a young man of good natural stock, has been talking with me, and his very first conversation showed how much spirit he has, how much talent, how much progress already made. He gave us a taste of himself, and he will live up to it; for he did not speak from preparation—he was caught off guard. As he was collecting himself, he could hardly shake off his bashfulness, a good sign in a young man; the blush welled up in him from so deep. This blushing, I suspect, will stay with him even when he has strengthened himself and stripped away every fault—even when he is wise. For no wisdom removes the natural flaws of body or mind: whatever is fixed and inborn can be softened by training, not defeated. [2] Even in some of the steadiest men, sweat breaks out before a crowd, exactly as it does in men worn out and overheated; some men's knees shake when they are about to speak, some men's teeth chatter, the tongue stumbles, the lips clamp shut. Neither discipline nor practice ever drives these things off; nature exerts her force and uses that flaw to remind even the toughest of what they are. [3] Among these things, I know, is the blush that floods without warning over even the most dignified men. It shows more, admittedly, in the young, who have more heat and a thinner brow; but it touches veterans and old men too. Some men are never more to be feared than when they have blushed, as if they had poured out all their capacity for shame. [4] Sulla was at his most violent when the blood had rushed into his face. Nothing was softer than Pompey's face; he never failed to redden in front of a group, especially at public assemblies. I remember Fabianus blushing when he was brought into the senate as a witness, and the modesty was wonderfully becoming on him. [5] This does not come from weakness of mind but from the newness of the situation, which unsettles the unpracticed even when it does not shake them, if they lean that way through a natural readiness of the body; for as some men have placid blood, others have blood that is quick, restless, and fast to rush into the face. [6] Nothing in wisdom, as I said, drives these things away—otherwise, if it could scrub out every flaw, wisdom would hold nature herself under its command. Whatever the circumstances of one's birth and the mixture of one's body have assigned will cling, however much and however long the mind works to compose itself; none of these things can be forbidden, any more than they can be summoned. [7] Stage actors, who mimic the emotions, who express fear and trembling, who portray grief, imitate bashfulness by these signs: they drop the gaze, lower the voice, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them down. The blush they cannot force out of themselves; it can be neither prevented nor produced. Against these things wisdom promises nothing and accomplishes nothing: they are a law to themselves; they come unbidden, unbidden they leave.
[8] Now the letter demands its closing. Take it, and a useful and wholesome one too, which I want you to fasten to your mind: 'We must fix our affection on some good man and keep him always before our eyes, so that we live as though he were watching and do everything as though he could see.' [9] This, my dear Lucilius, is Epicurus's instruction. He has given us a guardian and an attendant, and rightly: a great share of wrongdoing is removed if a witness stands beside those about to do wrong. Let the mind have someone it holds in awe, someone whose authority makes even its privacy more sacred. Happy the man who improves others not only when present but even when thought of! And happy the man who can hold someone in such awe that he composes and orders himself at the mere memory of him! One who can revere someone like that will soon be worth revering himself. [10] So choose Cato; or if he strikes you as too rigid, choose a man of easier temper, Laelius. Choose someone whose life, whose speech, whose very face—the face that carries his soul in front of him—has won you over; keep him always before you, as guardian or as pattern. We need someone, I insist, against whom our conduct can measure itself: you will never straighten what is crooked without a ruler. Farewell.

======== Letter 12 ========

[1] Wherever I turn, I see the evidence of my old age. I had gone out to my place near the city and was complaining about the money the crumbling building was costing. My manager tells me the fault is not his negligence—he is doing everything—but the house is old. That house grew up under my own hands: what awaits me, then, if masonry the same age as I am is already that rotten? [2] Annoyed with him, I seize the next excuse for irritation. 'It's obvious,' I say, 'these plane trees are being neglected: they have no leaves. Look how knotted and shriveled the branches are, how sad and scaly the trunks! That would not happen if someone dug around them, if someone watered them.' He swears by my guardian spirit that he is doing everything, that his care never lets up—but they are little old trees. Between us: I planted them myself; I saw their first leaf myself. [3] Turning to the door, I say, 'Who is that? That broken-down creature, quite properly stationed at the entrance—he's facing the way out. Where did you pick him up? What possessed you to carry off someone else's corpse?' But the man says, 'Don't you recognize me? I'm Felicio—you used to bring me little clay figurines. I'm the son of Philositus the manager, your little pet.' 'The man is completely raving,' I say. 'Now he's become a small boy, my pet even? Well, it's entirely possible: his teeth are falling out this very moment.'
[4] I owe this to my place near the city: my old age stood plainly before me wherever I looked. Let us embrace old age and love it; it brims with pleasure for anyone who understands its use. Fruit is never so welcome as when its season is ending; boyhood is loveliest at its close; for devoted drinkers the last drink is the delight—the one that sinks them, that puts the finishing touch on drunkenness. [5] Every pleasure saves its sweetest part for its own end. The most delightful age is the one already on the downslope, though not yet plunging; and even the age standing on the last tile has, in my judgment, its own pleasures—or else this itself takes the place of pleasures: to need none. How sweet to have worn out one's desires and left them behind! [6] 'It is disagreeable,' you say, 'to have death before your eyes.' First, death ought to be before the eyes of the young man as much as the old—we are not called up by the census list. Second, no one is so old that he would be wrong to hope for one more day. And one day is a step in life. A whole lifetime is made of parts, and it has circles drawn one around another, the larger enclosing the smaller. There is one that embraces and rings them all—this one runs from birth to the final day. There is another that shuts in the years of youth; one that binds all of boyhood within its circuit; then there is the year, containing in itself all the seasons whose multiplication makes up a life; the month is girded by a tighter circle; the day has the narrowest circuit of all—but this too runs from a beginning to an end, from rising to setting. [7] That is why Heraclitus, who earned his nickname from the obscurity of his speech, said, 'One day is equal to every day.' Different people have taken this differently. One said it is equal in hours, and he is not lying; for if a day is a span of twenty-four hours, all days must be equal to one another, since night gains what day loses. Another said one day is equal to all days in likeness: for the longest stretch of time contains nothing you would not also find in a single day—light and darkness—and in the alternations of the universe this happens more often, not differently: at one time shorter, at another drawn out longer. [8] So every day should be arranged as if it brought up the rear, as if it rounded off and completed a life. Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by long tenure, used to hold his own funeral rites with wine and the customary funeral feast, and would have himself carried from dinner to his bedroom while, to applause from his favorites, this was sung to music: 'He has lived! He has lived!' [9] Not a day passed on which he did not bury himself. What he did out of a bad conscience, let us do out of a good one, and as we go to sleep let us say, glad and cheerful,
I have lived, and the course that fortune gave me I have run.
If god adds a tomorrow, let us receive it gladly. The happiest man, the untroubled owner of himself, is the one who waits for tomorrow without anxiety; whoever has said 'I have lived' gets up each day to a profit.
[10] But now I ought to close the letter. 'What,' you say, 'will it come to me without any little gift?' Don't worry: it carries something with it. Why did I say something? A great deal. What could be finer than this saying I hand it to deliver to you? 'It is bad to live under compulsion, but no compulsion compels anyone to live under compulsion.' And why should there be? On every side, many roads to freedom lie open—short ones, easy ones. We should give thanks to god that nobody can be kept in life against his will: we are free to trample the compulsions themselves. [11] 'Epicurus said that,' you say. 'What business have you with another man's property?' Whatever is true is mine. I will keep pressing Epicurus on you, so that those people who swear by a name, and weigh not what is said but who says it, may learn that the best things are common property. Farewell.

======== Letter 13 ========

I know you have a great deal of spirit; for even before you armed yourself with wholesome teachings, teachings that conquer hardship, you were satisfied enough with yourself against fortune, and far more so after you locked hands with her and tested your own strength, which can never give a sure confidence in itself except when many difficulties have shown up on this side and that, and sometimes have even come closer still. That is how a truly genuine spirit, one that will never fall under another's judgment, is proven; that is its trial by fire. An athlete cannot bring great courage to the contest if he has never been bruised: it's the one who has seen his own blood, whose teeth have rattled under a fist, who has been tripped and gone down with his whole body but never thrown away his nerve even when thrown down himself, who rises more defiant each time he falls -- it's that man who goes down to the fight with great hope. So, to carry the comparison further, fortune has often been on top of you already, and yet you didn't surrender yourself, but sprang back up and stood your ground more fiercely; for courage that has been provoked adds a great deal to itself.
Still, if you like, take from me some defenses you can arm yourself with. There are more things, Lucilius, that terrify us than that actually crush us, and we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. I am not speaking to you in Stoic language now, but in this gentler tone; we Stoics say, of course, that all these things that draw out groans and howls are trivial and to be despised. Let's set aside those big words -- true as they are, by heaven -- and instead I'll give you this piece of advice: don't be miserable before your time, since the things you dreaded as if they loomed over you may perhaps never come at all -- certainly they have not come yet.
So some things torment us more than they should, some torment us before they should, and some torment us when they have no business tormenting us at all: we either magnify our pain, or anticipate it, or simply invent it. Let's set the first point aside for now, since it's a matter in dispute and we've already joined issue on it; I would call something trivial that you would insist is the gravest thing there is; I know some people laugh under the lash and others groan under a slap. We'll see later whether these things have force in themselves or only through our own weakness. Just grant me this: whenever people gather around you trying to convince you how wretched you are, think not about what you're hearing but about what you actually feel, and take counsel with your own patient endurance, and ask yourself -- you who know yourself best -- 'why are these people mourning over me? Why are they in such a panic, afraid the contagion of my misfortune might even leap onto them, as if a calamity could jump like that? Is there really something bad in my situation, or is it simply more notorious than it is actually bad?' Ask yourself: 'Am I torturing myself and grieving without cause, treating as an evil something that isn't one at all?' 'But how,' you ask, 'am I to tell whether the things that torment me are real or imagined?' Take this rule for the matter: we are tormented either by present things, or future things, or both. As for the present, judgment is easy: if your body is free and healthy, and no pain comes from any injury, we'll deal with the future when it arrives -- today it's none of its business. 'But it is going to happen,' you say. First, look closely to see whether there is any certain evidence that the harm is really coming; for the most part we suffer from mere suspicion, and we're deceived by that thing that usually finishes off a war -- rumor -- and it destroys individuals far more thoroughly. It's true, my dear Lucilius: we surrender to opinion far too quickly; we don't cross-examine the things that frighten us or shake them out to see what they really are, but panic and turn tail exactly like those who abandon camp because a cloud of dust raised by a stampede of cattle, or some rumor spread by no known source, has terrified them. I don't know how it is, but imagined terrors unsettle us even more than real ones; for real dangers have their own limit, but whatever comes out of uncertainty is handed over to conjecture and to the license of a frightened mind. And so no fears are as ruinous, as impossible to call back, as those born of a deranged imagination; ordinary fears at least lack reason, but these lack sense entirely. So let's look into the matter carefully. It's plausible that something bad is going to happen: that doesn't make it true yet. How many things that were never expected have come to pass! How many that were expected have never shown up at all! Even if it is going to happen, what good does it do to run out and meet your own grief? You'll grieve soon enough once it arrives: in the meantime, promise yourself something better. What do you gain by it? Time. Many things will intervene by which a danger, even one close by or nearly upon you, will either come to a halt, or stop altogether, or pass onto someone else's head instead: a fire has opened a path for escape; some people a collapsing building has set down gently; sometimes a sword has been called back from the very throat; some man has outlived his own executioner. Even bad fortune has its fickleness. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't: in the meantime it hasn't -- so picture something better. Sometimes, with no signs actually appearing that foretell any harm, the mind invents false images for itself: it twists some word of doubtful meaning toward the worse, or imagines someone's offense against it greater than it is, and thinks not about how angry that person actually is, but about how far an angry person is capable of going. But there is no reason left to live, no limit to our miseries, if we fear things to the full extent they could possibly happen. Here let good sense help you; here, with strength of mind, reject even a clear and obvious fear; if you can't manage that, meet one flaw with another, and temper fear with hope. Nothing among the things we fear is so certain that it isn't more certain still that dreaded things subside and hoped-for things disappoint. So weigh hope and fear both, and whenever everything is uncertain, favor yourself: believe what you would rather believe. If fear has the greater number of arguments on its side, lean toward the other side anyway, and stop tormenting yourself, and keep turning this over in your mind: that the greater part of humanity, though nothing bad actually afflicts them and nothing is certain to come, still boils over and rushes about in a panic. No one resists once he has begun to be pushed along, and no one brings his own fear back to what is real; no one says, 'the source is groundless, groundless: either he made it up, or he simply believed it.' We let ourselves be carried by every passing breeze; we dread uncertainties as if they were certainties; we don't keep a sense of proportion about things -- the moment a scruple arises, it turns instantly into terror.
I'm ashamed to be talking to you like this, coaxing you back to health with such gentle remedies. Let someone else say, 'perhaps it won't happen': you say, 'well, what if it does? We'll see who wins; perhaps it comes on my behalf, and that death will do honor to my life.' Hemlock made Socrates great. Wrench the sword, freedom's champion, out of Cato's hand, and you will have taken away a great part of his glory. I've been urging you on too long now, when what you need is reminding more than urging. We aren't leading you away from your own nature: you were born for the very things we're telling you; all the more reason to increase and adorn what is already good in you.
But now let me bring the letter to a close, once I've stamped it with its own seal -- that is, once I've entrusted some splendid saying to be carried to you. 'Among its other faults, foolishness has this one too: it is always just beginning to live.' Consider what that saying means, Lucilius, best of men, and you will understand how foul is the fickleness of people who lay new foundations for life every day, and start new hopes even at the point of death. Look around you at people one by one: you'll come across old men getting ready, at just this moment, for ambition, for travel, for business ventures. And what is more shameful than an old man just beginning to live? I wouldn't attach a name to this saying, except that it's a more private one, not among the well-known sayings of Epicurus -- one I've allowed myself both to praise and to adopt as my own. Farewell.

======== Letter 14 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I admit that a love of our own body is bred into us; I admit that we are its caretakers. I do not deny that it should be indulged; I deny that it should be served. A man who serves his body serves many masters — whoever fears too much on its behalf, whoever refers everything to it. We should conduct ourselves not as though we had to live for the body, but as though we could not live without it. Excessive love of it fills us with fears, burdens us with anxieties, exposes us to insults. To a man who cherishes his body too dearly, honor becomes worthless. Let the body's care be attended to most carefully, yet on the understanding that when reason demands it, or dignity, or good faith, it must be thrown into the fire. Nonetheless, as far as we are able, let us avoid inconveniences too, not just dangers, and withdraw ourselves into safety, constantly devising ways by which the things we fear may be driven off. These fears, unless I am mistaken, are of three kinds: we fear poverty, we fear illness, and we fear whatever comes to us through the violence of someone more powerful. Of all these, nothing shakes us more than what threatens from another's power, for it comes with great noise and commotion. The natural evils I have mentioned — poverty and illness — creep upon us in silence, striking no terror into eyes or ears; but the other kind of evil comes with an enormous show. It carries iron around it, and fires, and chains, and a mob of wild beasts to loose upon human flesh. Picture, here, the prison, the crosses, the racks, the hook, the stake driven straight through a man so that it emerges from his mouth, limbs torn apart by chariots driven in opposite directions, that tunic smeared and woven with material to feed the flames, and whatever else cruelty has invented besides these. It is no wonder, then, that the fear of this is greatest, since its variety is so great and its apparatus so terrible. For just as a torturer accomplishes more the more instruments of pain he displays — since men who would have held out against the pain itself are overcome by the mere sight — so too, among the things that subdue and tame our minds, those succeed best which have something to put on display. Those other afflictions are no less serious — I mean hunger and thirst and festering internal wounds and a fever that scorches the very vitals — but they lie hidden; they have nothing to brandish, nothing to display. These others have conquered, as great wars do, by their appearance and their preparation.
Let us take care, then, to give no offense. Sometimes it is the people we ought to fear; sometimes, if the constitution of the state is such that most business is transacted through the senate, it is the men in favor there; sometimes it is individuals to whom power over the people has been given. It is a great deal of work to have all of these as friends; it is enough not to have them as enemies. So the wise man will never provoke the anger of the powerful — indeed he will steer around it, just as a sailor steers around a storm. When you were sailing for Sicily, you crossed the strait. A reckless helmsman scorns the threats of the south wind — for it is this wind that roughens the Sicilian sea and gathers it into whirlpools — and makes not for the left-hand shore, but for the one nearer which Charybdis churns the waters. But the more cautious pilot asks those who know the region what the tides are like, what signs the clouds give, and keeps his course far from that region infamous for its whirlpools. The wise man does the same: he avoids power that could harm him, taking care above all not to seem to be avoiding it; for part of safety lies in not seeking it as an open policy, since a man condemns whatever he flees. We must therefore look carefully to how we can be safe from the crowd. First, let us desire nothing that others desire too — that is a recipe for a brawl. Next, let us possess nothing that could be snatched away to great profit for someone lying in wait; let there be as little plunder as possible on your person. No one comes after human blood for its own sake, or very few do; most calculate rather than hate. The robber lets the naked man pass; even on a road beset by bandits, the poor man has peace. Then, according to an old precept, there are three things to be avoided: hatred, envy, and contempt. How this is to be done, wisdom alone can show; for it is a difficult balance to strike, and there is a danger that fear of envy may tip us over into contempt, so that in not wanting to be trampled on we may seem able to be trampled on. Being feared has given many people reasons to fear. Let us withdraw from every side: being despised does no less harm than being envied. We must therefore take refuge in philosophy. This pursuit is, among the good — no, even among the moderately bad — something like a sacred badge of protection. For forensic eloquence, and anything else that stirs up the crowd, has adversaries; but philosophy, quiet and minding its own business, cannot be despised — it is honored by every trade, even by the worst of men. Wickedness will never grow so strong, the conspiracy against virtue will never be so complete, that the name of philosophy does not remain venerable and sacred. But philosophy itself must be handled calmly and modestly.
'Well then,' you say, 'does it seem to you that Marcus Cato philosophized modestly, when he tries to check civil war with a single vote? When he steps between the armies of raging leaders? When, with some men attacking Pompey and others Caesar, he provokes both at once?' One could debate whether the wise man ought to have taken up public affairs at that particular time. What do you want of me, Cato? By now it is no longer freedom that is at stake — that was thrown away long ago. The question is whether Caesar or Pompey will possess the republic. What business is that of yours? You have no part in it. A master is being chosen: what is it to you which one wins? The better man may win, but whoever wins cannot help being the worse for it. I have touched on Cato's last role; but not even the earlier years were such as would have admitted a wise man into that plundering of the republic. What did Cato do but shout, and utter cries that came to nothing, when at one moment he was lifted up and dragged out of the forum by the people's hands, spat upon and covered in filth, and at another led from the senate straight to prison?
But we shall see later whether the wise man ought to devote his efforts to public affairs. For now I call you to those Stoics who, shut out from the republic, withdrew to cultivate their own lives and to lay down laws for the human race without giving offense to anyone more powerful. The wise man will not throw public morals into confusion, nor will he turn the people's attention toward himself by the novelty of his way of life. 'Well then — will a man who follows this course always be safe?' I can no more promise you this than I can promise good health to a temperate man; and yet temperance does produce good health. A ship sometimes sinks even in harbor — but what do you suppose can happen out on the open sea? How much more exposed to danger would this man be if he were busy with many undertakings, striving after many things, a man for whom not even leisure is safe? The innocent do sometimes perish — who denies it? — but the guilty perish more often. It is the man struck down amid his own decorations whose skill has failed him. In the end, the wise man looks to the plan behind every action, not its outcome. The beginnings are in our power; fortune decides the results, and I grant fortune no verdict over me. 'But it will bring some trouble, some adversity.' A robber does not condemn a man simply by killing him.
Now you are holding out your hand for the daily dole. I shall fill it with a golden one — and since gold has been mentioned, let me tell you how you can enjoy the use and profit of it more agreeably. 'The man who enjoys riches most is the one who needs riches least.' 'Name the author,' you say. So you can see how generous we are, it is our policy to praise other men's work: this belongs to Epicurus, or to Metrodorus, or to someone from that workshop. And what does it matter who said it? He said it for everyone. Whoever is in need of riches is afraid for them; and no one enjoys a good that causes anxiety. He strives to add something more to them; while he is thinking about increase, he has forgotten how to use what he has. He takes accounts, wears out the marketplace, pores over his ledger: from being master, he turns into a mere steward. Farewell.

======== Letter 15 ========

[1] The old Romans had a custom, still alive in my own day, of opening a letter with the words: 'If you are in good health, all is well; I am in good health.' The right version for us is: 'If you are doing philosophy, all is well.' Because that, in the end, is what good health means. Without it the mind is sick; and the body too, however much muscle it carries, is strong only the way a madman's or a lunatic's body is strong. [2] So look after that health first, and the other kind second — it won't cost you much, if what you want is genuine fitness. It is a foolish business, my dear Lucilius, and about the last thing that suits an educated man, this working up of biceps and thickening of the neck and hardening of the flanks. However well the bulking-up goes, however the muscles swell, you will never match a prize ox for strength or for weight. And there is this besides: the heavier the body's load, the more the mind is squeezed and the less nimble it becomes. So cut the body back as far as you can and clear room for the mind. [3] All sorts of nuisances trail after the people devoted to that regimen. First the workouts themselves, whose exertion drains the breath out of a man and leaves him unfit for concentration and for the more demanding studies; then the sheer quantity of food blunts the mind's fine edge. On top of that come the trainers — slaves of the worst stamp taken on as instructors, men whose whole existence runs between the oil-flask and the wine-jar, who count the day a success if they have sweated hard and then poured back down, into an empty stomach where it sinks the deeper, a quantity of drink to replace what leaked away. [4] Drinking and sweating — that is the life of a man with heartburn. There are exercises that are easy and short, that tire the body without delay and are sparing of time, which deserves our first consideration: running, moving the arms with some weight in the hands, and jumping — the kind that lifts the body straight up, or the kind that sends it forward, or the kind I might call the leaping of the Salii, or, to put it more rudely, of the fuller at his vat. Pick whichever of these you like; use makes it easy. [5] Whatever you do, come back quickly from body to mind, and exercise the mind night and day. Modest effort keeps it fed; this is one workout that no cold will interrupt, no heat, not even old age. Tend the good that improves with the years. [6] Not that I am ordering you to hang over a book or writing-tablets forever: the mind must be given some interval — slackened, though, not unstrung. Riding in a carriage shakes the body up without getting in study's way: you can read, you can dictate, you can talk, you can listen — and a walk forbids none of these either. [7] And don't sneer at voice-training; though I forbid you to run the voice up through scales and set rhythms and then back down. Suppose next you wanted lessons in how to walk! Once let in those characters whom hunger has taught new trades, and there will be someone to regulate your stride, watch your jaws while you eat, and go exactly as far as your patience and credulity encourage his nerve. Well then — should your voice start straight off at a shout, at full stretch? No: it is so natural to warm up by degrees that even men in a quarrel begin with ordinary talk and only then pass to yelling; nobody appeals to the honor of Roman citizens as his opening move. [8] So follow the push of your feeling: rail against vice now more fiercely, now more gently, as the voice itself prompts you in that direction; and when you rein it in and call it back, let it come down modestly — a descent, not a collapse; let it keep its middle register and not rage away in the untrained manner of a yokel. The point, after all, is not to give the voice a workout, but to have it give one.
[9] There — I have taken no small chore off your hands. One small fee, one Greek contribution, will round off these favors. Here is a precept worth marking: 'The fool's life is thankless and jittery; it pours itself entirely into the future.' 'Whose saying is this?' you ask. The same author as earlier. And whose life do you suppose is meant by 'the fool's'? Baba's and Isio's? Not at all: it means ours — we whom blind desire flings headlong at things that will hurt us and will certainly never fill us; we for whom, if anything could ever have been enough, it already would have been; we who never stop to consider what a delight it is to demand nothing, what a magnificence to be full and owe nothing to fortune. [10] So keep reminding yourself, Lucilius, how much you have already attained. When you notice how many people are ahead of you, think how many are behind. If you want to be grateful toward the gods and toward your own life, think how many you have outstripped. But what have others to do with it? You have outstripped yourself. [11] Fix a limit that you could not cross even if you wanted to. Let them go at last, those treacherous goods that are worth more to the hopeful than to the possessor. If there were anything solid in them, sooner or later they would satisfy; as it is, they only sharpen the thirst of those who gulp them. Away with the glittering trappings. And as for what the uncertain lot of time to come may bring — why should I beg fortune to grant it rather than beg myself not to want it? Why want it at all? Shall I pile things up, forgetting how fragile human life is? What would I be toiling for? Look: this day is your last; and if not, it is next door to the last. Farewell.

======== Letter 16 ========

[1] I know this much is clear to you, Lucilius: no one can live happily, or even bearably, without the pursuit of wisdom; a happy life is the work of wisdom brought to completion, but even wisdom just begun makes life bearable. Yet what is clear must still be reinforced, driven deeper by daily rehearsal: it takes more work to keep your resolutions than to make honorable ones. You have to persist, and add strength by constant study, until good will has hardened into good character.
[2] So with me you need no lengthy speeches or drawn-out assurances: I can see you have made real progress. I know where the things you write come from; they are not invented, not touched up. Still, I will say what I think: I already have hopes of you, but not yet confidence. I want you to take the same line yourself: there is no reason to believe in yourself quickly and easily. Shake yourself out, examine yourself from every side, keep watch; and look first of all at this — whether your progress has been in philosophy or in life itself. [3] Philosophy is no trick for the crowd, no piece got up for display; it lies not in words but in deeds. Nor is its use to make the day pass with a little amusement, to take the queasiness out of leisure: it molds and builds the mind, orders a life, steers conduct, points out what to do and what to leave undone; it sits at the helm and holds the course through the pitching of dangerous waters. Without it no one can live unafraid, no one secure; every single hour brings countless situations calling for advice, and that advice must be sought from philosophy. [4] Someone will say: 'What good is philosophy to me if fate exists? What good, if a god is in charge? What good, if chance gives the orders? What is fixed cannot be changed, and against the unfixed nothing can be prepared: either a god has forestalled my planning and decreed what I shall do, or fortune leaves my planning nothing to decide.' [5] Whichever of these is true, Lucilius — or even if all of them are — we must still do philosophy. Whether fate binds us with a law that hears no appeals, or a god as arbiter of the universe has arranged everything, or chance shoves and tosses human affairs without order, philosophy has to be our guard. It will urge us to obey god gladly and fortune defiantly; it will teach you to follow god and to put up with chance. [6] But this is not the moment to slide into the debate over how much lies in our power if providence rules, or if the chain of fate drags us along in its coils, or if the sudden and the unforeseen hold sway. I come back to my point: my warning and my urging is that you not let the surge of your spirit sag and go cold. Hold on to it and set it firm, so that what is now an impulse becomes a settled state of mind.
[7] By now, if I know you, you have been looking round from the start to see what little present this letter has brought. Shake it out and you will find one. No need to marvel at my generosity: for the moment I am open-handed with other people's property. Though why did I say other people's? Whatever anyone has said well belongs to me. This too was said by Epicurus: 'Live by nature and you will never be poor; live by opinion and you will never be rich.' [8] Nature's wants are tiny; opinion's are boundless. Suppose everything many rich men ever owned were heaped upon you; suppose fortune carried you past any private scale of wealth, roofed you with gold, dressed you in purple, brought you to such a pitch of luxury and riches that you paved over the earth with marble — so that you could not merely own wealth but walk on it; add statues and paintings and whatever any art has worked up to serve extravagance: from all this you will learn only to crave more. [9] Natural desires have a limit; those born of false opinion have nowhere to stop, because the false has no endpoint. The traveler on a road has some destination; wandering has none. So pull back from empty things, and when you want to know whether what you are after answers a natural desire or a blind one, ask whether it can come to rest anywhere. If you have gone a long way and something further always remains, you may be sure the desire is not natural. Farewell.

======== Letter 17 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Throw away all those things, if you are wise—or rather, so that you may become wise—and strain toward a good mind at full speed and with all your strength; if there is anything holding you back, either free yourself from it or cut it away. 'My household affairs delay me,' you say; 'I want to arrange them so that they can support me even if I do nothing, so that neither poverty is a burden to me, nor I to anyone else.' When you say this, you do not seem to know the force and power of that good you have in mind; you see well enough the sum total of the matter—how much philosophy is worth—but you do not yet see its parts clearly enough, and you do not yet know how much it helps us everywhere, how it can, to use Cicero's word, 'lend aid' in the greatest things and also stoop down into the smallest. Trust me: call it into counsel; it will urge you not to sit down at your account books.
Surely this is what you are after, and this is what you want to achieve by that delay: that you need not fear poverty. But what if it is to be sought after? Riches have stood in the way of many who wished to philosophize: poverty is unencumbered, it is secure. When the trumpet sounds, it knows it is not being sought; when the cry of 'fire' goes up, it asks how to get out, not what to carry out; if a voyage must be made, the harbors do not roar for it, nor are the shores made restless by the escort of one man; no crowd of slaves stands around it, for whose feeding one would need to hope for the fertility of lands across the sea.
It is easy to feed a few bellies, well trained and wanting nothing but to be filled: hunger costs little, fastidiousness costs much. Poverty is content to satisfy pressing needs: why then do you refuse this companion, whose ways the sane rich man himself imitates? If you want to be free in mind, you must either be poor or be like the poor. A saving pursuit of health cannot come about without care for frugality, and frugality is voluntary poverty. So away with these excuses: 'I do not yet have enough; once I reach that sum, then I will give myself wholly to philosophy.' And yet this very thing you put off, and prepare for after everything else, is the first thing that must be secured; it is with this that you must begin. 'I want,' you say, 'to secure what I shall live on.' Learn to secure yourself at the same time: if something forbids you to live well, it does not forbid you to die well.
There is no reason poverty should call us back from philosophy, nor even want. For those hurrying toward this goal, even hunger must be endured; some have endured it in sieges, and what other reward was there for that endurance than not falling into the conqueror's power? How much greater is what is promised here: perpetual freedom, fear of no man and no god. Must one come to these things even while starving? Armies have endured the lack of every necessity, have lived on the roots of plants and borne hunger with things foul to mention; all this they suffered for a kingdom, and, to make you wonder the more, another's kingdom: will anyone hesitate to bear poverty in order to free his mind from madness? So it need not be acquired first: one can arrive at philosophy even without provisions for the road.
Is it so? Once you have everything, will you then want to have wisdom too? Will this be the last instrument of life and, so to speak, an extra addition? No—whether you have something already, philosophize now (for how do you know you do not already have too much?), or if you have nothing, seek this before anything else. 'But necessities will be lacking.' First of all, they cannot be lacking, because nature asks very little, and the wise man accommodates himself to nature. But if the direst necessities should befall him, he will already long since have departed from life and will cease to be a trouble to himself. If, however, what remains is meager and narrow, enough only to sustain life, he will take it in good part, and, no longer troubled or anxious beyond what necessity requires, he will give his stomach and shoulders their due, and, untroubled and cheerful, will laugh at the busy scrambling of the rich and the running about of those chasing after riches, and he will say, 'Why do you put yourself off so long? Will you wait for the profit of interest, or a gain from trade, or the will of some rich old man, when you could become rich right now? Wisdom hands over wealth on the spot, wealth it has made superfluous to whomever it has given it.' These things apply to others: you are closer to the wealthy. Change the age, and you have too much; but what is enough is the same in every age.
I could close the letter here, if I had not spoiled you. No one can greet the Parthian kings without a gift; you are not allowed to say goodbye to me for free. What of it? I will borrow from Epicurus: 'For many, the acquiring of riches has not been the end of miseries but a change of them.' Nor do I wonder at this; the fault is not in things but in the mind itself. That which had made poverty a burden to us has made riches a burden too. Just as it makes no difference whether you place a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one—wherever you move him, he will carry his disease with him—so it makes no difference whether a sick mind is set among riches or among poverty: its evil follows it. Farewell.

======== Letter 18 ========

[1] It is December, and the city is sweating as never before. License for indulgence has been granted officially; everything echoes with enormous preparations, as if the Saturnalia differed at all from an ordinary working day. The difference is so nil that the man who said December was once a month and is now a year seems to me to have got it exactly right. [2] If I had you here, I would gladly talk over with you what you thought should be done: change nothing in the daily routine, or — so as not to seem at odds with the public mood — dine more cheerfully and shed the toga? For what once happened only in a crisis, in the city's dark hours, we now do for pleasure and for the holidays: we change our dress. [3] If I know you, playing the umpire you would have wanted us neither like the crowd in its liberty-caps in every respect, nor unlike it in every respect — unless perhaps these are precisely the days when the mind should be given its orders, told to stand alone in abstaining from pleasures at the very moment the whole mob has flung itself upon them. For it wins the surest proof of its own solidity if it neither goes toward the things that entice and pull toward excess, nor gets dragged there. [4] It takes far more nerve to stay dry and sober while the populace is drunk and vomiting; but it takes more moderation not to cut yourself off, not to make yourself conspicuous, not to blend in with everyone either — to share the crowd's actions without sharing its manner. A holiday can be kept without dissipation.
[5] All the same, I am so set on testing the firmness of your mind that, following the prescription of great men, I will give you a prescription too: set aside a stretch of days in which you content yourself with the scantiest and cheapest food and with rough, coarse clothing, and say to yourself, 'Is this what I was afraid of?' [6] Let the mind ready itself for hard conditions while conditions are safe; let it fortify itself against fortune's blows while fortune is still handing out favors. The soldier runs his drills in the depths of peace, throws up a rampart with no enemy in sight, and wears himself out with unnecessary labor so that he may be equal to the necessary kind; the man you do not want panicking in the crisis you must train before the crisis. This was the practice of those who every month acted out poverty, coming close to real want, so that they would never be terrified by what they had rehearsed so often. [7] Do not imagine I mean 'Timon dinners' and 'poor men's garrets' and all the other games by which luxury toys with riches out of sheer boredom. Let the cot be a real cot, the cloak a soldier's cloak, the bread hard and coarse. Endure this for three or four days, sometimes more, so that it is a trial and not a game; then, believe me, Lucilius, you will jump for joy at being full for two coppers, and you will grasp that peace of mind does not depend on fortune — for even an angry fortune still grants what necessity requires. [8] Not that you should count it any great feat — you will only be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of the poor do every day. Take credit rather on this score: that you will be doing it uncompelled, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it forever as to try it once. Let us drill at the practice-post; and so that fortune never catches us unprepared, let poverty become an intimate of ours. We shall be richer with less anxiety once we know how little hardship there is in being poor. [9] Even Epicurus, that master of pleasure, kept fixed days on which he grudgingly fed his hunger, to see whether anything would be missing from full and finished pleasure, or how much would be missing, and whether it was worth anyone's paying great effort to make up. He says so, at any rate, in the letters he wrote to Polyaenus in the magistracy of Charinus; indeed he boasts that he himself was fed for less than a whole as, while Metrodorus, whose progress was not yet so great, needed the whole as. [10] Do you think a man can be full on such rations? He can — and there is pleasure in it too; not the flighty, fleeting pleasure that needs constant topping-up, but pleasure steady and sure. Water and barley-meal and a scrap of barley bread are no delicacy; but it is the highest pleasure to be able to draw pleasure even from these, and to have brought oneself down to a level that no unfairness of fortune can snatch away. [11] Prison rations are more generous than that; the executioner does not feed men set apart for capital punishment so meagerly. What greatness of soul it is, then, to descend of one's own accord to a level that need not be feared even by men under final sentence! That is how you get your blow in before fortune's weapons land. [12] So begin, my dear Lucilius, to follow the custom of those men: mark out some days on which you withdraw from your affairs and make yourself at home with the bare minimum. Begin to do business with poverty.
Dare, stranger, to look down on wealth, and shape yourself, too, into someone worthy of a god.
[13] No one is worthy of a god except the man who has looked down on riches. I am not forbidding you to own them; I want to bring you to own them without fear. And there is only one way to manage that: convince yourself that you will live happily even without them, and always look at them as if they were on their way out.
[14] But it is time to start folding up this letter. 'Not before you pay what you owe,' you say. I will refer you to Epicurus; he will count out the payment: 'Anger beyond measure breeds madness.' How true that is you are bound to know, since you have had both a slave and an enemy. [15] This passion flares up against every kind of person; it is born of love as much as of hatred, and no less in serious business than amid games and jokes. What matters is not how great the cause it springs from, but what kind of mind it lands in. Just so with fire: the question is not how big it is, but where it falls; solid materials have withstood even the greatest blaze, while dry stuff, quick to catch, will nurse a mere spark all the way to a conflagration. So it is, my dear Lucilius: the end of towering anger is madness — and therefore anger is to be shunned not for moderation's sake but for sanity's. Farewell.

======== Letter 19 ========

[1] I rejoice every time I receive a letter from you, for it fills me with good hope; your letters no longer just make promises about you, they give guarantees. Keep on this way, I beg and implore you - what better thing could I ask of a friend than something I will end up asking on his own behalf? If you can, withdraw yourself from those preoccupations of yours; if you cannot, tear yourself away. We have scattered enough of our time already: let us start, in our old age, gathering up our baggage. [2] Surely there's nothing objectionable in that? We have lived on the open sea; let us die in harbor. I am not suggesting you seek fame through leisure - fame you should neither flaunt nor hide; I would never drive you so far, having condemned the madness of the human race, as to want you to find some hiding place and be forgotten. My point is this: let your retirement not be conspicuous, but let it be visible. [3] After that, it will be for people whose plans are still untouched and just beginning to decide whether they want to pass their lives in obscurity - that choice is not open to you. The vigor of your talent, the elegance of your writings, your distinguished and noble friendships have already thrust you into the public eye; fame has already taken hold of you. Even if you sink into the deepest retreat and bury yourself completely, your past achievements will still point you out. [4] You cannot have darkness; wherever you flee, a good deal of your former light will follow you. But you can claim peace and quiet without anyone's hatred, without longing or the gnawing of your own conscience. What, really, would you be leaving behind that you could think of as left against your will? Clients? None of them follows you yourself - only something they can get from you. Friendship used to be sought; now it's plunder. Abandoned old men will change their wills, and the morning caller will move on to another doorstep. A great thing cannot be had cheap: weigh whether it's better to abandon yourself, or some part of your possessions. [5] If only you had been allowed to grow old within the bounds of your birth, and fortune had never carried you out to sea! Headlong success has swept you far from the sight of a healthy life - the governorship, the procuratorship, and whatever those positions promise; greater responsibilities will follow, and from those, still others. Where will it end? [6] What are you waiting for, until you stop having something to crave? There will never be such a time. Just as we speak of a chain of causes from which fate is woven, so is there a chain of desires: one is born from the end of another. You have been thrust down into a life that will never of its own accord put an end to your miseries and your servitude: pull your neck out from under the yoke that has worn it raw; better to have it cut once than pressed down forever. [7] If you retreat into private life, everything will be smaller, but it will fill you up abundantly; whereas now, though enormous quantities are heaped on you from every side, they do not satisfy you. And which would you rather have - fullness from scarcity, or hunger amid abundance? Success is greedy by nature, and exposed to the greed of others as well; as long as nothing is enough for you, you yourself will not be enough for others. [8] 'How,' you ask, 'do I get out?' However you can. Think how many rash risks you've taken for money, how many laborious ones for advancement: something must be dared for peace of mind too, or else you will grow old amid the anxiety of these procuratorships and, after that, of civic offices in the city, in turmoil and amid ever-new waves that no moderation, no calm way of life ever lets you escape. What does it matter whether you want peace? Your fortune does not want it for you. And what if you let it keep growing even now? Whatever is added to your successes will be added to your fears as well. [9] Here I want to quote a saying of Maecenas, who spoke the truth even on his own rack: 'For the very heights thunder upon their own summits.' If you ask in which book he said this, it's the one called Prometheus. What he meant was this: the summits are struck by thunder. Is any amount of power worth having your speech reduced to such drunken babble? He was a talented man, and would have given a great model of Roman eloquence, had success not enervated him - or rather, castrated him. This is the end that awaits you too, unless you now furl your sails, unless - as he wished too late - you hug the shore.
[10] I could have balanced my account with you using this saying of Maecenas alone, but you'll raise an objection with me - if I know you - and you won't want to accept what I owe you unless it's in rough, honest coin. As things stand, I must take out a loan from Epicurus. 'Before,' he says, 'you must consider whom you will eat and drink with, rather than what you will eat and drink; for without a friend, a life of feasting is the life of a lion or a wolf.' [11] This will not happen to you unless you withdraw; otherwise you will have as dinner guests whoever the name-caller sorts out for you from the crowd of morning callers. It is a mistake to look for a friend in the entrance hall and test him at the dinner table. A busy man, besieged by his own good fortune, has no greater misfortune than this: he thinks people are his friends when he himself is not a friend to them, and he judges his favors effective for winning over hearts, when in fact some people hate all the more, the more they owe. A light debt makes a debtor; a heavy one makes an enemy. [12] 'What then? Don't favors create friendships?' They do, if you were allowed to choose who would receive them, if they were placed carefully rather than scattered about. So while you are just beginning to belong to your own mind, in the meantime follow this piece of wisdom from the wise: consider it more relevant who receives something than what he receives. Farewell.

======== Letter 20 ========

[1] If you are well, and think yourself worthy of one day becoming your own master, I rejoice; it will be my glory if I manage to pull you out of the place where you're now tossing about with no hope of escape. But there's one thing I ask and urge of you, my dear Lucilius: bring philosophy down into your innermost being, and take the measure of your progress not by speech or writing, but by firmness of mind, by the diminishing of your desires. Prove your words by your deeds. [2] Those who make speeches and chase the crowd's applause have one goal; those who hold the attention of idle young men with varied or fluent argument have another. Philosophy teaches one to act, not to talk, and it demands this: that each person live according to its law, so that life does not clash with speech, or with itself - so that all one's actions have a single consistent color. This is the greatest task and the surest sign of wisdom: that word and deed be in harmony, that a person be uniform and the same, everywhere. 'Who will manage that?' Few, but some do. It is difficult - though I am not saying the wise man will always walk at the same pace, only along the same road. [3] So watch yourself: notice whether your clothing and your house are at odds with each other, whether you are generous to yourself but stingy to your own household, whether you dine frugally but build extravagantly. Pick one single rule to live by, and bring your whole life into line with it. Some people restrict themselves at home but expand and spread out in public: this inconsistency is a fault, a sign of a wavering mind that has not yet found its own steady course. [4] I will tell you now the source of this inconsistency and mismatch between actions and intentions: no one sets out what he wants for himself, and even if he has set it out, he does not persist in it, but leaps over it; and not only does he change, he goes back, circling around to the very things he had abandoned and condemned. [5] So, setting aside the old definitions of wisdom and taking in the whole scope of human life, I can be content with this: what is wisdom? Always wanting the same thing, and always refusing the same thing. You need not even add the small qualification that what you want should be right; for nothing can please a person always unless it is right. [6] So people do not know what they want, except in the very moment they want it; no one has ever decided, once and for all, to want or not want something; judgment shifts daily and turns to its opposite, and for most people life is played out as a game. So hold fast to what you have begun, and perhaps you will be led either to the summit, or to the point where you alone understand that it is not yet the summit.
[7] 'What,' you ask, 'will become of this crowd of dependents without an estate to support them?' Once that crowd stops being fed by you, it will feed itself - or else, something you cannot know through your own generosity, you will learn through poverty: poverty will keep for you your true and certain friends, and whoever was not seeking you but something else will leave. And is poverty not to be loved, if only for this one reason, that it shows you by whom you are truly loved? Oh, when will that day come, when no one will lie in order to flatter you! [8] Let your thoughts, then, tend toward this, care for this, wish for this, resigning all other prayers to God: that you be content with yourself and with the good things that spring from within you. What happiness could be closer at hand? Reduce yourself to the small things from which you cannot fall, and so that you may do this more willingly, the contribution of this letter - which I will hand over right now - will help with that.
[9] You may be envious, but even now Epicurus will gladly pay on my behalf. 'Believe me, your words will seem more impressive spoken from a cot and in rags; for then they will not merely be said, they will be proven.' I, for one, listen differently to what our friend Demetrius says when I see him lying naked, on something even less than straw bedding: he is not a teacher of the truth, he is its witness. [10] 'What then? Is it not permitted to despise riches when they are lying right in one's lap?' Why should it not be permitted? And that man has a truly great soul who, having wealth heaped all around him, marvels long and much that it has come to him, laughs at it, and merely hears that it is his rather than feels it. It is a great thing not to be corrupted by close association with riches; great is the man who is poor amid his riches. [11] 'I don't know,' you say, 'how he would bear poverty, if he fell into it.' Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether that poor man of yours would despise riches, if he fell into them; and so in both cases the mind must be judged, and one must examine whether the poor man indulges his poverty, or whether the rich man does not indulge his riches. Otherwise a cot or rags are a flimsy proof of good will, unless it becomes clear that someone endures them not out of necessity but by choice. [12] But it shows great natural character to approach such things not by rushing toward them as if they were something better, but by preparing for them as things easy to bear. And Lucilius, they are easy; and once you approach them after long meditation beforehand, they are pleasant too - for in them lies that security without which nothing is pleasant. [13] So I judge it necessary - as I have already written to you - to do what great men have often done: set aside certain days on which we practice imagined poverty, to prepare us for the real thing. This is all the more necessary because we have grown soft with luxury and judge everything hard and difficult. Instead, the mind must be roused from sleep, pinched awake, and reminded that nature has set very little as our due. No one is born rich; whoever comes out into the light is bound to be content with milk and rags. And yet from such beginnings, kingdoms cannot contain us. Farewell.

======== Letter 21 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You think you have trouble with the people you wrote to me about? Your biggest trouble is with yourself — you are a burden to yourself. You don't know what you want. You approve of what's right more readily than you pursue it. You see where happiness lies, but you don't dare go all the way to it. Let me tell you what's holding you back, since you can't quite see it yourself: you think the things you're about to leave behind are important, and having set your sights on the security you're about to cross over into, you're held back by the glitter of the life you're about to leave, as if you were about to fall into something squalid and dark. [2] You're wrong, Lucilius: this life is a step up to that one. The difference between a glare and a light — one has a fixed source of its own, the other shines with a borrowed brightness — is the difference between this life and that one. This life is struck by a brilliance coming from outside; anyone who stands in its way will instantly cast a thick shadow over it. That life is bright with its own light. Your studies will make you famous and distinguished. [3] Let me give you the example of Epicurus. Writing to Idomeneus, and calling him back from a showy life to a reliable, lasting glory — Idomeneus, at that time a minister of royal power handling great affairs — he said: 'If glory is what moves you, my letters will make you better known than all those things you cultivate, and for the sake of which you are cultivated.' [4] Was he lying? Who would know Idomeneus today if Epicurus hadn't carved his name into his writings? Deep oblivion has swallowed all those grandees and satraps and even the king himself, from whom Idomeneus's title was obtained. Cicero's letters won't let the name of Atticus perish. It would have done him no good to have Agrippa as a son-in-law, Tiberius as a grandson-in-law, Drusus Caesar as a great-grandson — among such great names he would have gone unmentioned, if Cicero hadn't attached him to himself. [5] A vast depth of time is bearing down on all of us; only a few great minds will lift their heads above it, and though they too are eventually bound for that same silence, they resist oblivion and hold their ground for a long while. What Epicurus could promise his friend, I promise you, Lucilius: I will have favor with posterity, and I can carry names along with mine that will endure. Our own Virgil promised two men eternal remembrance, and he delivers it:
Fortunate pair! If my poems have any power, no day will ever erase you from the memory of the ages, so long as the house of Aeneas dwells on the Capitol's unmoving rock, and the Roman father holds the empire.
[6] Whoever fortune has thrust into the light, whoever has been a limb or a part of someone else's power — their favor flourished, their house was crowded with visitors, as long as they themselves stood. But once they were gone, their memory faded quickly. The regard we have for genius only grows, and it isn't the great themselves who are honored — everything that has attached itself to their memory is carried along with it.
[7] So that Idomeneus doesn't turn up in my letter for nothing, he will pay for his own place in it. It was to him that Epicurus wrote that famous line urging him not to make Pythocles rich by any common or uncertain path. 'If you want,' he says, 'to make Pythocles rich, it isn't money that needs to be added, but desire that needs to be subtracted.' [8] That statement is too plain to need interpreting, and too well put to need any help. I'll only remind you of this one thing: don't think it was said only about wealth. Apply it wherever you like, and it will still hold. If you want to make Pythocles honorable, it isn't honors that need to be added, but desires that need to be subtracted. If you want Pythocles to live in continuous pleasure, it isn't pleasures that need to be added, but desires that need to be subtracted. If you want to make Pythocles old and to fill out his life, it isn't years that need to be added, but desires that need to be subtracted. [9] You have no reason to think these are sayings that belong only to Epicurus — they belong to everyone. What's normally done in the senate, I think should be done in philosophy too: when someone proposes a motion I only partly agree with, I ask him to divide the motion, and I go along with the part I approve.
I bring up Epicurus's excellent sayings all the more gladly for the sake of those people who run to him out of a false hope, thinking they'll get a cover for their own vices — so that they can prove, wherever they turn, that an honest life is required. [10] When you approach his little garden, with its inscription — 'Stranger, you will do well to stay here; here pleasure is the highest good' — the keeper of that dwelling will be ready and waiting, hospitable and kind. He'll serve you porridge, and pour you plenty of water besides, and ask, 'Haven't you been treated well?' 'These gardens,' he says, 'don't provoke hunger, they satisfy it; they don't create a greater thirst through what they offer to drink, but quench it by a natural and free remedy. In this pleasure I have grown old.' [11] I'm talking to you here about needs that admit no consolation, that have to be given something in order to stop. As for the extraordinary ones — the ones we're free to put off, to rein in and suppress — I'll remind you of just this one thing: that kind of pleasure is natural, not necessary. You owe it nothing; whatever you spend on it is voluntary. The stomach doesn't listen to advice — it demands, it makes claims. Still, it isn't a troublesome creditor: it lets you off cheaply, as long as you give it what it's owed, not what you're able to give. Farewell.

======== Letter 22 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] By now you understand that you need to be led out of those glamorous, harmful occupations of yours, but you ask how you can manage it. Some things can only be shown by someone actually present — a doctor can't choose the timing of a meal or a bath by letter; he has to feel the pulse. There's an old saying that a gladiator takes his plan from the arena itself: something in his opponent's face, some movement of his hand, some shift of his body warns him, as he watches. [2] What is usually done, and what ought to be done, can be laid down and written in general terms — such advice can be given not only to people far away, but even to people not yet born. But the other question — when it should be done, or how — no one can advise from a distance; that has to be worked out on the spot, from the circumstances themselves. [3] It takes not just someone present but someone alert to catch an opportunity as it rushes past. So watch for it, and when you see it, seize it, and throw your whole effort, all your strength, into stripping yourself of those obligations. And listen to the verdict I'm handing down: I think you need to get out either of that life, or out of life altogether. But I also think you should take the gentle road — untie the knot you've tangled yourself in, rather than tearing it apart, provided that, if there's no other way to undo it, you go ahead and tear it. No one is so timid that he'd rather hang forever than fall once. [4] In the meantime — and this comes first — don't hold yourself back any further. Be content with the business you've gotten into, or, if you'd rather put it that way, that you've stumbled into. There's no reason to push yourself further into it; you'll lose your excuse, and it will become obvious that you didn't just stumble in after all. What people usually say is false: 'I couldn't have done otherwise. What if I hadn't wanted to? It was necessary.' No one is required to chase good fortune at a run. It's something, even if you can't resist it outright, simply to hold your ground and not press on after fortune as it rushes by.
[5] Would you mind if I don't just offer my own advice but call in reinforcements — and wiser ones than myself, people I regularly consult when I have a decision to make? Read Epicurus's letter on this very subject, the one addressed to Idomeneus, in which he asks him to flee as fast as he can and hurry, before some greater force steps in and takes away his freedom to withdraw. [6] Yet he adds that nothing should be attempted except when it can be attempted suitably and at the right time; but once that long-awaited moment arrives, he says, you must leap up and go. He forbids anyone thinking about escape to doze off, and he holds out hope of a safe way out even from the most difficult situations, provided we neither rush ahead of the time nor hold back when the time has come. [7] I suppose you're also wondering now what the Stoics would say. No one should accuse them, in your hearing, of recklessness — they're more cautious than they are bold. Maybe you're expecting them to tell you: 'It's shameful to give in under a burden; keep struggling with a duty once you've taken it on. A man isn't brave and vigorous if he flees hard work — unless the very difficulty of the task makes his spirit grow.' [8] They'll tell you that, if perseverance is worth the effort, if there's nothing a good man would have to do or endure that's beneath him. Otherwise, he won't wear himself down with degrading, humiliating labor, and he won't stay in business just for the sake of being busy. Nor will he do what you imagine — get so entangled in ambitious pursuits that he's forever swept along by their tide. Instead, once he sees how heavy, uncertain, and precarious the things are that he's caught up in, he'll draw back his foot — not turn and run, but gradually retreat to safety. [9] And it's easy, my dear Lucilius, to escape your occupations, if you stop valuing what they pay you. It's the rewards that hold us back and detain us. 'What, then? Am I to abandon such great hopes? Walk away right at harvest time? Leave my side unescorted, my litter unaccompanied, my hall empty?' It's this that people leave reluctantly — they love the wages of their misery, while cursing the misery itself. That's how people complain about ambition the way they complain about a mistress — that is, if you look closely at their real feelings, they don't hate it, they're just quarreling with it. Press these people who bemoan the very things they craved, who talk about fleeing from things they can't do without, and you'll see that their delay is voluntary, in the very thing they claim to resent and complain so miserably about. That's how it is, Lucilius: slavery holds few people, but most people hold onto slavery themselves. But if you've made up your mind to set it down, and freedom has genuinely won you over, and the only thing you're asking advice on is how to manage this without endless anxiety — why wouldn't the whole company of the Stoics approve? Every Zeno and every Chrysippus will urge on you exactly what is moderate, honorable, and your own. But if you're only stalling so you can calculate how much you can take with you, and how large a fortune you can build up to furnish your leisure, you'll never find your way out: no one swims to shore carrying his luggage. Rise up into a better life, with the gods' favor — though not the kind of favor they show those people on whom, with a kind and generous face, they've bestowed grand miseries, excused only on the grounds that the very things that burn and torment them were given because they asked for them.
[13] I was already sealing this letter, but it has to be opened again, so that it can come to you with its customary little gift, carrying some splendid saying along with it. And here one occurs to me — I don't know whether it's truer or more eloquent. 'Whose is it?' you ask. Epicurus's — I'm still doting on other men's belongings: 'No one leaves life any differently than if he had just now entered it.' Take anyone you like — a young man, an old man, someone in between — you'll find him equally afraid of death, equally ignorant of life. No one has anything actually accomplished; we've put everything off to the future. Nothing pleases me more in that saying than the reproach it levels at old men for their childishness. 'No one,' he says, 'leaves life in any way other than the way he was born into it.' That's false: we die worse than we're born. This is our own fault, not nature's. Nature ought to complain to us and say, 'What is this? I brought you into the world without desires, without fears, without superstition, without treachery, without the rest of these plagues — leave it in the same condition you entered it.' A man has grasped wisdom if he can die as free from care as he was when he was born; but as it is, we start to panic the moment danger draws near — our composure fails us, our color fails us, tears fall that will do us no good. What's more shameful than being anxious right on the threshold of security? The reason is this: we're empty of every good thing, yet we labor over our life. No part of it has settled and remained with us — it has all been passed through and drained away. Hardly anyone cares how well he lives, only how long, though it's within everyone's reach to live well, and within no one's to live long. Farewell.

======== Letter 23 ========

Do you suppose I'm going to write and tell you how mild the winter has been with us, gentle and short, how nasty the spring is, how out-of-season the cold, and all the other trivialities people reach for when they're short of something to say? No, I'll write something that can do some good, for me and for you. And what could that be, except to urge you toward a sound mind? You ask what its foundation is? Not to take joy in empty things. I called it the foundation; it is really the summit. The man who has reached the top is the one who knows what he should rejoice in, who has not placed his happiness in the power of anything outside himself. Anyone lured on by some hope is anxious and unsure of himself, even if the thing is within reach, even if it's not hard to get, even if his hopes have never once let him down. Above everything else, my dear Lucilius, do this: learn to rejoice. You think, I suppose, that I am taking a great many pleasures away from you, when I dismiss the gifts of chance and think that hopes, however sweet a diversion, ought to be avoided. Quite the opposite: I don't want gladness ever to fail you. I want it to be born in your own house. And it will be, if only it arises from within yourself. Other kinds of cheer don't fill the heart; they merely smooth the brow, they're superficial, unless you count as joy the man who merely laughs. The spirit ought to be lively and confident and lifted above everything else. Believe me, real joy is a serious business. Do you really think that a man with a relaxed, cheerful little face, as these pampered types put it, can look on death with contempt, throw his house open to poverty, keep a tight rein on his pleasures, and rehearse patience under pain? Whoever turns these things over in his mind is in the midst of great joy, but not a charming one. It's in possession of this joy that I want you to be: it will never fail you, once you've found where it comes from. The yield of the cheaper metals lies on the surface; the richest ores are those whose veins lie deep, promising an ever fuller return to the one who keeps digging. The things that delight the crowd give a thin and superficial pleasure, and any joy that comes from outside lacks a foundation. The joy I'm speaking of, the one I'm trying to lead you to, is solid, and opens up more the deeper you go. Do this, I beg you, my dearest Lucilius: do the one thing that can make a man happy. Fling away and trample underfoot everything that glitters on the outside, everything promised you by another or through another; look instead to the true good, and take your joy from what is your own. But what does 'your own' mean here? It means yourself, and the best part of yourself. Don't go believing your poor little body counts as a good; the craving for the true good is a safe one. You ask what that good is, or where it comes from? I'll tell you: from a good conscience, from honorable purposes, from right actions, from contempt for the gifts of chance, from a calm, unbroken course of life following a single path. Those who leap from one plan to another, or who don't even leap but get swept along by some accident, how can they possess anything fixed or lasting, suspended and adrift as they are? Few are the people who arrange themselves and their affairs by design; the rest are like objects floating on a river: they don't go, they are carried. Some are caught by a gentler current and swept along more softly; others are seized by a more violent one; others are set down near the bank as the current slackens; others are flung out to sea by the torrent's force. That's why we must settle on what we want, and hold to it.
Here is the place to pay off the debt I owe you. I can hand you a saying of your friend Epicurus and so clear this letter of its obligation: 'It is a wretched thing always to be starting life over'; or, if the sense can be put more sharply this way: 'They live badly who are always only beginning to live.' You ask why? Because for such people life is always incomplete. And a man who has only just begun to live cannot stand ready for death. What we must aim for is to have lived enough; and no one achieves that who is, at this very moment, still just setting his life in motion. Don't imagine such people are few; they are practically everyone. Some, in fact, only begin when it's time to stop. If you find that strange, I'll add something that will astonish you even more: some people stopped living before they ever began. Farewell.

======== Letter 24 ========

You write that you're anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit, which your enemy's rage has threatened you with, and you suppose I'll advise you to picture something better for yourself and settle into a comforting hope. But what need is there to go looking for trouble, to anticipate sufferings that will come soon enough on their own, and to ruin the present by fearing the future? It is foolish, without question, to be miserable now simply because you may be miserable someday. But I will lead you to peace of mind by a different road: if you want to strip off every anxiety, then assume that whatever you fear may happen is certainly going to happen; measure that evil, whatever it is, in your own mind, and put a price on your fear. You will surely find that what you dread is either not great or not lasting. Nor do you need to spend long gathering examples to steady yourself: every age has produced them. Send your memory into any quarter of affairs, domestic or foreign, and you will meet minds distinguished either by their progress or by their daring. If you are condemned, can anything harsher befall you than to be sent into exile, or led off to prison? Is there anything beyond these that anyone need dread, except burning, except death? Take these things one by one and summon the men who have despised them — men one does not have to hunt for, only choose among. Rutilius bore his condemnation as though nothing about it troubled him except that the verdict was wrong. Metellus bore exile bravely, Rutilius even gladly; the one granted his return as a gift to the state, the other refused his return to Sulla — to whom, in those days, nothing was refused. In prison Socrates held his discussions, and though there were men who promised him escape, he refused to leave; he stayed, to rid mankind of its fear of the two heaviest things, death and prison. Mucius laid his hand on the flames. It is bitter to be burned: how much more bitter when you inflict it on yourself! Here you see a man with no education, drilled by no precepts against death or pain, equipped only with a soldier's toughness, exacting from himself the penalty for a failed attempt: he stood as a spectator of his own right hand dripping in the enemy's brazier, and did not withdraw the hand, melting to the bare bones, until the enemy pulled the fire away. He could have done something luckier in that camp — nothing braver. See how much fiercer virtue is in seizing dangers than cruelty in inflicting them: Porsenna found it easier to pardon Mucius for having meant to kill him than Mucius to pardon himself for having failed.
But I'll lead you to peace of mind by another road. If you want to strip away all anxiety, assume that whatever you're afraid might happen will happen for certain, and whatever that evil turns out to be, measure it for yourself and put a price on your fear. You'll realize soon enough that what you're afraid of is either not so great, or not so lasting. Nor do you need to hunt far for examples to steady yourself; every age has supplied them. Send your memory into any corner of history, public or foreign, and great characters, great achievements, great courage, will come to meet you. Can anything worse happen to you, if you're condemned, than being sent into exile, being led off to prison? Is there anything anyone need fear beyond being burned, beyond dying? Set each of these terrors up one at a time, and summon the men who scorned them—there's no need to search for them, only to choose among them. Rutilius bore his own condemnation as if nothing troubled him except that the verdict had been unjust. Metellus endured exile bravely; Rutilius endured it gladly. The one gave the state the gift of his return; the other refused to return even when Sulla, to whom nothing was then refused, offered it. Socrates debated philosophy in prison, and when there were those ready to promise him escape, he refused to leave and stayed, so as to lift from mankind the fear of two of its heaviest burdens, death and imprisonment. Mucius thrust his hand into the flames. It's a bitter thing to be burned—how much more bitter to endure it by your own hand! You see a man untrained in letters, armed against death or pain by no philosophical precept, equipped only with a soldier's toughness, exacting from himself the penalty for a failed attempt; he stood and watched his own right hand dripping over the enemy's brazier, and did not pull his hand away, bones bare and flesh melting, until the fire was taken from him by the very enemy he'd meant to kill. He could have done something luckier in that camp, but nothing braver. See how much keener courage is at seeking out danger than cruelty is at inflicting it: Porsenna forgave Mucius more easily for wanting to kill him than Mucius forgave himself for failing to.
I am not piling up examples now to exercise my wit, but to hearten you against what seems most terrifying of all; and I will hearten you the more easily by showing that not only brave men have despised this moment when the breath goes out, but that certain men, cowards in everything else, have in this one matter matched the spirit of the bravest — like that Scipio, father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompey, who, driven back to Africa by a contrary wind and seeing his ship in the enemy's hands, ran himself through with his sword; and when men asked where the commander was, he said, 'The commander is well.' That one utterance made him the equal of his ancestors and refused to let the glory that destiny had assigned the Scipios in Africa be broken off. It was a great thing to conquer Carthage; a greater thing to conquer death. 'The commander is well': should a commander have died any other way — and Cato's commander at that? I am not calling you back to the history books, nor collecting from every century the despisers of death, who are legion. Look at these times of ours, whose softness and daintiness we complain of: they will supply men of every rank, every fortune, every age, who cut their troubles short by death. Believe me, Lucilius, death is so far from being fearful that by its favor nothing is fearful. So listen to your enemy's threats with an untroubled mind; and although your own conscience gives you confidence, still — since many things outside the merits of the case carry weight — hope for what is most just, and prepare yourself for what is most unjust. But remember this above everything: strip the uproar from things and see what each thing actually is: you will find that there is nothing terrible in them except the fear itself. What you see happen to children happens to us too, children of a somewhat larger growth: the people they love, are used to, play with — if they see them in masks, they are terrified. It is not only from people but from things that the mask must be pulled off and the true face restored. Why do you show me swords and fires and a mob of executioners roaring around you? Take away that pageantry behind which you hide and frighten fools: you are death, whom lately my slave, my serving-girl, despised. Why do you again unfold, with great fanfare, your whips and racks? Why the separate contraptions fitted to wrench each separate joint, and the thousand other instruments for butchering a man piece by piece? Lay aside these things that stun us; silence the groans and the shrieks and the bitter cries forced out between the tearings: you are, after all, pain — which that gout-ridden man despises, which that dyspeptic endures in the midst of his delicacies, which a girl bears through in childbirth. You are light if I can bear you; you are brief if I cannot.
Turn these things over in your mind — things you have often heard, often said; but prove by the result whether you truly heard them, whether you truly said them. For this is the most shameful charge usually thrown at us: that we handle the words of philosophy, not its works. Well? Is this the first moment you have known that death hangs over you, or exile, or pain? You were born to these things; let us think of whatever can happen as something that will. What I am urging you to do, I know for certain you have done: now I warn you not to drown your mind in this anxiety, or it will grow dull and have too little vigor left when the moment comes to rise. Draw it away from your private case to the case of mankind. Tell yourself that this little body of yours is mortal and fragile, and that pain will be served on it not only by injustice or by superior force: its very pleasures turn into torments — feasts bring indigestion, drinking bouts bring numbness and trembling of the sinews, lusts bring deformities of the feet, the hands, every joint. I shall become poor: I shall be one of the many. I shall become an exile: I shall consider myself born in the place they send me. I shall be put in chains: what of it? Am I unfettered now? Nature has bound me fast to this heavy weight of my body. I shall die: what you are saying is this — I shall cease to be able to fall sick, cease to be able to be chained, cease to be able to die.
I'm not piling up these examples now to show off my learning, but to urge you against the thing that seems most terrible of all. And I'll urge you more effectively if I show that it was not only brave men who scorned this moment of breathing out the soul, but that some, cowards in every other respect, matched in this one thing the courage of the very bravest—like that Scipio, Pompey's father-in-law, who, driven back to Africa by a contrary wind, and seeing his ship seized by the enemy, ran himself through with his sword, and when they asked where the general was, said: 'The general is doing just fine.' That saying put him on a level with his ancestors and did not let the glory fated to the Scipios in Africa be interrupted. It was a great thing to conquer Carthage, but a greater thing to conquer death. 'The general is doing just fine': and should a general—Cato's general, no less—have died any other way? I'm not sending you back to history books, and I'm not gathering up, from every century, the countless men who scorned death. Look instead to our own times, whose lethargy and self-indulgence we complain about: men of every rank will offer themselves up, of every fortune, of every age, men who cut short their troubles by dying. Believe me, Lucilius, death is so far from being something to fear that, thanks to it, nothing is left to fear. So listen calmly to your enemy's threats. And even though your own clear conscience gives you confidence, still, because many things outside the merits of the case carry weight, hope for the fairest outcome, but brace yourself for the most unfair. Above all, remember this: strip things of their commotion and see what's actually in each one; you'll find there's nothing terrible in any of it except the fear itself. What you see happen to children happens to us too, grown-up children that we are: those they love, those they're used to, those they play with, if they see them wearing a mask, they're terrified. It's not only people but things from which the mask must be removed, and their true face given back. Why show me swords and fires and a crowd of executioners snarling around you? Take away that pageantry behind which you hide and with which you frighten fools: you are death, the very thing my slave and my slave-girl recently scorned. Why do you unpack, with such elaborate show, whips and racks for me again? Why the devices fitted to each separate joint to wrench it apart, and the thousand other instruments for tearing a man to pieces bit by bit? Put away the things that stun us; command the groans and cries and the shrill sounds crushed out amid the torture to fall silent: you are, after all, only pain, the very thing that man with gout scorns, that the man with a stomach ailment endures in the midst of his indulgences, that a girl bears through in childbirth. You are light, if I can bear you; you are brief, if I cannot.
Turn these things over in your mind—things you've often heard, often said yourself. But whether you've truly heard them, truly said them, prove by the outcome; for this is the most shameful charge leveled at us, that we deal in the words of philosophy and not its works. What—have you only just now learned that death hangs over you, or exile, or pain? You were born to these. Whatever can happen, let's think of it as something that will happen. I know for certain you've already been doing what I'm urging you to do; now I'm only reminding you not to let your mind sink into this anxiety, for it will grow dull and have less vigor when the moment comes to rise up. Draw it away from your private case to the universal one: tell yourself your body is a mortal, fragile little thing, one from which pain can be threatened not only by injury or by more powerful hands—even pleasures themselves turn into torments, feasts bring on indigestion, drunkenness brings the trembling numbness of the nerves, lust brings the ruin of feet, hands, and every joint.
I'll become poor: I'll be in the company of the many. I'll be exiled: I'll consider myself born wherever I'm sent. I'll be put in chains: well, what of it—am I unbound now? Nature has tied me down already to this heavy burden of my own body. I'll die: that only means I'll stop being able to fall sick, I'll stop being able to be chained, I'll stop being able to die.
I'm not so foolish as to go chasing after the Epicurean tune at this point and tell you that fears of the underworld are empty, that Ixion isn't spun on his wheel, that Sisyphus doesn't push his boulder uphill, that no one's entrails grow back daily only to be torn out again; no one is so childish as to be afraid of Cerberus, and darkness, and ghostly shapes clinging to bare bones. Death either destroys us or strips us bare. For those set free, better things remain once the burden is dropped; for those destroyed, nothing remains at all—good and bad are equally swept away. Allow me here to quote a line of your own, after first reminding you to consider that you wrote it not only for others but for yourself as well. It's shameful to say one thing and think another; how much more shameful to write one thing and think another! I remember you once treated that theme, that we don't fall into death all at once, but move toward it little by little. We die every day; every day some part of life is taken from us, and even while we're growing, life is shrinking. We lost infancy, then boyhood, then adolescence. All the time that has passed, right up to yesterday, is gone; even this very day we're living we share with death. Just as a water-clock is emptied not by the last drop but by everything that has flowed out before, so the final hour, in which we cease to exist, does not by itself cause death, but only completes it; we arrive at death then, but we have been a long time on the way. When you had described all this in your own style—always great, but never sharper than when you lend your words to the truth—you said, 'death does not come just once; the death that carries us off is only the last of many.' I'd rather you read your own words than my letter; for it will be clear to you that the death we fear is the final one, not the only one. I can see what you're waiting for: you want to know what I've tucked into this letter, some spirited saying, some useful maxim. I'll send you something drawn from the very material we've just been handling. Epicurus rebukes, no less, those who crave death than those who fear it, and says: 'It is ridiculous to run toward death out of weariness with life, when it is your own way of living that has made running toward death necessary.' Elsewhere he says something similar: 'What is so ridiculous as seeking death, when it's the fear of death that has made your life restless?' To these you may add another saying of the same stamp: that men's thoughtlessness—madness, really—runs so deep that some are driven to death by the very fear of death. Whichever of these you turn over in your mind, you will strengthen your spirit either for enduring death or for enduring life; for we need to be advised and steadied for both directions, so that we neither love life too much nor hate it too much. Even when reason persuades us to end our own life, the impulse must not be seized rashly or with a headlong rush. A brave and wise man ought not to flee life, but to walk out of it; and above all, that other feeling should be avoided too, the one that has taken hold of so many—the craving to die. For there is, my dear Lucilius, just as in other matters, an ill-considered inclination of the mind toward dying as well, one that often seizes men of noble and keenest character, and often the cowardly and listless too: the former scorn life, the latter find it a burden. Some are overtaken by a weariness of doing and seeing the same things, and by a distaste for life—not hatred, but disgust—into which we slide thanks to philosophy itself pushing us along, as we say: 'How much longer the same things? I'll wake up, sleep, eat, go hungry, freeze, sweat. Nothing has an end; everything is linked in a circle, fleeing and pursuing in turn; night presses on day, day on night; summer ends in autumn, autumn is pressed by winter, which is checked by spring; everything passes only to come back around. I do nothing new, I see nothing new: eventually one grows sick of this too.' There are many who judge that living is not bitter, but simply pointless. Farewell.

======== Letter 25 ========

As for our two friends, we need different approaches for each: one man's faults need correcting, the other's need breaking. I'll use complete frankness with him: I don't love him unless I offend him. "What?" you say. "Do you mean to keep a forty-year-old ward under your guardianship? Consider his age—it's already hardened and unyielding; it can't be reshaped. Only the pliable can be molded." I don't know whether I'll make any progress; I'd rather lack success than lack faith. Don't lose hope that even chronic invalids can be healed, if you stand firm against their excess, if you force them, unwilling, to do and to endure a great deal. Even with the other man I don't have enough confidence, except for this: he still blushes when he does wrong. That sense of shame needs to be nurtured; as long as it endures in his mind, there's some room for good hope. With this veteran, I think we should proceed more gently, so he doesn't fall into despair about himself. And no time is better for making the attempt than now, while he's resting, while he seems like a reformed man. This lull has fooled others, but it doesn't fool me: I'm waiting for his faults to return with heavy interest—faults I know are merely dormant now, not gone. I'll spend some days on this business and find out whether anything can be done or not.
As for you, keep showing yourself brave, as you're doing, and pack your bags light—nothing we own is necessary. Let's go back to the law of nature; wealth stands ready there. What we need is either free or cheap: nature wants only bread and water. No one is poor by that standard—and whoever has confined his wants within it can rival Jupiter himself in happiness, as Epicurus says, and I'll wrap up one of his sayings in this letter. "Act," he says, "in all things as though Epicurus were watching." There's no doubt it helps to have set a guardian over yourself, someone you can look to, someone you can imagine present at your thoughts. It's certainly far grander to live as though under the eyes of some good man, always present—but I'll settle even for this: that you act, whatever you do, as though someone were watching. Solitude persuades us to every kind of wrongdoing. Once you've made enough progress that you have some regard for yourself too, you may dismiss your tutor; meanwhile, guard yourself under the authority of others—let it be Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius, or someone else in whose presence even ruined men would suppress their vices, while you make yourself into someone in whose presence you wouldn't dare do wrong. Once you've achieved that, and some self-respect has begun to take root in you, I'll start letting you do what Epicurus also advises: "Withdraw into yourself especially when you're forced to be in a crowd." You need to become different from the many, as long as it isn't yet safe for you to withdraw into yourself. Look at people one by one: there's no one who wouldn't be better off with just about anyone else than alone with himself. "Withdraw into yourself especially when you're forced to be in a crowd"—if you are a good man, a calm one, a moderate one. Otherwise you should withdraw from yourself into the crowd; there you're closer to a bad man than you are within yourself. Farewell.

======== Letter 26 ========

[1] Not long ago I was telling you that old age was in sight; now I suspect I have left old age behind me. These years of mine—this body of mine, at any rate—deserve a different word now, since 'old age' names a life that is tired, not one that is broken. Count me among the worn-out, the ones touching the very edge. [2] Still, in your hearing I give myself some credit: I do not feel the damage of age in my mind, though I feel it in my body. Only my vices have grown old, and the equipment that served them. The mind is vigorous, and it delights in having little business with the body; it has set down a great part of its load. It celebrates, and picks a quarrel with me about this so-called old age: this, it says, is its time of bloom. Let us take it at its word—let it enjoy what is good for it. [3] It tells me to go into my thoughts and sort out how much of this calm and this restraint of conduct I owe to wisdom and how much simply to my years; to examine carefully what I cannot do and what I do not want to do—and to treat whatever I am glad to find impossible as if I did not want it anyway. For what is there to complain of, what hardship is it, if something that was due to stop has run out? [4] 'It is the worst hardship of all,' you say, 'to shrink, to waste away, to melt—that is the exact word. We are not knocked flat by a single blow: we are whittled down, and each day takes something from our strength.' But is there any better way out than to slide toward one's own end while nature loosens the fastenings? Not that there is anything bad in a sudden stroke and an abrupt exit from life—only that this other road, being drawn away gently, is the soft one. As for me, as if the test were approaching and the day that will pass sentence on all my years had arrived, I keep watch on myself and I say to myself: [5] 'Nothing we have shown so far, in deeds or in words, counts for anything. Those are light and deceptive pledges of the spirit, wrapped in a great deal of window-dressing. What progress I have made, I will let death decide. So I am preparing—without fear—for that day when the tricks and the makeup come off and I pass judgment on myself: whether I merely talk courage or actually feel it; whether all those defiant words I hurled at fortune were playacting and mime. [6] Set aside other people's opinion of you: it is always uncertain, and it splits both ways. Set aside the studies you have pursued your whole life: death is going to pronounce the verdict on you. I mean this: debates and bookish conversation and sayings gathered from the precepts of the wise and cultivated talk do not display the real strength of a mind—even the most frightened people can speak boldly. What you have accomplished will show when you are gasping out your last breath. I accept the terms; I do not flinch from the verdict.' [7] I say this to myself, but consider it said to you as well. You are younger—what of it? The years are not counted out one by one. There is no knowing where death is waiting for you; so you wait for it everywhere.
[8] I was ready to stop, and my hand was reaching for the closing line, but the accounts have to be settled and this letter must be given its travel money. Assume I am not telling you where I will borrow it from—you know whose cash-box I draw on. Give me a little while and the payment will come from my own house; in the meantime Epicurus will advance the loan. He says: 'Rehearse for death'—or, if the thought crosses over to us more comfortably this way: 'It is a splendid thing to learn death thoroughly.' [9] Perhaps you think it pointless to learn something you will use only once. That is precisely why we must rehearse it: a thing must be studied forever when we cannot test whether we know it. [10] 'Rehearse for death': whoever says this is telling you to rehearse freedom. To have learned death is to have unlearned servitude. He stands above every power—certainly outside every power. What are prison and guards and bolted doors to him? His way out is unlocked. There is one chain that holds us bound: love of life. It need not be thrown off, but it should be slackened, so that when circumstances someday demand it, nothing holds us back or keeps us from being ready to do at once what must be done sooner or later. Farewell.

======== Letter 27 ========

[1] 'You are giving me advice?' you say. 'Have you already advised yourself, then—already straightened yourself out? Is that why you have leisure for correcting other people?' I am not so shameless as to take up doctoring while I am sick myself. No—think of me as a fellow patient in the same sickroom, talking with you about our common disease and passing along the remedies. So hear me as one talking to himself: I am letting you into my private room and calling myself to account with you standing by. [2] I shout at myself: 'Count your years, and you will be ashamed to want the same things you wanted as a boy, to be laying in the same supplies. As the day of your death nears, secure yourself this much at least: let your vices die before you do. Dismiss those churning pleasures that cost so much to pay off: they do harm not only when they are coming but after they have gone. Just as with crimes—even when they were not caught in the act, the anxiety does not leave when they do—so with dishonest pleasures: regret outlasts them. They have no substance and no loyalty; even when they do no harm, they run away. [3] Look around instead for some good that will stay. And there is none, except what the mind finds for itself, out of itself. Virtue alone supplies a joy that is unbroken and secure; even if something gets in its way, it comes between like clouds, which drift below and never defeat the daylight.' [4] When will it fall to you to reach this joy? So far there has been no dawdling, true—but pick up the pace. A great deal of the work remains, and for it you must spend your own late nights and your own sweat, if you want the thing accomplished; this business cannot be handed off to an agent. [5] A different branch of learning does admit outside help. Within my memory there was Calvisius Sabinus, a rich man; he had a freedman's fortune and a freedman's mind. I never saw wealth worn with less decency. So faulty was his memory that the name Ulysses would slip from him one moment, Achilles the next, then Priam—men he knew as well as we know our childhood tutors. No doddering name-prompter, the kind who no longer reports names but invents them, ever miscalled the voting tribes as badly as Sabinus miscalled the Trojans and the Greeks in his greetings. [6] Even so, he wanted to look educated. So he devised this shortcut: he paid a huge sum for slaves, one to hold Homer in his head, another Hesiod, and he assigned one apiece to the nine lyric poets. That he paid a fortune should not surprise you: he could not find such slaves ready-made, so he contracted to have them manufactured. Once this staff had been assembled, he began tormenting his dinner guests. He kept these men at his feet, and though he was constantly asking them for verses to repeat, he would often break down mid-word. [7] Satellius Quadratus—a nibbler at rich fools, and, as follows from that, a fawner on them, and, as goes with both, a mocker of them—suggested he acquire scholars to pick up his crumbs. When Sabinus said each slave had cost him a hundred thousand sesterces, Satellius said: 'For less money you could have stocked that many book-chests.' Sabinus nonetheless held the settled view that he himself knew whatever anyone in his household knew. [8] The same Satellius began urging him to take up wrestling—a sickly man, pale, scrawny. When Sabinus answered, 'How can I? I can barely stay alive,' he said, 'Please, do not say that. Look how many superbly muscled slaves you have!' A sound mind can be neither borrowed nor bought—and I suspect that if it were for sale, it would find no buyer. Yet an unsound one is bought every day.
[9] But now take what I owe you, and goodbye. 'Poverty arranged according to nature's law is wealth.' Epicurus says this often, in one form after another; but a thing is never said too often that is never learned well enough. To some people remedies need only be pointed out; into others they must be pounded. Farewell.

======== Letter 28 ========

[1] Do you think this has happened to you alone, and are you amazed, as if at something unheard of, that so long a journey and so many changes of scenery have not shaken off your sadness and the heaviness of your mind? It is the mind you must change, not the sky over your head. Though you cross the vast sea, though—as our Vergil puts it—
your faults will follow you wherever you land. [2] Socrates said the same thing to a man making this very complaint: 'Why are you surprised that traveling does you no good, when you carry yourself along? The same thing that drove you out is pressing on you still.' What relief can new countries give? What good is acquaintance with cities and places? All that tossing about comes to nothing. You ask why this flight of yours does not help you? You are fleeing in your own company. The load on the mind must be set down; until then, no place will please you. [3] Picture your present condition as like that of the prophetess our Vergil brings on—already stirred and goaded, with a great deal of breath in her that is not her own:
the seer raves, trying whether she can shake the great god out of her breast.
You go here, you go there, to shake off a weight that sits on you—a weight the jolting itself makes more troublesome, the way cargo in a ship presses less when it lies still, while a load shifting unevenly sinks the side it has settled on all the faster. Whatever you do, you do against yourself; the very movement harms you, for you are shaking a sick man. [4] But once you have removed that evil, every change of place will turn delightful. Banish yourself to earth's farthest edge, plant yourself in whatever corner of barbarian country you like: that lodging, whatever it is, will be a welcoming home. Who you are when you arrive matters more than where you arrive; and so we should mortgage the mind to no single place. Live with this conviction: 'I was not born for one corner; my homeland is this whole world.' [5] If that were clear to you, you would stop marveling that you get no help from the variety of regions you keep moving to out of boredom with the last: the first would have pleased you if you believed every one of them yours. As it is, you are not traveling—you are drifting, driven along, swapping place after place, though what you are hunting—the good life—is on offer everywhere. [6] Can anything be as noisy and churning as the forum? Yet even there one can live quietly, if one has to. But given a free choice of station, I would flee even the sight and the neighborhood of the forum from a long way off; for just as unhealthy districts try even the strongest constitution, so certain places are not very wholesome for a good mind that is still convalescing and not yet at full strength. [7] I part ways with those who wade into the middle of the surf, who applaud a stormy life and grapple every day, great-souled, with difficulties. The wise man will bear that sort of thing, not choose it; he will prefer peace to combat. It profits little to have thrown out your own vices if you must brawl with other people's. [8] 'Thirty tyrants,' someone says, 'hemmed Socrates in, and his spirit stayed unbroken.' What does the count of masters matter? Slavery is one thing only; the man who has despised it is free in however large a crowd of masters.
[9] It is time to stop—but not before I have paid the toll. 'The beginning of rescue is the recognition of the fault.' Epicurus seems to me to have put this superbly; for a man who does not know he is going wrong has no wish to be set right. You must catch yourself before you can correct yourself. [10] Some people boast of their vices: do you imagine anyone gives a thought to a cure who counts his diseases as virtues? So arraign yourself as hard as you can; investigate yourself. Play first the prosecutor's part, then the judge's, and last of all the advocate's who pleads for mercy. Sometimes give yourself offense. Farewell.

======== Letter 29 ========

You ask about our friend Marcellinus and want to know how he's doing. He rarely comes to see us, for no other reason than that he's afraid of hearing the truth — and he's already past that danger, since the truth should only be told to someone willing to hear it. That's why people often wonder whether Diogenes and the other Cynics, who exercised an indiscriminate freedom of speech and lectured whoever crossed their path, ought to have done so. What good is it, after all, to scold the deaf, or people mute by nature or by illness?
"Why," you say, "should I be sparing with words? They cost nothing. I can't know whether I'll do any good for the particular person I warn; but I do know this: if I warn many people, I'll do good for someone. My hand has to be scattered wide — it's impossible, if you try with enough people, that you won't succeed sometimes." This, my dear Lucilius, is not something I think a great man should do. It wears down his authority and carries too little weight with the very people whom, if less worn thin, it might have corrected. An archer shouldn't sometimes hit and sometimes miss — a skill that arrives at its result by chance isn't a skill at all. Wisdom is a skill: it should aim at a fixed target, choose those who are going to make progress, withdraw from those it has given up on — though not too quickly — and even in that final despair still try extreme remedies.
As for our friend Marcellinus, I haven't given up on him yet; even now he can be saved, but only if a hand is held out to him quickly. There is, admittedly, a danger that in reaching out I might get pulled down with him; there's great force of talent in him, but it's already bending toward the wrong direction. All the same, I'll take the risk, and I'll dare to show him his own faults.
He'll do what he usually does: he'll call up those witticisms of his that can draw a laugh even from mourners, and he'll joke first at his own expense, then at ours; he'll anticipate everything I'm about to say. He'll rummage through our schools of philosophy and throw in our faces the free handouts philosophers accept, their mistresses, their gluttony. He'll point out to me one caught in adultery, another in a tavern, another at court; he'll show me the charming philosopher Ariston, who used to lecture while being carried around in a litter — for he'd set aside that time for delivering his performances. When someone asked what school he belonged to, Scaurus said, "He's certainly not a Peripatetic." And when Julius Graecinus, an outstanding man, was asked his opinion of the same fellow, he said, "I can't tell you — I don't even know what he does when he's on his feet," as if he'd been asked about a gladiator who fights from a chariot.
He'll fling these charlatans in my face, men who would have shown more honor to philosophy by neglecting it than they do by peddling it. Still, I've resolved to put up with the insults. Let him make me laugh; perhaps I'll make him cry instead — or if he keeps on laughing, I'll be glad, as one is glad amid misfortunes, that at least his particular brand of madness turned out cheerful. But that cheerfulness doesn't last long: watch, and within a short time you'll see the same people laughing as hard as they can and raging as hard as they can.
My plan is to go after him and show him how much more he was worth when he seemed worth less to the crowd. Even if I don't root out his vices, I'll hold them in check; they won't stop, but perhaps they'll pause — and perhaps they'll even stop, if pausing becomes a habit. This in itself shouldn't be looked down on, since for people badly afflicted, a good remission stands in for health.
While I'm getting myself ready for him, you meanwhile — since you can, since you understand where you've come from and where you've arrived, and from that can guess how much further you're going to go — put your character in order, lift up your spirit, stand firm against the things you dread; don't count the people who frighten you. Wouldn't it seem foolish for someone to fear a crowd at a passage through which only one at a time can go? In just the same way, death has no access to you through many at once, however many threaten it. Nature has arranged it so: a single person will take your breath from you, just as a single person gave it to you.
If you had any shame, you'd have let me off the last installment; but I won't be stingy either, when it comes to paying off my debt to you — I'll throw in what I owe you as a bonus. "I never wanted to please the crowd; for what I know, the crowd doesn't approve, and what the crowd approves, I don't know." "Who said that?" you ask, as if you didn't know whom I quote. Epicurus. But every school will shout this same thing at you from every house — Peripatetics, Academics, Stoics, Cynics. For who can please the crowd, when what pleases him is virtue? Popular favor is won by bad methods. You'd have to make yourself like them; they won't approve of you unless they recognize themselves in you. But it matters far more what you think of yourself than what others think of you; the love of base people cannot be won except by base means. So what will that philosophy give you, the one so praised and to be ranked above all other arts and pursuits? This, of course: that you'd rather please yourself than the crowd, that you weigh judgments instead of counting them, that you live without fear of gods or men, that you either conquer your troubles or put an end to them. But if I should ever see you made famous by the crowd's cheering, if applause and shouting greeted you as you entered, like the trappings of a stage performer, if the whole city, women and children alike, sang your praises — why shouldn't I pity you, knowing as I do what road leads to that kind of favor? Farewell.

======== Letter 30 ========

I saw Aufidius Bassus, an excellent man, shaken, struggling against his age. But now more weighs him down than can be lifted off; old age has settled on him with its full, general weight. You know he always had a weak and sapped constitution; for a long time he held it together, and, to put it more accurately, patched it up: now suddenly it has given out. Just as in a ship that's taking on bilgewater, one leak or another can be plugged, but once it starts opening and giving way in many places at once, nothing can save the leaking vessel — so too in an aging body, weakness can be propped up and supported only up to a point. When, as in a crumbling building, every joint pulls apart, and while you're shoring up one spot another splits open, you have to look around for a way out. Our friend Bassus, though, is cheerful in spirit: this is what philosophy provides — to be joyful in the very sight of death, and, whatever condition the body is in, to be strong and glad and not to fail even while one is failing. A great helmsman sails on even with a torn sail, and if he's lost his rigging, still fits what's left of the ship to keep it on course. This is what our Bassus is doing, and he looks toward his own end with the same calm expression you'd think too unconcerned if he were looking at someone else's. It's a great thing, Lucilius, and one that takes a long time to learn — to go off with an even mind when that inescapable hour draws near. Other kinds of death offer some hope: the illness ends, the fire is put out, the collapsing building sets down those it seemed about to crush; the sea spits out unharmed those it had swallowed, with the same force it used to suck them in; the soldier's sword is called back from the very throat of the man about to die. The one whom old age leads to death has nothing left to hope for; this alone admits no reprieve. No kind of death is gentler for a person — but none is longer either.
Our Bassus seemed to me to be escorting himself to the grave and putting his affairs in order, living as though he had outlived himself, and bearing the loss of himself with wisdom. He talks a great deal about death, and works hard to persuade us that if there's any discomfort or fear in this business, it's the fault of the dying person, not of death itself; that there's no more trouble in the moment of death than there is after it. And it's just as mad to fear something you won't suffer as to fear something you won't feel. Or does anyone actually believe that the very thing through which nothing is felt will itself be felt? "So," he says, "death is so far outside every evil that it's outside every fear of evil." I know all this — it's been said often, and needs saying often — but it never did me as much good when I read it, or heard it said by people who denied there was anything to fear in what they themselves were nowhere near. This man, though, carried the greatest weight with me, because he was speaking about a death close at hand. Let me tell you what I really think: I believe a man who is right at the point of death is braver than one who is merely approaching it. For death, once it draws near, gives even the inexperienced the courage not to avoid the unavoidable — just as a gladiator who has been thoroughly frightened through the whole fight will offer his throat to his opponent and guide the wandering blade to his own body. But that death which is still some way off, though certainly coming, calls for a slow, steady firmness of mind, which is rarer and can be shown only by the wise man. So I listened to him most gladly, as though he were bringing back a verdict on death, showing what its nature is like as if he'd inspected it up close. It would carry more weight with you, I imagine, and more authority, if someone who had come back to life told you from experience that there's nothing bad in death; those who can tell you best what disturbance the approach of death brings are the ones who have stood right beside it, who have seen it coming and taken it in. You can count Bassus among these; he didn't want us to be deceived. He says it's just as foolish to fear death as to fear old age; for just as old age follows youth, so death follows old age. Whoever doesn't want to die didn't want to live either; for life is given on the condition of death — that's where it's headed. To fear it, then, is madness, because certain things are awaited calmly while only uncertain things are feared. Death has a fair and unconquerable claim on everyone: who can complain about being in a condition that everyone shares? And the first mark of fairness is equality. But it's pointless now to plead nature's case, since it never wanted our law to be any different from its own: whatever it has put together, it takes apart, and whatever it takes apart, it puts together again. And truly, if it happens that old age lets someone go gently, not torn suddenly from life but withdrawn from it little by little, oh, how that person ought to thank all the gods, for having been led, satisfied, to the rest that everyone needs, brought there welcome, after being weary. You see some people actually wishing for death, and more eagerly than life is usually begged for. I don't know which group I should think gives us greater courage — those who demand death, or those who wait for it cheerfully and calmly, since the former sometimes comes from a kind of frenzy or sudden fit of indignation, while the latter tranquility comes from settled judgment. Some people come to death in anger: no one has ever received death cheerfully as it approached, except someone who had long since made himself ready for it.
So I confess I went more often than usual to see this man so dear to me, for several reasons — to find out whether I would find him each time still the same, and whether the vigor of his mind was diminishing along with his bodily strength; and it kept growing, the way the joy of chariot drivers is more clearly noticed as they approach the finish on the seventh lap. He would say, following Epicurus's teachings, that he hoped, first, there would be no pain in that last gasp; but even if there were, it would have some comfort in its very brevity, since no pain that is great can also be long. Besides, he'd have this to fall back on even in the very tearing apart of soul from body: if it happened with torment, once that pain was past he could no longer feel pain at all. He had no doubt, moreover, that an old man's soul sits right at the edge of his lips and would need no great force to be torn from the body. "A fire that has taken hold of fuel that keeps feeding it must be put out with water, or sometimes by pulling down what it's burning; but one that's running out of fuel dies down on its own." I listen to all this gladly, my dear Lucilius, not as though it were new, but as though I'd been brought face to face with the reality itself. And what of it? Haven't I watched many people cut their lives short? I have indeed, but those who come to death without hating life, and let it in rather than dragging it toward themselves, carry more weight with me. And he used to say that we feel that particular torment through our own doing, because we panic exactly when we believe death is close by — but who is death not close to? It's ready in every place and at every moment. "But let's consider," he said, "how, whenever some particular cause of dying seems to be approaching, there are so many other causes much closer that we don't fear at all." An enemy was threatening someone with death; indigestion got to him first. If we're willing to distinguish the causes of our fear, we'll find that some are real and others merely seem so. We don't fear death itself, but the thought of death; for we're always exactly the same distance from death itself. So if death is something to be feared, it must be feared always — for what moment is exempt from death?
But I should be careful that you don't come to hate such long letters worse than death itself. So I'll bring this to an end: as for you, so that you may never fear death, think about it always. Farewell.

======== Letter 31 ========

I recognize my Lucilius: he is beginning to show himself as he promised. Follow that impulse of spirit which was carrying you, trampling on popular goods, toward all that is best. I don't ask you to become anything greater or better than what you were striving for. Your foundations have taken up a great deal of ground: only accomplish as much as you have attempted, and bring to completion what you carried with you in your mind.
In sum, you will be wise if you close your ears - and for that, plugging them with wax isn't enough: you need something more solid than the stuff Ulysses is said to have used on his crew. The voice that was feared then was seductive, but it wasn't public; the voice that must be feared now sounds around us not from a single cliff but from every corner of the earth. So sail past not one place suspected of treacherous pleasure, but every city there is. Be deaf to the very people who love you most: they wish evil on you with the best of intentions. And if you want to be happy, beg the gods that none of the things they pray for on your behalf should come to pass.
What those people want heaped upon you are not good things at all. There is one good, the cause and foundation of the happy life: trust in oneself. But this cannot be achieved unless hard work is despised and counted among the things that are neither good nor bad; for it is impossible for any single thing to be bad at one moment, good at another, sometimes light and bearable, sometimes to be dreaded.
Hard work is not a good. What, then, is good? Contempt for hard work. So I would blame those who toil to no purpose; but as for those who strain toward honorable things, the harder they press on and the less they allow themselves to be beaten or to falter, the more I will admire them and cry out: 'All the better - rise up, draw a breath, and clear that slope in a single breath if you can!'
Hard work nourishes noble spirits. So there is no reason for you to choose, from that old prayer of your parents, what you want to happen to you, what to wish for; and for a man who has already achieved the greatest things, it is shameful even now to keep pestering the gods. What need is there of prayers? Make yourself happy. And you will, if you understand that the things mixed with virtue are good, and the things joined with wickedness are shameful. Just as nothing shines without an admixture of light, nothing is black except what contains darkness or has drawn something dark into itself, just as nothing is warm without the help of fire and nothing cold without air, so it is the partnership of virtue and vice that produces what is honorable and what is shameful.
What, then, is good? Knowledge of things. What is bad? Ignorance of things. The person who is wise and skilled will reject or choose according to circumstance; but he neither fears what he rejects nor marvels at what he chooses, so long as his spirit is great and unconquered. I forbid you to be brought low or bowed down. If you do not refuse hard work, that is not enough - demand it.
'What then,' you say, 'is hard work that is frivolous and superfluous, work summoned by petty causes, not bad?' No more than work spent on beautiful things, since it is the mind's own endurance that spurs it toward what is hard and rough, and says: 'Why do you hold back? It's not a man's part to fear sweat.'
Add to this, so that virtue may be perfect, an evenness and a consistency of life harmonizing with itself throughout - which cannot exist unless one attains knowledge of things and the skill by which human and divine matters are understood. This is the highest good; and if you seize it, you begin to be a companion of the gods, not a supplicant.
'How,' you ask, 'is that reached?' Not through the Pennine or Graian pass, nor through the deserts of Candavia; you need not approach the Syrtes, or Scylla, or Charybdis - and yet you crossed all of those for the price of a petty appointment. The road is safe, the road is pleasant; nature equipped you for it. She gave you what, if you do not abandon it, will let you rise equal to a god.
Money will not make you equal to a god: a god has nothing. A purple-bordered robe will not do it: a god is naked. Fame will not do it, nor showing yourself off, nor sending your name abroad to be known among the nations: no one knows god, and many think badly of him, with impunity. It is not a crowd of slaves carrying your litter through the streets of the city or on journeys abroad: that greatest and most powerful god carries everything himself. Not even beauty and strength can make you happy: none of these withstands the passage of time.
What must be sought is something that does not grow worse day by day, something nothing can obstruct. What is this? The mind - but a mind that is upright, good, great. What else would you call this but a god lodging as a guest in a human body? This mind can fall to a Roman knight as much as to a freedman, as much as to a slave. For what is a Roman knight, or a freedman, or a slave? Names born of ambition or of injustice. One may leap into heaven from the meanest corner: only rise up
...and fashion yourself worthy of god too.
But you will not fashion yourself out of gold or silver: from that material no image resembling god can be made. Consider that when the gods were kindly disposed toward us, their images were made of clay. Farewell.

======== Letter 32 ========

I make inquiries about you, and I ask everyone who comes from your part of the world what you are doing, where you are living, and with whom. You cannot deceive me: I am with you. Live as though I were going to hear of whatever you do - no, as though I were going to see it. Do you want to know what pleases me most in what I hear about you? That I hear nothing - that most of the people I question don't know what you're doing.
This is a healthy sign: not associating with people unlike yourself, people who want different things. I do have confidence that you cannot be twisted aside, and that you will hold to your purpose even if a crowd of people trying to entice you surrounds you. What is it, then, that I fear? Not that they will change you, but that they will hold you back. And even someone who merely delays you does great harm, especially given how short life is - and we make it shorter still through our own inconsistency, constantly beginning it afresh, over and over; we tear it into little pieces and mangle it.
So hurry, dearest Lucilius, and consider how much speed you would add if an enemy were pressing at your back, if you suspected cavalry approaching and closing on the heels of those in flight. That is exactly what is happening - you are being pressed. Speed up and get clear, bring yourself to safety, and think from time to time how fine a thing it is to complete your life before death, and then to await, free of care, whatever part of your time remains, owing nothing to yourself, settled in possession of a happy life which does not grow happier by being longer.
Oh, when will you see that time when you know that time has nothing to do with you, when you will be calm and untroubled, careless of tomorrow, utterly filled and satisfied with yourself! Do you want to know what makes people greedy for the future? No one has yet come into possession of himself. And so your parents wished other things for you; but I, in turn, wish for you contempt of all the things they wished you an abundance of. Their prayers plunder many people so as to enrich you; whatever is transferred to you must be taken away from someone else.
I wish for you possession of yourself, so that your mind, tossed about by wandering thoughts, may finally come to rest and be settled - so that it may be content with itself and, having understood the true goods, which are possessed the moment they are understood, may have no need of the addition of more years. That man alone has risen above all necessities, is discharged from service and free, who has lived his life to its completion while still alive.

======== Letter 33 ========

[1] You want me to add to these letters, as I did to the earlier ones, some sayings of our leading men. They did not busy themselves with pretty phrases: the whole fabric of their work is masculine. Where the striking bits stand out, you may be sure the quality is uneven; a single tree draws no wonder where the whole forest has risen to the same height. [2] Poems are stuffed with sayings of that kind; so are the histories. So please don't take them for Epicurus's property: they belong to everyone, and most of all to us Stoics. In him, though, they get noticed more, because they turn up only now and then, because they come unexpected, because it startles people that something brave should be said by a man whose creed is softness. That, at least, is the common verdict; to my mind Epicurus is brave too, even if his sleeves hang to his wrists. Courage, hard work, a spirit ready for war can be found among Persians just as well as among men with their tunics belted high. [3] So there is no reason to demand extracts and quotable tags: what gets excerpted from other writers runs unbroken through ours. We keep no eye-catching wares in the window; we don't trick the buyer into walking in only to find nothing beyond what hangs at the entrance. We let readers take their sample from wherever they please. [4] Suppose we did want to pick individual maxims out of the crowd: under whose name would we enter them — Zeno's, Cleanthes's, Chrysippus's, Panaetius's, Posidonius's? We serve no king; each of us claims his own ground. Among the Epicureans, whatever Hermarchus said, whatever Metrodorus said, is booked to one account; everything anyone in that fellowship uttered was said under one man's command and auspices. We simply cannot, however hard we try, pull one item out of so vast a stock of equal goods:
it is the poor man who counts his flock.
Wherever you cast your eye, you will land on something that could stand out, if it were not being read among its equals. [5] So drop this hope of yours that the greatest minds can be tasted in summary form. You must look them over whole and work through them whole. The thing is built as a continuous whole; along its own lines the work of a mind is woven together, and nothing can be pulled out without the structure collapsing. I don't object to your examining the limbs one by one, provided you do it on the living body itself. A woman is not beautiful because her leg or her arm earns compliments; the beautiful one is she whose face as a whole leaves no attention to spare for the parts. [6] Still, if you insist, I won't deal with you like a miser; it will be by the fistful. There is an enormous crowd of such sayings lying about everywhere; they need to be picked up, not hunted down. They don't drop out in fragments; they flow, continuous and woven into one another. I don't doubt they do a great deal of good for beginners still listening from outside the door; single points settle in more easily when they come with clear edges, closed off like a line of verse. [7] That is why we set boys to memorize maxims, and the things the Greeks call chriae: a boy's mind can get its arms around them, and cannot yet hold more. But for a man of assured progress it is disgraceful to go chasing petals, to prop himself on a handful of very familiar tags and stand on memory alone. Let him lean on himself by now. Let him say such things, not recite them; it is shameful for an old man, or a man in sight of old age, to have a wisdom that lives in a notebook. 'Zeno said this.' And you — what do you say? 'Cleanthes said this.' And you? How long will you march under someone else's orders? Take command; say something worth handing down to memory; produce something from your own stock. [8] All these men, then, who are never authors and always interpreters, hiding in someone else's shadow, have, I think, nothing noble in them: they have never once dared to do what they spent so long learning. They trained their memory on other men's material. But remembering is one thing, knowing is another. To remember is to guard something deposited in the memory; to know is to make each thing your own — not to hang on a model and keep glancing back at the teacher. [9] 'Zeno said this; Cleanthes said that.' Put some distance between yourself and the book. How long will you be a student? Start teaching. What reason is there for me to hear what my own reading supplies? 'The living voice,' someone says, 'counts for much.' Not this voice, which is lent out to other men's words and does the work of a court clerk. [10] Add to this that people who never come of age follow their predecessors, first, in a field where everyone has broken with his predecessor, and second, in a field where the search is still on. And the answer will never be found if we rest content with what has been found already. Besides, a man who follows another discovers nothing — worse, he isn't even looking. [11] What then? Shall I not walk in the footsteps of the men before me? The old road I will take, certainly; yet should a nearer, smoother track appear, I will pave it myself. The men who worked on these questions before us are not our masters but our guides. Truth lies open to everyone; no one has staked a claim on it; a great deal of it is left even for those still to come. Farewell.

======== Letter 34 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I grow, I exult, I shed my old age and feel young again whenever I understand from what you do and write how far you have surpassed even yourself - for you left the common crowd behind long ago. If a farmer takes delight in a tree he has brought to fruit, if a shepherd finds pleasure in the young of his flock, if no one looks at his foster-child except as if that boy's youth were his own, what do you suppose happens to those who have raised minds and see, suddenly grown, what they shaped when tender?
I claim you for myself; you are my work. When I saw your natural gifts, I laid my hand on you, urged you on, applied the spurs, and did not let you go along slowly but kept pressing you forward; and now I do the same, except now I urge on a runner, one who in turn urges me on.
"What is that," you ask, "which I still lack?" In this there is a very great deal - not in the way people say the beginning is half of any whole undertaking. This matter is a question of character; and so wanting to become good is a large part of goodness. Do you know whom I call good? The complete man, the finished one, whom no force, no compulsion can make bad.
This is the man I foresee in you, if you persevere, if you press on, if you manage things so that all your deeds and words agree with each other and answer to one another, struck from a single mold. A mind is not on the right path if its actions are at odds with each other. Farewell.

======== Letter 35 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. When I urge you so strongly to pursue your studies, I am looking after my own business: I want to have a friend, and that cannot fall to me unless you go on cultivating yourself as you have begun. As things stand now, you love me, but you are not my friend. "What then? Are those two different things?" More than different - unlike. Whoever is a friend loves; whoever loves is not necessarily a friend. And so friendship is always beneficial, while love sometimes even does harm.
If for no other reason, make progress for this: so that you may learn to love. Hurry, then, while you are making progress for my sake, so that you do not end up having learned it for someone else's. As for me, I already reap the reward, when I picture to myself that we will one day share a single mind, and that whatever vigor has left my years will return to me from you too - though not much is missing from mine; but still I want to be glad in the reality itself as well.
Some joy comes to us even from those we love when they are absent, but it is slight and fleeting; the sight of them, their presence, conversation with them - these hold something of living pleasure, especially if you see not merely the person you want but the sort of person you want him to be. So bring yourself to me - a tremendous gift - and to press you on further, consider that you are mortal, and that I am old.
Hurry to me - but hurry to yourself first. Make progress, and above all take care of this: that you be consistent with yourself. Whenever you want to test whether anything has been accomplished, observe whether you want today the same things you wanted yesterday. A change of will shows that the mind is adrift, appearing now here, now there, as the wind carries it. What is fixed and well-founded does not wander. That belongs to the perfect sage, and to some degree also to the one making progress and advancing. What, then, is the difference? This one is stirred, but does not shift his ground - he only sways in place; that one is not even stirred at all. Farewell.

======== Letter 36 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Urge your friend to hold in noble contempt those who scold him for seeking shade and leisure, for abandoning his rank and, though he could have achieved more, preferring quiet to everything else; let him show them every day how profitably he has managed his own affairs. Those who are envied will not cease to pass by: some will be crushed, others will fall. Prosperity is a restless thing; it stirs itself up. It disturbs the mind in more than one way: it goads different men in different directions - some toward loss of self-control, others toward extravagance; some it puffs up, others it softens and utterly dissolves.
"But someone bears it well." Yes, the way one bears wine well. So there is no reason for these people to persuade you that a man besieged by crowds is happy: people rush to him the way they rush to a pond, which they drain and muddy. "They call him useless and idle." You know that some people speak perversely and mean the opposite of what they say. They used to call him happy - well, was he?
Nor do I care in the least that some think his character too harsh and severe. Ariston used to say he would rather have a young man be somber than cheerful and pleasing to the crowd, since good wine turns out to come from what seemed hard and rough when new; the vintage does not tolerate what pleased already in the cask. Let them call him gloomy and an enemy to his own advancement: that very gloominess will turn out well as it ages, provided only he keeps at cultivating virtue, keeps drinking deep of the liberal studies - not those with which it is enough merely to be sprinkled, but those with which the mind must be thoroughly dyed.
This is the time for learning. "What then - is there some time when one should not be learning?" Not at all; but just as it is honorable to pursue study at every age, it is not fitting to be under instruction at every age. It is a shameful and ridiculous thing, an old man still at his ABCs; the young must acquire, the old must use what they have acquired. So you will do the most useful thing for yourself if you make him as good as possible; they say such benefits are the ones most to be sought and bestowed, without doubt of the first rank, since giving them profits as much as receiving them.
Finally, he no longer has any freedom of his own - he has pledged himself; and it is less shameful to default on a creditor than on a good hope. To pay off that debt, a merchant needs a favorable voyage, a farmer needs the fertility of the land he tills and the favor of the sky; but what our friend owes can be paid off by will alone.
Fortune has no jurisdiction over character. Let him arrange his character so that his mind may come to perfection in the greatest possible tranquility, a mind that feels nothing taken from it and nothing added to it, but stays in the same condition no matter how things turn out - one which, whether ordinary goods are heaped upon it, rises above its own possessions, or whether chance strips away some or all of them, grows no smaller.
If he had been born in Parthia, he would have drawn a bow as an infant; if in Germany, he would have brandished a light spear as a mere boy; if he had lived in our grandfathers' time, he would have learned to ride and to strike the enemy hand to hand. These are the things each nation's own tradition urges and demands of its people.
What, then, must this man of ours train for? For what serves well against every weapon, against every kind of enemy: to hold death in contempt - and no one doubts that death has something terrible in it, enough to offend even our minds, which nature has shaped to love themselves. For there would be no need to be prepared and sharpened for something we would go toward by a kind of voluntary instinct anyway, as all creatures are carried toward self-preservation.
No one learns so that, if it should be necessary, he can lie on a bed of roses with an even mind; rather, one is toughened for this: so that he will not surrender his integrity under torture, so that, if necessary, he will stand watch, sometimes even wounded, before the rampart, and not lean even on his spear, since sleep tends to creep up on those who rest against any support. Death has no drawback to it - for there must be something existing for a drawback to belong to.
But if such a strong desire for a longer life grips you - consider that nothing which passes from our sight is destroyed, but only stored back into the nature of things, out of which it came and from which it will soon emerge again. These things cease, they do not perish; and death, which we so dread and refuse, only interrupts life, it does not steal it away. A day will come again that will place us back into the light - a day many would refuse, if it did not bring them back forgetful of what came before.
But later I will teach more carefully that everything which seems to perish only changes. He who is to return should leave with an even mind. Watch the cycle of things returning upon themselves: you will see that nothing in this world is extinguished, but only rises and falls in turn. Summer departs, but another year will bring it back; winter has fallen, but its own months will restore it; night buries the sun, but day at once drives night away. That procession of the stars brings back whatever has passed; part of the sky is always rising, part always sinking.
In short, I will bring this to an end, if I add just this one thing: neither infants nor children nor those who have lost their minds fear death, and it is most shameful if reason cannot grant us the same freedom from care that folly grants to them. Farewell.

======== Letter 37 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. The strongest bond toward a sound mind is this: you have promised to be a good man, you have taken the oath. Someone will laugh at you if he tells you that this service is soft and easy. I do not want you to be deceived. The words of this most honorable oath and of that most degrading one are the same: "to be burned, to be bound, to be killed by the sword."
Those who hire out their hands to the arena, and eat and drink what they will pay back in blood, are guarded so that they suffer these things even against their will; you must suffer them willingly and gladly. They are allowed to lower their weapons, to try the crowd's mercy; you will neither lower your weapon nor beg for your life - you must die upright and unconquered. And besides, what good does it do to gain a few extra days or years? We are born with no discharge.
"How, then," you ask, "can I free myself?" You cannot escape necessities, but you can conquer them - and philosophy will give you this road.
Turn to philosophy if you want to be safe, if you want to be free from anxiety, if you want to be happy - if, in short, you want to be, which is the greatest thing of all, free; this cannot come about in any other way. Folly is a base thing, abject, sordid, servile, subject to many passions, and the most tyrannical ones at that. Wisdom dismisses these harsh masters from you - masters who sometimes rule by turns, sometimes together - and wisdom alone is freedom. There is one road that leads to it, and a straight one; you will not go astray - walk it with a firm step. If you want to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason; you will rule over many, if reason rules you. From reason you will learn what and how you ought to undertake things; you will not stumble into events blindly.
You cannot give me a single person who knows how he came to want what he wants; he was not led there by deliberation but driven by impulse. Fortune runs into us no less often than we run into fortune. It is shameful not to go but to be carried along, and suddenly, in the midst of the whirlwind of events, to ask, dazed, "How did I get here?" Farewell.

======== Letter 38 ========

[1] You are right to insist that we keep up this traffic of letters between us. Conversation does the most good, because it steals into the mind a little at a time. Set-piece lectures, poured out before a crowd, make more noise and less intimacy. Philosophy is good counsel, and counsel is never shouted. There is a time, granted, for those harangues, so to call them, when a man who wavers needs a push; but when the task is no longer kindling the wish to learn, but the learning itself, you must come down to these quieter words. They get in more easily, and they stick; you don't need many words, only ones that work. [2] They should be scattered like seed. A seed is a small thing, but once it takes hold of the right ground it unfolds its powers and spreads from a minimum into the greatest growth. Reason does the same: look at it and it covers little space; set it working and it grows. Few things get said, but if the mind receives them well, they gather strength and shoot up. Precepts and seeds, I tell you, are under the same law: they accomplish much, and they are compact. Only, as I said, let a fit mind seize them and draw them into itself; then it will generate much in its turn, and give back more than it received. Farewell.

======== Letter 39 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I will indeed put together the notes you're asking for, carefully arranged and compressed into a small compass. But watch that a systematic treatment doesn't end up more useful to you than what people nowadays commonly call a "summary" -- in the old days, when we still spoke proper Latin, it was called an "abstract." The full treatment is more necessary to someone still learning; the abstract, to someone who already knows. The one teaches; the other reminds. But I'll give you plenty of both. Only don't demand that I hand you this author or that one: whoever needs an introducer is a stranger to the subject. So I'll write what you want, but in my own way. Meanwhile you have many authors whose writings are, I'm not sure, arranged well enough. Pick up a list of the philosophers: the very sight of it will force you awake, once you see how many men have labored for your benefit. You'll want to be one of them yourself; for this is the best thing about a noble mind, that it's stirred to honorable ends. No man of lofty character finds pleasure in what is low and squalid: the spectacle of great things calls him on and lifts him up. Just as flame rises straight up and cannot be made to lie flat or sink, any more than it can stay still, so our mind is in motion, and the more vehement it is, the more mobile and active. But happy is the one who has directed that impulse toward better things: he will set himself outside the jurisdiction and dominion of fortune; he will keep prosperity in check, diminish adversity, and look down on what others find astonishing. It belongs to a great mind to despise great things and to prefer the moderate to the excessive; for the moderate is useful and life-sustaining, while the excessive harms precisely because it overflows its measure. So an overabundant harvest flattens the field, branches break under their own load, and excessive fruitfulness never reaches maturity. The same thing happens to minds too: unchecked success shatters them, and they use that success not only to injure others but even themselves. What enemy has ever been as vicious toward anyone as certain men's own pleasures are toward them? Their lack of self-control and their mad lust could almost be forgiven for this one reason -- that they suffer what they inflict. And it's not without reason that this madness torments them; for a desire that leaps past the natural limit is bound to run out into the boundless. Natural desire has its own end; what is empty and born of lust has none. Necessity is measured by usefulness: how do you measure what's superfluous? And so people drown themselves in pleasures which, once habitual, they can't do without -- and for this reason they are utterly wretched, that they've come to the point where what was once superfluous has become necessary. So they are slaves to their pleasures, not masters enjoying them, and they even love their own evils -- which is the worst evil of all -- and their unhappiness is complete when shameful things not only delight them but win their approval, and there's no room left for a cure once what were once vices have become their character. Farewell.

======== Letter 40 ========

[1] Thank you for writing to me so often; you are showing yourself to me in the one way you can. I never receive a letter of yours without our being instantly together. If portraits of absent friends give us pleasure — refreshing our memory of them, easing the ache of separation with a comfort that is false and empty — how much more pleasure in letters, which bring the true traces, the true marks, of an absent friend. What is sweetest when we meet face to face, a friend's hand pressed into his letter supplies: the moment of recognition.
[2] You write that you heard the philosopher Serapion when he landed where you are: 'He likes to tear his words loose at a great gallop; he doesn't pour them out but crowds and drives them — more of them come than any one voice can handle.' In a philosopher I don't approve of this. His speech, no less than his conduct, ought to be kept in order; and nothing is orderly that rushes headlong. So in Homer the speech that comes storming without a pause, like falling snow, is given to the orator; from the old man the speech flows gently, sweeter than honey. [3] Take it this way, then: that rushing, overflowing style of speech suits a street performer better than a man handling a great and serious matter and teaching it. Yet I no more want him to drip than to sprint; he should neither leave the ear straining nor bury it. Thinness and poverty of delivery also lose the hearer's attention — he wearies of a slowness full of stops; still, what is waited for settles in more easily than what flies past. And after all, people say teachers hand down precepts to their students; what runs away cannot be handed down. [4] Add to this that speech which serves the truth should be plain and unstudied. This crowd-pleasing sort has no truth in it. It aims to stir the mob and sweep unreflecting ears along by sheer momentum; it does not submit itself to examination — it is gone. But how is speech to rule others when it will not take the rein itself? And consider: speech applied to healing minds must sink down into us. Remedies do no good unless they stay in place. [5] Besides, that style carries a great load of hollowness and emptiness; it makes more sound than force. My terrors need soothing, my irritants need curbing, my illusions need dispelling, my extravagance needs the rein, my greed needs the rebuke: which of these can be done at a run? What doctor treats his patients in passing? And note that there is not even any pleasure in such a din of words tumbling out without selection. [6] But just as with most things you would never have believed possible, it is enough to have learned once that they happen, so with these word-athletes: to have heard them once is plenty. What would anyone want to learn from them, or imitate? What should one conclude about the mind of men whose speech is a disordered stampede that cannot be pulled up? [7] As a man running downhill cannot stop where he chooses, but is the servant of his body's gathering weight and carried farther than he intended, so this speed of speaking is not under its own control, and not decent enough for philosophy — which ought to place its words, not fling them, and go forward one step at a time. [8] 'What, then? Is it never to rise to a height?' Of course it is — but with the dignity of character intact, which that violent, excessive force strips away. Let it have great strength, but strength under discipline; let it be a stream that never fails, not a torrent. Even in a courtroom orator I would scarcely allow a pace of speaking that cannot be recalled and moves without law: how is the judge to keep up — a judge who at times is inexperienced and untrained besides? Even when showing off carries the speaker away, or a passion beyond his control, let him hurry and heap up only as much as the ears can take.
[9] You will do well, then, not to listen to those men who ask how much they can say rather than how they say it, and yourself to prefer, if it comes to that, to speak like P. Vinicius. When someone asked how P. Vinicius spoke, Asellius said, 'By the syllable, dragging.' And Geminus Varius said, 'What makes you people call him a speaker is beyond me — he can't string three words together.' Why shouldn't you rather choose to speak the way Vinicius did? [10] Some wit may break in on you, like the man who said to Vinicius — who plucked his words out one at a time, as if he were dictating rather than speaking — 'Say it! Are you never going to say it?' Though as for the racing pace of Q. Haterius, the most celebrated orator of his day, I want it kept far from any sane man: he never hesitated, he never paused; he began once and he stopped once.
[11] Some habits, I think, suit some nations more, some less. Among Greeks you might tolerate that license; we Romans have got into the habit of punctuating even when we write. Our own Cicero too, from whom Roman eloquence sprang up, went at a walking pace. Roman speech looks about itself more; it takes its own measure, and offers itself to be measured. [12] Fabianus, a remarkable man in his life, in his learning, and — what comes after those — in his eloquence as well, used to discourse fluently rather than furiously, so that you could call it ease, not speed. That I accept in a wise man; I don't demand it. Let his speech come out unimpeded — but I would rather it were brought forth than let flow. [13] I am all the more anxious to scare you off this disease because you cannot catch it except by losing your capacity for shame. You would have to rub your forehead smooth and stop listening to yourself; that unwatched gallop will carry along a great deal you would want to take back. [14] You cannot, I repeat, catch it with your modesty intact. Moreover it demands daily practice, and your effort would have to shift from matter to words. And even if the words are there and can run on without any labor from you, they still need the rein; for as a more restrained walk befits a wise man, so does speech that is compact, not daring. So the sum of all my sums is this: I order you to be a slow talker. Farewell.

======== Letter 41 ========

[1] You are doing something excellent, something good for your own health, if, as you write, you keep pressing on toward a sound mind. How foolish to pray for what you could grant yourself! There is no need to lift your hands toward the sky, no need to beg the temple attendant to let us close to the statue's ear, as though the god could hear us better there. God is near you, with you, inside you. [2] I mean it, Lucilius: a holy spirit has its seat within us, watching over our bad deeds and our good ones, guarding them. As we treat this spirit, so it treats us. No one is a good man without god. Can anyone rise above fortune unless god lifts him? It is god who supplies counsel that is grand and upright. In every good man a god dwells - which god, we cannot say.
In every good man, though which god is uncertain, a god makes his home.
[3] Suppose you come upon a grove thick with ancient trees grown past their usual height, where the tangle of branch over branch shuts out any view of the sky: the sheer stature of that forest, the seclusion of the place, the wonder of shade so deep and unbroken out in open country, will convince you a divine power is there. Or suppose a cave holds up a mountain on rock hollowed deep beneath it - not cut by any hand, but opened out to that vastness by natural causes: some tremor of religious awe will strike your soul. We venerate the sources of great rivers; where a huge stream bursts suddenly out of hiding, altars stand; springs of hot water have their cults, and certain pools have been made sacred by their darkness or their fathomless depth. [4] Now suppose you see a man unshaken by dangers, untouched by cravings, happy in the middle of adversity, calm at the center of storms, looking down on other men from a higher place and at the gods as an equal - won't reverence for him steal over you? Won't you say: this thing is too great, too lofty, to be of the same stuff as the scrap of body it lives in? [5] A divine force has come down into him. A soul that stands above things, well-ordered, passing through everything as if it were beneath it, laughing at all we fear and all we pray for - such a soul is driven by a power from heaven. Something that great cannot stand without a god propping it; so the greater part of it remains where it came down from. The sun's beams reach down to the earth, yet their home is the source that sends them; in the same way a soul that is great and holy - sent down here so that we might know the divine at closer range - keeps company with us, yes, but stays fastened to its origin. It hangs from there, it looks and strains back toward there; it moves among our affairs as something better than we are. [6] What kind of soul is this, then? One that shines by no good but its own. What is more foolish than to praise in a man what belongs to someone else? What is crazier than admiring things that can be handed over to another in an instant? Golden bridles do not improve a horse. A lion with a gilded mane goes into the arena one way - handled, worn down, forced to put up with having the ornament fastened on; a lion untouched, its spirit whole, goes in quite another. That one, fierce in its charge, the way nature meant it to be, magnificent in its shagginess - its beauty being exactly this, that you cannot look at it without fear - stands above the listless, gold-leafed one. [7] No one should take pride in anything but his own. We praise a vine if it loads its shoots with fruit, if the sheer weight of what it has borne drags its supports toward the ground. Would anyone prefer to it a vine hung with golden grapes and golden leaves? The vine's own excellence is fruitfulness; in a man, too, what deserves praise is what is his. He has a good-looking household staff and a beautiful house, he plants widely, he lends at high interest: none of this is in him; it is around him. [8] Praise in a man what can neither be snatched away nor handed to him, what belongs to the human being as such. You ask what that is? The soul, and reason brought to completion in the soul. For man is a rational animal; his good is therefore complete when he has fulfilled the purpose he was born for. And what does this reason demand of him? The easiest thing there is: to live according to his own nature. What makes it hard is the shared madness of us all: we push each other over into vice. And what recall to health is possible for men whom nobody restrains and the whole populace shoves forward? Farewell.

======== Letter 42 ========

Has that fellow already persuaded you he's a good man? But a good man can't be made, or even recognized, that quickly. Do you know what I mean now by "a good man"? One of the second rank. The genuine article is born, like the phoenix, maybe once every five hundred years. And it's no wonder great things are produced only at long intervals: mediocre things, born in crowds, fortune churns out regularly, but she recommends the exceptional precisely by its rarity. But this man of yours is still a long way from what he claims to be; and if he knew what a good man actually was, he wouldn't yet believe himself one -- he might even despair of ever becoming one. "But he thinks badly of the wicked." So do the wicked themselves; no punishment for viciousness is greater than displeasing yourself and your own kind. "But he hates those who use sudden, great power without restraint." He'll do the same once he has the same power. In many people vice lies hidden only because it's weak, no less ready to dare everything once its strength pleases it than the vice that fortune has already brought into the open. They simply lack the tools to unfold their own wickedness. In the same way you can safely handle even a venomous snake while the cold keeps it stiff: the poison isn't gone, it's just dormant. Many people's cruelty and ambition and extravagance, capable of matching the very worst, are held back only by the absence of fortune's favor. That they want the same things, you'll find out -- just give them the power they want. Do you remember, when you were insisting that a certain man was in your power, I told you he was flighty and unreliable, and that you didn't hold him by the foot but by a feather? I was wrong: it was a downy tuft you held, and he shed it and flew off. You know what a show he's put on for you since, how many schemes he's tried that were bound to come crashing down on his own head. He didn't see that by endangering others he was rushing to his own ruin; he never stopped to think how burdensome the things he was chasing would be, even if they weren't also useless.
So this is what we ought to examine in the things we strive for, the things we struggle so hard to attain: either there's no real advantage in them at all, or there's more harm than advantage. Some things are simply superfluous; others aren't worth what they cost. But we fail to see this clearly, and things that come at the very highest price look free to us. Our stupidity is plain enough from the fact that we consider only the things we pay money for as bought, while we call things free that cost us ourselves. Things we'd refuse to buy if the price were our own house, or some pleasant, productive estate, we're perfectly ready to obtain at the cost of anxiety, of danger, of the sacrifice of our modesty, our freedom, our time -- so true is it that nothing is cheaper to a person than himself. So let's do, in all our plans and undertakings, what we usually do whenever we approach a shopkeeper selling some good: let's see what price is being asked for the thing we crave. Often the highest price is paid for something given for nothing. I could show you many things which, once acquired and accepted, have wrung our freedom out of us; we would belong to ourselves, if those things didn't belong to us. So turn this over in your own mind, not only when there's a question of gain, but also when there's a question of loss. "This is going to be lost." Well, it was an extra to begin with; you'll live without it as easily as you lived before you had it. If you've had it a long time, you lose it once you're already sated with it; if not long, you lose it before you've grown used to it. "You'll have less money." Yes, and less trouble too. "Less influence." Yes, and less envy too. Look around at the things that drive us to distraction, the things we lose with so many tears: you'll find that it isn't the loss itself that's painful, but the idea of the loss. No one feels that those things are gone -- he only thinks about it. The man who still has himself has lost nothing. But to how few does it fall to truly have themselves? Farewell.

======== Letter 43 ========

You ask how this reached me, who told me what you had told no one you were thinking. The one who knows the most: rumor. "What then," you say, "am I important enough to stir up rumor?" You shouldn't measure yourself by this place you're looking back toward; look instead at the place where you're actually living. Whatever stands out among its neighbors is great right where it stands out; for greatness has no fixed measure -- comparison either raises it or brings it down. A boat that's large on a river is tiny on the sea; a rudder that's large for one ship is small for another. You, right now, in your province, however much you may look down on yourself, are a great man. What you do, how you dine, how you sleep -- people ask, people know: all the more carefully must you live. But count yourself truly fortunate only when you can live out in the open, when your own walls shelter you rather than hide you -- walls which, for the most part, we think we've put up around ourselves not to live more safely but to sin more secretly. I'll tell you something from which you can judge our morals: you'll hardly find a man who can live with his door open. It's our conscience, not our pride, that has posted doorkeepers: we live in such a way that to be caught unawares is to be caught in the act. But what good does it do to hide yourself away, to avoid the eyes and ears of other people? A good conscience welcomes a crowd; a bad one is anxious and uneasy even in solitude. If what you're doing is honorable, let everyone know it; if shameful, what does it matter that no one knows, so long as you know? How wretched you are if you think nothing of that witness! Farewell.

======== Letter 44 ========

Once again you're making yourself out to be small, saying that nature treated you meanly at first, and fortune after her, when in fact you could lift yourself out of the crowd and rise to the very height of human happiness. If there's any good at all in philosophy, it's this: it doesn't look at your family tree. All of us, if we're traced back to our first origin, come from the gods. You're a Roman knight, and your own effort brought you to that rank; but heaven knows, for many the fourteen rows are closed off, not everyone is admitted to the senate, even the army chooses fastidiously whom it will accept for its labor and danger: a good mind is open to everyone, on this score we are all nobly born. Philosophy rejects no one and chooses no one: she shines on everyone alike. Socrates was no patrician; Cleanthes hauled water and hired out his hands to water a garden; philosophy did not receive Plato already noble -- she made him so. Why then should you despair of being able to become their equal? All of them are your ancestors, if you show yourself worthy of them; and you will show yourself worthy, if you convince yourself right now that no one surpasses you in nobility. All of us have just as many generations behind us; for no one does the origin fail to lie beyond memory. Plato says there is no king who is not descended from slaves, no slave who is not descended from kings. A long procession of change has mixed all this together and fortune has turned it upside down and right side up again. Who is well-born? The one well fitted by nature for virtue. This is the only thing to consider; otherwise, if you go back to ancient origins, everyone traces back to something before which there is nothing. From the very first origin of the world down to this present time, an alternating sequence of the splendid and the squalid has brought us along. An entrance hall full of smoke-blackened ancestral portraits doesn't make a man noble; no one lived for our glory, and what existed before us is not ours: it's the mind that confers nobility, and the mind, whatever its condition, can rise above fortune. So imagine yourself not a Roman knight but a freedman: you can still achieve this -- to be the only free man among the freeborn. "How?" you ask. By not judging good and bad according to popular opinion. What must be considered is not where things come from, but where they're headed. If there is anything that can make life happy, that thing is good in its own right; for it cannot be corrupted into something bad. Where, then, does the error lie, when everyone wants a happy life? In this: that people take its tools for the thing itself, and in pursuing it, flee from it. For since the sum of a happy life is unshakable security and unwavering confidence in that security, people gather up the causes of anxiety instead, and along life's treacherous road they don't just carry their burdens, they drag them; and so they draw farther and farther away from the very thing they're seeking, and the more effort they spend, the more they hinder themselves and are carried backward. This is what happens to people hurrying through a labyrinth: their very speed tangles them up. Farewell.

======== Letter 45 ========

You complain that where you are there's a shortage of books. It doesn't matter how many you have, but how good they are: reading a fixed selection does good, reading widely only gives pleasure. Whoever wants to arrive where he has set out for should follow a single road, not wander through many; that isn't traveling, it's straying. "I'd rather," you say, "you gave me guidance than books." As for me, I'm ready to send you whatever I have, and to empty my whole storehouse; I'd transfer myself to where you are too, if I could, and if I didn't hope you'd soon win release from your official duties, I would have set myself this journey even at my age, and not even Charybdis and Scylla and that fabled strait could have deterred me. I would have swum across, not merely sailed across, if only I could embrace you and see for myself, in person, how much you'd grown in spirit.
As for your wanting my books sent to you, I don't think myself any more eloquent for that than I'd think myself handsome if you asked for my portrait. I know that's a matter of your affection, not your judgment; and even if it is judgment, your affection has deceived you. But whatever they're worth, read them as though I were still seeking the truth, not yet knowing it, and seeking it stubbornly. I haven't signed myself over to anyone as property; I don't carry any master's name. I trust a great deal to the judgment of great men, but I claim something for my own judgment too. For they too left us not discoveries but things still to be searched for, and they might have discovered what's necessary if they hadn't also gone searching for what's superfluous. Much of their time was stolen by quibbling over words, by those trap-laying disputes that exercise cleverness to no purpose. We tie knots and bind ambiguous meanings into words, and then untie them again: do we really have so much free time? Do we already know how to live, already know how to die? We should press on with our whole mind toward the point where we must guard against being deceived by things, not by words. Why do you point out to me subtle distinctions between words that no one was ever caught out by except while arguing? It's things that deceive us: sort those out. We embrace evils in place of goods; we wish for the opposite of what we once wished for; our own prayers fight against our prayers, our own plans against our plans. How like friendship flattery is! It doesn't just imitate friendship, it outdoes and surpasses it; it's welcomed by open and receptive ears and sinks down into the depths of the heart, all the more winning for the very harm it does: teach me how I can tell the two apart. A fawning enemy comes to me disguised as a friend; vices creep up on us under the name of virtues: recklessness hides under the title of courage, caution is called cowardice, the timid man is taken for the careful one. In these matters we go badly astray, at great risk: stamp on them some sure marks. As for the rest, a man asked whether he has horns isn't so foolish as to feel his own forehead, but neither is he so silly or dull that he wouldn't know the answer -- unless you'd persuaded him otherwise with some extremely subtle chain of reasoning. That's how such tricks deceive harmlessly, the way a conjuror's cups and balls do, where the very deception delights me. Make me understand how it's done, and I've spoilt the game. I say the same about these verbal traps -- what better name is there for them than sophisms? -- they neither harm the ignorant nor help the wise. If you really want to untangle ambiguities of words, teach us this instead: that the happy man is not the one the crowd calls happy, the one great wealth has flowed toward, but the one for whom every good lies in the mind, upright and lofty, treading marvels underfoot, who sees no one he'd want to trade places with, who values a human being only by that which makes him human, who takes nature as his teacher, shapes himself to her laws, lives just as she has prescribed; a man whose goods no force can shake loose, who turns evils into good, sure in judgment, unshaken, fearless; whom some force may move, but none can throw into confusion; a man whom fortune, even when she hurls with all her might the most harmful weapon she possesses, only pricks, not wounds -- and even that rarely; for the rest of her weapons, by which the human race is beaten down, bounce off him like hail, which rattles and dissolves against a roof without any harm to the person sheltered inside. Why do you keep me lingering over that puzzle you yourself call the Liar, on which so many books have been written? Look, my whole life is lying to me: refute that, bring that back to the truth, if you're so sharp. It judges necessary a great many things that are actually superfluous; and even what isn't superfluous carries no real weight toward this, toward being able to guarantee a fortunate and happy life. For a thing isn't automatically good just because it's necessary -- otherwise we'd be cheapening the very word "good" by applying it to bread and porridge and everything else without which life can't be sustained. Whatever is good is certainly necessary; but whatever is necessary isn't necessarily good, since indeed some necessary things are also utterly worthless. No one is so ignorant of the dignity of the good as to lower it to the level of things merely useful for the day. What then? Wouldn't you do better to turn your attention to showing everyone that superfluous things are pursued at enormous cost of time, and that many people have spent their whole lives assembling life's equipment? Look at individuals, consider people as a whole: there is no one whose life doesn't look ahead to tomorrow. You ask what's wrong with that? Everything. For such people don't live, they're only going to live: they put everything off. Even if we paid close attention, life would still race past us; as it is, while we hesitate, it rushes by as though it belonged to someone else, and it comes to an end on the very last day, though it's been perishing the whole time. But so as not to overrun the limit of a letter, which shouldn't fill the left hand of its reader, I'll put off this quarrel with the logicians -- too subtle by half, and caring about this alone, and nothing else -- to another day. Farewell.

======== Letter 46 ========

[1] The book you promised me has arrived. I opened it meaning to read at my leisure, intending only a taste; then the thing itself coaxed me on and on. How eloquent it is you may judge from this: it felt light in my hands, though its bulk was not like mine or yours - at first glance it might have passed for Livy or Epicurus. But it held me, pulled me along with such sweetness that I read it straight through without stopping. The sun was inviting me out, hunger was nagging, clouds were threatening rain; still I drained it to the last drop. [2] I was not merely entertained; I rejoiced. What talent the book showed, what spirit! I would have said 'what bursts of force!' if it had rested now and then, if it had risen up at intervals; as it was, there were no bursts - it was one sustained pull. The style is manly and clean, and yet that sweetness, that gentleness in the right place, kept appearing through it. You are large; you stand tall: hold onto that, keep walking that way. The subject matter did some of the work too - which is why one should choose a subject that is fertile, that gives talent room and spurs it on.
[3] I will write more about the book when I have gone over it again; for now my judgment is not settled - it is as if I had heard it rather than read it. Let me examine it too. You have nothing to fear: you will hear the truth. What a lucky man you are, to own nothing that would make anyone lie to you from this far away! - except that by now we lie even when the reason for lying is gone, purely out of habit. Farewell.

======== Letter 47 ========

[1] I was glad to hear, from people who have been with you, that you live on familiar terms with your slaves. That fits your good sense; it fits your education. 'They're slaves.' No - human beings. 'They're slaves.' No - housemates. 'They're slaves.' No - friends of humble rank. 'They're slaves.' No - fellow slaves, once you reflect that fortune holds exactly the same power over both of you. [2] So I laugh at the people who think it degrading to dine with their own slave. Why is it degrading, except that our most arrogant custom rings the dining master with a crowd of standing slaves? The master devours past what he can hold, cramming with enormous greed a belly stretched tight and no longer able to do a belly's work, so that he labors harder to get it all out than he did to stuff it in. [3] Meanwhile the wretched slaves may not move their lips even to speak. The rod cuts off every murmur; not even accidents - a cough, a sneeze, a hiccup - are exempt from the lash. Breaking the silence with any sound is paid for with heavy punishment. All night they stand there, hungry and mute. [4] The result is that men who may not talk in front of the master talk about the master. But slaves in the old days, who could speak not only in the master's presence but with him, whose mouths were not sewn shut, were ready to stretch out their necks for him, to draw an approaching danger down on their own heads. They talked at dinner parties; under torture they said nothing. [5] Then there is that proverb, born of the same arrogance, that we have as many enemies as we have slaves. We do not have them as enemies; we make them so. I pass over other treatment, cruel and inhuman - that we misuse them not even as human beings but as pack animals. While we recline at dinner, one wipes up spittle; another, crouched under the couch, gathers what the drunks have dropped. [6] Another carves expensive birds: guiding his practiced hand in fixed strokes across breast and rump, he flicks off the portions - poor man, who lives for this one skill, carving fowl elegantly; though the man who teaches it for pleasure's sake is more pitiful than the one who learns it because he must. [7] Another, the wine server, decked out like a woman, is at war with his own age: he is not allowed to escape boyhood; he is dragged back into it. Though he already has a soldier's build, he is kept smooth, his hair rubbed away or plucked out by the roots, and he stays awake the whole night, dividing it between his master's drunkenness and his master's lust - a man in the bedroom, a boy at the table. [8] Another, entrusted with grading the guests, stands there miserably, watching to see whose flattery and whose lack of restraint - of gullet or of tongue - will earn an invitation back tomorrow. Add the buyers of delicacies, who possess a fine-tuned knowledge of the master's palate: which flavor rouses him, which sight delights him, what novelty can prop him up when he is queasy, what he now rejects from sheer fullness, what he is hungry for on a given day. With these people he cannot bear to dine; he considers it a diminishment of his dignity to come to the same table as his own slave. Gods forbid! - how many masters he has among them! [9] I saw Callistus's former master standing at Callistus's door: the man who had hung the sale-notice on him, who had put him up with the throwaway lot of slaves, was shut out while others went in. That slave paid him back - the slave once tossed into the first batch on the block, the batch where the auctioneer warms up his voice: now he in his turn struck the master off his list; now he judged him unworthy of his house. The master sold Callistus; but how much Callistus cost the master! [10] Be willing to remember that this man you call your slave grew from the same seed, has the same sky above him, and draws breath, lives, and dies just as you yourself do. You can as easily see a freeborn man in him as he can see a slave in you. In the disaster under Varus, fortune crushed many men of the most brilliant birth, men beginning the climb to senatorial rank through military service: she made one of them a shepherd, another the keeper of a hut. Now go despise a man whose condition you may pass into even while you are despising it.
[11] I do not want to launch into that vast topic and argue about the treatment of slaves, toward whom we are so arrogant, so cruel, so abusive. But the core of my teaching is this: live with your inferior the way you would want your superior to live with you. Every time it occurs to you how much you are allowed to do to your slave, let it also occur to you that your own master is allowed exactly as much against you. [12] 'But I have no master,' you say. You are still young; perhaps you will. Do you not know at what age Hecuba became a slave, at what age Croesus did, and the mother of Darius, and Plato, and Diogenes? [13] Live with your slave mercifully, even companionably; admit him to your conversation, to your deliberations, to your table.
At this point the whole troop of the pampered will shout me down: 'Nothing could be more degrading, nothing more shameful.' These same men I will catch kissing the hands of other people's slaves. [14] Do you not even see how our ancestors stripped away everything invidious from the master's position and everything insulting from the slave's? They called the master 'father of the household' and the slaves 'members of the household' - a usage that survives to this day in the mime plays. They established a festival day, not as the only day masters ate with their slaves, but as a day on which they always did. They allowed slaves to hold offices within the house, to give judgments there, and they considered the household a miniature commonwealth. [15] 'What then? Shall I bring all my slaves to my table?' No more than all free men. You are wrong if you think I would turn some away as doing dirtier work - that muleteer, say, or that herdsman. I will value them not by their jobs but by their characters. Each man gives himself his character; chance assigns the jobs. Let some dine with you because they deserve it, and some so that they may come to deserve it; for if anything slavish still clings to them from low company, eating with more honorable men will shake it off. [16] There is no reason, my Lucilius, to look for a friend only in the forum and the senate house. If you pay close attention, you will find one at home too. Good material often sits idle for lack of a craftsman: try it, put it to the test. A man buying a horse who inspects not the animal itself but its saddle-cloth and bridle is a fool; even more foolish is the man who values a human being by his clothes or by his station - which is merely a kind of clothing wrapped around us. [17] 'He is a slave.' But perhaps free in soul. 'He is a slave.' Will that count against him? Show me who is not one. One man is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition - all of us to hope, all of us to fear. I will show you an ex-consul enslaved to a little old woman, a rich man enslaved to a servant girl; I will point out young men of the noblest houses who are chattel to pantomime dancers. No slavery is more shameful than the voluntary kind. So there is no reason to let those fastidious people scare you out of showing a cheerful face to your slaves and a superiority without arrogance. Let them respect you rather than fear you.
[18] Someone will now say I am summoning slaves to the freedman's cap and toppling masters from their eminence, because I said 'let them respect the master rather than fear him.' 'Really?' he says. 'Respect him like clients, like morning callers?' The man who talks this way has forgotten that what suffices for a god can hardly be too little for a master. Whoever is respected is also loved; and love cannot be mixed with fear. [19] So I judge that you are doing exactly right in not wanting your slaves to fear you, in correcting them with words: whipping is how we train dumb animals. Not everything that annoys us also harms us; but soft living drives us to fury, so that whatever fails to answer our will calls out our anger. [20] We have put on the temper of kings; for they too, forgetting their own strength and other men's weakness, blaze up and rage as though they had suffered a wrong - though the sheer size of their fortune makes them perfectly safe from any such thing. They know this well enough, but by complaining they hunt for an opening to do harm; they claim they received an injury so that they can inflict one.
[21] I will not keep you longer, for you need no encouragement. Good character has this advantage, among others: it satisfies itself, and it lasts. Badness is fickle; it changes often - not for the better, just into something else. Farewell.

======== Letter 48 ========

[1] That letter you sent me from the road, as long as the road itself — I'll answer it later. I need to go off by myself and think through what advice to give. You, after all, before asking my counsel, spent a long time deciding whether to ask at all; how much longer should I take, when solving a question needs more time than posing one? Especially when what's good for you and what's good for me are two different things. [2] There I go, talking like an Epicurean again. In fact what's good for you IS what's good for me — otherwise I'm no friend, since anything that touches you is my business too. Friendship makes everything between us joint property. Nothing is good luck for one of us alone, nothing bad luck for one alone; we live in common. And nobody can live happily who looks only at himself, who bends everything toward his own advantage. If you want to live for yourself, you must live for another. [3] This fellowship — kept carefully and kept sacred — the one that binds human being to human being and holds that the human race has some law common to all, does the most to nurture that inner fellowship of friendship I was speaking of. A man who shares much with mankind will share everything with a friend.
[4] This, Lucilius, best of men, is what I'd rather have those hair-splitters teach me: what I owe a friend, what I owe a fellow human — not how many senses the word 'friend' carries or how many things 'man' can mean. Look at wisdom and folly heading in opposite directions! Which side do I join? Which way do you order me to march? For one man, every human counts as a friend; for the other, a friend doesn't even count as a human. The one is winning a friend for himself; the other is fitting himself for his friend — and you sit there twisting words and sorting syllables. [5] So apparently, unless I've rigged up the slyest possible trick-questions and cinched a lie onto the truth with a false conclusion, I'll never manage to tell what to pursue from what to flee. It embarrasses me: grown old men, playing games with a matter this serious.
[6] 'Mouse is a syllable; but a mouse gnaws cheese; therefore a syllable gnaws cheese.' Suppose I can't untangle that one — what danger hangs over me for my ignorance? What harm comes of it? No doubt I should worry that one day I'll catch syllables in my mousetrap, or that if I get careless my book will eat the cheese. Unless this chain of reasoning is sharper: 'Mouse is a syllable; but a syllable doesn't gnaw cheese; therefore a mouse doesn't gnaw cheese.' [7] What childish nonsense! Is this why we knit our brows? Is this why we let the beard grow long? Is this what we teach, grim-faced and pale? Do you want to know what philosophy promises the human race? Counsel. One man is being called by death, another is being scorched by poverty, another tormented by wealth — someone else's or his own; this one shudders at bad fortune, that one wants out from under his own success; men make life miserable for one, the gods for another. Why are you assembling these parlor games for me? This is no time for jokes: you've been called in to help the desperate. You promised to bring aid to the shipwrecked, the captive, the sick, the destitute, to those whose heads lie under the lifted axe — where are you wandering off to? What are you doing? The man you're playing games with is afraid: help him — everyone caught in the noose of these quibbles is begging for release. From every side, all of them stretch out their hands to you; lives ruined and about to be ruined implore some help; you are their hope and their strength. They beg you to drag them out of that enormous churning, to hold up the clear light of truth for the scattered and the straying. [9] Say which things nature has made needful and which are excess, how easy the laws she laid down are, how sweet and unobstructed life is for those who follow them, how bitter and tangled for those who trusted opinion more than nature *** if you first teach which part of their burden these subtleties will lift. Which of them removes cravings? Which reins any craving in? If only they were merely useless! They do damage. I'll make this perfectly plain to you whenever you like: a noble nature thrown into these quibbles is chipped away and crippled. [10] I'm ashamed to say what weapons they hand to men about to fight fortune, how they equip them for it. Is this the road to the highest good? Through philosophy's 'if-this-then-unless-that,' through evasions that would be shabby and disgraceful even in men sitting at the praetor's notice-board? When you knowingly lead the man you're questioning into a trap, what are you doing except making it look as if he lost his case on a technicality? But just as the praetor restores such litigants to their rights, philosophy restores these victims. [11] Why do you men walk away from your enormous promises? After the grand talk — that you'd see to it the glint of gold dazzles my eyes no more than the glint of a sword, that with immense steadiness I'd trample both what everyone prays for and what everyone dreads — why do you sink to the schoolmaster's ABCs? What is it you say?
this is the way to the stars
For that is what philosophy promises me: to make me the equal of a god. That's the invitation I accepted; that's what I came for. Keep your word.
[12] So pull back, my Lucilius, as far as you can from these philosophers' quibbles and legal dodges: goodness is suited by what is open and plain. Even if a great stretch of life were left to us, it would have to be budgeted carefully to cover what's necessary. As it is, what madness — to study the superfluous when time is this scarce! Farewell.

======== Letter 49 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. It is a careless, lazy sort of man, my dear Lucilius, who has to be jogged into remembering a friend by some particular place. And yet the longing that lies stored in our minds is sometimes summoned back by familiar surroundings, which do not revive a memory that had died out but stir up one that had merely gone quiet—just as the grief of mourners, even when time has softened it, is renewed by a favorite slave they have lost, or a piece of clothing, or a house. Well, here I am in Campania, and the mere sight of Naples and of your beloved Pompeii has, unbelievably, made my longing for you fresh again. You stand before my eyes, whole. I am on the very point of leaving you: I can see you swallowing back your tears, unable, for all your self-control, to keep your feelings from breaking through.
It seems only just now that I lost you. And really, what is not 'just now,' if you think back on it? It seems only just now that I sat as a boy at the feet of the philosopher Sotion; just now that I began to plead cases in court; just now that I stopped wanting to plead them; just now that I stopped being able to. Time moves with an unimaginable speed, and this is most visible to those who look back. To people intent on the present it slips by unnoticed—so smooth is the passage of its headlong flight. You ask the reason for this? Whatever time has gone by stands in the same place; it is all seen together, it all lies in a single heap; everything falls into the same abyss. And besides, there cannot really be long intervals within a thing that is, in its entirety, brief. What we live is a mere point, and less than a point; and yet nature has mocked even this least of things by giving it the appearance of a longer stretch: out of it she has made one part infancy, another childhood, another adolescence, another a kind of downward slope from youth toward old age, and another old age itself. In so narrow a space, how many steps she has fitted!
It seems only just now that I said goodbye to you—and yet that 'just now' amounts to a considerable share of our lifetime, whose brevity we ought to keep in mind, since it will one day run out. Time never used to seem so swift to me; now its course strikes me as unbelievable, whether because I sense the finish line drawing near, or because I have begun paying attention and counting up my losses.
That is why I am all the more indignant that some people spend the greater part of this time—which cannot even suffice for necessities, however carefully it is guarded—on things that are entirely unnecessary. Cicero says that even if his life were doubled, he would not have time to read the lyric poets: I would place the logicians in the same category—though they are tiresome in a sadder way. The lyric poets play the fool openly; the logicians think they are actually accomplishing something.
Not that I deny these subjects deserve a glance—but only a glance, a greeting from the threshold, so that we are not taken in by mere words and led to imagine that they contain some great, hidden good. Why torment and wear yourself out over a question it is more elegant to dismiss with contempt than to solve? It is only someone at leisure, moving house at his own convenience, who goes around gathering up trifles; when the enemy is pressing from behind and the soldier has been ordered to move out, necessity shakes loose whatever peacetime idleness had collected. I have no time to go chasing after words that teeter between two meanings and testing my own cleverness on them.
'See what peoples are gathering, what walled cities are sharpening iron behind closed gates.'
It is with a stout heart that I must listen to this din of war resounding all around me. I would rightly seem out of my mind if, while old men and women were piling up stones to fortify the walls, while the young men under arms inside the gates were waiting for, or clamoring for, the signal to charge, while enemy spears quivered in the very gates and the ground itself shook with mines and tunnels—if, amid all that, I sat there at my ease posing little puzzles of this sort: 'What you have not lost, you have. But you have not lost horns. Therefore you have horns'—and other such nonsense fashioned on the model of that clever lunacy.
And yet I might just as well seem out of my mind if I spent my energy on questions like these: for I too am under siege right now. In that case, though, the danger threatening me under siege would come from outside, and a wall would separate me from the enemy; but now the deadly things are within me. I have no time for such trifles; I have a vast piece of business on my hands. What am I to do? Death is following me, and life is fleeing.
Teach me something to use against these things. Bring it about that I do not flee death, and that life does not escape me. Encourage me against hardships, against things that cannot be avoided; widen out the narrow confines of my time. Teach me that the good of life does not consist in its length, but in how it is used—and that it can happen, indeed happens very often, that a man who has lived long has lived little. Tell me, as I am about to fall asleep, 'You may never wake again'; tell me, once awake, 'You may never sleep again.' Tell me, as I go out, 'You may never come back'; tell me, as I come back, 'You may never go out again.'
You are wrong if you think it is only at sea that the gap separating life from death is at its narrowest: everywhere the interval is equally thin. Death does not always show itself so close at hand—but it is always that close. Scatter this darkness, and you will more easily hand on to me the teachings for which I stand prepared. We were brought into being by nature as capable of being taught, and she gave us reason imperfect, but capable of being perfected.
Discuss justice with me, and duty, and frugality, and both kinds of modesty—the one that consists in keeping one's hands off another's body, and the one that consists in caring for one's own. If you are unwilling to lead me by roundabout paths, I will more easily arrive where I am headed; for, as the tragic poet says, 'the language of truth is simple,' and so it ought not to be tangled up in complications; nothing suits minds engaged in great undertakings less than that sly cleverness. Farewell.

======== Letter 50 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I received your letter many months after you sent it; so I thought it pointless to ask the man who brought it how you were doing. He would have to have an extraordinarily good memory to remember. And in any case I hope you are now living in such a way that, wherever you are, I will know how you are doing. For what else are you doing but making yourself better day by day, shedding some of your errors, coming to understand that the faults you attribute to circumstances are really your own? Some things, after all, we blame on places and occasions; but those faults will follow us wherever we go.
You know Harpaste, my wife's fool, who has remained in my house as an inherited burden—I myself have the greatest aversion to such freaks; if I ever want to amuse myself with a fool, I need not look far: I laugh at myself. Well, this fool has suddenly lost her sight. I am telling you something unbelievable but true: she does not know she is blind. She keeps asking her attendant to move to another house, saying this one is too dark.
What we laugh at in her case, you may be sure, happens to all of us: no one recognizes that he is greedy, no one that he is grasping. The blind at least look for a guide; we wander without one, and say, 'I am not ambitious, but there is no other way to live in Rome'; 'I am not extravagant, but the city itself demands great expense'; 'It is not my fault that I am short-tempered, that I have not yet settled on a fixed way of life: it's my youth that does it.'
Why do we deceive ourselves? Our trouble is not something outside us: it sits within us, lodged in our very insides, and that is why we come to health with such difficulty—because we do not know we are sick. If we were to begin treatment now, when would we ever break the massive strength of so many diseases? As it is, we do not even look for a doctor—one who would have far less work to do if he were called in while the fault was still fresh; young, untried minds would follow readily enough someone who showed them the right path.
No one finds it hard to be brought back to nature except the one who has departed from it: we are ashamed to learn to have a sound mind. But, good heavens, if it is shameful to look for a teacher in this matter, then we must give up all hope—hope that so great a good could flow into us merely by chance: we must work at it. And, to tell the truth, the work is not even great, provided that, as I said, we begin shaping and correcting our minds before their perversity has hardened.
But even in a mind already hardened I do not despair: there is nothing that persistent effort and intent, careful attention cannot conquer. You can straighten out timber, however warped, back to true; heat unbends curved beams, and things that grew in one shape are reshaped into whatever our use demands. How much more easily does the mind take on a form—pliant as it is, and more yielding than any liquid! For what is the mind but a kind of breath, disposed in a certain way? And you can see that breath is far more tractable than any other material, the thinner it is.
There is nothing in this, my dear Lucilius, that should stop you from having good hopes for us, on the grounds that wickedness already has hold of us, that it has long been in possession of us: no mind ever arrived at goodness before it had first been occupied by badness. We are all preoccupied beforehand; learning the virtues means unlearning the vices.
But we ought to set about correcting ourselves with all the more courage because, once the good has been handed over to us, our possession of it is permanent: virtue is not unlearned. Its opposites cling badly, because they cling to something not their own, and so they can be driven out and expelled; but what comes into its own proper place settles there for good. Virtue is in accordance with nature; vices are its enemies, hostile to it.
But just as virtues, once received, cannot leave, and are easy to guard, so the beginning of the journey toward them is hard, because it is characteristic of a weak and sickly mind to be afraid of what it has not yet tried; so the mind has to be forced to make a start. After that, the medicine is not bitter; it gives pleasure from the very first, even as it heals. With other remedies, the pleasure comes only after health is restored; philosophy alone is both healing and sweet at once. Farewell.

======== Letter 51 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Each of us does what he can, my dear Lucilius: over there you have Etna, that most celebrated of Sicilian mountains—though why Messala, or Valgius (I have read the claim in both) called it unique, I cannot discover, since a great many places belch out fire, not only high ones, which happens more often, presumably because fire is naturally carried upward, but low-lying ones as well. As for me, I make do, as best I can, with Baiae, which I left the day after I arrived—a place to be avoided, even though it has certain natural charms, precisely because luxury has claimed it as a place to be celebrated in its own honor.
'What, then? Must every place be an object of hatred?' Not at all; but just as one garment suits a wise and upright man better than another—not that he hates any color, but he judges some colors ill-suited to a man who professes plain living—so too there are regions that a wise man, or one striving toward wisdom, should avoid as unsuited to good character.
And so, when thinking about a retreat, he will never choose Canopus, even though Canopus forbids no one to live a sober life—nor Baiae either: these places have begun to serve as lodging-houses for vice. At Baiae, luxury allows itself the greatest license; there, as though some special permission were owed to the place, people let themselves go still further. We ought to choose a place that is wholesome not only for the body but for our character; just as I would not want to live among torturers, so I would not want to live among taverns either. What need is there to watch drunks wandering the shore, boating parties in full riot, lakes echoing with the singing of musicians, and every other thing that luxury, as though released from all law, not only commits but flaunts openly?
We ought to make it our business to flee as far as possible from whatever incites us to vice; the mind needs to be toughened and dragged well away from the blandishments of pleasure. It was a single winter of soft living that undid Hannibal, and the comforts of Campania that sapped the strength of that man untamed by snow and the Alps: he conquered by arms, and was conquered by vices.
We too must serve as soldiers, and in a kind of campaign that never allows rest, never allows a furlough: it is above all our pleasures that must be fought down and defeated, since, as you see, they have dragged off toward themselves even fierce and savage natures. If a man reckons up how great a task he has taken on, he will know that nothing in it can be done delicately or softly. What business do I have with these steaming hot pools? What business with sweating-rooms, where the body is shut in to be drained by dry heat? Let all sweating come only from hard work.
If we did what Hannibal did—break off the course of our affairs, abandon the campaign, and devote ourselves to pampering the body—everyone would rightly condemn such untimely idleness, dangerous even to a conqueror, let alone to one still fighting to conquer. We have even less license than those who followed the Carthaginian standards: greater danger remains for those who retreat, and greater effort even for those who persevere.
Fortune is waging war on me: I will not do what she orders; I will not accept the yoke—no, what takes still greater courage, I shake it off. My mind must not be softened: if I give way to pleasure, I must also give way to pain, give way to hardship, give way to poverty; ambition and anger will claim the same right over me; torn among so many passions, I will be pulled apart, rather than merely pulled.
Freedom is the goal set before me; it is for this reward that I labor. You ask what freedom is? To be slave to no thing, to no necessity, to no chance happenings; to bring fortune down to my own level. On the day I recognize that fortune has more power than I do, she will have no power at all. Shall I put up with her, when death lies ready to my hand?
For a mind intent on such thoughts, it is fitting to choose serious, sacred places; excessive pleasantness of surroundings softens the mind, and there is no doubt a region can do something toward corrupting one's vigor. Pack-animals can endure any road, so long as their hooves have been hardened on rough ground; fattened on a soft, marshy pasture, they quickly wear away. A soldier, too, comes out stronger from rugged country; the city-bred recruit, the house-slave soldier, is sluggish. Hands that are transferred from the plow to weapons refuse no labor; it is the pampered, glistening dandy who gives out at the very first cloud of dust.
A stricter discipline of place strengthens character and makes it fit for great undertakings. Scipio spent his exile at Liternum with more honor than he would have at Baiae; a downfall of that kind should not be given so soft a setting. Even those men to whom fortune first transferred the public wealth of the Roman people—Gaius Marius, Gnaeus Pompeius, and Caesar—did build villas in the region of Baiae, but they set them on the very tops of the mountain ridges. This seemed more soldierly somehow—to survey the land spread out below from a height, far and wide. Look at the sites they chose, the places and the kind of buildings they raised there: you will know they are not villas, but forts.
Do you suppose Marcus Cato could ever have lived in such a place, counting up the adulteresses sailing past, the many kinds of skiffs painted in various colors, the roses floating over the whole lake, listening to singers howling their obscenities through the night? Would he not have preferred to stay within the rampart he himself had thrown up with his own hand for a single night's camp? Surely any real man would rather have his sleep broken by the trumpet than by an orchestra.
But I have quarreled with Baiae long enough—one can never quarrel long enough with vices, which, I beg you, Lucilius, pursue without limit, without end; for they too have neither end nor limit. Throw away whatever tears at your heart; if there were no other way to root such things out, the heart itself would have to be torn out along with them. Above all, drive out pleasures, and hold them in the deepest hatred: like the bandits the Egyptians call 'philetai,' they embrace us for this very purpose—to strangle us. Farewell.

======== Letter 52 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. What is this, Lucilius, that drags us one way while we're aiming at another, and pushes us toward the very thing we want to escape? What is it that wrestles with our mind and won't let us want any one thing once and for all? We toss between different resolutions; nothing we want is free, nothing complete, nothing lasting. "It's foolishness," you say, "when nothing is settled, when nothing pleases for long." But how, or when, will we tear ourselves free of it? No one is strong enough alone to climb out; someone has to reach out a hand, someone has to lead the way. Epicurus says that some people have reached the truth with no one's help, cutting their own road; these he praises most, the ones whose drive came from within, who pushed themselves forward. Others, he says, need outside help—they won't set out unless someone goes first, but they'll follow well. He says Metrodorus was of this kind: a fine achievement too, though a second-rate sort of talent. We don't belong to that first class; we're doing well if we're admitted to the second. Don't even look down on the man who can only be saved by someone else's help—wanting to be rescued is itself a great deal. Beyond these you'll find yet another kind of person, not to be despised either: those who can be forced and driven onto the right path, who need not just a guide but a helper, and, so to speak, an enforcer. This is the third shade. If you want an example of this type too, Epicurus says Hermarchus was such a man. And so he congratulates one more, but admires the other more; for although both reached the same goal, greater praise goes to achieving the same thing on harder ground. Suppose two buildings have been put up, both equal, equally tall and magnificent. One was built on clear, level ground, and the work rose straight up from there; the other's foundations wore themselves out, sunk into soft, shifting soil, and a great deal of labor was spent just reaching bedrock—to anyone looking on, whatever the first man built stands plain to see, while the greater and harder part of the other man's work lies hidden. Some natures are easy, quick, unencumbered; others must be, as they say, worked by hand, tied up in their own foundations. So I'd call the first man luckier, since he had no trouble with himself, but I'd say the second has earned more credit—he beat down the meanness of his own nature and did not merely arrive at wisdom, but dragged himself out to it.
You can be sure this rough, laborious nature is the one given to us: we walk through obstacles. So let's fight, and call on the help of others. "Whom," you ask, "shall I call on? This man or that one?" No—turn even to those who came before us, who have time to spare; those who can help us are not only the living but the dead. Of the living, though, let's choose not the ones who rattle off grand words at top speed and turn over commonplaces and hold forth to their own little circle, but those who teach by their life, who, once they've said what should be done, prove it by doing it, who teach what should be avoided and are never caught doing the very thing they said to flee. Choose as your helper the one you admire more when you've seen him than when you've merely heard him. Nor would I forbid you to listen also to those whose habit is to admit a crowd and lecture to it, provided they come forward into the throng with this aim: to become better themselves and to make others better, and provided they do it for no purpose of self-promotion. For what is more shameful than philosophy hunting for applause? Does a sick man praise the surgeon while he's cutting? Be quiet, be attentive, and submit yourselves to the treatment; even if you cry out, I'll listen to it only as I would to a groan wrung from you by the touch on your own diseased spot. Do you want to show that you're paying attention, that you're moved by the greatness of what's said? By all means, let that be allowed—so that you may judge and cast your vote for the better view, why should I not permit that? Among Pythagoras's students there were five years of required silence: do you really suppose that they were allowed to speak and to praise right away?
But how mad is the man whom the shouts of the ignorant send home cheerful from the lecture hall! Why be glad that you've been praised by people you yourself cannot praise? Fabianus used to lecture to the public, but he was heard with restraint; every so often a great roar of applause broke out, but it was one called forth by the greatness of the matter, not the sound of a speech gliding along smoothly and without a hitch. Let there be some difference between the roar of a theater and that of a lecture hall; there's a kind of refinement even in praising. If you watch closely, everything is a sign of something, and you can grasp the evidence of a person's character even from the smallest things: an indecent man is given away by his walk, by a wave of the hand, sometimes by a single reply, by a finger brought up to the head, by the way his eyes shift; a wicked man is shown by his laugh, a madman by his face and bearing. These traits come out into the open through their telltale marks: you'll know what kind of person someone is if you watch how he praises and how he is praised. When an audience reaches out its hands to a philosopher from this side and that, and a crowd of admirers gathers right over his head—that man is not being praised now, if you understand it rightly, he's being shouted down. Let those cries be left to the arts whose whole aim is to please a crowd; let philosophy be revered. It will sometimes have to be allowed to young men to follow the impulse of their spirit, but only when they do it from genuine impulse, when they simply cannot command silence for themselves; praise of that kind brings something exhortative even to the listeners themselves, and spurs on the spirits of the young. But let them be stirred toward the substance, not toward polished phrases; otherwise eloquence does them harm, if it creates in them a hunger not for the subject but for itself.
I'll put this off for now; it calls for its own long treatment—how one ought to lecture to a crowd, what one may permit oneself before a crowd, and what the crowd before oneself. There's no doubt philosophy has taken a loss since she was put on the street corner; but she can still be shown in her inner sanctuary, provided she's found not a peddler but a priestess. Farewell.

======== Letter 53 ========

[1] What can't I be talked into, when I let myself be talked into a boat? I cast off on a calm sea. True, the sky was heavy with dirty clouds — the kind that usually break into rain or wind — but I figured the few miles from your Parthenope to Puteoli could be stolen even under a doubtful, lowering sky. So, to get across faster, I steered straight out through open water toward Nesis, meaning to cut off all the bays. [2] By the time going forward and going back cost me exactly the same, the first thing to fail was that smoothness which had seduced me. It wasn't a storm yet, but the sea was already heaving, and the swells came quicker and quicker. I began pleading with the pilot to land me on any stretch of beach. He answered that the coast was rough and harborless, and that in a storm there was nothing he feared so much as land. [3] But I was suffering too badly for danger to even register: I was in the grip of that sluggish seasickness that offers no relief, the kind that stirs the bile without bringing it up. So I leaned on the pilot and forced him, willing or not, to make for shore. As soon as we got close, I didn't wait for anything out of Vergil's instructions —
the anchor is thrown from the prow —
no: remembering my old training as a veteran devotee of cold water, I dropped myself into the sea, woolen cloak and all, the way a proper cold-plunger should. [4] Imagine what I went through crawling out over the rocks, hunting for a path, making one. I understood that sailors have good reason to fear the land. What I endured is past believing, given that I couldn't endure myself. Let me tell you: Ulysses wasn't born to such an angry sea that he had to shipwreck everywhere — he was a seasick man. And I too, wherever I have to go by ship, will get there in the twentieth year.
[5] Once I'd settled my stomach — which, as you know, doesn't leave its seasickness behind with the sea — and refreshed my body with a rubdown, I began to reflect on how thoroughly we forget our failings, even the bodily ones that keep reminding us of themselves, let alone those that hide more deeply the bigger they are. [6] A slight chill can fool a man; but when it grows and a real fever blazes up, it forces a confession even out of the tough and long-suffering. Our feet ache, our joints feel little stabs: we still play it down, claiming we twisted an ankle or overdid it in some exercise. While the disease is uncertain and just beginning, we shop for a name for it; but once it starts swelling the ankles and has bent both feet out of shape, there's no choice but to admit it's gout.
[7] With the diseases of the mind, the opposite happens: the worse off a man is, the less he feels it. Don't be surprised, dearest Lucilius. A light sleeper has dream-images in his rest and sometimes, while sleeping, knows that he's asleep; but heavy stupor snuffs out even the dreams and sinks the mind too deep for any awareness of itself. [8] Why does no one confess his vices? Because he is still inside them. Telling your dream is for the man who's awake, and to confess your vices shows the patient is mending. Let us wake up, then, so that we can call out our own errors. Only philosophy will rouse us; only she will shake off the heavy sleep. Devote yourself to her entirely. You are worthy of her, she of you: go into each other's arms. Refuse yourself to everything else — bravely, openly. Philosophy is not something to do on sufferance. [9] If you were sick, you'd have suspended the management of your estate; your court business would have dropped away; you'd think no client important enough to go down to the forum for during a remission. You'd work with your whole mind at one thing: getting free of the disease as fast as possible. Well then — won't you do the same now? Drop every hindrance and clear time for a sound mind: no one arrives at it while busy. Philosophy exercises her own sovereignty; she grants time, she doesn't accept it. She's not a sideline; she's the main business, she's the mistress, she is present and she commands. [10] When a certain city offered Alexander part of its lands and half of everything it owned, he said: 'I came to Asia intending not to take what you might give, but to let you keep what I might leave.' Philosophy says the same to all our affairs: 'I am not going to accept the time you have left over; you shall have the time I refuse.' [11] Give her your mind entire; keep close beside her; wait on her: a vast gap will open between you and everyone else. You will run far ahead of all mortals, and the gods will not run far ahead of you. You ask what the difference between you and them will be? They will last longer. But by god, it takes a great artist to shut the whole into a small space. To the wise man his own lifetime lies as open as all of time does to a god. And there is one point where the wise man outstrips a god: the god is free of fear by nature's gift, the wise man by his own. [12] What a thing that is — to have the weakness of a man and the security of a god. The power of philosophy to blunt every blow of chance is beyond belief. No weapon lodges in her body; she is fortified, solid. Some attacks she wears out, dodging them like light missiles with a slack fold of her robe; others she shatters and hurls back at whoever threw them. Farewell.

======== Letter 54 ========

[1] Bad health had given me a long furlough; then, without warning, it jumped me. 'What kind?' you ask. A perfectly fair question — there isn't a kind I haven't met. But there's one disease I've practically been assigned to. Why should I call it by its Greek name? I don't know; 'gasping' describes it well enough. The attack is very short, like a squall; it's over within about an hour — after all, who can spend long breathing his last? [2] Every discomfort and danger the body has to offer has passed through me, and none seems worse than this. Naturally: anything else is being sick; this is heaving out your life. That's why the doctors call it 'a rehearsal for death' — for one day that breath will accomplish what it has attempted so often. Do you think I'm writing this in high spirits because I got away? [3] If I take pleasure in this ending of the attack as if it were good health, I'm being as ridiculous as a man who thinks he's won his case because he got the hearing postponed.
As for me, even in mid-suffocation I never stopped resting in cheerful, brave thoughts. [4] 'What is this?' I said. 'Death keeps testing me — let it. I tested death a long time ago.' 'When?' you ask. Before I was born. Death is not existing. I already know what that's like: what follows me will be what preceded me. If there is any torment in this condition, then there must have been torment before we came out into the light — and we felt no distress then at all. [5] Tell me: wouldn't you call it utter stupidity to think a lamp is worse off after it's put out than before it was lit? We too are put out and lit. In the time between, we suffer some things; on either side of it lies deep peace. Here is our mistake, my Lucilius, if I'm not wrong: we think death comes after, when in fact it came before and will come after. Whatever was before us is death. What difference does it make whether you never begin or you cease, when the result of both is the same — not existing?
[6] With these encouragements and others like them — silent ones, of course; there was no room for words — I kept talking to myself. Then, gradually, that gasping, which had already turned into panting, came at longer intervals and slowed down. But it has lingered; even now, though the attack has stopped, my breathing doesn't flow naturally. I feel it catch and hesitate. Let it do as it likes, so long as the sighing doesn't come from my soul. [7] Take this promise about me: I won't tremble at the end. I'm already prepared; I make no plans for a whole day. Praise and imitate the man who isn't reluctant to die even while it's a pleasure to live. What virtue is there in leaving when you're being thrown out? Yet there's virtue here too: I am being thrown out, yes — but as though I were walking out. And that is why the wise man is never thrown out: to be thrown out is to be driven from a place you leave unwillingly. The wise man does nothing unwillingly. He escapes necessity, because he wills what it is going to force. Farewell.

======== Letter 55 ========

[1] I've just come back from a ride in my litter, as worn out as if I'd walked the whole distance instead of sitting it. Being carried for a long stretch is work too — and maybe harder work, because it goes against nature, which gave us feet so we could do our own walking and eyes so we could do our own seeing. Soft living has sentenced us to feebleness: what we long refused to do, we have finally become unable to do. [2] Still, I needed to shake my body up, so that if bile had settled in my throat the jolting would break it loose, or if my breathing had thickened for some reason, the bouncing would thin it out — and I could feel it doing me good. So I kept riding longer than planned, tempted by the shoreline itself, which curves between Cumae and the villa of Servilius Vatia and is hemmed in like a narrow lane, sea on one side, lagoon on the other. It was packed firm from a recent storm; as you know, frequent, driven surf levels the sand, while a longer calm loosens it, once the moisture that binds the grains has drained away.
[3] Out of old habit I started looking around to see whether the place offered me anything I could use, and my eyes went to the villa that once belonged to Vatia. There that rich ex-praetor grew old, famous for nothing except his leisure, and on that one account he was counted a lucky man. Every time someone was sunk by friendship with Asinius Gallus, or by Sejanus's hatred — and later by his affection, since it was as dangerous to have loved him as to have offended him — people would cry out, 'Vatia, you're the only one who knows how to live!' [4] What he knew was how to hide, not how to live; and it matters enormously whether your life is at leisure or merely limp. While Vatia was alive I never passed that villa without saying, 'Here lies Vatia.' But philosophy, my dear Lucilius, is something so sacred and so venerable that even a counterfeit of it wins approval. The crowd assumes a man in retirement is withdrawn, untroubled, content with what he has, living for himself — when none of those things can belong to anyone but the wise man. Only the wise man understands what living for oneself is, because he, first of all, understands what living is. [5] The man who runs from affairs and from people, driven into exile by the failure of his own desires, who couldn't bear to watch others do better, who has gone to ground in fear like some skittish, sluggish animal — that man is not living for himself but, most shameful of all, for his belly, his sleep, and his lust. Living for no one does not automatically mean living for yourself. Yet steadiness and sticking to one's course count for so much that even stubborn idleness carries a certain authority.
[6] About the villa itself I can tell you nothing for certain; I know only its front and the parts on display, the ones it shows even to passers-by. There are two grottoes, huge undertakings, each as roomy as a spacious entrance hall, dug by hand: one never admits the sun, the other holds it until it sets. A stream, fed both from the sea and from Lake Acheron, runs like a channel through the middle of a plane-tree grove — enough to stock with fish even if you drew on it constantly. But it gets spared when the sea is open; only when a storm gives the fishermen a holiday does the hand reach for what's ready and waiting. [7] The villa's greatest convenience, though, is this: it has Baiae just over the wall. It escapes Baiae's nuisances while enjoying its pleasures. These merits I know at first hand. I believe it's a villa for the whole year, too: it meets the west wind head-on and intercepts it so completely that Baiae never gets it. Vatia doesn't seem to have chosen badly when he picked this spot to deposit a leisure already lazy and elderly.
[8] But place contributes little to peace of mind. It is the mind that makes everything acceptable to itself. I have seen gloomy people in a cheerful, lovely villa; I have seen people in the depths of solitude who might as well have been swamped with business. So there's no reason to think yourself poorly settled just because you're not in Campania. And anyway, why aren't you? Send your thoughts all the way here. [9] You may keep company with absent friends — as often as you like, for as long as you like. In fact we enjoy this pleasure, the greatest there is, more while we're apart. Presence makes us spoiled: because we sometimes talk, walk, and sit together, once we're separated we give no thought at all to those we've just seen. [10] And here's another reason to bear absence calmly: everyone is largely absent even from the people right beside him. Count up, first, the nights spent apart, then the different engagements each one has, then private study, trips out to the countryside — and you'll see that travel doesn't steal much from us. [11] A friend must be possessed in the mind; and the mind is never absent — it sees whomever it wants, every day. So study with me, dine with me, walk with me. We would be living in a tight cell indeed if anything were closed to thought. I see you, my dear Lucilius; at this very moment I hear you. So fully are you here beside me that I begin to doubt whether letters are the right vehicle at all — perhaps I should be sending you short notes instead. Farewell.

======== Letter 56 ========

[1] Damn me if silence is really as necessary as it seems for a man shut away with his studies. Look: a jumble of noise surrounds me on every side — I live right over a bathhouse. Now picture every variety of sound that can make ears hate themselves. When the stronger types are working out, pumping hands weighted with lead, when they're straining or pretending to strain, I hear the grunting; every time they release their held breath, I hear the hissing and the raspiest gasping. When I get someone lazy, content with the cheap common rubdown, I hear the smack of a hand slapping shoulders, changing pitch according to whether it lands flat or cupped. And if a ball-player turns up and starts calling the score out loud, it's all over. [2] Now add the brawler, and the thief caught in the act, and the man who loves the sound of his own voice in the bath; add the divers hitting the pool, each landing with a huge report of driven water. Besides all these — whose voices are at least natural, if nothing else — think of the hair-plucker, forcing out his thin, screechy cry again and again to advertise himself, never quiet except when he's plucking armpits and making someone else do the yelling for him. Then the drink-seller's assorted shouts, and the sausage-man and the pastry-man and all the food-stall hawkers crying their wares, each with his own trademark singsong.
[3] 'You must be made of iron,' you say, 'or stone deaf, if your mind holds steady amid so many different, clashing noises, when a constant stream of morning callers is driving our friend Chrysippus to the grave.' But honestly, I care no more about that racket than about waves or falling water — even though I hear one nation moved its entire city for this single reason: it could not endure the crash of the Nile's cataract. [4] A voice seems to me more distracting than mere noise, because a voice tugs at the attention, while noise only fills and pounds the ears. Among the sounds that clatter around me without distracting me I count passing carriages, the carpenter in my building, a sawyer next door, and the fellow near the Meta Sudans testing his little trumpets and pipes — not playing, just blasting. [5] Even now, an intermittent noise bothers me more than a continuous one. But by this point I've toughened myself so far against all of it that I could even listen to a rowing-master setting the stroke for oarsmen in the harshest voice imaginable. I force my mind to attend to itself and not be dragged off toward externals. Let everything outside rattle, so long as there's no uproar inside — so long as desire and fear aren't brawling with each other, so long as greed and self-indulgence aren't at odds, one harassing the other. What good is silence over a whole district if your passions are roaring?
[6] All things lay settled in the night's calm rest.
Wrong. There is no calm rest except the rest reason has settled. Night puts our distress on display; it doesn't remove it — it just trades one set of worries for another. Even the dreams of sleepers are as stormy as their days. The only true tranquility is the one in which a sound mind unfolds itself. [7] Look at the man for whom sleep must be procured by hushing his vast house: so that no sound will disturb his ears, his whole herd of slaves has fallen silent, and whoever approaches him walks on tiptoe. Naturally he tosses this way and that, chasing a light sleep between his miseries, and complains he heard things he never heard. [8] What do you think is the cause? His mind is making the noise. That is what must be quieted; that is where the mutiny needs putting down. Don't assume the mind is at peace just because the body lies still — sometimes stillness itself is restless. That's why we should rouse ourselves to action and keep busy with the practice of good pursuits whenever this idleness, unable to stand itself, makes us miserable. [9] Great generals, when they see the troops turning insubordinate, break them with hard labor and keep them occupied with expeditions: men kept busy have no time for mischief, and nothing is more certain than that the vices of leisure are worked off by work. Often we appear to have withdrawn out of weariness with public life and regret at an unrewarding, thankless post; yet in that hiding place into which fear and fatigue threw us, ambition sometimes flares up again. It never quit because it was cut out at the root — it was just tired, or sulking because things wouldn't go its way. [10] I say the same of self-indulgence, which seems at times to have retreated and then starts pestering the very people who have professed plain living: right in the middle of their frugality it goes after pleasures it never renounced but only left behind — and all the more fiercely for doing it in secret. All vices are milder out in the open; even diseases turn toward healing when they break out of hiding and show their full strength. So with greed, ambition, and the other sicknesses of the human mind: know that they are at their deadliest when they lie low behind a mask of health. [11] We look like men at leisure, and we are not. For if we genuinely are — if we've sounded the retreat, if we've learned to despise what merely glitters — then, as I was saying a moment ago, nothing will pull us away; no chorus of men or of birds will break in on thoughts that are good, and by now solid and settled. [12] A character that jumps at a voice and at random happenings is a flimsy one that hasn't yet drawn itself inward. It carries some anxiety inside, some ingrained flinch of fear, and that is what makes it jittery — as our Virgil puts it:
and I, whom until now no hurled spears could shake, nor Greeks massed in a hostile column, now every breeze terrifies, every sound startles me — on edge, fearing alike for my companion and my burden.
[13] The first man is the wise one, frightened neither by whirring spears, nor by the clashing weapons of a packed column, nor by the crash of a city under assault. The second is the untrained man: he fears for his possessions and panics at every rattle; a single voice of any kind, taken for a mob's roar, flattens him; the slightest movements stop his heart. His baggage is what makes him a coward. [14] Pick any of these so-called lucky men you like, hauling much and carrying much, and you'll see him 'fearing for his companion and his burden.' Know that you have arrived at composure, then, when no shout reaches you, when no voice can shake you out of yourself — not by coaxing, not by threatening, not by swirling around you with empty, meaningless noise. [15] 'What then? Isn't it sometimes simpler just to get away from the din?' Granted — and that's why I'm moving out of this place. I wanted to test and train myself. Why go on being racked, when even against the Sirens Ulysses hit on so simple a cure for his crew? Farewell.

======== Letter 57 ========

When I had to travel back from Baiae to Naples, I readily convinced myself there was a storm at sea, so as not to try a boat again; and the whole road was so muddy that I might as well be said to have sailed after all. That day I had to endure the full fate of an athlete: from the oil we went straight into the dust, in the Naples tunnel. Nothing is longer than that prison, nothing dimmer than those torches, which serve us not to see through the darkness but to see the darkness itself. But even if the place had light, the dust would take it away, and dust is a heavy, annoying thing even in the open air; what must it be there, where it swirls back on itself and, shut in with no vent at all, falls back on the very people who stirred it up? We suffered two opposite discomforts at once: on the same road, on the same day, we struggled with both mud and dust.
Still, that darkness gave me something to think about. I felt a certain jolt of the mind, and a change of mood without fear, brought on by the strangeness and ugliness of an unfamiliar experience hitting me all at once. I'm not talking about myself now with you - I'm a long way from being even a tolerable man, let alone a perfect one - but about the man over whom fortune has lost all its rights: even his mind will be struck by this, his color will change. Some things, my dear Lucilius, no virtue can escape; nature reminds even virtue of its own mortality. And so it will draw the face into gloom at sad things, and shudder at sudden ones, and grow dizzy if it looks down a vast height while standing on its very edge: this is not fear, but a natural reaction that reason cannot conquer. And so some men, brave and perfectly ready to shed their own blood, cannot bear to watch someone else's; some grow faint and lose their nerve at the handling and sight of a fresh wound, or of an old, festering one; others take a sword more easily than they can look at one. So I felt, as I said, not exactly turmoil, but a change of state: and the moment I caught sight of light restored, my old good spirits came back, unthought and uncommanded. Then I began asking myself how foolishly we fear some things more and others less, when all of them end the same way. What difference does it make whether a watchtower falls on someone, or a mountain? You'll find none. And yet there will be people who fear this collapse more than that one, though both are equally deadly - so true is it that fear looks not to the effect, but to what causes it.
Now do you think I'm talking about the Stoics, who hold that a man's soul, crushed under a great weight, cannot go on existing but is scattered at once, because it had no free way out? I am not making that argument: those who say this seem to me to be mistaken. Just as a flame cannot be smothered - for it slips away on every side that presses it - just as air is not hurt by a blow or a stroke, nor even split by it, but flows back around whatever it has yielded to, so the mind, which is made of the finest substance, cannot be caught or crushed to death inside the body, but by virtue of its very fineness bursts out through the very things that press upon it. Just as lightning, even when it strikes and flashes over the widest area, has its way back out through the tiniest opening, so the mind, which is finer even than fire, has an escape route through the whole body. And so the question to ask about it is whether it can be immortal. But hold this much as certain: if it survives the body, it can in no way be crushed out of existence, since no immortality comes with an exception clause, and nothing eternal can be harmed. Farewell.

======== Letter 58 ========

I have never realized how poor - no, how destitute - our vocabulary is as clearly as I did today. A thousand things came up, when we happened to be talking about Plato, that wanted names and had none, and some words, though we once had them, we have let go out of fastidiousness. But who can afford fastidiousness in the midst of poverty? What the Greeks call "oestrus," which drives cattle mad and scatters them across whole forests, our people used to call "asilus." You can believe this on Virgil's authority:
Near the grove of the Silarus and green Alburnus, thick with holm oaks, there flies a swarm of insects - the Romans name it asilus, the Greeks have turned it into "oestrus" - harsh, its buzzing bitter, and at its sound whole herds scatter in terror through the woods.
I think it's clear that word has died out. And not to keep you waiting too long, some simple words were once in use, such as "to fight it out between themselves with the sword," cernere ferro inter se. Virgil will confirm this for you too:
Mighty men, born in different parts of the world, met and fought it out, cernere, with the sword.
What we now say as decernere: the plain, simple use of that verb has been lost. The ancients used to say si iusso, that is, "if I shall have ordered," for iussero. I don't want you to take my word alone for this, but again from Virgil:
the rest, wherever I shall order, iusso, let the band bring arms with me.
I'm not going to all this trouble now to show you how much time I've wasted with a grammar teacher, but so you'll understand from it how much ground has been lost to us in words that Ennius and Accius once used - when even in Virgil, who is combed over every day, some things have slipped away from us. "What's the point," you ask, "of all this preamble? Where is it heading?" I won't hide it from you: I want, if it can be done, to say "essentia" to your sympathetic ear - and if not that, I'll say it to an unsympathetic one too. I have Cicero as the authority for this word, a wealthy one, I think; if you want someone more recent, there's Fabianus, eloquent and elegant, his style polished even by our fastidious standards. But what else can be done, my dear Lucilius? How else will we say "ousia," that necessary thing, the underlying nature that contains the foundation of everything? So I ask you to let me use this word. Even so, I'll take care to exercise the right you've granted as sparingly as possible; perhaps I'll be content just to have permission. But what good will your indulgence do me, when look - there's something I simply cannot express in Latin at all, and it's on that very account that I've been abusing our language? You'll condemn Roman poverty even more once you learn there's a single syllable I can't translate. You ask what it is? "To on." You'll think me a dull sort of mind: laid right out in the open, surely it can be rendered "that which is." But I see there's a great difference: I'm forced to put a whole phrase in place of a single word. But if that's how it must be, I'll set down "that which is."
Our learned friend was saying today that Plato speaks of this in six ways. I'll set them all out for you, once I've first pointed out that there is something called a genus, and something called a species. Now, the first thing we're looking for is that genus from which all the other species hang suspended, from which every division is born, and which comprehends the whole of things. And we'll find it if we start reading particular things backward; that way we'll be led back to the first one. Man is a species, as Aristotle says; horse is a species; dog is a species. So we must look for some common bond among all of these, something that embraces them and holds them under itself. What is this? Animal. So animal has become the genus of all these I've just mentioned - man, horse, dog. But some things have a soul and are not animals; for it's generally agreed that even trees and shrubs have a kind of life in them, and so we say of them too that they live and die. So living things will hold a higher place, since both animals and plants fall under this form. But some things lack life altogether, like stones; so there will be something still prior to living things, namely, body. This I will divide by saying that all bodies are either living or lifeless. And even now there's something higher than body; for we say that some things are corporeal, some incorporeal. What, then, will be the thing from which these are derived? That thing to which we just now gave a rather improper name, "that which is." It will be cut into species like this: we say that "that which is" is either corporeal or incorporeal. This, then, is the first and most ancient genus, and, so to speak, the generic one; the rest are genera too, but subordinate ones. Take man, for instance, as a genus: it contains within it the species of nations - Greeks, Romans, Parthians; of colors - white, black, yellow; it contains individuals - Cato, Cicero, Lucretius. So insofar as it contains many things, it falls under "genus"; insofar as it stands under something else, it falls under "species." That generic genus, "that which is," has nothing above it; it is the beginning of things; everything is under it. The Stoics want to set above even this yet another, more principal genus; I'll speak of that presently, once I've shown that the genus I've been discussing deserves to be set first, since it holds room for absolutely everything. I divide "that which is" into these species: corporeal or incorporeal, nothing else. How do I divide body? I say: either living or lifeless. Again, how do I divide living things? I say: some have a mind, some have only life - or rather, put it this way: some have impulse, they move about, they cross from place to place, while some are rooted fast in the soil and are nourished and grow that way. Again, into what species do I cut animals? Either they are mortal or immortal. Some Stoics think this first genus should be called "something" (quid); I'll set out why they think so. "In the nature of things," they say, "some things exist, some do not exist, and the nature of things embraces even those that do not exist, things that occur to the mind, like centaurs, giants, and whatever else, shaped by a false notion, has come to take on some image, even though it has no real substance."
Now I return to what I promised you: how Plato divides everything that exists into six kinds. First there is that "that which is," grasped by neither sight nor touch nor any sense at all: it is an object of thought. What exists generically, like man in general, does not come before the eyes; but the specific form does come before them, as Cicero and Cato do. Animal is not seen: it is thought. But its species is seen - horse, and dog. Second among the things that exist, Plato places what stands out and surpasses everything else; this, he says, exists by way of pre-eminence. "Poet" is used as a common term - it's the name for everyone who writes verse - but among the Greeks it has already narrowed down to mark out one man alone: when you hear "the Poet," you understand Homer. What, then, is this pre-eminent thing? God, of course, greater and more powerful than all. The third kind is that of the things that properly exist; these are innumerable, but placed beyond our sight. You ask what they are? This is Plato's own particular furniture: he calls them "Ideas," from which everything we see comes into being, and to which everything is shaped. These are immortal, unchangeable, inviolable. Listen to what an Idea is, that is, what Plato thinks it to be: "an Idea is the eternal model of the things that come to be by nature." I'll add an explanation to the definition, to make the thing clearer to you. Suppose I want to make your portrait. I have you as the model for the picture, from which my mind takes a certain form to impose on its own work; so that face which teaches and instructs me, from which the imitation is drawn, is the Idea. Nature, then, has countless such models of things - of men, of fish, of trees - to which whatever is to be made by her is matched. The fourth place will belong to "eidos." You need to pay attention to what this eidos is, and blame Plato, not me, for the difficulty of the subject; there's no subtlety without some difficulty. A little earlier I used the image of the painter. When he wanted to render Virgil in colors, he kept his eyes on Virgil himself. The Idea was Virgil's face, the model of the work to come; what the artist draws from this and imposes on his own work is the eidos. You ask what the difference is? One is the model, the other is the form taken from the model and imposed on the work; the artist imitates the one, and makes the other. A statue has a certain look: that is the eidos. The model itself, which the craftsman looked at while shaping the statue, has a certain look too: that is the Idea. If you still want another distinction, the eidos is in the work, the Idea is outside the work - and not just outside the work, but before the work. The fifth kind is that of the things that exist in the common sense; these are the things that begin to concern us; here belong all things - men, cattle, objects. The sixth kind is that of the things that, so to speak, exist - like empty space, like time.
Whatever we see or touch, Plato does not count among the things he thinks truly exist; for they are in flux, in constant loss and constant addition. None of us is the same in old age as he was in youth; none of us is the same in the morning as he was the day before. Our bodies are swept along like rivers. Whatever you see runs on together with time; nothing of what we see stays in place; even I myself, while I speak of these things changing, have already changed. This is what Heraclitus means: "we step into the same river twice, and we do not." The river keeps the same name, but the water has already flowed past. This is more obvious in a stream than in a man; but we too are swept along by no less swift a current, and so I marvel at our madness in loving so fleeting a thing as the body so intensely, and fearing that we might one day die, when every single moment is the death of the state we were in a moment before. Will you please stop being afraid that something will happen once, when it happens every single day! I've been speaking of man, a fluid, perishable matter, exposed to every cause of harm; but the world too, an eternal and unconquerable thing, changes and does not remain the same. For although it still contains everything it ever had, it holds it differently than it once did: it changes its order.
"What good will all this subtlety do me?" you ask. If you're asking me, none at all; but just as an engraver, after long straining and tiring his eyes, lets them rest and turns them elsewhere and, as the saying goes, gives them pasture, so we too should sometimes let the mind relax and refresh it with certain pleasures. But let even these pleasures be a kind of work; from these too, if you pay attention, you can draw something that turns out to be beneficial. This is what I make a habit of doing, Lucilius: out of every notion, even one furthest removed from philosophy, I try to dig out something and turn it to use. What could be further from the reform of character than the things we've just been handling? How can Plato's Ideas make me a better man? What can I draw from them that will check my desires? Well, take this very point: that all these things which serve the senses, which inflame and provoke us, Plato denies belong among the things that truly exist. So they are mere images, and only for a time do they wear any semblance of a face; none of them is stable or solid; and yet we desire them as though they would last forever, or as though we would possess them forever. Weak and flowing, we stand planted among illusions: let us send our minds instead to the things that are eternal. Let us marvel at the forms of all things soaring on high, and at God moving among them and providing for this - how he defends from death, and by reason overcomes the failing of matter, those things which he could not make immortal, because matter itself stood in the way. For all things endure not because they are eternal, but because they are defended by the care of their ruler; immortal things would need no guardian. This is how the craftsman preserves them, overcoming the fragility of matter by his own power. Let us despise everything so little precious that it's a genuine question whether it even exists at all. Let us at the same time reflect on this: if providence rescues the world itself, no less mortal than we are, from danger, then our own foresight too can, to some extent, prolong this brief stay for our little body, if only we can govern and restrain our pleasures, the very thing through which the greater part of us perishes. Plato himself, through his own careful discipline, extended his life into old age. He had, it's true, been given a strong and sturdy body, and the breadth of his chest had even earned him his name; but voyages and dangers had drained much from his strength; and yet frugality, and moderation in the things that stir up craving, and diligent care of himself, brought him to old age despite many causes working against it. For you know, I think, that it fell to Plato, thanks to his own careful discipline, to die on his birthday, having completed his eighty-first year without any loss. And so the Magi, who happened to be in Athens at the time, sacrificed to the dead man, believing his lot to have been more than human, because he had rounded out that most perfect number, made up of nine multiplied by nine. I have no doubt you're ready to let go, from that total, a few days and a sacrifice too. Frugal living can lengthen old age - which, though I don't think it should be craved, I don't think it should be refused either; it's pleasant to be with oneself for as long as possible, when one has made oneself worthy of one's own company.
So we'll pass judgment on this question: whether we ought to spurn the last stretch of old age, and not wait for the end but bring it about by our own hand. The man who sluggishly waits for fate is not far from the coward - just as the man who drains the jar to the very dregs and sucks out the sediment too is too far gone in devotion to wine. But on this we'll ask: is the topmost part of life the dregs, or something perfectly clear and pure - provided the mind is unharmed and the intact senses aid it, and the body is not yet failing and half-dead already; for it matters a great deal whether a person is prolonging life or prolonging death. But if the body has become useless for its functions, why shouldn't it be right to bring out the struggling soul? And perhaps it should be done a little before it's strictly necessary, so that when it does become necessary, you may not be able to do it; and since the risk of living badly is greater than that of dying quickly, only a fool refuses to buy so great a stake with so small a stake of time. A very long old age has brought only a few men to death unscathed; for many, an idle life has simply lain there, useless even to themselves: how much more cruel, then, do you judge it, to have lost something out of life, than to lose the right to end it? Don't listen to me unwillingly, as though this decision were already yours to make, but weigh what I'm saying: I will not abandon old age, if it leaves me whole to myself - whole, that is, in the better part of me; but if it begins to shake my mind, to tear away its faculties one by one, if it leaves me not life but mere breath, I will leap out of the crumbling, collapsing building. I will not flee illness by way of death, so long as it is curable and does not cripple the mind. I will not lay hands on myself because of pain: to die that way is to be defeated. But if I know I must endure this pain forever, I will make my exit - not because of the pain itself, but because it will stand as an obstacle to everything for whose sake one lives; weak and cowardly is the man who dies because of pain, foolish is the man who lives for the sake of pain.
But I'm running on too long; there's more material besides that could stretch the day out further. And how will the man who cannot put an end to a letter manage to put an end to his life? Farewell, then - and you'll read that word more gladly than a letter of nothing but deaths. Farewell.

======== Letter 59 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I took great pleasure in your letter; let me use the word in its everyday sense, and don't twist it into a Stoic technicality. We hold that pleasure is a vice. Fine, let it be so; but we still use the word to describe a cheerful state of mind.
I know, I say, that pleasure, if we measure words by our own strict standard, is a disreputable thing, and that joy belongs only to the wise man; for joy is the elation of a mind that trusts in its own true goods. Yet in ordinary speech we say we felt great joy at someone's consulship, or his wedding, or the birth of his wife's child—things which are so far from being true joys that they are often the seeds of future sorrow. Joy, properly speaking, is bound up with never ceasing and never turning into its opposite.
So when our Virgil says
"and the mind's evil joys,"
he speaks eloquently, but not quite correctly; for no joy is ever evil. He gave that name to pleasures, and expressed exactly what he meant: he was pointing to people made happy by their own harm.
Still, I was not wrong to say I took great pleasure from your letter. Even when an untutored man feels joy from an honorable cause, I still call his state pleasure, since it is uncontrolled and bound to swing at once to its opposite—stirred as it is by the mere belief in a good that is false, excessive and immoderate.
But to return to my point: hear what delighted me in your letter. You have your words under control; your style doesn't carry you away, doesn't drag you further than you meant to go.
Many writers are lured away from their intended subject by the charm of some appealing word—that never happens to you. Everything is compact and fitted to the matter. You say as much as you wish, and you convey more than you say. That is a mark of something greater: it shows that your mind, too, has nothing superfluous, nothing swollen.
Still, I do find metaphors—not reckless ones, but ones that take a certain risk. I find images too, and if anyone forbids us to use them, judging them the exclusive privilege of poets, he seems to me never to have read the ancients, among whom fine phrase-making for its own sake was not yet the fashion. Those writers, who spoke plainly and only to make their point clear, are full of comparisons—which I consider necessary, not for the same reason poets use them, but as props for our weakness, to bring both speaker and listener face to face with the thing itself.
Take Sextius, whom I happen to be reading just now, a keen thinker who philosophizes in Greek words but with Roman character. I was struck by an image he uses: an army advancing in a hollow square, ready for battle, when the enemy is suspected on every side. 'The wise man,' he says, 'ought to do the same: he should deploy all his virtues on every front, so that wherever some hostile force may arise, defenses are already in place there and respond to the commander's signal without confusion.' What we see happen in the armies that great generals marshal—that the whole force feels the commander's will at once, so arranged that a single signal runs through infantry and cavalry together—he says is even more necessary for us.
Soldiers, after all, have often feared the enemy without cause, and the safest road has often been the one most suspected; folly has nothing settled about it. Its fear comes from above as much as from below; both flanks tremble; dangers pursue it and meet it coming; it is terrified of everything, unprepared, and frightened even by its own defenses. The wise man, by contrast, is fortified against every attack, alert, and will not retreat a step whether poverty assaults him, or grief, or disgrace, or pain: undaunted, he will walk straight against them and through them.
We, on the other hand, are bound by many chains, weakened by many. We have lain a long time in these faults; washing them off is hard, for we are not merely stained but dyed through.
Not to leap from one image to another, let me ask this question, which I often turn over in my own mind: why does folly hold us so stubbornly? First, because we do not resist it forcefully, and do not strain with our whole strength toward safety; second, because we do not trust enough in what wise men have discovered, and do not drink it in with open hearts, and give only a light effort to so great a matter.
How can anyone learn enough to fight vice, when he studies only as much as he is already free from vice? None of us goes down deep; we skim only the surface, and think it more than enough, given how busy we are, to have spent a little time on philosophy.
What especially hinders us is that we grow satisfied with ourselves too quickly. If we find someone to call us good men, prudent, upright, we accept it. We are not content with modest praise: whatever flattery heaps on us without shame, we seize as our due. We agree with those who assure us we are the best, the wisest, even though we know they often lie a good deal. And we indulge ourselves so far that we want to be praised for a quality we are, at that very moment, contradicting by our actions. A man hears himself called most merciful even in the midst of inflicting punishment, most generous in the midst of plunder, most temperate in the midst of drunkenness and lust. And so it follows that we refuse to change, precisely because we have convinced ourselves we are already the best.
When Alexander was already roaming through India, ravaging peoples scarcely even known to their own neighbors, at the siege of some city, while he was circling the walls looking for the weakest point in the fortifications, he was struck by an arrow; yet he stayed at his post a long while and kept on with what he had begun. Then, when the bleeding was checked and the pain of the dry wound grew worse, and his leg, hanging from the horse, gradually went numb, he was forced to stop, and said: 'Everyone swears I am the son of Jupiter, but this wound shouts that I am a man.'
Let us do the same. Flattery makes each of us a fool, each according to his own share of it: let us say, 'You indeed call me prudent, but I see how many useless things I crave, how many harmful things I wish for. I do not even grasp what animals show by simply reaching their fill—how much food is enough, how much drink; how much I can hold, I still do not know.'
Now I will teach you how to recognize that you are not yet wise. The wise man is full of joy, cheerful and calm, unshaken; he lives on equal terms with the gods. Now examine yourself: if you are never downcast, if no hope disturbs your mind with expectation of the future, if day and night alike your state of mind holds one steady, unwavering course, upright and pleased with itself, then you have reached the height of human good. But if you go chasing pleasures from every direction and of every kind, know that you lack as much wisdom as you lack joy. You wish to reach that height, but you go astray, hoping to arrive there amid riches, amid honors—that is, you search for joy amid anxieties. The very things you pursue as though they would give you gladness and pleasure are in fact the causes of pain.
All men, I say, aim at joy, but they do not know from where they might obtain something lasting and great: one seeks it in banquets and luxury, another in ambition and the crowd of clients surrounding him, another in a mistress, another in the empty display of liberal studies and letters that heal nothing—all of these are deceived by pleasures that are false and short-lived, like drunkenness, which pays for one hour of cheerful madness with a long stretch of weariness, or like the applause and favor of popular acclaim, won at the cost of great anxiety and needing, afterward, to be atoned for.
So consider this: that the effect of wisdom is an evenness of joy. The wise man's mind is like the region of the sky above the moon: there it is always clear. You have, then, a reason to wish to be wise, since the wise man is never without joy. And this joy is born from nothing but the awareness of one's own virtues: no one can rejoice unless he is brave, unless he is just, unless he is temperate.
'What then,' you say, 'do fools and wicked men not rejoice?' No more than lions that have caught their prey. When they have worn themselves out with wine and lust, when night has left them exhausted in the midst of their vices, when pleasures crammed into a body too small to hold them have begun to fester, then the wretches cry out that line of Virgil's:
"for you know how we spent that last night amid false joys."
The luxurious spend every night amid false joys, and indeed as though it were their last. But that joy which follows the gods and those who rival the gods is never interrupted, never ceases; it would cease, if it had been borrowed from elsewhere. Because it is not another's gift, it is not subject to another's whim either: what fortune did not give, she cannot take away. Farewell.

======== Letter 60 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I complain, I quarrel, I lose my temper. And even now do you still wish for what your nurse wished for you, or your tutor, or your mother? Do you not yet understand how much harm they wished on you? How hostile to us are the prayers of our own people! And all the more hostile the more successfully they turn out. I no longer wonder that misfortunes have dogged us from earliest childhood: we grew up amid our parents' curses. Let the gods, for once, hear a prayer we make freely for our own good, and without cost to anyone.
How much longer will we go on asking the gods for something, as if we still could not feed ourselves? How long will we go on filling the fields around great cities with our sowing? How long will whole nations reap for us? How long will many ships, and not from one sea only, bring supplies for a single table? A bull is filled by the pasture of just a few acres; a single forest is enough for many elephants; man alone is fed by both land and sea.
What then? Did nature give us so insatiable a belly, when she gave us such modest bodies, that we should outdo the greed of the vastest, most voracious beasts? Not at all; for how little is given to nature! She is dismissed with very little: it is not the hunger of our stomach that costs us dearly, but our ambition.
So let us count these people, as Sallust says, 'slaves of their bellies,' in the rank of animals, not of men—and some of them not even in the rank of animals, but of the dead. The man who is of use to many is alive; the man who makes use of himself is alive. But those who hide away and grow torpid are as good as in their tombs while still in their own houses. You might as well carve their names in marble right on the threshold: they have gone ahead of their own death. Farewell.

======== Letter 61 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Let us stop wanting what we once wanted. For my part, I make it my business, now that I am old, not to want the same things I wanted as a boy. My days go toward this one thing, my nights toward this, this is my task, this my constant thought: to put an end to my old faults. What I am working toward is that each day should stand for a whole lifetime. And, by Hercules, I do not seize it as though it were my last, but I look upon it as though it could indeed be my last.
It is in this spirit that I write you this letter, as though death were about to summon me away at the very moment of writing. I am ready to depart, and for that very reason I enjoy life, because I do not fret too much over how much longer it will last. Before old age I took care to live well; in old age, to die well. And dying well means dying gladly.
Take care never to do anything against your will. Whatever will have to be done regardless, if you resist it, is no longer a necessity once you do it willingly. This is what I mean: the man who accepts orders willingly escapes the bitterest part of servitude—doing what he does not want to do. It is not the man commanded to do something who is wretched, but the man who does it unwillingly. So let us so compose our minds that we want whatever circumstance demands, and above all, that we contemplate our own end without sorrow.
We must prepare for death before we prepare for life. Life is sufficiently equipped, but we are greedy for the equipment of it; something always seems lacking to us, and always will: whether we have lived long enough is decided not by years or days, but by the mind. I have lived, dearest Lucilius, as long as was enough; I await death full and content. Farewell.

======== Letter 62 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Those who want it to look as though a crowd of business affairs stands in the way of their liberal studies are lying: they pretend to be busy, they exaggerate it, and they keep themselves busy on purpose. I have free time, Lucilius, I have free time, and wherever I am, there I am my own. I don't hand myself over to affairs, I only lend myself to them, and I don't chase after reasons to waste my time; wherever I've come to a stop, that's where I turn over my own thoughts and work through something wholesome in my mind.
When I've given myself to friends, I still don't withdraw from myself, and I don't linger with those whom some occasion has thrown together or some duty born of public office, but I keep company with the best people of all; to them, in whatever place, in whatever age they lived, I send my mind.
I carry Demetrius, the best of men, around with me, and leaving behind the men dressed in purple, I talk with him half-naked, and I admire him. Why wouldn't I admire him? I've seen that he lacks nothing. Anyone can despise everything, but no one can have everything: the shortest road to riches is through despising riches. Our Demetrius, though, lives not as though he had despised everything, but as though he had let others have it. Farewell.

======== Letter 63 ========

[1] I am sorry to hear that your friend Flaccus has died — but I don't want you to grieve beyond measure. That you should not grieve at all, I'll hardly dare demand, though I know it would be better. But who gets that kind of firmness of soul, except a man already lifted high above fortune? Even him such a loss will pinch — but only pinch. As for us, we can be forgiven for slipping into tears, provided they haven't overflowed, provided we've checked them ourselves. When a friend is lost, the eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Weep, yes; wail, no. [2] Does the rule I'm laying down seem harsh, when the greatest of the Greek poets granted a right to cry for just one day, when he tells us that even Niobe thought about food? Do you ask where the loud laments come from, the extravagant weeping? Through our tears we are hunting for proof that we miss the dead; we are not following our grief but exhibiting it. Nobody is sad for his own benefit. What miserable folly — even grief has its vanity. [3] 'What, then,' you say, 'am I to forget my friend?' You're promising him a short stay in your memory if it can only last as long as your sorrow does: any chance trifle will soon smooth that brow of yours into a smile. I won't stretch it further than that — the interval that soothes every longing, in which even the sharpest mourning settles down. The moment you stop watching yourself, that mask of sadness will fall away. Right now you are standing guard over your own grief; but grief slips away even from its guard, and the fiercer it is, the sooner it stops. [4] Let's work at making the memory of those we've lost a pleasure to us. Nobody willingly returns to a thought he can't entertain without torment — though it's inevitable that the names of loved ones we've lost come back to us with a certain sting. But even that sting has its own sweetness. [5] As our Attalus used to say, 'the memory of dead friends is pleasing the way certain fruit is pleasingly tart, the way in a very old wine the very bitterness delights us; but once time has intervened, everything that hurt is snuffed out and the pleasure reaches us pure.' [6] If we take his word for it, 'to think of friends alive and well is to enjoy honey and cake; recalling those who are gone gives pleasure with a certain bite in it. Yet who would deny that sharp things too, things with an edge of harshness, wake up the appetite?' [7] My own experience is different: to me the thought of dead friends is sweet and comforting. When I had them, I held them as men I would lose; having lost them, I hold them as if I have them still.
So do what your own fairness requires, my dear Lucilius: stop misreading what fortune did for you. She took away — but she also gave. [8] Let us therefore enjoy our friends hungrily, because how long that privilege will last is uncertain. Think how often we've left them behind when setting out on some long journey, how often we've failed to see them while staying in the same town — and we'll realize we lost more time with them while they were alive. [9] And can you stand these people who treat their friends with total neglect and then mourn them with total abandon — who love no one until they've lost him? They grieve the more lavishly precisely because they're afraid someone might doubt whether they loved at all; they're scrambling for late evidence of their own affection. [10] If we have other friends, we treat them badly and rate them cheaply if they count for so little as consolation for the one who's been buried. If we have none, we've done ourselves a worse injury than fortune did us: she took one man away; we failed to make any. [11] What's more, a man who couldn't love more than one person didn't love even that one very much. If someone stripped of his only tunic chose to stand there bewailing himself rather than looking about for a way to escape the cold and find something to throw over his shoulders, wouldn't you call him a perfect fool? You have buried someone you loved: find someone to love. Replacing a friend beats crying for one.
[12] What I'm about to add is worn thin, I know, but I won't leave it out just because everyone has said it: even the man who never ended his grieving by decision finds it ended by time. And for a man of sense, the most disgraceful cure for sorrow is to grow tired of sorrowing. I'd rather you abandoned your grief than have it abandon you. Stop as soon as you can doing what you couldn't keep doing for long even if you wanted to. [13] Our ancestors set women a year for mourning — not so they would mourn that long, but so they would mourn no longer. For men no period is prescribed, because no period is honorable. Still, out of all those poor women who could barely be dragged from the pyre, barely pried off the corpse, show me one whose tears lasted a full month. Nothing becomes hateful faster than grief: while fresh, it finds a consoler and draws people to its side; grown stale, it gets laughed at — and deservedly, for by then it is either fake or foolish.
[14] And I write this to you as the man who wept for my dearest Annaeus Serenus so uncontrollably that — the last thing I'd want — I stand among the examples of men whom grief defeated. Today, though, I condemn what I did, and I understand that the chief reason I mourned that way was that I had never once considered he could die before me. Only one thought ever occurred to me: he was younger, much younger — as if the fates kept to a schedule! [15] So let us think constantly about our own mortality no less than that of everyone we love. Back then I should have said, 'My Serenus is younger — what does that matter? He ought to die after me, but he can die before me.' Because I didn't, fortune's blow caught me unprepared. Now I keep it all in mind: everything is mortal, and mortal on no fixed terms. Whatever can ever happen can happen today. [16] So let us reflect, dearest Lucilius, that we will soon arrive where we grieve that he has arrived; and perhaps — if only the report of the wise is true and some place receives us — the one we think we have lost has simply been sent on ahead. Farewell.

======== Letter 64 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You were with us yesterday. You can complain, if only 'yesterday'; that's why I added 'with us' - for you're always with me. Some friends had dropped in, on whose account a bigger smoke was made, not the kind that bursts out of the kitchens of the wealthy and terrifies the night watch, but the modest kind that signals guests have arrived.
Our talk ranged widely, as it does at a dinner party, never carrying any one subject through to the end, but leaping from one thing to another. Then a book of the elder Quintus Sextius was read, a great man, believe me, even though he denies being a Stoic.
Good gods, what force there is in him, what vigor of spirit! You won't find this in all philosophers: the writings of some men of famous name are bloodless. They lay down rules, they argue, they split hairs, they don't put spirit into you because they don't have any themselves. When you've read Sextius you'll say, 'he's alive, he's vigorous, you are free, he is above the human, he sends me away full of tremendous confidence.'
I'll admit to you the state of mind I'm in when I read him: I want to challenge every disaster, I want to shout, 'why the delay, fortune? come at me: you see I'm ready.' I put on the spirit of a man looking for somewhere to test himself, somewhere to show his courage,
and prays that a foaming boar be sent among the idle cattle, or a tawny lion come down from the mountain.
I want to have something to conquer, something whose endurance will train me. For this too is a splendid thing in Sextius, that he'll show you the greatness of the happy life while never making you despair of reaching it: you'll know that it stands on the heights, but that it can be scaled by anyone willing to try. Virtue itself will give you this very same gift, that you admire it and yet hope for it. For my part, the contemplation of wisdom itself often takes up a great deal of my time; I gaze on it, stunned, just as I sometimes gaze on the universe itself, which I often view like a spectator seeing it for the first time.
And so I venerate the discoveries of wisdom and its discoverers; it's a pleasure to approach them as though claiming the inheritance of many men. These things were acquired for me, worked out for me. But let's play the good head of household, let's increase what we've received; let this inheritance pass on greater still from me to those who come after. Much work still remains, and much will still remain, and no one born a thousand generations from now will be shut out from the chance to add something more.
But even if everything had already been discovered by the ancients, this will always be new: the use of what has been discovered, and the knowledge and arrangement of it by others. Suppose remedies had been left to us for healing the eyes: I wouldn't need to look for others, but even so they must be fitted to the disease and to the occasion. This remedy soothes irritated eyes; this thins swollen eyelids; this drives away a sudden rush of fluid; this sharpens the sight: you have to grind these together, choose the right time, and apply the right dose to each case. Remedies for the mind were discovered by the ancients; but how they're to be applied, and when, is the work that falls to us.
Those who came before us accomplished much, but they didn't finish the job. Still, they deserve to be looked up to and honored the way we honor the gods. Why shouldn't I keep images of great men, too, to spur my spirit, and celebrate their birthdays? Why shouldn't I always address them with a title of honor? The same reverence I owe my own teachers, I owe those teachers of the human race, from whom the beginnings of so great a good first flowed. If I see a consul or a praetor, I'll do everything by which honor is customarily paid to honor: I'll dismount from my horse, bare my head, give way in the road. Well then? Am I to admit both Marcus Cato and Laelius the Wise, and Socrates with Plato, and Zeno and Cleanthes, into my mind without the utmost respect? No - I venerate them, and I always rise to my feet before such great names. Farewell.

======== Letter 65 ========

[1] Yesterday I split with my bad health: it claimed the morning, and the afternoon it surrendered to me. So first I tested my mind with reading; then, when it stood up to that, I dared to demand more of it — or rather, to allow it more. I wrote something, and with more concentration than usual, since I was wrestling with difficult material and refused to be beaten — until some friends broke in, applied force, and reined me in like a patient who won't behave. [2] Conversation took the pen's place, and I'm going to bring you the part of it that is still in dispute. We've appointed you judge. You have more work on your hands than you think: the case has three sides.
Our Stoics say, as you know, that there are two things in nature from which everything comes: cause and matter. Matter lies there inert, a thing ready for anything, and it would sit idle if no one set it moving; cause — that is, reason — shapes matter, turns it wherever it wants, and produces from it all sorts of works. So there has to be something a thing is made from, and then something it is made by: the latter is the cause, the former the matter. [3] Every art imitates nature; so take what I have said about the universe and apply it to whatever human hands must make. A statue required both matter that would submit to the craftsman and a craftsman to give the matter a face. In the statue, then, the matter was the bronze, the cause the workman. The same condition holds for everything: it consists of what is made and what makes.
[4] The Stoics hold that there is one cause — that which makes. Aristotle thinks 'cause' is said in three ways: 'The first cause,' he says, 'is the matter itself, without which nothing can be produced; the second is the workman; the third is the form, which is stamped on each work as on a statue.' This is what Aristotle calls the 'idos.' 'A fourth,' he says, 'joins these: the purpose of the whole work.' [5] Let me unpack that. The bronze is the statue's first cause, for it would never have been made without something for it to be cast or hammered from. The second cause is the craftsman, since that bronze could not have been shaped into the figure of a statue unless skilled hands had been brought to bear. The third cause is the form: the statue would not be called 'the Spear-bearer' or 'the Ribbon-binder' unless that particular look had been pressed into it. The fourth cause is the purpose of making it — without that, it would not have been made. [6] What is the purpose? Whatever drew the craftsman on, what he was pursuing when he made it: money, if he built it to sell; or fame, if he worked for a name; or piety, if he was preparing a gift for a temple. So this too is a cause of the thing's being made — or don't you think that something whose removal would have meant the work was never made deserves to be counted among its causes?
[7] To these Plato adds a fifth, the model, which he himself calls the 'idea': this is what the craftsman kept looking back at while he produced what he intended. It makes no difference whether he has his model outside him, to fix his eyes on, or inside, where he himself conceived and installed it. God holds these models of all things within himself; his mind has embraced the numbers and measures of everything that is to be brought about. He is full of these shapes, which Plato calls 'ideas' — deathless, unchanging, never wearying. And so human beings perish, but humanity itself, the pattern a human being is molded on, endures; while people struggle and die, it suffers nothing. [8] There are five causes, then, as Plato says: that from which, that by which, that in which, that toward which, that for the sake of which; and last of all, what results from these. In the statue — since that is where we started — that from which is the bronze; that by which is the craftsman; that in which is the form fitted to it; that toward which is the model the maker imitates; that for the sake of which is the maker's purpose; what results from them all is the statue itself. [9] The world, too, as Plato says, has all of these: a maker — this is god; that from which it is made — this is matter; a form — this is the arrangement and order of the world we see; a model — namely what god looked to in making this vast and beautiful work; a purpose — what he made it for. [10] You ask what god's purpose is? Goodness. So Plato says, at any rate: 'What was god's reason for making the world? He is good, and the good begrudges no one any good thing; so he made it the best he could.'
So sit as judge, hand down your verdict, and declare who seems to you to say what is most like the truth — not who says what is truest, for that is as far above us as truth itself.
[11] This crowd of causes assembled by Aristotle and Plato covers either far too much or far too little. If they judge that anything whose removal makes production impossible is a cause of the making, they have named too few. Let them put time among the causes: nothing can happen without time. Let them add place: if there is nowhere for a thing to happen, it will not happen at all. Let them add motion: without it nothing comes to be or perishes; there is no art without motion, no change. [12] But what we are after now is the first and general cause. That must be simple, for matter too is simple. What is the cause, we ask? Reason that makes — in other words, god. All those items you have listed are not so many separate causes; they hang from one, the one that makes. [13] You say form is a cause? The craftsman imposes it on the work: it is part of the cause, not the cause. The model too is not a cause but a necessary instrument of the cause. The model is necessary to the craftsman the way a chisel is, or a file: the art cannot proceed without them, yet they are not parts of the art, nor causes. [14] 'The craftsman's purpose,' someone says, 'his reason for setting out to make something, is a cause.' Even granting it is a cause, it is not the efficient cause but an accessory one. And such causes are countless; we are asking about the general cause. And when they said that the whole world, the finished work, is a cause, that fell short of their usual precision: there is a great difference between a work and the cause of a work.
[15] Either hand down a ruling, or — and in questions of this kind it is the simpler path — admit the matter is not clear to you and send us back for a rehearing. 'What pleasure do you get,' you say, 'from wearing away your time on questions that rid you of no passion and drive off no desire?' For my part I do take up and handle those matters that bring the mind peace: I examine myself first, and this world afterward. [16] Nor am I wasting time even now, as you suppose. All these questions, provided they are not minced up and pulled apart into useless hair-splitting, lift and lighten the mind, which, weighed down by its heavy load, longs to be freed and to return to the things it once belonged to. For this body is the mind's burden and its punishment; under its pressure the mind is crushed, in chains, unless philosophy comes to it, bids it draw breath at the spectacle of nature, and releases it from earthly things toward the divine. This is its freedom, this its excursion: for a while it slips out of the custody in which it is held and is restored by the sky. [17] Just as craftsmen doing some fine-grained work that strains and tires the eyes, if their light is poor and borrowed, go out into the open and, in some quarter given over to public leisure, treat their eyes to free daylight — so the mind, shut up in this gloomy, dark lodging, seeks the open whenever it can and finds rest in the contemplation of nature. [18] The wise man, and the pursuer of wisdom, does stay attached to his body, but with the best part of himself he is elsewhere, and he directs his thoughts toward what is above. Like a man under military oath, he counts this life of his as his term of service; and his character is so shaped that life draws from him neither love nor hatred, and he endures mortal things although he knows greater ones remain. [19] Do you forbid me the study of nature — drag me away from the whole and shut me up in a part? Am I not to ask what the beginnings of all things were? who shaped the world? who sorted out everything that was sunk in a single mass, wrapped up in sluggish matter? Am I not to ask who the craftsman of this universe is? by what plan such vastness came under law and order? who gathered what was scattered, separated what was jumbled, and dealt out distinct faces to things lying in one common shapelessness? from what source so much light is poured out? whether it is fire, or something brighter than fire? [20] Am I not to ask these things? Am I not to know where I came down from? whether I get to see all this once, or must be born again and again? where I am headed from here? what home awaits the soul once released from the laws of human slavery? You bar me from the sky — in other words, you order me to live with my head down. [21] I am greater, and born for greater things, than to be the slave of my body, which I look at as nothing other than a shackle fastened around my freedom. So I throw it in fortune's way as the point where she can spend her attack, and I let no wound pass through it to me. Whatever in me can suffer injury is just this; in this exposed lodging lives a free mind. [22] Never will this flesh drive me to fear, never to any pretense unworthy of a good man; never will I lie for the sake of this scrap of body. When it seems right, I will dissolve my partnership with it; and even now, while we cling together, we will not be partners on equal terms: the mind will draw every right to itself. Contempt for one's own body is freedom guaranteed.
[23] To return to the point: this freedom is much helped by the very inquiry we were just discussing. Everything, after all, consists of matter and god. God governs the things that surround him and follow their ruler and guide. And what makes — which is god — is more powerful and more precious than matter, which is passive under god. [24] The place god occupies in this world is the place the mind occupies in a human being; what matter is there, the body is in us. So let the worse serve the better. Let us be brave against whatever chance brings; let us not tremble at injuries, at wounds, at chains, at poverty. What is death? Either an end or a crossing. I am not afraid to stop — it is the same as never having begun — nor to cross over, because nowhere will I be so cramped. Farewell.

======== Letter 66 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] I have seen my old fellow student Claranus again, after many years. You don't expect me, I think, to add that he is old - but I will tell you, by god, that he is green and vigorous in mind, and still wrestling with his poor little body. For nature has treated him unjustly, and lodged so fine a soul badly - or perhaps she meant precisely this: to show us that the strongest and happiest of minds can hide under any skin at all. Still, he has overcome every obstacle, and from despising himself he has come to despise everything else. [2] I think the poet was wrong who said, "and virtue comes more welcome from a beautiful body." Virtue needs no such ornament: it is itself its own great glory, and it consecrates the body it inhabits. Certainly I have begun to look at our friend Claranus differently: to me he seems handsome now, and as upright in body as he is in mind. [3] A great man can come out of a hut; a beautiful and great soul can come out of an ugly, stunted little body. Nature seems to me to produce certain people expressly to prove that virtue can be born anywhere. If she could bring forth naked souls by themselves, she would have; as it is, she does something even greater: she brings forth some souls hampered by bodies, but breaking through the obstacles nonetheless. [4] Claranus, it seems to me, was produced as a model, so that we might know that the body is not what disfigures the soul, but rather the soul's beauty that adorns the body. Although we spent very few days together, we still had many conversations, which I have been turning over since and will now pass on to you.
[5] On the first day the question raised was this: how can goods be equal to one another, if there are three different classes of them? Some, as we hold, are primary goods - joy, for instance, or peace, or the safety of one's country. Some are secondary, expressed through unhappy material - such as endurance under torture, or self-control in a serious illness. The first kind of good we will choose for ourselves directly; the second, only if necessity forces it on us. There is still a third kind - a modest gait, a composed and honest expression, a bearing suited to a wise man. [6] How can these be equal to one another, when some are to be chosen and others avoided?
If we want to sort this out, let us go back to the primary good and consider what sort of thing it is. A mind that beholds the truth, skilled in what to seek and what to avoid, assigning value to things not by opinion but by nature, inserting itself into the whole universe and directing its contemplation to all its workings, attentive equally to thought and to action, great and forceful, unconquered equally by hardship and by flattery, submitting to neither fortune, rising above everything that happens or befalls it, most beautiful, most perfectly ordered in both grace and strength, sound and dry, unshaken, undaunted, which no force can break, which chance events can neither lift up nor cast down - such a mind is virtue itself. [7] This is its face, if it can be taken in under a single gaze and shows itself whole all at once. But it has many appearances, unfolding according to the variety of life and its actions; and it does not become smaller or greater for that. For the highest good cannot diminish, nor is virtue permitted to go backward; it only turns itself into one quality after another, shaped to the character of the actions it is about to perform. [8] Whatever it touches, it draws into its own likeness and colors; it graces the actions, the friendships, sometimes the whole households it has entered and set in order; whatever it handles, it makes lovable, notable, admirable. So its power and its greatness cannot rise any further, since the greatest cannot be increased: you will find nothing more upright than the upright, no more than you will find anything truer than the true, or more temperate than the temperate. [9] All virtue lies within a measure; that measure is fixed. Steadfastness has nowhere further to go, no more than trust, or truth, or good faith. What can be added to something perfect? Nothing - or else it was not perfect, that thing to which something was added. So neither can anything be added to virtue; if anything could be added to it, it would have been lacking something. Honor, too, admits no addition; it is honorable precisely for the reasons I have listed. And what of that? Do you think the fitting, the just, and the lawful are not all of the same shape, bounded by fixed limits? The capacity to grow is the mark of something imperfect. [10] Every good falls under the same laws: private and public advantage are joined together, just as inseparable, I assure you, as what is praiseworthy is from what is desirable. So the virtues are equal to one another, and so are the works of virtue, and so are all the people to whom they have fallen. [11] But the virtues of plants and animals, being mortal, are also fragile, perishable, uncertain; they spring up and subside, and so are not valued at the same rate. One single rule applies to human virtues, for there is only one right and simple reason. Nothing is more divine than the divine, nothing more heavenly than the heavenly. [12] Mortal things shrink and fall, wear away and grow, are emptied out and filled up again; and so, given so uncertain a lot, there is inequality among them - but divine things share a single nature. Now reason is nothing other than a portion of the divine spirit immersed in a human body; if reason is divine, and no good exists without reason, then every good is divine. And there is no difference among divine things; therefore none among goods either. So joy and brave, unbending endurance under torture are equal: in both, the greatness of soul is the same - relaxed and at ease in the one case, straining and taut in the other. [13] What? Do you not think the virtue of a man who storms an enemy's walls with courage is equal to that of a man who endures a siege with the utmost patience? Great is Scipio, who shuts Numantia in, presses it, and forces its unconquered hands to turn against themselves in ruin; equally great is the spirit of the besieged, who knows that a man to whom death lies open is not truly shut in, and who breathes his last in the embrace of freedom. In the same way all the rest are equal to one another too - tranquility, simplicity, generosity, constancy, evenness of temper, endurance; for beneath all of these lies one single virtue, which keeps the mind upright and unbending.
[14] "What, then? Is there no difference between joy and unbending endurance of pain?" None, as far as the virtues themselves go - though a great deal of difference among the things in which each virtue is displayed. In the one case, the mind's relaxation and ease is natural; in the other, the pain runs contrary to nature. These, then, are the intermediate things, which admit a very wide range - but the virtue in both is equal. [15] The material does not change virtue: hard and difficult circumstances do not make it worse, nor do cheerful and joyful ones make it better; it must therefore be equal in both. For in either case what is done is done equally rightly, equally wisely, equally honorably; so the goods are equal, beyond which neither man can conduct himself any better - the one in his joy, the other amid his torments; and two things than which nothing better can be done are equal to one another. [16] For if things placed outside virtue could diminish or increase it, then the honorable would cease to be the single good that it is. Grant that, and every honorable thing collapses. Why? I'll tell you: because nothing is honorable that is done unwillingly, or under compulsion; every honorable act is voluntary. Mix in reluctance, complaint, evasion, fear, and it has lost the best thing it had - its self-approval. Nothing can be honorable that is not free; for what fears, serves. [17] Everything honorable is secure, is tranquil: if it recoils from something, if it laments, if it judges something an evil, it has let in disturbance and is tossed about in great inner conflict - drawn on one side by the appearance of what is right, pulled back on the other by the suspicion of evil. And so a man who is about to do something honorable, whatever stands in his way, even if he thinks it inconvenient, must not think it an evil - he must want it, and do it gladly. Everything honorable is unforced and uncompelled, pure, mixed with no evil.
[18] I know what can be said to me in reply here: "Are you trying to persuade us that it makes no difference whether a man lies at a banquet or on the rack, wearing out his torturer?" I could answer: Epicurus too says that the wise man, even if he is roasted inside the bull of Phalaris, will cry out, "How sweet this is, and none of my concern." Why are you surprised that I call the goods equal - one man reclining at a banquet, another standing most bravely amid torments - when Epicurus says something far harder to believe, that being roasted is sweet? [19] But here is my answer: there is a great deal of difference between joy and pain. If a choice is asked for, I will seek the one and avoid the other; the one is in accordance with nature, the other against it. As long as they are weighed on that scale, they stand far apart from each other. But once we come to virtue, both are equal - the virtue that proceeds through joys and the virtue that proceeds through sorrows. [20] Vexation and pain and every other inconvenience carry no weight at all; virtue swallows them up. Just as the brightness of the sun blots out small lights, so virtue, by its own greatness, crushes and extinguishes pains, troubles, injuries; wherever it shines, whatever appears without it is snuffed out, and inconveniences, once they run up against virtue, have no more effect than a rain cloud has on the sea. [21] To convince you this is so: a good man will rush toward everything beautiful without any hesitation. Let the executioner stand there, let the torturer and the fire stand there - he will persevere, and he will look not at what he is about to suffer but at what he is about to do, and he will trust himself to the honorable act as to a good man; he will judge it useful to him, safe, favorable. The honorable thing, even when it is grim and harsh, will hold the same place in his eyes as a good man holds who is poor, or exiled, or thin and pale. [22] Go on, then - set on one side a good man overflowing with riches, and on the other a man who has nothing, but has everything within himself: each will be equally a good man, even though their fortunes differ. The same judgment applies to things as to men, as I said: virtue is equally praiseworthy whether it is lodged in a strong, free body or a sick, shackled one. [23] So you too will not praise your own virtue any more if fortune has kept your body whole than if it has been maimed in some part - otherwise you would be judging a master by the clothing of his slaves. For all those things over which chance exercises dominion are slaves - money, the body, honors - weak, fluid, mortal, held by an uncertain tenure; but the works of virtue, on the other hand, are free and unconquered, no more to be sought after if fortune treats them kindly, nor any less if some unfairness of circumstance presses them down. [24] What friendship is among men, desire is among things. You would not, I think, love a good man who is rich any more than one who is poor, nor a strong and muscular one any more than a slight man of weak body; so neither will you desire or love a cheerful, peaceful circumstance any more than a strained and toilsome one. [25] Or if you do, then, of two equally good men, you will love the sleek and well-oiled one more than the dusty and unkempt one; and from there you will go on to love the man whole and unharmed in all his limbs more than the crippled or one-eyed man; little by little your fastidiousness will advance to the point where, of two men equally just and wise, you will prefer the one with a full head of curly hair. But where the virtue in each is equal, the inequality of other things does not show; for all those other things are not parts of the good, but mere additions to it. [26] Does anyone conduct so unfair a reckoning among his own children that he loves a healthy son more than a sick one, or a tall, striking one more than a short or ordinary one? Wild animals do not distinguish among their offspring, and offer themselves equally to feed them all; birds divide the food equally. Ulysses hurries toward the rocks of his own Ithaca just as Agamemnon hurries toward the noble walls of Mycenae; no one loves his country because it is great, but because it is his own. [27] What is the point of all this? That you should know: virtue looks upon all its works as its own offspring, with the same eyes, and shows the same indulgence to all - indeed more intensely to those struggling harder, since even a parent's love leans more toward the children it pities. Virtue, too, does not love its struggling and burdened works any more, but, in the manner of good parents, embraces and cherishes them more.
[28] Why is no good greater than another? Because nothing is more fitting than what is fitting, nothing more level than what is level. You cannot say that this thing is more equal to something than that thing is; so neither is anything more honorable than the honorable. [29] But if the nature of all the virtues is equal, then the three classes of goods stand on the same level. I mean this: moderate joy and moderate grief stand on the same level. That joy does not surpass the firmness of mind that swallows its groans under torture: the one kind of good is desirable, the other admirable, but both are equal nonetheless, because whatever inconvenience there is gets covered over by the force of a proportionately greater good. [30] Whoever judges these unequal has turned his eyes away from the virtues themselves and is looking around at externals instead. True goods weigh the same, show the same; false goods are full of emptiness - and so, showy and impressive to onlookers, once weighed on the scale, they deceive. [31] It is so, my dear Lucilius: whatever true reason recommends is solid and eternal, it strengthens the mind and lifts it up to stand forever on the heights. The things praised rashly, and by the crowd's opinion called goods, puff up those who are glad of them with empty air; conversely, the things feared as evils throw fear into people's minds, and stir them, just like animals, at the mere appearance of danger. [32] So both these things - without reason - either swell the mind or gnaw at it; neither the one deserves joy nor the other fear. Reason alone is unchanging and holds fast to its judgment; it does not serve the senses but commands them. Reason is equal to reason, just as the upright is equal to the upright; so too is virtue equal to virtue, for virtue is nothing other than right reason. All the virtues are forms of reason; they are reason, if they are right; if they are right, they are also equal. [33] As the reason is, so are the actions; therefore all are equal, for being like reason, they are like one another too. But I say the actions are equal to one another only insofar as they are honorable and right; otherwise they will show great differences, as the material varies - now broader, now narrower, now illustrious, now obscure, now affecting many, now affecting few. Yet in all of them, what is best is equal: they are honorable. [34] It is like this: all good men are equal insofar as they are good, but they differ in age - one older, one younger; they differ in body - one handsome, one plain; they differ in fortune - one rich, one poor, one influential, powerful, known to cities and to peoples, the other unknown to most and obscure. But by that quality by which they are good, they are equal.
[35] The senses do not judge between goods and evils; they do not know what is useful and what is not. They cannot pass judgment except on something brought right before them; they are not foresighted about the future nor mindful of the past; they do not know what follows from what. But from this, order and sequence are woven together, and the unity of a life that means to proceed on a straight course. Reason, then, is the arbiter of goods and evils; it holds things foreign and external as cheap, and judges the additions that are neither good nor bad to be the smallest and lightest of things - for to it, every good lies in the mind. [36] Still, it reckons certain goods primary, which one approaches by deliberate purpose - victory, say, or good children, or the safety of one's country; certain goods secondary, which appear only in adversity - enduring illness, fire, or exile with an even mind; and certain goods intermediate, no more in accordance with nature than against it - such as walking with dignity, or sitting composedly. For sitting is no less in accordance with nature than standing or walking. [37] Those two higher classes of goods are different from each other: the first are in accordance with nature - rejoicing in the devotion of one's children, in the safety of one's country; the second are against nature - standing firm bravely against torture, and enduring thirst while a burning illness consumes one's vitals. [38] "What, then? Can something against nature be good?" Not at all; but the situation in which that good arises is sometimes against nature. To be wounded, to waste away under applied fire, to be afflicted with poor health - these are against nature; but to keep an unwearied mind amid such things is in accordance with nature. [39] And to say briefly what I mean: the material of a good is sometimes against nature, but the good itself never is, since no good exists without reason, and reason follows nature. "What, then, is reason?" An imitation of nature. "What is man's highest good?" To conduct himself according to the will of nature.
[40] "There is no doubt," someone says, "that peace never disturbed is happier than peace won back through much bloodshed. There is no doubt," he says, "that unshaken health is a happier thing than health drawn back to safety, by some force and endurance, out of serious illness and threats of death. In the same way, there will be no doubt that joy is a greater good than a mind straining to endure the torments of wounds or fire." [41] Not at all; for things that are matters of chance admit a great deal of variation, since they are valued by the usefulness they have to those who receive them. Of goods, there is one single aim: to agree with nature; and this is achieved equally in all of them. When we follow someone's opinion in the senate, it cannot be said that one man agrees more than another - all move toward the same opinion. I say the same of the virtues: all of them agree with nature. I say the same of goods: all of them agree with nature. [42] One man died young, another old, someone else an infant, who got nothing more than a glimpse of life; all of these were equally mortal, even though death allowed some to go on living longer, cut others off in the middle of their bloom, and cut short still others at their very beginnings. [43] One man's life ended in the middle of dinner; another's death followed continuously on sleep; someone was extinguished in the act of love. Set against these men who were run through by the sword, or killed by a serpent's bite, or crushed under a collapsing building, or torn apart bit by bit through a long contraction of the sinews. One man's end can be called better, another's worse - but death itself is the same for all. The paths by which they arrive are different; the point at which they end is one. No death is greater or smaller than another; it has the same measure in everyone: the ending of a life. [44] I say the same to you about goods: this good exists amid pure pleasures, that one amid grim and bitter things; the one was governed by fortune's indulgence, the other tamed fortune's violence - but both are equally good, though the one traveled a level and easy road, the other a rough one. For the end of all of them is the same: they are good, they are praiseworthy, they accompany virtue and reason; virtue makes equal whatever it recognizes as its own.
[45] There is no reason for you to be surprised at this among our own doctrines: even in Epicurus's system there are two goods, out of which that highest and blessed condition is composed - that the body be without pain, the mind without disturbance. These goods do not grow if they are already full; for how can something grow that is already full? The body lacks pain: what can be added to this absence of pain? The mind is self-consistent and at peace: what can be added to this tranquility? [46] Just as the clearness of the sky does not admit any further brightness once it has been cleansed to its purest brilliance, so the condition of a man who tends to both his body and his mind, and binds his good together out of both, is perfect, and finds the sum of his wishes if there is no fever in his mind and no pain in his body. If any further pleasures come along from outside, they do not increase the highest good, but, so to speak, season and delight it; for that complete good of human nature is content with peace of body and mind.
[47] I will show you, from Epicurus's own system, a division of goods very like our own even now. In his view, some things he would prefer to happen to him - such as bodily rest free of all discomfort, and relaxation of mind rejoicing in the contemplation of its own goods; other things he does not wish to happen, yet still praises and approves - such as that endurance, which I mentioned a moment ago, of poor health and the gravest pains, which Epicurus experienced on that final, most fortunate day of his life. For he says that he endured the torments of his bladder and ulcerated stomach, which admitted no further increase of pain, and that the day was nonetheless a happy one for him. But no one can spend a happy day unless he is in possession of the highest good. [48] So even in Epicurus there are these goods, which you would rather not experience, but which, since circumstances turned out that way, must be embraced, praised, and set on a level with the highest goods. It cannot be said that this good, which set the closing seal on a blessed life, and for which Epicurus gave thanks with his very last breath, is not equal to the greatest goods.
[49] Allow me, Lucilius, best of men, to say something rather bold: if any goods could be greater than others, I would have preferred these grim-seeming ones to those soft and delicate ones, and called them the greater. For it is a greater thing to break through hardship than to keep moderation amid joy. [50] It happens, I know, by the same reasoning that one man bears good fortune well and another bears disaster bravely. The man who keeps guard calmly before the rampart with no enemy testing the camp can be just as brave as the man who, his hamstrings cut, drops to his knees and does not let go of his weapons; "well done, and bravely," is what is said to men returning from battle bloodied. And so I would praise these tested and battle-hardened goods more, the ones that have wrestled with fortune. [51] Would I hesitate to praise the maimed, withered hand of Mucius more than the intact hand of any other man, however brave? He stood there, a man scorning his enemies and their flames, and watched his own hand dripping over the enemy's brazier, until Porsenna, envying the glory of the punishment he was favoring, ordered the fire snatched away against Mucius's will. [52] Why should I not count this good among the first-rank goods, and think it that much greater than those safe, untested ones, in the same proportion that it is rarer to defeat an enemy with a hand lost than with a hand still armed? "What, then?" you say, "would you wish this good for yourself?" Why not? For only the man who is able to wish for it is able to do it. [53] Or should I wish instead to hold out my joints to be massaged by pretty boys? To have some little woman, or some man turned woman, gently work my little fingers? Why should I not think Mucius the happier man, because he handled fire as though he were handing that hand over to a masseur? Whatever had gone wrong, he set entirely right: unarmed and maimed, he finished the war, and with that mutilated hand he conquered two kings. Farewell.

======== Letter 67 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. To start with the ordinary things: spring has begun to show itself, but it's already tilting toward summer, when it ought to be hot—instead it's merely gone lukewarm, and I still don't trust it, since it often folds back into winter. You want to know how uncertain it still is? I don't yet dare a real cold bath—I only take the edge off the chill. 'That,' you say, 'is neither hot nor cold.' Just so, my dear Lucilius: my age by now is content with its own chill; it barely thaws in the middle of summer. So most of it is spent wrapped in clothes. I'm grateful to old age for pinning me to my couch—and why shouldn't I be grateful to it on that score? Whatever I ought to have stopped wanting, I now can't do anyway. My conversation these days is mostly with my books. And whenever your letters come along, I feel as if I were with you, and I'm affected in my mind as though I weren't writing back to you but talking with you. So, on this question you're asking, let's examine what it amounts to as if we were in conversation.
You ask whether every good is something to be wished for. 'If it's good,' you say, 'to endure torture bravely, to be burned with great courage, to be sick patiently, then it follows that these things are worth wishing for; but I see nothing in them worthy of a prayer. Certainly I don't know of anyone who has yet paid a vow because he'd been flogged, or twisted with gout, or stretched longer on the rack.' Make a distinction here, my dear Lucilius, and you'll see there's something in these things worth wishing for after all. I would wish torments away from me; but if they have to be endured, I will wish to bear myself in them bravely, honorably, with spirit. Why wouldn't I prefer that war never come my way? But if it does come, I will wish to bear wounds, hunger, and everything war's necessity brings, with nobility. I'm not so mad as to want to fall sick; but if I must fall sick, I will wish to do nothing intemperate, nothing unmanly. So it isn't hardships that are to be wished for, but the virtue by which hardships are endured.
Some of our school hold that the brave endurance of all such things is not to be wished for—though not to be shunned either—because a wish ought to aim at a good that is pure, calm, and set outside of trouble. I disagree. Why? First, because it can't be that something is genuinely good and yet not to be wished for; next, if virtue is to be wished for, and no good exists without virtue, then every good is to be wished for; and further, even if [text uncertain] the brave endurance of torments is to be wished for.
Let me press the question again: surely courage is to be wished for? And yet courage despises dangers and even provokes them; its finest and most admirable part is precisely this—not yielding to fires, going out to meet wounds, sometimes not even dodging a weapon but taking it full in the chest. If courage is to be wished for, then bearing torments patiently is to be wished for too, since that is part of courage. But separate the elements, as I said, and nothing will mislead you. It isn't enduring torments that is to be wished for, but enduring them bravely: what I wish for is the 'bravely'—that is the virtue.
'But who has ever wished this for himself?' Some prayers are open and declared, when they're made item by item; others lie hidden, when a single wish takes in many things at once. For instance, I pray for an honorable life; but an honorable life is made up of varied actions—in it is Regulus's chest, Cato's wound torn open again by his own hand, Rutilius's exile, the cup of poison that carried Socrates from prison up to heaven. So when I have prayed for an honorable life, I have also prayed for these things, without which an honorable life sometimes cannot be.
"O three and four times blessed, those who were granted to meet their deaths before their fathers' eyes beneath Troy's high walls!"
What difference does it make whether you wish this for someone, or simply admit that it was something to be wished for?
Decius devoted himself for the republic and, driving his horse into the thick of the enemy, seeking death, charged in. Another after him, rivaling his father's courage, ran into the densest battle-line with the solemn, now-familiar words already formed, anxious only that the sacrifice go well, counting a noble death a thing to be prayed for. Do you doubt, then, whether it is the best thing to die memorably, in some act of virtue?
When someone endures torments bravely, he is exercising all the virtues at once. Perhaps one alone is on display and most visible—endurance; but courage is there too, of which endurance and suffering and forbearance are the branches; prudence is there, without which no plan is undertaken, which advises bearing what you cannot escape as bravely as possible; constancy is there, which cannot be dislodged from its place and abandons its resolve under no force's compulsion; the whole undivided company of the virtues is there. Whatever is done honorably, one virtue does it, but by the judgment of counsel; and whatever is approved by all the virtues together, even if it seems to be done by one alone, is to be wished for.
What—do you suppose that only the things that come through pleasure and leisure are to be wished for, the things welcomed at garlanded doorways? Some goods wear a grim face; some prayers are celebrated not by a crowd offering congratulations, but by people bowing in awe and reverence.
So do you not think Regulus wished to reach the Carthaginians? Put on the spirit of a great man, and withdraw for a moment from popular opinion; grasp, as you should, the full and splendid image of the most beautiful and magnificent virtue—one that must be honored by us not with incense or garlands, but with sweat and blood.
Look at Marcus Cato laying his own pure hands upon that sacred chest, widening the wound that had not gone deep enough. Would you really say to him, 'I wish you hadn't wanted this,' and 'I'm sorry for you'—or rather, 'How fortunate, what you're doing'?
At this point our friend Demetrius comes to mind, who calls a life of security, untouched by any assault of fortune, a dead sea. To have nothing to rouse you, nothing to stir you, nothing whose threat and onset tests the firmness of your spirit, but to lie in undisturbed leisure—that is not tranquility; that is stagnation.
Attalus the Stoic used to say, 'I would rather fortune keep me in her camp than among her indulgences. I'm tortured, but bravely: that's good. I'm being killed, but bravely: that's good.' Listen to Epicurus, and he'll say it's sweet too. I will never put so soft a name on something so honorable and severe a thing.
I am burned, but unconquered—why shouldn't this be something to be wished for? Not because the fire burns me, but because it does not defeat me. Nothing surpasses virtue, nothing is more beautiful; and whatever is carried out under its command is both good and to be wished for. Farewell.

======== Letter 68 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I agree with your plan: hide yourself away in leisure, but hide the leisure itself too. You may know that the Stoics would have you do this, if not by precept, then at least by example; but you'll do it by precept as well—you'll win the approval both of yourself and of whomever else you choose. We don't send everyone into public life, nor always, nor without any limit; besides, since we have given the wise man a commonwealth worthy of him—namely, the universe—he is not outside public life even when he has withdrawn from it; in fact, perhaps, having left behind one small corner, he passes into something greater and wider, and once set in the heavens he understands, as he takes his seat on a magistrate's chair or tribunal, how humble a place he used to occupy. Store this away in your mind: the wise man is never doing more than when things divine and human have come within his sight.
Now let me return to what I began urging on you—that your leisure should go unnoticed. You have no business labeling your retreat 'Philosophy' and 'quiet'; give your project some other name—call it ill health, or frailty, or plain idleness. To boast of one's leisure is a lazy kind of ambition. Some animals blur their own tracks around the den itself so they can't be found; you must do the same, or else there will be no shortage of people hunting you down. Many pass by what's out in the open, but pry into what's hidden and shut away; a locked door tempts a thief. Whatever lies exposed seems cheap; the burglar walks past open doors. This is the crowd's way, and every least experienced person's way: they long to break into secrets. So the best course is not to make a show of your leisure; and making too much of hiding is itself a kind of showing off. That man buried himself at Tarentum, that one shut himself up at Naples, another hasn't crossed his own threshold in many years: whoever turns his leisure into a story draws a crowd.
When you withdraw, the point is not to get people talking about you, but to talk with yourself. And what should you say? What people are only too glad to do about others—say hard things about yourself, to yourself; you'll grow used to both speaking the truth and hearing it. Above all, work on whatever you sense is weakest in yourself. Each of us knows the particular faults of his own body. So one man relieves his stomach by vomiting, another props it up with frequent meals, another empties and purges his body with an interposed fast; those whose feet are plagued by recurring pain abstain from wine or the baths: in other respects careless, they take precautions against the one thing that so often attacks them. So too in our minds there are certain, so to speak, sickly parts, which need to be given treatment.
What am I doing in my leisure? Tending my own sore. If I were showing you a swollen foot, a discolored hand, or the shriveled sinews of a shrunken leg, you would allow me to lie in one place and nurse my ailment: this is a worse trouble, that I can't show it to you—the abscess and the festering wound are inside the chest itself. I don't want, I don't want praise, I don't want you to say, 'What a great man! He has scorned everything and fled the madness of human life, which he condemns.' I have condemned nothing except myself. There's no reason for you to want to come to me for the sake of self-improvement. You're mistaken if you hope for any help from this quarter: it isn't a doctor who lives here, but a patient. I would rather, when you leave, you say: 'I used to think that man happy and learned—I had pricked up my ears—but I was let down; I saw nothing, heard nothing, that I coveted, or that would draw me back.' If that's what you feel, if that's what you say, something has been gained: I would rather you forgive my leisure than envy it.
'Are you recommending leisure to me, Seneca?' you say. 'Are you sliding down into Epicurean talk?' I recommend leisure to you in which you may do greater and finer things than the ones you've left behind: knocking on the proud doors of the powerful, drawing up in writing the names of childless old men, wielding great influence in the forum—that kind of power is enviable but brief, and, if you judge it truly, squalid. That man will far outstrip me in influence at the bar, that one in his years of military service and the standing won through them, that one in his crowd of dependents. I cannot be his equal; they have more favor to offer. It's worth being outdone by everyone else, so long as I outdo fortune.
If only the resolve to follow this course had come to you long ago! If only we were not discussing the happy life within sight of death! But even now we're not delaying too long; for many things which we would once have believed superfluous and hostile to reason, we now believe on the strength of experience. Let's do as those do who set out too late and want to make up for lost time by hurrying—let's put spurs to it. This age is best suited to these studies: it has already boiled itself down, it has already tired out the vices that ran unchecked in the first fever of youth; not much remains for it to extinguish. 'And when,' you ask, 'will what you're learning at the end of your life do you any good, or for what purpose?' For this: that I may leave life a better man. Still, there's no reason to think any age better suited to a sound mind than one that has tamed itself through many trials and long, repeated regret over past actions, and has come to what is wholesome only once the passions have been calmed. This is that good's proper season: whoever arrives at wisdom in old age arrives at it only after long years. Farewell.

======== Letter 69 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] I don't want you changing your location and leaping from one place to another. First, because such frequent moving is a sign of an unsettled mind: it cannot cohere in stillness unless it stops looking around and wandering. To hold your mind in place, first stop your body from fleeing. [2] Second, remedies work best when kept up without interruption: your quiet, and your forgetting of your former life, must not be broken off. Don't let your eyes unlearn their new habits, don't let your ears stop growing used to sounder words. Every time you go out, something will cross your path, right there in transit, that stirs your old cravings back to life. [3] Just as someone trying to shed a love affair must avoid every reminder of the body he loved - nothing flares back up more easily than love - so too a person who wants to lay aside his longing for all the things he once burned to have must turn his eyes and ears away from whatever he has left behind. [4] The feeling rebels quickly. Wherever it turns, it will spot some immediate reward for going back to its old business. No vice comes without a bribe: greed promises money, indulgence promises many and varied pleasures, ambition promises the purple robe and applause and, through them, power, and whatever power can buy. [5] Vices court you with a fee; here, you must live for free. It can hardly be managed in an entire lifetime to subdue vices so swollen with long license and make them accept the yoke - let alone if we keep breaking up the little time we have with these gaps. Constant vigilance and effort can barely bring even one single thing to completion. [6] If you're willing to listen to me, meditate on this and practice it: how to both welcome death and, if the situation calls for it, summon it yourself. It makes no difference whether death comes to us or we go to it. Convince yourself that the phrase every ignorant person repeats is false: 'it's a fine thing to die one's own death.' No one dies any death but his own. And consider this too: no one dies except on his own day. You lose nothing of your own time, for what you leave behind was never yours. Farewell.

======== Letter 70 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] After a long interval I have seen your beloved Pompeii again. I was brought back into the sight of my own youth; whatever I had done there as a young man, it seemed to me I could still do, and had done only a little while ago. [2] We have sailed past life, Lucilius, and just as at sea, as our Virgil says,
so in this course of swiftly rushing time, we first leave behind us childhood, then youth, then whatever lies between young and old, set on the border of both, then the best years of old age itself; last of all, the end common to the whole human race begins to come into view. [3] Only fools think that end is a reef; it is a harbor, one we must sometimes make for, and never one to refuse. If a person is carried into it in his early years, he has no more right to complain than someone who has made a quick voyage. For as you know, sluggish winds toy with one sailor and hold him back, wearying him with the tedium of a dead calm, while a steady, driving wind carries another along at great speed. [4] Assume the same happens to us: life brings some people swiftly to the point they had to reach even if they lingered, while it wears others down slowly, cooking them over time. Life, as you know, is not something always to be clung to; for living is not itself the good - living well is.
So the wise person will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. [5] He will consider where he is going to live, with whom, how, and doing what. He always thinks about the quality of life, not its length. If many troubles arise that disturb his peace, he lets himself go; and he does this not only as a last resort, but as soon as fortune first begins to look suspect to him, he looks carefully around to see whether it's time to stop there. He thinks it makes no real difference to him whether he brings the end about himself or merely accepts it, whether it comes sooner or later: he does not fear it as some great loss - no one can lose much from a mere trickle. [6] Dying sooner or later doesn't matter; dying well or badly does. And dying well means escaping the danger of living badly. That's why I think the words of that Rhodian were thoroughly unmanly: thrown into a cage by a tyrant and fed like some wild animal, when someone urged him to refuse food, he said, 'While a man lives, he should hope for everything.' [7] Even granting that this is true, life should not be bought at any price. Some things, however great and certain, I still will not stoop to purchase by such a shameful confession of weakness. Should I really think that fortune has power over everything, so long as a man lives - rather than think that fortune has no power at all over a man who knows how to die?
[8] Yet sometimes, even when death is certain and closing in and a person knows the punishment set for him, he will not lend a hand to his own execution - he would be lending it to himself. It is foolish to die from fear of dying: your killer is coming - wait for him. Why anticipate it? Why take over the administration of someone else's cruelty? Are you begrudging your executioner his job, or sparing him the trouble? [9] Socrates could have ended his life by refusing food, dying of starvation rather than by poison; yet he spent thirty days in prison awaiting death, not with the attitude that anything could still happen, that so long a stretch of time still held out many hopes, but so as to make himself available to the laws, and to let his friends enjoy Socrates right up to the very end. What could have been more foolish than to scorn death but fear poison? [10] Scribonia, a woman of great dignity, was the aunt of Drusus Libo, a young man as stupid as he was well-born, hoping for things greater than anyone in that age could hope for - or than he himself could really hope for. When he was carried home from the Senate ill, in a litter, with hardly a crowd attending him - since all his connections had already abandoned him out of disloyalty, treating him now not as an accused man but as a corpse - he began to deliberate whether to take his own life or wait it out. Scribonia said to him, 'What pleasure do you find in doing someone else's business?' She did not persuade him: he laid hands on himself, and not without reason. For a man who lives on three or four more days only to die at his enemy's discretion is indeed doing someone else's business.
[11] So you cannot make a blanket pronouncement about whether, when death is being threatened by some outside force, one should seize it first or wait for it; there are many considerations that can pull the matter either way. If one death comes with torture, and the other is simple and easy, why not reach for the latter? Just as I would choose a ship if I were about to sail, or a house if I were about to live in one, so I would choose a death if I were about to leave life. [12] Furthermore, just as a longer life is not necessarily a better one, a longer death is necessarily a worse one. In no matter should we defer to the spirit's own inclination more than in death. Let it leave by whatever impulse it has seized on: whether it reaches for the sword, the noose, or some drink that seizes the veins, let it go forward and break the chains of its servitude. Everyone is obliged to justify his life to others, but his death only to himself: the best death is the one you like. [13] It is foolish to worry about things like this: 'someone will say I didn't act bravely enough, someone else that I was too rash, someone else that some other kind of death would have shown more spirit.' Do you really want to consider that what's in your hands here is a decision that has nothing to do with reputation? Look only to this: to tear yourself free of fortune as quickly as you can. Otherwise there will always be people ready to think ill of what you've done.
[14] You will even find people who profess wisdom and yet deny that one should use force against one's own life, and judge it a sin to become one's own killer: we must, they say, wait for the end that nature has decreed. Whoever says this fails to see that he is closing off the road to freedom: the eternal law did nothing better than to give us one entrance into life, but many exits. [15] Am I to wait for the cruelty of disease or of a man, when I can walk out through the middle of my torments and shake off my troubles? This is the one thing we cannot complain about in life: it holds no one against his will. Human affairs stand in a good position, because no one is wretched except by his own fault. If you like it, live; if you don't, you may go back to where you came from. [16] To relieve a headache, you have often had blood let; a vein is opened to reduce the body's fullness. There's no need to slash open the chest with some huge wound: a scalpel opens the way to that great freedom, and a single puncture secures your liberty. What is it, then, that makes us sluggish and idle? None of us thinks that someday he will have to leave this house; that's how old tenants are kept in place by fondness for the location and long habit, even amid its injuries. [17] Do you want to be free with respect to this body? Live in it as though you are about to move out. Picture to yourself that at some point you'll have to do without this shared lodging: you'll be stronger in facing the necessity of leaving it. But how will the thought of an end ever occur to people who crave everything without end? [18] No exercise of thought is more necessary than this one - other exercises, perhaps, are performed to no purpose. We have prepared our minds against poverty: yet our wealth remained intact. We have armed ourselves to scorn pain: yet the good fortune of a sound, healthy body has never demanded that we actually put that virtue to the test. We have trained ourselves to bear bravely the loss of those we love: yet fortune has kept alive, safe and unharmed, everyone we ever loved. [19] But the day will come that demands we put this one skill to use. You should not suppose that only great men have had the strength to break through the bars of human servitude, or judge that no one but Cato could have done it, Cato who tore out with his own hand the life he had failed to release with the sword: men of the meanest condition have, in a great burst of will, escaped to safety, and when they were not permitted to die at their own convenience or to choose the instruments of death as they pleased, they seized whatever lay in their path and made deadly weapons, by sheer force, out of things that by nature were harmless. [20] Recently, at a training school for beast-fighters, one of the Germans, while getting ready for the morning show, withdrew to relieve himself - the only privacy allowed him without a guard - and there he took the stick fitted with a sponge, used for cleaning the more shameful parts, and rammed the whole thing down his throat, choking off his breath and crushing his own windpipe. That was to insult death itself. Just so, and none too clean or decent about it: but then what is more foolish than to be squeamish about dying? [21] O brave man, worthy to have been given the choice of his own fate! How courageously he would have wielded a sword, how boldly he would have hurled himself into the depths of the sea or off some sheer cliff! Stripped of everything, he still found a way to provide himself both a death and a weapon, so you can see that nothing else delays a person's dying except the will to do it. Let each person judge this fierce man's act as he sees fit, so long as this much is agreed: even the filthiest death is to be preferred to the cleanest slavery.
[22] Since I've begun using low examples, I'll keep at it - for a person will demand more of himself if he sees that even the most despised people can hold death in contempt. We think of Catos and Scipios, and others we're used to hearing about with admiration, as set beyond our imitation; but I will now show you that this same virtue has just as many examples in a school for beast-fighters as among the generals of the civil war. [23] Recently, as one of the condemned men, under guard, was being carried to the morning show, he began to nod as though overcome by sleep, and let his head droop lower and lower until he could slip it between the spokes of the wheel, and he held himself there in his seat until the wheel's turning broke his neck. He escaped by means of the very cart that was carrying him to his punishment. [24] Nothing stands in the way of a person eager to burst out and escape: nature keeps us guarded only in the open. Whoever's circumstances allow it should look around for a gentle way out; whoever has several means close at hand for asserting his freedom should make a choice among them and consider by which one he might best be freed; whoever finds the opportunity difficult should seize whatever comes closest to hand as though it were the best, even if it is unheard of, even if it is strange. Ingenuity for dying will never fail the person who has not failed to summon the will. [25] You see how even the lowliest slaves, once pain has driven its goad into them, rouse themselves and outwit the most closely watched guards? That man is truly great who has not merely obeyed the command to die, but has invented his own way of doing it. I promised you more examples from that same show. [26] At the second staged sea-battle, one of the barbarians drove clean through his own throat the spear he had been given to use against his opponents. 'Why, why,' he said, 'don't I escape at once from every torment, every mockery? Why do I wait for death armed?' This spectacle was all the more striking because it shows men learning to die more nobly than they learn to kill. [27] What, then? Will those whom long meditation and reason, the teacher of all things, have equipped against such misfortunes, not have the same capacity that even ruined, guilty minds possess? Reason teaches us that the roads to our fated end vary, but the end itself is the same, and that it makes no difference at all where the thing that is coming begins. [28] That same reason advises that if you are permitted, you should die as you please; if not, then as you can, and you should seize whatever comes to hand to use force against yourself. It is criminal to live by plunder, but on the contrary, it is a most beautiful thing to die by plunder. Farewell.

======== Letter 71 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You keep asking me about individual problems, forgetting that a vast sea separates us. Since a large part of good counsel lies in timing, it's inevitable that on some matters my opinion reaches you only when the opposite course has already become the better one. Advice has to be fitted to circumstances; our circumstances are being carried along, or rather swept along, so advice needs to be born close to the day it's used. And even that is too slow: it needs to be born on the spot, as they say. Let me show you how that's done. Whenever you want to know what to avoid or what to pursue, look to the highest good, the guiding purpose of your whole life. Everything we do ought to be consistent with that; no one will get the details right who hasn't already settled on the overall design of his life. No one, however many colors he has ready, will produce a likeness unless he already knows what he wants to paint. That's why we go wrong: we all deliberate about the parts of life, and no one deliberates about the whole. Anyone who wants to shoot an arrow needs to know what he's aiming at, and only then direct and steady his hand toward the target; our plans go astray because they have nothing to aim at. For a man who doesn't know what harbor he's making for, no wind is the right wind. Chance is bound to have great power over our lives, because we live by chance. But some people manage not to know things they in fact know; just as we sometimes go looking for the very people we're standing next to, so most of us fail to notice that the goal of the highest good is right in front of us. You won't work out what the highest good is through many words or a long detour: it has to be pointed to, so to speak, with a finger, not scattered into many pieces. What's the use of breaking it down into fragments? You can simply say: the highest good is what is honorable, and, more surprisingly still, the only good is what is honorable; everything else is a false, counterfeit good. If you convince yourself of this and fall in love with virtue — for merely liking it isn't enough — then whatever happens to touch that virtue, however it looks to others, will be lucky and happy for you. Being tortured, provided you lie there more secure than your torturer; being sick, provided you don't curse fortune or give in to the disease — all the things that look like evils to everyone else will grow tame and turn into goods, if you rise above them. Let this be clear: nothing is good except what is honorable. And every hardship will rightly be called good, so long as virtue has made it honorable. To many people we seem to promise more than the human condition can deliver, and not without reason — because they're looking at the body. Let them turn back to the mind: then they'll measure a human being against a god.
Stand up straight, Lucilius, best of men, and leave behind that grammar-school game the philosophers play, reducing the grandest subject to syllables, dragging the mind down and wearing it out with petty instruction. You'll end up resembling the men who invented these ideas, not the ones who merely teach them and manage to make philosophy look difficult rather than great. Socrates, who brought all of philosophy back to conduct and said that this — distinguishing good from evil — was the whole of wisdom, said: 'Follow those men, if I carry any authority with you, so that you may be happy, and let yourself be thought a fool by someone. Let anyone who wants to insult you and wrong you do so; still you will suffer nothing, so long as virtue stays with you. If you want,' he said, 'to be happy, if you want in good faith to be a good man, let someone despise you.' No one can achieve this except a man who has first despised everything himself, who has ranked all goods as equal, because there is no good without honor, and honor is equal in all its instances.
'What, then? Is there no difference between Cato's praetorship and his defeat in the election? Is there no difference between Cato losing at Pharsalus and Cato winning there? Was the good in him, by which his defeated party could not defeat him, equal to the good by which he would have returned victorious to his country and arranged the peace?' Why shouldn't it be equal? The same virtue conquers bad fortune and puts good fortune in order; and virtue cannot become greater or smaller — it is of one fixed stature. 'But Pompey will lose his army; that splendid facade of the republic, the optimates, the front line of Pompey's party — a senate bearing arms — will be crushed in a single battle, and the ruin of so great an empire will scatter across the whole world: part of it will fall in Egypt, part in Africa, part in Spain. The unhappy republic won't even be granted the mercy of collapsing just once.' Let all of it happen: let Juba get no help in his own kingdom from knowledge of the terrain, nor from the stubborn courage of his people fighting for their king; let even the loyalty of the people of Utica break under disaster and fail; let Scipio's own name betray him in Africa. It was arranged long ago that Cato would suffer no loss. 'And yet he was defeated.' Then count that too among Cato's electoral defeats: he will bear with just as great a spirit the fact that something stood in the way of his victory as he bore the fact that something stood in the way of his praetorship. On the day he was defeated in the election, he played games; on the night he was going to die, he read. He regarded losing the praetorship and losing his life as the same sort of thing; he had convinced himself that whatever happened had to be borne.
Why shouldn't he have endured the upheaval of the republic with a brave and level mind? What is exempt from the risk of change? Not the earth, not the sky, not this whole fabric of things, even though it is guided by the working of a god; it will not keep this order forever, but some day will be thrown off this course. Everything moves on its appointed schedule: things must be born, grow, and be extinguished. Whatever you see running its course above us, and these things on which we stand and lean as if they were utterly solid, will wear away and come to an end; nothing lacks its own old age. Nature dismisses all things toward the same end by unequal intervals: whatever is will cease to be, but it will not perish — it will be dissolved. To us, being dissolved feels like perishing; for we look only at what's nearest, and our sluggish mind, one that has committed itself to the body, doesn't look further ahead. Otherwise it would bear the end of itself and its own more bravely, if it hoped that, just like everything else, life and death likewise pass in turns — things composed are taken apart, things taken apart are composed again — and that in this labor lies the eternal art of the god who governs all things. And so, as Marcus Cato will say, once he has run through the whole span of time in his mind: 'The whole human race, what is and what will be, is condemned to death; all the cities that ever hold power anywhere, and all the great ornaments of foreign empires, will one day be asked where they were, and will be removed by various kinds of destruction: some will be destroyed by wars, others will be consumed by idleness and a peace turned to laziness, and by that ruinous thing that comes with great wealth, luxury. All these fertile plains will be swallowed by a sudden flood of the sea, or carried off by the collapse of settling ground into a sudden chasm. Why then should I be indignant or grieve, if I go ahead of the fate of the state by so small a margin?' Let a great mind obey god, and endure without hesitation whatever the law of the universe commands. Either it is sent out into a better life, to dwell more brightly and calmly among things divine, or at least it will exist without any harm at all, if it is remixed with nature and returns into the whole. So the honorable life of Marcus Cato is no greater good than his honorable death, since virtue is never stretched beyond itself. Socrates used to say that truth and virtue were the same thing. Just as truth does not increase, neither does virtue: it has its own measure, and it is already complete.
So you shouldn't be surprised that goods are equal, both the ones we choose deliberately and the ones that come our way because circumstances demanded it. If you accept this inequality — counting bravely-endured torture among the lesser goods — you will also have to count things among the lesser evils, and you'll end up calling Socrates unhappy in prison, calling Cato unhappy as he tore open his own wounds more fiercely than he had first inflicted them, calling Regulus the most miserable man of all for paying the penalty of keeping his word even to his enemies. Yet no one has dared to say this, not even the most softhearted; they deny that such a man is happy, but they still deny that he is wretched. The old Academics admit that he is happy even amid such torments, but not perfectly or completely happy — which can't be accepted at all: unless he is happy, he is not in possession of the highest good. The highest good has no rank above itself, provided virtue is present in him, provided adversity doesn't diminish it, provided it remains intact even when the body is broken — and it does remain. For I understand virtue to be spirited and lofty, something that is spurred on by whatever attacks it. This spirit, which noble young men of good natural character often put on when the beauty of some honorable action has struck them, so that they scorn everything that depends on chance — wisdom will surely instill and hand down in full; it will convince them that the only good is what is honorable, that this can be neither loosened nor tightened, any more than you can bend the ruler by which straightness is normally tested. Whatever you change in it is a wrong done to straightness itself. So we'll say the same about virtue: it too is straight, and admits no bending — though it can certainly be strengthened, made more taut. Virtue passes judgment on everything else; nothing passes judgment on it. If virtue itself cannot be made more upright, then not even the actions that come from it are more upright than one another; they must correspond to it, and so they are equal.
'What, then?' you say, 'is lying on a dining couch at a banquet the same as being stretched on the rack?' Does that seem surprising to you? Here's something you may find still more surprising: lying at a banquet can be an evil, and lying on the rack can be a good, if the one is done shamefully and the other honorably. It is not the material that makes these things good or bad, but virtue; wherever virtue appears, everything is of the same measure and the same worth. Now that man shakes his fist in my face who judges everyone's spirit by his own, because I say that the goods are equal for someone who judges honorably and for someone who is tested honorably, because I say the goods are equal for the man who celebrates a triumph and for the man who is led before the chariot with his spirit unconquered. Such people don't believe that anything can happen that they themselves are incapable of doing; they pass judgment on virtue out of their own weakness. Why are you surprised if being burned, wounded, killed, chained sometimes brings pleasure, even delight? To the extravagant man, frugality is a punishment; to the lazy man, work is like a penalty; the pampered man pities the hardworking one; to the idle man, study feels like torture. In the same way, we consider things that we're all too weak to face as harsh and unbearable, forgetting how many people find it torment just to go without wine or to be woken at first light. These things are not difficult by nature; we are the ones who are soft and drained of strength. We need to judge great matters with a great spirit; otherwise what is really our own fault will look like a fault in the things themselves. In the same way, certain perfectly straight objects, when lowered into water, appear bent and broken to onlookers. It matters not only what you see, but how you see it: our mind is clouded when it comes to perceiving the truth clearly. Give me a young man of uncorrupted character and lively natural gifts: he will say that the man who can bear the whole weight of adversity with an unbending neck seems to him luckier — the man who rises above fortune. It's no wonder that a person isn't shaken when things are calm; what you should marvel at is someone rising up precisely where everyone else is pushed down, standing precisely where everyone else lies flat. What evil is there in torments, or in the other things we call adversities? This, I think: that the mind gives way, bends, and collapses. None of that can happen to a wise man: he stands upright under any weight whatsoever. Nothing makes him smaller; nothing among the things that must be endured displeases him. For whatever can happen to any human being, he does not complain has happened to him in particular. He knows his own strength; he knows he is capable of bearing the burden. I do not remove the wise man from the ranks of humanity, nor do I shield him from pain as if he were some rock with no capacity for feeling. I remember that he is composed of two parts: one is irrational, and this part is bitten, burned, hurt; the other is rational, and this part holds unshaken convictions, is fearless and unconquered. In this rational part lies that highest good of man. Before it is complete, the mind's movement is uncertain; but once it is perfected, its stability is unmoved. And so a man who is only beginning, advancing toward the heights, a devoted follower of virtue, even if he is drawing near to the complete good but has not yet put the final touch on it, will sometimes step backward and relax the tension of his mind somewhat; for he has not yet passed beyond uncertainty, and he is still walking on slippery ground. But the truly happy man, the man of perfected virtue, loves himself most precisely when he has been tested most bravely, and things that others dread — if they are the price of some honorable duty — he not only bears but embraces, and much prefers to hear 'the better for it' than 'the luckier for it.'
Now I come to the point my anticipation of your objection is calling me to. So that our virtue doesn't seem to be wandering outside the bounds of nature, the wise man will indeed tremble, and feel pain, and turn pale; these are all bodily sensations. So where, then, is disaster, where is real evil? There, of course, if these things drag the mind down, if they lead it to confess its own enslavement, if they make it regret its own condition. The wise man does conquer fortune by virtue, but many people who have professed wisdom have sometimes been terrified by the flimsiest threats. This is our own fault at this point, in that we demand the same thing from the wise man and from the man still making progress. I am still only persuading myself of the things I praise; I have not yet fully convinced myself; and even if I had convinced myself, I wouldn't yet have those convictions so ready and so well-drilled that they would rush forward to meet every circumstance. Just as wool takes some dyes at once, but absorbs others only after repeated soaking and boiling, so some natural gifts show the effects of certain disciplines the moment they receive them, while this discipline, unless it sinks deep and settles in for a long time, coloring the mind rather than merely dyeing its surface, delivers none of what it promised. This much can be taught quickly and in very few words: that virtue is the only good, that certainly nothing is good without virtue, and that virtue itself is situated in the better part of us — that is, the rational part. What will this virtue be? True and unshaken judgment. From this will come the impulses of the mind; by this, every impression that stirs an impulse will be tested and clarified. Consistent with this judgment will be the conclusion that everything touched by virtue is good, and equally good among themselves. But the goods of the body are indeed goods for the body, though not goods in an unqualified sense; they will have some price, but no dignity; they will differ from one another by great intervals: some will be smaller, others greater. And among those actually pursuing wisdom, we must admit there are great differences: one has already made such progress that he dares to raise his eyes against fortune, though not persistently — for such men fall, dazzled by too much brilliance; another has made such progress that he can meet fortune's gaze face to face, unless indeed he has already reached the summit and is full of confidence. The imperfect are bound to waver, sometimes advancing, sometimes slipping back or collapsing. And they will slip back, unless they persevere in going forward and striving; if they relax at all in their dedication and faithful effort, they must go back the way they came. No one finds the progress he has made still there when he returns to the place he had abandoned it.
So let us press on and persevere; more remains than we have already accomplished, but a great part of progress is wanting to make progress. I am aware of this in myself: I want it, and I want it with my whole mind. I see that you too are driven and hurrying with great energy toward the finest things. Let us hurry: only then will life be a gift; otherwise it is a delay, and a shameful one at that, for people caught up in disgraceful things. Let us see to it that all our time becomes truly our own; but it will not be, unless we ourselves first begin to belong to ourselves. When will we manage to scorn both kinds of fortune, when will we manage, with all our passions suppressed and brought under our own control, to utter this word: 'I have won'? You ask whom I have conquered. Not the Persians, nor the farthest reaches of the Medes, nor whatever warlike people lie beyond the Dahae, but greed, but ambition, but the fear of death — which has conquered the conquerors of nations. Farewell.

======== Letter 72 ========

[1] What you're asking me was clear to me - I had the matter learned by heart - on its own account; but I haven't tested my memory in a long time, so it doesn't follow me easily. What happens to books stuck together from sitting unused, I feel has happened to me: the mind needs to be unfolded, and whatever has been laid up in it must be shaken out from time to time, so that it's ready whenever use demands it. So let's put this off for now; it calls for a good deal of work, a good deal of care. As soon as I hope for a longer stay in one place, I'll take the matter in hand. [2] Some things you can write even riding in a gig; others require a couch, leisure, and privacy. Nonetheless, even on these busy days something should be done - and indeed the whole of it. New business will never fail to turn up: we sow it ourselves, and so out of one thing many come forth. Then we grant ourselves postponements: 'once I've finished this, I'll throw myself into it wholeheartedly,' and 'once I've settled this annoying business, I'll devote myself to study.' [3] Philosophy isn't to be pursued when you have free time - you're to make free time so that you can pursue philosophy; everything else is to be neglected so that we can attend to this, for which no amount of time is enough, even if life is stretched from childhood to the furthest limits of a human lifespan. It makes little difference whether you drop philosophy or merely suspend it; for it doesn't stay where it was interrupted, but like things stretched taut that snap apart, it springs back to its starting point once it breaks off from continuity. We must resist our engagements - they're not to be untangled but pushed aside. No time, in fact, is too unsuitable for beneficial study; and yet many people fail to study amid the very things for which studying is needed. [4] 'Something will come up to get in the way.' Not for the man whose mind is glad and eager in every undertaking: in those still imperfect, joy is cut through with interruptions, but the sage's joy is woven seamlessly, broken by no cause, no turn of fortune; he is tranquil always and everywhere. For he doesn't depend on anything outside himself, and doesn't wait on fortune's favor or another man's. His happiness is his own household affair; it would leave his mind if it entered from outside - it is born there. [5] Occasionally something from outside comes along to remind him of his mortality, but it's a light thing, scraping only the surface of the skin. He is brushed by some inconvenience, I grant you, but that greatest good of his stands fixed. What I mean is this: there are some outward inconveniences, just as in a body that is strong and sound there sometimes break out a few pustules and small sores, but there is no sickness deep within. [6] This, I say, is the difference between the man of perfected wisdom and one still advancing, the same as between a healthy man and one emerging from a serious, long illness, for whom a lighter relapse counts as health: the latter, if he isn't careful, is soon weighed down again and rolls back into the same state; the sage cannot relapse, and indeed cannot fall ill any further. For the body, good health is only a matter of time - even the doctor, when he restores it, doesn't guarantee it, for he is often called back to the very same patient who summoned him before. The mind, once healed, is healed entirely. [7] I'll tell you how you can recognize a healthy mind: if it is content with itself, if it trusts itself, if it knows that all the wishes of mortal men, all the favors given and sought, carry no weight at all in a happy life. For whatever something can be added to is imperfect; whatever something can be taken from is not permanent - and the man whose joy is to be everlasting should rejoice in what is his own. But everything the crowd gapes after flows back and forth: fortune gives nothing as an outright possession. Yet even these chance gifts delight us only when reason has tempered and blended them - it is reason that even lends worth to external things, whose enjoyment is thankless for the greedy. [8] Attalus used to use this image: 'Have you ever seen a dog snapping with open mouth at scraps of bread or meat thrown by its master? Whatever it catches it swallows whole at once, and its mouth still hangs open in hope of what's to come. The same thing happens to us: whatever fortune tosses to us as we wait for it, we gulp down at once without any pleasure, already straining and gaping toward the next snatch.' This doesn't happen to the sage: he is full; even if something comes his way, he takes it calmly and sets it aside; he enjoys the greatest joy, continuous, his own. [9] Someone has good intentions, has made progress, but is still a long way short of the summit: this man is thrown down and lifted up by turns, now raised to the sky, now brought back down to earth. For the untrained and unskilled there's no end to the plunging; they fall into that Epicurean chaos, an empty void without limit. [10] There is yet a third kind - those who are within reach of wisdom, though they haven't actually touched it, yet have it in view and, so to speak, within striking distance: these are not shaken, nor do they slip back; they aren't yet on dry land, but they're already in port. [11] So then, since the differences between the highest and the lowest are so great, and since even those in the middle have their own wave to follow, along with the huge danger of sliding back to worse things, we mustn't indulge our engagements. They must be shut out: if they get in even once, they'll put others in their place. Let's resist their very beginnings: better that they not start than that we have to stop them. Farewell.

======== Letter 73 ========

[1] Those seem to me mistaken who think that men faithfully devoted to philosophy are stubborn and rebellious, contemptuous of magistrates or kings or whoever administers public affairs. On the contrary, no one is more grateful toward them, and not without reason; for to no one do they grant more than to those who are allowed to enjoy peaceful leisure. [2] And so those for whom public security contributes a great deal toward their purpose of living well cannot help but honor the author of this good as a parent - much more so, indeed, than those restless people caught up in the middle of things, who owe rulers a great deal but also charge them with a great deal, people whom no generosity can ever satisfy so fully that it exhausts their desires, which grow as they are fed. Whoever thinks about receiving more has already forgotten what he's received, and greed has no worse fault than that it is ungrateful. [3] Add to this that none of those engaged in politics looks at how many he outranks, but at those by whom he is outranked; and it's not so pleasant for them to see many below them as it is grievous to see anyone above. Every form of ambition has this flaw: it never looks back. Nor is ambition alone unstable - so is every kind of desire, because it always starts from the finish line. [4] But that sincere and pure man, who has left behind the senate house and the forum and all administration of public affairs in order to withdraw to greater things, cherishes those through whom he is able to do this safely, and he alone renders them a testimony that asks for nothing in return, and owes them a great debt of which they are unaware. Just as he venerates and looks up to his teachers, by whose kindness he finds a way out of pathless places, so too he honors those under whose protection he practices his good arts.
[5] 'But a king protects others too, by his own strength.' Who denies it? But just as a man who has carried more valuable cargo across that same sea, enjoying the same calm, judges that he owes more to Neptune than others do - a vow is paid more eagerly by the merchant than by the passenger, and among the merchants themselves more lavishly by the one who carried perfumes and purple cloth and goods weighed out in gold than by the one who had loaded up nothing but the cheapest stuff, fit only for ballast - so too the benefit of this peace, which touches everyone, reaches more deeply into those who make good use of it. [6] For there are many among these toga-wearing citizens for whom peace is more burdensome than war: do you think those who spend it on drunkenness or lust or other vices - vices that even war would be needed to break up - owe as much for peace as anyone else? Unless perhaps you think it so unfair of the sage that he should judge he owes nothing individually for the common good. I owe a very great deal to the sun and moon, and yet they don't rise for me alone; I am bound privately to the god who tempers the year and rules it, even though nothing has been arranged specially in my honor. [7] The foolish greed of mortals distinguishes possession from ownership and believes that nothing that is public can be its own; but the sage judges nothing more his own than that in which he shares in common with the human race. For these things wouldn't be common at all unless some portion of them belonged to each individual; even the smallest share in something common makes one a partner in it.
[8] Add to this that great and true goods are not divided up so that only a small portion falls to each person: the whole reaches every single one. From a public handout people carry off only as much as was promised per head; a public feast and the meat distributed and whatever else is taken by hand is split into shares; but these indivisible goods, peace and liberty, belong just as wholly to everyone as they do to each individual. [9] And so he reflects on the man through whom he comes to enjoy the use and benefit of these things, through whom public necessity does not call him to arms, nor to standing watches, nor to guarding the walls, nor to the manifold tribute of war, and he gives thanks to his helmsman. This is what philosophy teaches above all: to owe benefits well, and to repay them well; and sometimes the very acknowledgment is itself the repayment. [10] He will confess, then, that he owes a great deal to the one through whose administration and foresight he comes to enjoy a rich leisure and control over his own time and an untroubled quiet, free from public business.
O Meliboeus, a god has granted us this leisure;
for he will always be a god to me.
[11] If even that other leisure owes a great debt to its own author, whose greatest gift is this -
he allowed my cattle to wander, as you see, and allowed me myself
to play what I wished on my rustic pipe -
how much do we value this leisure, which is spent among the gods, which makes us gods?
[12] That's how I put it, Lucilius, and I'm calling you to heaven by a shortcut. Sextius used to say that Jupiter can do no more than a good man. Jupiter has more things to grant to men, but between two good men the one who is wealthier is not the better one - any more than, between two men equally skilled at handling the tiller, you'd call the one with the bigger and more splendid ship the better sailor. [13] In what does Jupiter surpass a good man? He is good for a longer time. The sage rates himself no less because his virtues are confined within a shorter span. Just as, of two sages, the one who died older is not happier than the one whose virtue was bounded within fewer years, so god does not surpass the sage in happiness, even if he surpasses him in age; virtue is not greater for being longer. [14] Jupiter has everything, but of course he's handed it over to others to hold; to himself belongs this one use of it, that it is the reason for everyone else's use of things. The sage looks upon everything held by others, and scorns it, with a mind just as untroubled as Jupiter's - and he looks up to himself all the more for this, that Jupiter cannot make use of these things, while the sage does not wish to. [15] So let's trust Sextius, who points out the most beautiful path and cries out, 'this way -
this way, following frugality; this way, following self-control; this way, following courage.' The gods are not disdainful, not envious; they let you in, and reach out a hand to those climbing up. [16] Are you surprised that a man goes to the gods? God comes to men - or rather, closer still, he comes into men: no mind is good without god. Divine seeds are scattered through human bodies, and if a good farmer receives them, they spring up resembling their origin and rise equal to the things from which they arose; if a bad one, they die no differently than barren, marshy ground, and thereafter produce weeds instead of crops. Farewell.

======== Letter 74 ========

[1] Your letter delighted me and roused me from my torpor; it also called up my memory, which by now has grown sluggish and slow. And why shouldn't you, my dear Lucilius, think this conviction the greatest instrument of the happy life: that the only good is what is honorable? For whoever judges other things to be goods falls under the power of fortune, becomes subject to another's control; but whoever has bounded every good within the honorable is happy within himself. [2] This man is grieved by the loss of his children, that one is anxious over the sick, another is saddened by disgraceful conduct spattered with some infamy; you will see one man tortured by love for another's wife, another by love for his own; there will be no shortage of a man twisted by a rejection, and there will be others whom honor itself torments. [3] But the largest crowd of the wretched, out of the whole population of mortals, is that which is harried by the expectation of death looming over them from every side; for there is no direction from which it cannot come. And so, like people stationed in enemy territory, they must look about them this way and that, and turn their necks at every noise; unless this fear has been cast out of the breast, life is lived with a fluttering heart. [4] They will meet men driven into exile and stripped of their goods; they will meet men poor in the midst of riches, which is the heaviest kind of poverty; they will meet the shipwrecked and those who have suffered things like shipwreck—men scattered by popular anger, or by envy, that ruinous weapon against the best of men, while they were unsuspecting and secure, in the manner of a storm that tends to rise up out of the very confidence of a clear sky, or of a sudden lightning bolt at whose stroke even the neighboring places trembled. For just as there, whoever stood nearer the fire went numb as if struck himself, so among those to whom something happens by some violent force, calamity crushes one, fear crushes the rest, and it makes those who merely could have suffered feel a sadness equal to those who did. [5] The misfortunes of others, when sudden, disturb the minds of everyone. Just as birds are frightened even by the mere sound of an empty slingshot, so we too are stirred not only by the blow itself but by the mere crack of it. No one, then, can be happy who has entrusted himself to this opinion. For nothing is happy unless it is free of fear; life is lived badly amid suspicions. [6] Whoever has given himself over greatly to chance has made for himself an enormous and inextricable source of disturbance; there is one single road for the person walking toward safety: to look down on external things and be content with the honorable. For whoever thinks something better than virtue, or thinks any good exists apart from it, opens wide his lap to whatever fortune scatters about, and anxiously awaits her missiles. [7] Set this image before your mind: imagine fortune putting on games, and scattering among this gathering of mortals honors, riches, and favor—things of which some are torn apart in the hands of the grabbing crowd, others are divided up in some faithless partnership, others are seized to the great loss of those into whose hands they fell. Of these, some fall to people who weren't even trying for them, some, precisely because they were too eagerly sought after, are lost and knocked away in the very act of being greedily snatched up; and for no one, not even the man for whom the grab succeeded happily, did the joy of the prize last on into the future. And so the most prudent of men, as soon as he sees the little gifts being brought out, flees the theater, and knows that small things cost a great deal. No one comes to blows with someone who is walking away, no one strikes at someone leaving; the fight is over the prize while it's still in the air. [8] The same thing happens with these things that fortune tosses down from above: we wretches seethe, we are pulled apart, we long to have many hands, we look now this way, now that; things that inflame our desires seem to us to be thrown too slowly, things that will reach only a few but are hoped for by all. [9] We long to rush toward the things as they fall; we rejoice if we have grabbed hold of something, and if some vain hope of grabbing has deceived us; we pay for our cheap prize with some great loss, or else we are simply deceived. Let us, then, withdraw from these games and give the grabbers their place; let them watch these goods hanging in the air, and let them themselves hang all the more.
[10] Whoever resolves to be happy should think this the only good: what is honorable. For if he reckons any other thing a good, in the first place he judges providence badly, because many misfortunes befall just men, and because whatever it has given us is brief and small if you compare it to the age of the whole universe. [11] Out of this complaint arises our ingratitude as interpreters of divine things: we complain that our goods do not last forever, that what falls to us is little, uncertain, and destined to pass away. Hence it happens that we want neither to live nor to die: hatred of life grips us, and fear of death. Every plan we make wavers, and no happiness can fill us up. The reason is that we have not arrived at that immense and unconquerable good where our will must necessarily come to rest, because there is no place beyond the highest point. [12] You ask why virtue needs nothing? It rejoices in what is present, it does not crave what is absent; nothing that is enough is anything but great to it. Depart from this judgment, and neither devotion nor good faith will hold firm, for a person who wants to render both fully must endure many of the things called evils, and must spend many of the things we indulge in as though they were goods. [13] Courage perishes, which ought to put itself at risk; greatness of soul perishes, which cannot stand out unless it has despised as trifles all the things the crowd wishes for as if they were the greatest; gratitude and the repayment of gratitude perish if we fear hardship, if we know anything more precious than good faith, if we do not keep our eyes on what is best.
[14] But to pass over those points: either those things called goods are not goods, or man is happier than god, since indeed god does not have in his use the things dear to us; for lust does not belong to him, nor the extravagance of feasts, nor wealth, nor anything of the things that entice men and lead them on with cheap pleasure. So either it must be believed that god lacks goods, or this very fact is proof that they are not goods, namely that god lacks them. [15] Add to this that many things which wish to be seen as goods fall more fully to animals than to man. Animals use food more eagerly, are not wearied equally by sex; their strength has greater and more even endurance; it follows that they would be much happier than man. For they live without wickedness, without deceit; they enjoy pleasures, and they seize them more fully and more easily, without any fear of shame or regret. [16] Consider, then, whether that ought to be called a good in which god is outdone by man, and man by animals. Let us keep the highest good contained within the mind: it goes stale if it passes from the best part of us to the worst, and is transferred to the senses, which are more agile in dumb animals. The sum of our happiness must not be placed in the flesh: those goods are the true ones which reason gives, solid and everlasting, which cannot fall, and cannot even shrink or diminish. [17] The rest are goods only by opinion, and indeed they share a name in common with the true goods, but the property of being good is not in them; so let them be called advantages, and, to use our own language, 'produced things.' For the rest, let us know that they are our slaves, not parts of us, and let them be in our possession, but in such a way that we remember they are outside us; even if they are in our possession, let them be counted among the subject and lowly things, on account of which no one ought to exalt himself. For what is more foolish than for someone to be pleased with himself over something he himself did not make? [18] Let all these things come to us without clinging to us, so that if they are taken away, they may depart without any tearing of ourselves. Let us use them, not boast of them, and let us use them sparingly, as things deposited with us and destined to leave. Whoever possessed them without reason did not hold them long; for happiness itself, unless it is tempered, weighs down on the one who has it. If a person has trusted in the most fleeting of goods, he is quickly abandoned, and, in being abandoned, is afflicted. Few have been able to lay down happiness gently; the rest slip along with the very things among which they stood out, and the same things that raised them up weigh them down. [19] For this reason prudence must be applied, to impose on these things moderation and restraint, since indeed unchecked license hurls one's wealth headlong and drives it on, and immoderate things have never lasted unless reason, that moderator, has restrained them. This the fate of many cities will show you, whose luxurious empires fell at the very height of their flower, and whatever had been won by virtue collapsed through excess. Against these misfortunes we must fortify ourselves. But there is no wall impregnable against fortune from the outside: we must be built up on the inside; if that part is safe, a man can be battered, but not captured. Do you wish to know what this instrument is? [20] Let him refuse to be indignant that anything happens to him, and let him know that the very things by which he seems to be harmed pertain to the preservation of the universe, and are among the things that carry through the course and function of the world; let whatever pleases god please the man; let him admire himself and his own for this very reason, that he cannot be conquered, that he holds the evils themselves beneath him, that by reason—than which nothing is stronger—he subdues chance, pain, and injury. [21] Love reason! Love of it will arm you against the hardest things. Love of their cubs drives wild beasts onto the hunting spears, and savagery and reckless impulse make them fearless; sometimes a youthful longing for glory has sent young minds to scorn both sword and fire alike; the mere appearance and shadow of virtue drives some men to voluntary death: how much braver than all these is reason, how much steadier, so much the more forcefully will it make its way out through the very fears and dangers themselves.
[22] 'You accomplish nothing,' someone says, 'by denying that any good exists besides the honorable. This fortification will not make you safe from fortune or immune to it. For you say that dutiful children and a well-governed homeland and good parents are among the goods. You cannot watch the dangers to these things with unconcern: the siege of your homeland, the death of your children, the enslavement of your parents will disturb you.'
[23] I will set down what is usually answered on our behalf against these people; then I will add what I think should be said in addition. There is a different condition in the case of things which, when taken away, put something harmful in their place: as when good health, once spoiled, turns into bad health; when the keenness of the eyes, once extinguished, afflicts us with blindness; not only is speed lost when the hamstrings are cut, but weakness takes its place. This is not the danger in the cases we mentioned a little earlier. Why? If I have lost a good friend, I do not have to endure treachery in his place; nor, if I have buried good children, does impiety succeed to their place. [24] Then, too, what perishes there is not the friends or the children, but the bodies. A good, however, perishes in one way only: if it passes into an evil; and nature does not allow this, because every virtue, and every work of virtue, remains uncorrupted. Further, even if friends have died, even if children who proved themselves and answered a father's prayers have died, there is something that can fill their place. You ask what it is? The very thing that had made them good too: virtue. [25] This allows no place to stand empty; it holds the whole mind, it removes the longing for everything, it alone is enough; for in it lies the force and origin of all goods. What does it matter whether the flowing water is cut off and departs, if the spring from which it flowed is unharmed? You will not say that a life is more just when the children survive than when they are lost, nor more orderly, nor more prudent, nor more honorable; therefore not better either. The addition of friends does not make a man wiser, nor does their subtraction make him more foolish; therefore neither does it make him happier or more wretched. As long as virtue remains unharmed, you will not feel whatever has gone away.
[26] 'What then? Is a man not happier when he is attended by a crowd of friends and children?' Why would he not be? For the highest good is neither diminished nor increased; it remains within its own measure, however fortune has conducted herself. Whether a long old age has fallen to a man's lot or his life has ended short of old age, the measure of the highest good is the same, however different the length of his life may be. [27] Whether you draw a larger or a smaller circle concerns its size, not its shape: even if one has lasted long and you have drawn the other at once and dissolved into dust the surface on which it was drawn, both were in the same shape. What is right is measured neither by size nor by number nor by time; it can no more be stretched out than it can be shrunk. Take an honorable life spanning a hundred years and shrink it as much as you like, compress it into a single day: it is equally honorable. [28] At one time virtue spreads more widely, governs kingdoms, cities, provinces, brings laws, cultivates friendships, distributes duties among relatives and children; at another time it is hemmed in by the narrow bounds of poverty, exile, childlessness; yet it is no smaller if it is drawn down from a loftier height to a lowly one, from royal estate to private life, from a broad and public sphere of law into the narrow confines of a house, or even of a single corner. [29] It is equally great even if it has withdrawn into itself, shut out on every side; for none the less it is a matter of great and lofty spirit, of perfected prudence, of unbending justice. Therefore it is equally happy; for that happy state is fixed in one place only, in the mind itself—stable, grand, tranquil—and this cannot be achieved without knowledge of things divine and human.
[30] There follows the point I said I would answer. The wise man is not crushed by the loss of children, nor of friends; for he bears their death with the same spirit with which he awaits his own; he no more fears the one than he grieves the other. For virtue consists in consistency: all its works agree and are in harmony with itself. This harmony is destroyed if the mind, which ought to be lofty, is brought low by grief or longing. Every trembling and anxiety is dishonorable, as is sluggishness in any action; for the honorable is secure and unencumbered, unafraid, and stands ready for action. [31] 'What then? Will he not suffer something resembling disturbance? Will his color not change, his expression not be agitated, his limbs not grow cold? And whatever else happens not by the command of the mind, but by some unreasoned impulse of nature?' I admit it; but the same conviction will remain in him, that none of these things is an evil, nor worthy that a sound mind should give way before it. [32] Whatever must be done, he will do boldly and readily. For who would call it anything but foolishness, to do what one does sluggishly and reluctantly, and to drive the body one way and the mind another, and to be torn apart between the most opposite impulses? For on account of the very things by which a man exalts and admires himself, he is despised, and he does not even do gladly the things he boasts of. But if some evil is feared, then, while he awaits it, he is harassed by it just as if it had already come, and whatever he fears he may suffer, he already suffers through fear itself. [33] Just as in weak bodies signs run ahead of exhaustion—for there is a certain nerveless sluggishness, a weariness with no exertion behind it, and yawning, and a shudder running through the limbs—so a weak mind is shaken by evils long before it is crushed by them; it anticipates them and collapses before its time. But what is more insane than to be tormented over what is to come, and not to save oneself for the torment, but to summon miseries to oneself and draw them near, when it is best to put them off, if you cannot dispel them altogether? [34] Do you wish to know that no one ought to be tortured by the future? Whoever hears that he must endure punishments after his fiftieth year is not disturbed—unless he leaps over the intervening space and thrusts himself forward into that anxiety which lies a lifetime ahead. In just the same way it happens that minds that are gladly sick, and hunt out reasons for grief, are saddened by things old and forgotten. Both what has passed and what is yet to come are absent: we feel neither. But there is no pain except from what you actually feel. Farewell.

======== Letter 75 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You complain that the letters I send you aren't polished enough. But who speaks carefully except someone who wants to sound affected? I want my letters to be like my conversation would be if we were sitting or walking together—unlabored and easy—with nothing far-fetched or contrived in them. If it were possible, I would rather show you what I think than say it. Even if I were making a formal argument, I wouldn't stamp my foot or wave my hand or raise my voice; I'd leave that to the orators, content to have carried my thoughts to you without dressing them up or cheapening them. This one thing I'd like plainly to prove to you: that I feel everything I say, and not only feel it but love it. People kiss a mistress one way and their children another; yet even in that embrace, chaste and restrained as it is, the affection shows through clearly enough. I don't mean, heaven knows, that what's said about such weighty matters should be dry and bloodless—philosophy doesn't renounce talent—but too much effort shouldn't be spent on the words. Let this be the whole of my aim: let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let speech match life. A man has kept his promise when he is the same whether you see him or hear him. We'll see what sort of man he is, how great a man—he is one man, not two. Our words should not delight but help. Still, if eloquence can be had without effort, if it comes ready-made or costs little, let it be there, and let it accompany the finest subjects—but let it be the kind that shows the subject rather than itself. Other arts belong wholly to talent; here it's the soul's business that's at stake. A sick man doesn't look for an eloquent doctor—but if it happens that the very man who can cure him also discusses what needs doing in a polished way, he'll take it well enough. Still, he has no particular reason to congratulate himself on landing a doctor who is also a fine speaker; it's the same as if a skilled helmsman also happened to be handsome. Why do you scratch my ears? Why do you entertain me? Something else is at stake here: I must be cauterized, cut open, put on a strict regimen. That's what you were called in for; you must treat a disease that is old, serious, and shared by everyone. You have as much on your hands as a doctor does in a plague. And you're busy with words? Be glad, for heaven's sake, if you're even equal to the substance. When will you learn so much? When will you fix what you've learned so firmly in yourself that it can't slip away? When will you put it to the test? For it isn't enough, as with other things, to have committed it to memory—it has to be tried in practice. The happy man is not the one who knows these things, but the one who does them.
'What, then? Are there no steps below that man? Is it a sheer drop straight from wisdom?' No, I don't think so; for the man making progress is still counted among the fools, yet he is set apart from them by a great distance. Even among those making progress there are great differences: some hold that they fall into three classes.
The first are those who don't yet have wisdom but have already taken up a position in its neighborhood; and yet what is near is still outside. You ask who these people are? They are the ones who have already laid aside all their passions and vices, who have learned what things must be embraced, but whose confidence in this is still untested. They don't yet enjoy their own good in practice, though they can no longer fall back into what they've fled; they are already at the point past which there is no sliding backward, but this much is not yet clear to them about themselves—as I recall writing in a certain letter, 'they don't know that they know.' They have already come to enjoy their own good, but not yet to trust it. Some describe this class of the progressing, of which I've spoken, by saying that they have already escaped the diseases of the soul, though not yet its disturbances, and still stand on slippery ground, since no one is beyond the danger of wickedness except the man who has shaken it off entirely; and no one has shaken it off entirely except the man who has taken up wisdom in its place. I've often already explained the difference between diseases of the soul and its disturbances. But I'll remind you again now: diseases are inveterate, hardened vices, like greed and ambition; these have entangled the mind far too tightly and have begun to be its permanent afflictions. To put it briefly: a disease is a persistent misjudgment, as if things that deserve only mild pursuit deserved intense pursuit; or, if you prefer, let's define it this way: setting too high a value on things that deserve only mild pursuit, or none at all, or holding in great esteem something that ought to be held in some esteem, or none. Disturbances are objectionable movements of the mind, sudden and violent, which, when frequent and left unchecked, produce a disease—just as a single attack of catarrh, not yet become habitual, causes a cough, while a persistent, chronic one causes consumption. So those who have made the most progress are beyond the diseases, but still feel the disturbances, being nearest to the perfected state.
The second class consists of those who have laid aside both the worst afflictions of the soul and its disturbances, but in such a way that they don't yet hold secure possession of their own peace of mind; for they can still slide back into the same condition.
The third class is beyond many great vices, but not beyond all of them. It has escaped greed, but still feels anger; it is no longer troubled by lust, but still by ambition; it no longer desires, but still fears, and in that very fear it stands firm enough against some things but yields to others: it despises death but dreads pain.
Let's give some thought to this point: things will go well enough for us if we're admitted into this last number. The second rank is occupied only by great natural good fortune together with great and unrelenting effort of study; but even this third grade isn't to be despised. Think how much evil you see around you; consider how there's no wickedness without a precedent, how much villainy advances every day, how much wrongdoing goes on both in public and in private: you'll understand that we've achieved enough if we aren't among the worst. 'But I,' you say, 'hope I can rise even to the higher rank.' I would wish this for us more than promise it: we're already forestalled, hemmed in by our vices as we struggle toward virtue. It's shameful to admit: we cultivate what is honorable only in our spare time. And yet what a great reward awaits us if we break off our preoccupations and our most stubborn faults! No craving will drive us on, no fear; untroubled by terrors, uncorrupted by pleasures, we'll shudder neither at death nor at the gods; we'll know that death is not an evil, and that the gods are not the source of evil. Whatever harms is as weak as whatever is harmed by it: the finest power is free of harm. What awaits us, if we ever climb out of this dregs of existence into that sublime and lofty state, is tranquility of mind and, once errors are driven out, a freedom without reservation. You ask what that freedom is? Not fearing men, not fearing gods; wanting neither shameful things nor excessive things; holding the greatest power over oneself: to become one's own possession is an inestimable good. Farewell.

======== Letter 76 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings.
You threaten me with a falling-out if I let you stay ignorant of anything I do every day. See how openly I live with you: I'll hand over this too. I've been attending a philosopher's lectures — in fact this is the fifth day I've gone to the school and listened to him disputing from the eighth hour on. 'A fine age for it,' you say. Why not a fine age? What's more foolish than refusing to learn just because you haven't learned for a long time? 'What then? Am I to do what the young dandies and the youths do?' I'm doing well if the only thing that disgraces my old age is this: the school admits people of every age. 'Are we to grow old just so we can follow the young?' I'll go to the theater as an old man, I'll be carried to the circus, and no gladiatorial match will be fought out without me watching — and shall I blush to go to a philosopher? You must keep learning as long as you don't know something — and if we trust the proverb, as long as you live. And nothing fits that saying better than this: you must keep learning how to live as long as you live. Yet I too teach something there. You ask what I teach? That even an old man must keep learning. I'm ashamed of the human race whenever I walk into that school. As you know, on the way to Metronax's house one has to pass the theater of the Neapolitans. That place is packed, and people judge with tremendous eagerness who is the best flute-player; the Greek trumpeter and the herald draw a crowd too. But in that other place, where a good man is sought, where a good man is made, only a very few sit, and most people think they have nothing better to do than that — they're called useless and idle. May that mockery fall on me too: the taunts of the ignorant must be heard with an even mind, and anyone heading toward what is honorable must despise being despised.
Push on, Lucilius, and hurry, so that you don't end up like me, learning in old age — no, hurry all the more for that very reason, since you've now taken up something you can hardly master fully even as an old man. 'How much progress will I make?' you ask. As much as you attempt. What are you waiting for? No one has ever stumbled into wisdom by chance. Money will come on its own, honor will be offered, favor and standing may perhaps be heaped on you unasked — but virtue will not fall into your lap. It isn't gained by light effort or small labor; but it's worth the labor, since one who wins it wins every good thing at once. For there is only one good, the honorable; in all those other things that please popular opinion you will find nothing true, nothing certain. As for why I say the only good is the honorable — since you judge that I didn't follow the point through enough in my last letter, and think this claim was praised to you rather than proved — let me compress into a tight space what was said there.
Everything is defined by its own particular good. A vine is commended by its fruitfulness and the flavor of its wine; a stag by its speed. If you ask how strong pack animals should be in the back, the answer lies in their one use: to carry a load. In a dog the first quality is a keen nose, if it must track wild game; speed, if it must run them down; boldness, if it must bite and attack. In each creature, that quality must be best which is the reason it was born, the standard by which it is judged. In a human being, what is best? Reason. By this we surpass the animals and follow close behind the gods. Perfected reason, then, is our own particular good; everything else we share, and share sufficiently, with the animals. He is strong — so are lions. He is handsome — so are peacocks. He is fast — so are horses. I'm not saying he is beaten in all these things; I'm not asking what quality is greatest in him, but what is properly his own. He has a body — so do trees. He has impulse and voluntary motion — so do beasts and even worms. He has a voice — but how much clearer is the voice of dogs, how much sharper that of eagles, how much deeper that of bulls, how much sweeter and more supple that of the nightingale? What is properly a human being's own? Reason. When this is straight and complete, it fulfills human happiness. So if every thing, once it has perfected its own particular good, is praiseworthy and has reached the end set by its nature, and if reason is man's own particular good, then if he has perfected reason he is praiseworthy and has touched the end set by his nature. This perfected reason is called virtue, and it is the same thing as the honorable. That, then, is the one good in a human being which belongs to man alone; for we are not now asking what is good in general, but what is the good of man. If man has nothing else that is his alone but reason, then reason will be his one good — but weighed against everything else. If someone is bad, I think he'll be condemned by this measure; if good, he'll be approved by it. This, then, is the one thing in man, first and only, by which he is both approved and condemned.
You have no doubt that this is a good; you doubt whether it is the only good. Suppose someone has everything else — health, wealth, many ancestral portraits, a crowded entrance hall — but is admittedly bad: you will condemn him. Likewise, suppose someone has none of the things I just listed — he lacks money, a crowd of clients, noble birth, a long line of ancestors — but is admittedly good: you will approve of him. This, then, is the one good of man: whoever has it deserves praise even if he is stripped of everything else, and whoever lacks it is condemned and rejected even amid an abundance of everything else. The condition that applies to things applies to people too. A ship is called good not because it's painted in costly colors, nor because its prow is silver or gold, nor because its figurehead is carved in ivory, nor because it's loaded down with chests and royal treasure, but because it is steady and sound, its joints packed tight against the water, solid enough to bear the sea's assault, responsive to the helm, swift, and unfeeling of the wind. You will call a sword good not because its sword-belt is gilded nor because its scabbard is studded with gems, but because its edge is fine for cutting and its point will pierce any defense. A ruler is judged not by how handsome it is but by how straight it is: each thing is praised for the quality proper to it, the quality by which it is measured. So in a human being too, it makes no difference to the matter how much land he plows, how much he lends out at interest, how many people pay him morning calls, how costly the couch he reclines on, how clear the glass he drinks from — what matters is how good he is. And he is good if his reason is unfolded straight and true, and fitted to what his nature wills. This is called virtue; this is the honorable, and the sole good of man. For since reason alone perfects a human being, reason alone makes him perfectly happy; and this is the one good by which alone he is made happy. We also call good the things that spring and are drawn from virtue — that is, all of virtue's works — but virtue itself is the one good, because nothing is good without it. If every good lies in the mind, then whatever strengthens it, lifts it, enlarges it is good — and it is virtue that makes the mind stronger, loftier, and more expansive. Everything else that stirs up our desires actually weakens the mind and undermines it, and even when such things seem to lift it up, they only puff it up and deceive it with much vanity. So the one good is that by which the mind is made better. All the actions of an entire life are governed with an eye to the honorable and the shameful; the reasoning for doing or not doing something is directed by these alone. Let me tell you what this means: a good man will do whatever he judges he can do honorably, even if it costs him money, even if it is laborious, even if it brings him loss, even if it is dangerous; conversely, he will not do what is shameful, even if it brings him money, even pleasure, even power. Nothing will scare him away from the honorable, nothing will lure him toward the shameful. So if he is bound to pursue the honorable in every case and to avoid the shameful in every case, and in every act of his life is bound to look to these two things alone — no good but the honorable, no evil but the shameful — and if virtue alone is incorruptible and alone remains constant in its own tenor, then the one good is virtue, which can no longer ever cease to be good. It has escaped the danger of change: folly can crawl up toward wisdom, but wisdom never slides back down into folly.
I said, if you happen to remember, that many people, driven by a reckless impulse, have trampled underfoot the things the crowd both desires and dreads. There have been those who threw away riches, those who put a hand into the flames without letting a torturer's cruelty interrupt their laughter, who did not shed a tear at their children's funeral, who faced death without trembling; love, anger, or desire had demanded these risks of them. If a brief fit of stubborn resolve, stirred up by some single goad, can do so much, how much more can virtue do, which is strong not from impulse or a sudden surge but steadily, and whose strength is permanent? It follows that the things reckless people often despise, and wise people always despise, are neither good nor bad. Virtue itself, then, is the one good, walking proudly between good and bad fortune alike, with great contempt for both.
If you accept the view that there is some good besides the honorable, then no virtue at all will hold together; for none can be maintained if it has to look outside itself for anything. If that is so, it contradicts reason, from which the virtues spring, and it contradicts truth, which cannot exist without reason; and any opinion that contradicts truth is false. You must grant that a good man is a man of the utmost devotion toward the gods. He will therefore bear with an even mind whatever happens to him; for he will know that it happened by that divine law by which the whole universe proceeds. If this is so, then the one good for him will be the honorable, since it consists precisely in this: obeying the gods, not flaring up at sudden events or lamenting one's own lot, but accepting fate patiently and doing what is commanded. If there is any good besides the honorable, then a greed for life will pursue us, and a greed for the things that furnish life — and that is unbearable, endless, and unstable. The only good, then, is the honorable, which has its own measure.
We said that human life would turn out happier than that of the gods, if the things of which the gods have no use at all — such as money and honors — were counted as goods. Add to this that, if souls remain once released from bodies, a happier state awaits them than while they are caught up in the body. But if the things we use through our bodies are good, then souls will be worse off once set free — which contradicts belief — since it would make souls free and released in general happier while shut in and beleaguered by the body. I had also said this: if the things that fall to man's lot fall equally to dumb animals, then dumb animals too would be living a happy life — which is utterly impossible. Everything must be endured for the sake of the honorable; and that would not have to be done if there were any good besides the honorable.
Although I went into this more fully in my last letter, I've tightened it up and run through it briefly here. But this opinion will never seem true to you unless you lift up your mind and ask yourself: if circumstances demanded that you die for your country and buy the safety of all your fellow citizens with your own, would you stretch out your neck not just patiently but even gladly? If you would do this, then there is no other good; for you give up everything in order to have this one thing. See how great is the power of the honorable: you will die for the republic even if you would do so instantly, the moment you knew it was required of you. Sometimes great joy is drawn even from the briefest and shortest span of the finest action, and although no fruit of a completed work belongs to the man who has died and been removed from human affairs, the mere contemplation of the deed to come brings its own pleasure — and a brave, just man, once he has set before himself the price of his death, the freedom of his country, the safety of all those for whom he lays down his life, feels the deepest pleasure and enjoys his own danger. But even the man who is robbed of this very joy — the joy that comes from carrying through the greatest and final deed — will still, without hesitation, leap down into death, content simply to have acted rightly and dutifully. Set before him, even now, all the many arguments meant to dissuade him; say, 'oblivion will soon overtake what you've done, and the citizens' gratitude will be scant.' He will answer you: 'All that lies outside my own work; I am looking at the deed itself. I know this is honorable; and so, wherever it leads and calls, I go.'
This, then, is the one good — and not only the perfected mind feels it, but also a generous one, and one of good natural disposition. Everything else is trivial, changeable. That's why such things are held onto anxiously; even when fortune's favor has heaped them all together in one place, they weigh heavily on their owners and press down on them constantly, and sometimes make fools of them too. None of those you see dressed in purple is happy, any more than those to whom, in a stage play, the scepter and the royal cloak are assigned: while the crowd is watching they walk about grandly, in their tragic buskins, but the moment they exit, off come the buskins, and they're back to their own height. None of those whom riches and honors set upon a higher pedestal is truly great. Why, then, does he seem great? Because you're measuring him along with his pedestal. A dwarf is not tall even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps its size even if it stands in a well. This is the error we struggle under, this is how we're deceived: we never assess anyone for what he actually is, but add on to him the things he's decked out with. But when you want to make a true assessment of a man, to know what he's really like, look at him naked; let him set aside his estate, set aside his honors and fortune's other lies, let him strip off even his body: look at his mind — what sort it is, how great it is, whether its greatness is borrowed or its own. If he looks straight-eyed at flashing swords, and if he knows it makes no difference whether his soul goes out through his mouth or through a wound in his throat, call him happy; if, when tortures of the body are announced to him — both those that come by chance and those inflicted by another's power — if he hears of chains and exile and the empty terrors that haunt human minds without fear, and says:
'O maiden, this strange, unexpected shape now rises before me;
but I foresaw it all, and rehearsed it in my mind long ago.
You are announcing that to me today; but I have always announced it to myself, and prepared myself, a mere man, for what befalls men.' A blow that has been thought through beforehand lands softly. But to fools, and to those who trust in fortune, every shape that events take seems new and unexpected; and to the untrained, novelty makes up a large part of any evil. To confirm this: things they had thought harsh they bear more bravely once they've grown used to them. That's why the wise man grows accustomed beforehand to evils yet to come, and what others make light through long endurance, he makes light through long reflection. We sometimes hear the ignorant say, 'I knew this was in store for me' — but the wise man knows that everything is in store for him; whatever happens, he says, 'I knew it.' Farewell.

======== Letter 77 ========

[1] Today, without warning, the Alexandrian ships came into view — the ones customarily sent ahead to announce the arrival of the fleet behind them; they call them mail-boats. Campania is glad at the sight of them: the whole crowd stands on the piers of Puteoli and can pick out the Alexandrians, even among a great press of shipping, by the very cut of their sails; they alone are allowed to spread the topsail, which every ship carries on the open sea. [2] Nothing speeds a ship's run like the uppermost stretch of canvas; that is where she gets her strongest push. So whenever the wind has freshened and grown stronger than is useful, the yard is lowered: a gust has less force from down low. Once they have passed Capri and the headland from which
Pallas keeps watch from her storm-beaten summit,
the rest are ordered to make do with the mainsail: the topsail is the Alexandrians' badge.
[3] Amid all this rushing about, with everyone hurrying to the shore, I took great pleasure in my own laziness: though I was about to receive letters from my people, I was in no hurry to learn how my affairs stood over there or what news the letters brought. For a long time now nothing of mine is either lost or gained. Old age aside, I ought to have felt this already; now all the more so: however little I had, I would still have more travel-money left than road — especially since we have set out on a road we are not obliged to finish. [4] A journey is incomplete if you stop halfway, or short of your destination; a life is not incomplete if it is honorable. Wherever you leave off, if you leave off well, it is whole. Often, too, one must leave off bravely, and not for the weightiest of reasons — for neither are the reasons that hold us here the weightiest.
[5] Tullius Marcellinus — you knew him thoroughly — was a quiet young man who aged before his time; seized by an illness, not incurable, but long, wearisome, and full of demands, he began to deliberate about death. He called together a number of friends. Each one either urged on him, because he was timid, what he would have urged on himself, or, because he was a flatterer eager to please, gave the advice he guessed would be most welcome to the man deliberating. [6] Our Stoic friend, a remarkable man and — to praise him in the words he deserves — a brave, vigorous man, gave him, I think, the best encouragement. He began like this: 'Stop torturing yourself, my dear Marcellinus, as though you were deliberating about something great. Living is nothing great: all your slaves live, all the animals do. What is great is to die honorably, sensibly, bravely. Think how long you have been doing the same things: food, sleep, sex — we run round and round this circuit. The wish to die can come not only to the sensible man, the brave man, or the wretched: even a man who is simply fed up can wish it.' [7] What Marcellinus needed was not an adviser but a helper: his slaves refused to obey. So the friend first removed their fear, showing them that a household is in danger only when it is uncertain whether the master's death was voluntary; otherwise it would be as bad a precedent to prevent a master's death as to kill him. [8] Then he reminded Marcellinus himself that it would be no unkindness — just as when dinner is over the leftovers are divided among those standing by — for a man whose life is over to hand something to those who had been his life's attendants. Marcellinus had an easy, generous temper, even when the giving came out of his own pocket; so he distributed small sums to his weeping slaves and comforted them into the bargain. [9] He needed no blade, no bloodshed: he fasted for three days and had a tent set up in his own bedroom. Then a tub was brought in, in which he lay a long while, and as hot water was poured over him again and again, he gradually failed — not, as he kept saying, without a certain pleasure, the kind that a gentle fainting away tends to bring, a feeling not unknown to those of us whose heart has sometimes given out.
[10] I have wandered off into a little story, but not one you'll mind: you now know that your friend's departure was neither hard nor pitiable. Though he chose his own death, he slipped away most gently and simply glided out of life. And the story is not even without use, for necessity often demands examples of this kind. Often we ought to die and refuse; we die, and refuse still. [11] There is no one so untaught that he does not know he must die someday; yet when it draws near, he twists away, trembles, weeps. Wouldn't you call that man the greatest fool of all who cried because a thousand years ago he was not alive? He is just as great a fool who cries because a thousand years from now he will not be alive. These are on a level: you will not be, and you were not; neither stretch of time belongs to you. [12] You have been thrown onto this single point of time — and even if you stretch it, how far can you stretch it? Why cry? Why wish? You are wasting your effort.
Give up hoping that the gods' decrees can be bent by prayer.
They are settled and fixed, and driven by a vast, eternal necessity: you will go where everything goes. What is new in that for you? You were born under this law. This happened to your father, this to your mother, this to your ancestors, this to everyone before you, this to everyone after you. An unconquerable sequence, which no power can alter, has bound all things and drags them on. [13] What a multitude of people destined to die will follow you, what a multitude will keep you company! You would be braver, I suppose, if many thousands were dying along with you; and in fact many thousands, human and animal, at this very moment while you hesitate to die are giving up the breath of life in all sorts of ways. Did you really not think you would someday reach the point you were always traveling toward? No road is without an end.
[14] Do you expect me now to bring you examples of great men? I will bring you boys' examples. There is the story of the Spartan, still a child, who when captured kept shouting 'I will not be a slave!' in that Doric speech of his — and he made good on his words: at the very first order to do slave's work of a degrading kind (he was told to fetch a chamber pot), he dashed his head against the wall and broke it. [15] Freedom lies that close — and someone is still a slave? Wouldn't you rather your son died like that than grew old through spinelessness? Why be shaken, then, if dying bravely is something even a child can do? Suppose you refuse to follow: you will be dragged. Make your own what now belongs to another. Won't you take up that boy's spirit and say, 'I am no slave'? Poor wretch — you are a slave to men, a slave to things, a slave to life; for life, when the courage to die is missing, is slavery. [16] Have you anything worth waiting for? The very pleasures that delay and hold you, you have used up: none is new to you, none has not already turned loathsome from sheer glut. You know the taste of wine, the taste of honeyed wine: it makes no difference whether a hundred jars pass through your bladder or a thousand — you are a strainer. You know precisely how an oyster tastes, how a mullet does: your self-indulgence has kept nothing back untouched for the years ahead. And yet these are the things you are torn from against your will. [17] What else is there whose loss would grieve you? Friends? Do you even know how to be one? Your country? Do you value it enough to put off your dinner? The sun? You would put it out if you could — for what have you ever done worthy of the light? Confess it: it is not longing for the senate house, or the forum, or nature herself that makes you slow to die. What you hate leaving is the food market — where you have left nothing. [18] You fear death — yet how grandly you scorn it over a plate of mushrooms! You want to live: do you even know how? You fear dying: well then — isn't this life of yours a death? When Gaius Caesar was passing along the Latin Way and a man from a column of prisoners, his old beard hanging down to his chest, begged him for death, he replied, 'Why — are you alive now?' That is the answer for those whom death would rescue: 'You're afraid to die — why, are you alive now?' [19] 'But I,' someone says, 'want to live; I do many honorable things. I am unwilling to leave the duties of life, which I perform faithfully and diligently.' Really? Don't you know that dying is one of life's duties too? You are abandoning no duty, for there is no fixed number set that you must complete. [20] No life is anything but short. If you measure by the nature of things, even Nestor's life is short — even Sattia's, who ordered it carved on her tomb that she had lived ninety-nine years. You see: someone actually boasting of a long old age. Who could have endured her if she'd managed to fill out the hundredth? Life is like a play: what matters is not how long it ran but how well it was acted. The place where you break off is of no consequence. Break off where you please — only give it a good closing line. Farewell.

======== Letter 78 ========

[1] That you are plagued by constant runnings of catarrh and by the low fevers that follow when such attacks drag on and settle into a habit — this troubles me all the more because I have been through that kind of ill health myself. At the start I brushed it off — my youth could still absorb rough treatment and stand up defiantly to disease — but then I went under, and was brought so low that I was practically dissolving in catarrh myself, wasted down to extreme thinness. [2] Many times I felt the urge to cut my life short; what held me back was the old age of my very affectionate father. I thought not of how bravely I could die, but of how little bravery he would have for missing me. So I ordered myself to live — for sometimes even staying alive is an act of courage.
[3] I will tell you what comforted me then, but first let me say this: the very things I rested on had the force of medicine. Honorable consolations turn into cures, and whatever lifts the spirit does the body good as well. My studies were my salvation. I credit philosophy with my getting up, with my recovery; I owe her my life, and that is the least of what I owe her. [4] My friends, too, contributed a great deal to my return to health; their encouragement, their sitting up with me, their talk kept my spirits up. Nothing, Lucilius — best of men — restores and helps a sick man like the affection of friends; nothing so steals away the expectation of death and the fear of it. I could not believe I was dying while leaving them behind alive. I believed, I tell you, that I would go on living, not with them, but through them; I felt I was not pouring out my breath but handing it over. These things gave me the will to help myself and to endure every torment; otherwise it is the most wretched state of all, to have thrown away the will to die and not to have the will to live.
[5] Turn, then, to these remedies. Your doctor will lay out how far to walk and how much to exercise; will warn you not to sink into the idleness that a listless illness inclines toward; will tell you to read aloud, to exercise the breath whose passage and reservoir are ailing; to take boat trips and let the gentle rocking shake up your insides; will say what foods to take, when to call in wine to build strength and when to leave it off so it doesn't irritate and inflame your cough. My own prescription for you is a remedy not just for this illness but for your whole life: despise death. Nothing is grim once we have escaped the fear of it.
[6] Three things weigh heavy in every illness: fear of death, bodily pain, and the interruption of pleasures. About death enough has been said; I will add only this, that the fear belongs not to the disease but to nature. Illness has postponed many people's deaths, and seeming to be dying has proved their salvation. Your death will come not from the sickness but from the living. That fate waits for you even when you are cured; in recovering, you escape not death but ill health.
[7] Now let's return to the complaint that is specific here: the disease brings great torments — but the intervals make them bearable. For pain at its utmost pitch comes to an end; no one can be in extreme pain for long. Nature, who loves us dearly, has arranged things so that pain is either endurable or brief. [8] The greatest pains lodge in the leanest parts of the body: sinews, joints, and whatever else is thin rage most fiercely when trouble takes hold in a narrow space. But these parts quickly go numb, and through the very pain they lose the feeling of pain — whether because the vital breath, blocked from its natural course and altered for the worse, loses the force by which it thrives and signals to us, or because the corrupted humor, when it no longer has anywhere to drain, chokes on itself and knocks out sensation in the parts it has overfilled. [9] So gout in the feet, gout in the hands, and every pain of the spine and sinews takes its pauses, once it has dulled the very region it was torturing; in all of these it is the first gnawing that torments; the attack is snuffed out by time, and numbness is the end of pain. Toothache, eye-ache, earache are so very sharp precisely because they arise in the body's narrow places — no less sharp, I swear, than pain in the head itself; but if it grows too violent, it turns into stupor and sleep. [10] This, then, is the consolation of overwhelming pain: feel it beyond a certain pitch, and you cease to feel it at all. What really makes the untrained suffer in bodily torment is this: they have not learned to be content with the mind; they have been much occupied with the body. That is why a great and sensible man separates mind from body and dwells much with the better, divine part, and with this whining, fragile one only as much as he must. [11] 'But it is a hardship,' someone says, 'to go without the pleasures you're used to — to abstain from food, to be thirsty, to be hungry.' Abstinence is hard at first; then desire slackens as the very things we crave tire and give out; after that the stomach turns fussy, and people who once had a greed for food come to loathe it. The cravings themselves die off, and there is nothing bitter about lacking what you have ceased to want. [12] Add that every pain either pauses entirely or at least eases. Add that you can guard against its coming and meet its approach with remedies; for every pain sends warning signs ahead, certainly any that comes back on schedule. Enduring an illness is bearable if you have learned to despise its ultimate threat.
[13] Do not make your troubles heavier for yourself, or load yourself with complaints. Pain is light if opinion adds nothing to it. If instead you start encouraging yourself — 'It's nothing, or next to nothing; let's hold out; it will stop soon' — then in thinking it light you will make it so. Everything hangs on opinion: not only ambition looks to it, and luxury, and greed — our very pain follows opinion. [14] Each of us is as miserable as he has believed himself to be. I say we should strike out all lamenting over past pains — all that talk of 'No one was ever worse off. What agonies, what horrors I went through! Nobody thought I would get up again. How many times my family gave me up for lost, how many times the doctors abandoned me! Men stretched on the rack aren't pulled apart like that.' Even if all of it is true, it is over. What good does it do to chew over past pains and be miserable now because you once were? Besides, doesn't everyone add a great deal to his own troubles and lie to himself? And what was bitter to bear is pleasant to have borne: it is natural to rejoice when one's trouble ends. Two things, then, must be pruned away: fear of the future and the memory of old discomfort. The one no longer concerns me; the other does not yet. [15] Set in the very thick of his difficulties, let a man say,
Someday, perhaps, even these things will be a joy to remember.
Let him fight with his whole soul: he will be beaten if he yields; he will win if he strains against his pain. As it is, most people do the opposite — they pull down onto themselves the collapse they should be propping up. The thing that presses on you, hangs over you, bears down on you — if you start backing away from it, it will follow and land on you all the harder; if you stand your ground and choose to push back, it will be driven off. [16] Think how many blows athletes take to the face, how many over the whole body! Yet they bear every torment out of hunger for glory, and they suffer these things not only because they fight, but in order to fight: the training itself is torment. Let us too conquer everything — we whose prize is not a wreath or a palm branch or a trumpeter hushing the crowd for the announcement of our name, but virtue, firmness of mind, and peace secured for all time to come, if once, in any contest, fortune has been beaten to her knees. 'I feel severe pain.' [17] Well — do you feel it any less by bearing it like a coward? Just as an enemy is deadlier to men in flight, so every misfortune that chance sends presses harder on the one who gives way and turns his back. 'But it is heavy.' What — is our strength for carrying light loads only? Would you rather the illness were long, or sharp and short? If it is long, it has pauses, gives room for recovery, grants plenty of time; it must rise to its crisis and then stop. A short, steep illness will do one of two things: be extinguished, or extinguish. And what difference does it make whether it is gone or I am? Either way the pain ends.
[18] This too will help: turn the mind to other thoughts and walk away from the pain. Think of what you have done honorably, done bravely; go over the good chapters with yourself; scatter your memory across the things you have most admired. Then let the bravest men rise before you, each one a conqueror of pain: the one who kept on reading his book while he held out his varicose veins to be cut; the one who never stopped laughing while his torturers, enraged by exactly that, tried every instrument of their cruelty on him. Shall pain not be beaten by reason, when it has been beaten by a laugh? [19] Name anything you please now — the catarrh, the force of an unbroken cough that brings up pieces of your insides, fever scorching the very chest, thirst, limbs twisted with the joints wrenched out of line: worse still are the flame, the rack, the hot metal plates, and the thing pressed into wounds already swelling to reopen them and drive in deeper. Yet amid all that, a man did not groan. That's not all: he did not beg. Not all: he did not answer. Not all: he laughed — and from the heart. After that, are you willing to laugh at pain?
[20] 'But my illness,' someone says, 'lets me do nothing; it has pulled me away from all my duties.' Ill health holds your body, not your mind as well. So it slows a runner's feet; it hampers a cobbler's or a smith's hands. If your mind is the tool you normally work with, you will still advise and teach, listen and learn, inquire and remember. What's more — do you think you are doing nothing if you are self-controlled while sick? You will be demonstrating that illness can be overcome, or at least carried. [21] There is room for virtue, believe me, even in a sickbed. Weapons and battle lines are not the only proof of a keen spirit unbroken by terrors: a brave man shows himself even in his bedclothes. You have something to do: wrestle well with your disease. If it forces nothing from you, if it wheedles nothing out of you, you are setting a signal example. What a vast field for glory there would be, if we had an audience when sick! Be your own audience; give yourself your own applause.
[22] Besides, there are two kinds of pleasures. The bodily ones illness checks but does not abolish — in fact, judged rightly, it sharpens them. Drinking gives more delight to a thirsty man; food is more welcome to a hungry one; whatever comes after abstinence is seized more eagerly. As for the pleasures of the mind — greater and more reliable — no doctor denies these to a patient. Whoever pursues them and understands them well despises all the sweet-talk of the senses. [23] 'Oh, the poor invalid!' Why? Because he doesn't melt snow into his wine? Because he doesn't refresh the chill of his drink — mixed in a giant cup — by crumbling ice on top? Because Lucrine oysters aren't opened for him right at the table? Because there's no commotion of cooks around his dining room, carrying the stoves in along with the dishes? For this is luxury's latest invention: so that no food cools off, so that nothing arrives insufficiently scalding for a palate already calloused, the kitchen follows the dinner in. [24] 'Oh, the poor invalid!' He will eat as much as he can digest. No boar will lie in full view only to be banished from the table as cheap meat; no breasts of birds will be piled on his serving tray (since seeing them whole is disgusting). What harm has been done to you? You will dine like a sick man — that is, for once, like a healthy one.
[25] But all these things — the broth, the warm water, and whatever else seems unendurable to the pampered, to people dissolving in luxury, sick more in mind than in body — all these we will bear easily, if only we stop shuddering at death. And we will stop, once we have learned the limits of goods and evils; then and only then will life not be a weariness, nor death a terror. [26] For surfeit of itself cannot take hold of a life that surveys so many things — varied, great, divine; it is idle inactivity that usually drives life to self-loathing. To one who ranges through the nature of things, truth will never grow stale; it is falsehoods that cloy. [27] And again, if death approaches and calls, even if it is early, even if it cuts a man off in mid-life, he has already gathered the fruit of the longest life. He has come to know nature in large part; he knows that honorable things do not grow with time. Life must inevitably seem short to those who measure it by pleasures that are empty and, for that very reason, endless.
[28] Refresh yourself with these thoughts, and in the meantime keep some room for my letters. A time will come someday that joins and mingles us again; however brief it is, the knowledge of how to use it will make it long. For as Posidonius says, 'A single day of the educated stretches wider than the longest lifetime of the ignorant.' [29] Meanwhile hold on to this, sink your teeth into it: do not go down before adversity; do not trust prosperity; keep all of fortune's license before your eyes, as though she were going to do whatever she can do. What has long been expected arrives more gently. Farewell.

======== Letter 79 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I'm waiting for your letters to tell me what your circuit of all Sicily has shown you that's new, and to give me something more definite about Charybdis itself. I know very well that Scylla is a rock, and not a terrifying one for sailors at that; but whether Charybdis lives up to the stories is what I want written out for me, and if by chance you've observed it closely—and it's worth observing—let me know whether it's driven into whirlpools by only one wind, or whether every storm churns that sea the same way, and whether it's true that whatever is snatched up by that strait's whirl is dragged, hidden, for many miles and surfaces again near the coast of Taormina. If you write me all this, then I'll dare to ask you, in my honor, to climb Etna as well, which some gather is being consumed and gradually sinking, because it used to be visible from somewhat farther out to sailors. This could happen not because the mountain's height is decreasing, but because the fire has faded and is thrown out less forcefully and abundantly—for the same reason its smoke, too, is sluggish during the day. Neither is unbelievable: that a mountain being devoured shrinks daily, or that it stays the same, since the fire does not eat away at the mountain itself but, generated in some hollow deep below, boils up and feeds on other material—in the mountain itself it finds not fuel but a path out. In Lycia there's a very well-known region—the inhabitants call it Hephaestion—where the ground is pierced through in many places, and a harmless fire circles about without doing any damage to the plants growing there. So the region is lush and grassy, with nothing scorched by the flames, since they only glow with a mild, gentle force.
But let's save these questions for when you write and tell me how far the snows lie from the very mouth of the mountain—snows that not even summer melts, so safe are they from the nearby fire. You needn't credit me with this curiosity, though; you would have indulged your own obsession even if no one had asked. What will you give me not to describe Etna in your poem, not to touch this subject sacred to every poet? The fact that Virgil had already filled it up didn't stop Ovid from taking it on; nor did either of them deter Cornelius Severus. This subject, besides, has turned out well for everyone, and those who came before don't seem to me to have snatched away what could be said, but to have opened it up. It matters a great deal whether you're approaching material that's been used up or material that's been worked and made ready: it grows day by day, and what's already been found doesn't stand in the way of what's still to be found. Besides, the one who comes last has the best position: he finds words ready-made, which take on a new look when arranged differently. And he doesn't lay hands on them as though they belonged to someone else, for they are common property. Either I don't know you, or Etna is making your mouth water; already you long to write something grand, on a par with your predecessors. Your modesty won't let you hope for more than that—modesty so great in you that you seem to me ready to hold back the powers of your own talent if there's any risk of surpassing them: such is your reverence for those who came before.
Wisdom has this good among other things: no one can be surpassed by another except while still climbing. Once you reach the top, all are equal; there's no room for advancing further—you simply stand there. Does the sun add to its own size? Does the moon go beyond its usual course? The seas don't grow; the universe keeps the same condition and measure. Things that have already reached their full, rightful size cannot exalt themselves further: whoever the wise are, they will be equal and alike. Each of them will have his own particular gifts: one will be more affable, another quicker, another more ready in speech, another more eloquent; but the thing that matters, the thing that makes a person happy, is the same in all of them. Whether your Etna might collapse and cave in on itself, whether the steady force of its fires might wear down this lofty, conspicuous peak visible across the vast reaches of the sea—I don't know. But no flame, no collapse, will bring virtue any lower; this one greatness alone cannot be brought down. It can be neither advanced further nor pushed back; like the greatness of the heavens, its measure is fixed. Let us strive to raise ourselves up to it. A great deal of the work has already been done—or rather, if I want to tell the truth, not much. For it isn't goodness merely to be better than the worst: who would boast of his eyesight if he could only make out the day dimly? Anyone for whom the sun shines through a fog, though he may for the moment be content just to have escaped the darkness, still doesn't enjoy the true good of light. Our mind will have reason to congratulate itself only when, released from the darkness in which it now wallows, it has looked out on clear things not with a feeble squint, but has let in the whole day and been restored to its own sky, when it has taken back the place it was allotted at birth. Its origin calls it upward; and it will be there even before it's released from this custody, once it has cast off its faults and, pure and light, has darted up into thoughts of the divine.
This is what we're working toward, my dear Lucilius, this is the whole force of the effort we're aiming toward, and it pleases us even if few know it, even if no one does. Glory is the shadow of virtue: it will follow along even against virtue's will. But just as a shadow sometimes goes ahead, sometimes follows behind or trails at one's back, so glory sometimes goes before us and puts itself on display, and sometimes it lies behind, and is all the greater the later it comes, once envy has withdrawn. How long did Democritus seem mad! How reluctantly did fame receive Socrates! How long did the state fail to recognize Cato! It rejected him and did not understand him until it had lost him. The innocence and virtue of Rutilius would have gone unnoticed had he not suffered an injustice: while being wronged, he blazed into brightness. Didn't he thank his fate and embrace his own exile? I'm speaking of men fortune made illustrious even while tormenting them: how many men's achievements only came to public notice after the men themselves were gone! How many did fame not merely welcome, but dig up out of the ground! You see how greatly Epicurus is admired, not only by the more learned but by this crowd of the unschooled as well: yet he was unknown even in Athens itself, the very city he'd been hiding near. And so, many years after outliving his dear Metrodorus, in one of his letters, having sung of his friendship and gratefully recalled Metrodorus, he added this at the very end: that nothing had harmed him and Metrodorus, amid such great goods, so much as the fact that famous Greece had not merely failed to know them, but had almost never even heard of them. Wasn't he, then, found out only after he had ceased to exist? Didn't his reputation shine forth only afterward? Metrodorus too admits this in one of his letters, that he and Epicurus had not become well enough known; but that after himself and Epicurus, those who wished to follow in the same footsteps would have a name that was great and ready-made. No virtue stays hidden, and its having lain hidden is no loss to virtue itself: a day will come that will make public what was buried and suppressed by the spite of its own age. Whoever thinks only of the people of his own generation is born for very few. Many thousands of years, many peoples are still to come: look to those. Even if envy imposes silence on everyone living with you today, there will come those who judge without offense, without favor. If virtue's reward depends at all on fame, not even that perishes. It's true that the talk of later generations won't matter to us; and yet, even without our being aware of it, it will honor and frequent our name. Virtue has repaid everyone's gratitude, living or dead, provided he pursued it with genuine sincerity, provided he didn't dress it up and paint it over, but was the same man whether he appeared prepared beforehand or caught off guard and sudden. Pretense accomplishes nothing; a mask applied from outside deceives only a few, and only lightly: truth is the same all the way through. Things that deceive have nothing solid in them. A lie is thin: it shows through if you look at it carefully. Farewell.

======== Letter 80 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Today I have free time for myself not only by my own doing but thanks to a spectacle, which has called away everyone who might have bothered me, off to watch the ball-fighters. No one will burst in, no one will interrupt my thinking, which advances all the more boldly on this very confidence. The door won't keep creaking, the curtain won't keep being lifted: I'll be free to go on safely, which matters more to someone going his own way and following his own path. So am I not following my predecessors, then? I do follow them, but I allow myself to find something new too, to change things, to leave things aside; I'm not a slave to them, I just agree with them. Still, that was a big claim I made, promising myself silence and a retreat free of interruption: look, a huge roar carries over from the stadium, and it doesn't shake me out of myself, but it does turn my thoughts toward considering this very matter. I think to myself how many people train their bodies, and how few train their minds; what a huge crowd gathers for a spectacle that is neither serious nor even genuinely a contest, and what solitude surrounds the fine arts; how feeble in spirit are the men whose arms and shoulders we admire. Here's the thing I keep turning over most in my mind: if the body can be trained by exercise to endure so much that it can take punches and kicks alike from more than one man, that a man can hold out under the blazing sun in the scorching dust and, drenched in his own blood, go on through the whole day—how much more easily could the mind be strengthened so that it might take the blows of fortune unconquered, so that it might rise again after being thrown down, after being trampled underfoot. For the body needs many things to stay strong; the mind grows out of itself, feeds itself, trains itself. The body needs a lot of food, a lot of drink, a lot of oil, and long, sustained effort besides; but virtue will come to you without equipment, without expense. Whatever can make you good is already with you. What do you need in order to be good? Just the will. And what better thing could you want than to tear yourself free from this slavery that weighs on everyone—the very thing that even slaves of the lowest condition, born into this degradation, try every way they can to shed? They count as the price of their heads the savings they scraped together by starving their own bellies: and will you not long to reach freedom, whatever it costs, you who think yourself born into it? Why do you look toward your strongbox? That kind of freedom can't be bought. And so it's an empty name of "freedom" that gets tossed into contracts, one that neither the buyers nor the sellers actually possess: you have to give yourself that good, you have to seek it from yourself. Free yourself first from the fear of death—that's what puts a yoke on us—and then from the fear of poverty. If you want to know how little harm there really is in poverty, compare the faces of the poor and the rich with each other: the poor man laughs more often, and more genuinely; there's no deep anxiety in him; even if some worry does strike, it passes like a light cloud. But the cheerfulness of those who are called fortunate is either fake, or else a heavy, festering gloom—all the heavier, in fact, because sometimes they're not even allowed to be openly miserable, but amid their inner torments, which are eating away at the very heart, they're forced to act happy. I keep having to use this example, since nothing brings out this farce of human life more effectively—a farce that hands us roles we play badly. That man who struts across the stage and, leaning back, declares: "Behold, I rule in Argos; Pelops left his kingdom to me, reaching from the sea of Helle to the Ionian shore"— that man is a slave, and receives five measures of grain and five denarii. And that other one, arrogant and unrestrained, swollen with confidence in his own strength, who says: "Unless you keep quiet, Menelaus, this right hand will kill you"— he gets a daily wage, and sleeps in a patchwork blanket. You could say the same thing about all those people whom a litter raises up above the heads of ordinary men, above the crowd, in delicate comfort: all of their happiness is wearing a mask. You'll despise them the moment you strip off their costumes. When you're about to buy a horse, you order its blanket removed; you strip the clothes off slaves up for sale so that no bodily flaws can hide: do you assess a man all wrapped up? Slave dealers hide behind some bit of dressing-up whatever might displease a buyer, and so buyers grow suspicious of the very ornaments themselves; if you saw a leg or an arm bandaged, you'd order it uncovered, and the body itself shown to you. Do you see that king of Scythia or Sarmatia, adorned with a splendid headdress? If you want to assess him, to know completely what he's really like, undo the headband: a great deal of evil lies hidden beneath it. Why should I speak of others? If you want to weigh yourself properly, set aside your money, your house, your rank, and look inward at yourself: as it stands now, you're taking others' word for what kind of person you are. Farewell.

======== Letter 81 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You complain that you have run into an ungrateful man. If this is the first time it has happened, thank either your luck or your own care. But in this matter care can accomplish nothing except to make you stingy; for if you want to avoid this risk, you will simply stop giving benefits at all. So rather than have them wasted on someone else, you will waste them by never giving them. Better that they go unanswered than that they never be given: even after a bad harvest, you must sow again. Often a single year's abundance restores everything that a soil's unbroken sterility had lost. [2] It is worth the trouble of testing even ungrateful men, for the sake of finding a grateful one. No one has so sure a hand at giving benefits that he is never mistaken; men must miss the mark sometimes in order to hit it at other times. After a shipwreck, people still take to the sea; a moneylender is not driven from the forum by a bankrupt debtor. Life would quickly stiffen into a useless idleness if we had to abandon everything that ever disappointed us. Indeed this very risk should make you more generous, not less; for when the outcome of something is uncertain, you must try it often in order for it to succeed even once.
[3] But I have said enough on that subject in the books I wrote on benefits. The question that seems to need more attention, one that I do not think has been adequately worked out, is this: if a man who once helped us later harms us, has he thereby balanced the accounts and cleared our debt to him? Add to that, if you like, the further case where he later harmed us far more than he had earlier helped. [4] If you want the strict verdict of a rigorous judge, he will weigh one thing against the other and say, 'even though the injuries outweigh the benefits, still whatever remains after subtracting the injury should be credited to the benefits.' He did more harm, but he helped first; so the matter of timing should also be taken into account. [5] It is obvious enough, hardly needing to be pointed out, that we must ask how willingly he helped and how reluctantly he harmed us, since both benefits and injuries are matters of intention. 'I did not want to give the benefit; I was overcome by embarrassment, or by someone's persistence, or by hope of gain.' [6] Whatever is owed is owed according to the spirit in which it was given; what counts is not the size of the gift but the quality of the will behind it. Now let us set guesswork aside: both the earlier act and the later one were real -- the earlier was a benefit, and the later, insofar as it exceeded the measure of the first, was an injury. A good man weighs both sides of the ledger in a way that shortchanges himself: he adds to the benefit, he subtracts from the injury. The more lenient judge -- and I would rather be that kind -- will order us to forget the injury and remember the service. [7] 'Surely,' you say, 'justice requires giving each its due: gratitude for a benefit, retaliation -- or at least ill will -- for an injury.' That would be true if one person had done the injury and another had given the benefit; but if it is the same person, the benefit cancels out the force of the injury. For someone who would have deserved forgiveness even without prior merit is owed more than mere pardon if he harms us after having helped us. [8] I do not set the two on equal footing: I value a benefit more highly than an injury. Not everyone knows how to be grateful; even a fool, an unrefined man, one indistinguishable from the crowd, can recognize that he owes a debt of gratitude, at least while the memory of receiving it is fresh -- but he has no idea how much he owes for it. Only the wise man knows exactly what value to place on each thing. As for the sort of man I was just calling a fool -- even if he means well, he repays either less than he owes, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong place; whatever he ought to return he pours out and throws away carelessly.
[9] The precision of language in certain matters is remarkable, and the usage of old-fashioned speech marks certain distinctions with signs that most effectively teach us our duties. We regularly say, for instance, 'he returned the favor to him.' To return is to bring, of your own accord, what you owe. We do not say 'he repaid the favor'; for people repay even when they are being dunned for it, even unwillingly, from wherever, even through an intermediary. We do not say 'he restored the benefit' or 'he settled it': no word suited to a monetary debt has ever satisfied us here. [10] To return is to bring the thing back to the one from whom you received it. This word implies a voluntary act of returning: whoever 'returns' has, so to speak, named himself as the one doing it. The wise man will examine everything within himself -- how much he received, from whom, why, when, where, in what manner. So we say that no one but the wise man knows how to return a favor, just as no one but the wise man knows how to give a benefit -- the wise man, that is, being the one who takes more pleasure in giving than another does in receiving. [11] Someone classes this among the things we seem to say that strike everyone as paradoxical (the Greeks call them paradoxa), and says, 'so no one but the wise man knows how to return a favor? Then does no one else know how to repay what he owes a creditor, or how to pay a seller the price when he buys something?' Well, so that this reproach not fall on me alone, know that Epicurus says the same thing. Metrodorus, certainly, says that only the wise man knows how to return a favor. [12] Then the same person is amazed when we say, 'only the wise man knows how to love, only the wise man is a friend.' And yet returning a favor is part of both love and friendship -- indeed this is more common and applies to more people than true friendship does. Then the same person is amazed that we say faithfulness exists only in the wise man, as though he himself did not say the same thing. Does it seem to you that a man who does not know how to return a favor can be trusted to keep faith? [13] So let people stop slandering us as though we were throwing out incredible claims, and let them recognize that with the wise man these virtues are the real things, while with the crowd they are mere copies and images of honorable things. No one knows how to return a favor except the wise man. The fool, too, returns one, however and as best he can; what he lacks is the knowledge rather than the will -- the will cannot be taught. [14] The wise man will weigh everything against everything else; the same thing becomes greater or lesser depending on time, place, and circumstance. Often a fortune poured into a household could not do what a thousand denarii, given at the right moment, could. It matters a great deal whether you gave a gift or came to someone's rescue, whether your generosity saved him or merely equipped him; often what is given is small, but what follows from it is large. And how much difference do you think there is between someone taking from his own resources what he then gives, and someone receiving a benefit in order to pass it on as a gift?
[15] But so as not to circle back over ground we have already examined enough, in this comparison of benefit and injury the good man will judge, certainly, according to strict fairness, but he will lean in favor of the benefit; he will be more inclined to that side. [16] The person involved usually carries the greatest weight in matters like this: 'you gave me a benefit through a slave, but did me an injury through my father; you saved my son for me, but took my father from me.' He will go on to weigh everything else through which the whole comparison proceeds, and if the difference is small, he will overlook it; even if it is large, but if it can be forgiven without violating loyalty and duty, he will let it go -- that is, if the injury falls entirely on himself alone. [17] The sum of the matter is this: he will be easygoing in settling accounts; he will let more be charged to his own debt than is fair; he will only reluctantly cancel a benefit by offsetting it against an injury; he will lean and incline in this direction, so as to want to owe gratitude, to want to return it. For anyone is mistaken who thinks a benefit is received more gladly than it is repaid: just as the man who pays off a debt is happier than the one who borrows, so the man who unburdens himself of a great debt of gratitude for a benefit received ought to be happier than the man who is just now incurring the obligation. [18] For ungrateful people are mistaken about this too: with a creditor they pay, beyond the principal, extra interest as a matter of course, but they think that the use of a benefit costs nothing; yet benefits, too, grow with delay, and the longer one waits, the more one owes. A man who repays a benefit without interest is ungrateful; so this too will be taken into account when receipts and payments are reckoned up.
[19] We should do everything we can to be as grateful as possible. For this good belongs to us; it is not, as is commonly believed, something that concerns others -- a large part of it comes back to ourselves. Whenever a man benefits another, he has also benefited himself -- and I do not say this merely because the one he has helped will want to help him in turn, the one he has defended will want to protect him, because a good example returns by a roundabout path to the one who set it (just as bad examples fall back on their authors, and no pity is due to those who suffer wrongs which their own actions taught others could be done) -- but because the reward of every virtue lies within itself. Virtues are not practiced for a prize; the wages of a right act is to have done it. [20] I am grateful not so that someone else, provoked by my example, will more readily do me a good turn, but so that I may do the most pleasant and most beautiful of things; I am grateful not because it is expedient, but because it is a joy. And to show you that this is so: if I cannot be grateful except by appearing ungrateful, if I can repay a benefit only by way of what looks like an injury, I will proceed with perfect calm toward the honorable course even through the middle of disgrace. No one, it seems to me, values virtue more highly, no one is more devoted to it, than the man who has sacrificed his reputation as a good man rather than sacrifice his conscience. [21] So, as I said, you are grateful more for your own good than for the other person's; for what happened to him is a common, everyday thing -- getting back what he had given -- but what happened to you sprang from a great and supremely blessed state of mind: having been grateful. For if wickedness makes men wretched and virtue makes them happy, and being grateful is a virtue, then what you gave back was an ordinary thing, but what you gained was beyond price: the awareness of having been grateful, which comes only to a soul that is godlike and fortunate.
The opposite disposition, however, is pursued by the utmost misery: no one who has not been grateful to another can be pleased with himself. Do you think I mean that the ungrateful man will be wretched? I am not putting it off to some future time: he is wretched right now. [22] So let us avoid ingratitude not for another's sake but for our own. Only the smallest and lightest part of wickedness spills over onto others; the worst of it, the thickest sediment, so to speak, stays at home and weighs down the one who holds it, just as our friend Attalus used to say: 'malice drinks off the greatest part of its own poison.' That poison which snakes bring forth for another's destruction, without harming themselves, is not like this one: this poison is at its worst for those who carry it. [23] The ungrateful man torments and wastes himself; he hates what he has received, because he will have to repay it, and he minimizes it, while he magnifies and exaggerates the injuries done to him. What could be more wretched than a man for whom benefits slip away while injuries stick fast? But wisdom, on the contrary, adorns every benefit and commends it to itself, and takes pleasure in constantly recalling it. [24] The wicked have only one pleasure, and a brief one at that -- the moment of receiving benefits -- whereas for the wise man a lasting and perpetual joy remains from them. For it is not the receiving that delights him but the having received, which is immortal and constant. He scorns the things by which he has been injured, and forgets them not through carelessness but on purpose. [25] He does not turn everything toward the worse, nor does he look for someone to blame for misfortune, and he attributes men's wrongdoings to chance rather than malice. He does not read the worst into words or looks; whatever happens, he lightens it by interpreting it kindly. He remembers services rendered rather than offenses given; as far as he can, he keeps himself fixed in an earlier and better memory, and he does not change his attitude toward those who have earned his good will unless their bad deeds far outweigh the good, and the difference is unmistakable even to one who is willing to overlook it -- and even then, only to the extent of being, after the greater injury, the same as he was before the benefit. For when the injury is exactly equal to the benefit, some measure of good will still remains in his mind. [26] Just as a defendant is acquitted when the votes are equal, and humanity always tips the balance toward the better verdict whenever there is doubt, so the mind of the wise man, when the wrongs done to him exactly balance the merits, ceases indeed to owe anything, but does not cease to want to owe it -- doing just what debtors do who pay off old obligations even after new laws have cancelled the need to.
[27] No one, however, can be grateful unless he has learned to despise the things the crowd goes mad over: if you want to return a favor, you must be ready to go into exile, to shed your blood, to take up poverty, and often to stain your very innocence and expose it to undeserved rumors. Being a grateful man does not come cheap. [28] We value nothing more highly than a benefit while we are still seeking it, nothing more cheaply once we have received it. Do you ask what makes us forget the benefits we have received? The desire for more benefits; we think not about what we have already obtained but about what we still need to seek. Wealth, honors, power, and everything else our own opinion holds dear -- worthless at their real price -- draw us away from what is right. [29] We do not know how to assess the value of things that must be judged not by reputation but by their nature; those things have nothing splendid in them to draw our minds toward them, except the fact that we have grown accustomed to admiring them. They are not praised because they deserve to be desired; rather, they are desired because they have been praised, and once the error of individuals has become the common error, the common error in turn creates the error of each individual. [30] But just as we have trusted the crowd about those things, so let us trust that same crowd on this one point too: that nothing is more honorable than a grateful spirit. Every city, every nation, even among the barbarians, will proclaim this with one voice; on this point good and bad alike will agree. [31] There will be those who praise pleasure, and those who prefer hard work; there will be those who call pain the greatest evil, and those who do not even call it an evil; some will admit wealth among the highest goods, others will say it was invented for the ruin of human life, and that nothing is richer than the man for whom fortune can find nothing left to give: yet amid such disagreement of opinions, all will affirm to you, as they say, with one voice, that gratitude must be returned to those who have deserved well of us. On this one point this so discordant crowd will agree -- while all the while we repay benefits with injuries, and the first reason a man becomes ungrateful is that he could not manage to be grateful enough. [32] Madness has reached such a point that it has become a genuinely dangerous thing to confer great benefits on someone; for since he thinks it shameful not to repay them, he comes to wish there were no one for him to repay. Keep what you received from me; I do not ask for it back, I do not demand it; let it be safe merely to have helped you. No hatred is more destructive than one born of shame over a violated benefit. Farewell.

======== Letter 82 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I've stopped worrying about you. "Which of the gods," you ask, "did you get to stand surety for me?" The one, of course, who deceives no one: a mind that loves what is right and good. The better part of you is safe. Fortune can do you an injury -- but what matters more is that I'm not afraid you'll do one to yourself. Go on as you've begun, and settle yourself into that way of living calmly, not softly. I'd rather be badly off than softly off -- and take 'badly' the way ordinary people mean it: hard, rough, laborious. We're used to hearing certain people's lives praised by those who envy them: 'he lives softly' -- what they mean is, 'he's soft.' For the mind is gradually made effeminate, and it dissolves into a likeness of the idleness and sloth in which it lies. Well then? Isn't it better even to grow stiff and hard? ... And then these same pampered people fear the very thing -- death -- to which they've made their life so similar. There's a great difference between leisure and a coffin. "Well then," you say, "isn't it better to lie inert like that than to be tossed about on those peaks of public duty?" Both conditions are detestable, the cramped and the numb alike. I think a man lying dead among his perfumes is just as dead as one dragged off by the hook. Leisure without learning is death, and a live burial for a man. What good, then, does withdrawing do? As if the causes of our anxiety didn't follow us across the seas! What hiding place is there that the fear of death doesn't enter? What quiet retreat of life, however well fortified and set up on the heights, does grief not terrify? Wherever you hide yourself, human troubles will clamor around you. Many things from outside surround us, meaning either to deceive or to press us hard; many from within seethe in the midst of our very solitude. Philosophy must be thrown around us like a wall, one that can't be taken -- one that fortune, though she assails it with many engines, cannot get past. The mind that has abandoned externals and asserts its own claim to its own citadel stands in an unconquerable place; every weapon falls short of it. Fortune doesn't have the long reach we imagine: she seizes no one except the man clinging to her. So let us spring back from her as far as we can; only knowledge of ourselves and of nature will grant us that. The mind must know where it's going, where it came from, what is good for it and what is bad, what it should pursue and what avoid, and what that reason is which distinguishes the desirable from the to-be-shunned, by which the madness of our cravings is tamed and the savagery of our fears held in check. Some people think they've suppressed these things by themselves, without philosophy; but when some accident has put the unwary man to the test, a late confession is squeezed out of him. Big words fall away once the torturer demands the hand, once death has drawn nearer. You could say to such a man: 'You easily challenged evils that weren't there. Now here's the pain you called bearable, here's the death against which you spoke so bravely and at such length. The whips are cracking, the sword is flashing --
now, Aeneas, is the time for courage, now for a steady heart.'
That steadiness, though, will be produced only by constant practice, if you exercise not your words but your mind, if you prepare yourself against death -- and no one will exhort or brace you against death by trying to convince you through quibbles that death is not an evil. It amuses me, Lucilius, best of men, to laugh at the little Greek absurdities that I haven't shaken off yet, much as I marvel at them.
Our Zeno uses this piece of reasoning: 'No evil is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not an evil.' Well, you've cured me! I'm freed from fear; after this I won't hesitate to stretch out my neck. Don't you want to speak a little more seriously, and not raise a laugh in a man about to die? I honestly couldn't easily tell you which was more foolish: the man who thought he'd extinguished the fear of death with this syllogism, or the man who tried to refute it as though it actually mattered.
For this second man set up an opposing syllogism, arising from the fact that we class death among the 'indifferents' -- what the Greeks call adiaphora. 'Nothing indifferent,' he says, 'is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not indifferent.' You see where this argument sneaks past you: death itself is not glorious, but dying bravely is glorious. And when you say 'nothing indifferent is glorious,' I grant you that -- provided I can add that nothing is glorious except in connection with indifferent things; I call these things indifferent (that is, neither good nor bad): sickness, pain, poverty, exile, death.
None of these is glorious in itself, yet nothing is glorious without them. For it's not poverty that's praised, but the man whom poverty doesn't bring low or bend; it's not exile that's praised, but the man who went into exile with a bolder face than the one who sent him; it's not pain that's praised, but the man whom pain never forced to yield; no one praises death itself, but the man whose death took his spirit away before it could trouble it.
None of these things is honorable or glorious in itself, but whatever virtue touches and handles becomes honorable and glorious; they lie there in the middle, neutral. It matters whether it's wickedness or virtue that lays a hand on them. The very death that is glorious in Cato is at once shameful and blush-worthy in Brutus. This is the same Brutus who, about to die, looked for delays -- withdrew to relieve his bowels, and when summoned to death and ordered to bare his neck, said, 'I will bare it -- so may I live!' What madness, to flee when you cannot go back! 'I will bare it,' he said, 'so may I live!' He very nearly added, 'even under Antony.' What a man, worthy to have his life spared!
But, as I was starting to say, you see that death itself is neither an evil nor a good: Cato made the most honorable use of it, Brutus the most disgraceful. Every thing takes on the beauty it lacked in itself once virtue is added to it. We call a bedroom bright; the very same room is pitch dark at night;
day pours light into it, night snatches the light away: so too with those things we call indifferent and neutral -- riches, strength, beauty, honors, kingship, and on the other side, death, exile, bad health, pains, and whatever else we fear more or less -- it is either wickedness or virtue that gives them the name of bad or good. A lump of metal is by itself neither hot nor cold; thrown into a furnace it grows hot, dropped into water it cools. Death is made honorable by that which is honorable -- namely, virtue, and a mind that scorns externals.
There is, Lucilius, a great difference even among the things we call 'neutral.' Death isn't indifferent in the way it's indifferent whether your hair is even or uneven in length. Death belongs among those things which, though not actually evils, still have the appearance of evil: there is a love of self, an innate will to persist and preserve oneself, and a recoiling from dissolution ... because death seems to snatch away many good things from us and lead us out of this abundance of things to which we've grown accustomed. This too alienates us from death: that we already know this life, but we don't know what the things are like to which we're about to pass, and we shudder at the unknown. There is, besides, a natural fear of the darkness into which death is believed to lead us.
And so even if death is indifferent, it isn't the kind of thing that can easily be disregarded: the mind must be hardened by great training so that it can bear the sight of death and its approach. Death ought to be held in more contempt than it usually is; for we've believed many things about it -- many minds have vied with one another to increase its ill repute. The prison of the underworld has been described, and a region oppressed by unending night, in which
a beast lies coiled over half-eaten bones in its bloody cave,
barking forever to terrify the bloodless shades.
Even once you've convinced someone that these are just stories, and that the dead have nothing left to fear, another fear creeps in: people are just as afraid of being somewhere among the dead as of being nowhere at all.
Given all this opposition -- the long-standing persuasion that has been poured over us -- why shouldn't it be glorious to bear death bravely, one of the greatest achievements of the human mind? A mind will never rise up to virtue if it believes death is an evil; it will rise up if it thinks death indifferent. Nature doesn't allow anyone to approach with a great spirit something he judges to be an evil: he'll come sluggishly and hesitantly. But nothing done unwillingly, dragging one's feet, is glorious; virtue does nothing because it's compelled to.
Add to this that nothing is done honorably unless the whole mind has thrown itself into it and stood by it, unless no part of the man resisted. But when someone approaches an evil either out of fear of worse things, or out of hope for goods so great that the swallowing of one evil is worth reaching them, the judgments of the one acting are at odds with each other: on one side something bids him carry through what he's set out to do, on the other something pulls him back and makes him flee something suspect and dangerous; so he's torn in different directions. If that's how it is, glory perishes; for virtue carries out its decisions with a mind in harmony with itself, and fears nothing that it does.
Don't yield to evils, but go against them all the more boldly
than your fortune will allow you.
You won't go more boldly if you've believed those things to be evils. This conviction has to be torn out of your breast; otherwise a lingering suspicion will slow down your charge, and you'll be pushed into what you ought to be attacking.
Our Stoics, of course, want it to appear that Zeno's syllogism
is true, and that the other one opposed to it is deceptive and false. I don't reduce these things to the rule of logic and those tangled knots of a stale, worn-out craft; I judge that this whole genre ought to be thrown out -- the kind by which the person being questioned thinks he's being boxed in, and, driven to an admission, answers one thing while thinking another. In defense of the truth we ought to proceed more straightforwardly, against fear more forcefully.
As for these tangles that the Stoics wind up, I would rather untie them and lay them out flat, so as to persuade, not to trap. When a general is about to lead his army into battle, meaning to have them die for their wives and children, how will he exhort them by a syllogism? I give you the Fabii, transferring an entire war of the republic onto a single household. I show you the Spartans stationed in the very narrow pass of Thermopylae: they hope neither for victory nor for return; that place is going to be their tomb. How do you exhort men to receive with their own bodies the ruin of an entire nation, and to give up their lives rather than their ground? Will you say, 'What is an evil is not glorious; death is glorious; therefore death is not an evil'? What a powerful speech that would be! Who, after hearing it, would hesitate to hurl himself onto hostile blades and die standing up? But how bravely Leonidas addressed his men instead! 'Eat your breakfast, comrades,' he said, 'as men who will dine below with the dead.' The food didn't swell in their mouths, didn't stick in their throats, didn't slip from their hands: eagerly they promised themselves both that breakfast and that dinner.
And what of that Roman general who, sending soldiers to seize a position, when they would have to march through a vast enemy army, addressed them like this: 'Go there, comrades, it is necessary; coming back is not necessary.' You see how simple and commanding virtue is: which mortal can your little tricks and syllogisms make braver, which one more upright? They break the spirit down, when the spirit needs least of all to be shrunk and forced into small, thorny matters -- precisely when it is being composed for something great.
It's not from three hundred men but from all mortals that the fear of death must be stripped away. How do you teach them that death is not an evil? How do you overcome the opinions of an entire age, opinions with which infancy itself is steeped from the very start? What help do you find for human weakness? What do you say to set them ablaze so they'll rush into the middle of danger? With what speech, with what powers of intellect, do you turn back this universal agreement in fear, this conviction of the human race standing braced against you? Are you putting together for me tricky little words and stringing together petty questions? Great monsters are struck down with great weapons. That savage serpent in Africa, more terrifying to the Roman legions than the war itself, they tried in vain to bring down with arrows and slingstones: it couldn't even be wounded by the Pythian bow. Since its enormous size, matching the vastness of its body, threw back iron and whatever weapons human hands had hurled, it was finally broken by boulders flung from millstones. And against death you hurl such tiny darts? Do you meet a lion with an awl? What you say is sharp enough -- nothing is sharper than a blade of grass -- but excessive sharpness itself renders some things useless and ineffective. Farewell.

======== Letter 83 ========

You order me to give you an account of my days, one by one and in full. You must think well of me if you assume there is nothing in them I would hide. And in fact that is how we ought to live — as if we lived in plain view; that is how we ought to think — as if someone could look into the depths of our chest. Someone can. What good does it do to keep a thing secret from men? Nothing is closed to god. He stands within our minds; he steps into the middle of our thoughts — though 'steps in' is a poor way to put it, as if he ever stepped out. So I will do what you order: I will gladly write you what I am doing and in what sequence. I will start watching myself at once and — the most useful practice of all — I will review my day. What makes us as bad as we are is that no one looks back over his own life. Our thoughts run ahead to what we intend to do — and even that seldom — while what we have already done we never consider. Yet any plan for the future has to come out of the past.
Today is a solid block; no one has stolen any piece of it from me. The whole of it went to my bed and my reading. Only a scrap was given to bodily exercise, and on that score I thank old age: it costs me very little. The moment I move, I am tired — and being tired is where exercise ends even for the strongest. You ask about my training partners? One is enough for me: Pharius, a boy — a lovable one, as you know — but he will have to be replaced; I am already looking for someone younger. He claims, actually, that he and I are at the same critical stage, since we are both losing our teeth. But already I can barely keep up with him when he runs, and within a very few days I will not be able to at all: see what daily practice accomplishes. The gap between two people moving in opposite directions widens fast: he is climbing at the very moment I am going down, and you know well how much faster the second of those goes. No — I lied: at my age one is no longer going down; one is falling. Still, you want to know how today's race came out? We did what runners rarely do: we finished in a dead heat, and the prize went to the god. After this — fatigue rather than exercise — I went down into the cold plunge, which in my house means water not quite warm. I, the great cold-bather, who used to greet the canal on the first of January, who used to open the new year by leaping into the Aqua Virgo the way other men open it by reading or writing or making a speech — I moved camp first to the Tiber, then to this tub of mine, which the sun takes the chill off when I am at my bravest and everything is done in good faith. I am not far from the warm bath now. Then dry bread, a lunch without a table, the kind after which there is no need to wash one's hands. I sleep very little. You know my habit: I take the briefest of naps, unyoking the team for a moment, so to speak. It is enough for me to have stopped being awake. Sometimes I know I have slept; sometimes I only suspect it. Now the roar of the Games breaks in — some sudden shout from every throat at once strikes my ears, but it does not shake my train of thought loose; it does not even interrupt it. Noise I bear with great patience. Many voices blurred into one are to me like surf, or wind lashing a forest, or any other sound that carries no meaning.
What, then, have I turned my mind to? I will tell you. Left over from yesterday is this puzzle: what did those very shrewd men think they were doing when, for the greatest questions, they built proofs so flimsy and so tangled that even when true they look like lies? Zeno — that very great man, founder of this bravest and purest of schools — wants to scare us away from drunkenness. Hear, then, how he proves that a good man will not get drunk: 'No one entrusts a confidential conversation to a drunk man; but people do entrust one to a good man; therefore a good man will not be drunk.' Now watch how he is mocked by a parallel argument set against it — one out of many will do: 'No one entrusts a confidential conversation to a sleeping man; but people do entrust one to a good man; therefore a good man does not sleep.' Posidonius pleads our Zeno's case in the only way it can be pleaded — and even so, in my judgment, it cannot be won. He says 'drunk' is used in two senses: of a man heavy with wine and not in command of himself, and of a man who habitually gets drunk and is a slave to this vice. Zeno, he says, means the man who habitually gets drunk, not the man who is drunk right now; and to that man no one will entrust secrets that wine might make him blurt out. This is false. The first premise of the argument covers the man who is drunk, not the man who is going to be. You will grant that there is a great deal of difference between a drunk man and a drunkard: the man who is drunk may be drunk for the first time and not have the habit at all, and the drunkard is often free of drunkenness. So I take the word in the sense it usually carries — especially when it is set down by a man who professes precision and weighs his words. Add this: if Zeno understood it one way and wanted us to understand it another, he used an ambiguous word to open the door to a cheat, and that must never be done where truth is the object. But suppose he did mean it that way: the next step is still false — that a confidential conversation is not entrusted to a man who habitually gets drunk. Think how many soldiers, not always sober, have been given orders to keep quiet about by their general, their tribune, their centurion. Take the plot to kill Gaius Caesar — I mean the one who defeated Pompey and got the state into his grip: Tillius Cimber was trusted with it as fully as Gaius Cassius. Cassius drank water his whole life; Tillius Cimber was both heavy in his wine and a brawler. Cimber himself joked about it: 'Am I to carry any man,' he said, 'when I can't carry my wine?'
Let each of us now name for himself the men he knows can be trusted badly with wine and well with a secret. One example, though, occurs to me, and I will set it down before it gets lost — for life should be stocked with striking examples, and we need not always run back to the old ones. Lucius Piso, the warden of the city, was drunk from the moment he first got drunk. He spent the greater part of the night at dinner parties and slept until nearly the sixth hour: that was his morning. Yet the duty on which the safety of the city depended he discharged with the utmost care. The deified Augustus gave him confidential instructions when he set him over Thrace — which he subdued — and so did Tiberius when leaving for Campania, though he was leaving behind in the city much that was suspect and much that was hated. Later — I suppose because Piso's drunkenness had turned out so well for him — Tiberius made Cossus prefect of the city: a serious, steady man, but soaked and dripping with wine, to the point that he was once carried out of the senate, where he had come straight from a dinner party, sunk in a sleep no one could wake him from. Yet Tiberius wrote to this man, in his own hand, many things he judged unfit to entrust even to his own agents; and not one secret, private or public, ever slipped out of Cossus.
So let us clear away those set-piece declamations: 'The mind in the grip of drunkenness is not its own master. Just as fermenting must bursts the very casks, and the force of the heat throws whatever lies at the bottom up to the top, so when wine seethes, whatever lies hidden at the bottom is carried up and comes out into the open. Men loaded with drink cannot hold their food down when the wine overflows — and no more can they hold a secret; they spill their own and other people's alike.' That does commonly happen; but it just as commonly happens that we take counsel on essential business with men we know to be fond of their drink. So the claim offered as a defense — that nothing confidential is given to a man who habitually gets drunk — is false.
How much better to accuse drunkenness openly and lay out its vices — vices even a passable man would avoid, let alone the perfected and wise man, for whom it is enough to quench his thirst, and who, even when good cheer is urged on further than usual for someone else's sake, still halts short of drunkenness. Whether the wise man's mind can be thrown off balance by too much wine and do what drunks typically do — that we will examine later. Meanwhile, if your aim is to prove that drunkenness is beneath a good man, why work with syllogisms? Say how ugly it is to pour into yourself more than you have room for, ignorant of what your own stomach can take; how many acts a drunk commits that would make him blush once sober; that drunkenness is nothing other than madness taken up voluntarily. Stretch that drunken condition over several days: will you have any doubt it is insanity? As it is, it is not a lesser insanity — only a shorter one. Cite the example of Alexander of Macedon, who ran Clitus — the man he loved and trusted most — through at a banquet, and when he grasped what he had done, wanted to die; certainly he ought to have. Drunkenness ignites every vice and uncovers it; it strips away the shame that blocks bad impulses — for more men are held back from what is forbidden by embarrassment at doing wrong than by good will. When an overload of wine has taken possession of the mind, whatever evil lay hidden comes to the surface. Drunkenness does not create vices; it drags them out. Then the lecher does not even wait for a bedroom, but grants his appetites, without delay, everything they ask; then the pervert confesses his disease and advertises it; then the bully controls neither his tongue nor his hand. Arrogance swells in the insolent man, cruelty in the savage, spite in the envious; every vice is let off the leash and steps out. Add the loss of self-command: the slurred, half-formed words, the unfocused eyes, the wandering step, the spinning head, the very ceiling in motion as if some whirlwind were turning the whole house, the torments of the stomach as the wine boils up and bloats the guts themselves. Even then it is somehow bearable while the wine still has its force: what about when sleep sours it, and what was drunkenness has become indigestion? Think of the disasters public drunkenness has produced: it has handed the fiercest, most warlike nations over to their enemies; it has opened walls defended through years of stubborn war; it has driven the most defiant peoples, who refused every yoke, under a stranger's control; it has tamed with wine men unconquered in battle. Alexander, whom I mentioned just now — all those marches, all those battles, all those winters he came through, beating the difficulty of season and terrain, all those rivers falling out of unknown country, all those seas let him pass unhurt: it was intemperance in drinking, and that fatal cup of Hercules, that buried him. What glory is there in holding a lot of liquor? When the palm is yours, when the others, sprawled in sleep or vomiting, have declined your toasts, when you are the last man standing at the whole banquet, when you have beaten everyone by your magnificent prowess and no one has held as much wine as you — you are still beaten by the cask. What else destroyed Mark Antony — a great man, of noble talent — and drove him over into foreign habits and un-Roman vices, if not drunkenness, and a love of Cleopatra no weaker than his love of wine? This is what made him an enemy of the state; this is what left him unequal to his enemies; this is what made him cruel — when the heads of the leading men of Rome were brought to him at dinner, when amid the most elaborate banquets and royal luxury he inspected the faces and hands of the proscribed, when, heavy with wine, he thirsted all the same for blood. It was intolerable that he was getting drunk while he did these things; more intolerable by far that he did them in the drunkenness itself. Cruelty generally follows on hard drinking, for soundness of mind is damaged and rubbed raw. As long illnesses make men peevish and touchy and enraged at the smallest slight, so continual drunkenness brutalizes the mind: when a man is repeatedly out of his own possession, the habit of insanity hardens, and the vices conceived in wine stay strong without it.
Say, then, why the wise man ought not to get drunk. Show the ugliness of the thing, and its offensiveness, by facts, not words. Prove — nothing is easier — that the so-called pleasures, once they pass the limit, are punishments. For if your argument is that the wise man does not become intoxicated by a great deal of wine, and that even when soused he holds his course straight, then you may as well conclude that after drinking poison he will not die, after taking a sleeping draught he will not sleep, and after a dose of hellebore he will not throw off, up or down, whatever is lodged in his bowels. But if his feet stagger and his tongue will not obey, on what grounds would you judge him part sober, part drunk? Farewell.

======== Letter 84 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. These journeys that shake the sluggishness out of me, I judge, do good both to my health and to my studies. How they help my health you can see: since love of literature makes me lazy and careless about my body, I get my exercise by someone else's efforts. How they help my studies I will show you: I have not stopped reading. Reading is necessary, I think, first so that I am not content with myself alone, and second so that once I have learned what others have discovered, I can then form judgments about their discoveries and think about what remains to be discovered. Reading nourishes the mind and refreshes it when it is tired from writing—though not without writing all the same. We ought not to do only writing or only reading: the one will sadden and drain our strength (I mean the pen), the other will loosen and dilute it. We must move back and forth between the two and temper one with the other, so that whatever has been gathered by reading, the pen reduces into a body of work. We ought, as they say, to imitate the bees, which flit about and pluck the flowers suited to making honey, then arrange whatever they have brought and distribute it through the combs, and, as our Virgil says,
pack the cells and stretch them tight with sweet nectar.
It isn't entirely settled whether bees draw a juice from flowers that is honey from the start, or whether they change what they have gathered into this flavor by some mixture and the special property of their own breath. Some hold that bees have not the skill of making honey but only of gathering it. They say that among the Indians honey is found on the leaves of reeds, produced either by the dew of that sky or by the sweet and rather thick moisture of the reed itself; and that in our own plants too the same power exists, but less obvious and less noticeable, which the creature born for this task tracks down and gathers. Others think that what the bees pluck from the tenderest parts of blooming, flowering things is turned into this quality by a kind of storage and arrangement, not without something like a ferment, by which the different elements are fused into one.
But let me not be led off into some other subject than the one at hand: we too ought to imitate these bees, and separate out whatever we have gathered from varied reading (for things are better preserved when kept distinct), then, applying the care and skill of our own mind, blend those various samplings into a single flavor, so that even if it is apparent where something was taken from, it will still be apparent that it has become something different from where it was taken. We see nature do this in our own bodies without any effort on our part—the food we take in, as long as it keeps its own quality and floats undigested in the stomach, is a burden; but once it has been changed from what it was, only then does it pass into strength and blood. Let us do the same with the things that feed our minds: let us not allow whatever we have absorbed to remain unaltered, or it will not be truly ours. Let us digest it; otherwise it will pass into memory, not into the mind itself. Let us assent to it faithfully and make it our own, so that many things become one thing, just as one number is made from single digits when a single reckoning takes in smaller, disparate sums. Let our mind do this: let it hide away everything by which it has been helped, and display only what it has produced. Even if the likeness of someone you have admired and who has made a deeper mark on you should show through in you, I want you to be like him the way a son is like his father, not the way a portrait is like its subject: a portrait is a dead thing. 'What then? Will people not recognize whose style you are imitating, whose reasoning, whose thoughts?' I think that sometimes it cannot even be recognized, if a man of great talent has stamped his own form on everything he has drawn from whatever model he chose, so that all those elements come together into one unity. Don't you see how a chorus is made up of the voices of many people? Yet a single sound comes out of them all. In it one voice is high, another low, another middle; men's voices are joined by women's, flutes are mixed in: the individual voices there are hidden, and what appears is the sound of them all together. I am speaking of the chorus known to the old philosophers: at our public performances there are more singers than there were spectators in the old theaters. When the ranks of singers have filled every aisle and the seating is ringed with trumpeters, and every kind of pipe and instrument sounds out from the stage, a single harmony arises from discordant parts. That is what I want our mind to be like: let it contain many arts, many precepts, examples from many ages, but all conspiring together into one.
'How,' you ask, 'can this be achieved?' By constant attention: if we do nothing except what reason recommends, and avoid nothing except what reason recommends. If you are willing to listen to reason, it will tell you: leave behind, once and for all, those things people run about chasing; leave riches—either a danger to those who possess them or a burden; leave the pleasures of body and mind—they soften and weaken; leave ambition, a swollen thing, empty, blown about by wind, with no limit, so anxious not to see anyone ahead of it that it is equally anxious not to see anyone level with it, tormented by envy, and a double envy at that. You see how wretched a person is who is both envied and envious. Look at those houses of the powerful, those tumultuous, quarreling thresholds crowded with callers: there is much humiliation in getting in, and more once you are in. Pass by those steps of the rich and those entrance halls suspended on great mounds of earth: there you will stand not merely on the edge of a precipice, but on slippery ground. Direct yourself instead toward wisdom, and seek out her calmest concerns, which are also her greatest. Whatever seems to stand out among human affairs, however small it may be, even though it rises above the very lowest things by comparison, is nonetheless reached only by difficult and steep paths. The road to the height of high position is rugged; but if you wish to climb this peak, to which fortune has submitted herself, you will indeed see beneath you everything that is held to be most exalted, yet you will arrive at the summit by a level road. Farewell.

======== Letter 85 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I had spared you, and passed over whatever knotty material still remained, content, as it were, to give you a taste of what our school argues, in order to prove that virtue by itself is sufficient to fill out the happy life. You tell me to gather up every syllogism there is, whether devised by our own school or adapted for our use: if I were willing to do that, it would not be a letter but a book. I say again and again that I take no pleasure in this kind of argument; I am ashamed to go down armed with an awl into a battle line drawn up on behalf of gods and men.
'Whoever is prudent is also temperate; whoever is temperate is also steady; whoever is steady is untroubled; whoever is untroubled is free of sadness; whoever is free of sadness is happy; therefore the prudent man is happy, and prudence is enough for the happy life.'
Certain Peripatetics respond to this syllogism in this way: they interpret 'untroubled,' 'steady,' and 'free of sadness' to mean not one who is never troubled, but one who is troubled rarely and moderately. Likewise they say a man is called 'free of sadness' if he is not prone to sadness, and not frequent or excessive in this fault; for they say it denies human nature to claim that anyone's mind is wholly immune to sadness; the wise man, they say, is not overcome by grief, but he is touched by it—and so on, in ways consistent with their school's position. By this they do not remove the emotions, but temper them. But how little we grant the wise man, if he is only braver than the weakest, more cheerful than the saddest, more moderate than the most unrestrained, greater than the most abject! What if Ladas were to marvel at his own speed only by comparing himself to the lame and the crippled?
She would fly over the tips of standing grain
and never bruise the tender ears with her stride,
or she would race across the middle of the sea, skimming
the swelling waves, her swift feet never wetting in the water.
This is swiftness measured on its own terms, not the kind praised only by comparison with the slowest. What if you called someone healthy simply because his fever was mild? Moderate sickness is not good health. 'In just this way,' they say, 'the wise man is called untroubled, the way certain fruits are called seedless—not because they have no hardness of pit at all, but less of it.' That is false. For I do not understand the good man's freedom from evils as a diminishment of them, but as an exemption from them entirely; they ought to be nonexistent, not merely small; for if there is any amount of them at all, they will grow, and meanwhile they will hinder him. Just as a large, fully formed cataract blinds the eyes, a slight one clouds them. If you grant the wise man any emotions at all, reason will be no match for them and will be swept away as if by a torrent, especially since you are not giving him a single emotion to wrestle with, but all of them. A crowd of even middling emotions can do more than the violence of one great one. He has a desire for money, but a moderate one; he has ambition, but not an inflamed one; he has a temper, but an appeasable one; he has inconstancy, but less erratic and changeable; he has lust, but not a mad one. A man would be better off having one vice whole and entire than one who has all of them, even if lighter. Besides, it makes no difference how great an emotion is: however large it is, it does not know how to obey, it does not accept counsel. Just as no animal submits to reason—not the wild ones, not the tame and domesticated ones either, for their nature is deaf to persuasion—so the emotions, however small they are, do not follow reason, do not listen to it. Tigers and lions never shed their savagery; they sometimes lower it, and just when you least expect it, their tamed ferocity flares up again. Vices never grow gentle in good faith. Besides, if reason has any effect at all, the emotions will not even begin; and if they begin against reason's will, they will persist against its will as well. It is easier to block their beginnings than to control their onrush.
So this notion of moderation is false and useless, to be classed with saying that one should be moderately insane, or moderately sick. Virtue alone possesses due measure; the soul's diseases admit no tempering. You will find it easier to remove them than to govern them. Can there be any doubt that the ingrained, hardened vices of the human mind — the ones we call diseases — are without measure: greed, cruelty, lack of self-command? Then the passions are without measure too, for it is from the passions that one crosses over into the vices. Besides, if you grant any legal standing to grief, fear, desire, and the other crooked impulses, they will slip out of our control. Why? Because the things that provoke them lie outside us; so they will grow in proportion as the causes that excite them are great or small. Fear will be greater the more there is to terrify a man, or the closer he has seen it; desire will be keener the larger the prize whose hope has called it forth. If it is not in our power whether the passions arise, neither is it in our power how large they are: once you have allowed them to begin, they will grow along with their causes and will be as big as they become. Add to this that such things, however slight at first, spread and swell; nothing destructive ever keeps within bounds. However trivial the beginnings of a disease, it creeps onward, and sometimes the smallest added attack sinks a body already ailing. And what lunacy it is to believe that when the beginnings of things lie outside our decision, their endings lie within it! How am I strong enough to stop a thing I was too weak to keep out — when it is easier to shut something out than to suppress it once admitted?
Virtue alone admits no such tempering; the mind's evils do not accept a middle degree; you will more easily remove them than govern them. Is there any doubt that the ingrained, hardened vices of the human mind, which we call diseases—like avarice, cruelty, lack of self-control—are immoderate by nature? Then the emotions too are immoderate; for it is from the emotions that one passes into these diseases. Besides, if you grant any legal standing at all to sadness, fear, desire, and the other perverse impulses, they will not be in our power. Why? Because the things that provoke them lie outside us; and so they will grow or shrink according to whether the causes that stir them are great or small. Fear will be greater the more, or the nearer, the thing is that terrifies; desire will be sharper the greater the hope of the thing that calls it forth. If it is not in our power whether the emotions exist at all, then neither is it in our power how great they will be: once you have allowed them to begin, they will grow along with their causes and become as great as circumstance makes them. Add to this that these things, however small at first, grow beyond measure; nothing destructive ever keeps within bounds; however slight the beginnings of diseases, they creep on, and a sick body is sometimes overwhelmed by the smallest addition. But how mad it is to believe that we can set the limits of things whose beginnings lie outside our own control! How am I strong enough to put an end to something I was too weak to keep from starting, when it is easier to shut something out than to suppress it once it is let in? Others have drawn the distinction this way, saying: 'the temperate and prudent man is calm in the disposition and habit of his mind, but not in outcome. For as far as the settled state of his mind goes, he is not disturbed, not saddened, not afraid; but many causes from outside befall him and bring disturbance upon him.' What they mean to say is this: that he is not, in fact, an angry man, though he does sometimes grow angry; and that he is not a fearful man, though he does sometimes feel fear—that is, that he lacks the vice of fear, but not the emotion itself. But if this is granted, then through repeated practice fear will pass over into a vice, and anger, once admitted into the mind, will unravel that very disposition of a mind free from anger. Furthermore, if he does not disregard causes coming from outside, and does feel some fear, then when he must go bravely against swords or fire, for his country, its laws, its liberty, he will go out hesitantly and with his resolve wavering. But this inconsistency of mind does not fall upon the wise man. I think it should also be observed that we must not confuse two things that need to be proved separately: it is proved on its own terms that the only good is what is honorable, and again on its own terms that virtue alone is enough for the happy life. If the only good is what is honorable, everyone agrees that virtue is sufficient for living happily; but the reverse does not follow—that if virtue alone makes one happy, the only good must be what is honorable. Xenocrates and Speusippus think that a man can become happy by virtue alone, yet do not hold that the only good is what is honorable. Epicurus too judges that a man who has virtue is happy, but that virtue itself is not sufficient for the happy life, because it is the pleasure that arises from virtue that produces happiness, not virtue itself. A silly distinction: for the same man says that virtue is never found without pleasure. So if pleasure is always joined to virtue and inseparable from it, then virtue alone is also sufficient; for it carries pleasure with it, without which it does not exist, even when it exists alone. But this claim is absurd: that a man will indeed become happy by virtue alone, but will not become perfectly happy. I cannot see how that could be so. For the happy life has within itself a good that is complete and beyond all surpassing; and if that is so, it is perfectly happy. If the life of the gods contains nothing greater or better, and the happy life is a divine life, then it contains nothing to which it could be raised any higher. Furthermore, if the happy life lacks nothing, then every happy life is complete, and one and the same life is both happy and happiest. Do you doubt that the happy life is the highest good? Then, if it possesses the highest good, it is happy in the highest degree. Just as the highest good admits no addition (for what could be above the highest?), so neither does the happy life, which cannot exist without the highest good. But if you introduce a 'more happy,' you will also introduce a 'much more happy'; you will create countless gradations of the highest good, whereas I understand the highest good to be that which has no degree above itself. If one person is less happy than another, it follows that he would desire the other, happier person's life more than his own; but the happy man prefers nothing to what is his own. Either alternative here is unbelievable: either that something remains for the happy man which he would rather have than what he has, or that he does not prefer the thing that is better than what he has. For surely, the wiser he is, the more he will stretch himself toward what is best, and the more he will desire to attain it by every means. But how is a man happy who can still desire something—or rather, who must?
I will tell you the source of this error: people do not realize that the happy life is one single thing. Its own quality, not its size, puts it in the best possible condition; and so it is the same whether long or short, spread wide or narrower, distributed into many places and many parts, or drawn together into one. Whoever measures it by number, by extent, by parts, robs it of the very thing that makes it exceptional. And what is exceptional about the happy life? That it is full. The end of eating and drinking, I think, is being satisfied. One person eats more, another less: what does it matter? Both are now full. One drinks more, another less: what does it matter? Neither is thirsty. One has lived more years, another fewer: it makes no difference, if many years made the one man happy just as much as few years made the other. The man you call less happy is not happy at all; this word admits no diminishing.
'Whoever is brave is without fear; whoever is without fear is without sadness; whoever is without sadness is happy.'
This is our school's syllogism. Against it, they try to respond as follows: that we are treating as an admitted fact a claim that is actually false and controversial—namely, that the brave man is without fear. 'What then?' they say. 'Will the brave man not fear looming evils? That would be the mark of a madman out of his senses, not a brave man. No,' they say, 'he fears things with the greatest moderation, but he is not entirely outside the reach of fear.' Those who say this fall back into the same error, making lesser vices stand in the place of virtues; for a man who does fear, but rarely and only a little, is not free of the fault—he is only troubled by a lighter form of it. 'But surely I think it madness not to be afraid of looming evils.' What you say would be true if they were in fact evils; but if he knows they are not evils, and judges only baseness to be evil, then he ought to look upon dangers without concern, and disregard as trivial the things that others fear. Or if it belongs to a fool and a madman not to fear evils, then the wiser a man is, the more he ought to fear. 'As you people see it,' they say, 'the brave man will expose himself to dangers.' Not at all: he will not fear them, but he will avoid them; caution suits him, fear does not. 'What then?' they ask. 'Will he not fear death, chains, fire, the other weapons of fortune?' No; for he knows that these things are not evils, but only seem to be; he considers all of them the ordinary terrors of human life. Describe captivity, floggings, chains, poverty, the mutilation of limbs whether by disease or by violence, and whatever else you can bring up: he counts these among the fears of the deranged. These are things to be feared by the timid. Or do you think something is an evil, when it is a thing that we sometimes must go to meet of our own will? You ask what evil actually is? It is yielding to the things called evils, and handing over to them your own freedom—the freedom for which everything else ought to be endured: freedom perishes unless we scorn the things that would place a yoke upon us. People would not be uncertain about what befits a brave man, if they knew what courage really is. It is not rash recklessness, nor love of danger, nor a craving for what is fearsome: it is the knowledge of distinguishing what is evil from what is not. Courage is the most careful guardian of itself, and at the same time the most patient in enduring the things that only have the false appearance of evils. 'What then? If a sword is aimed at a brave man's throat, if one part of his body after another is repeatedly pierced, if he sees his own entrails spill into his own lap, if the torture is renewed after a pause, so that he may feel it all the more, and fresh blood is drawn from wounds already dried—does he feel no fear? Will you say that he feels no pain either?' No, he does feel pain—for no virtue strips a man of his human capacity to feel—but he does not fear; unconquered, he looks down on his own sufferings from a height. You ask what his state of mind is then? The same as that of someone comforting a sick friend.
'What is evil does harm; what does harm makes a man worse; pain and poverty do not make a man worse; therefore they are not evils.'
'What you propose is false,' they say, 'for it does not follow that whatever does harm also makes worse. A storm and a squall do harm to the helmsman, yet they do not make him worse.' Some of the Stoics answer this objection as follows: that the helmsman is indeed made worse by the storm and squall, because he cannot accomplish what he set out to do, nor hold his course; that he is not made worse in his skill, but in the exercise of it. To which the Peripatetic replies, 'So then poverty, pain, and anything else of that kind will also make the wise man worse; it will not take his virtue away from him, but it will hinder its operation.' This would be rightly said, were the helmsman's situation not different from the wise man's. For the wise man's purpose in living his life is not necessarily to accomplish what he attempts, but to do everything rightly; the helmsman's purpose is necessarily to bring the ship into harbor. The arts are servants; they must deliver what they promise; wisdom is mistress and ruler; the arts serve life, wisdom commands it.
I think it should be answered differently: that neither the helmsman's skill nor the exercise of that skill is made worse by any storm. The helmsman did not promise you good fortune, but useful effort and knowledge of how to steer a ship; and this becomes all the more apparent the more some chance force has opposed him. Whoever was able to say, 'Neptune, you shall never sink this ship except on a straight course,' has fully satisfied his art: the storm hinders not the helmsman's work, but his success. 'What then?' they say. 'Does it do the helmsman no harm, this thing that keeps him from reaching harbor, that renders his efforts fruitless, that turns him back or holds him fast and strips him of resources?' It does harm—not to him as helmsman, but as a man sailing; otherwise he is no true helmsman at all. It so little hinders the helmsman's art that it actually displays it; for in calm weather, as they say, anyone can be a helmsman. These things are harmful to the vessel, not to its pilot in his capacity as pilot. The helmsman has two roles: one shared with everyone else who has boarded the same ship—he too is a passenger; the other his own—he is the helmsman. The storm harms him as a passenger, not as a helmsman. Furthermore, the helmsman's skill is a good belonging to someone else: it pertains to those he carries, just as a doctor's skill pertains to those he treats. The wise man's good is shared: it belongs both to those with whom he lives and to himself alone. And so the helmsman may perhaps suffer harm, since the service he has promised to others is hindered by the storm; but the wise man suffers no harm from poverty, none from pain, none from the other storms of life. For not all his work is prevented—only the part that concerns others; he himself is always in action, and his achievement is greatest precisely when fortune has set itself against him; for then he is carrying out the business of wisdom itself, which we have said is both a good belonging to others and his own.
Besides, even when he is under the pressure of some necessity, he is not thereby prevented from doing good to others. Poverty may keep him from teaching how the state should be governed, but he still teaches how poverty itself should be handled. His work extends across his whole life. Thus no turn of fortune, no circumstance, shuts out the wise man's activity; for the very thing that keeps him from doing other things is itself the subject of his action. He is fitted for either kind of situation: ruler of good things, conqueror of bad ones. He has trained himself, I say, to display virtue as much in favorable circumstances as in adverse ones, and to look not at the material he is given but at virtue itself; and so neither poverty nor pain nor anything else that turns the inexperienced aside and drives them headlong can hold him back. Do you think he is being crushed by misfortunes? He is making use of them. Phidias did not know how to make statues only out of ivory; he made them out of bronze too. If you had given him marble, or some even cheaper material, he would have made from it the best thing that could be made from that material. So too the wise man will unfold virtue in riches, if that is granted him; if not, in poverty; in his homeland, if he can; if not, in exile; as a commander, if he can; if not, as a common soldier; sound in body, if he can; if not, disabled. Whatever fortune he receives, he will make something memorable out of it. There are certain trainers of wild animals who bring the fiercest creatures, terrifying even to encounter, to tolerate a man's presence, and, not content merely to have shaken off their savagery, tame them into close companionship: a trainer puts his hand into a lion's jaws, a tiger's own keeper kisses it, the smallest Ethiopian boy orders an elephant to kneel and to walk a tightrope. Just so, the wise man is an artist in taming misfortunes: pain, want, disgrace, imprisonment, exile—everywhere terrifying—become gentle once they reach him. Farewell.

======== Letter 86 ========

I write this to you lying in the very villa of Scipio Africanus, after paying my respects to his shade and to the altar which I suspect is that great man's tomb. His soul, I am convinced, returned to the heaven it came from — not because he led great armies (Cambyses had those too, a madman who used his madness with success) but because of his rare restraint and sense of duty, which I find more admirable in him when he left his country than when he defended it. Either Scipio had to be at Rome, or Rome had to be free. 'I want to take nothing away from the laws,' he said, 'nothing from our institutions; let the rights of all citizens be equal. My country, enjoy the good I did you — without me. I was the cause of your liberty; I will also be its proof: I am leaving, if I have grown larger than is good for you.' How could I not admire the greatness of spirit with which he withdrew into voluntary exile and took the weight off the state? Things had come to the point where either liberty must wrong Scipio or Scipio wrong liberty. Neither was permissible; so he gave the laws right of way and retired to Liternum, meaning to put his own exile on the state's account as surely as Hannibal's.
I have seen the villa: built of squared stone; a wall enclosing a wood; towers, too, run up on both sides as strongpoints for the house; a cistern set beneath the buildings and the greenery, big enough to supply an army; and a little bathroom, cramped and dark in the old fashion — our ancestors did not think water was hot unless it was in the dark. A great pleasure came over me as I compared Scipio's ways with ours. In this cranny that 'terror of Carthage,' the man Rome must thank that she was captured only once, used to wash a body worn out by farm work. For he kept himself in trim with labor, and — as the custom was in the old days — worked his own land himself. Under this roof, this shabby roof, he stood; this floor, this cheap floor, bore his weight. And now — who is there who could bear to bathe like that? A man thinks himself poor and squalid unless his walls gleam with great costly disks, unless Alexandrian marbles are set off with Numidian inlay, unless a laborious border, tinted as variously as a painting, runs around them on every side, unless the vault is hidden under glass, unless Thasian stone — once a rare sight in the odd temple — rims our pools, into which we lower bodies drained thin by heavy sweating, unless silver spigots deliver the water. And so far I am only talking about the common man's plumbing. What when I come to the baths of the freedmen? What a mass of statues, what a mass of columns supporting nothing, set up as ornament purely for the sake of the expense! What volumes of water crashing down over steps! We have arrived at such delicacy that we refuse to walk on anything but gems.
In this bath of Scipio's there are tiny slits rather than windows cut through the stone wall, to let in light without weakening the defenses. Nowadays people call a bath a moth-hole if it has not been angled to catch the sun all day through enormous windows, if men cannot bathe and tan at the same time, if they cannot look out from the tub over fields and sea. And so baths that drew crowds and gasps at their dedication are shrugged off as antiques as soon as luxury has thought up some novelty to bury itself under. In the old days baths were few, and not decorated at all — why decorate a thing that cost a quarter-as and was invented for use, not amusement? The water was not kept topped up; it did not run fresh continuously as if from a hot spring; and men did not think the transparency of the water they left their dirt in was worth a thought. But, good gods, what a pleasure to step into those dark baths with their ordinary plaster, knowing that the aedile Cato — or a Fabius Maximus, or some Cornelius — had tested the temperature for you with his own hand! For even the noblest aediles performed this duty too: entering the places where the people were received, and demanding cleanliness and a temperature useful and healthy — not this recent invention that resembles a house fire, so much so that a slave convicted of some crime ought by rights to be sentenced to be bathed alive. As far as I can see there is no longer any difference between a bath that is burning and one that is hot. What rustic crudity some people now convict Scipio of — that he did not let daylight into his hot-room through broad panes, that he did not stew himself in full sunshine and wait to digest his dinner in the tub! The unlucky fellow — living was a skill he never acquired! He bathed in unfiltered water, often cloudy water, nearly mud when the rain came down hard. Nor did it much matter to him that he bathed that way; he came to wash off sweat, not scented oil. What do you suppose some people will say to that? 'I don't envy Scipio: a man who bathed like that truly lived in exile.' Worse yet, if you must know — he did not bathe every day. Those who have handed down the old customs of the city tell us that men washed their arms and legs daily — the parts that work had dirtied — and washed all over only on market days. Someone will say here: 'Clearly they were filthy men.' And what do you think they smelled of? Of soldiering, of labor, of a man. Since spotless baths were invented, men are dirtier. When Horatius Flaccus wanted to describe a notorious character, a man conspicuous for overdone refinements, what does he say? 'Buccillus smells of lozenges.'
Show me a Buccillus today: it would be just the same as if he reeked of goat — he would stand where Gargonius did, the man that same Horace set opposite Buccillus. It is not enough now to put on perfume unless it is freshened two or three times a day so it will not fade on the skin. And what of the fact that men boast of this scent as if it were their own?
If all this strikes you as too gloomy, charge it to the villa — where I learned from Aegialus, that most careful head of a household (he now owns this land), that a tree can be transplanted however old it is. We old men need this lesson, since every one of us is planting an olive orchard for somebody else — I have seen that orchard, in its third and fourth year, drop its fruit as if disdaining it. You too will one day be sheltered by the tree that
comes slowly, to make shade for grandsons far ahead,
as our Vergil says — a poet who looked not for the truest thing to say but the most graceful, and who aimed to delight readers, not to instruct farmers. To pass over everything else, let me copy out the point I had to catch him on today:
in spring the beans are sown; then you too, Median clover, the crumbling
furrows receive, and the millet's yearly care comes round.
Whether these crops go in at one and the same time, and whether both are spring sowings, you may judge from this: it is June as I write to you, tipping already into July, and on one and the same day I have seen men harvesting beans and men sowing millet.
Back to the olive orchard, which I saw planted in two ways. In the first, Aegialus took the trunks of large trees, cut back the branches to a single foot each, and moved them root-ball and all, after pruning off the roots and leaving only the knob from which they had hung. He dipped this in dung, sank it in the pit, and then not only heaped earth over it but trod and packed it down. Nothing, he says, is more effective than this 'tamping,' as he calls it. Evidently it shuts out cold and wind; besides, the trunk shifts less, and so allows the emerging roots to come out and take hold of the soil — roots which are still waxy, holding on by sufferance, so that even a slight shaking tears them loose. He scrapes the ball of the tree, moreover, before he buries it, since new roots come out, he says, from all the wood that has been bared. The trunk should project from the soil no higher than three or four feet; that way it clothes itself in growth from the very base, and no great part of it will be dry and scorched, as in old olive orchards. The second way of planting was this: he set out, by the same method, strong branches whose bark was not yet hard, the kind young trees carry. These rise a little more slowly, but since they grow up as if from a seedling, there is nothing gnarled or dismal about them. I saw this too: a vine of many years' standing transplanted away from its tree. With a vine, even the hair-fine rootlets should be gathered up if possible, and then the vine bedded out generously, so it can strike root from the body itself. And I have seen vines planted not in February alone but even when March was already spent: they have taken hold, and are embracing elms not their own. All these trees of the thicker-stemmed kind, so to speak, should be helped along, he says, with cistern water — and if that works, we have the rain in our own power.
I do not plan to teach you any more, or I would be training you up as my rival, the way Aegialus trained me up as his. Farewell.

======== Letter 87 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I suffered a shipwreck before I ever boarded a ship. I won't tell you how it happened, so you don't think it belongs among the Stoic paradoxes - none of which is false, and none as strange as it seems at first sight, as I will prove to you whenever you like, or even if you don't like.
In the meantime this trip has taught me how many things we have that are superfluous, and how easily we could set them aside by our own judgment, since when necessity takes them away we do not even notice they are gone. With the fewest possible slaves - as many as one carriage could hold - and with nothing but what our own bodies could carry, my Maximus and I are now spending the happiest two days imaginable. A mattress lies on the ground, and I lie on the mattress. Of my two travelling-cloaks, one has become a groundsheet, the other a blanket. Nothing could be cut from our lunch: it was ready in no time at all, and never without dried figs, never without writing tablets. The figs serve as a side dish if I have bread, and as bread itself if I don't. Every day they make a New Year for me, which I turn into a lucky and happy one through good thoughts and greatness of soul - and the soul is never greater than when it has set aside everything that belongs to others, and made peace for itself by fearing nothing, and made itself rich by wanting nothing. The carriage I have been put into is a farm cart; the mules show they are alive by walking; the muleteer goes barefoot, and not because of the heat. I can hardly bring myself to admit that I am willing to have this carriage seen as mine: a perverse false modesty about what is right still lingers in me, and every time I run into some more elegant company on the road, I blush against my will, which proves that these things I approve of, that I praise, still have no fixed and unshakable place in me. A man who blushes at a shabby carriage will boast of an expensive one. I have made too little progress so far: I do not yet dare to display my frugality openly; even now I care what travelers think of me.
A voice ought to have been raised against the opinions of the whole human race: "You are mad, you are wrong, you are struck dumb with admiration for superfluous things, you value no one at his own worth. When it comes to a man's estate, you are the most careful accountants, working out the balance sheet for each person to whom you are about to lend either money or favors (for you nowadays enter these too on the expense side): he holds broad lands, but he owes a great deal; he has a beautiful house, but it was bought with someone else's money; no one will parade a finer household of slaves, but he cannot meet his debts; if he paid his creditors, nothing would be left to him. You ought to do the same in all other cases too, and shake out how much each man really has of his own." You think that man rich because his gold plate follows him even on the road, because he farms in every province, because a huge ledger of accounts is unrolled for him, because he owns as much land near the city as he would own, to everyone's envy, in the deserts of Apulia: say everything you like about him, and still he is poor. Why? Because he owes. "How much?" you ask. Everything - unless perhaps you think it makes a difference whether a man has borrowed from another man or from Fortune. What does it matter that his fattened mules are all the same color? What do those carved carriages matter?
steeds draped in purple and embroidered blankets,
golden collars hanging down over their chests,
champing under their teeth on tawny gold covered in gold.
None of that can make the owner any better, nor the mule either. Marcus Cato the Censor, whose birth was as much a boon to the republic as Scipio's - one waged war on our enemies, the other on our vices - used to ride a plow-horse, and with saddlebags loaded on it, so that he might carry useful things along with him. Oh, how I wish that one of those dandies today could meet him on the road - one of the rich men, with his runners and his Numidian outriders and a great cloud of dust raised ahead of him! This fellow would no doubt seem more refined and better attended than Marcus Cato - this fellow who, in the midst of all his dainty equipment, is at this very moment wondering whether to hire himself out to the sword or to the knife. Oh, what an ornament to the age it was that a general, a man honored with a triumph, a censor - and this above all the rest - that Cato, should be content with a single horse, and not even the whole of that; for part of his baggage, hanging down on either side, took up part of it too. So would you not prefer that one horse, groomed by Cato's own hand, to all your bloated ponies and Asturian cobs and ambling nags?
I see there will be no end to this subject unless I make one myself. So here I will fall silent about all this - things which, without a doubt, the man who first called them "impedimenta" foresaw would turn out to be exactly the burden they now are. Now I want to give you back a very few of our school's arguments concerning virtue, which we maintain is sufficient for a happy life.
"What is good makes men good (for even in music, what is good makes a musician); chance goods do not make men good; therefore they are not goods."
The Peripatetics answer this by saying that our first premise is false. "Not everything that is good," they say, "necessarily makes men good. In music there is something good, such as a flute or a string or some instrument fitted for the purpose of playing; yet none of these makes a musician." We will answer them: "you do not understand how we have posited what is good in music. We do not mean what equips a musician, but what makes one: you are talking about the tools of the art, not the art itself. But whatever is good within the art of music itself will indeed make a musician." I want to put this even more clearly. What is good in the art of music is spoken of in two senses: one by which the musician's performance is aided, another by which the art itself is aided. To the performance belong the instruments - flutes, organs, strings; these do not belong to the art itself. For a man is a craftsman even without them, though perhaps he cannot practice his craft. This is not equally twofold in a human being; for what is good for a person is the same as what is good for his life.
"What can happen to the most contemptible and disgraceful person is not a good; but wealth can happen to a pimp or a gladiator-trainer; therefore wealth is not a good."
"What you propose is false," they say, "for even in grammar and in the art of medicine or of navigation we see good things happen to the humblest of people." But these arts have not laid claim to greatness of soul, they do not rise up on high, nor do they scorn chance goods: virtue lifts a man up and sets him above what mortals hold dear; it neither craves nor dreads to excess either the things called goods or the things called evils. Chelidon, one of Cleopatra's soft favorites, owned a huge fortune. Recently Natalis, a man whose tongue was as filthy as it was shameless, in whose mouth respectable women were slandered, was heir to many and had many heirs. What then - did money make that man foul, or did he foul the money? Money falls upon certain men the way a coin falls into a sewer. Virtue stands above such things; it is valued at its own worth; it judges nothing good that comes falling in from whatever direction. Medicine and navigation do not forbid themselves or their practitioners admiration for such things; a man who is not good can still be a doctor, can still be a ship's captain, can still be a grammarian, just as well, by heaven, as he can be a cook. But the man to whom it falls to possess anything you like, you would not call anything you like: whatever a man possesses, such a man he is. A strongbox is worth as much as it holds - no, it actually becomes an addition to what it holds. Who sets a price on a full purse except what the sum of money stored in it determines? The same happens to the owners of great fortunes: they become additions and appendages to their wealth. Why, then, is the wise man great? Because he has a great soul. So it is true that what can happen to the most contemptible person is not a good. And so I will never call freedom from pain a good: the cicada has it, the flea has it. Nor will I call being at rest and free from trouble a good: what is more idle than a worm? Do you ask what makes a wise man? The same thing that makes a god. You must grant him something divine, heavenly, magnificent: not everything can be good, nor does it allow just any possessor.
See
what each region bears, and what each refuses:
here grain grows better, there the grapes flourish more happily,
tree-fruit elsewhere, and grasses grow green
unbidden. Do you not see how Tmolus sends saffron-scented perfumes,
India ivory, the soft Sabaeans their own incense,
but the naked Chalybians iron?
'A good does not come from an evil; but riches come from greed; therefore riches are not a good.' 'It is not true,' he says, 'that good is not born from evil; for money is born from temple-robbery and theft. So temple-robbery and theft are indeed evils, but only because they produce more evil than good: they yield profit, but profit that comes with fear, anxiety, and torments of mind and body alike.' Whoever says this must admit that temple-robbery, just as it is an evil because it produces much evil, is also in some measure a good, because it produces some good — and what could be more monstrous than that? Although, to be sure, we have thoroughly convinced ourselves that temple-robbery, theft, and adultery belong among the goods. How many men feel no blush at theft; how many boast of adultery! For petty sacrileges are punished; great ones are carried in triumphal processions. Add to this that if temple-robbery is in any respect a good at all, it will also be honorable and will be called a right action — for it is an action of ours — a conclusion no mortal mind can accept. Therefore goods cannot be born from evil. For if, as you say, temple-robbery is an evil for this one reason, that it brings much evil in its train, then remit its punishments, guarantee it impunity, and it will be a good through and through. And yet the greatest punishment of crimes lies within them. You are mistaken, I say, if you postpone their punishment to the executioner or the prison: they are punished the moment they are committed — no, while they are being committed. So good is not born from evil, any more than a fig from an olive tree: fruits answer to the seed; goods cannot degenerate. Just as the honorable is not born from the shameful, so neither is the good from the evil — for the honorable and the good are the same thing.
"Good does not come from evil; but wealth does come from greed; therefore wealth is not a good." "It is not true," they say, "that good does not arise from evil; for money arises from sacrilege and theft. And so sacrilege and theft are indeed an evil, but only because they produce more evils than goods; they do bring profit, but along with fear, anxiety, and torments both of mind and body." Whoever says this must also concede that sacrilege, just as it is an evil because it produces many evils, is also to some extent a good, because it produces some good. What could be more monstrous than this conclusion? And yet we have thoroughly convinced ourselves to count sacrilege, theft, and adultery among goods. How many feel no shame at theft, how many boast of adultery! Small sacrilege is punished, great sacrilege is carried in triumph. Add to this that sacrilege, if it is in any respect at all a good, will also be honorable and will be called a right action - which no mortal's thinking accepts. Therefore goods cannot arise from evil. For if, as you say, sacrilege is an evil for this one reason, that it brings much evil with it, then if you remit its punishments, if you guarantee its safety, it will be entirely a good. But in fact the greatest punishment for crimes lies within the crimes themselves. You are wrong, I say, if you postpone that punishment to the executioner or the prison: crimes are punished the moment they are committed - no, while they are being committed. So a good does not arise from an evil, any more than a fig from an olive tree: things born answer to their seed, and goods cannot degenerate. Just as the honorable does not arise from the shameful, so neither does the good arise from evil; for the honorable and the good are one and the same thing.
Some of our own school answer this as follows: "let us suppose money is a good no matter where it is taken from; it does not, however, follow that money comes from sacrilege just because it was taken from a sacrilege. Understand it this way: in the same jar there is both gold and a viper. If you take the gold out of the jar, you do not take it out because there is also a viper there; the jar does not give me gold, I say, because it holds a viper, but it gives gold even though it also holds a viper. In the same way, profit comes from sacrilege, not because sacrilege is shameful and criminal, but because it also happens to contain profit. Just as in that jar the evil is the viper, not the gold that lies beside the viper, so in sacrilege the evil is the crime, not the profit." I disagree with them, for the two cases are very different. There, I can take out the gold without the viper; here, I cannot make the profit without the sacrilege; that profit is not merely placed next to the crime, it is mixed into it.
'Your proposition,' he says, 'carries two senses. One is that while we are trying to gain riches we fall into many evils. But we also fall into many evils while trying to gain virtue: one man is shipwrecked while sailing abroad for the sake of study; another is taken captive. The other sense is this: that through which we fall into evils is not a good. From this proposition it will not follow that we fall into evils through riches or through pleasures; or else, if we do fall into many evils through riches, then riches are not merely not a good — they are an evil; whereas you claim only that they are not a good. Moreover,' he says, 'you concede that riches have some use: you count them among advantages. Yet by the same reasoning they will not even be an advantage, for through them many disadvantages come our way.' To this some people answer: 'You are mistaken to charge riches with those disadvantages. Riches harm no one: it is each man's own folly that hurts him, or another man's wickedness — just as a sword kills no one; it is the killer's weapon. Riches do not harm you merely because harm comes to you on account of riches.' Posidonius answers better, I think: he says riches are a cause of evils not because they themselves do anything, but because they goad men who will. There is one kind of cause, the efficient, which must do harm directly; another, the antecedent. Riches supply this antecedent cause: they puff up the mind, they breed arrogance, they attract envy, and they so unhinge the understanding that a reputation for money delights us even when it is going to hurt us. All goods, however, ought to be free of blame; they are pure, they do not corrupt the mind, they do not agitate it. They lift and enlarge the spirit, yes — but without swelling. Things that are good produce confidence; riches produce audacity. Things that are good give greatness of soul; riches give insolence — and insolence is nothing but a false semblance of greatness. 'On that reckoning,' he says, 'riches are actually an evil, not merely not a good.' They would be an evil if they did the harm themselves — if, as I said, they held the efficient cause. As it is, they hold the antecedent one, and one that does not merely goad the mind but drags it: they pour over us an appearance of good that looks like the real thing and convinces most people. Virtue too carries an antecedent cause — toward envy: many men are envied for their wisdom, many for their justice. But virtue does not have this cause from itself, nor is the appearance plausible; on the contrary, the image that virtue sets before men's minds is more like the truth — one that summons them to love and admiration.
"Your proposition," they say, "has two meanings: one, that while we try to attain wealth, we fall into many evils. But we fall into many evils while trying to attain virtue too: one man, sailing for the sake of study, has suffered shipwreck, another has been taken captive. The other meaning is this: that through which we fall into evils is not a good. On this proposition it will not follow that we fall into evils through wealth or through pleasures; or if we do fall into many evils through wealth, then wealth is not merely not a good, it is an evil - yet you yourselves say only that it is not a good. Besides," they say, "you concede that wealth has some usefulness: you count it among the advantages. But by the same reasoning it will not even be an advantage, since through it many disadvantages come upon us." To this some reply: "you are wrong to charge wealth with these disadvantages. Wealth harms no one: either a man's own folly harms him, or someone else's wickedness, just as a sword kills no one - it is the weapon of the killer. Wealth does not harm you simply because you are harmed on account of wealth." Posidonius, in my opinion, puts it better, when he says that wealth is a cause of evils - not because it does anything itself, but because it provokes people to do things. For one kind of cause is an efficient cause, which necessarily and directly does harm, and another is a preceding cause. Wealth has this preceding kind of cause: it puffs up souls, breeds arrogance, draws envy, and so alienates the mind that we come to delight even in a reputation for money that is bound to harm us. But all goods ought to be free of fault; they are pure, they do not corrupt souls, they do not disturb them; they do lift up and expand the soul, but without swelling it. What is good produces confidence, wealth produces recklessness; what is good gives greatness of soul, wealth gives insolence. And insolence is nothing but a false semblance of greatness. "In that case," they say, "wealth is even an evil, not merely not a good." It would be an evil if it did harm on its own, if, as I said, it had an efficient cause; as it is, it has only a preceding cause, and indeed one that not merely provokes souls but draws them in, since it casts before them a semblance of good that resembles the truth and is credible to most people. Virtue too has a preceding cause of envy; for many are envied on account of their wisdom, many on account of their justice. But this cause does not come from virtue itself, nor does it resemble the truth; on the contrary, a truer semblance is thrown before men's minds by virtue, one that calls them to love and admiration.
Posidonius says the argument should be framed this way: "What gives the soul neither greatness nor confidence nor security is not a good; but wealth and good health and things like them do none of these; therefore they are not goods." He presses this argument still further in this form: "What gives the soul neither greatness nor confidence nor security, but instead breeds insolence, swelling, and arrogance, is an evil; but we are driven into these states by chance goods; therefore they are not goods."
"By this reasoning," they say, "they will not even be advantages." The condition of advantages is different from that of goods: an advantage is that which has more use than trouble; a good must be pure and harmless from every angle. What is good is not what benefits more, but what benefits only. Besides, an advantage belongs also to animals, to imperfect men, and to fools. And so it can have some disadvantage mixed in with it, but it is still called an advantage, judged by the greater part of itself; a good belongs only to the wise man; it must be inviolate.
Keep a good spirit: only one knot remains for you, and it is a Herculean one: "good does not come from evils; but wealth comes from many poverties; therefore wealth is not a good." Our own school does not recognize this argument - the Peripatetics both invent it and untangle it. Posidonius says that this sophism, tossed around in every school of logic, is refuted by Antipater as follows: "poverty is not defined by possession, but by deprivation" (or, as the ancients said, by lack - the Greeks call it "kata steresin"); "it speaks not of what one has, but of what one does not have. And so out of many empty things nothing can be filled up: many things make wealth, not many lacks. You understand poverty," he says, "differently than you ought. For poverty is not what possesses few things, but what does not possess many things; so it is defined not by what one has, but by what one lacks."
I could express what I mean more easily if there were a Latin word for what the Greeks call anhyparxia - "non-existence." Antipater assigns this to poverty; I do not see what else poverty could be than the possession of little. We will look into this question - what is the real nature of wealth, what is the real nature of poverty - whenever I have plenty of leisure; but even then we will have to consider whether it is not more useful to soothe poverty and take the arrogance out of wealth than to quarrel over words, as if the matter itself had already been settled. Let us suppose we have been summoned to a public assembly: a law is being brought forward to abolish wealth. Are we going to persuade or dissuade people with arguments like these? Are we going to use them to make the Roman people long for and praise poverty - the foundation and cause of their empire - and fear their own wealth instead, so that they reflect that they found it among the conquered, that from it ambition and bribery and turmoil have burst into a city once most upright and disciplined, that the spoils of nations are displayed with too much extravagance, and that what one people has seized from all can just as easily be seized from that one people by all? It is more useful to urge this, and to storm the passions themselves, not merely to hem them in with fine distinctions. If we can, let us speak more forcefully; if not, let us at least speak more plainly. Farewell.

======== Letter 88 ========

You want to know what I think of the liberal studies. I respect none of them, I count none of them a good, if its end point is cash. They are hired trades — useful just so far as they get the mind ready, so long as they do not hold it back. One should linger over them only while the mind is unable to tackle anything greater; they are our warm-up, not our work. You can see why they were called 'liberal' studies: because they are worthy of a free man. But only one study is truly liberal — the one that sets a man free: the study of wisdom, lofty, brave, great-souled. The rest are small stuff for children. Or do you believe there is any good in subjects whose professors, as you can see, are the most disgraceful and scandalous of men? We ought not to be learning these things; we ought to have learned them.
Some have judged that the question to ask about the liberal studies is whether they make a man good. They do not even promise that; they make no pretense of that kind of knowledge. The literary scholar is busy with the care of language and, if he wants to range wider, with histories — and, pushing his boundaries out as far as they will go, with poetry. Which of these paves a road to virtue? Parsing syllables, fussing over words, memorizing myths, the laws and measures of verse — which of these takes away fear, removes desire, bridles lust? Pass to geometry and to music: you will find nothing in them that forbids fearing, forbids desiring. And whoever is ignorant of that knows everything else in vain.
The question is whether these men teach virtue or not. If they do not teach it, they do not even transmit it; if they do teach it, they are philosophers. Do you want proof of how far they are from having set up shop to teach virtue? Look how unlike one another all their pursuits are — yet there would be uniformity if they were teaching the same thing. Unless perhaps they can persuade you that Homer was a philosopher — though they refute that with the very arguments they use to prove it. For now they make him a Stoic, approving virtue alone, fleeing pleasures, refusing to leave the honorable even at the price of immortality; now an Epicurean, praising the condition of a city at peace, passing life amid banquets and song; now a Peripatetic, introducing three classes of goods; now an Academic, declaring everything uncertain. Clearly none of these positions is in him, because all of them are — for they contradict one another. But grant them that Homer was a philosopher: then surely he became wise before he knew any poetry; so let us learn the things that made Homer wise. As for asking me which was the elder, Homer or Hesiod — that is no more to the point than knowing why Hecuba, though younger than Helen, wore her years so badly. And the ages of Patroclus and Achilles — do you really think investigating those is to the point? Do you ask where Ulysses wandered rather than see to it that we are not wandering all the time? There is no leisure to hear whether he was tossed about between Italy and Sicily or beyond the world known to us — indeed so long a wandering could not have happened in so narrow a space. Storms of the soul toss us daily, and our worthlessness drives us into every one of Ulysses' misfortunes. There is no lack of beauty to trouble the eye, no lack of an enemy; on one side savage monsters that delight in human blood, on another treacherous enticements for the ear, and elsewhere shipwrecks and every variety of disaster. Teach me this: how to love my country, my wife, my father; how to sail toward these honorable ports even after shipwreck. Why inquire whether Penelope was unchaste, whether she pulled the wool over her generation's eyes, whether she suspected the man before her was Ulysses before she knew it? Teach me what chastity is, and how great a good lies in it, and whether it is located in the body or in the mind.
I pass to the musician. You teach me how high and low notes harmonize, how strings that give back different sounds produce concord. Bring it about instead that my mind is in harmony with itself and my plans do not clash. You show me which musical modes are plaintive; show me instead how, in the middle of adversity, not to let out a plaintive note.
The geometer teaches me to measure estates rather than teaching me how to measure what is enough for a man. He teaches me to count, and lends my fingers to greed, rather than teaching me that those computations are beside the point — that a man whose fortune wears out the bookkeepers is not the happier for it; rather, how much useless property that man owns who will be reduced to utter misery if he is forced to reckon up, by himself, how much he has. What use is it to me to know how to divide a little field into parcels, if I do not know how to divide it with my brother? What use to tot up with precision the feet in an acre, and to catch even what escapes the measuring-rod, if a high-handed neighbor scraping off a bit of my land can make me miserable? He teaches me how to lose nothing of my boundaries; but what I would rather learn is the art of losing them entire, and cheerfully. 'I am being driven,' the man says, 'from the field of my father and grandfather.' Really? Before your grandfather, who held that field? Can you explain what man — no, what people — it belonged to? You entered it not as owner but as tenant. Whose tenant? If things go well for you, your heir's. The jurists say that no public property can be acquired by usage; what you hold, what you call yours, is public — the property, in fact, of the human race. A splendid art! You know how to measure circles; you reduce whatever shape you are given to a square; you state the distances between stars; nothing exists that does not fall within your measurement. If you are such a craftsman, measure a man's mind; say how great it is, say how puny it is. You know what a straight line is: what good is that to you if you do not know what is straight in life?
I come now to the man who glories in his knowledge of the heavens —
where the cold star of Saturn takes itself off,
into what orbits the Cyllenian fire wanders across the sky.
What will knowing this profit me? That I should be anxious when Saturn and Mars stand in opposition, or when Mercury makes his evening setting with Saturn looking on — rather than learn this: that wherever those bodies are, they are favorable and cannot change? The unbroken order of the fates and their inescapable course drive them along; they come round in fixed rotations, and the outcomes of all things they either cause or mark. But if they cause whatever happens, what good will knowledge of an unchangeable thing do? And if they merely signal it, what is the point of foreseeing what you cannot escape? Know these things or don't — they will happen.
But if you keep in view the swift sun and the stars that follow
in their order, never will tomorrow's hour deceive you,
nor will you be caught by the snares of a cloudless night.
Provision has been made, amply and more than amply, to keep me safe from snares. 'What — does tomorrow's hour really never deceive me? Whatever befalls a man without his knowing deceives him.' I do not know what will happen; I know what can happen. From that total I will beg off nothing; I expect all of it, and if any of it is remitted, I count myself lucky. The hour deceives me if it spares me — and yet even then it does not deceive me. For just as I know that anything can happen, so I also know it will not necessarily happen. So I look for the best and am ready for the worst.
On one point you will have to bear with me while I stray off the prescribed track: I cannot be induced to admit painters into the roster of the liberal arts, any more than sculptors, marble-workers, or the other servants of luxury. Just as firmly I expel wrestlers, and that whole science built of oil and mud, from these liberal studies — otherwise I must also admit the perfumers and the cooks and all the others who fit their talents to our pleasures. For what, I ask you, is liberal about those fellows who vomit on an empty stomach, whose bodies are fattened while their minds are starved and comatose? Or are we to believe that kind of training is liberal for our young men — the young men our ancestors trained upright: to throw javelins, to whirl a stake, to manage a horse, to handle weapons? They taught their sons nothing that had to be learned lying down. Still, neither the old exercises nor the new ones teach or nourish virtue. What is the profit in guiding a horse and governing its gallop with a bit, while being dragged off by passions with no bit at all? What is the profit in beating many men at wrestling or boxing, and being beaten by anger?
'What then — do the liberal studies contribute nothing to us?' To other things, much; to virtue, nothing. Even those admittedly humble trades that work with the hands contribute a great deal to the equipment of life, yet they have nothing to do with virtue. 'Then why do we educate our sons in the liberal studies?' Not because these can bestow virtue, but because they prepare the mind to receive it. Just as that primary schooling — 'letters,' as the ancients called it — through which children are given their elements, does not teach the liberal arts but clears the ground for taking them in later, so the liberal arts do not conduct the mind all the way to virtue; they clear its road.
Posidonius says there are four kinds of arts: the common and menial, the theatrical, the boyish, and the liberal. The common are the craftsmen's, done by hand and busy with equipping life, making no show of grace or of honor. The theatrical are those aimed at pleasing eye and ear; among these you may count the stage-engineers who devise scaffolds that rise by themselves, platforms that climb silently into the air, and other surprises — things that were joined splitting apart, things that stood apart coming together on their own, things that stood high sinking gradually into themselves. The eyes of the ignorant are struck by all this; knowing none of the causes, they marvel at everything sudden. The boyish arts, which have something resembling the liberal about them, are those the Greeks call 'encyclical' and we call liberal. But the only truly liberal arts — or, to speak more truly, the only free ones — are those whose concern is virtue.
'Just as there is a natural part of philosophy,' he says, 'a moral part, and a logical part, so this crowd of liberal arts also claims its own place within philosophy. When we come to questions of natural science, we rest the case on geometry's testimony; therefore geometry is a part of the discipline it assists.' Many things assist us without being parts of us; indeed, if they were parts, they would not assist. Food is an aid to the body, yet it is not a part of it. Geometry renders us a certain service: it is necessary to philosophy the way the carpenter is necessary to geometry — but the carpenter is not a part of geometry, nor is geometry a part of philosophy. Besides, each has its own boundaries. The wise man investigates and knows the causes of natural things; their numbers and measures the geometer pursues and calculates. On what principle the heavenly bodies hold together, what force and what nature is theirs, the wise man knows; their courses and returns, and those certain oscillations by which they sink and rise and sometimes present the appearance of standing still — though standing still is not permitted to heavenly bodies — the mathematician computes. The wise man will know the cause that produces reflections in a mirror; the geometer can tell you how far the object must be from the image, and what shape of mirror gives back what images. That the sun is large the philosopher will prove; how large it is, the mathematician — who advances by a kind of practice and drill. But in order to advance, he must beg certain first principles; and no art whose foundation is held on sufferance is its own master. Philosophy asks nothing from anyone else; it raises the whole structure from the ground up. Mathematics is, so to speak, a surface-tenant: it builds on another's land, accepting first principles by whose favor it reaches what lies beyond. If it went to the truth on its own, if it could grasp the nature of the whole universe, I would say it contributed much to our minds, which grow by handling the heavens and draw something down from on high.
One thing alone brings the mind to completion: the unshakable knowledge of good and evil — and no other art inquires into good and evil at all. Let us take the virtues one by one. Courage is the scorner of everything frightening; it looks down on the terrors that would put our liberty under the yoke; it challenges them and breaks them. Do the liberal studies strengthen it? Faithfulness is the holiest good of the human heart; no compulsion forces it to deceive, no reward corrupts it. 'Burn me,' it says, 'flog me, kill me: I will not betray them; the harder pain digs for my secrets, the deeper I will bury them.' Can the liberal studies make souls like that? Temperance commands the pleasures; some it hates and drives off, others it rations and reduces to a healthy measure — and it never approaches them for their own sake. It knows the best measure of what we desire is not how much you want but how much you ought to take. Kindness forbids being arrogant toward one's fellows, forbids being harsh; in words, in deeds, in feelings it shows itself gentle and approachable to everyone; it counts no misfortune another's, and loves its own good chiefly because that good will be good to someone else. Do the liberal studies teach that character? No more than they teach simplicity, or modesty and restraint, or thrift and frugality, or the mercy that spares another's blood as its own and knows that man is not to be used wastefully by man.
'Since you say,' comes the objection, 'that virtue cannot be reached without the liberal studies, how can you deny that they contribute anything to virtue?' Because virtue is not reached without food either, yet food has nothing to do with virtue. Timber contributes nothing to a ship, though a ship is made of nothing but timber. There is no reason, I say, to think a thing comes about by the help of something merely because it cannot come about without it. One can even go further and say that wisdom can be reached without the liberal studies at all; for though virtue must be learned, it is not learned through them. Why should I suppose a man who does not know his letters cannot become wise, when wisdom does not reside in letters? Wisdom delivers facts, not words — and perhaps memory is more reliable when it has no prop outside itself. Wisdom is a large, spacious thing; it needs the whole room to itself. There is learning to be done about things divine and human, about past and future, about the perishable and the eternal, about time — and consider, on that one subject, how many questions arise: first, whether time is anything in its own right; then whether anything exists before time, apart from time; whether time began with the universe, or, because something existed before the universe, time existed too. About the soul alone the questions are countless: where it comes from, what it is like, when it begins to exist, how long it exists; whether it migrates from place to place, changing residence as it is thrown into one animal form after another, or serves only a single term and then, released, roams through the whole; whether or not it is a body; what occupation it will have once it stops acting through us; how it will use its freedom when it has escaped this cage; whether it forgets its past and begins to know itself from the moment it is drawn away from the body and withdraws to the heights. Whatever region of things human and divine you take hold of, you will be worn out by the enormous supply of matters to investigate and learn. So that these many great subjects may have free lodging, everything superfluous must be cleared out of the mind. Virtue will not squeeze herself into those cramped quarters; a great thing wants room to move. Let everything else be evicted; let the whole heart be empty for her.
'But it is delightful to know many arts.' Then let us keep only as much of them as we need. Do you think a man deserves censure who accumulates useless goods and lays out a parade of costly objects in his house, and not the man who buries himself in the useless bric-a-brac of learning? Wanting knowledge past the point of enough is intemperance of its own kind. Consider too that this chasing after the liberal arts makes men tiresome, wordy, tactless, pleased with themselves — men who fail to learn the necessary things because they have learned the superfluous ones. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand books; I would pity him if he had merely read that much superfluity. In these books he investigates Homer's birthplace, Aeneas' true mother, whether Anacreon lived more given to lust or to drink, whether Sappho was a prostitute — and other things you would want to unlearn if you knew them. Now go and tell me life is not long!
But when you come to our own people too, I will show you plenty that ought to be cut away with the axe. It costs a great outlay of time and a great weariness of other men's ears to earn the compliment 'What a learned man!' Let us be content with a plainer, countrier title: 'What a good man!' Is that how it is to be? Am I to unroll the annals of every nation and hunt for the first writer of poetry? Am I to calculate the span between Orpheus and Homer, when I have no chronology to go by? Am I to study the critical marks with which Aristarchus pricked at other men's verses, and wear my life out on syllables? Am I to stay stuck in the geometer's sand-tray? Has the wholesome precept 'be sparing of your time' slipped so far out of my mind? Am I to know these things — and be ignorant of what? The scholar Apion, who toured the whole of Greece under Gaius Caesar and was adopted by every city in Homer's name, used to say that Homer, after finishing both his subjects, the Odyssey and the Iliad, added to his work a beginning in which he embraced the whole Trojan war. His proof was that Homer deliberately placed in his first line two letters giving the number of his books. A man who wants to know a great deal needs to know that sort of thing. Won't you consider instead how much time bad health takes from you, how much public business, how much private business, how much daily business, how much sleep? Measure your life: it does not hold so much. I have been speaking of the liberal studies — but how much superfluity the philosophers have, how much that retreats from any use! They too have sunk to distinctions of syllables and the proper force of conjunctions and prepositions, and have come to envy the grammarians, to envy the geometers: whatever was superfluous in those men's arts they have imported into their own. The result is that they know how to speak more carefully than how to live. Hear how much harm excessive subtlety does, and how hostile it is to truth. Protagoras says one can argue either side of any question with equal force — including this very question, whether every question can be argued on either side. Nausiphanes says that of the things that appear to be, none is any more existent than nonexistent. Parmenides says that of all appearances, nothing exists except the universe as one. Zeno of Elea knocked the whole business out of business: he says nothing exists. The Pyrrhonists work the same ground, and the Megarians and Eretrians and Academics, who introduced a new branch of knowledge — knowing nothing. Toss all of these onto that useless heap of liberal studies. The first group hand me a knowledge that will do me no good; the second strip away the hope of any knowledge at all. Better to know useless things than to know nothing. The first do not hold up a lamp to aim my sight at the truth; the second gouge my eyes out. If I believe Protagoras, nothing in the nature of things exists except doubt; if Nausiphanes, only this is certain, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, nothing exists but the One; if Zeno, not even the One. What, then, are we? What are these things that surround us, feed us, hold us up? The whole of nature is a shadow — either empty or deceiving. I could not easily say which group angers me more: those who decided we know nothing, or those who did not leave us even that — the knowing that we know nothing. Farewell.

======== Letter 89 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You want something useful, something necessary to a man hurrying toward wisdom: that philosophy be divided, and its vast body arranged into limbs. It is easier, after all, to be led to knowledge of the whole through its parts. If only philosophy as a whole could come before us the way the entire face of the world comes into view all at once—a spectacle most like the universe itself! For it would surely seize every mortal with wonder at itself, and we would abandon the things we now, in the vast ignorance of vast fools, consider great. But since that cannot happen, philosophy must be looked at the way the secrets of the universe are looked at. [2] The wise man's mind embraces the whole mass of it, and covers it no less swiftly than our eyesight covers the sky; but for us, who must break through fog and whose vision fails close at hand, individual things can more easily be shown one at a time, since we are not yet capable of grasping the whole. So I will do what you ask, and divide philosophy into parts—not into scraps. To divide it is useful; to hack it apart is not. For it is difficult to grasp the smallest things as it is to grasp the greatest. [3] The people are divided into three classes, the army into centuries; whatever has grown large is more easily recognized once it has been broken into parts—which, as I said, should not be countless and tiny. Too much division has the same fault as none at all: whatever has been cut down to dust is as good as jumbled together.
[4] So first, if you agree, let me say what the difference is between wisdom and philosophy. Wisdom is the perfected good of the human mind; philosophy is the love and pursuit of wisdom: philosophy strains toward what wisdom has already reached. Where the word 'philosophy' comes from is obvious; by its very name it confesses what it loves. [5] Some have defined wisdom as knowledge of things divine and human. Others put it this way: wisdom is knowing things divine and human, and their causes. This addition seems superfluous to me, since the causes of things divine and human are themselves part of the divine. There have also been those who defined philosophy this way and that: some called it the pursuit of virtue, others the pursuit of correcting the mind; some have called it the striving after right reason. [6] This much seems settled: there is some difference between philosophy and wisdom. It cannot be that the thing pursued is the same as the pursuing. Just as there is a great difference between greed and money—greed desires, money is desired—so it is between philosophy and wisdom. Wisdom is the effect and reward of philosophy; philosophy comes on its own, wisdom is arrived at. [7] Wisdom is what the Greeks call sophia. The Romans used to use this very word too, just as they now use 'philosophia'; your old comic plays will prove it to you, and so will the inscription on the tomb of Dossennus:
Stop, stranger, and read the sophia of Dossennus.
[8] Some of our own school, though they held that philosophy was the pursuit of virtue—virtue being what is sought, and philosophy the seeking—nevertheless did not think the two could be pulled apart; for there is no philosophy without virtue, nor virtue without philosophy. Philosophy is the pursuit of virtue, but pursued through virtue itself; nor can virtue exist without pursuit of itself, nor pursuit of virtue without virtue. It is not as with people trying to hit something from a distance, where the one aiming is in one place and the target in another; nor is it like roads leading to cities, which lie outside the cities—so too the roads to virtue lie outside virtue itself. No: one arrives at virtue through virtue; philosophy and virtue are bound together.
[9] The greatest and the majority of authorities have said philosophy has three parts: moral, natural, and rational. The first orders the mind; the second investigates the nature of things; the third demands precision in the meaning of words, in structure, and in argument, so that falsehood does not slip in disguised as truth. But there have also been those who reduced philosophy to fewer parts, and those who spread it into more. [10] Some of the Peripatetics added a fourth part, civic philosophy, because it requires its own particular training and deals with its own subject matter; some added to these the part they call 'economics,' the science of managing a household; some even set apart a separate topic on ways of life. None of this, though, will fail to be found within the moral part. [11] The Epicureans thought philosophy had two parts, natural and moral; they threw out the rational part. But then, forced by the facts themselves to distinguish ambiguous things and to expose falsehoods hiding under the appearance of truth, they too introduced a topic they call 'on judgment and the standard'—which under another name is the rational part—though they consider it an appendage of the natural part. [12] The Cyrenaics did away with both the natural and the rational parts and were content with the moral part alone—but even what they cut away, they bring back in another way; for they divide moral philosophy into five parts: one on things to be avoided and sought, a second on the emotions, a third on actions, a fourth on causes, a fifth on proofs. But causes belong to the natural part, and proofs to the rational. [13] Ariston of Chios said that the natural and rational parts were not only superfluous but actually harmful; and he trimmed down even the moral part, the only one he had left standing. For he removed the section containing exhortations and moral advice, saying that belonged to a schoolmaster, not a philosopher—as if the wise man were anything other than the schoolmaster of the human race.
[14] Since philosophy, then, is threefold, let us begin by arranging its moral part first. This, in turn, it has been agreed to divide into three: first, the assessment that assigns to each thing its due worth and judges how much each is worth—this is most useful, for what is more necessary than putting the right price on things?—second, the study of impulse; third, of action. First you must judge how much each thing is worth; second, direct toward it an impulse that is ordered and controlled; third, bring your impulse and your action into agreement, so that in all these things you are consistent with yourself. [15] Whatever is missing from these three throws the rest into disorder. What good does it do to have correctly assessed everything, if you are excessive in your impulse? What good does it do to have curbed your impulses and to hold your desires in your own power, if in the actual carrying out of things you are ignorant of timing, and don't know when, where, and how each thing should be done? It is one thing to know the worth and value of things, another to know the particulars of action, and still another to rein in impulse and move toward action without rushing headlong. Life is in harmony with itself only when action does not fall short of impulse, and impulse is conceived in proportion to the worth of the thing pursued—so that it is slack or keen exactly as that thing deserves to be pursued.
[16] The natural part of philosophy splits into two: bodies and incorporeal things; and each of these divides further into what I might call its own grades. The topic of bodies falls first into things that act and things produced by them—and what is produced are the elements. The topic of the elements itself, some think, is simple; others think it divides into matter, the cause that moves everything, and the elements.
[17] It remains for me to divide the rational part of philosophy. All speech is either continuous, or broken up between question and answer; the latter has been called 'dialectic,' the former 'rhetoric.' Rhetoric is concerned with words, thoughts, and arrangement; dialectic divides into two parts, words and their meanings—that is, the things spoken of, and the terms by which they are spoken of. A vast further division follows in each. So at this point I will make an end, and
follow only the highest summits of the matter;
otherwise, if I wanted to make parts of parts, this would turn into a book of quibbles.
[18] None of this, best of men, Lucilius, do I discourage you from reading—provided that whatever you read you immediately apply to your character. Restrain your vices, rouse what has grown slack in you, tighten what has grown loose, tame your stubbornness, and, so far as you can, harass your own desires and those shared by everyone; and when people say to you, 'How much longer the same old thing?'—answer:
[19] 'I ought to be the one saying, "how much longer will you go on committing the same sins?" Do you want the remedies to stop before the diseases do? I will say it all the more, and precisely because you refuse to hear it I will persist; medicine only begins to do good once, touching a body that has grown numb to itself, it draws out the pain. I will say things that will benefit you even against your will. Let some voice that flatters you not, for once, reach you—and since each of you, one by one, refuses to hear the truth, hear it in public.
[20] 'How far will you go in extending the boundaries of your estates? Is a field too narrow for one master, when it once held a whole people? How far will you stretch your plowlands, not content to mark out the size of your farms even by the measure of provinces? Great rivers flow through private property from source to mouth, and mighty streams that once bounded mighty nations now belong to you alone. Even that is too little, unless you have girdled the seas with your latifundia, unless your bailiff rules beyond the Adriatic, the Ionian, the Aegean, unless islands—once the residences of great commanders—are counted among your cheapest possessions. Own as widely as you like, let what was once called an empire become one estate; make everything you can your own, as long as more remains that is someone else's.
[21] 'Now I speak to you whose extravagance spreads out just as widely as their greed. I say to you: how long before there is no lake without your villas' rooflines looming over it? no river without your buildings lining its banks? Wherever a hot spring bubbles up, there some new resort of luxury will be built. Wherever the shore curves into a bay, you will immediately lay foundations, and not content with dry land unless it is land you made yourselves, you will drive the sea inward. You may have your roofs gleaming in every location—here perched on mountains for a vast view of land and sea, there raised from the plain to the height of mountains—yet however much you have built, however enormous, you yourselves remain single bodies, and small ones. What good do many bedrooms do you? You lie in only one of them. Wherever you are not, is not yours.
[22] 'Next I turn to you whose bottomless, insatiable gullet ransacks the seas on one side and the lands on the other, pursuing prey with hooks, with snares, with every kind of net, at enormous effort: for you, no animal is safe except from your own disgust. How little of all those dishes, gathered with such labor, do you actually taste, with a mouth exhausted by pleasures? How little of that wild beast, dangerously caught, does the queasy, bloated master actually sample? How little of all those shellfish, hauled from so far away, actually slides down that insatiable gut of yours? Wretched people—do you not realize that your hunger is bigger than your stomach?'
[23] Say these things to others, so that in saying them you hear them yourself; write them, so that in writing them you read them yourself—applying everything to your character, to calming the madness of your passions. Study not so that you may know more, but so that you may know better. Farewell.

======== Letter 90 ========

[1] Who could doubt, my Lucilius, that we owe the bare fact of living to the immortal gods, and the fact of living well to philosophy? So we would owe philosophy more than we owe the gods, by exactly as much as a good life outweighs mere life — that would count as certain, except that the gods gave us philosophy itself. Knowledge of it they gave to no one; the capacity for it they gave to everyone. [2] For if they had made philosophy too a common possession, if we were born already prudent, wisdom would have lost the best thing about it: that it is not part of the lottery. As things stand, this is what makes it precious and splendid — it does not simply arrive; each of us owes it to himself; it cannot be requested from someone else. What would you find to admire in philosophy if it came as a handout? [3] Its one task is to discover the truth about things divine and human. Religious reverence never leaves its side, nor duty, nor justice, nor the whole retinue of virtues linked arm in arm and holding together. Philosophy taught us to worship what is divine and to love what is human, taught that command belongs to the gods and fellowship to mankind. And that fellowship stayed intact for a long while, until greed tore the partnership apart and became the cause of poverty even for those it made richest; for men stopped possessing everything the moment they wanted things of their own. [4] But the first mortals, and those born from them, followed nature uncorrupted; they had one and the same person as leader and as law, having placed themselves in the hands of their better. It is natural for the worse to yield to the stronger. Even among dumb herds, the biggest bodies or the fiercest take the lead: it is no puny bull that walks in front of the cattle, but the one whose size and muscle have beaten the other males; the tallest elephant leads the herd. Among human beings, 'best' takes the place of 'biggest.' So the ruler was chosen for his mind, and the greatest happiness belonged to peoples among whom no one could be more powerful without being better; a man can safely do whatever he wants when he thinks he can do only what he ought.
[5] In that age, then, which they call golden, Posidonius holds that kingship lay with the wise. They kept hands off and held the stronger back from the weaker; they urged and dissuaded, and pointed out what was useful and what was not. Their foresight saw to it that their people lacked nothing; their courage kept dangers away; their generosity made their subjects flourish and gave them dignity. Ruling was a duty, not a reign. No one tested his power against the very men through whom he had come to have any, and no one had either the impulse or the grounds for wrongdoing, since a ruler who commanded well was obeyed well, and a king could make no graver threat against the disobedient than that he would leave the kingdom. [6] But once vices crept in and kingdoms turned into tyrannies, laws became necessary — and in the beginning these too were given by the wise. Solon, who set Athens on a footing of equal justice, was one of the seven famous for wisdom; if the same generation had produced Lycurgus, he would have joined that sacred number as an eighth. The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas are praised; and these men learned the statutes they would lay down for Sicily, then in its prime, and for the Greek settlements across Italy, not in the forum or the anterooms of legal consultants but in Pythagoras's quiet and holy retreat.
[7] Up to this point I agree with Posidonius. But that philosophy invented the crafts daily life makes use of — that I will not grant, nor will I claim the glory of the workshop for it. 'It was philosophy,' he says, 'that taught men who were scattered about, sheltering in huts or a hollowed-out cliff or the trunk of a rotted tree, to build proper roofs.' For my part I think philosophy no more dreamed up these contrivances of roofs rising on top of roofs, of cities pressing down on cities, than it dreamed up fishponds enclosed for one purpose — so the gullet need not run the risk of storms, and luxury, however savagely the sea might rage, could have its own private harbors in which to fatten sorted flocks of fish. [8] What are you saying? Philosophy taught men to keep a lock and key? What was that but handing greed its signal? Was it philosophy that hoisted these overhanging roofs at such peril to the people underneath? As if it were not enough to be covered by whatever came to hand, and to find some natural shelter for oneself without craft and without trouble. [9] Believe me, that was a happy age — before architects, before roof-plasterers. All that came in with luxury, which was being born at the same time: squaring timbers with the axe, and slicing a beam with a steady hand while the saw ran along the marked line;
for the earliest men split their splittable wood with wedges.
They were not building halls to house a banquet, nor for that purpose was pine or fir carted down in a long train of wagons while the streets trembled, so that coffered ceilings heavy with gold could hang from it. [10] Forked poles propped at either end held up the hut; with brushwood packed tight and leaves heaped up and laid on a slope, the rain — however heavy — ran off. Under such roofs they lived without a care. Thatch covered free men; slavery lives under marble and gold.
[11] I part company with Posidonius on this point too, his view that the tools of the smith's trade were thought up by wise men. On that logic he might as well say it was wise men through whom
men learned in those days to trap wild beasts with snares, to cheat them with birdlime,
and to ring the great woodland glades with dogs.
All of that was discovered by human shrewdness, not by wisdom. [12] I disagree here as well — that it was wise men who discovered the ores of iron and copper when forest fires scorched the earth and the surface veins melted and ran out. Such things are discovered by the kind of men who prize them. [13] Nor does the question strike me as being as subtle as it strikes Posidonius: whether the hammer or the tongs came into use first. Both were invented by someone with a lively, sharp mind — not a great or lofty one — and so was everything else that has to be hunted for with the body bent over and the mind staring at the ground. The wise man was easy to feed. How not? Even in our own age he wants to travel as light as possible. [14] How, I ask you, can it be consistent to admire both Diogenes and Daedalus? Which of the two looks wise to you: the man who devised the saw, or the man who, on seeing a boy drinking water from a cupped hand, immediately pulled his cup out of his knapsack and broke it, telling himself off with the words, 'What a fool I've been, carrying superfluous baggage all this time!' — the man who folded himself into a storage jar and slept there? [15] Which do you think the wiser today: the one who worked out how to shoot saffron spray to an astonishing height out of concealed piping, who floods or empties channels with a sudden rush of water, who fits together revolving ceilings for dining rooms so that one face follows another and the ceiling changes as often as the courses — or the one who demonstrates to others and to himself how nature has commanded us nothing harsh or difficult, that we can house ourselves without the marble-cutter and the joiner, clothe ourselves without trade in silks, and have what our needs require if we will be content with what the earth has laid on its surface? If the human race were willing to listen to him, it would learn that a cook is as superfluous to it as a soldier.
[16] Those men were wise, or at any rate like the wise, for whom the care of the body was a simple business. Necessities cost simple effort; it is for luxuries that we sweat. You will feel no need of craftsmen: follow nature. She did not want us stretched thin; whatever she made compulsory, she equipped us for. 'Cold is unbearable to a naked body.' Well then — can't the skins of wild beasts and other animals ward off cold fully and to spare? Don't plenty of peoples cover their bodies with tree bark? Aren't birds' feathers stitched together to serve as clothing? Even today, doesn't a large part of the Scythians dress in the pelts of foxes and mice — soft against the skin, and proof against any wind? Well then — hasn't anyone you like woven a wicker hurdle by hand, daubed it with cheap mud, roofed the ridge with straw and other wild stuff, and passed the winter unworried while the rain slid down the slopes? [17] 'Still, one needs a thicker shade to beat back the heat of the summer sun.' Well then — hasn't the passage of time hidden away many places which, hollowed out by weathering or some other accident, have receded into caves? Well then — don't the peoples of the Syrtes burrow into the ground and hide there — they for whom, given the sun's excessive blaze, no covering is solid enough to repel the heat except the parched earth itself? [18] Nature was not so unjust that, while granting every other animal an easy passage through life, man alone should be unable to live without all these crafts. Nothing harsh has been commanded of us by her, nothing that must be painfully hunted down for life to be sustained. We were born into a world already furnished; the difficulty is our own manufacture — we made it by disdaining what is easy. Shelter, coverings, ways to warm the body, food — all the things that have now become a massive industry — lay ready to hand, free, obtainable with light effort; for the measure of everything matched the need. We are the ones who made these things expensive, made them marvels, made them obtainable only through many elaborate arts. [19] Nature is sufficient for what nature demands. Luxury has deserted nature; it spurs itself on daily, grows through all these centuries, and uses ingenuity to abet vice. First it began to crave the superfluous, then the harmful; at last it sold the mind into bondage to the body and ordered it to be the slave of the body's appetite. All those trades that keep the city in a whirl or a din are doing business for the body — the body which once was given its due as a slave, and now is provisioned as a master. So from this come the weavers' shops, from this the carpenters', from this the perfume-boilers, from this the teachers of effeminate posturings of the body and of songs effeminate and limp. The natural measure, which capped desire at what need supplied, has retreated; by now it counts as boorishness and misery to want only as much as is enough.
[20] It is unbelievable, my Lucilius, how easily the sweetness of eloquence draws even great men away from the truth. Take Posidonius, who ranks, as I see it, among philosophy's greatest benefactors. He wants to describe, first, how certain fibers get their twist while others are pulled from the loose, yielding mass; then how the loom, with hanging weights, stretches the warp straight; how the weft, inserted to soften the stiffness of the web pressing it on both sides, is forced by the batten to close up and bind — and he declared that the weaver's art too was invented by the wise, forgetting that this more refined kind was discovered later, in which
the web is bound to the beam, the reed parts the warp,
the weft is threaded through the middle by pointed shuttles,
and the broad comb's notched teeth beat it home.
What if he had had the chance to see the looms of our day, which produce clothing that will conceal nothing — clothing that offers no help, I won't say to the body, but even to modesty? [21] He then passes to farmers, and no less eloquently describes the soil broken open by the plough and worked a second time, so that the loosened earth lies more open to the roots; then the seed scattered, and the weeds pulled by hand so that nothing random and wild springs up to kill the crop. This too, he says, is the work of wise men — as if farmers were not even now discovering plenty of new ways to increase the yield. [22] Then, not content with these arts, he sends the wise man down into the mill. He relates how, by imitating nature, he began to make bread: 'The grain taken into the mouth,' he says, 'is broken by the hardness of the teeth meeting; whatever falls away is carried back to those same teeth by the tongue; then it is mixed with moisture so that it slips more easily down the slippery throat; when it reaches the stomach, it is cooked by the stomach's even heat; and only then does it pass into the body. [23] Following this model, someone set a rough stone on top of a rough stone, in the likeness of the teeth, one set of which stays still and waits on the motion of the other; then, by the rubbing of the two, the grains are broken and fed back again and again until, ground repeatedly, they are reduced to fineness. Then he sprinkled the flour with water, tamed it with steady kneading, and shaped a loaf, which at first hot ash and a glowing tile baked through; later ovens were gradually discovered, and other devices whose heat obeys the will.' He came within an inch of saying that shoemaking too was invented by the wise.
[24] All of that was devised by reason, certainly — but not by right reason. They are the inventions of man, not of the wise man; just as much, by god, as the ships in which we cross rivers and seas, their sails rigged to catch the driving winds, with steering-oars added at the stern to twist the vessel's course this way and that. The model was taken from fish, which are steered by the tail and by its slight flick to either side turn their own speed. [25] 'The wise man,' he says, 'did indeed invent all this, but it was beneath his own handling, so he gave it over to humbler workmen.' On the contrary — these things were thought up by exactly the same sort of people who look after them today. Some of them, we know, appeared only within living memory: the use of window-panes that transmit clear light through translucent shell, the raised floors of baths and the pipes set into the walls to spread the heat around and warm bottom and top evenly. Need I mention the marbles that make temples and houses gleam? Or the masses of stone shaped round and smooth, on which we set colonnades and halls big enough to hold whole populations? Or the shorthand signs by which even a rapid speech is taken down and the hand keeps pace with the tongue? These are the inventions of the cheapest slaves. [26] Wisdom sits higher; it does not train hands: it is the teacher of minds. Do you want to know what it has unearthed, what it has accomplished? Not graceful movements of the body, nor varied tunes on horn and pipe, in which the breath is caught and shaped into a note as it leaves or passes through. It builds no weapons, no walls, nothing of use in war: it stands for peace and calls the human race to concord. [27] It is not, I insist, a manufacturer of tools for everyday needs. Why assign it such trifles? What you are looking at is the craftsman of life. Other arts it does hold in subjection — for where life belongs to it, life's furnishings serve it too. But its aim is the state of happiness: there it leads, there it opens the roads. [28] It shows what things are evils and what merely look like evils. It strips vanity from minds; it gives a greatness that is solid, and deflates the kind that is puffed up and showy from sheer emptiness; nor does it allow the difference between the great and the swollen to go unrecognized. It hands on the knowledge of nature as a whole and of its own nature. It declares what the gods are and of what kind; what the underworld powers are, what the household spirits and guardian geniuses, what the souls that have endured into the second rank of divinities, where they dwell, what they do, what they can do, what they want. These are its rites of initiation, through which is unlocked no parochial shrine but the vast temple of all the gods — the universe itself — whose true images and true faces it has brought forth for minds to gaze on; for eyesight is too dull for spectacles so great. [29] Then it goes back to the beginnings of things, to the eternal reason infused through the whole and the force in all seeds that shapes each thing to its proper form. Then it begins to inquire into the soul: where it comes from, where it resides, how long it lasts, into how many parts it is divided. Then it crosses from bodies to the bodiless, and sifts truth and the proofs of truth; after that, how ambiguities in life or in language are to be sorted out — for in both, the false is mixed in with the true.
[30] The wise man did not, I say, withdraw from these crafts, as Posidonius thinks: he never came near them at all. He would have judged nothing worth inventing that he was not going to judge worth using forever; he would not take up what would have to be put down. [31] 'Anacharsis,' he says, 'invented the potter's wheel, by whose turning vessels are shaped.' Then, because the potter's wheel is found in Homer, he preferred to have the verses look spurious rather than the story. I for my part do not insist that Anacharsis was not the author of this thing; but if he was, then a wise man invented it, yet not in his capacity as wise — just as the wise do many things as human beings, not as wise men. Suppose the wise man is a very fast runner: he will outstrip everyone in a race insofar as he is fast, not insofar as he is wise. I could wish I might show Posidonius a glassblower, who with his breath shapes glass into a multitude of forms that could scarcely be fashioned by the most careful hand. These things were invented after we stopped finding the wise man. [32] 'Democritus,' he says, 'is reported to have invented the arch, so that a curve of stones leaning gradually inward is locked by the keystone.' This I will call false; for there must have been bridges and gateways before Democritus, and their tops are generally curved. [33] And you have both forgotten, it seems, that this same Democritus discovered how ivory could be softened, and how a pebble could be boiled down and turned into an emerald — the very firing by which, even today, stones found suitable for it are colored. A wise man may well have invented such things, but he did not invent them insofar as he was wise; for he does many things which we see done just as well by the most unphilosophical of men, or with more skill and practice.
[34] You ask what the wise man has tracked down, what he has dragged into the light? First, truth and nature — which he pursued not, like the other animals, with eyes too slow for things divine; then the law of life, which he aligned with the universe, and he taught us not merely to know the gods but to follow them, and to receive what befalls us exactly as we would receive orders. He forbade obedience to false opinions, and weighed the worth of each thing on a true scale; he condemned pleasures that come mixed with regret, praised goods that will please forever, and made it public knowledge that the happiest man is the one who has no need of happiness, and the most powerful the one who has power over himself. [35] I am not speaking of that philosophy which set the citizen outside his country and the gods outside the universe, which handed virtue over to pleasure — but of the philosophy which counts nothing good except the honorable, which cannot be sweet-talked by the gifts of man or of fortune, whose price is precisely this: that it cannot be bought for a price.
That this philosophy existed in that rough age, when crafts were still lacking and useful things were learned by use itself, I do not believe. [36] Then came those fortunate times, when nature's benefits lay in common, open for all to use alike — before greed and luxury broke the partnership of mortals and taught them to scatter from fellowship into plunder. The men of that age were not wise, even if they were doing what the wise should do. [37] Certainly no one could look with more admiration on any other condition of the human race; and if a god allowed someone to shape earthly affairs and give peoples their ways of life, he would approve nothing other than what is recorded of those among whom
no tenant farmers subdued the fields;
even to mark the plain or divide it with a boundary
was forbidden: men sought all things for the common store, and the earth herself
gave everything more freely with no one demanding it.
[38] What race of men was ever happier than that one? They enjoyed nature in common; she sufficed, like a parent, as guardian of all; and what they had was the untroubled possession of public wealth. Why shouldn't I call that the richest race of mortals, in which you could not find a poor man? Into this best of arrangements burst greed, and in its eagerness to set something apart and turn it to its own use, it made everything belong to someone else, and shrank itself from boundless to cramped. Greed brought in poverty: by craving much it lost everything. So now, though it try to recover what it lost, though it pile field on field, driving out the neighbor by purchase or by force, though it stretch estates to the size of provinces and call a long journey through one's own land 'ownership' — no extension of boundaries will bring us back to where we started. When we have done everything, we will possess much: we used to possess the universe. [39] The earth itself was more fertile untilled, and generous toward peoples who did not plunder her. Whatever nature produced, it was as much a pleasure to show one's find to another as to have found it; no one could have too much or too little: everything was shared out among people in accord. [40] The stronger had not yet laid a hand on the weaker; the miser had not yet, by hoarding away what would lie idle for him, shut another man off even from necessities. Each cared for the other as much as for himself. [41] Weapons lay unused, and hands unstained by human blood had turned all their hostility against wild beasts. Those men, whom some dense grove sheltered from the sun, who lived safe under leaves in a cheap refuge against the savagery of winter or rain, passed peaceful nights without a sigh. Anxiety tosses us about on our purple and jabs us awake with the sharpest goads: but what soft sleep the hard earth gave them! [42] No carved ceiling panels hung over them; they lay in the open with the stars gliding above, and — the glorious spectacle of the nights — the heavens swept along headlong, conducting that great work in silence. By day as by night they had the vistas of this most beautiful of houses open to them; they loved to watch the constellations sinking from mid-sky, and others rising again from hiding. [43] How could it fail to delight, to wander among wonders scattered so wide? But you people panic at every creak of your roofs, and if anything snaps among your painted walls, you run for it, terrified. They had no houses the size of cities: the open air, the breeze blowing free through unenclosed space, the light shade of a rock or a tree, clear springs and streams unspoiled by engineering works or piping or any forced channel, running of their own accord, and meadows lovely without artifice — and among all this a rustic dwelling, finished by a country hand. That was a home in accord with nature, in which it was a pleasure to live, fearing neither the house itself nor for it: today our houses are a great part of what we are afraid of.
[44] But however splendid their life was, and however free of deceit, they were not wise men, since that name is now reserved for the greatest of achievements. Still, I would not deny that they were men of high spirit and, so to speak, fresh from the gods; there is no doubt that the world, before it was worn out, produced better stock. But though their native temper was stronger in all of them and readier for hard work, their capacities were not perfected in all. Nature does not give virtue: becoming good is an art. [45] They, at least, did not go hunting for gold or silver or translucent stones in the lowest dregs of the earth, and they still spared even the dumb animals. So far were they from a man killing a man — not out of anger, not out of fear, but just to watch. They had no embroidered clothing yet; gold was not yet woven — was not, so far, even being mined. [46] What follows, then? They were innocent through ignorance; and there is a great difference between refusing to do wrong and not knowing how. They lacked justice, they lacked prudence, they lacked self-control and courage. Their rough life had certain things resembling all these virtues; but virtue comes only to a mind trained, taught, and brought to its peak by unremitting practice. We are born for virtue, not born possessing it; even the finest natures, until you train them, hold virtue's raw material rather than virtue itself. Farewell.

======== Letter 91 ========

[1] Our friend Liberalis is downcast just now at the news of the fire that burned the colony of Lyon to the ground. This disaster could shake anyone, let alone a man so devoted to his native city. The event has left him searching for his firmness of mind — the firmness he had trained, evidently, against the things he thought could be feared. But an evil this unexpected, this nearly unheard of — I am not surprised it went unfeared, since it was without precedent. Fire has harassed many cities; it has wiped out none. Even where the flames were flung onto rooftops by an enemy's hand, they die out in many places, and though rekindled again and again, they still rarely devour everything so completely as to leave nothing for the sword. Even an earthquake has scarcely ever been so severe and destructive as to overturn whole towns. Never, in short, has a fire raged anywhere so ruinously that nothing was left for a second fire. [2] So many magnificent works, any one of which could have made a city famous by itself, one night flattened; and in the depths of peace there occurred a thing beyond what could be feared even in war. Who would believe it? While arms are quiet everywhere, while security has spread across the whole world, Lyon — the showpiece of Gaul — is being looked for. Fortune has always allowed those she strikes publicly to fear what they were about to suffer; nothing great has ever failed to get some interval before its own collapse. Here a single night stood between a very great city and none. In short, it takes me longer to tell you the city perished than it took it to perish.
[3] All of this weighs on the spirit of our Liberalis, firm and upright though he is against troubles of his own. Nor was he shaken without cause: the unexpected presses harder. Novelty adds weight to calamities, and there is no mortal whose grief was not increased by his own astonishment. [4] For that reason nothing should catch us unprepared. The mind must be sent ahead to meet everything, and we should consider not what usually happens but what can happen. What is there, after all, that fortune does not pull down from full bloom when she chooses — that she does not attack and batter the more brilliantly it shines? What is steep or difficult for her? [5] She does not always come by one road, or even by a well-worn one: now she calls in our own hands against us; now, content with her own strength, she finds dangers that need no agent. No moment is exempt: in the middle of pleasures the causes of pain spring up. War rises in the depths of peace, and the safeguards of our security turn into things to fear; friend becomes enemy, ally becomes foe. The calm of summer is whipped into sudden storms worse than winter's. Without an enemy we suffer an enemy's work, and if all else fails, excessive prosperity finds the causes of its own ruin. Disease attacks the most temperate, consumption the strongest, punishment the most innocent, riot the most withdrawn. Chance picks out something new by which to force its strength on those who had forgotten it. [6] Whatever a long sequence of years has built with great labor and great indulgence from the gods, a single day scatters and disperses. Whoever said 'a day' has granted a long reprieve to evils in a hurry: an hour, an instant of time, is enough to overturn empires. It would be some consolation for our weakness and our affairs if everything perished as slowly as it comes into being; as it is, growth is a slow exit, but the road to ruin is a sprint. [7] Nothing is stable, private or public. The destinies of men and of cities alike are on the wheel. Amid the profoundest calm, terror arises, and with no disturbing causes outside, evils burst out from where they were least expected. Kingdoms that had stood through civil wars and foreign ones collapse with no one pushing. How few states have carried their prosperity all the way! Everything, then, must be thought through, and the mind fortified against whatever can happen. [8] Rehearse exile, torture, war, shipwreck. Chance can tear you from your country or your country from you; it can drive you into the wilderness; the very place where crowds are suffocating can become a wilderness. Let the whole condition of the human lot be set before your eyes, and let us anticipate in our minds not just as much as often happens but as much as can happen at the utmost, if we do not want to be crushed, or stunned by unusual events as if they were unprecedented. Fortune must be thought through in full. [9] How many times have the cities of Asia, how many times those of Achaia, fallen in a single tremor! How many towns in Syria, how many in Macedonia, have been swallowed up! How often has that scourge laid Cyprus waste! How often has Paphos collapsed on itself! Time and again news has reached us of the destruction of whole cities — and we, among whom such news arrives time and again, what fraction of the whole are we? Let us stand up, then, against the accidents of fortune, and know that whatever befalls is never as great as rumor makes it. [10] A rich city has burned, the ornament of provinces into which it had been set and from which it stood apart, perched on a single hill, and not a very broad one. But of all those cities you now hear called magnificent and noble, time will erase even the traces. Don't you see how in Achaia the very foundations of the most famous cities have already crumbled away, and nothing survives to show that they even existed? [11] It is not only what hands have made that falls; it is not only what human art and industry have set up that time overturns. Mountain ridges dissolve; whole regions have subsided; places that stood far from any sight of the sea have been covered by its waves. The vast violence of fire has eaten away the hills through which it once glowed, and has brought low peaks that were once towering — the comfort and the seamark of sailors. The works of nature herself are battered; so we ought to bear the destruction of cities with an even mind. [12] They stand only to fall. This end awaits them all: whether the inner violence of winds, blasts raging through closed spaces, throws off the weight that holds them down; whether the rush of torrents, vaster underground, breaks through what stands in the way; whether the fury of flames ruptures the fabric of the soil; whether age, from which nothing is safe, overpowers them bit by bit; whether an unhealthy climate drives out their populations and neglect rots what is abandoned. To list every road fate can take would be a long business. One thing I do know: everything mortals make stands condemned to mortality; we live surrounded by what must perish.
[13] These, then, and consolations like them are what I offer our Liberalis, who burns with an extraordinary love for his city — which perhaps was consumed only so that it might be raised up better. Often an injury has made room for a greater fortune: many things have fallen in order to rise higher. Timagenes, no friend to the prosperity of Rome, used to say that fires in the city grieved him for one reason only: he knew that what rose would be better than what had burned. [14] In this city too it is likely that everyone will compete to rebuild greater and loftier than what they lost. May the new buildings be long-lasting, and founded under better auspices for a longer age! For this colony is in its hundredth year from its origin — an age not extreme even for a man. Planted by Plancus, it grew to this density of population thanks to the advantages of its site: yet how many grave disasters it has endured within the span of a human old age! [15] So let the mind be shaped to understand and to endure its lot, and let it know that there is nothing fortune has not dared; that she has the same rights against empires as against those who rule them; the same power against cities as against men. There is nothing here to resent: we have entered a world where life is lived under these laws. You accept them: obey. You don't: leave, by whatever exit you please. Be indignant if some injustice has been decreed against you personally; but if this necessity binds highest and lowest alike, make your peace with fate, by which all things are dissolved. [16] There is no reason to measure us by our burial mounds, or by those monuments of unequal size that line the road: the ash makes everyone equal. We are born unequal; we die equal. I say the same of cities as of their inhabitants: Ardea was captured just as Rome was. The founder of human law distinguished us neither by birth nor by the fame of our names — except while we exist. But when the end of mortals is reached, he says: 'Away with ambition; for everything that presses upon the earth, let one and the same law hold.' For enduring everything we are equals; no one is more fragile than another, no one more sure of himself for tomorrow.
[17] Alexander, king of the Macedonians, had begun to study geometry — the poor wretch — because it would teach him how tiny the earth is, of which he had seized only the smallest part. Yes, I call him a wretch on this account, that he was bound to understand he bore a false surname: for who can be Great on something tiny? What was being taught was fine-grained and had to be learned with careful attention — not the sort of thing a madman could take in, a man dispatching his ambitions beyond the ocean. 'Teach me the easy parts,' he says. His teacher replies: 'It is all the same for everybody, and just as hard for everybody.' [18] Imagine that nature is saying this: 'The things you complain of are the same for everyone. I cannot make them easier for anyone; but whoever wishes will make them easier for himself.' How? By evenness of mind. You are bound to feel pain, and thirst, and hunger, and to grow old (if a longer stay among men falls to you), and to be ill, and to lose things, and to die. [19] Still, there is no reason to believe the people making all that noise around you: none of these things is an evil, none unendurable or even hard. Fear of them rests on nothing but consensus. You fear death the way you fear gossip — and what is more foolish than a man afraid of words? Our friend Demetrius puts it neatly: he says the utterances of the ignorant rank with him exactly as high as noises passed from the belly. 'Why should I care,' he says, 'whether the sound comes out above or below?' [20] What madness, to be afraid of being defamed by the infamous! And just as your fear of gossip was groundless, so is your fear of the things you would never fear if gossip had not ordered it. Would a good man take any damage from being spattered with unfair rumors? [21] Then let this not count even against death in our court — for death, too, has a bad reputation. Not one of its accusers has tried it; in the meantime, it is rash to condemn what you do not know. But here is what you do know: to how many people it is useful, how many it frees from torture, from poverty, from complaints, from punishments, from weariness. We are in no one's power, so long as death is in our own. Farewell.

======== Letter 92 ========

I think you and I will agree that external things are acquired for the body, and the body is cared for out of respect for the soul; and that within the soul there are subordinate parts, through which we move and are nourished, given to us for the sake of the ruling part itself. In this ruling part there is something irrational, and something rational; the former serves the latter, and the latter is the one thing that is not referred to anything else, but refers everything to itself. For that divine reason, too, is set over all things, and is itself under nothing; and this reason of ours is the very same reason, since it comes from that one.
If we agree on this, it follows that we agree on the next point too: that the happy life consists in this one thing alone, that reason be perfected in us. For reason alone does not bow the mind down; it stands firm against fortune; in every condition of circumstance it preserves itself. This alone is the one good that is never broken off. The happy man, I say, is the one whom nothing can make lesser: he holds the summit, and leans on nothing but himself; for whoever is propped up by some outside support can fall. If it were otherwise, things that are not truly ours would begin to have great power over us. But who wants to depend on fortune's constancy, or what wise man marvels at himself on account of things that belong to someone else? What is the happy life? Security, and unbroken tranquility. Greatness of soul will give us this, and a steadfast constancy that holds firm to sound judgment once formed. How is this reached? If the whole truth has been clearly seen; if, in our conduct, order, measure, and decency have been kept, along with a will that is harmless and kind, intent on reason and never departing from it — a will lovable and admirable at once. In short, to give you a brief formula: the soul of a wise man ought to be such as would befit a god. What can the man to whom every honorable thing belongs still want? For if things that are not honorable could add anything to the highest state, then the happy life would depend on things it can in fact do without. And what is more shameful, or more foolish, than to weave the good of a rational soul out of irrational things?
And yet some think the highest good can be increased, because it is not full enough when opposed by chance events. Even Antipater, among the great founders of this school, says that he allows some weight to external things — though very little. But you see what it means not to be content with daylight unless some little flame is added to it: what can a spark contribute, in the brightness of full sunlight? If you are not content with honor alone, you must want either freedom from trouble — what the Greeks call aochlēsia — or pleasure. The first of these can, in some fashion, be accepted; for a mind free of distress is unburdened and able to contemplate the universe, and nothing calls it away from the study of nature. But the other, pleasure, is a good fit for cattle: we are adding the irrational to the rational, the dishonorable to the honorable, to something great... does a tickling of the flesh make a life? Why, then, do you hesitate to say that a man is well off, if his palate is well off? And do you count this person — I will not say among men, but among human beings at all — whose highest good consists in flavors, colors, and sounds? Let him be removed from the ranks of animals, the most beautiful of them, second only to the gods; let him be herded in with the dumb beasts that rejoice in their feed. The irrational part of the soul has two divisions: one spirited, ambitious, unruly, given over to the passions; the other lowly, sluggish, devoted to pleasures. The first, though unbridled, they at least left as the better one, certainly the stronger and more worthy of a man; the second they judged necessary to the happy life — feeble and degraded as it is. They ordered reason to serve this one, and so made the highest good of the noblest of creatures something base and ignoble — worse still, a mixture, a monstrosity, patched together out of mismatched limbs. For as our Virgil says of Scylla:
a woman's face and lovely breast in front,
below the waist a monstrous sea-beast's form,
joined to the tails of dolphins and of wolves.
And yet to this Scylla they attached wild creatures, terrifying and swift; but what monstrous pieces have these men used to assemble their wisdom? The first part of a man is virtue itself; to this they attach useless, sagging flesh, fit only for taking in food, as Posidonius says. That divine virtue trails off into something slippery, and to its higher, venerable, celestial parts they stitch on a sluggish, wasting creature. Even that other thing, rest, contributed nothing itself to the soul, but merely removed obstacles; pleasure, on the other hand, actively dissolves and softens all strength. What union of parts could be found more discordant with itself? To the strongest of things they attach the feeblest; to the most solemn, something scarcely serious; to the most sacred, something unrestrained to the point of incest.
'What then?' someone says. 'If good health, calm, and freedom from pain will not hinder virtue in any way, will you not seek them?' Of course I will seek them — not because they are goods, but because they are in accordance with nature, and because I will take them up with sound judgment. What good, then, will there be in them? This one thing alone: choosing well. For when I put on the clothing that suits me, when I walk as I ought, when I dine as I should, it is not the dinner or the walk or the clothing that is good, but my own purpose in these things, keeping, in each case, the measure that agrees with reason. I will add still further: a man should aim to choose clean clothing, for by nature man is a clean and refined creature. And so it is not clean clothing itself that is good, but the choosing of clean clothing, because the good lies not in the thing but in the quality of the choice; our actions are honorable, not the things acted upon. What I have said of clothing, take me to be saying of the body as well. For nature has thrown this too around the soul like a kind of garment; it is its covering. But who has ever valued clothing by its storage chest? Neither does the scabbard make the sword good or bad. So I give you the same answer about the body too: I would indeed choose health and strength, if the choice were offered me, but what will be good is my own judgment about them, not the things themselves. 'The wise man,' someone says, 'is indeed happy; but he does not attain that highest good unless the instruments of nature also cooperate with him. Thus a man who has virtue cannot be wretched, but he is not most happy either, if he is deprived of natural goods, such as health, such as bodily wholeness.' What seems more incredible, you concede — that a man in the greatest and most constant pain is not wretched, and is even happy; what is easier to grant, you deny — that he is most happy. And yet if virtue can bring it about that someone is not wretched, it will more easily bring it about that he is most happy; for there is less distance from happy to most happy than from wretched to happy. Can the thing that has enough power to rescue a man from calamity and place him among the happy not have enough power left over to add what remains, and make him most happy? Does it fail on the last stretch of the climb? There are advantages and disadvantages in life, and both lie outside us. If the good man is not wretched, however much he is weighed down by disadvantages, how is he not most happy, if he lacks a few advantages? Just as he is not dragged down to wretchedness by the burden of disadvantages, so he is not led away from being most happy by a want of advantages; rather, he is as much most happy without advantages as he is not wretched under disadvantages — unless, of course, his own good can be snatched from him, if it can be diminished. I said a little earlier that a small flame adds nothing to the light of the sun; for whatever would shine without it is hidden in the sun's brightness. 'But some things,' one objects, 'block the sun too.' Yet the sun remains whole even when something stands in its way; and though something may come between it and us that blocks our view of it, the sun is still at its work, still carried on in its course; whenever it shines out from among the clouds, it is no less bright than in clear weather, nor even slower, since it makes a great difference whether something merely stands in the way or actually hinders. In the same way, things set against virtue take nothing away from it: it is not lessened, it merely shines less brightly to us. To us, perhaps, it appears and gleams less clearly, but to itself it is the same, and, like the sun when obscured, exercises its power in secret. This, then, is what calamities, losses, and injuries can do against virtue — exactly what a cloud can do against the sun.
There is someone who says that the wise man, if his bodily state is not favorable, is neither wretched nor happy. He too is mistaken; for he makes chance events equal to the virtues, and gives as much weight to honorable things as to things that lack honor altogether. But what is more disgraceful, more unworthy, than to compare things worthy of reverence with things beneath contempt? For justice, devotion, good faith, courage, and prudence are worthy of reverence; on the other hand, cheap are the things that often come to those least worthy of them — a sound leg, a strong arm, good teeth, and the health and firmness of such parts. Further, if the wise man whose body troubles him is to be considered neither wretched nor happy, but left in some middle state, then his life too will be neither to be sought nor to be avoided. But what is more absurd than saying the wise man's life is not to be sought? Or what is more incredible than that there should be some life neither to be sought nor avoided? Again, if bodily losses do not make him wretched, they allow him to remain happy; for things that have no power to shift a man into a worse condition have no power, either, to interrupt him from his best condition.
'We know something is cold and something is hot,' one says, 'and between the two is the lukewarm; likewise one man is happy, another wretched, another neither happy nor wretched.' I want to shake apart this image set up against us. If I pour more cold into the lukewarm thing, it will become cold; if I pour on more heat, it will eventually become hot. But to this man who is, as you say, neither wretched nor happy, however much misery I add, he will not become wretched — as you yourselves claim; so the image does not hold. Again, suppose I hand you a man neither wretched nor happy. I add blindness to him: he does not become wretched. I add disability: he does not become wretched. I add constant, severe pain: still he does not become wretched. If so many evils do not carry him down into a wretched life, neither do they draw him out of a happy one. If, as you say, the wise man cannot fall from happy into wretched, then he cannot fall into the not-happy either. For why should someone, once he has begun to slip somewhere, come to a stop partway? Whatever keeps him from rolling all the way to the bottom keeps him at the top as well. Why should the happy life not be capable of being torn away? Because it cannot even be slackened, and for that reason virtue by itself is sufficient for it. 'What then?' one asks. 'Is not the wise man who has lived longer, whom no pain has ever distracted, happier than the one who has always had to struggle against bad fortune?' Answer me this: is he also better and more honorable? If not, then he is not happier either. To live more happily, one must live more rightly; if he cannot live more rightly, he cannot live more happily either. Virtue admits of no increase, and so neither does the happy life that comes from virtue. For virtue is so great a good that it does not even feel these petty additions — the brevity of a lifetime, pain, and the various injuries done to the body; for pleasure is not even worth its notice. What is the chief thing in virtue? Not needing the future, and not counting up one's days. In however small a span of time is allotted, it brings eternal goods to completion. This seems incredible to us, and beyond the reach of human nature; for we measure its greatness by our own weakness, and give the name of virtue to our own vices. And yet is it not just as incredible that a man in the depths of torment should say, 'I am happy'? And yet this very voice was heard in the workshop of pleasure itself. 'This is the happiest day, and the last, that I am living,' said Epicurus, even as difficulty of urination tortured him on one side and the incurable pain of an ulcerated stomach on the other. Why, then, should this seem incredible among those who cultivate virtue, when it is found even among those ruled by pleasure? These same degraded, low-minded people say that in the depths of pain, in the depths of calamity, the wise man will be neither wretched nor happy. And yet this too is incredible — more incredible, in fact; for I cannot see how virtue, once cast down from its own height, is not driven all the way to the bottom. Either it must guarantee happiness, or, if it has been driven from that, it will not prevent a man from becoming wretched. What stands firm cannot be half-toppled: it must either be overcome, or it prevails.
'Only to the immortal gods,' one says, 'has virtue and the happy life been given outright; to us belongs only some shadow and likeness of those goods; we approach them, we do not reach them.' But reason is common to gods and men alike: in the gods it is already complete, in us it is capable of completion. It is our own vices that drive us to despair. For man in his second, imperfect state is like someone not steady enough to hold on to the best things, whose judgment still wavers and is uncertain. He may still lack the use of eyes and ears, good health, an unmarred bodily appearance, and, along with a body that stays as it is, a longer span of years besides. Through these things he can live a life he need not regret; and yet in the imperfect man there remains a certain power of wickedness, because his mind is still inclined to what is wrong — that active, agitated wickedness is absent only from the good man. He is not yet good, but he is being shaped toward the good; and whoever still lacks anything needed for goodness is, in fact, bad. But 'if anyone has virtue and a soul truly present in the body, he matches the gods,' and strives toward that source he remembers as his own. No one struggles shamefully to climb back to the place he came down from. Why should you not think there is something divine in a being who is a part of god? This whole universe that contains us is one, and is god; we are its partners and its members. Our soul has the capacity, and is carried through to that height, if vices do not weigh it down. Just as the posture of our bodies stands upright and looks toward the sky, so the soul, which is free to stretch as far as it wishes, has been shaped by the nature of things for this very purpose: to desire what is equal to the gods; and if it uses its own strength and stretches out into its proper space, it strives toward the heights by no foreign path. It was a great labor to go up to heaven; now it is only a return. Once the soul has found this road, it walks it boldly, scorning everything; it does not look back at money, at gold and silver — things most fit for the darkness in which our greed once buried and dug them up. It knows, I say, that riches are stored elsewhere than where men pile them up; that the soul, not the strongbox, ought to be filled. It is permitted for such a soul to be set over the dominion of all things, to be led into possession of the whole of nature, so that it marks out its boundaries by the limits of sunrise and sunset, and, in the manner of the gods, possesses all things, looking down from above on the wealthy in their riches — none of whom is as glad of his own fortune as he is grieved by someone else's. Once it has raised itself to this height, it treats even the body — as a necessary burden — not as something to love but as something to manage, and does not subject itself to the thing it has been placed in charge of. No one is free who is a slave to his body; for, setting aside other masters that excessive anxiety over the body creates, its own rule is fussy and demanding. From this the soul departs, sometimes with an even mind, sometimes leaping forth greatly, and afterward does not ask what will become of what it has left behind. Just as we pay no mind to hair or beard once cut away, so that divine soul, on its way out of the man, does not consider it any more its concern what becomes of the vessel that held it — whether fire consumes it, or earth covers it, or wild beasts tear it apart — than a newborn child concerns itself with its afterbirth. Whether birds scatter the discarded body, or it is 'given as prey to dogs and to sea creatures,' what does it matter to one who no longer exists? But even while he is still among the living, he does not fear any threats made after death by those for whom it is not enough to be feared only up until death. 'I am not terrified,' he says, 'neither by the hook, nor by the foul mutilation of a corpse thrown out for public disgrace, in the sight of those who will see it. I ask no one for the last rites; I entrust my remains to no one. Nature has taken care that no one goes unburied: the day that abandons a body to cruelty will bury it in time.' Maecenas put it eloquently: 'I care nothing for a tomb: nature buries those left behind.' You would think he spoke with his belt cinched tight; for he had a great and manly talent, if only good fortune had not loosened it. Farewell.

======== Letter 93 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. In the letter where you complained about the death of the philosopher Metronax, as though he both could and should have lived longer, I missed in you that fairness you show toward every person and every matter, but that fails you in the one case where it fails everyone: I have found many people fair toward men, no one fair toward the gods. Every day we scold fate: 'Why was he snatched away in mid-course? Why isn't that one snatched away? Why does he drag out an old age burdensome to himself and others?'
Tell me, please, which do you think fairer: that you obey nature, or that nature obey you? And what does it matter how soon you leave a place you must leave in any case? We should not aim to live long, but to live enough; for living long depends on fate, living enough on your own character. Life is long if it is full; and it is full once the mind has restored to itself its own good and transferred into its own possession the mastery of itself.
What good do eighty years do a man spent in idleness? Such a man did not live, he merely lingered in life, and he did not die late, but took a long time dying. 'He lived eighty years.' That depends on the day from which you start counting his death. 'But he died in his prime.'
No—he carried out the duties of a good citizen, a good friend, a good son; in no part did he fall short. Though his years were incomplete, his life was complete. 'He lived eighty years.' Rather, he existed for eighty years—unless you mean he 'lived' the way trees are said to live. Please, Lucilius, let us work at this: that our life, like precious things, should not spread out wide but weigh heavy; let us measure it by what it did, not by how long it lasted. Do you want to know the difference between this vigorous man, a scorner of fortune, who fulfilled every campaign of human life and rose to its highest good, and the other man to whom many years were merely handed over? One exists even after death; the other perished before death.
Let us praise him, then, and count him among the fortunate, this man to whom whatever small span of time fell was well invested. He saw the true light; he was not one of the crowd; he both lived and flourished. Sometimes he enjoyed clear skies; sometimes, as often happens, the brilliance of a strong star flashed out through the clouds. Why do you ask how long he lived? He lives: he has leapt across to future generations and given himself over to memory.
Not that I would therefore refuse more years, should they be offered me; yet I would say nothing was missing from my happy life even if its span were cut short; for I did not fit my hopes to that final day that greedy expectation promised me, but I have looked at every day as though it were my last. Why do you ask me when I was born, whether I still count among the younger men? I have what is mine.
Just as a man can be complete in a smaller frame of body, so too a life can be complete in a smaller span of time. Age belongs among external things. How long I shall exist is not up to me; that I truly exist for as long as I do exist—that is mine. This is what you must demand of me: that I not measure out an obscure span of time as if groping through darkness, but that I actually live my life, not merely be carried past it.
You ask what is the fullest possible span of a life? To live until you reach wisdom. Whoever arrives there has touched not the longest limit, but the greatest. Let him boast of it boldly and give thanks to the gods, and among the gods to himself, and let him credit his share to the nature of things—and rightly so, for he has given nature back a better life than he received from it. He set up the model of a good man; he showed what such a man is like and how great; had he added more, it would only have repeated what came before.
And yet how long do we really live? We have enjoyed knowledge of all things: we know from what first principles nature raises itself up, how it orders the world, through what changes it brings back the year, how it has enclosed everything that will ever exist and made itself the boundary of itself; we know that the stars move by their own force, that nothing but earth stands still, that everything else runs on in continuous swift motion; we know how the moon passes before the sun, why the slower body leaves the swifter one behind it, how it takes or loses its light, what cause brings on night and what brings back day. It is there we must go to see these things at closer range.
'And it is not only in this hope,' says that wise man, 'that I go out more bravely—the hope that the way lies open for me to my gods. I have deserved admission; indeed I have already been among them, and I have sent my mind there, and they have sent theirs to me. But suppose I am simply removed from the scene, and after death nothing remains of the man: I have just as great a spirit even if I depart to pass into nowhere.' He did not live as many years as he could have.
There is also a book of only a few lines, and yet praiseworthy and useful; you know how ponderous the Annals of Tanusius are, and what they're nicknamed. This is what the long life of certain people is like—it follows the Annals of Tanusius.
Do you judge the gladiator killed on the last day of the games happier than one killed in the middle of it? Do you think anyone so foolishly greedy for life that he would rather have his throat cut in the stripping-room than in the arena? We do not outdistance one another by any great stretch. Death goes through everyone; the one who is killed catches up with the one who killed him first. The matter over which we fret so anxiously is the smallest of things. What does it matter, after all, how long you avoid what you cannot escape? Farewell.

======== Letter 94 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Some have accepted only that part of philosophy which gives each person rules suited to his particular role, and does not shape the whole human being but advises a husband how to conduct himself with his wife, a father how to raise his children, a master how to govern his slaves — leaving the rest to wander about as though useless to us, as if anyone could give advice about a part who had not first grasped the sum of a whole life. Ariston the Stoic takes the opposite view: he considers this part lightweight, one that never sinks all the way into the heart, a collection of old wives' precepts. What does the most good, he says, are the very doctrines of philosophy and the settling of the highest good: 'the man who has well understood and learned that prescribes for himself what is to be done in each situation.' Just as a man learning to throw the javelin fixes on his target and trains his hand to guide what he hurls — and once he has acquired this power through instruction and practice, he uses it wherever he wishes, for he has learned to hit not this mark or that but whatever mark he chooses — so the man who has equipped himself for life as a whole does not need to be advised piecemeal, since he has been taught for the whole: not how to live with a wife or with a son, but how to live well — and how to live with wife and children is contained in that. Cleanthes, for his part, judges this branch useful too, but feeble unless it flows from the whole — unless one has come to know the very doctrines and chief principles of philosophy.
The question, then, divides into two: whether this part of philosophy is useful or useless, and whether it can by itself make a good man — that is, whether it is superfluous or makes everything else superfluous. Those who want this part to appear superfluous argue as follows: if something held in front of the eyes blocks the sight, it must be removed; as long as the obstruction is there, you waste your labor telling a man 'walk this way; stretch your hand out over there.' In the same way, when something blinds the mind and hinders it from making out the order of its duties, one accomplishes nothing by prescribing 'live thus with your father, thus with your wife.' Precepts will do no good so long as error clouds the mind; if the error is dispelled, it will become plain what each duty requires. Otherwise you are teaching a sick man what a healthy man ought to do — you are not making him healthy. You show a pauper how to act the rich man: how can that be done while his poverty remains? You point out to a starving man what he might do on a full stomach: rather pull out the hunger lodged in his marrow. The same, I tell you, holds for all the vices: the vices themselves must be removed, not instructions given for what cannot be done while they remain. Unless you drive out the false opinions under which we labor, the greedy man will not hear how money should be used, nor the coward how to look down on dangers. You must bring him to know that money is neither a good nor an evil; you must show him rich men who are utterly wretched; you must bring him to know that whatever we publicly dread is not so fearsome as rumor makes it — that no one grieves long, and no one dies more than once; that in death, which it is our law to undergo, there is this great consolation, that it comes to no one twice; that in pain, stubbornness of spirit will serve as a remedy, since the soul makes anything lighter for itself by suffering it defiantly; that pain's nature is the best thing about it — what stretches on cannot be great, and what is great cannot stretch on; and that everything the world's necessity commands must be met bravely. When by these doctrines you have brought him to a clear view of his own condition, and he has learned that the happy life is not the one that follows pleasure but the one that follows nature; when he has fallen in love with virtue as man's only good and fled disgrace as the only evil, and knows that everything else — riches, offices, good health, strength, commands — is a middle territory, to be counted neither with the goods nor with the evils: then he will not need an adviser at his elbow for every single act, saying 'walk like this, dine like this; this befits a man, this a woman; this a husband, this a bachelor.' The people who give such advice most diligently cannot practice it themselves; these are the precepts a tutor gives a boy, a grandmother her grandson, and it is the most hot-tempered schoolmaster who argues that one must not lose one's temper. Walk into any elementary school and you will find that the maxims philosophers deliver with towering eyebrows are all there in the children's copybook.
Just as a man learning to throw a javelin aims at a fixed target and trains his hand to guide what he throws, and once he has gained this skill from training and practice he can use it against any target he chooses—for he has learned not to hit this or that particular mark, but whatever mark he wishes—so too the man who has trained himself for the whole of life has no need to be reminded piece by piece, since he has been taught in general terms, not how to live with a wife or a son, but how to live well: and living well includes how to live with a wife and children. Cleanthes, too, judges this part useful, but weak unless it flows from the whole—unless he has already learned the very doctrines and headings of philosophy.
This topic, then, divides into two questions: whether it is useful or useless, and whether by itself it can produce a good man—that is, whether it is superfluous, or whether it alone makes everything else superfluous. Those who want this part to seem superfluous argue as follows: if something placed before the eyes hinders one's sight, it must be removed; but if it is left in place, whoever advises 'walk this way, reach out your hand there' wastes his effort. In the same way, when something blinds the mind and hinders it from discerning the order of duties, the man who advises 'live this way with your father, that way with your wife' accomplishes nothing. Rules will do no good so long as error is spread over the mind; once that is dispelled, what is owed to each duty will become clear. Otherwise you are teaching a man what a healthy person should do, without making him healthy. You show a poor man how to act like a rich one: how can he do this while poverty remains? You show a starving man how to act as if he were full: better instead to remove the hunger fixed deep in his marrow. I say the same of every vice: the vices themselves must be removed, not rules prescribed that cannot be followed while the vices remain. Unless you drive out the false opinions under which we labor, the greedy man will not listen to how money should be used, nor the fearful man to how dangerous things should be scorned. You must bring it about that he knows money is neither good nor bad; you must show him the most wretched of rich men; you must bring it about that he knows whatever we publicly dread is not as fearsome as rumor makes out, that no one grieves long nor dies often: that in death, which the law compels us to endure, there is great comfort in the fact that it returns to no one; that in grief, the remedy will be firmness of mind, which lightens for itself whatever it has borne with stubbornness; that grief has this excellent trait, that what is drawn out cannot be great, and what is great cannot be drawn out; that everything the necessity of the world imposes on us must be met bravely. Once you have brought a man face to face with his own condition through these doctrines, and he has learned that the happy life is not the one according to pleasure but the one according to nature, once he has come to love virtue as man's one good and to flee baseness as his one evil, and has learned that everything else—riches, honors, good health, strength, power—falls into the middle category, to be counted among neither goods nor evils, he will no longer need someone to advise him point by point, telling him 'walk this way, dine this way; this suits a man, that a woman, this a husband, that a bachelor.' Those who most carefully give such advice are themselves unable to follow it; a tutor gives such rules to a boy, a grandmother to her grandson, and the most bad-tempered teacher lectures on why one should not lose one's temper. Step into an elementary school and you will find that what philosophers proclaim with such lofty brows is written into a schoolboy's copybook.
Next: will you give rules about things that are obvious, or things that are doubtful? Obvious things need no one to advise them; doubtful ones will not be believed on the say-so of the one advising. So it is superfluous to give rules at all. Learn this well: if what you advise is obscure and ambiguous, it will need to be backed by proofs; and if you are going to prove it, then the proofs by which you prove it carry more weight, and are sufficient in themselves. 'Treat your friend this way, your fellow citizen that way, your partner this way.' 'Why?' 'Because it is just.' All of that is handed to me by the topic of justice: there I find that fairness is to be sought for its own sake, that we are not driven to it by fear nor hired to it by reward, and that a man is not just if anything about this virtue pleases him besides the virtue itself. Once I have persuaded myself of this and drunk it in, what good do those rules do that merely instruct someone who already knows? Giving rules to a man who knows is superfluous, to a man who does not know it is not enough; for he needs to hear not only what is prescribed for him but why. I ask, then: are such rules necessary for a man who already holds true opinions about good and evil, or for one who does not? The man who does not have them will get no help from you; his ears are already occupied by rumor, which contradicts your advice. The man who has a settled judgment about what to seek and what to avoid knows what he must do even while you say nothing. So this whole branch of philosophy can be dispensed with.
There are two reasons we go wrong: either the mind is already infected with wickedness contracted from perverse opinions, or, even if it is not gripped by falsehoods, it is prone to them and quickly corrupted, drawn where it should not go by some appearance. So we must either fully cure a sick mind and free it from its vices, or forestall a mind that is still free but inclined toward the worse. Doctrines of philosophy accomplish either task; therefore this kind of rule-giving does nothing. Besides, if we give rules to individuals one by one, the task becomes impossible to encompass; we would have to give different rules to the moneylender, the farmer, the merchant, the man courting the friendship of kings, the man dealing with equals, the man dealing with inferiors. In marriage you would have to prescribe how a man should live with a wife he married as a virgin, and differently with one who had known another man before marriage; how with a wealthy wife, how with a dowerless one. Don't you think there is some difference between a barren wife and a fertile one, between an older woman and a young girl, between a mother and a stepmother? We cannot embrace every particular case, and yet each particular case demands its own rule, while the laws of philosophy are brief and bind everything at once. Add to this that the precepts of wisdom must be finite and definite; whatever cannot be made finite lies outside wisdom, since wisdom knows the limits of things. So this rule-giving part must be dispensed with, because it cannot deliver to everyone what it promises to only a few, whereas wisdom holds everyone within its grasp. Between public madness and the kind that is handed over to doctors there is no difference except that the latter suffers from disease, the former from false opinions; one draws the causes of its frenzy from bodily illness, the other's madness is a sickness of the mind itself. If someone gave a madman rules about how he should speak, how he should walk, how he should conduct himself in public, how in private, he would be more insane than the very man he was advising: black bile needs to be cured, and the cause of the madness itself removed. The same must be done in this other madness of the mind: it must itself be dispelled; otherwise the words of those giving advice will come to nothing.
This is what Ariston says; I will answer him point by point. First, against his claim that if something obstructs the eye and blocks vision it must be removed—I grant that in this case there is no need of rules for seeing, but of a remedy that clears the sight and lets it escape whatever obstruction is in its way; for we see by nature, and nature restores the use of sight to whoever removes the obstacles. But nature does not teach what is owed to each particular duty. Furthermore, once a man's cataract has been treated, he cannot immediately, upon regaining his sight, restore it to others as well; but a man freed from wickedness can free others too. There is no need of exhortation, nor even of advice, for the eye to recognize the properties of colors; it will distinguish white from black even with no one instructing it. But the mind needs many rules, by contrast, in order to see what must be done in life. And yet even in cases of the eyes, a doctor does not merely treat the sick but also advises them: 'There is no reason,' he says, 'to expose weak sight at once to harsh light; go first from darkness to shadowy places, then dare a little more, and gradually accustom your eyes to bear the full light. There is no reason to study right after eating, no reason to strain eyes that are full and swollen; avoid a draft and the force of cold air blowing in your face'—and other such things, which help no less than medicines do. Medicine adds counsel to its remedies.
'Error,' he says, 'is the cause of wrongdoing: rules do not remove this from us, nor do they conquer false opinions about good and evil.' I grant that rules by themselves are not effective at overturning a mind's perverse conviction; but that does not mean that, added to other things, they do no good. First, they refresh the memory; next, things that seemed rather confused when viewed as a whole are examined more carefully once divided into their parts. By this same reasoning you might say that consolations and exhortations are superfluous too—and yet they are not superfluous; therefore neither are admonitions. 'It is foolish,' he says, 'to prescribe to a sick man what a healthy man ought to do, when health itself must first be restored, without which the rules are useless.' But what of the fact that the sick and the healthy have certain things in common about which they need to be reminded—for instance, not to crave food greedily, to avoid exhaustion? Rich and poor alike have certain rules in common. 'Cure the greed,' he says, 'and you will have nothing to advise either the poor man or the rich man, once the craving of each has settled down.' But what of the fact that not craving money is one thing, and knowing how to use money is another? The greedy man does not know the limit of it, but even the non-greedy man may not know its proper use. 'Remove the errors,' he says, 'and the rules become superfluous.' That is false. Suppose greed has been loosened its grip, suppose extravagance has been reined in, rashness bridled, cowardice given a spur: even once the vices are removed, we still must learn what and how we ought to act. 'Admonitions,' he says, 'accomplish nothing against serious vices.' Not even medicine conquers incurable diseases, and yet it is applied—as a cure in some cases, as relief in others. Not even the whole force of philosophy, though it summon its entire strength to the task, will root out a plague grown hard and old in the mind; but it does not follow that it heals nothing just because it does not heal everything.
'What good does it do,' he says, 'to point out what is obvious?' A great deal; for sometimes we know something and simply are not paying attention. Admonition does not teach, but it turns our attention, rouses us, holds the memory in place and does not let it slip away. We pass by many things set right before our eyes; to remind someone is a form of exhortation. Often the mind conceals even what is obvious to it; the knowledge of the most familiar things must be forced back upon it. Here we should recall Calvus's line against Vatinius: 'You know that bribery took place, and everyone knows that you know it.' You know that friendships must be cultivated as sacred, but you do not do it. You know it is shameless for a man to demand chastity from his wife while himself corrupting other men's wives; you know that just as she should have nothing to do with an adulterer, you should have nothing to do with a mistress—and you do not act on it. So you need constantly to be led back to remembrance; such things ought not to be tucked away, but kept ready at hand. Whatever is beneficial must be turned over and handled often, so that it is not merely known to us but also ready for use. Add to this that even obvious things tend to become still more obvious when repeated.
'If what you prescribe is doubtful,' he says, 'you will need to add proofs; so it is the proofs, not the rules, that do the good.' But what of the fact that even without proofs, the very authority of the one advising is useful—just as the opinions of legal experts carry weight even when no reasoning is given for them? Besides, the very content of what is prescribed carries much weight on its own, especially when it is woven into verse or compressed into a pointed prose maxim, like that Catonian saying: 'Buy not what you need, but what is necessary; what you don't need is expensive even at a penny'—or sayings like those given as oracles, or similar to them: 'Use time sparingly,' 'Know thyself.' Would you demand a reason from anyone who quoted you these lines: 'Forgetfulness is the remedy for wrongs.' 'Fortune favors the bold; the sluggish man is his own obstacle.' Such things need no advocate: they touch the feelings themselves directly and succeed by nature's own force acting through them. The seeds of all honorable things lie in the mind, and admonition rouses them, just as a spark, helped by a light breath, unfolds its own fire; virtue rises up once it has been touched and given a push. Besides, some things are indeed already in the mind, but not readily at hand, which become available for use the moment they are spoken; other things lie scattered in different places, which an untrained mind cannot gather together on its own. So they must be collected into one and joined together, so that they carry more weight and lift the mind more effectively. Or else, if rules do no good at all, then all instruction should be abolished, and we should be content with nature alone. Those who say this fail to see that one man has a nimble, alert mind, another a slow and dull one, and that one man is simply more gifted than another. The power of talent is nourished and grows by instruction, adding new convictions to those already innate, and correcting what has gone astray.
'If someone,' he says, 'does not have correct doctrines, how will admonitions help him, bound as he is by his vices?' In this way: that they help free him from those very vices; for his natural disposition has not been extinguished in him, only obscured and suppressed. Even so it struggles to rise up again and strains against what is perverse, and once it has found support and been helped by rules, it grows strong—provided that a long-standing plague has not infected and killed it off; for in that case not even the discipline of philosophy, striving with its full force, will restore it. What difference is there, after all, between the doctrines of philosophy and its rules, except that the former are general precepts and the latter specific ones? Both alike prescribe, but one does so as a whole, the other piece by piece.
'If someone,' he says, 'already holds correct and honorable doctrines, then he is being advised for no reason.' Not at all; for even such a man, though taught what he ought to do, does not always see it clearly enough. We are hindered from doing what we should approve not only by our passions, but also by inexperience in finding out what each situation requires. Sometimes we have a well-ordered mind, but one that is sluggish and untrained in discovering the path of duty—a path that admonition points out.
'Expel,' he says, 'false opinions about good and evil, and put true ones in their place, and admonition will have nothing left to do.' Without doubt the mind is put in order by that method, but not by that alone; for even though it has been gathered by argument what things are good and evil, rules still have their own part to play. Both prudence and justice consist in duties; and duties are arranged by rules. Besides, our very judgment about good and evil is confirmed by the actual performance of duties, to which rules lead us. The two are mutually consistent: the doctrines cannot come first without the duties following, and the duties follow their own order—from which it is clear that the doctrines come first.
'Drive out false opinions about goods and evils,' he says, 'put true ones in their place, and admonition will have nothing left to do.' The mind is certainly set in order by that method — but not by that method alone. For even when argument has established which things are good and which evil, precepts still have their own role to play. Both prudence and justice consist of duties, and duties are arranged by precepts. Moreover, our very judgment about goods and evils is confirmed by carrying out our duties — and it is precepts that lead us to carry them out. The two agree with each other: doctrines cannot go in front without precepts following, and precepts follow in their own proper order — from which it is plain that the doctrines go first.
'No one,' he says, 'cures madness with rules; so neither can wickedness be cured that way.' The cases are not alike; for if you remove madness, health is restored outright; but if we exclude false opinions, a clear view of what is to be done does not follow at once—yet even when it does follow, admonition will still strengthen the correct judgment about good and evil. It is also false that rules do no good at all among the insane; for just as they do no good alone, so they help the treatment; both warning and reproof have restrained madmen—I am speaking now of those whose minds are disturbed, not wholly taken away.
'Laws,' he says, 'do not bring it about that we do what we ought, and what are they but rules mixed with threats?' First of all, laws fail to persuade for this very reason—that they threaten, whereas rules do not compel but entreat; besides, laws deter from crime, while rules exhort toward duty. Add to this that laws too contribute to good character, especially when they do not merely command but also teach. Here I disagree with Posidonius, who says he disapproves of the preambles added to Plato's laws. A law, he says, ought to be brief, so that it may be more easily grasped by the unlearned; it should be like a voice sent down from heaven: it should command, not argue. Nothing seems to me colder or more inept than a law with a preface. 'Warn me,' he says, 'tell me what you want me to have done: I am not here to learn, but to obey.' But laws do help; and you will see that peoples of bad character have been the very ones using bad laws. 'But laws do not succeed with everyone.' Neither does philosophy—yet that does not make it useless or ineffective at shaping minds. And after all, is not philosophy itself the law of life? But let us suppose laws do no good; it still does not follow that admonitions do no good either. Otherwise you might as well deny that consolations do any good, or persuasions, exhortations, reproofs, and praises. All of these are kinds of admonition; through them we arrive at a perfect state of mind. Nothing clothes the mind in honor more, and calls back to the right path minds that waver and lean toward the wrong, than the company of good men; for it sinks little by little into the heart, and the mere fact of being often seen and often heard has the force of a rule. And, by Hercules, the mere encounter with wise men itself helps, and there is something to be gained from a great man even when he says nothing.
'Laws,' he says, 'do not bring it about that we do what we ought — and what are they but precepts mixed with threats?' First of all, laws fail to persuade precisely because they threaten, whereas precepts do not compel but entreat; next, laws deter from crime, while precepts urge on toward duty. Add to this that laws too contribute to good morals — at least if they do not merely command but teach. On this point I part company with Posidonius, who says: 'I disapprove of the preambles attached to Plato's laws. A law ought to be brief, so the unlearned can grasp it the more easily. Let it be like a voice sent down from heaven: let it command, not argue. Nothing strikes me as flatter, nothing as sillier, than a law with a prologue. Warn me, tell me what you want done: I am not learning, I am obeying.' But laws do in fact do good; and so you will find that states with bad morals have used bad laws. 'But they do not do good with everyone.' Neither does philosophy — and it is not on that account useless or powerless to shape minds. And besides, what is philosophy but the law of life? But suppose we grant that laws do no good: it does not follow that admonitions do no good either. On that reasoning you would have to deny that consolations do good, and dissuasions, and exhortations, and rebukes, and words of praise. All these are forms of admonition; through them one arrives at the perfected state of the soul. Nothing clothes minds in honor, and calls back to the straight path those who waver and lean toward crookedness, more than the company of good men; seen often and heard often, they sink gradually into the heart and take on the force of precepts. The mere encounter with the wise, I swear, does one good; there is something you can gain from a great man even when he is silent. I could not easily tell you exactly how it helps, though I do understand that it has helped. 'Certain tiny creatures,' as Phaedo says, 'are not felt when they bite, so subtle and deceptive is the force with which they cause harm; a swelling reveals the bite, and yet in the swelling itself no wound is visible.' The same thing will happen to you in the company of wise men: you will not catch the moment or the manner in which it does you good, but you will discover that it has done you good.
You ask, 'What is the point of all this?' Good rules, if often kept close to you, will do you as much good as good examples. Pythagoras says a person becomes a different man on entering a temple and seeing the images of the gods close at hand, and waiting to hear the voice of some oracle. And who would deny that even the most untrained people are struck effectively by certain rules—brief sayings like these, yet carrying great weight: 'A greedy mind is satisfied by no amount of profit.' 'Expect from another whatever you have done to someone else.' We hear such things with a kind of jolt, and no one is permitted to doubt them or ask 'why?'—so brightly does the truth itself shine even without reasoning attached. If reverence curbs minds and restrains vices, why should admonition not be able to do the same? If reproof instills shame, why should admonition not do so too, even if it uses bare rules alone? In fact, admonition is more effective and penetrates more deeply when it backs up what it prescribes with reason, when it adds why each thing must be done and what reward awaits the man who obeys the rule and follows it. If command achieves results, so does admonition; but command does achieve results; therefore so does admonition.
Virtue divides into two parts: contemplation of truth and action. Instruction hands down contemplation, admonition hands down action. Right action both exercises and displays virtue. But if whoever advises a man about to act helps him, then whoever admonishes him will help him too. So if right action is necessary for virtue, and admonition points out right actions, then admonition too is necessary. Two things give the mind the most strength: confidence in the truth, and self-assurance; admonition produces both. For it is trusted, and once trusted, the mind takes on great courage and is filled with confidence; so admonition is not superfluous. Marcus Agrippa, a man of immense spirit—the only one among those whom the civil wars made famous and powerful who remained fortunate in his public standing to the end—used to say he owed a great deal to this saying: 'By harmony, small things grow; by discord, even the greatest things fall apart.' He used to say that this saying had made him both a good brother and the best of friends. If sayings of this kind, taken familiarly into the mind, can shape a man, why should this branch of philosophy, which consists of just such sayings, not be able to do the same? Part of virtue consists in teaching, part in practice; you must both learn, and confirm by action what you have learned. If this is so, then not only the doctrines of wisdom are of use, but its rules as well, which restrain and banish our passions as if by an edict.
'Philosophy,' he says, 'divides into knowledge and a settled disposition of mind; for a man who has learned and grasped what is to be done and avoided is not yet wise unless his mind has been transformed with respect to what he has learned. That third part, the giving of rules, is drawn from both—from doctrines and from disposition; so it is superfluous for the completion of virtue, for which those two suffice.' By that same reasoning, consolation too would be superfluous (for it likewise draws from both), and so would exhortation and persuasion, and even argumentation itself; for these too proceed from a mind already composed and strong. But although these things come from the best disposition of mind, the best disposition of mind is also made up of them; it produces them, and it is itself formed out of them.
Next, what you describe already belongs to the perfected man, one who has attained the height of human happiness. But that is arrived at slowly; meanwhile, even the man who is still imperfect but making progress needs to have the path shown to him in matters of action. Perhaps wisdom itself will eventually give this to him without admonition, once it has brought his mind to the point where it cannot be moved except toward what is right. But for weaker minds it is indeed necessary that someone go ahead of them, saying: 'You will avoid this, you will do that.' Besides, if a man waits for the time when he will know by himself what is best to do, meanwhile he will go astray, and by going astray he will be hindered from reaching the point where he can be content with himself; so he must be guided while he is only beginning to be able to guide himself. Children learn by tracing letters; their fingers are held and guided by another hand through the outlines of the letters, then they are told to imitate what has been set before them and shape their own handwriting to match it: in the same way, our mind, while it is being trained by a set model, is helped along.
These are the arguments by which it is proven that this part of philosophy is not superfluous. The next question is whether it alone suffices to produce a wise man. We will give that question its own proper day; meanwhile, setting arguments aside, is it not obvious that we need some advocate to give us counsel against the counsel of the crowd? No voice reaches our ears without doing us harm: those who bless us do harm, and those who curse us do harm. For the curses of the latter implant false fears in us, and the affection of the former misleads us with good wishes badly aimed; it sends us off after distant, uncertain, wandering goods, when we could draw happiness from our own house. It is not permitted, I say, to walk the straight path; our parents drag us toward what is crooked, our slaves drag us there too. No one goes wrong only for himself; he scatters his madness onto those nearest him, and receives it back from them in turn. And so the vices of whole peoples exist in individuals, because the people gave them those vices. As each person makes another worse, he is himself made worse; he has learned worse things, then taught them, and that vast wickedness has been produced by heaping together in one place whatever is known to be worst in each. Let there be, then, some guardian to tug at our ear from time to time and drive off rumors, and to protest against a crowd that heaps on praise. For you are wrong if you think vices are born with us: they have come upon us from outside, been heaped onto us. So let the opinions that ring around us on every side be driven back by frequent admonitions. Nature reconciles us to no vice; she brought us into being whole and free. She placed nothing in plain view to provoke our greed: she laid gold and silver beneath our feet, to be trodden and trampled, along with whatever else it is on whose account we ourselves are trodden and trampled. She raised our faces upward toward the sky and wanted whatever splendid and wondrous thing she had made to be seen by those who looked up: sunrises and sunsets, the wheeling course of the hurrying heavens, laying open earthly things by day and heavenly things by night; the slow movement of the stars if you compare it to the whole sky, yet the swiftest imaginable if you consider how vast a distance they circle without ever pausing in their speed; the eclipses of sun and moon as they block each other in turn; and other things equally worthy of wonder in succession, whether they rise in due order or spring forth suddenly from unexpected causes, like nighttime streaks of fire, and flashes of open sky with no crash or sound, and columns and beams of light and the varied shapes of flames. These things nature set high above us; gold and silver, and iron, which because of them never rests at peace, she hid away, as if they would be entrusted to us at our peril. We ourselves have dragged into the light the very things we would fight over; we ourselves have dug out, by scattering the weight of the earth, both the causes of our dangers and the instruments of them; we have handed our own evils over to fortune, and we do not blush to consider the highest things among us those that had once been the lowest depths of the earth. Do you want to know how false is the gleam that has deceived your eyes? There is nothing filthier than these things while they lie buried and wrapped in their own muck, nothing more obscure—how could there not be, dragged as they are through the darkness of the longest tunnels? There is nothing more shapeless than they are while they are being extracted and separated from their dross. Just look, finally, at the workmen themselves, through whose hands this barren and infernal stuff of the earth is refined: you will see how thickly they are smeared with soot. And yet such things stain minds more than they stain bodies, and there is more filth in the man who possesses them than in the man who works them. So it is necessary to be reminded, to have some advocate for a sound mind, and, amid so great a din and uproar of false things, to hear, in the end, one single voice. And what will that voice be? Obviously the one that, when your ears have been deafened by the great shouting of ambition, whispers healthy words to you, saying: there is no reason to envy those whom the crowd calls great and fortunate; there is no reason for applause to shake loose your settled, healthy state of mind; there is no reason for that man decked out in purple beneath his official rods to make you disgusted with your own tranquility; there is no reason to judge happier the man before whom the crowd is cleared than yourself, whom the lictor's rod merely pushes off the footpath. If you want to exercise power that is useful to you and burdensome to no one, remove your vices.
These are the arguments by which it is proved that this part of philosophy is not superfluous. The next question is whether it alone is enough to make a wise man. We will give that question its own day; meanwhile, setting arguments aside, is it not obvious that we need some advocate to give us precepts against the precepts of the crowd? No word reaches our ears without doing damage: those who wish us well harm us, and those who curse us harm us. The curses of the latter plant false fears in us, and the love of the former teaches us badly by wishing us well; for it sends us off after goods that are distant, uncertain, and wavering, when we could draw happiness out of our own house. We are not allowed, I say, to walk the straight road; our parents drag us into crookedness, our slaves drag us. No one goes wrong for himself alone: he scatters his madness among his neighbors and catches theirs in return. That is why the vices of whole peoples are found in individuals — because it is the people who supplied them. Each man, while making another worse, is made worse himself; he learns what is more depraved, then teaches it, and the result is that enormous wickedness which comes of heaping into one place the worst that each man knows. Let there be, then, some guardian to tug repeatedly at our ear, to drive off the rumors and cry out against the applauding crowds. For you are mistaken if you think our vices are born with us: they came upon us later; they were dumped on us. So let the opinions that din around us be beaten back by frequent admonitions. Nature binds us to no vice; she brought us forth whole and free. She set nothing in the open that might goad our greed: she put gold and silver beneath our feet, and gave us, to trample and tread down, everything for whose sake we are trampled and trodden down. She lifted our faces toward heaven, and willed that whatever she had made magnificent and marvelous be seen by upturned eyes: risings and settings, and the wheeling course of the hurrying firmament, revealing earthly things by day and heavenly things by night; the movements of the stars, slow if you compare them with the whole, yet swiftest if you consider what spaces they circle at a speed that never slackens; the eclipses of sun and moon as they block each other in turn; and then the other things worthy of wonder, whether they come up in order or leap out driven by sudden causes — trails of fire in the night, flashes of the sky splitting open without blow or sound, columns and beams and the various apparitions of flame. All these things nature set above us; but gold and silver, and the iron that on their account never keeps the peace, she hid away, as though it were dangerous to trust them to us. It was we who hauled up into the light the things we would fight over; we who dug out both the causes of our dangers and the tools for them, tearing apart the earth's weight; we who handed our own evils over to Fortune; and we do not blush that the things which lay lowest in the earth are held highest among us. Do you want to know how false the glitter is that has deceived your eyes? There is nothing fouler than these metals so long as they lie sunk and wrapped in their own mud, nothing dingier — how could there not be, when they are dragged out through the darkness of the longest mineshafts? There is nothing more shapeless than they are while they are being worked and separated from their dross. Finally, look at the workmen themselves, through whose hands that barren, underworld breed of earth is scoured clean: you will see how thick the soot is that coats them. And yet these things stain souls more than bodies, and there is more filth on their owner than on their workman. It is necessary, then, to be admonished — to have some advocate of a sound mind, and amid so much roaring and tumult of falsehoods to hear, at last, one single voice. What will that voice be? The one, surely, that whispers wholesome words to you, deafened as you are by the huge clamor of ambition; the one that says: you have no reason to envy those the crowd calls great and fortunate; no reason to let applause shake loose your composure and health of mind; no reason to let that man in purple behind his rods of office make your own tranquility disgust you; no reason to judge the man for whom the crowd is cleared happier than yourself, whom the lictor shoves off the path. If you want to exercise a command that is useful to you and burdensome to no one, banish your vices. Many men can be found who set fire to cities, who topple things that have stood safe for centuries and through several ages, who raise siege-ramparts level with citadels and shake walls built to astonishing heights with battering rams and siege engines. Many are those who drive armies before them and press hard on the backs of their enemies, and arrive, drenched in the slaughter of nations, at the great sea beyond — but these men too, in conquering their enemy, were themselves conquered by their own desire. No one resisted them as they advanced, but they themselves had not resisted their own ambition and cruelty; even as they seemed to be driving others, they themselves were being driven. Madness drove the unhappy Alexander to lay waste to foreign lands and sent him off to unknown places. Do you think a man sane who begins by devastating Greece, the very land in which he was educated? Who snatches away from each people whatever is best for it, orders Sparta to be enslaved, Athens to fall silent? Not satisfied with the ruin of so many cities that Philip had either conquered or bought, he flings still more down in one place after another and carries war around the whole world; and his cruelty never rests anywhere, exhausted, like that of monstrous wild beasts that bite more than their hunger demands. By now he has crammed many kingdoms into one, by now Greeks and Persians alike fear the same man, by now even the nations that were free under Darius accept the yoke; yet still he presses on beyond the ocean and the sun, and resents having to turn his victory back from the footsteps of Hercules and Bacchus — he is preparing to do violence to nature itself. He does not so much want to go on as he is simply unable to stop, no differently from a weight cast down a slope, for which the only end of its going is to come to rest at the bottom. Not even in Gnaeus Pompey did true virtue or reason urge on his foreign and civil wars, but an insane love of a false greatness. At one moment he was marching into Spain and against Sertorius's forces, at another to round up the pirates and pacify the seas: these were the pretexts put forward to keep extending his power. What dragged him into Africa, into the north, against Mithridates and into Armenia and every corner of Asia? Simply an endless craving to keep growing, since he seemed too small even to himself alone. What drove Gaius Caesar to hurl both his own fate and the state's together into ruin? Glory, and ambition, and no limit on rising above everyone else. He could not bear to have even one man ranked ahead of him, though the republic once bore two men above itself. And what about you — do you think Gaius Marius, consul only once by right (for he received one consulship; the rest he seized), sought out so many dangers, cutting down the Teutons and the Cimbri, chasing Jugurtha through the deserts of Africa, out of the promptings of virtue? An army was driving Marius; ambition was driving Marius. All these men, while they were shaking everything around them, were themselves being shaken, like whirlwinds, which sweep up whatever they seize but are themselves whirled about first, and for that very reason strike with greater force, because they have no control over themselves; and so, even while they have been a disaster to many, they themselves feel that destructive force with which they harmed so many others. You have no reason to believe that anyone becomes happy through someone else's misfortune.
All those examples that are constantly forced upon our eyes and ears must be unlearned, and a heart full of harmful talk must be emptied out; virtue must be brought in to occupy the vacated space, to root out the lies and whatever pleases us in defiance of the truth, to separate us from the crowd we trust too readily, and restore us to honest opinions. For this is wisdom: to be turned back toward nature and restored to the place from which the common error of mankind has driven us out. A great part of health lies in abandoning the cheerleaders of madness and withdrawing far from that mutually harmful gathering. To know this is true, notice how differently each person lives when alone from how he lives before the crowd. Solitude is not by itself a teacher of innocence, nor does the countryside teach frugality; but where the witness and the spectator have withdrawn, vices settle down, since their whole point is to be displayed and seen. Who puts on purple that he will show to no one? Who sets out a secret feast on golden plate? Who, stretched out alone in the shade of some rustic tree, unfolds the whole pageant of his own luxury by himself? No one is elegant for his own eyes alone, not even for those of a few intimates; he lays out the full display of his own vices in proportion to the size of the crowd watching. So it is: what excites all the things we go mad over is an admirer and a witness. You will make sure we do not desire things if you make sure we do not display them. Ambition, extravagance, and lack of self-control all need a stage: you will cure them if you hide them. And so, if we are placed in the midst of the uproar of cities, let a monitor stand at our side, and, against those who praise enormous fortunes, let him praise instead the man who is rich on little and measures his wealth by its use. Against those who extol favor and power, let him himself look up instead to leisure devoted to letters, and a mind turned back from external things to its own concerns. Let him show that those the crowd counts happy, at that envied pinnacle of theirs, are actually trembling and terrified, and hold a very different opinion of themselves than others hold of them; for what seems lofty to others is, to the men themselves, a sheer precipice. And so they are shaken and terrified whenever they look down over that precipice of their own greatness; for they think of the various accidents that can happen, which are most treacherous of all at the greatest heights. Then they dread the very things they once sought, and the good fortune that makes them burdensome to others weighs down all the more heavily on themselves. Then they praise a mild independence and freedom from obligation; the glare of their position becomes hateful, and they seek escape from things that are still standing firm. Only then would you see, born of fear and a sick fortune, philosophizing that is actually sound advice. For as if good fortune and a good mind were opposites, we are actually wiser amid troubles: prosperity strips away sound judgment. Farewell.

======== Letter 95 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You ask me to bring forward, ahead of its due day, something I had said I owed you, and to write and tell you whether that part of philosophy which the Greeks call paraenetic and we call "the giving of precepts" is enough by itself to complete wisdom. I know you'll take it well if I say no. All the more reason I promise to do it, and I won't let a common saying go to waste: "afterward, don't ask for what you wouldn't want to get." [2] For sometimes we beg hard for something we would refuse if someone actually offered it. Whether this is fickleness or a kind of servile flattery, it deserves to be punished by having our promise granted. We often want to seem to want many things we don't really want. A reader once brought a huge history, written in the tiniest hand, packed tight line upon line, and after reading a great part of it said, "I'll stop, if you like" — and those who most wanted him to shut up shouted, "Go on, go on!" We often want one thing and wish for another, and we don't tell the truth even to the gods — but the gods either don't hear us, or take pity on us. [3] I, however, will drop the pity and take my revenge: I'll hit you with a huge letter. If you read it unwillingly, tell yourself, "I brought this on myself," and count yourself among those tormented by a wife married for her big dowry, among those made miserable by riches won through great sweat, among those racked by honors chased after with every trick and effort — and the rest of the people who are fully complicit in their own troubles.
[4] But let me drop the preliminaries and get to the matter itself. "The happy life," they say, "consists of right actions; precepts lead to right actions; therefore precepts are sufficient for the happy life." But precepts do not always lead to right actions — only when the disposition is already receptive; sometimes they are applied in vain, if false opinions have taken possession of the mind. [5] And besides, even when people act rightly, they don't know that they are acting rightly. For no one can carry out every requirement of right action — knowing when, how far, with whom, how, and why — unless he has been shaped from the start and put together by a complete rational system. No one can strive toward what is honorable with his whole soul, nor even consistently or willingly, unless he has that; instead he will look back, he will hesitate.
[6] "If honorable action," someone says, "comes from precepts, then precepts are quite enough for the happy life; and honorable action does come from precepts, therefore so does the happy life." We will answer that honorable actions come from precepts, yes, but not only from precepts.
[7] "If other arts," he says, "are satisfied with precepts, wisdom will be too, for it is also an art of living. And indeed the man who instructs, 'move the tiller this way, lower the sails like this, use a following wind this way, resist a headwind this way, seize control of an uncertain, shifting one this way,' makes a pilot. Precepts shape practitioners of other arts too; so in this same way they will be able to shape the practitioners of the art of living." [8] But all those arts are concerned with the tools of life, not with the whole of life; and so many things from outside hold them back and hinder them — hope, desire, fear. But this art, which professes to be the art of life itself, cannot be prevented by anything from exercising itself, for it shakes off obstacles and throws off whatever stands in its way. Do you want to know how different the condition of the other arts is from this one? In them it is more excusable to err by intention than by accident; in this one, to go wrong deliberately is the greatest fault. [9] Here is what I mean. A grammarian will not blush at a solecism if he made it on purpose, but he will blush if he made it unknowingly; a doctor, if he fails to recognize that his patient is failing, is at greater fault professionally than if he pretends not to recognize it. But in this art of living, the fault of those who err on purpose is the more shameful one. Add to this that most arts — indeed the most liberal of all — have their own doctrines, not just precepts, as medicine does; hence one school follows Hippocrates, another Asclepiades, another Themison. [10] Moreover, no contemplative art is without its own doctrines, which the Greeks call dogmata and we may call decrees, or tenets, or convictions — you find these in geometry and in astronomy too. But philosophy is both contemplative and active: it looks and it acts at the same time. You're wrong if you think it promises only earthly business; it breathes something higher. "I search," it says, "the whole universe, and I do not confine myself within mortal company, content merely to advise or dissuade you: greater things call me, things set above you."
For I will begin to explain to you the highest
reckoning of the sky and the gods,
and lay open the first beginnings of things,
from which nature creates, increases, and nourishes all things,
and into which that same nature again dissolves them once destroyed,
as Lucretius says. It follows, then, that since philosophy is contemplative, it has its own doctrines. [12] What of the fact that no one will properly carry out what needs doing unless he has been given a rational system by which he can carry out every requirement of duty in every situation? A person who has received precepts about one particular matter, not about every matter, will not keep to them. Things given piecemeal are weak in themselves and, so to speak, rootless. Doctrines are what protect us, what guard our security and peace of mind, what embrace the whole of life and the whole of nature all at once. This is the difference between the doctrines of philosophy and its precepts: it is the difference between the basic elements and the limbs of the body. The limbs depend on the elements; the elements are the cause both of the limbs and of everything else.
[13] "Ancient wisdom," he says, "prescribed nothing beyond what should be done and what avoided, and men were far better then. Since the learned appeared, good men have grown scarce; for that simple, open virtue has turned into a dark and clever science, and we are taught to argue, not to live." [14] It's true, as you say, that this ancient wisdom, being newly born, was crude, no less than the other arts whose refinement grew only over time. But then there was not yet even any need for careful remedies. Wickedness had not yet risen so high nor spread so wide: simple faults could be met with simple remedies. Now it's necessary that our defenses be as much more elaborate as the forces attacking us are more violent.
[15] Medicine was once the knowledge of a few herbs to stop bleeding or close wounds; only gradually did it grow into this many-sided complexity we see now. And no wonder it had less work to do then, when bodies were still firm and sound and food was simple, not yet corrupted by artifice and pleasure-seeking. But once people began to seek food not to relieve hunger but to provoke it, and a thousand seasonings were invented to stir up appetite, then what used to be nourishment for the hungry became a burden for the full. [16] From this came pallor, and the trembling of nerves soaked in wine, and an emaciation from indigestion more pitiable than that from hunger; from this the unsteady, stumbling feet, always tottering as if drunk; from this fluid seeping under the whole skin and a belly distended from the bad habit of taking in more than it could hold; from this the yellow bile spreading beneath the skin, the discolored face, the wasting away of what rots within, the shriveled fingers with stiffened joints, the numbness of nerves lying without feeling, or a ceaseless trembling of bodies. [17] What shall I say of the dizziness in the head? Of the tortures of eyes and ears, the worm-gnawing of a fevered brain, and everything through which we discharge the ulcers within us? And beyond that the countless kinds of fevers — some raging in a sudden onslaught, some creeping in with a slow, subtle sickness, some coming on with chills and much shaking of the limbs? [18] Why should I recount the other countless diseases, the punishments of extravagance? Those who had not yet given themselves over to indulgence, who ruled themselves and served themselves, were free of these ills. They toughened their bodies with real work and real exertion — tired out by running, or hunting, or tilling the soil; food awaited them that could please only the hungry. So there was no need for such a vast array of doctors' equipment, nor so many instruments and boxes of drugs. Health was simple because its cause was simple: it is many courses of food that have caused many diseases. [19] See how much stuff luxury — that ravager of land and sea — jumbles together to pass through a single gullet. Things so different from one another can hardly help but clash, and what is swallowed digests badly when its parts pull in different directions. No wonder that disease born of discordant food is itself inconstant and varied, and that things drawn from opposite corners of nature, crammed together into the same stomach, come back up in revolt. That is why we are sick with as strange a range of ailments as we live a strange range of lives.
[20] The greatest of physicians, the founder of this science, said that women neither lose their hair nor suffer in their feet — yet now they go bald and their feet ache. Women's nature hasn't changed; it has been overcome. Since they have matched the license of men, they have also come to match the physical troubles of men. [21] They keep watch just as late, drink just as much, and challenge men with oil and unmixed wine; just as readily they force back up through the mouth what their unwilling stomachs took in, and measure out again by vomiting every drop of wine they drank; just as readily they gnaw on ice, the comfort of a burning stomach. In lust, indeed, they yield nothing even to men — born to be passive (may the gods and goddesses damn them for it!), they have devised so perverse a kind of shamelessness that they mount men. So why should we wonder that the greatest of physicians, most expert in nature, is caught out in an untruth, when so many women now have gout and go bald? They have destroyed the one advantage of their sex through vice, and by shedding their womanhood they have been condemned to the diseases of men.
[22] The ancient doctors did not know how to give food more frequently and prop up sinking veins with wine; they did not know how to let blood, or ease a lingering illness with baths and sweating; they did not know how to bind the legs and arms to draw hidden strength lodged deep in the body out to the extremities. There was no need to look about for many kinds of remedies, since there were so very few dangers. [23] But now — how far the ills of health have advanced! We pay this interest on pleasures pursued beyond all measure and all decency. You need not marvel that diseases are countless: count the cooks. Every serious study has come to a halt; those who profess the liberal arts sit unattended in deserted corners; in the schools of rhetoricians and philosophers there is a wasteland — but how crowded the kitchens are, how the young crowd around the hearths of gluttons! [24] I pass over the herds of unhappy boys awaiting, after the banquet is over, still other indignities in the bedroom; I pass over the troops of male prostitutes sorted by nationality and complexion, so that all may have the same smoothness of skin, the same measure of first down on the cheek, the same style of hair, lest one with straighter hair be mixed in among the curly ones; I pass over the crowd of bakers, I pass over the throng of servants who scatter at a signal to bring in dinner. Good gods, how many people a single belly keeps busy! [25] What of this — do you think those mushrooms, that luxurious poison, do no hidden damage, even when they don't kill on the spot? Do you think that summer snow doesn't callous the liver? Those oysters, that laziest of flesh fattened on filth — do you think they add nothing of muddy heaviness? That garum from allied provinces, that costly discharge of rotten fish — don't you believe it burns the vitals with its salty decay? Those scalding dishes, brought almost straight from the fire to the mouth — do you think they cool down inside the body without harm? What foul, pestilential belches result, what disgust at themselves as they breathe out yesterday's drunkenness! You may be sure that what they've eaten is rotting, not digesting. [26] I remember once hearing talk of a famous dish into which some fast-food shop, rushing headlong to its own ruin, had crammed everything that usually takes a whole day to serve among the fashionable: mussels and oysters and spondyli, trimmed just enough to be eaten, were set out with sea urchins in between, and boned mullets, filleted whole, had been laid all around. [27] It disgusts me now even to speak of these things one by one: the flavors are all forced into one. What ought to happen in the stomach now happens in the dining room; I expect soon they'll serve it pre-chewed. And how much less would that be than picking out the shells and bones and letting the cook do the work of the teeth? "It's too tiresome," they say, "to indulge one course at a time; let everything be served at once, blended into a single flavor. Why should I reach my hand out for just one thing? Let many come together at once, let the trimmings of many courses meet and merge. [28] Let those who used to say they wanted display and glory from such things know at once that this is not for show but offered to their own conscience. Let the things usually served separately be lumped together, drenched in one sauce; let there be no distinction — oysters, urchins, mussels, mullets, all jumbled and cooked up together and served that way." The food of a vomiting man would not be more of a mess. [29] Just as these dishes are all tangled together, so from them arise diseases that are not single but tangled, various, many-shaped, against which medicine has begun arming itself with many kinds of remedies, many methods of observation.
I say the same thing to you about philosophy. It was once simpler, back when men's faults were smaller and curable even with light care; against so great an overturning of morals, everything must be tried. If only this plague could finally be conquered that way! [30] We rage not only privately but publicly. We restrain individual murders, single killings — but what of wars, and the glorious crime of slaughtering whole nations? Neither greed nor cruelty knows any limit. And these things, as long as they are done stealthily and by individuals, are less harmful, less monstrous; but once they are authorized by decrees of the senate and votes of the people, savage acts are carried out and publicly ordered that are forbidden in private. [31] Deeds that, done in secret, would cost a man his life, we praise once they are done in uniform. Human beings, that gentlest of creatures, feel no shame in rejoicing in each other's blood, in waging wars and handing them down to their children to wage in turn — even though there is peace among dumb beasts and wild animals.
[32] Against so powerful and so widely spread a madness, philosophy has had to become more laborious, and has taken on for itself as much strength as has grown in the forces it was raised against. It was easy to rebuke people indulging in wine or craving richer food when the mind did not need to be dragged back with great force to a frugality from which it had only slightly departed:
but now there is need of grasping hands, now of guiding art.
Pleasure is sought from everything. No vice stays within its own bounds: luxury rushes headlong into greed. Forgetfulness of honor has taken hold; nothing is shameful once its price is right. Man, a thing sacred to man, is now killed for sport and amusement, and one whom it was once wrong to train to inflict and receive wounds is now led out naked and unarmed, and a man's death is spectacle enough. [34] In this perversity of morals, then, something more forceful than usual is needed to shake loose ills grown chronic: we must work through doctrines, so that the accepted persuasion of false beliefs may be uprooted from deep within. If we add to these precepts, consolations, exhortations, they will be able to have effect; by themselves they are ineffective. [35] If we want to hold men bound to virtue and pull them away from the evils that already grip them, they must learn what is evil and what is good, and know that everything but virtue changes its name, becoming now bad, now good. Just as the first bond of military service is devotion, love of the standards, and the conviction that desertion is unthinkable — and only then are the rest of the duties easily demanded and the oath exacted of the recruits — so too, in those you wish to lead to the happy life, the first foundations must be laid and virtue must be instilled. Let them be held by a kind of reverence for it, let them love it; let them want to live with it and refuse to live without it.
[36] "What then? Haven't some people, without any refined instruction, turned out upright and made great progress simply by following bare precepts?" I admit it, but they had a fortunate nature and snatched up what was healthy in passing. For just as the immortal gods never learned any virtue, being born complete in every way, and it is part of their nature to be good, so too some human beings, endowed with an outstanding disposition, arrive at what is usually only taught without long instruction, and embraced what is honorable the first time they heard of it; hence come those minds so quick to seize on virtue, or so fertile in producing it from within themselves. But those who are dull and slow, or beset by bad habits, need a long time to scrub the rust off their minds. [37] Still, just as instruction leads those already inclined to the good more quickly to the heights, it will also help the weaker ones and draw them out of their bad opinions if someone hands them the doctrines of philosophy. And you can see just how necessary these are in the following way. Certain things lodge in us that make us slow toward some things, rash toward others; and this rashness cannot be checked, nor that sluggishness roused, unless their causes are removed — false admiration and false dread. As long as these possess us, you may say, 'you owe this to your father, this to your children, this to your friends, this to your guests' — but greed will hold back the man who tries. He will know he ought to fight for his country, but fear will talk him out of it; he will know he ought to sweat to the very last drop for his friends, but self-indulgence will forbid it; he will know that a mistress is the gravest wrong a wife can suffer, but lust will drive him the other way. [38] So it will do no good to give precepts unless you first remove what will stand in the precepts' way — no more good than it would do to lay out weapons in plain sight and bring them closer, unless the hands that must use them are first freed. For the mind to be able to advance toward the precepts we give it, it must first be set loose.
[39] Let us suppose someone does what he ought: he will not do it consistently, he will not do it evenly, for he will not know why he is doing it. Some actions will turn out right by chance or by practice, but he will have no fixed rule in hand by which to test them, no ground for trusting that what he did was right. A man who is good by chance cannot promise to remain so forever.
[40] Furthermore, precepts may perhaps enable him to do what he ought, but they will not enable him to do it in the way he ought; and if they do not achieve that, they do not lead to virtue. He will do what he ought when reminded to, I grant you; but that is too little, since praise lies not in the deed itself but in how it is done. [41] What is more scandalous than an extravagant dinner that eats up a knight's whole fortune? What more deserving of the censor's mark, if someone, as those gluttons put it, indulges himself and his own appetite that way? And yet dinners costing a million sesterces to inaugurate a priesthood have been given by the most frugal men. The same act, if done to satisfy the palate, is disgraceful; if done to honor an office, it escapes censure — for it is not luxury but a customary expense. [42] There was a mullet of enormous size — why not add the exact weight, and whet the appetite of a few gourmands as well? — they said it weighed four and a half pounds — which Tiberius Caesar, when it was brought to him, ordered taken to the fish market and sold, saying, 'Friends, I am much mistaken if that mullet isn't bought by either Apicius or Publius Octavius.' His guess exceeded even his own expectation: they bid against each other, Octavius won, and won enormous glory among his circle for buying, for five thousand sesterces, a fish that Caesar had sold and that not even Apicius had bought. It was shameful only for Octavius to pay that sum — not for the man who bought it to send it to Tiberius, though I would fault him too, for admiring something he thought worthy of Caesar. Someone sits at the bedside of a sick friend — we approve. [43] But suppose he does it for the sake of an inheritance: then he's a vulture, waiting for a corpse. The same act can be either base or honorable: it depends on why and how it is done. Everything, however, will be done honorably if we devote ourselves to what is honorable and judge it the one good thing in human affairs, along with whatever follows from it; everything else is only good for the moment. [44] So a conviction bearing on the whole of life must be firmly fixed in us: this is what I call a doctrine. Whatever this conviction is, so will be the actions and the thoughts that follow; and whatever these are, so will life be. Persuading someone about particular matters is not enough when the whole must be set in order. [45] Marcus Brutus, in the book he entitled On Duty, gives many precepts concerning parents, children, and siblings; but no one will carry these out as he ought unless he has something to refer them to. We must set before ourselves the goal of the highest good, toward which we strive, and to which every deed and word of ours looks back — just as sailors must steer their course by some star. [46] Life without a purpose wanders aimlessly; and if a purpose must in any case be set, then doctrines become necessary. You will grant me this, I think: nothing is more shameful than a hesitant, uncertain step, timidly drawing back. This will happen to us in everything unless we remove whatever holds our minds back, checks them, and forbids them to advance and strive with their whole force.
[47] How the gods are to be worshiped is usually taught by precept. Let us forbid anyone to light lamps on the sabbath, since the gods have no need of light, and even men take no pleasure in smoke. Let us forbid people to attend morning greetings and sit at the doors of temples: it is human ambition that is caught by such observances; the man who truly worships god is the one who knows him. Let us forbid bringing linens and scrapers to Jupiter, or holding up a mirror to Juno: god seeks no attendants. Why should he? He himself attends on the human race, present everywhere and to everyone. [48] One may be told what measure to observe in sacrifices, how far to shrink from tiresome superstitions — but no real progress will ever be made unless he has conceived god in his mind as he ought to be: possessing everything, granting everything, beneficent for nothing in return. [49] What is the cause of the gods' doing good? Their nature. Whoever thinks they are simply unwilling to do harm is mistaken: they cannot do it. They can neither receive an injury nor inflict one; for to harm and to be harmed go together. That highest and most beautiful of all natures, having removed them from danger, has not thereby made them dangerous. [50] The first act of worshiping the gods is to believe that they exist; next, to render to them their majesty, to render their goodness, without which there is no majesty; to know that they are the ones who preside over the world, who govern the whole by their power, who watch over the human race, sometimes without concern for individuals. They neither give evil nor possess it; but they do chastise and restrain certain people, and impose penalties, and sometimes punish under the guise of a benefit. Do you want to win the gods over? Be good. Whoever has imitated them has worshiped them enough.
[51] Now here is a second question: how are we to treat other human beings? What are we doing? What precepts are we giving? That we should spare human blood? What a small thing it is not to harm someone you ought to be helping! It is, apparently, great praise if one man is gentle to another. Shall we instruct someone to give a hand to a shipwrecked man, to show a lost traveler the way, to share his bread with someone starving? Why should I list everything that must be done and everything that must be avoided, when I can hand him this brief formula of human duty in a few words: [52] all this that you see, in which divine and human things are enclosed together, is one; we are limbs of one great body. Nature made us kin, since she produced us from the same elements and for the same ends; she implanted in us mutual love and made us social. It is she who established what is fair and just; by her decree it is more wretched to harm than to be harmed; by her command our hands should be ready to help. [53] Let that verse be always in our heart and on our lips:
I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me.
Let us hold things in common: we were born for that common holding. Our fellowship is very much like an arch of stones, which would collapse if the stones did not hold each other up — and it is held up by that very mutual resistance.
[54] After the gods and men, let us consider how we ought to use material things. We will waste our precepts in vain unless this comes first: what opinion we ought to hold about anything — poverty, riches, glory, disgrace, our country, exile. Let us judge each thing on its own, apart from its reputation, and ask what it is, not what it is called.
[55] Let us pass on to the virtues. Someone will instruct us to hold prudence in high esteem, to embrace courage, and, if possible, to attach ourselves to justice even more closely than the rest; but he will accomplish nothing if we don't know what virtue is, whether it is one thing or many, separate or interwoven, whether whoever has one has all the rest, and how they differ from one another. [56] It is not necessary for a craftsman to ask about his craft what its origin is or what its use is, any more than it is for a pantomime dancer to ask about the art of dance: all those arts know themselves fully, nothing is missing, because they do not bear on the whole of life. Virtue, though, is knowledge both of other things and of itself; one must learn about it in order to learn it. [57] An action will not be right unless the will behind it is right, for action comes from the will. Again, the will will not be right unless the disposition of the mind is right, for the will comes from that. And the disposition of the mind will not be at its best unless it has grasped the laws governing the whole of life and worked out what judgment to make about everything, unless it has reduced things to the truth. There is no peace of mind except for those who have attained a fixed and unchangeable judgment: the rest keep falling and being picked up again, tossed back and forth between what they've given up and what they still crave. [58] What causes this tossing about? That nothing is clear to those steering by the most uncertain of guides — reputation. If you want to always want the same things, you must want what is true. And you cannot reach the truth without doctrines: they contain the whole of life. Good and evil, honorable and base, just and unjust, dutiful and impious, the virtues and their exercise, the possession of useful things, reputation and standing, health, strength, beauty, keenness of the senses — all of these require someone to appraise them. We ought to be able to know how much each is worth when declared for assessment. [59] For you are mistaken, and you rate some things higher than they are — so mistaken that the things held greatest among us, wealth, influence, power, ought to be valued at a single sesterce. You will not know this unless you have examined the very system by which these things are weighed against one another. Just as leaves cannot be green by themselves, but need a branch to cling to from which they draw their sap, so these precepts, if left alone, wither; they need to be rooted in a system of doctrine.
[60] Besides, those who reject doctrines fail to see that the very act of rejecting them confirms them. For what do they say? That precepts are enough to guide life fully, and the doctrines of wisdom — dogmas, that is — are superfluous. But this very statement is itself a doctrine, every bit as much as if I now said we should abandon precepts as superfluous and rely only on doctrines, devoting our study to them alone; in denying that precepts need attention, I would be laying down a doctrine of my own. [61] Some things in philosophy require only a reminder, others require proof, and a great deal of it, because they are intricate and are laid bare only with the utmost care and subtlety. If proofs are necessary, then the doctrines that establish truth through argument are necessary too. Some things are plain, others obscure: plain are the things grasped by the senses and by memory; obscure are those beyond these. But reason is not fulfilled by what is plain; the greater and finer part of it lies among hidden things. Hidden things demand proof, and proof cannot exist without doctrines; therefore doctrines are necessary. [62] The same thing that produces ordinary sense also produces perfect sense: a firm conviction about things. Without this, if everything floats loose in the mind, doctrines are necessary, since they give the mind an unbending judgment. [63] Finally, when we advise someone to hold a friend in the same regard as himself, to consider that an enemy may become a friend, to stir up love in the one case and restrain hatred in the other, we add: 'this is just, this is honorable.' But the reasoning behind our doctrines is what contains what is just and honorable; therefore this reasoning is necessary, since without it those qualities do not exist either. [64] But let us join the two together, for branches without roots are useless, and the roots themselves are helped by what they have produced. No one can fail to see how useful the hands are — their help is plain; but the heart, by which the hands live, from which they draw their impulse, by which they are moved, is hidden. I can say the same about precepts: they are plain, but the doctrines of wisdom lie hidden. Just as only the initiated know the more sacred rites of the mysteries, so in philosophy those secret things are shown only to those admitted and received into the inner rites; but precepts and matters like them are known even to the uninitiated.
[65] Posidonius holds that not only instruction (nothing forbids us from using this word) but also persuasion, consolation, and exhortation are necessary. To these he adds the investigation of causes, aetiology — I don't see why we shouldn't dare to use that word ourselves, since grammarians, the guardians of the Latin tongue, use it freely enough. He says a description of each virtue will also be useful; this Posidonius calls 'ethology,' others call it 'characterismos' — giving the signs and marks of each virtue and vice by which similar things may be told apart from one another. [66] This has the same force as giving precepts; for the one who instructs says, 'do that, if you want to be temperate,' while the one who describes says, 'the temperate man is the one who does that, who abstains from that.' You ask what the difference is? One gives the precepts of virtue, the other a model. I admit these descriptions — or, to borrow a word from the tax-farmers, these 'likenesses' — are useful in practice: let us hold up things worth praising, and an imitator will be found. [67] Do you think it useful to be given marks by which you can recognize a noble horse, so you aren't deceived when buying one, and don't waste your effort on a worthless animal? How much more useful is it to know the marks of an excellent spirit, which one is allowed to transfer from another into oneself!
At once the foal of noble stock strides higher
across the fields, and sets down his supple legs;
first he dares to go the road and test the threatening streams,
and trust himself to an unknown bridge,
and shies at no idle noise. His neck is proud,
his head fine-drawn, his belly short, his back full,
and his spirited chest swells with muscle . . .
. . . Then, if far off some weapon has rung out,
he cannot stand still; his ears flick and his limbs tremble,
and, gathering the fire within, he rolls it beneath his nostrils.
[69] Meaning to describe something else, our Virgil there described the brave man; I certainly would not assign the great man any other image. If I had to picture Marcus Cato, fearless amid the crash of civil wars, first to stand against the armies already advancing on the Alps and to throw himself in the way of civil war, I would give him no other face, no other bearing. [70] Certainly no one could stride higher than the man who rose up alone against both Caesar and Pompey at once, and, while some favored Caesar's power and others Pompey's, challenged both, showing that there was still a place for the republic's own side. For it's too little to say of Cato, 'he shies at no idle noise.' Of course not — when he doesn't shy even at real and neighboring dangers, when, against ten legions and Gallic auxiliaries and mixed barbarian arms joined with citizens, he raises a free voice and urges the republic not to give up its liberty but to try everything, since it is more honorable to fall into slavery than to walk into it. [71] What vigor, what spirit was in that man, what confidence amid the public panic! He knows he is the one man whose own standing is not at stake; for the question is not whether Cato is free, but whether he is still among free men — hence his contempt for danger and for swords. One is tempted, admiring the man's unconquered constancy amid public ruin, to say of him, 'and his spirited chest swells with muscle.'
[72] It will help not only to describe what good men are usually like, sketching their general shape and features, but also to narrate and set out what particular good men actually were — Cato's last and bravest wound, through which he let his freedom out along with his life; the wisdom of Laelius and his harmony with his friend Scipio; the outstanding deeds, at home and abroad, of the other Cato; Tubero's wooden couches, when he was laying out a public banquet, and goatskins used in place of coverlets, and earthenware vessels set out for the feast right before the very shrine of Jupiter. What else was that but consecrating poverty on the Capitol itself? Even if I had no other deed of his to place him among the Catos, is this not enough for us to believe it? That was a censorship, not a dinner. [73] Oh, how little men who crave glory understand what glory is or how it should be sought! On that day the Roman people looked at the fine furnishings of many men, but marveled at the furnishings of one. All that gold and silver of theirs has since been broken up and melted down a thousand times over, but Tubero's earthenware will endure through every age to come. Farewell.

======== Letter 96 ========

[1] So you feel outraged by something, or you complain, and you fail to see that the only bad thing in these situations is the one fact that you feel outraged and complain? If you ask me, nothing is wretched for a man except thinking there is something in the nature of things that is wretched. I will not put up with myself on the day I can no longer put up with something. I'm in poor health: that's part of my lot. My household has come down with illness, expenses have piled up, the house has cracked, losses, injuries, hard labor, fears have all come running at me: that's what usually happens. No — put it stronger: that's what had to happen. [2] These things are decreed, not accidents. If you believe me at all, I am laying bare to you right now my deepest feelings: in the face of everything that looks adverse and harsh, I have shaped myself like this — I do not merely obey god, I agree with him; I follow him from the heart, not because I have to. Nothing will ever befall me that I greet with a gloomy face, with a scowl; I will never pay any tax unwillingly. All the things over which we groan, which we dread, are taxes on life: don't hope for exemption from them, my dear Lucilius, and don't ask for it. [3] A pain in the bladder has troubled you, letters have arrived that weren't very sweet, one loss after another — let me come closer to it — you've been afraid for your life. What, didn't you know that this is what you were wishing for when you wished for old age? All these things belong to a long life, the way dust and mud and rain belong to a long road. [4] 'But I wanted to live, while being spared all its inconveniences.' Such an effeminate remark is unworthy of a man. Consider how you'd like me to take this wish of mine: I make it with a great spirit, not merely a good one — may neither the gods nor the goddesses arrange for fortune to pamper you. [5] Ask yourself this: if some god gave you the power to choose, would you rather live in the meat market or in the camp? And yet living, Lucilius, is soldiering. And so those who get tossed about, who go up and down through toilsome and steep ground, who undertake the most dangerous campaigns, are brave men, the front-rank fighters of the camp; while those whom a rank ease keeps soft while others labor are turtledoves, safe only to be despised. Farewell.

======== Letter 97 ========

[1] You are wrong, my dear Lucilius, if you think that extravagance and the neglect of good conduct — and the other things each generation charges against its own times — are the fault of our age: these are the faults of men, not of times. No age has been free of blame; and if you set out to weigh the license of any given age, it's embarrassing to say, but wrongdoing was never more open than in the presence of Cato. [2] Could anyone believe that money changed hands in that trial in which Publius Clodius was the defendant, charged with the adultery he had committed with Caesar's wife in a secluded place, violating the sacred rites of that sacrifice which is called the one performed 'for the people' — a rite from which every man is excluded from the enclosed area, so strictly that even paintings of male creatures are covered over? And yet the jurors were given money, and — more shameful still than that bargain — the seductions of married women and of well-born young men were exacted on top of it, in place of a fee. [3] The wrongdoing in the acquittal was worse than the crime charged: the man accused of adultery went and divided up adulteries of his own, and had no confidence in his safety until he had made the jurors just like himself. This is what happened in that trial in which, if nothing else, Cato had given testimony. I will set down Cicero's own words, since the facts exceed belief. [From Book One of Cicero's Letters to Atticus] [4] 'He summoned them to him, made promises, went surety, handed over money. And now — good gods, what a ruined business! — the nights of certain women, and introductions to well-born young men, served some of the jurors as a bonus on top of their fee.' [5] There's no point complaining about the price — the extras were the greater part of it. 'Do you want that stern man's wife? I'll give her to you. Do you want that rich man's? I'll deliver you his bed. If you don't vote for acquittal, you lose out. That beautiful woman you want will come to you. I promise you her night, and I won't put it off; before the case is adjourned for reconsideration, my promise will be made good.' It's a worse thing to hand out adulteries than to commit them — this, in fact, is announcing them publicly to respectable wives. [6] These jurors of Clodius's had asked the senate for a guard, something needed only by men who meant to convict; and they got it. So Catulus made a nice remark to them once the defendant was acquitted: 'Why were you asking us for a guard? Was it so your money wouldn't be snatched from you?' Yet amid this mockery the adulterer got off scot-free — an adulterer before the trial, a pimp during it, who escaped conviction in a worse way than he deserved it. [7] Do you think anything could have been more corrupt than the morals of that age, in which lust could be checked neither by religious rites nor by a judge, in which, in that very inquiry which the senate's decree had set up as an extraordinary proceeding, more was committed than was being investigated? The question under investigation was whether anyone, after committing adultery, could be safe: it turned out that no one could be safe without committing it.
[8] This affair was set in motion between Pompey and Caesar, between Cicero and Cato — that very Cato in whose presence, it's said, the people did not dare to demand the traditional stripping of the prostitutes at the Floralia — if you can believe that people watched more strictly than they judged in those days. Such things will happen again, and have happened before, and the license of cities is sometimes reined in by discipline and fear, but it never settles down on its own. [9] So there's no reason for you to believe that we have given the most license to lust and the least respect to law; this younger generation is by far more restrained than that one, when the defendant would deny adultery before the jurors while the jurors were confessing it in front of the defendant, when the crime itself was committed for the sake of deciding the case, when Clodius, popular through the very vices that made him guilty, ran his procuring business in the middle of delivering his defense. Can anyone believe it? A man who was being condemned for one act of adultery was acquitted by committing many.
[10] Every age will produce its Clodiuses; not every age will produce its Catos. We slide easily toward the worse, because there is never a shortage of a leader or a companion for it, and the thing proceeds even without a leader or a companion, on its own momentum. The slope toward vice is not merely gentle but headlong, and — what makes most people incorrigible — the failures of every other art embarrass their practitioners and sting them when they go wrong, but the failures of living give pleasure. [11] A helmsman takes no joy in a shipwreck, a doctor takes no joy in a patient carried out dead, an orator takes no joy if his client is convicted through his own fault as advocate; but on the contrary, everyone takes delight in his own wrongdoing: one man is glad of the adultery he was drawn into by the very difficulty of it; another is glad of the swindle and the theft, and neither feels guilt until his luck in the guilt turns bad. This comes from a corrupt habit. [12] Otherwise — and I say this so you'll know that even in minds dragged down to the worst there still lurks some sense of the good, that wrong is not unrecognized but merely disregarded — everyone conceals his own misdeeds, and even when they've turned out well, people enjoy the profit from them while hiding the acts themselves. But a good conscience wants to come forward and be seen: it is wickedness alone that is afraid of the dark. [13] So I think Epicurus put it elegantly: 'a guilty man may manage to escape notice, but he can have no assurance of escaping notice' — or if you think the thought can be better put this way: 'concealment does no good for wrongdoers, because even if their concealment succeeds, they have no confidence in it.' That's how it is: crimes can be safe, but they cannot be free of anxiety. [14] I don't think this conflicts with our school, if you take it this way. Why? Because the first and greatest punishment of wrongdoers is the very fact of having done wrong, and no crime — even if fortune decks it out with her gifts, even if she protects and defends it — goes unpunished, since the punishment for the crime lies within the crime itself. But nonetheless these secondary punishments also press upon it and follow it: perpetual fear and dread, and no confidence in one's own safety. So why should I free wickedness from this punishment? Why should I not leave it forever hanging in suspense? [15] Let us part ways with Epicurus where he says that nothing is just by nature and that crimes are to be avoided because fear cannot be avoided; but let us agree with him here: that evil deeds are scourged by conscience, and that the greatest part of their torment is this, that unrelenting anxiety besets and lashes them, that they cannot trust the guarantors of their own safety. For this, Epicurus, is proof in itself that we recoil from crime by nature — the fact that fear dogs everyone, even amid safety. [16] Fortune frees many from punishment, but no one from fear. Why is that, if not because the aversion to that thing which nature has condemned is fixed deep within us? That's why concealment never gives confidence even to those who are concealed — because conscience convicts them and reveals them to themselves. It is the special mark of the guilty to tremble. It would have gone badly for us, given that many crimes escape the law and its avenger and the punishments written down, if nature's own grave penalties did not settle accounts on the spot, and fear did not take the place of suffering. Farewell.

======== Letter 98 ========

[1] Never believe anyone happy whose happiness hangs on borrowed goods. Whoever takes joy in what comes from outside is leaning on fragile supports: the joy that entered from elsewhere will exit the same way. But that joy which arises from oneself is trustworthy and solid, and it grows and stays with a man to the very end; everything else, the sort of thing the crowd admires, is a good only for a day. 'What, then? Can such things not be useful or pleasant?' Who denies it? But only on condition that they depend on us, not we on them. [2] Everything that fortune looks upon becomes fruitful and pleasant only if the one who has it also has himself in hand, and is not in the power of his own possessions. People go wrong, Lucilius, when they judge that fortune hands out either something good or something bad to us: she supplies the raw material of good and bad things, and the beginnings of matters that will turn out, in our hands, for good or ill. For the mind is stronger than any fortune, and it steers its own affairs itself, in one direction or the other, and is itself the cause of a happy or a wretched life. [3] A bad mind turns everything to the bad, even things that had arrived under the best of appearances; an upright and sound mind corrects the crookedness of fortune, and by its skill in bearing things softens what is hard and harsh, and it receives good fortune gratefully and with restraint, and bears adversity steadily and with courage. Even if a man is wise, even if he does everything with sound judgment, even if he attempts nothing beyond his strength, he will not attain that good, whole and beyond the reach of threats, unless he is certain in the face of uncertainty. [4] Whether you want to observe others (judgment is freer when it deals with what belongs to someone else) or observe yourself, setting favoritism aside, you will feel this and admit it: none of these desirable and dear things is of any use unless you have armed yourself against the fickleness of chance and the chance that follows on its heels, unless you frequently say, without complaint, in the midst of each loss:
the gods saw fit otherwise.
[5] Actually, by Hercules, to reach for a saying that is stronger and fairer, one that will prop up your spirit more firmly, say this instead, whenever something turns out other than you had planned: 'the gods have arranged it better.' A person composed like this will have nothing happen to him. And he will be composed like this if he has thought, before he feels it, about what the variety of human affairs can do — if he holds his children, his wife, and his fortune in such a way as though he were not necessarily going to keep them forever, and as though he would not be more wretched on that account if he ceased to have them. [6] A mind anxious about the future is a wretched one, wretched even before its miseries arrive, one that worries whether the things it delights in will last all the way to the end; for it will never rest, and by anticipating what is to come it will lose the present, which it could have enjoyed. The pain of losing something and the fear of losing it stand on the same footing. [7] I am not, for that reason, telling you to be careless. No — do avoid what should be avoided; whatever can be foreseen through forethought, foresee it; whatever is going to hurt you, watch for it and ward it off long before it arrives. What will help you most in this very effort is confidence and a mind steeled to endure everything. A man who can bear fortune can also be on guard against it; certainly, once at peace, he doesn't panic. Nothing is more wretched or more foolish than fearing things in advance — what madness is it, to run out ahead to meet your own misfortune? [8] In short, to sum up my view briefly, and to describe to you these fretful, self-tormenting people: they are just as lacking in self-control in the midst of their miseries as they were before them. A man who grieves before he must, grieves more than he must; for it is the same weakness that makes him fail to gauge his grief that made him fail to anticipate it. That same lack of self-control makes him imagine his own happiness will last forever, makes him imagine that whatever has befallen him ought to grow, not merely endure, and, forgetting the seesaw on which human affairs are tossed about, he alone promises himself constancy amid chance events. [9] So I think Metrodorus put it splendidly, in that letter in which he consoles his sister for the loss of a son of the finest character: 'every good thing belonging to mortals is itself mortal.' He is speaking there of those goods that people run after; for the true good does not die — it is certain and everlasting, namely wisdom and virtue; this alone falls to mortals as something immortal. [10] But people are so thoughtless, and so forgetful of where they're heading, of where each passing day is pushing them, that they're astonished to lose some one thing, though one day they will lose everything at once. Whatever you can label 'mine' is in your keeping, but it is not yours; nothing is stable for something unstable, nothing is eternal and unconquerable for something fragile. It is just as necessary to perish as it is to lose things, and this very fact, if we understand it, is itself a comfort. Lose with an even mind: you have to perish anyway.
[11] So what remedy have we found against these losses? This one: that we hold on to the memory of what we've lost, and not let the enjoyment we drew from it vanish along with the thing itself. Having a thing can be taken from us; having had it, never. It is a thoroughly ungrateful man who, once he has lost something, feels he owes nothing for having received it in the first place. Chance snatches the object from us, but leaves its use and enjoyment in our possession — which we ourselves destroy through the unfairness of our longing. [12] Tell yourself: 'Of these things that seem so terrible, nothing is unconquerable.' Many people have already conquered them one by one: Mucius conquered fire, Regulus the cross, Socrates poison, Rutilius exile, Cato a death driven home by the sword: let us too conquer something. [13] Then again, those things that draw the crowd along as though splendid and blessed have been despised by many people, and often. Fabricius, as a general, rejected riches; as censor, he branded them with disgrace. Tubero judged poverty worthy both of himself and of the Capitol, when, by using earthenware dishes at a public banquet, he showed that a man ought to be content with the very things the gods themselves still use. Sextius the father turned down public honors: born into a position that obliged him to take up public life, he refused the broad purple stripe offered by the deified Julius; for he understood that what could be given could also be taken away. Let us too, on our own, do something with spirit; let us stand among the examples. [14] Why have we grown slack? Why do we despair? Whatever could be done can still be done, if only we cleanse our minds and follow nature — a person who strays from nature is bound to desire and to fear, and to be a slave to chance. It is possible to return to the road, possible to be restored to wholeness: let us be restored, so that we can bear pains, however they invade the body, and say to fortune, 'You have a man to deal with: go find someone to beat.'
[15] *** By these words and others like them, that violent pain of the ulcer is eased — a pain I truly hope will be soothed, and either healed, or held steady and grow old along with the man himself. But I have no worry on his account: it's our loss that's at stake, we who are about to have this remarkable old man taken from us. For he himself is full of life, a man who wants nothing more added to it for his own sake, but only for the sake of those to whom he is useful. [16] It is a generous act on his part that he goes on living. Another man would long since have put an end to these torments; he thinks it just as shameful to flee death as to flee to death. 'What then? Won't he leave, if the situation urges it?' Why wouldn't he leave, if no one can any longer make use of him, if all he'd be doing is ministering to his pain? [17] This, my dear Lucilius, is learning philosophy in action, and being trained in the real thing: to see what a wise man's spirit holds in reserve against death, against pain, when the one is approaching and the other pressing hard; what must be done is to be learned from the one who is doing it. [18] Up to now the question has been argued in theory, whether anyone could withstand pain, whether death, even when it draws near, could bring low even great spirits. What need is there for words? Let us go to the facts themselves: in him, it isn't death that makes him braver against pain, nor pain that makes him braver against death. He trusts himself against each of them separately: he doesn't endure his pain patiently out of hope for death, and he doesn't die gladly out of weariness with pain. This one he bears; that one he awaits. Farewell.

======== Letter 99 ========

[1] I'm sending you the letter I wrote to Marullus when he lost his young son and was said to be taking it hard. In it I didn't follow my usual practice, and I didn't think he deserved gentle handling, since his case called for a scolding rather than comfort. When someone is struck down and bearing a great wound badly, you have to give way for a while; let him wear himself out, or at least spend the first rush of grief. But those who have taken it upon themselves to mourn on principle should be checked at once, and taught that some kinds of weeping are simply foolish.
"You expect comfort? Take a scolding instead. Is this how weakly you bear the death of your son? What would you do if you'd lost a friend? A son of uncertain promise has died, a little boy; a small amount of time has been lost. We go hunting for reasons to grieve, and we're even willing to complain unfairly against fortune, as if it wouldn't be only too glad to supply us with genuine grounds for complaint. And yet, by god, you used to strike me as having spirit enough even against solid misfortunes, let alone against these shadows of misfortune that people groan over out of habit. Here's the greatest of all losses: if you had lost a friend, you should have made it your business to rejoice more that you'd had him than to grieve that you'd lost him. But most people never reckon up how much they received, how much joy they had. This is what's worst about this kind of grief besides everything else: it isn't just useless, it's ungrateful. So because you had such a friend, does the fact vanish into nothing? Did so many years, such a close-knit life together, such an intimate partnership in your pursuits, come to nothing? Do you bury your friendship along with your friend? And why grieve at having lost him, if having had him did you no good? Believe me: a great part of those we have loved, even though circumstance has carried off the men themselves, remains with us still. The time that has passed is ours, and nothing is in a safer place than what has already happened. We're ungrateful about the hopes we've already realized for the future, as if what is going to happen — provided only it turns out well for us — won't quickly pass over into the past. Whoever finds his enjoyment only in the present narrows his profit from things too much: both future and past give pleasure, the one through expectation, the other through memory. But the one is uncertain and may never come to pass, the other cannot possibly not have been. What madness, then, to let go of the one thing that is perfectly certain! Let's rest content with what we've already drunk in, provided we weren't drinking with a leaky vessel of a mind that let slip away whatever it had received.
"There are countless examples of people who have buried young children without tears, who went straight from the funeral pyre to the senate or to some public office and turned at once to other business. And not without reason: first, it's useless to grieve if grieving gets you nowhere; second, it's unfair to complain about something that has happened to one person when it awaits everyone; third, it's a foolish complaint of longing when there's so little difference between the one lost and the one doing the longing. We ought therefore to be all the more at ease, because we're only following those we've lost. Consider the speed of time as it rushes past, think how brief this stretch is through which we run at breakneck pace, watch this procession of the human race heading toward the same point, separated by the smallest intervals even where they seem greatest: the one you think has perished has simply been sent on ahead. And what is crazier than weeping for someone who went first, when you yourself have the same journey to complete? Does anyone weep over something he knew all along was going to happen? Or if he never gave thought to the fact that a human being must die, he has only himself to blame. Does anyone weep over something he himself used to say couldn't possibly not happen? Whoever complains that someone has died is complaining that he was a human being. The same condition binds us all: whoever is granted birth has death still owing. We're set apart by intervals, we're made equal by the end. What lies between the first day and the last is variable and uncertain: reckoned by its troubles, it's long even for a child; reckoned by its speed, it's short even for an old man. Nothing is free of slipperiness and deception, nothing more shifting than any storm; everything is tossed about and reverses itself at fortune's command, and amid such churning of human affairs nothing is certain for anyone except death — and yet everyone complains about the one thing in which no one is ever deceived.
"'But he was a child when he died.' I'm not yet ready to say that things go better for someone who departs life quickly; let's turn instead to someone who lived to old age: by how little does he outdo the infant! Set before yourself the vastness of the depths of time and take in the whole of it, then compare this thing we call a human lifetime to the immense expanse: you'll see how tiny a thing it is that we long for, that we stretch out. Out of this span, how much is taken up by tears, how much by anxieties? How much by the death we long for before it comes, how much by illness, how much by fear? How much is held by years that are either too raw or too useless? Half of this time is slept away. Add to that our labors, our griefs, our dangers, and you'll realize that even in the longest life, what is actually lived amounts to very little. But who will grant you that the one who gets to turn back quickly isn't better off, the one whose journey is finished before he grows weary? Life is neither a good nor an evil: it is simply the space where good and evil occur. So he has lost nothing except a throw of the dice that was more certain to turn out a loss. He might have grown up modest and wise; under your care he might have been shaped toward better things. But — and this is the more justified fear — he might have turned out like so many others. Look at those young men whom luxury has flung into the arena from the noblest houses; look at those who indulge their own and each other's lust, trading shamelessness back and forth, not one of whom lets a day pass without drunkenness, not one without some notorious disgrace: it will be plain that there was more to fear from him than to hope for. You shouldn't, then, go hunting for reasons to grieve, or pile up trivial troubles by working yourself into indignation over them. I'm not urging you to brace up and rise above this; I don't think so poorly of you that I believe you need to summon the whole of virtue against this blow. This isn't grief, it's a sting — you're the one turning it into grief. Philosophy has certainly done you a great deal of good, if you're longing with a stout heart for a child who was still better known to his nurse than to his father!
"Now then, am I urging hardness on you, insisting that your face stay rigid at the very funeral, refusing to let your spirit contract even for a moment? Not at all. That would be inhumanity, not virtue — to view the funerals of our own with the same eyes we view them with when they're strangers, and to feel nothing at the first parting from family. But suppose I did forbid it: some things are their own masters; tears fall even when we try to hold them back, and once let flow they relieve the mind. So what's the answer? Let's allow them to fall, not command them to. Let them flow as much as feeling forces out, not as much as imitation demands. But let's add nothing to our grief, and not swell it by following someone else's example. Putting grief on display demands more than grief itself does — how many people are actually sad on their own account? They groan more loudly when there's an audience, and stay quiet and calm as long as they're alone, only to work themselves up into fresh tears the moment they see other people; then they tear at their own heads — something they could have done more freely with no one stopping them — then they pray for their own death, then they fling themselves off their couches: grief stops the moment there's no one watching. In this, as in other things, we're subject to this failing: we shape ourselves to the example of the many, and look not to what's proper but to what's customary. We abandon nature and give ourselves over to the crowd, which is a poor guide in anything, and in this matter as in all others the most inconsistent of guides. It sees someone bearing his grief bravely and calls him unfeeling and brutish; it sees someone collapsing and clinging to the body and calls him effeminate and weak. So everything must be brought back to reason. Nothing, in fact, is more foolish than chasing a reputation for sorrow and putting on a show of tears, which I think a wise man should sometimes let fall, sometimes bear with self-control. Let me explain the difference. When the first news of a bitter death strikes us, when we hold the body in our arms that is about to pass over into the fire, natural necessity wrings out tears, and the breath, driven by the shock of grief, shakes the whole body just as it shakes the eyes, squeezing out and expelling the moisture that lies in them. These tears fall under compulsion, against our will; there are others which we allow their outlet when we go back over the memory of those we've lost, and there's a certain sweetness mixed in with the sadness when we recall their pleasant conversation, their cheerful company, their devoted affection; then the eyes relax as if in joy. To the second kind we may give way; by the first we are simply overcome. So there's no reason either to hold back your tears or to force them out on account of someone standing by or sitting with you: they never stop, and never flow, as shamefully as when they're put on for show. Let them come of their own accord. But they can come calmly and under control; often tears have flowed without any loss to a wise man's dignity, with such moderation that they lacked neither humanity nor self-respect. It's allowed, I say, to comply with nature while preserving one's composure. I have seen men, at the funerals of their own, worthy of reverence, in whose faces love shone out with every trace of theatrical mourning removed; there was nothing but what genuine feeling supplied. There is a certain grace even to grieving; this the wise man should preserve, and just as in everything else, so too in tears there's a point that's enough: the foolish let their joys overflow just as they let their sorrows.
"Accept life's necessities with an even mind. What has happened that's unbelievable, that's new? At this very moment, how many people's funerals are being arranged, how many people are buying funeral goods, how many are mourning after your own mourning is over! Every time you think of him as a boy, think of him also as a human being, to whom nothing is promised for certain, whom fortune doesn't necessarily carry through to old age: it dismisses him whenever it sees fit. But do speak of him often, and celebrate his memory as much as you can; it will come back to you more readily if it returns without bitterness — for no one willingly spends time with someone sad, let alone with sadness itself. If there were any words of his, any jokes, however small, that you once heard with pleasure, go back over them often; affirm boldly that he could have fulfilled the hopes you had conceived for him as a father. But to forget one's own, to bury their memory along with their bodies, to weep without restraint yet remember with the utmost stinginess — that belongs to an inhuman spirit. That's how birds, how wild animals, love their young — their love is intense, almost frenzied, but once the young are lost it's utterly extinguished. This isn't fitting for a wise man: let him persist in remembering, let him stop mourning.
"I don't approve at all of what Metrodorus says, that there's a certain pleasure akin to sadness, and that this is what should be hunted for at such a time. I've copied out Metrodorus's own words: 'From Metrodorus's letter to his sister: for there is a certain pleasure kindred to grief, which one should hunt for at such a time.' I have no doubt what your reaction to this will be. What could be more disgraceful than to hunt for pleasure right in the midst of mourning — worse, through mourning — and to look for something enjoyable even amid tears? These are the people who charge us with excessive harshness and brand our principles as cruel, because we say that grief should either not be let into the mind at all, or should be driven out quickly. Which, I ask you, is more unbelievable or more inhuman: to feel no grief at the loss of a friend, or to go chasing after pleasure in the very midst of grief? What we teach is honorable: once feeling has poured out some tears and, so to speak, worked off its froth, the mind should not be handed over to grief. But you — are you saying pleasure should be mixed right into grief itself? That's how we comfort children with little cakes, how we quiet an infant's crying by pouring in milk. Not even at the moment when your son is burning on the pyre, or your friend is breathing his last, do you let pleasure stop — you actually want to tickle grief itself? Which is more honorable: banishing grief from the mind, or admitting pleasure even into grief? 'Admitting,' did I say? Hunting it out — and out of grief itself, no less. 'There is,' he says, 'a certain pleasure akin to sadness.' We are allowed to say that; you certainly are not. You people recognize one good, pleasure, and one evil, pain: what kinship can there be between a good and an evil? But suppose there is one: is this really the moment to go digging it out? Are we now, of all times, to scrutinize grief itself to see whether it has something pleasant and enjoyable about it? Certain remedies that are beneficial when applied to some parts of the body cannot be used on others, being too shameful and unseemly, and something that elsewhere would do good with no loss of decency becomes disgraceful when applied to a wound: aren't you ashamed to heal mourning with pleasure? That kind of injury needs to be treated more severely. Remind him instead of this: no awareness of misfortune reaches the one who has perished, for if it reaches him, he hasn't perished. Nothing, I say, can harm someone who is nothing; he's alive if he can be harmed. Do you think it's bad for him that he's nothing, or that he's still something? And yet neither can there be torment for him from the fact that he doesn't exist (for who has any awareness once he's nothing?), nor from the fact that he does exist; for he has escaped the greatest drawback of death — not existing. Let's also say this to someone who weeps and longs for a young life cut off in its prime: all of us, when it comes to the shortness of our span, whether young or old, stand on equal footing if you compare us to the whole of time. For less comes to us out of all the ages than what anyone would call the smallest possible amount, since even the smallest amount is still some part of something; but this life we're living amounts to next to nothing — and yet, what madness is ours, we spread it out so grandly!
"I've written all this to you not as though you'd be expecting so late a remedy from me — it's clear enough to me that you've already said to yourself whatever you're about to read — but to scold you a little for that brief lapse in which you gave way, and to urge you, for the future, to raise your spirits against fortune, and to look ahead at all her weapons not as things that merely could come, but as things that certainly will come. Farewell.'

======== Letter 100 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You write that you have read the books of Fabianus Papirius entitled On Civil Life with great eagerness, and that they did not meet your expectations; then, forgetting that we're talking about a philosopher, you find fault with his style. Suppose what you say is true, and that his words pour out rather than being fixed in place. First, this quality has its own charm, and there is a distinctive grace to prose that flows gently along; for I think it matters a great deal whether words fall out or flow out. Add to this a further point I'm about to make, where the difference is enormous: [2] Fabianus, to my mind, doesn't pour his speech out so much as pour it forth. It is so abundant, and comes without disturbance, yet not without motion. He himself plainly admits, and even prefers, that it hasn't been worked over or long labored at. But let's grant, as you wish, that this is so: he arranged his character, not his words, and wrote for the mind, not for the ear. [3] Besides, if you had heard him speaking, you wouldn't have had leisure to examine the parts, so thoroughly would the whole have swept you along; and generally things that please by their impact do less well when handled up close in the hand. But this too counts for much: to have seized the eye at first sight, even if careful scrutiny will find something to criticize. [4] If you ask me, the greater man is the one who carries off your judgment than the one who merely earns it; and I know this one is safer, I know he can promise himself more boldly about the future. Anxious speech doesn't suit a philosopher: where, in the end, will he be brave and steady, where will he risk himself, if he is afraid of his own words? [5] Fabianus was not careless in his speech but unworried by it. So you will find nothing shoddy in it: the words are chosen, not hunted down, and not, in the fashion of our own age, twisted and inverted against their own nature, yet splendid even though drawn from everyday use. You have thoughts that are noble and grand, not forced into an epigram but stated more expansively. We'll see what is not quite trimmed, what is not quite well-built, what lacks this modern polish: but when you've looked all around, you'll find no empty narrowness anywhere. [6] Granted, it lacks the variety of marbles, the channeled waters running between rooms, the poor man's cell, and whatever else luxury mixes in when it isn't content with plain elegance: as the saying goes, the house stands upright and sound.
Add to this the further point that there's no agreement about style: some want it polished out of roughness, others delight in roughness to such a degree that they deliberately scatter what chance had smoothed out more gently, and break off their clauses so they won't land where expected. [7] Read Cicero: his rhythm is uniform, bending its foot slowly and softly without disgrace. Pollio Asinius's, by contrast, is bumpy and jumps about, and lets you down exactly where you least expect it. In short, in Cicero everything comes to a close; in Pollio, everything falls, except for a very few passages bound to a fixed measure and a single pattern.
[8] You say, besides, that everything in him seems low to you and insufficiently elevated: I judge him free of that fault. For his style isn't low, but calm, shaped to a quiet and composed cast of mind, not sunken but level. It lacks the orator's vigor, the goads you're looking for, and the sudden stabs of epigram; but the whole body of it, once you see how well-groomed it is, is honorable. His speech does not yet possess dignity, but it will give it. [9] Name someone you could rank above Fabianus. Say Cicero, whose philosophical books are almost as numerous as Fabianus's: I'll grant it, but a thing isn't immediately trivial just because it's less than the greatest. Say Asinius Pollio: I'll grant that too, and let's answer: in so great a matter, to stand out is to come third after two others. Name also Titus Livy, for he too wrote dialogues, which you could no more assign to philosophy than to history, and also books devoted expressly to philosophy: I'll give him a place as well. But see how many he still outranks, even while being beaten by three, and three of the most eloquent men there are.
[10] But he doesn't excel in everything: his speech is not forceful, though it is elevated; it is not violent or torrential, though it flows freely; it is not brilliant, but it is pure. 'I would want,' you say, 'something said harshly against vice, boldly against dangers, proudly against fortune, scornfully against ambition. I want luxury rebuked, lust held up to ridicule, self-indulgence broken. Let something be sharp in the manner of the orator, grand in the manner of tragedy, slight in the manner of comedy.' You want him to sit down beside some trivial matter and fuss over words; he has devoted himself to the greatness of the subject matter, and drags eloquence along like a shadow, without aiming at it. [11] Individual points, no doubt, will not be closely examined or tightly gathered in on themselves, and not every word will rouse and sting you, I admit; much will pass by without striking home, and at times his speech will glide past almost idly, but there will be great brightness throughout, an immense expanse without tedium. In the end, this he will achieve: that it becomes clear to you he felt what he wrote. You will understand that this was done so that you might know what pleased him, not so that he might please you. Everything tends toward progress, toward a sound mind: applause is not what is sought.
[12] I have no doubt his writings are of this kind, even though I recall them more than I retain them, and their color clings to me not from recent familiarity but only in outline, as tends to happen with old acquaintance; certainly when I used to hear him, this is how he seemed to me: not solid, but full, of a sort that would raise up a young man of good natural gifts and call him to imitation without despair of ever matching him, which strikes me as the most effective kind of encouragement. For a man deters others the moment he has stirred the desire to imitate him but taken away the hope of doing so. For the rest, he was abundant in words, magnificent as a whole without any single part standing out for special praise. Farewell.

======== Letter 101 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] Every day, every hour, shows us how little we are, and reminds those of us who have forgotten it, with some fresh proof, of our fragility; then it forces those of us who have been contemplating eternal things to look back toward death. You ask what this opening is driving at? You knew Cornelius Senecio, a distinguished and dutiful Roman knight: he had raised himself up from small beginnings, and by now his path to everything else was downhill, since standing on rank is easier than reaching it in the first place. [2] Money, too, involves the greatest delay around poverty; while it's crawling out of it, it sticks. Senecio was by now closing in on wealth, toward which two very effective things were leading him: the skill of acquiring and the skill of guarding, either one of which could have made a man rich. [3] This man, of the utmost frugality, no less careful of his estate than of his body, had seen me that morning as usual, had sat the whole day beside a friend who was gravely ill and past hope, lingering into the night, had then dined cheerfully, and was seized by a swift illness, quinsy, and drew breath, barely, through a throat squeezed narrow, all the way into daylight. So within a very few hours of having performed all the duties of a healthy and vigorous man, he died. [4] The man who was moving money about by sea and by land, who, leaving no kind of profit untried, had gone into public contracting as well, was snatched away in the very act of his affairs going well, in the very rush of money flowing in.
'Plant your pear trees now, Meliboeus, set your vines in rows.'
How foolish it is to plan out one's life when one isn't even master of tomorrow! Oh, what madness it is to begin upon long-range hopes: I will buy, I will build, I will lend, I will collect debts, I will hold office, and then at last, when I'm tired and full of years, I'll withdraw old age into leisure. [5] Everything, believe me, is uncertain, even for the fortunate; no one has any right to promise himself anything about the future; even what we hold slips through our hands, and chance cuts into the very hour we are grasping. Time rolls on by a fixed law, but through darkness: what does it matter to me whether it is fixed for nature, if it is uncertain for me? [6] We plan long voyages and, after wandering foreign shores, a late return to our homeland; we plan military service and the slow wages of camp labor, official posts and advancement through a succession of offices, while all the time death stands at our side, which, since it is never thought of except as happening to someone else, keeps thrusting examples of our mortality upon us that stick with us no longer than the time it takes us to marvel at them. [7] But what is more foolish than to be amazed that something happened on some particular day, when it can happen on any day at all? There is indeed a boundary fixed for us, set wherever the inexorable necessity of the fates has fixed it, but none of us knows how close he stands to that boundary; so let us shape our mind as though it were now come to the very end. Let us put nothing off; let us balance the books of our life with each passing day. [8] The greatest flaw of life is that it is always incomplete, that some part of it is always being postponed. The man who has put the finishing touch on his life every single day has no need of more time; but out of this need is born fear, and a craving for the future that eats away at the mind. There is nothing more wretched than uncertainty about where things are headed; how great is what remains, or of what sort, a mind troubled by inexplicable dread cannot work out. [9] How shall we escape this tossing about? By one way alone: if our life does not reach out ahead of itself, if it gathers itself into itself. For the man hangs suspended on the future for whom the present counts for nothing. But when I have paid back what I owe to myself, when my settled mind knows there is no difference between a day and an age, then whatever days and events are still to come it looks out on from on high, and contemplates the whole sequence of time with a good deal of laughter. For what will the variety and instability of chance disturb, if you are certain in the face of uncertainty? [10] So hurry, my dear Lucilius, to live, and count each single day as a separate life. The man who has fitted himself to this pattern, whose life has been complete every single day, is free of care: for those who live in hope, each coming stretch of time slips away, and in its place creeps a craving and the most wretched of things, a fear of death that spoils everything. That is the source of Maecenas's utterly shameful prayer, in which he refuses neither weakness nor deformity nor, finally, the sharpened stake, provided only that his breath be prolonged amid these evils:
[11] 'Make me weak of hand, weak of foot and hip, heap a hump upon my crooked back, shake loose my teeth; so long as life remains, it is well: sustain me even if I must sit upon the sharpened stake.'
[12] What would have been most wretched if it had befallen him unasked, he prays for, and seeks life as though it were the mere prolonging of a punishment. I would think it utterly contemptible if a man wished to go on living all the way to the cross. 'Yes,' he says, 'weaken me as you like, so long as breath remains in this broken and useless body; deform me as you like, so long as some scrap of time is added to a monstrous and twisted frame; impale me on a stake if you like, and set me down upon the sharpened point that I am to sit on': is it worth so much to keep pressing on one's own wound and to hang stretched out upon a gibbet, only to postpone what, among evils, is the best of them, the end of the punishment? Is it worth so much to have a breath of life only in order to go on suffering? [13] What could one wish this man but that the gods be kind to him? What is the point of this shameful indecency of an effeminate poem? What is this bargain struck by the most senseless fear? What is this so foul a begging for life? Do you suppose Virgil was ever recited to this man:
'Is it really so wretched, then, to die?'
He prays for the worst of evils and desires that what is hardest to endure be drawn out and sustained; at what price? Of a somewhat longer life, of course. But what is it to live long, if not to die for a long time? [14] Can one find a man who would want to waste away amid torments, and perish limb by limb, and let out his breath drop by drop, rather than exhale it once and for all? Can one find a man who, driven up onto that unlucky beam of wood, already weak, already deformed, and crushed into a foul swelling of shoulders and chest, though he had many reasons for dying quite apart from the cross, would want to draw out a breath that will only draw out so much torment? Deny now, if you can, that it is a great kindness of nature that death is a necessity. [15] There are many who are prepared to bargain for still worse things: even to betray a friend, so as to live a little longer, and to hand over their own children to be abused with their own hands, so as to have the chance to see the light of day, an accomplice in so many crimes. The craving for life must be shaken off, and we must learn that it makes no difference when you suffer what must be suffered at some point regardless; what matters is how well you live, not how long; and often it is precisely in this that living well consists, in not living long. Farewell.

======== Letter 102 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. It's the way a man who is dreaming something pleasant is annoyed by whoever wakes him up (for he takes away a pleasure, even a false one, that nonetheless had the effect of a real one); that's the injury your letter has done me. It called me back from a train of thought I was well suited to, one I would gladly have pursued further had I been allowed. [2] I was enjoying inquiring into the eternity of souls -- or rather, by god, believing in it; for I was giving myself over freely to the opinions of great men who promise this most welcome thing more than they prove it. I was surrendering myself to so great a hope; already I was weary of myself, already I was scorning the broken remnants of this life, on the verge of passing into that immeasurable span of time and into possession of the whole of eternity, when suddenly I woke up on receiving your letter, and lost so lovely a dream. But I will reclaim it and buy it back, once I've dealt with you.
[3] You say that in my first letter I did not work out the whole question in which I was trying to prove what our school holds -- that the renown which comes after death is a good. For I did not, you say, resolve the objection raised against us: 'no good,' they say, 'can consist of separate parts; but this does.' [4] What you're asking about, my dear Lucilius, belongs to another branch of the same inquiry, and that's why I had put off not only that point but others bearing on the same subject; for, as you know, in questions of ethics some points of logic get mixed in. So I dealt with the part that is straightforwardly ethical and bears on conduct: whether it's foolish and pointless to look after matters beyond one's last day, whether our goods perish along with us and nothing belongs to one who no longer exists, or whether, since we will have no sensation of it when it happens, no benefit can be perceived or sought before it exists. [5] All these questions bear on conduct, and so they were placed in their proper spot. But the objections raised by the logicians against this view had to be kept separate, and so they were set aside. Now, since you demand everything, I will go through everything they say, and then answer each point in turn.
[6] Unless I first lay down some groundwork, the objections to be refuted won't be understood. What do I want to establish first? That some bodies are continuous, like a man; some are composite, like a ship, a house -- everything, in short, whose different parts are joined together and forced into one; and some consist of separate parts, whose members are still distinct, like an army, a people, a senate. The individuals through whom such bodies are formed are joined by right or by duty, but by nature they are separate and remain individuals. What else do I want to establish right now? [7] We hold that no good can consist of separate parts; for a single good must be held together and governed by a single spirit, and the ruling principle of one good must be one. If you ever want this proven on its own merits, that can be done; for now it had to be laid down, since these are the weapons being hurled at us.
[8] 'You say,' the objector puts it, 'that no good consists of separate parts; but renown is nothing but the favorable opinion held of good men by other good men. For just as reputation is not the talk of one person, nor a bad name the poor opinion of one person, so too renown is not the approval of a single good man; a number of distinguished and respected men must agree on this for there to be renown. But this is produced by the judgments of a plurality, that is, of separate individuals; therefore it is not a good.'
[9] 'Renown,' he says, 'is praise given by good men to a good man; praise is speech, and speech is a sound signifying something; but sound, even if it comes from good men, is not itself good. For not everything a good man does is good; he also applauds and he also hisses, yet no one calls either the applause or the hissing good, however much he may admire and praise everything about the man -- any more than one calls his sneeze or his cough good. Therefore renown is not a good.'
[10] 'In sum, tell us whether the good belongs to the one who praises or to the one who is praised. If you say it belongs to the one praised, you're making as ridiculous a claim as if you asserted that another man's good health is mine. But to praise those who deserve it is an honorable action; so the good belongs to the one who praises, whose action it is, not to us who are praised -- and yet that was exactly the question at issue.' [11] I'll answer each point now, briefly. First, whether any good can consist of separate parts is still an open question, and both sides have their arguments. Next, does renown require many votes? It can be satisfied with the judgment of a single good man: a good man judges good men to be good. [12] 'What then?' he says. 'Will reputation too be the estimation of a single person, and a bad name the malicious talk of one? Glory too,' he says, 'I understand to be something more widely spread, for it requires the agreement of many.' The situation of these is different from that other case. Why? Because if one good man thinks well of me, I stand in exactly the same position as if all good men thought the same of me; for all of them, once they come to know me, will think the same. Their judgment is identical and equal, and equally in accord with truth. They cannot disagree; so it's as good as if they all held the same opinion, since they cannot hold any other. [13] For glory or reputation, one person's opinion is not enough. There, a single verdict can carry the same weight as everyone's, because if everyone were polled, there would be one verdict; here, the judgments of dissimilar people are dissimilar. You will find agreement hard to come by, everything uncertain, shifting, suspect. Do you think there could be one single opinion held by everyone? A single opinion doesn't even belong to one person alone. There, what is agreed on is true, and truth has one force, one face; among these people, the things they agree on are false. But there is never any constancy in falsehoods; they vary and clash.
[14] 'But praise,' he says, 'is nothing but a sound, and a sound is not a good.' When they say that renown is praise given by good men to a good man, they are not referring to the sound but to the judgment behind it. For even if a good man stays silent but judges someone worthy of praise, that person has been praised. [15] Besides, praise is one thing, a formal eulogy another; the latter does require speech, and so no one calls a funeral tribute 'praise' but 'a eulogy,' whose whole function consists in speech. When we say that someone is worthy of praise, we are not promising him kindly words from men but their judgments. So praise belongs even to the man who says nothing but privately holds a good opinion and praises a good man within himself. [16] Further, as I said, praise refers to the state of mind, not to the words, which merely carry out the praise already conceived and broadcast it to a wider audience. The one who praises is the one who judges someone worthy of praise. When our tragic poet says it is a splendid thing 'to be praised by a man himself praised,' he means one worthy of praise. And when an equally ancient poet says 'praise nourishes the arts,' he does not mean formal eulogy, which corrupts the arts; for nothing has done as much damage to eloquence and to every other pursuit devoted to pleasing the ear as popular applause. [17] Reputation certainly requires speech; renown can occur even without speech, content with judgment alone. It is fully present not only among those who are silent but even among those who cry out against it. Let me tell you the difference between renown and glory: glory consists of the judgments of many, renown of the judgments of good men.
[18] 'To whom,' he asks, 'does renown belong -- that is, the praise given by good men to a good man -- to the one praised or to the one praising?' To both. It's mine, the one praised, because my nature has produced the mind of everyone else too, and I rejoice both that I have done well and that I have found grateful interpreters of my virtues. That they are grateful is a good belonging to them, but it is also mine; for I am so disposed in mind that I count the good of others as my own, especially of those for whom I myself am the cause of good. [19] That is the good of those who praise; for it comes about through virtue, and every act of virtue is a good. This could not have happened to them unless I were the kind of person I am. So being deservedly praised is a good for both parties -- just as, by god, having judged rightly is a good for the one who judges, and also for the one about whom the judgment is made. Surely you don't doubt that justice is a good both for the one who has it and for the one to whom what is owed is paid? To praise a person who deserves it is an act of justice; therefore it is a good for both.
[20] We have now answered these quibblers more than enough. But it should not be our goal to argue subtleties and drag philosophy down from its majesty into these narrow straits: how much better it is to walk the open, straight road than to lay out for oneself a maze of twists and turns that one will later have to retrace with great difficulty! For these disputations are nothing but a game played between people cleverly trying to trap one another. [21] Tell me instead how natural it is for the mind to extend itself into the immeasurable. The human soul is a great and noble thing; it will not tolerate any limits set upon it except those it shares with god. First, it refuses to accept some lowly homeland -- Ephesus or Alexandria, or whatever place is even more crowded with inhabitants and richer in buildings: its homeland is whatever the outermost circuit encloses in its whole span, this whole vault within which lie the seas together with the lands, within which the air, while separating the human from the divine, also joins them together, in which so many divine powers, arrayed in their places, keep watch over their courses. [22] Next, it will not allow itself to be confined to a cramped span of years: 'all ages are mine,' it says; 'no era is closed to great minds, no time is impassable to thought. When that day comes which will separate this mixture of the divine and the human, I will leave the body here where I found it, and I myself will return to the elements from which I came. Nor am I without them even now, but I am weighed down and held back by what is earthly and heavy.' [23] Through these delays of a mortal span, the soul is being rehearsed for that better and longer life. Just as the womb holds us for ten months and prepares us not for itself but for that other place into which we seem to be sent forth, already fit to draw breath and to endure in the open air, so through this span that stretches from infancy to old age we are being made ready, unknowingly, for another birth. Another origin awaits us, another state of things. [24] We cannot yet endure heaven except at a distance. So look ahead, undaunted, to that decisive hour: it is not the last hour for the soul, but for the body. Whatever possessions lie around you, regard them as the baggage of an inn where you are only a guest: you must move on. Nature strips the one who is leaving just as she stripped the one who was entering. [25] You are not allowed to carry out more than you brought in -- indeed, a great part of even what you brought to life must be set down. This skin that wraps around you, the last covering of yourself, will be stripped away; the flesh will be stripped away, and the blood suffused through it and coursing through the whole body; the bones and sinews, the supports of these fluid and shifting parts, will be stripped away. [26] This day that you dread as your last is the birthday of your eternity. Set down your burden: why do you hesitate, as if you had not already, once before, left behind the body in which you were hidden and come forth from it? You cling, you resist -- yet then too you were driven out only by your mother's great effort. You groan, you weep -- and this very weeping belongs to one being born, though then it deserved to be forgiven: you had come raw and ignorant of everything. Released from the warm and soft shelter of your mother's womb, a freer air met your breath; then you encountered the touch of rough hands, and still tender and knowing nothing, you stood dazed among unfamiliar things. [27] Now it is not new to you to be separated from that of which you were once a part; calmly let go of limbs that are now superfluous, and set aside that body you have inhabited so long. It will be torn apart, buried, destroyed -- why does that grieve you? So it always goes: the wrappings of those being born always perish in the end. Why do you cling so to these things as if they were your own? You were covered by them: the day will come that strips you free and leads you out of the company of a foul and reeking womb. [28] From this womb, too, withdraw yourself now as much as you can, and stay apart from pleasure, except insofar as it must cling to necessities; turn your thoughts to something loftier and more sublime. One day the secrets of nature will be unveiled to you, this fog will be dispersed, and light will strike you clear from every side. Imagine to yourself how great that brightness will be, with so many stars mingling their light together. No shadow will trouble that clear sky; every quarter of the heavens will shine equally; day and night are only the alternations of the lowest air. Then you will say that you had been living in darkness, once you have seen the whole of light in its entirety -- the light you now glimpse only dimly through the narrow channels of your eyes, and yet you marvel at it even from so far away: what will the divine light seem to you once you have seen it in its own place? [29] This thought allows nothing base to settle in the mind, nothing low, nothing cruel. It declares that the gods are witnesses of all things; it bids us seek their approval, prepare ourselves for what is to come, and set eternity before us. Whoever has grasped this in his mind dreads no armies, is not terrified by the trumpet, is driven to fear by no threats. [30] Why should he not fear death, who hopes for it? Even the man who judges that the soul endures only as long as it is held by the bonds of the body, and that once released it is at once scattered, still acts so that even after death he may be useful to others. For though he himself has been snatched from our sight, still
'his valor lives on in our minds, and the honor of his people returns to us again and again.'
Consider how much good models of virtue do for us: you will find that the presence of great men is no less useful than the memory of them. Farewell.

======== Letter 103 ========

[1] Why do you look around at things that might happen to you but might just as easily not? I mean fires, collapsing buildings, and other things that befall us — they don't lie in wait for us. Look instead at the things that do watch us, that do stalk us: those are the ones to guard against. Accidents, even serious ones — shipwreck, being thrown from a carriage — are rare. But danger from one human being to another is a daily occurrence. Arm yourself against this, keep your eyes fixed on this; there is no evil more common, none more persistent, none more ingratiating. [2] A storm gives warning before it rises, buildings creak before they collapse, smoke announces a fire in advance. But ruin at the hands of a man comes suddenly, and the closer it gets, the more carefully it is hidden. You are wrong to trust the faces of the people you meet: they have the outward form of men, but the souls of wild beasts — except that with beasts, the first attack is the dangerous one; once they have passed you by, they don't come looking for you. Beasts are never driven to do harm except by necessity — hunger or fear forces them into the fight. But a man takes pleasure in destroying another man. [3] Still, think about the danger that comes from a human being in such a way that you also think about what a human being's duty is. Watch the one so that you aren't harmed, and watch the other so that you don't do harm. Rejoice in everyone's good fortune, be moved by everyone's misfortune, and remember what you owe and what you must guard against. [4] Living this way, what do you achieve? Not that people won't harm you, but that they won't deceive you. As far as you can, retreat into philosophy: she will shelter you in her lap, and in her sanctuary you will be safe, or at least safer. People don't collide unless they are walking the same road. [5] But you should not flaunt philosophy itself; handled arrogantly and defiantly, it has been the cause of danger for many. Let it strip away your own faults, not reproach others for theirs. It should not recoil from ordinary custom, nor act as though it condemns whatever it does not itself do. One can be wise without ostentation, without arousing envy. Farewell.

======== Letter 104 ========

[1] I have fled to my place at Nomentum — escaping what, do you suppose? The city? No: a fever, and one of the creeping kind; it had already laid its hand on me. My doctor said it was in its early stage — the pulse was disturbed, irregular, throwing off its natural rhythm. So I ordered the carriage made ready at once; my Paulina tried to keep me back, but I insisted on leaving. What I had on my lips was the remark of my master Gallio, who, when a fever came on him in Achaia, boarded a ship immediately, protesting loudly that the disease belonged to the place, not to his body. [2] I said as much to my Paulina, who is always urging my health on me. Since I know her life-breath turns on mine, I am beginning, in order to look after her, to look after myself. And though old age has made me braver about many things, I am losing this advantage of my years; for it occurs to me that in this old man there is also a young woman who is being spared. So, since I cannot get her to love me with more courage, she gets me to love myself with more care. [3] One must indulge honorable feelings. Sometimes, even when there are pressing reasons, the breath must be called back — in honor of those we love — even at the cost of torment, and held right there at the lips; for a good man ought to live not as long as it pleases him but as long as he ought. The man who does not value a wife or a friend enough to stay longer in life, who insists on dying, is self-indulgent. Let the mind command itself in this too, when the interest of loved ones requires it: not only if it wishes to die, but even if it has begun, let it pause and put itself at their disposal. [4] It takes greatness of soul to turn back toward life for someone else's benefit, and great men have often done it. But I count this too as the highest humanity: to take more careful care of one's old age — whose greatest reward is a more relaxed guardianship of oneself and a bolder use of life — if you know that this is sweet, useful, and dearly wished for by someone who loves you. [5] Besides, the thing carries no small joy and reward in itself. What is more delightful than being so dear to your wife that you become, on that account, dearer to yourself? So my Paulina can charge to my account not only her fear for me but my own.
[6] You ask, then, how my plan of getting away worked out? The moment I left behind the city's oppressive air and the stench of its smoking kitchens which, once stirred up, pour out whatever pestilential vapor they have soaked up, together with the dust, I felt my condition change at once. And how much do you think my strength gained once I reached my vineyards? Turned out to pasture, I attacked my food. So I have already recovered myself; that limpness of a body unsure of itself and brooding on the worst did not last. I am beginning to study with my whole mind. [7] The place contributes little to that, unless the mind makes itself available to itself — a mind that will have its retreat even in the thick of business, if it wants one. But the man who picks his locations and hunts for leisure will find something to distract him everywhere. The story goes that when someone complained to Socrates that his travels had done him no good, he answered: 'It serves you right — you were traveling with yourself.' [8] How well off some people would be, if they could only wander away from themselves! As it is, they press on themselves, harass, corrupt, and terrify themselves. What is the use of crossing the sea and changing cities? If you want to escape the things that weigh on you, you need to be not somewhere else, but someone else. Suppose you have arrived in Athens, suppose in Rhodes; choose a city at your own discretion — what does it matter what character that city has? You will bring your own. [9] Count wealth a good, and poverty will torture you — and, most wretched of all, a false poverty; for however much you own, still, because someone has more, you will feel short by exactly the margin you are beaten. Count office a good, and it will gall you that this man was made consul, that man even re-elected; you will feel envy every time you read a name repeated in the public lists. The frenzy of ambition will be so great that if anyone is ahead of you, no one will seem to be behind you. [10] Count death the greatest of evils, though there is nothing bad in it except what comes before it — being feared. Not only dangers will terrify you but suspicions of danger; you will be tormented perpetually by phantoms. For what good will it do
to have slipped past so many Argive cities and held your flight through the middle of the enemy?
Peace itself will supply terrors. Once the mind has been thrown into panic, it will not trust even what is safe; once it has made a habit of unthinking fright, it becomes incapable even of protecting its own life. It does not evade danger — it flees; and we are more exposed to dangers when our backs are turned. [11] Count it the heaviest of evils to lose someone you love, though all the while that will be as silly as weeping because the leaves fall from the lovely trees that ornament your house. Look on everything that delights you the same way you look at leaves in their green: enjoy them while they last. One day or another, chance will strip away one or another of them; but just as the loss of foliage is easy to bear because it grows back, so is the loss of those you love and think of as the delights of your life — because they are replaced, even if they are not reborn. [12] 'But they will not be the same.' You yourself will not be the same. Every day, every hour changes you; but in others the theft shows more easily, while here it hides, because it does not happen in the open. Others are taken from us; we are stolen from ourselves by stealth. Will you take none of this into account, apply no remedies to the wounds — and instead sow the causes of your own anxieties, hoping for one thing and despairing of another? If you are wise, mix the one with the other: do not hope without despairing, or despair without hoping.
[13] What benefit could travel on its own confer on anybody? It has never tempered pleasures, never bridled desires, never suppressed anger, never broken the wild assaults of love — in short, it has drawn no evil out of the mind. It has given no judgment, dissolved no error; it merely holds us for a little while with some novelty, like a child gaping at the unfamiliar. [14] For the rest, it aggravates the instability of the mind — the sickest thing about it; the very jolting about makes it more restless and more fickle. So the places people sought most eagerly they abandon more eagerly still; like birds they fly through and are gone faster than they came. [15] Travel will give you acquaintance with peoples, will show you new shapes of mountains, unfamiliar stretches of plain, and valleys watered by unfailing streams; it will set before your observation the peculiar character of some river — how the Nile swells with its summer flood, or how the Tigris is snatched from sight and, after running its course underground, is given back at full size, or how the Maeander, the training-ground and plaything of every poet, tangles itself in loop after loop, and often, drawn close to its own channel, bends away again before it can flow into itself. But it will make you neither better nor saner. [16] We must spend our time among studies and among the masters of wisdom, learning what has been discovered and searching for what has not; that is how the mind is claimed out of the most miserable slavery into freedom. As long as you do not know what is to be fled and what pursued, what is necessary and what superfluous, what is just and what unjust, what is honorable and what disgraceful, this will not be traveling but straying. [17] All this rushing about will bring you no help, for you are traveling in company with your emotions, and your troubles follow along. If only they did follow! They would be further off; as it is, you carry them — you are not leading them. So they press on you everywhere and chafe you with the same discomforts wherever you are. It is medicine the sick man needs to look for, not scenery. [18] Someone has broken a leg or wrenched a joint: he does not climb into a carriage or aboard a ship; he calls a doctor, so the fracture can be set and the dislocation put back into place. Well then — do you believe a mind broken and wrenched in so many places can be healed by a change of location? That ailment is too big to be cured by a ride. [19] Travel makes no one a doctor, no one an orator; no art is learned from a locale. Well then — is wisdom, the greatest art of all, to be picked up on a journey? Believe me, there is no route that will set you down beyond desires, beyond angers, beyond fears; if there were, the human race would march there in column. These evils will keep pressing and wearing you down as you wander over land and sea, as long as you carry the causes of your evils with you. [20] Are you surprised that running away does you no good? What you are running from is with you. Correct yourself, then; take the loads off your own back; keep your desires within a healthy limit; scrape every trace of wickedness out of your mind. If you want your travels to be pleasant, cure your traveling companion. Greed will stick to you as long as you live with a greedy miser; puffed-up pride will stick as long as you keep company with the arrogant; you will never lay aside cruelty while you share quarters with a torturer; the fellowship of adulterers will set your lusts alight. [21] If you want to strip off your vices, you must withdraw far from the examples of vice. The miser, the seducer, the brute, the cheat — men who would have done great harm if they had merely been near you — are inside you. Cross over to better men: spend your life with a Cato, with Laelius, with Tubero. And if you enjoy living with Greeks as well, keep company with Socrates and Zeno: the one will teach you to die if it becomes necessary, the other to die before it becomes necessary. [22] Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: they will hand you the knowledge of things human and divine; they will order you to be at work, and not merely to talk cleverly and toss out words to entertain an audience, but to harden your mind and raise it against threats. For the one harbor of this heaving, turbulent life is to despise what may happen, to stand confidently and ready, and to take fortune's missiles full in the chest — not skulking, not turning away. [23] Nature produced us with greatness of soul; and as she endowed some animals with ferocity, some with cunning, some with timidity, so she gave us a proud, soaring spirit that looks for the place where it may live most honorably, not most safely — a spirit very like the universe, which it follows and strives to match as far as mortal steps allow; it puts itself forward, confident of being praised and looked at. [24] It is master of everything, above everything; therefore let it bow to nothing, let nothing seem heavy to it, nothing such as to bend a man double.
Shapes dreadful to see, Death and Toil:
not dreadful in the least, if anyone can look at them with a steady eye and break through the darkness. Many things held terrifying by night the daylight turns to laughter.
Shapes dreadful to see, Death and Toil:
our Virgil put it superbly: they are dreadful not in fact but 'to see' — that is, they seem so; they are not. [25] What, I ask, is there in these things as fearsome as report has made out? What reason is there, I beg you, Lucilius, for a man to fear toil, or a human being to fear death? Again and again I run into those people who think nothing can be done that they cannot do, and who say we talk of things bigger than human nature can bear. [26] But how much better I think of them than they do! They too can do these things — they simply refuse. In any case, whom have these things ever failed when he made the attempt? To whom have they not proved easier in the doing? It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
[27] Still, if you want an example, take Socrates, that old man built for endurance, knocked about by every hardship yet unbeaten — by poverty, which the burdens of his household made heavier, and by labors, including those he bore as a soldier. He was drilled by his troubles at home, whether you think of a wife fierce in her ways and unruly with her tongue, or of children intractable and more like their mother than their father; and outside the home his life was passed in war, or under tyranny, or in a liberty more savage than wars and tyrants. [28] The war lasted twenty-seven years; when arms were laid down, the state was handed over to the injury of the Thirty Tyrants, most of whom were his enemies. Last came the condemnation, framed under the gravest charges: he was accused of violating religion and corrupting the young — the young whom he was said to have set against the gods, against their fathers, against the state. After that, prison and the poison. All of this so failed to move the mind of Socrates that it did not even move his face. What marvelous, unmatched praise that is! To the very end no one saw Socrates more cheerful or more downcast; he stayed even through all that unevenness of fortune.
[29] Do you want a second example? Take this Marcus Cato, the more recent one, with whom fortune dealt more aggressively and more stubbornly. She blocked him at every turn, at the last even in his death; yet he proved that a courageous man can both live against fortune's will and die against it. His whole life was spent either in civil wars or under a peace already pregnant with civil war; and you may say that he, no less than Socrates, gave his allegiance to liberty — unless perhaps you think Gnaeus Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus were partners of freedom. [30] No one ever saw Cato changed, though the state changed so many times; he showed himself the same in every circumstance — in his praetorship, in electoral defeat, under prosecution, in his province, at the public assembly, in the army, in death. Finally, in that panic of the republic, when on one side stood Caesar propped up by ten legions of hardened fighters and the entire strength of foreign nations, and on the other Gnaeus Pompey, by himself a match for everything, and while some leaned toward Caesar and others toward Pompey, Cato alone made the republic a party too. [31] If you are willing to embrace in your mind a picture of that time, you will see on one side the common people, the whole mob straining toward revolution, and on the other the aristocracy and the equestrian order, everything sacred and select in the state — and two left standing in the middle: the republic and Cato. You will be amazed, I tell you, when you notice
Atreus's son, and Priam, and Achilles, savage against both;
for he condemns both, and disarms both. [32] This is the verdict he delivers on the pair: if Caesar wins, he says, he will die; if Pompey, he will go into exile. What had he to fear, when he had fixed for himself, in defeat and in victory alike, terms as harsh as his angriest enemies could have fixed for him? So he perished by his own decree. [33] You see that men can endure toil: he led an army on foot through the middle of the African deserts. You see that thirst can be borne: dragging the remnants of a beaten army over parched hills, with no supply train, he endured the want of water in full armor, and whenever there was a chance of water, he drank last. You see that honor and disgrace can be despised: on the very day he lost the election he played ball in the assembly-place. You see that the power of superiors need not be feared: Pompey and Caesar — men no one dared offend, one without courting the other — he challenged both at once. You see that death can be despised as fully as exile: he sentenced himself to exile, and to death, and in the interval to war. [34] So we can have just as much courage against these things, if only we choose to draw our neck out from under the yoke. But first of all, pleasures must be spat out: they unnerve and effeminize, and they demand a great deal — and a great deal must then be demanded from fortune. Next, wealth must be scorned: it is the wage that binds us into slavery. Let gold and silver and everything else that loads down prosperous houses be left behind: liberty cannot be had for nothing. If you set a high price on it, everything else must be priced low. Farewell.

======== Letter 105 ========

I'm going to tell you what to watch out for if you want to live in greater safety. But take these rules the way you would take advice on keeping your health at your place in Ardea. Think about what drives one man to destroy another: you'll find hope, envy, hatred, fear, contempt. Of all these, contempt is by far the lightest — so light that many people have hidden inside it as a cure. When someone despises you, he tramples you, yes, but he keeps walking. Nobody works persistently, nobody works carefully, at harming a man he despises. Even on the battlefield the man lying down gets passed over; the fighting is with the man still standing.
You'll avoid the hopes of the wicked if you own nothing that stirs another man's greedy appetite, if you possess nothing conspicuous — for even small things get coveted when they are scarce or unfamiliar. You'll escape envy if you don't push yourself in front of people's eyes, if you don't parade what you have, if you learn to enjoy things quietly, close to your own chest. Hatred comes either from an injury — you'll avoid that by provoking no one — or for no reason at all, and against that kind ordinary tact will protect you. Still, hatred has been dangerous to many: some men have had haters without having a single enemy. As for being feared, a modest fortune and a mild temperament will spare you that. Let people know you're a man they can offend without risk; let making peace with you be both easy and reliable. Being feared is as miserable at home as it is in public, as bad with slaves as with free men: everyone has strength enough to do harm. And add this: whoever is feared is afraid. No one has ever managed to be terrifying and feel safe. That leaves contempt — and its measure lies in the hands of the man who has taken it on himself, who is despised because he chose to be, not because he had to be. Its disadvantages are dispelled by useful skills, and by friendships with men who have influence with someone influential; it pays to attach yourself to such people, but not to get entangled with them, or the cure will cost more than the danger.
Nothing, though, will help you as much as keeping quiet — speaking rarely with other people and constantly with yourself. There is a certain sweetness in conversation that creeps up on you and coaxes things out, and it draws out secrets exactly the way drunkenness or love does. No one will keep quiet about what he has heard; no one will repeat only as much as he heard. And a man who hasn't kept the story to himself won't keep the source to himself either. Everyone has somebody he trusts as much as he himself was trusted; so, even if each man rations his chatter to one listener's ears, he ends up making an audience — and what was a secret a moment ago is now common gossip.
A great part of security is doing nothing unjust. People with no self-control lead confused, chaotic lives: they fear in proportion to the harm they do, and they never get a moment free. They tremble once they've acted; they're stuck. Conscience won't let them attend to anything else and keeps hauling them back to answer for themselves. Whoever is waiting for punishment is already being punished — and whoever has earned it is waiting for it. With a bad conscience some circumstance may keep you safe, but nothing keeps you at ease; a man like that thinks that even if he isn't caught, he still could be. He stirs in his sleep, and whenever he talks about someone else's crime he thinks about his own — it never seems sufficiently erased to him, never sufficiently covered. A guilty man sometimes has the luck to stay hidden; he never has the confidence that he will. Farewell.

======== Letter 106 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I'm slow in replying to your letters, not because I'm tied up with business. Don't let that excuse fool you: I have free time, and so does everyone who wants it. Things don't chase people down — people embrace them and think being busy is proof of success. So why didn't I write back to you at once? Because the question you were asking was coming up in the natural course of the work I'm putting together —
for you know I mean to cover the whole of moral philosophy and explain every question that belongs to it. So I wondered whether to put you off until its proper place came round in that work, or to give you a special ruling outside the regular order. It seemed kinder not to keep someone waiting who has come from so far.
So I'll pull this one out of that connected sequence of topics, and if there's anything else of the sort you're after, I'll send it to you unasked, without your even having to request it. You ask what these questions are? The kind it's more pleasant to know than useful — like the one you're asking now: is the good a body?
The good acts; it benefits, after all; whatever acts is a body. The good stirs the mind, and in a sense shapes and contains it — and those are properties of a body. Whatever is good for the body is a body; therefore whatever is good for the mind is too, since the mind itself is a body.
The good of a human being must be a body, since the human being himself is corporeal. I'd be wrong not to say that whatever nourishes him, and whatever preserves or restores his health, are bodies too; so his good is a body. I don't think you'll doubt that the emotions are bodies (let me slip in another point you didn't ask about) — anger, love, sadness — unless you doubt that they change our expression, tighten our brow, relax our face, bring on a blush, or drain the blood away. Well then — do you think such plain marks of a body can be stamped on us by anything but a body?
If the emotions are bodies, so are the diseases of the mind — greed, cruelty, vices hardened and set beyond correction; therefore malice too, and all its forms: spitefulness, envy, arrogance. And likewise the virtues, first because they are the opposites of these, and second because they give the same evidence of themselves. Don't you see how much vigor courage gives to the eyes? How much intensity prudence gives? How much modesty and calm respect gives? How much serenity joy gives? How much sternness severity gives, and how much relaxation gentleness gives? So it is bodies that change the color and bearing of bodies, that exercise their power over them. And all the virtues I've listed are goods, along with everything that stems from them.
Can there be any doubt that whatever can be touched by something is a body? For nothing but a body can touch or be touched, as Lucretius says. Now none of the things I've mentioned would change the body if they didn't touch it; therefore they are bodies.
Again, whatever has such force that it can push and compel, restrain and hold back, is a body. Well then — doesn't fear hold us back? Doesn't boldness push us forward? Doesn't courage launch us and give us momentum? Doesn't restraint rein us in and call us back? Doesn't joy lift us up, and sadness pull us down?
In short, whatever we do, we do under the command of either vice or virtue; and whatever commands a body is a body, whatever exerts force on a body is a body. The good of the body is corporeal; the good of a human being is the good of a body; therefore it is corporeal.
Since I've indulged you as you wished, let me now say to myself what I can see you're about to say to me: we're playing at soldiers with pebbles. Subtlety is wasted on things that serve no purpose — such exercises don't make men good, only learned.
Wisdom is a more open matter, or rather a simpler one; for a good mind it's enough — for the few who need it — to make use of letters; but we, as with everything else, pour philosophy itself out into needless excess. Just as with everything, so with learning too, we suffer from overindulgence: we study not for life but for the lecture hall. Farewell.

======== Letter 107 ========

Where is that good sense of yours? Where is your sharpness in seeing things for what they are? Where is your largeness of spirit? Does something this small touch you? Your slaves saw your busy schedule as their chance to run. If your friends were cheating you — fine, let them keep the name our mistake gave them, and be called friends so that they can be all the more disgraceful in not being ones... but as it is, what your affairs have lost are men who were wearing out your effort and who thought you a burden to others. None of this is unusual, none of it unexpected. Taking offense at such things is as absurd as complaining that you get splashed in the baths, or jostled in public, or muddied in the street. Life is on the same terms as the bathhouse, the crowd, the road: some things will be thrown at you, some will simply land on you. Living is not a delicate business. You've set out on a long road: you're bound to slip, collide, fall, get exhausted, and cry out 'Oh, death!' — that is, to lie. At one point you'll leave a companion behind, at another you'll bury one, at another you'll be afraid. It's through bumps like these that this rough road has to be traveled. Does he want to die? Let the mind be readied against everything. Let it know it has come to where the lightning thunders; let it know it has come to where
Grief and avenging Cares have made their beds,
and pale Diseases live, and sorrowing Old Age.
This is the company we have to live our life in. You can't escape these things; you can despise them — and you will despise them if you think about them often and take the future in advance. Everyone approaches more bravely what he has long prepared himself for, and stands up even to hardships if they were rehearsed beforehand. The unprepared man, by contrast, panics at the most trivial things. Our job is to make sure nothing takes us by surprise; and since everything weighs heavier for being new, constant reflection will guarantee that no evil finds you a raw recruit.
'My slaves have deserted me.' Another man they robbed, another they denounced, another they murdered, another they betrayed, another they beat, another they went after with poison, another with a false charge. Whatever you name has happened to many people... and after that come the many and various missiles aimed at us. Some are already lodged in us; some are quivering in flight and arriving at this very moment; some, on their way to others, graze us in passing. Let's be amazed at nothing we were born for — things no one should complain about, because they fall equally on everyone. Yes, I say equally: for even what a man escaped, he could have suffered. A fair law is not the one everyone has actually used, but the one enacted for everyone. Let the mind be ordered to accept fairness, and let us pay the taxes of mortality without complaint. Winter brings cold: we must shiver. Summer brings back heat: we must sweat. Bad weather tests the health: we must be sick. Somewhere a wild beast will cross our path — and a human being, more destructive than all the beasts. Water will snatch away one thing, fire another. We cannot change this constitution of things; what we can do is take on a great spirit, worthy of a good man, with which to endure bravely what chance brings and to be in agreement with nature. And nature governs this kingdom you see by means of change: clear skies follow cloud; seas are churned up after they have been calm; winds blow in their turn; day follows night; part of the sky rises, part sinks. The everlastingness of the world is made of opposites. It's to this law that our mind must be fitted; let it follow this, let it obey this, and let it hold that whatever happens had to happen, and not want to scold nature. The best course is to endure what you cannot mend, and to accompany without grumbling the god who is the author of everything that comes about: he is a bad soldier who follows his commander groaning. So let us receive our orders promptly and cheerfully, and not desert this march of the most beautiful of works, into which everything we shall suffer is woven; and let us address Jupiter, at whose helm this great mass is steered, the way our own Cleanthes addresses him in his very eloquent verses. I am allowed to turn them into our language by the example of Cicero, that most eloquent of men. If you like them, take them kindly; if you don't, you'll know that in this at least I was following Cicero's example.
Lead me, O father, ruler of the towering sky, wherever you have decided: I obey without delay; I am here, and ready. Suppose I refuse — then I will come along groaning, and, a bad man, I will suffer what a good man could have done. The fates lead the willing; the unwilling they drag.
So let us live, and so let us speak; may fate come upon us prepared and unflagging. This is the great mind, the one that has handed itself over to fate; and the small, degenerate one is the mind that struggles against it, thinks badly of the order of the universe, and would rather correct the gods than itself. Farewell.

======== Letter 108 ========

The thing you're asking about belongs to the class of things it's relevant to know only for the sake of knowing. Still, since it is relevant, you're in a hurry and won't wait for the books I'm arranging right now, which cover the whole moral branch of philosophy. I'll deal with it at once; but first let me write about how this passion for learning that I see you burning with should be managed, so that it doesn't get in its own way. Things shouldn't be plucked at random, nor should the whole field be greedily attacked at once: you reach the whole through the parts. The load ought to be fitted to your strength, and you shouldn't take on more than you can handle. Draw off not as much as you want but as much as you can hold. Only keep a good attitude, and your capacity will match your wish: the more a mind receives, the wider it stretches.
I remember Attalus giving us this advice in the days when we laid siege to his lecture room, first to arrive and last to leave, and drew him into discussions even while he was out walking — for he was not merely available to his students but came out to meet them. 'Teacher and student,' he said, 'should have the same goal: the one should want to do good, the other to get better.' Whoever goes to a philosopher should carry off some benefit every day: he should come home either sounder or more curable. And he will: such is the power of philosophy that it helps not only the serious student but even the casual visitor. A man who steps into the sun will get a tan even if that isn't why he came; people who linger a little while in a perfume shop walk out wearing the shop's fragrance; and those who have spent time with a philosopher must inevitably take away something that would do good even to people paying no attention. Note my word: paying no attention — not fighting back.
'What then? Don't we know people who sat with a philosopher for years and never picked up even a tint?' Of course I know them — very persistent, very regular; I call them not the philosophers' students but their lodgers. Some come to listen, not to learn, the way we're drawn to the theater for pleasure, to delight our ears with speech or song or story. You'll see that a large part of the audience treats the philosopher's classroom as a lounge for their idle hours. They're not there to lay down any vices or to receive some rule of life to measure their conduct against, but to enjoy a treat for the ears. Some even come with notebooks — not to take down the substance, but the phrases, which they'll repeat with as little profit to others as they heard them with profit to themselves. Some are stirred up by grand utterances and pass into the emotion of the speakers, faces and hearts eager, worked up exactly like Phrygian half-men going frantic on command at the sound of the flute. What seizes and spurs them is the beauty of the subject matter, not the noise of empty words. If something has been said sharply against death, or defiantly against fortune, they itch to do at once what they hear. They're genuinely affected, and they are what they're told to be — if that impression stayed stamped on the mind, if the crowd, that great discourager of what's honorable, didn't immediately intercept the fine impulse. Few have managed to carry home the frame of mind they conceived there. It's easy to rouse a listener to a desire for what's right, because nature has given everyone the foundations and the seed of the virtues. We are all born for all of them; when someone comes to stir us, those good qualities of the soul wake up, as if from sleep. Don't you see how the theaters ring out whenever lines are spoken that we recognize as a community, and whose truth we all attest with one voice?
Poverty lacks much; greed lacks everything. The greedy man is good to no one — and worst to himself.
At verses like these even the most sordid man in the house applauds and delights to hear his own vices abused. How much more do you think this happens when such things are said by a philosopher, when verses are woven into wholesome teachings, to sink those same lessons more effectively into untrained minds? For as Cleanthes used to say, 'Just as our breath gives a clearer note when a trumpet has drawn it through the narrows of a long tube and poured it out at last through a widening mouth, so the tight discipline of verse makes our thoughts ring clearer.' The same points are heard more carelessly and strike less hard as long as they're delivered in loose prose; when rhythm comes in and fixed meter binds a fine thought tight, the very same idea is hurled as if by a stronger arm. A great deal gets said about despising money, and long speeches drive home the lesson that people should locate wealth in the mind, not in the estate — that the rich man is the one who has fitted himself to his poverty and made himself wealthy on little. But minds are struck harder when lines like these are spoken:
The mortal who wants least is the one who needs least. Whoever can want just what's enough has what he wants.
When we hear things like this, we're driven to confess the truth: even those whom no amount ever satisfies marvel, shout approval, declare war on money. When you see them in that state of feeling, press on — push it, load it on, and drop the ambiguities and syllogisms and quibbles and the rest of the games of pointless cleverness. Speak against greed, speak against luxury; and when you see you've made progress and touched your hearers' souls, bear down harder still. It's beyond belief how much good a speech like that does when it's bent on healing and turned entirely to the benefit of the audience. Young minds are most easily won to the love of what's honorable and right; on those still teachable and only lightly corrupted, truth lays her hand — if she finds a fit advocate. I know that when I heard Attalus arguing at full stretch against vice, against error, against everything wrong in how we live, I often pitied the human race and believed him to stand high above the human summit. He himself used to say he was a king; but to me he seemed something more than a king — a man licensed to sit in judgment on the ones who reign. And when he began to recommend poverty, and to show that whatever exceeds our needs is a useless weight, heavy on the one who carries it, I often wanted to walk out of that classroom a poor man. When he began to expose our pleasures, to praise a chaste body, a sober table, a mind kept clean not only of illicit pleasures but of superfluous ones, I wanted to set limits on my gullet and my belly. Some of it has stayed with me, Lucilius. I had come at it all with a huge rush of enthusiasm; then, drawn back into the life of the city, I kept only a little of the good start. From that time comes my lifelong renunciation of oysters and mushrooms — for they aren't food, they're seasonings for the sated, forcing men to eat past fullness (which is exactly what gluttons love, stuffing themselves beyond capacity): easy down, easy back up. From that time, a lifetime of doing without perfume, since the best smell for the body is none. From that time, a stomach that goes without wine. From that time, a lifelong avoidance of the hot bath: to stew the body and drain it with sweating seemed to me at once useless and self-indulgent. Other renunciations I abandoned have come back — but in such a way that where I stopped abstaining, I keep a limit that borders on abstinence and is perhaps harder, since some things are more easily cut out of the mind than kept in moderation.
Since I've started explaining how much greater my drive toward philosophy was as a young man than my persistence in it is as an old one, I won't be ashamed to confess the love that Pythagoras planted in me. Sotion used to explain why Pythagoras had abstained from animal food, and why Sextius did afterwards. Their reasons were different, but each was magnificent.
Sextius believed that man has food enough without shedding blood, and that a habit of cruelty forms once tearing flesh apart has been made into a pleasure. He added that we should shrink the raw material of luxury, and he reasoned that a varied diet, foreign to our bodies, is the enemy of good health. Pythagoras, by contrast, said there is a kinship of everything with everything, and an interchange of souls passing from one form into another. On his view, no soul perishes — none even stops, except briefly, while it's poured into another body. We may leave aside through what cycles of time, and when, after wandering through many dwellings, it returns into a man; meanwhile he made men afraid of crime and of parricide, since they might unknowingly assault a parent's soul and violate it with knife or with teeth, wherever some kindred spirit was lodged in a body. When Sotion had laid this out and filled it in with his own arguments, he said: 'You don't believe that souls are dealt out into one body after another, and that what we call death is a migration? You don't believe that in these cattle, in wild beasts, in creatures under the water, there lingers a soul that once belonged to a man? You don't believe that nothing perishes in this world, but only changes its neighborhood — and that not only do the heavenly bodies turn in their fixed circuits, but living creatures too pass through their turns, and souls are driven round in a cycle? Great men have believed these things. So suspend your judgment, by all means, but keep the whole question open for yourself. If it's all true, abstaining from animals is innocence; if it's false, it's frugality. What loss does your credulity suffer here? I'm merely taking away the food of lions and vultures.' Spurred by all this, I began to abstain from animal food, and after a year the habit was not merely easy but pleasant. I believed my mind was more lively — and today I wouldn't swear to you whether it really was. You ask how I stopped? My young manhood fell in the early principate of Tiberius Caesar. Foreign rites were then being suppressed, and abstaining from certain animal foods was counted among the proofs of superstition. So at my father's request — he wasn't afraid of an accusation; he just hated philosophy — I went back to my old habits; and he had no trouble persuading me to dine better. Attalus used to praise a mattress that resists the body: I use that kind even in old age, one that doesn't show the print of a sleeper. I've told all this to prove to you what passionate first impulses raw beginners have toward everything best, if someone urges them on, if someone gives them a push. But things go wrong, partly through the fault of the teachers, who train us to argue rather than to live, and partly through the fault of the students, who come to their teachers intending to cultivate not their character but their wits. And so what used to be philosophy has been turned into philology. It matters a great deal what purpose you bring to a thing. The future grammarian poring over Virgil doesn't read that superb passage with this in mind —
'we must stay awake; if we don't hurry, we're left behind; the swift day drives us and is driven; we're swept along without knowing it; we arrange everything for the future and dawdle on the edge of a cliff' — no, he reads it to note that whenever Virgil speaks of how fast time moves, he uses this word, fugit — 'it flees':
For wretched mortals the best days of life are the first to flee; diseases crowd in after, and gloomy old age, and toil, and the harshness of pitiless death snatches us away.
The man whose eye is on philosophy takes these same lines where they ought to go. 'Virgil never says the days go,' he says, 'but that they flee — the most headlong kind of running there is — and that the best are snatched first. Then why do we hesitate to spur ourselves, so that we can match the speed of the fastest thing there is? The better part flies past; the worse takes its place.' Just as it's the clearest wine that flows first from the jar, while the heaviest and murkiest settles to the bottom, so in our lifetime the best comes first. Do we let it be drained off for others, and keep the dregs for ourselves? Let this line stick in the mind, and let it please us like an oracle's pronouncement:
For wretched mortals the best days of life are the first to flee.
Why the best? Because what's left is uncertain. Why the best? Because in youth we can learn; we can turn a pliant mind, still workable, toward better things; because this is the season fit for hard work, fit for driving the intellect through study and exercising the body through action. What remains is slower and feebler and closer to the end. So let's go at it with our whole soul, drop the sideshows we keep turning off to, and labor at one thing only — lest we understand the speed of racing time, which we cannot hold back, only after it has left us behind. Let each day, as it comes, please us as if it were the best, and be made our own. What flees has to be seized. The man who reads that poem with a grammarian's eyes thinks about none of this — not that each day is the best precisely because diseases crowd in, because old age presses close and already hangs over our heads while we're still dreaming of youth. No, he notes that Virgil always puts diseases and old age together — and not without reason, by Hercules: old age is an incurable disease. 'Besides,' he says, 'he gave old age a fixed epithet — he calls it gloomy:
diseases crowd in after, and gloomy old age. And elsewhere he says: and pale Diseases live there, and gloomy Old Age.'
No need to be surprised that each man gathers from the same material what suits his own pursuits: in the same meadow the ox looks for grass, the dog for a hare, the stork for a lizard.
When a philologist, a grammarian, and a devotee of philosophy each pick up Cicero's book On the Republic, each sends his attention off in a different direction. The philosopher marvels that so much could be said against justice. When the philologist comes to the same reading, he jots down this: that there were two Roman kings of whom one has no father and the other no mother — for Servius's mother is a matter of doubt, and Ancus has no father, being called merely the grandson of Numa. He notes further that the officer we call dictator, and read of under that name in the histories, was called by the ancients the 'master of the people.' That survives today in the augural books, and the proof is that the man he appoints is the 'master of horse.' Likewise he notes that Romulus perished during an eclipse of the sun; and that appeal to the people existed even under the kings — so it stands in the pontifical books, and so some authorities hold, Fenestella among them. When the grammarian unrolls the same books, the first thing he enters in his notebook is that Cicero says 'reapse,' that is, 're ipsa,' and likewise 'sepse,' that is, 'se ipse.' Then he passes to what the usage of the age has changed — as when Cicero says, 'since we have been called back from the very calx by his interruption': what we now call the 'creta,' the chalk line in the Circus, the ancients called the 'calx.' Next he collects lines of Ennius, first of all the ones written about Africanus:
a man to whom no one, citizen or enemy, will be able to render a return worthy of his deeds.
From this he says he understands that ops among the ancients meant not only 'help' but 'effort': for Ennius is saying that no one, citizen or enemy, could pay Scipio back the price of his effort. Next he counts himself lucky to have found the source of Virgil's line
over whom the vast gate of heaven thunders.
Ennius, he says, filched this from Homer, and Virgil from Ennius; for in Cicero, in this same On the Republic, there stands this epigram of Ennius:
if it is right for anyone to climb into the regions of the gods, for me alone heaven's great gate stands open.
But before I slide into playing philologist or grammarian myself while my business lies elsewhere, let me give this warning: the hearing and the reading of philosophers must be pulled toward the goal of the happy life. We're not to chase archaic or invented words, extravagant metaphors, figures of speech — but useful teachings and grand, spirited utterances that can soon be carried over into action. Let's learn them so thoroughly that what were words become deeds. In my judgment no one has deserved worse of the whole human race than those who have learned philosophy as a trade with something to sell, and who live otherwise than they teach one must live. They parade themselves around as specimens of a useless training, slaves to every vice they denounce.
A teacher of that kind can do me no more good than a helmsman seasick in a storm. When the wave is wrenching the rudder, you have to hold it; you have to wrestle with the sea itself and tear the sails away from the wind. What help to me is a ship's captain who is stunned and vomiting? And how much greater a storm do you think tosses a life than tosses any boat? What's needed is not talking but steering. Everything these men say, everything they toss out before their crowds of listeners, belongs to other people: Plato said it, Zeno said it, Chrysippus and Posidonius said it, and a huge column of names as many and as great. I'll show them how they can prove it's their own: let them do what they've said.
Since I've now said what I wanted to bring to you, I'll satisfy your desire another time and carry the whole of what you demanded over into a second letter, so that you don't come tired to a thorny subject that needs to be heard with ears pricked and alert. Farewell.

======== Letter 109 ========

[1] You want to know whether one wise man can benefit another. We say that the wise man is full of every good and has reached the summit: the question is how anyone can benefit a man who already possesses the highest good. Good men do benefit one another. Each exercises his virtues and keeps his wisdom in trim; each needs someone with whom to compare notes, with whom to seek. [2] Practice keeps skilled wrestlers sharp; a musician who has learned his fellow's part is set in motion by him. The wise man too needs the exercise of his virtues; and just as he sets himself in motion, so he is set in motion by another wise man. [3] How will one wise man benefit another? He will give him momentum, and point out occasions for honorable action. Besides this, he will voice some of his own thoughts; he will teach what he has discovered. For even the wise man will always have something left to discover, some direction for his mind to run. [4] A bad man harms another bad man and makes him worse, by inflaming his anger, seconding his gloom, praising his pleasures; and the wicked do the most damage to each other precisely where their vices have mingled most and their depravity has been pooled. So, by the same logic in reverse, a good man will benefit a good man. 'How?' you ask. [5] He will bring him joy, he will strengthen his confidence; from the sight of each other's calm, the happiness of both will grow. Besides, he will pass on to him knowledge of certain things; for the wise man does not know everything, and even if he did, another might work out shorter paths to some things and point them out, paths by which the whole task is more easily carried through. [6] One wise man will benefit another, and not merely by his own resources but by those of the man he is helping. That man, left to himself, could certainly work out his own part; he would use his own speed. But even a runner already running is helped by someone cheering him on. 'No, the wise man does not benefit the wise man - he benefits himself. To see this, take away his own power, and he will accomplish nothing.' [7] By that reasoning you might as well say that there is no sweetness in honey; for the man whose tongue and palate are not so tuned as to be receptive to that particular taste will not be pleased by it - he will be offended by it; there are people whose sickness makes honey taste bitter to them. Both parties must be sound: the one so that he can benefit, and the other so that he is fit material for the benefit to work on.
[8] 'When heat,' he says, 'has been brought to its peak, it is pointless to heat it further, and when the good has been brought to its peak, a helper is pointless. Does the fully equipped farmer go looking for someone else to equip him? Does the armed soldier, once he has enough weapons to go into battle, want any more? So it is with the wise man too; he is sufficiently equipped for life, sufficiently armed.' [9] To this I answer: even a thing brought to the peak of heat needs added heat to stay at the peak. 'But,' he says, 'heat sustains itself.' First, there's a great difference between the two things you're comparing. Heat is one single thing; benefiting is various. Second, heat is not helped to stay hot by an addition of heat, whereas the wise man cannot maintain the state of his mind unless he admits some friends like himself, with whom he can share his virtues. [10] Add to this that friendship exists among all the virtues together; so a man benefits another simply by loving the virtues of someone equal to him, and by offering virtues in turn to be loved. Like things delight each other, especially when they are honorable and know how to approve and be approved. [11] Furthermore, no one but a wise man can skillfully move the mind of a wise man, just as no one but a human being can move a human being rationally. So just as reason is needed to move reason, perfect reason is needed to move perfect reason. [12] People are also said to benefit us when they hand us the ordinary means - money, influence, safety, and other things dear or necessary for use in life; in this sense even a fool will be said to benefit the wise man. But true benefit is moving the mind, in accordance with nature, by one's own virtue. And since this happens to the man who is moved, it cannot happen without benefit also to the man who does the moving; for in exercising another's virtue he necessarily exercises his own. [13] But even if you set aside all this - whether it is itself the highest good or productive of the highest goods - wise men can still benefit one another. For finding another wise man is, in itself, something a wise man should seek, because by nature every good is dear to the good, and each is drawn to the good exactly as he is drawn to himself.
[14] From this question, for the sake of argument, I must move on to another. For it is asked whether the wise man will deliberate, whether he will call anyone into counsel. This he must necessarily do when he comes to matters civic and domestic and, so to speak, mortal; here he needs another's counsel just as he needs a doctor, a helmsman, an advocate, or someone to manage a lawsuit. So the wise man will sometimes benefit the wise man; he will offer advice. But also in those great and divine matters we spoke of, he will be useful by working through honorable questions in common and by mingling minds and thoughts. [15] Besides, it is in accordance with nature to embrace friends and to rejoice in their growth as in one's own; for if we do not do this, not even virtue will endure in us, since virtue's strength lies in its exercise and feeling. Now virtue counsels us to make good use of the present, to plan for the future, to deliberate and focus the mind; and a man will focus and work this out more easily if he has taken someone alongside himself. So he will seek out either a perfect man, or one making progress and near to perfection. And the perfect man will benefit him, if he assists his counsel with shared good sense. [16] People say that others see more clearly into someone else's business than into their own. This happens to people whom love of self blinds, and whom fear, in moments of danger, shakes free of clear judgment about their own interest; a man will begin to see straight once he is safer and set beyond fear. But even so there are certain things that even wise men see more carefully in another than in themselves. And besides, that sweetest and most honorable thing - 'to want the same things and refuse the same things' - one wise man will grant another; they will pull a fine work together under a shared yoke.

======== Letter 110 ========

[1] I greet you from my Nomentan estate and bid you have a good mind - that is, all the gods well-disposed toward you, for a man secures the gods' favor and goodwill by first making himself well-disposed toward himself. Set aside for the moment the view held by some, that each of us is assigned a god as tutor - not one of the highest rank, but one of that lesser kind Ovid calls 'gods of the common people.' Still, set this aside remembering that our ancestors, who we're told were Stoics, believed it too; for they gave each individual both a Genius and a Juno. [2] Later we'll see whether the gods have enough leisure to attend to private business. For now, know this: whether we are assigned a guardian or left neglected and given over to fortune, you can wish nothing worse on anyone than that he have the gods angry with him. But there is no reason to wish, on anyone you think deserves punishment, that he have the gods hostile to him - he has them so already, I say, even if he seems to be advanced by their favor. [3] Apply your attention and look at what our circumstances actually are, not what they are called, and you will find that more evils befall us than actually happen to us. How often has what was called a disaster been the cause and the beginning of good fortune! How often has something received with great congratulation built for itself a stair down into ruin, lifting some man already prominent still higher - as though he still stood where men fall safely! [4] But the fall itself has nothing evil in it, if you look to its end, beyond which nature has cast down no one. The limit of all things is near - near, I say, both the point from which the fortunate man is thrown down and the point from which the unfortunate man is released: we stretch both of these out and make them long through hope and fear. But if you are wise, measure everything by the human condition; contract at once both what delights you and what frightens you. And nothing is worth rejoicing over for long, so that you need not fear anything for long.
[5] But why do I confine the evil to that alone? There is no reason to think anything need be feared: the things that stir us, that keep us stunned, are hollow. None of us has ever shaken out what is true; we have simply handed our fear from one to another; no one has dared approach the thing that disturbed him and learn the nature and true measure of his fear. And so a false and empty thing still commands belief, because it is never exposed. [6] Let us think it worth our while to fix our eyes on it steadily; then it will at once appear how brief, how uncertain, how safe are the things we fear. Our minds are as confused as Lucretius saw them to be:
for just as children tremble and fear everything
in the blind dark, so we in the light fear things.
Well then? Are we not more foolish than any child, we who fear in broad daylight? [7] But it is false, Lucretius - we do not fear in the light: we have made darkness for ourselves in every direction. We see nothing, neither what will harm us nor what will help us; we go stumbling through our whole life, and for all that we neither stop nor plant our feet more carefully. Yet you can see how mad a thing it is to rush forward in the dark. And, by heaven, what we actually do is arrange things so that we would be even harder to call back - even while ignorant of where we are being carried, we press on all the faster toward wherever it is we are headed. [8] But daylight can come, if we are willing. And it can come in one way only: if a person acquires a real understanding of things human and divine, if he does not merely sprinkle himself with it but is dyed through by it, if he goes over the same things again and again, however well he knows them, and refers them constantly back to himself, if he asks what things are truly good, what truly bad, and which have been falsely given that name, if he inquires into what is honorable and what is base, and into providence. [9] Nor does the reach of the human mind stop at these things: it delights also in looking ahead, beyond the world itself, to ask where it is being carried, from what it arose, toward what end this great velocity of things is hurrying. But we have dragged the mind away from this divine contemplation and pulled it down into squalid, low things, to make it slave to greed, so that, abandoning the world and its boundaries and the lords who govern the whole of it, it might grub through the earth and search for whatever evil it could dig out of it, unsatisfied with what was freely offered. [10] Whatever was going to be good for us, God, our parent, placed close at hand; he did not wait for us to go looking, and gave it freely; but whatever would harm us, he buried deep. We can complain of nothing but ourselves: we have brought into the light, against the will and despite the concealment of nature, the very things by which we perish. We have made the mind a slave to pleasure - to indulge which is the beginning of every evil - we have handed it over to ambition and to fame, and to the other things equally empty and hollow.
[11] What, then, do I urge you now to do? Nothing new - for new evils do not call for new remedies - but this first of all: that you consider for yourself what is necessary and what is superfluous. Necessary things will meet you everywhere; superfluous things must always be sought out, with the whole mind bent on the search. [12] There is no reason for you to congratulate yourself too much if you have scorned golden couches and furniture set with gems; for what virtue is there in scorning what is superfluous? Admire yourself only when you have scorned what is necessary. It is no great feat that you can live without royal display, that you do not crave boars weighing a thousand pounds, or flamingo tongues, or the other monstrosities of a luxury already sick of whole animals and picking out particular parts from each: I will admire you only when you have scorned even coarse bread, when you have persuaded yourself that grass, where it must, grows not only for cattle but for man too, when you have realized that treetops are just filler for a belly into which we heap up costly things as though it kept whatever it received. It must be filled without fastidiousness; for what does it matter what it receives, when it is going to destroy whatever it receives? [13] You take pleasure in the elaborate arrangement of what is caught on land and sea, some the more welcome for being brought fresh to the table, others for having been long fattened and force-fed until they run with grease and can scarcely contain their own fat; you take pleasure in the polish these things acquire through art. But, by heaven, once all this anxiously hunted, variously seasoned food has gone down into the belly, one and the same foulness will take hold of it. Do you want to scorn the pleasure of food? Look to its end.
[14] I remember Attalus saying this, to the great admiration of everyone: 'For a long time,' he said, 'wealth deceived me. I was awestruck whenever some part of it flashed out in one place or another; I assumed the parts I could not see were like the parts on display. But at a certain lavish spectacle I once saw the entire wealth of a city laid out - things wrought in gold and silver, and things whose price outstripped gold and silver; rare dyes and garments brought not only from beyond our own borders but from beyond the territory of our enemies; here whole troops of boys, glittering in their finery and beauty, there of girls, and other things which the fortune of a supreme empire, taking stock of its own possessions, had brought forth. [15] 'What is this,' I said to myself, 'but stirring up appetites in men that are already violent enough on their own? What is the point of this parade of money? Have we gathered here to be taught greed?' But, by heaven, I came away from there with less desire, not more. I had come to scorn riches - not because they are superfluous, but because they are trivial. [16] Did you see how, within a few hours, that whole procession - slow-moving and elaborately arranged as it was - had passed by? Is this to occupy our entire life, this thing that could not even fill out one whole day? And there was this too: these things looked just as superfluous to those who owned them as they had to those of us watching. [17] So this is what I say to myself whenever something of this sort dazzles my eyes, whenever I come upon a splendid house, a well-groomed troop of slaves, a litter set on the shoulders of handsome bearers: 'Why do you marvel? Why are you dumbstruck? It's a parade. These things are put on display, not truly possessed, and even while they please, they are passing away.' [18] Turn instead to the true riches; learn to be content with little, and cry out, greathearted and bold, that saying: we have water, we have barley meal; let us set ourselves in rivalry with Jupiter himself over happiness. Let us do so, I beg you, even if we lack those very things; it is shameful to place a happy life in gold and silver, and just as shameful to place it in water and barley meal. 'But what shall I do, then, if I have neither?' [19] You ask what the remedy for poverty is? Hunger ends hunger: otherwise, what does it matter whether the things that force you into servitude are great or small? What difference does it make how little a thing is, if fortune can still use it to say no to you? [20] This very water and barley meal fall under someone else's control; but a free man is not one over whom fortune has little power, but one over whom it has none at all. That is how it is: you must want nothing, if you wish to challenge a Jupiter who wants nothing.'
This is what Attalus told us; nature tells it to everyone. If you are willing to dwell on it often, you will manage to be happy, not merely to appear so, and to appear so to yourself, not to others. Farewell.

======== Letter 111 ========

[1] You asked me what the Latin word for sophisms should be. Many people have tried to give them a name, and none of it has stuck; evidently because we never accepted the thing itself, and it wasn't in use among us, so the name met the same resistance. Still, the one that seems most fitting to me is the one Cicero used: he calls them 'quibblings.' [2] Whoever gives himself over to these ties himself in clever little knots, but gains nothing for life: he becomes no braver, no more self-controlled, no more elevated. But the man who has practiced philosophy as his own remedy grows great in spirit, full of confidence, unconquerable, and greater the closer you approach him. [3] It's like what happens with great mountains, whose height seems less to those viewing them from a distance: only when you draw near does it become clear how lofty their peaks are. Such a man is the true philosopher, my dear Lucilius — one shaped by realities, not by tricks. He stands on the heights, admirable, lofty, of true greatness; he doesn't rise up on tiptoe or walk on the balls of his feet, in the manner of those who fake height with deception and want to look taller than they are; he is content with his own greatness. [4] Why shouldn't he be content, having grown to a height that fortune's hand can't reach? So he stands above human affairs, and equal to himself whatever the state of things — whether life proceeds on a favorable course, or is tossed and driven through hardship and difficulty. This constancy is something those quibblings I spoke of a moment ago cannot deliver. The mind toys with them, makes no progress, and drags philosophy down from its height into the flatlands. [5] I won't forbid you to engage in them sometimes — but only when you want to accomplish nothing. Still, they have this worst feature: they create a certain sweetness of their own and, through their appearance of subtlety, seduce and detain the mind, even while so vast a weight of real business calls, even while a whole lifetime barely suffices to learn this one thing — to hold life in contempt. 'What about ruling it?' you ask. That's a secondary task; for no one has ever ruled life well except the one who had first held it in contempt. Farewell.

======== Letter 112 ========

[1] I swear, I do want your friend shaped and trained as you wish, but he's proving very hard to take hold of — or rather, what's more troubling, he's very soft, and yet broken by a bad habit long indulged. Let me give you an illustration from our own craft. [2] Not every vine can bear grafting: if it's old and rotted through, or weak and thin, it will either refuse the graft or fail to nourish it, won't bond it to itself, won't come to share its quality and nature. So we're accustomed to cut it above ground, so that if it doesn't respond, a second chance can be tried and the graft inserted again below ground. [3] This man you write and ask about doesn't have the strength: he has indulged his vices. He has withered and hardened at the same time; he cannot take in reason, cannot nourish it. 'But he himself wants it.' Don't believe it. I'm not saying he's lying to you: he thinks he wants it. Excess has given him a bout of nausea; he'll be back on good terms with it soon enough. [4] 'But he says he's disgusted with his own life.' I wouldn't deny it — who isn't? People both love and hate their vices at once. So we'll pass judgment on him only once he's convinced us that excess has truly become hateful to him; right now the two are on poor terms, but they still get along. Farewell.

======== Letter 113 ========

[1] You want me to write and tell you what I think about a question debated among our school: whether justice, courage, prudence, and the other virtues are living beings. With this kind of subtlety, my dear Lucilius, we've managed to look like men exercising their wits on trifles, wasting our leisure on disputes that get us nowhere. I'll do as you ask and lay out our school's view; but I declare that I hold a different opinion myself: I think there are certain things that suit a man in slippers and a Greek cloak, and no one else. So let me tell you what has moved the old masters, or what ought to move them.
[2] It's agreed that the mind is a living being, since it is what makes us living beings, and living beings (animalia) take their very name from it (anima); virtue, however, is nothing other than the mind disposed in a certain way; therefore it is a living being. Furthermore, virtue does something; but nothing can act without impulse; if it has impulse, which belongs to nothing but a living being, then it is a living being. [3] 'If virtue is a living being,' comes the objection, 'then virtue itself has virtue.' Why shouldn't it possess itself? Just as the wise man does everything through virtue, so virtue acts through itself. 'Then,' the objection continues, 'all the arts are living beings too, and everything we think and everything we grasp with the mind. It follows that many thousands of living beings inhabit this narrow space of the chest, and each of us is many living beings, or contains many living beings.' You want to know how this is answered? Each one of these things taken singly will be a living being; but they won't be many living beings. Why? I'll tell you, if you'll lend me your subtlety and attention. [4] Individual living beings ought each to have its own individual substance; but all these things share one single mind; so they can each individually be a living being, but they cannot be many. I am both a living being and a man, yet you wouldn't say we are two. Why not? Because to be two, they would have to be separate. Here's my point: one thing must be set apart from another for there to be two. Whatever within one thing is manifold falls under a single nature; and so it is one. [5] My mind is a living being, and I am a living being, yet we are not two. Why? Because my mind is a part of me. A thing is counted as one in its own right only when it stands on its own; but when it is a limb of something else, it cannot be seen as something separate. Why? I'll tell you: because whatever is a separate thing must be its own, proper to itself, whole, and self-contained.
[6] I've declared that I hold a different view: for if this argument is accepted, it won't be only the virtues that turn out to be living beings, but their opposite vices and passions too — anger, fear, grief, suspicion. The thing will go further still: every opinion, every thought will be a living being. And that's something that must not be accepted on any account; for not everything produced by a man is a man. [7] 'What is justice?' comes the question. The mind disposed in a certain way. 'So if the mind is a living being, so is justice.' Not at all; for justice is a state and a certain power of the mind. The same mind turns itself into various shapes, and it isn't a different living being every time it does something different; nor is what is produced by the mind itself a living being. [8] If justice is a living being, if courage is, if the other virtues are, do they cease to be living beings from time to time and then start again, or are they always living beings? Virtues cannot cease to exist. So there are many living beings — countless, in fact — dwelling in this one mind. [9] 'They aren't many,' comes the reply, 'because they're bound together from one source and are parts and limbs of a single thing.' So the picture of the mind we're being offered is like that of a hydra with many heads, each of which fights on its own, does harm on its own. And yet none of those heads is itself a living being, but the head of a living being; the whole is one single living being. No one has ever said that the lion in the Chimera is a living being, or the serpent: these were parts of it; and parts are not living beings. [10] What's your basis for concluding that justice is a living being? 'It acts,' comes the answer, 'and does good; but whatever acts and does good has impulse; and whatever has impulse is a living being.' True — if it has its own impulse; but it doesn't have its own, it has the mind's. [11] Every living being, until it dies, remains what it began as: a man is a man until he dies, a horse a horse, a dog a dog; it cannot pass into something else. Justice — that is, the mind disposed in a certain way — is a living being. Let's grant it. Then courage too is a living being, that is, the mind disposed in a certain way. Which mind? The same one that a moment ago was justice? It's held fast in the earlier living being; it isn't allowed to pass into another living being; it must persist in the one it first began to be. [12] Besides, one mind cannot belong to two living beings, still less to more. If justice, courage, temperance, and the other virtues are living beings, how will they share one mind? Each ought to have its own, or else they aren't living beings. [13] One body cannot belong to several living beings. Even they admit this. What is the body of justice? 'The mind.' Well, what is the body of courage? 'The same mind.' And yet one body cannot belong to two living beings. [14] 'But the same mind,' comes the answer, 'puts on the guise of justice, and of courage, and of temperance.' This could happen if, at the time justice existed, courage did not exist, and at the time courage existed, temperance did not; but as it stands, all the virtues exist at once. So how can they each be living beings, when there is one single mind, which cannot make more than one living being? [15] Finally, no living being is part of another living being; but justice is part of the mind; therefore it is not a living being.
It strikes me I'm wasting effort on a point already conceded; this deserves indignation more than argument. No living being is the exact equal of another. Look around at the bodies of all creatures: every one has its own color, its own shape, its own size. [16] Among the other things that make the ingenuity of the divine craftsman a marvel, I count this too: that amid so vast an abundance of things, he never once repeats himself; even things that look alike turn out, on comparison, to differ. He has made so many kinds of leaves: not one without its own distinctive mark; so many living beings: no two of a size, some difference always present. He has made a point of ensuring that things which were otherwise different should also be unequal. The virtues, as you people say, are all equal; therefore they are not living beings. [17] No living being acts except on its own; but virtue does nothing on its own — only in conjunction with a human being. All living beings are either rational, like men and gods, or irrational, like wild beasts and cattle; virtues are certainly rational; but they are neither men nor gods; therefore they are not living beings. [18] Every rational living being does nothing unless it is first stirred by the appearance of something, then takes an impulse, then confirms that impulse through assent. Let me explain what assent is. I ought to walk: only once I have told myself this and approved my own judgment do I actually walk; I ought to sit: only then do I sit. This assent is not present in virtue. [19] Suppose prudence exists: how will it assent to 'I ought to walk'? Nature does not admit of this. Prudence looks out for the person to whom it belongs, not for itself; for it cannot walk, and it cannot sit. So it has no assent; and whatever has no assent is not a rational living being. If virtue is a living being, it is rational; but it is not rational; therefore it is not a living being either. [20] If virtue is a living being, and virtue is entirely good, then every good is a living being. Our own school admits this. Saving one's father is good, and speaking one's opinion wisely in the senate is good, and rendering a just verdict is good; therefore saving one's father is a living being, and speaking one's opinion wisely is a living being. The argument has pushed things so far that you can't hold back your laughter: keeping wise silence is good, dining is good; and so both silence and dinner are living beings.
[21] I swear, I won't stop needling this, and making sport for myself out of these subtle inanities. Justice and courage, if they are living beings, are certainly earthbound ones; every earthbound living being feels cold, hunger, thirst; therefore justice feels cold, courage feels hunger, mercy feels thirst. [22] What's more — won't I ask them what shape these living beings have? That of a man, a horse, a wild beast? If they say round, the same shape they gave to god, I'll ask whether greed and excess and madness are equally round — for they too are living beings. And if they round these off as well, I'll still ask whether a prudent stroll is a living being. They're bound to admit it — and then they'll have to say that a stroll is a living being, and a round one at that.
[23] And don't think it's only I, speaking not from our school's prescriptions but from my own opinion, who says such things: Cleanthes and his own pupil Chrysippus can't even agree on what a stroll is. Cleanthes says it's breath sent out from the ruling part all the way down to the feet; Chrysippus says it's the ruling part itself. So why shouldn't each of us, following Chrysippus's own example, claim the right to think for himself and laugh at these countless living beings that the universe itself couldn't hold?
[24] 'The virtues,' comes the reply, 'are not many living beings, yet they are living beings. For just as someone can be both a poet and an orator, and yet be one person, so these virtues are living beings but are not many. The mind is one and the same, and is just and prudent and courageous, disposed in a certain way toward each individual virtue.' [25] Once you take away... we agree on this. For I myself, for now, admit that the mind is a living being, reserving judgment on that question for later; but I deny that its actions are living beings. Otherwise every word will be a living being, and every line of verse. For if wise speech is good, and every good is a living being, then speech is a living being. A wise line of verse is good, and every good is a living being; therefore the verse is a living being. And so
it is a living being — which they can't call round, since it has six feet. [26] 'That's just weaving nonsense,' you'll say, 'this whole business as it now stands.' I burst out laughing when I picture to myself that a solecism is a living being, and a barbarism, and a syllogism, and I assign them faces to match, like a painter. Do we really debate these things with knitted brows and furrowed foreheads? I can't help but quote here that line of Caelius: 'oh, wretched trifles!' They're ridiculous.
So why don't we instead take up something useful and salutary for us, and ask how we can reach the virtues, what road can lead us to them? [27] Teach me — not whether courage is a living being, but that no living being can be happy without courage, unless it has grown strong against the blows of chance and, by rehearsing every misfortune in advance, has mastered it before it strikes. What is courage? An impregnable fortification against human weakness, which whoever has thrown up around himself endures secure through this siege of life; for he uses his own strength, his own weapons. [28] Here I want to pass on to you the view of our friend Posidonius: 'You should never think yourself safe using fortune's weapons: fight with your own. Fortune does not arm us against herself; and so we're equipped against enemies, but unarmed against her.' [29] Alexander laid waste and put to flight the Persians and Hyrcanians and Indians, and every nation the East extends as far as the ocean — but he himself, now over one friend killed, now over another lost, lay in darkness, mourning at one moment his crime, at another his loss, conqueror of so many kings and peoples yet succumbing to his own anger and gloom; for he had striven to hold everything else in his power except his own passions. [30] Oh, how great are the errors that grip men who long to extend the right to rule across the seas, and count themselves supremely fortunate if they hold many provinces by force of arms and add new ones to the old — not knowing that the truly vast kingdom, equal to the gods, is this: to command oneself is the greatest command of all. [31] Let someone teach me how sacred a thing justice is, looking to another's good, seeking nothing for itself except the exercise of itself. Let it have nothing to do with ambition or reputation: let it be content with itself. Let every man first convince himself of this above all: I ought to be just for nothing. That's not enough. Let him convince himself further of this: it should be a joy to spend myself, unasked, on this most beautiful of virtues; let every thought be turned as far as possible away from private advantage. There's no reason to look for a reward for a just act: the greater reward is in the just act itself. [32] Fix this further point in your mind, which I mentioned a little earlier: it is of no relevance how many people know of your fairness. Whoever wants his virtue made public is laboring not for virtue but for glory. Don't you want to be just without glory? Well, I swear, you'll often have to be just at the cost of a bad reputation — and then, if you're wise, let an ill opinion well earned give you pleasure. Farewell.

======== Letter 114 ========

You ask why, at certain periods, a degenerate style of speaking has appeared, and how it happens that talented men drift toward particular faults, so that at one time a puffed-up, sprawling manner was in fashion, at another a broken, sing-song delivery; why at one moment people admired bold conceits that outran belief, and at another clipped, insinuating epigrams in which more had to be guessed than heard; why there was an age that abused the license of metaphor without a blush. The answer is the common saying, long since a proverb among the Greeks: as men live, so they speak. Just as each individual's conduct resembles his manner of speaking, so a whole period's style sometimes copies the public morals, whenever the discipline of the state has broken down and given itself over to soft living. Wantonness in speech is proof of public excess, provided it is not confined to one or two men but has won general acceptance and approval. Talent cannot wear one complexion and the soul another. If the soul is healthy, well ordered, serious, self-controlled, the talent too is dry and sober; when the soul is tainted, the talent catches the infection. Haven't you noticed that when the spirit goes slack, the limbs drag and the feet move sluggishly? That when it turns effeminate, the softness shows in the very walk? That when it is keen and fierce, the step quickens? That when it raves — or is angry, which is close kin to raving — the body's movement is agitated, carried along rather than walking? How much more must this happen to a man's talent, which is wholly blended with his soul, is shaped by it, obeys it, takes its law from it?
How Maecenas lived is too well known to need retelling now — how he strolled about, how pampered he was, how eager to be noticed, how unwilling to let his vices go unseen. Well then: isn't his prose as ungirdled as the man himself? Aren't his words as conspicuous as his dress, his retinue, his house, his wife? He had the makings of a great talent, if he had driven it down a straighter road, if he had not dodged being understood, if he had not run to seed even in his prose. What you will find there is the eloquence of a drunk — tangled, wandering, taking every liberty. [Maecenas, On His Own Way of Life.] What could be uglier than 'a stream and woods with shaggy-haired banks'? See how 'they plough the channel with skiffs and, churning the shallows, leave the gardens behind.' And what of a man who 'crimps at a woman's pout and bills at her with his lips and starts in sighing, like the tyrants of the grove going faint with drooping neck'? 'A gang past cure, they ferret at banquets and put houses to the test with the flagon and by hope exact death.' 'A genius scarcely witness to his own feast-day.' 'Threads of slender wax-taper and the crackling meal.' 'Mother or wife dress the hearth.' Reading this, won't it strike you at once that this is the man who went about the city always with his tunic loose (even when he was standing in for the absent Caesar, the password was asked of an ungirdled commander)? That this is the man who appeared on the tribunal, on the rostra, in every public assembly with his head wrapped in a cloak, his ears poking out on both sides, exactly like the rich man's runaway slaves in a mime? The man who, at the very height of the civil wars, with the city anxious and under arms, had for escort in public two eunuchs — both more man than he was? The man who married a wife a thousand times over, though he had only the one? Those words, so shamelessly strung, so carelessly flung down, so set against everyone's usage, show that his character too was just as strange, warped, and singular. He is given great credit for mildness: he spared the sword, he kept clear of blood, and showed his power in nothing except his loose living. But he spoiled that very claim with these freakish daintinesses of style; it becomes plain he was soft, not gentle. Those winding constructions, those words set crosswise, those startling ideas — often grand, admittedly, but gone limp by the time they emerge — will make it obvious to anyone: too much good fortune had turned his head. The fault is sometimes a man's, sometimes an age's. When prosperity has spilled self-indulgence far and wide, dress and grooming get more elaborate first; then attention shifts to furniture; then money pours into the houses themselves — that they sprawl over the breadth of a countryside, that the walls gleam with marbles shipped across the seas, that the ceilings are patterned in gold, that the sheen of the floors answers the paneling overhead; then luxury moves to the dinner table, where novelty and the reshuffling of the usual order become the recipe for applause — the dishes that normally close a dinner are served first, and what used to be given to guests arriving is given to guests leaving. Once the mind has learned to sneer at whatever is customary, and the usual counts as shabby, it hunts for novelty in speech too: now it drags back and parades ancient, obsolete words; now it coins new ones or bends words out of shape; now — the habit that has lately spread — bold and constant metaphor passes for elegance. There are those who cut their thoughts short and hope the charm lies just there — in leaving the sentence hanging so that the hearer suspects more behind it; there are those who hold their sentences back and stretch them out; and there are those who do not merely drift into the fault (anyone attempting something grand must risk that) but who love the fault itself.
So wherever you see a corrupt style finding favor, you may be certain that morals too have strayed from the straight path. As extravagance in banquets and in dress is a symptom of a sick community, so license in style, if only it is widespread, shows that the minds from which the words come have also collapsed. Nor should you be surprised that corrupt work is welcomed not just by the seedier ring of listeners but by this better-dressed crowd as well; the two differ in their togas, not in their judgment. What may surprise you more is that praise goes not merely to flawed work but to the flaws themselves. The first has always happened: no talent has ever pleased without some indulgence. Name me any man of great reputation you like: I will tell you what his own age forgave him, what it knowingly overlooked in him. I will give you many whose faults did them no harm, and some whose faults did them good. I will give you men of the highest fame, set up as objects of admiration, whom to correct is to destroy; their faults are so interwoven with their virtues that removing the one would drag out the other.
Add to this that style has no fixed rule: the community's usage, which never stands in one place for long, keeps turning it over. Many fetch their words from another century and talk Twelve Tables; for them Gracchus and Crassus and Curio are too polished and too recent — they retreat as far as Appius and Coruncanius. Some men take the opposite path: wanting nothing that isn't worn and everyday, they sink into shabbiness. Both are corruption, each in its own way — just as much, I swear, as refusing to use anything but glittering, sonorous, poetic words and avoiding the necessary ones in common use. I will say the one sins as much as the other: one grooms himself more than is right, the other neglects himself more than is right; the first plucks even his legs, the second not even his armpits.
Let us pass to sentence-structure. How many kinds of error shall I show you here? Some favor a jolting, rough arrangement; they deliberately break up anything that has flowed out too smoothly; they want no join without a jolt; they consider it manly and strong when the unevenness bangs the ear. With others it is not composition at all but crooning, so caressingly does it glide along, so softly. And what shall I say of the arrangement in which words are postponed and, long awaited, barely arrive at the close? Or of the manner slow at the finish, like Cicero's, sloping gently down, holding you softly back, always true to its own habit and its own rhythm?
The fault in epigrams as a class is <also this>: if they are puny and childish, or shameless and daring more than decency allows; if they are flowery and over-sweet; if they end in nothing and, producing no effect, do no more than make a sound.
These faults are introduced by some one man under whose sway eloquence stands at the time; the rest copy him and pass them from one to another. So in Sallust's heyday clipped statements, words dropping before you expected them, and obscure brevity counted as elegance. Lucius Arruntius, a man of rare frugality, who wrote a history of the Punic war, was a Sallustian, straining after that manner. There is a phrase in Sallust, 'he made an army with silver,' meaning he raised one with money. Arruntius fell in love with this; he planted it on every page. In one place he says 'they made a rout for our men,' in another 'Hiero, king of the Syracusans, made war,' and in another 'the news made the people of Panhormus surrender to the Romans.' I only wanted to give you a taste: the whole book is woven of such stuff. What was rare in Sallust is in Arruntius constant and almost unbroken — and no wonder: Sallust stumbled on these things; Arruntius went hunting for them. You see what follows when a man's fault becomes another man's model. Sallust wrote 'while the waters wintered.' Arruntius, in the first book of his Punic war, says 'the storm suddenly wintered'; elsewhere, wanting to say the year had been cold, he says 'the whole year wintered'; and elsewhere, 'from there he sent sixty light transports, carrying nothing beyond soldiers and essential crew, while the north wind wintered.' He never stops wedging that word in everywhere. Somewhere Sallust says 'while amid civil arms he sought the fames of the just and good.' Arruntius could not restrain himself from putting, right in his first book, that the 'fames' about Regulus were immense. Faults like these, then, stamped on a man by imitation, are not symptoms of decadence or of a corrupted mind; to let you gauge a man's character, they must be his own, born of him: an angry man's speech is angry, an excitable man's is over-driven, a pampered man's is tender and slack. What you see is the method of those men who pluck their beards, or pluck them in patches, who shave the lip close and trim tight while keeping the rest long and untended, who put on cloaks of outrageous color and a see-through toga, who refuse to do anything that lets people's eyes pass over it: they provoke attention and turn it on themselves; they are willing even to be censured, so long as they are stared at. Such is the style of Maecenas and of all the others who go wrong not by accident but knowingly and willingly. This grows out of a great sickness of the soul. Just as in drinking the tongue does not stumble until the mind has given way under the load and buckled or betrayed itself, so this drunkenness of style — for what else is it? — troubles no one unless the soul is tottering. So it is the soul that must be treated: from it come our thoughts, from it our words, from it our bearing, our expression, our walk. When the soul is sound and strong, the style too is sturdy, forceful, manly; if the soul goes down, the rest follows it into the wreckage.
While the king is safe, one mind is in them all:
Our king is the soul. While it is safe, the rest stay at their posts, obey, comply; when it wavers a little, they all hesitate together. And once it has surrendered to pleasure, its skills and its actions wither too, and every effort comes from something limp and sagging.
Since I have used this comparison, I will keep it going. Our soul is now a king, now a tyrant: a king when it keeps its eyes on what is honorable, cares for the health of the body entrusted to it, and gives it no base or squalid orders; but when it is uncontrolled, greedy, pampered, it crosses over into that hateful and dreadful name and becomes a tyrant. Then unbridled passions seize it and press hard; at first it enjoys this, the way a mob does, stuffed to no purpose with a handout that will hurt it, pawing what it cannot swallow. But as the disease eats deeper and deeper into its strength, and the indulgences sink into marrow and sinew, it takes pleasure in the sight of those for whom its own excessive greed has left it useless; in place of its own pleasures it has the spectacle of other people's, purveyor and witness of appetites whose use it destroyed by overfeeding them. It finds it less sweet to have delights in abundance than bitter that it cannot push the whole spread through its own gullet and belly, that it cannot roll about with the whole crowd of catamites and women; it grieves that a great part of its happiness sits idle, shut out by the narrowness of a body. For is this not madness, my Lucilius — that not one of us reflects that he is mortal, not one that he is weak? Or rather, that not one of us reflects that he is a single man? Look at our kitchens, the cooks scurrying among so many fires: do you suppose it is for a single belly that food is prepared with all that uproar? Look at our wine-cellars, our storehouses filled with the vintages of many generations: do you suppose it is for a single belly that the wines of so many consulships and regions are locked away? Look at how many places the earth is turned, how many thousands of tenant farmers plough and dig: do you suppose it is for a single belly that crops are sown in Sicily and in Africa alike? We shall be sane, and our desires modest, if each man counts himself as one, and takes the measure of his body at the same time, and learns how little it can hold, and for how short a time. Yet nothing will do you so much good toward moderation in everything as frequent reflection on the shortness of life, and on its uncertainty: whatever you do, keep death in view. Farewell.

======== Letter 115 ========

[1] I don't want you to be too anxious about words and phrasing, my dear Lucilius; I have bigger things for you to worry about. Look for what to write, not how to write it, and even that not so you can write it but so you can feel it, so that what you have felt becomes more your own, so to speak sealed to you. [2] Whenever you see a man's speech anxious and overpolished, know that his mind too is occupied with trifles. A great man speaks more relaxed and more assured; whatever he says carries more confidence than care. You know the type: dapper young men, glossy in beard and hair, groomed head to toe from a toilet case. Expect nothing brave from them, nothing solid. Speech is the dress of the mind: if it is trimmed close, painted, handmade, it shows that the mind too is not sincere and has something broken in it. Studied elegance is not a manly ornament. [3] If we were allowed to look into the mind of a good man, oh what a beautiful face we would see, how holy, how radiant with something magnificent and calm—justice shining from one side, courage from another, temperance and prudence from still others! Beyond these, frugality and self-control and endurance and generosity and courtesy, and—who would believe it?—that rare good in a human being, humanity, would pour their own splendor over it. Then foresight paired with refinement, and out of these greatness of soul standing out above the rest—good gods, how much beauty, how much weight and gravity they would add to it! What authority it would carry, and with what grace! No one who called it lovable would fail also to call it worthy of reverence. [4] If someone were to see this face, loftier and more radiant than what we are used to seeing among human beings, would he not stop short, dumbstruck, as if he had met a god, and pray silently that it be permitted to have seen it, then, drawn out by the very kindness of its expression, worship and beg it—and after gazing long at something so far above and beyond the measure of what we're used to seeing among ourselves, its eyes gentle yet still burning with a living fire, would he not then, awestruck and afraid, utter that line of our Virgil?
"Oh, what shall I call you, maiden? For your face is not
mortal, nor does your voice sound human . . .
be gracious, and lighten whatever this burden of ours may be."
It will come and lighten it, if we are willing to honor it. And it is honored not by slaughtering bulls with rich bodies, not by gold and silver hung up as offerings, not by coins poured into treasuries, but by a devoted and upright will. [6] No one, I say, would fail to burn with love for it if it were granted us to see it; but as things stand, many things get in the way and either dazzle our sight with too much brightness or hold it back in obscurity. But if, just as the sight of the eyes can be sharpened and cleared by certain remedies, we are willing likewise to free the sight of the mind from its obstructions, we will be able to make out virtue even when it is buried under a body, even when poverty stands in its way, even when lowliness and disgrace lie across its path; we will see, I say, that beauty however covered over with squalor. [7] And conversely we will just as clearly make out wickedness and the sluggishness of a wretched soul, however much the great glitter of gleaming riches gets in the way, however much the false light of honors on one side and of great power on the other batters the onlooker's gaze. [8] Then we will be able to understand how contemptible are the things we marvel at—very like children, to whom every toy is a treasure; children, after all, prefer trinkets bought for small change to their parents, and no less to their brothers and sisters. What difference is there, then, between us and them, as Ariston says, except that we go mad over paintings and statues, being fools at greater expense? Smooth pebbles found on the shore and having some pattern to them delight children; we are delighted by the streaked marble of huge columns, whether brought from the sands of Egypt or the wastes of Africa, that hold up some colonnade or a banquet hall big enough for a crowd. [9] We marvel at walls faced with a thin layer of marble, though we know well enough what lies hidden behind it. We deceive our own eyes, and when we have drenched a ceiling in gold, what are we enjoying except a lie? For we know that under that gold ugly timber lurks. Nor is it only walls or paneled ceilings that get this thin veneer of ornament: the prosperity of all those you see walking tall is gilt foil. Look closer, and you will see how much rot lies beneath that thin skin of dignity. [10] This very thing that keeps so many magistrates and so many judges busy, that makes both magistrates and judges—money—ever since it began to be honored, the true honor of things has fallen, and, turned merchants and things for sale in turn, we ask not what a thing is but what it costs; for a price we are dutiful, for a price undutiful, and we pursue honest things only as long as some hope remains in them, ready to cross over to the opposite if crimes promise more. [11] Our parents instilled in us admiration for gold and silver, and the greed poured into us as children settled deeper and grew along with us. Then the whole populace, divided on everything else, agrees on this: this is what they look up to, this is what they wish for their own, this is what they consecrate to the gods as the greatest of human things, when they want to seem grateful. In the end our morals have been reduced to the point where poverty is a curse and a reproach, despised by the rich, hated by the poor. [12] Then come the poets' songs, which put a torch to our passions, in which riches are praised as the one and only glory and ornament of life. The immortal gods, it seems, can neither give anything better nor possess anything better.
"The palace of the Sun stood high on towering columns,
its axle was gold, gold its pole, golden the curve
of the topmost wheel-rim, and silver the row of spokes."
In the end, whatever age they want to seem best, they call the Golden Age. [14] Nor are the Greek tragedians short of examples of men who would trade innocence, safety, and good repute for profit.
"Let me be called the worst of men, so long as I am called rich.
Everyone asks whether a man is rich, no one whether he is good.
People ask only what you have, never how or from where.
Everywhere a man is worth exactly as much as he has.
You ask what it would be shameful for us to own? Nothing.
Either let me live rich, or die poor.
Whoever dies while making a profit dies well.
Money, that vast good of the human race,
no pleasure of a mother, no pleasure of an endearing child
can equal it, nor a father sacred for his merits;
if there is anything so sweet flashing in the face of Venus,
it rightly stirs the loves of gods and men alike."
[15] When these last lines were delivered in a tragedy of Euripides, the whole audience rose as one to drive out both the actor and the poem, until Euripides himself leapt into their midst begging them to wait and see what end this admirer of gold would come to. In that play Bellerophon was paying the penalty that every man like him pays. [16] For there is no greed without its penalty, even though the greed itself is punishment enough. Oh, how many tears, how much toil it demands! How wretched it is to want what one lacks, how wretched to have gotten it! Add to this the daily anxieties that torment each man in proportion to what he owns. Money is possessed with greater torment than it is sought. How people groan over their losses, losses that are both real and made to seem larger than they are! In the end, even if fortune takes nothing away from them, whatever is not gained counts as a loss. [17] 'But people call that man happy and rich, and they want to match what he has.' I admit it. Well then? Do you think there is any condition worse than that of people who have both misery and envy? If only those who are about to wish for riches would first talk it over with the rich; if only those about to seek office would talk with the ambitious and with those who have reached the highest rank of honor! Surely they would have changed their prayers, whereas as things stand these men take up new wishes even as they have already condemned their earlier ones. For there is no one whose happiness satisfies him, even if it came to him quickly; people complain about their own plans and their own progress, and they always prefer whatever they have left behind. [18] And so this is what philosophy will give you—and I think nothing greater exists: you will never regret being yourself. Neatly woven words and smoothly flowing speech will not lead you to this happiness, so solid that no storm can shake it; let words go where they will, so long as the mind's own composure holds firm, so long as it is great and untroubled by opinion, pleased with itself for the very things that displease others, a mind that measures its progress by its life and judges that it knows just as much as it does not desire and does not fear. Farewell.

======== Letter 116 ========

[1] The question has often been raised whether it is better to have moderate feelings or none at all. Our school expels them; the Peripatetics moderate them. I do not see how any moderate amount of a disease can be healthy or useful. Don't be alarmed: I am not taking away anything you don't want to be denied. I will be easy and indulgent about the things you are aiming at, the things you consider necessary, useful, or pleasant in life; I will only remove the defect. For once I have forbidden you to crave, I will allow you to want, so that you may do those same things fearlessly, with a steadier purpose, and feel the pleasures themselves more fully—why should they not reach you more when you command them than when you are their slave? [2] 'But it's natural,' you say, 'for me to be tormented by longing for a friend: grant tears that fall so justly their due. It's natural to be affected by people's opinions and saddened by hostile ones: why not allow me this fear, so honorable, of a bad reputation?' There is no vice without its defense; every vice has a modest and persuadable beginning, but from there it spreads far wider. You will not manage to make it stop once you have allowed it to begin. [3] Every passion is weak at first; then it works itself up and gathers strength as it goes: it is easier to shut it out than to drive it out. Who denies that every passion flows from some starting point that is, in a sense, natural? Nature entrusted to us care for ourselves, but once you indulge this too much, it becomes a vice. Nature mixed pleasure in with necessary things, not so that we would pursue pleasure itself, but so that the addition of pleasure would make more welcome to us the things without which we cannot live; once it comes in its own right, claiming its own authority, it is excess. So let us resist things at the point of entry, since, as I said, it is easier for them not to be let in than to be sent out again. [4] 'Allow me,' you say, 'to grieve a little, to fear a little.' But that 'a little' stretches out far, and does not stop where you want it to. For the wise man it is safe not to watch himself anxiously; he can halt his tears and his pleasures wherever he wishes; for us, since it is not easy to turn back, the best course is not to advance at all. [5] I think Panaetius answered elegantly a young man who asked whether the wise man would fall in love. 'As for the wise man,' he said, 'we shall see; as for you and me, who are still far from wise, we must not risk falling into something so disturbed, so out of control, so subject to another's will, so worthless in its own eyes. For if the beloved responds to us, we are provoked by her kindness; if she scorns us, we are set on fire by pride. Love's easiness harms as much as its difficulty: we are captured by easiness, we struggle against difficulty. And so, conscious of our own weakness, let us stay still; let us not entrust a mind already frail to wine, or to beauty, or to flattery, or to anything else that draws us on with soft coaxing.' [6] What Panaetius answered the young man about love, I say about all the passions: as far as we can, let us step back from slippery ground; even on dry ground we hardly stand firm enough.
[7] Here you will meet me with that common objection people make against the Stoics: 'Your promises are too grand, your rules too harsh. We are only little people; we cannot deny ourselves everything. We will grieve, but only a little; we will desire, but in moderation; we will grow angry, but we will be calmed.' [8] Do you know why we cannot manage this? Because we do not believe we can. No, by god, the truth is something else: we defend our vices because we love them, and we would rather make excuses for them than shake them off. Nature has given man strength enough, if only we use it, if we gather our powers and turn them wholly to our own defense, and certainly not against ourselves. Unwillingness is the real cause; incapacity is only the pretext. Farewell.

======== Letter 117 ========

[1] You're going to give me a great deal of trouble, and without knowing it you're pushing me into a serious dispute and a real headache, by asking me such little questions—the kind where I can neither disagree with our own school without losing its goodwill, nor agree with it without losing my own conscience. You ask whether it's true, as the Stoics hold, that wisdom is a good but being wise is not a good. First I'll set out what the Stoics think; then I'll dare to state my own opinion.
[2] Our school holds that whatever is good is a body, because whatever is good acts, and whatever acts is a body. What is good benefits us; but to benefit, it must do something; if it does something, it is a body. They say wisdom is a good; it follows that they must also say it is corporeal. [3] But they don't think that being wise belongs to the same category. It is incorporeal, an accident of something else—namely of wisdom—and so it neither does anything nor benefits anything. 'What then,' someone says, 'don't we say that being wise is good?' We do say it, but referring it back to the thing it depends on, that is, to wisdom itself.
[4] Hear now what others say against this position, before I myself step aside and take a seat on the other side. 'In that case,' they say, 'living happily is not a good either. Like it or not, you'll have to say that the happy life is a good but living happily is not a good.' [5] And here is another objection raised against our school: 'You want to be wise; therefore being wise is something to be sought; if it is to be sought, it is good.' Our people are forced to twist their words and insert one syllable into 'to be sought' that ordinary speech won't allow. I'll insert it myself, if you'll permit me. 'What must be sought,' they say, 'is what is good; what is worth having is what falls to us once we have attained the good. It isn't sought as a good in itself, but it accompanies the good once sought.'
[6] I don't agree, and I judge that our people fall into this position only because they're already bound by their first premise and aren't allowed to change their formula. We generally give great weight to what everyone assumes, and among us it counts as evidence of truth that something seems so to everyone; for instance, we conclude that the gods exist partly from the fact that the notion of gods is implanted in everyone, and there is no nation anywhere so cast outside law and custom that it doesn't believe in some gods. When we discuss the eternity of souls, the agreement of humankind—whether fearing the underworld or worshipping it—carries no small weight with us. I use that same common conviction here: you will not find anyone who doesn't think both wisdom and being wise are good.
[7] I won't do what the defeated usually do and appeal to the crowd; let's begin fighting with our own weapons instead. Whatever happens to someone—is it outside the one it happens to, or in that one? If it is in the one to whom it happens, it is as much a body as that one is. For nothing can happen without contact, and whatever makes contact is a body; nothing can happen without action, and whatever acts is a body. If it is outside, then once it has happened it has withdrawn; whatever has withdrawn has motion; whatever has motion is a body. [8] You expect me to say next that running is no different from a race, or being warm no different from heat, or shining no different from light. I grant that these are different things, but not of a different order. If health is indifferent, then being healthy is indifferent too; if beauty is indifferent, so is being beautiful. If justice is a good, so is being just; if baseness is an evil, then being base is an evil too—just as surely as, if bleary eyes are an evil, having bleary eyes is an evil. So you can see that neither can exist without the other: whoever is wise, is wise; whoever is wise, is wise. It is so far beyond doubt that the one is exactly like the other that some people think the two are one and the same thing. [9] But I would gladly ask this: since everything is either bad, good, or indifferent, which category does being wise fall into? They deny it is a good; it is certainly not an evil; it follows that it is a middling thing. But we call something middling and indifferent when it can befall the bad just as much as the good—like money, beauty, high birth. But this—being wise—cannot befall anyone except a good person; therefore it is not indifferent. And yet it is not an evil either, since it cannot befall a bad person; therefore it is a good. Whatever only a good person has is good; being wise is had only by the good; therefore it is good. [10] 'It's an accident,' they say, 'of wisdom.' Very well—this thing you call being wise: does it produce wisdom, or is it produced by it? Whichever way it goes, either way it is a body; for both what is made and what makes are bodies. If it's a body, it's a good; for the only thing keeping it from being good was its supposed incorporeality.
[11] The Peripatetics hold that there is no difference between wisdom and being wise, since each implies the other. Do you think anyone is wise unless he possesses wisdom? Do you think anyone who is wise fails to possess wisdom? [12] The old dialecticians drew this distinction, and it passed down from them to the Stoics. Let me explain what it is. A field is one thing, having a field another—why not, since having a field belongs to the one who has it, not to the field itself. So too wisdom is one thing, being wise another. I think you'll grant that these are two things: the thing possessed, and the one who possesses it. Wisdom is possessed; the wise person possesses it. Wisdom is a mind brought to perfection, or to its highest and best state; for it is the art of living. What is being wise? I can't call it 'a perfect mind,' but rather that which befalls the one who has a perfect mind; so one thing is a good mind, and another is, so to speak, having a good mind.
[13] 'There are,' they say, 'natures of bodies—this is a man, this is a horse; and these are then followed by movements of the mind that express those bodies in statements. These have a certain property of their own, separate from bodies—for instance, I see Cato walking: the senses show this, the mind believes it. What I see is a body, on which both my eyes and my mind are fixed. Then I say: Cato is walking. What I am now saying is not a body,' they say, 'but a kind of statement about a body, which some call an utterance, others a proposition, others a saying. So when we say "wisdom," we understand something corporeal; when we say "he is wise," we are speaking about the body. There's a great difference between naming a thing and speaking about it.'
[14] Let's suppose for now that these are two distinct things (I haven't yet declared my own view): what's to stop the one from being distinct yet nonetheless a good? I said a moment ago that a field is one thing, having a field another. Why not? For the one who has it and the thing had exist in different natures: the one is land, the other a person. But in the case we're discussing, both share the same nature—both the one who has wisdom and wisdom itself. [15] Moreover, in the first case the thing possessed is one thing and the possessor another; here the possessor and the thing possessed are one and the same. A field is possessed by legal right, wisdom by nature; the field can be alienated and handed over to another, wisdom never leaves its owner. So there's no basis for comparing things so unlike each other.
I had begun to say that these two things could exist and both still be good, just as wisdom and the wise person are two things and you concede that each is good. Just as nothing prevents both wisdom and the one who possesses wisdom from being good, so nothing prevents both wisdom and possessing wisdom—that is, being wise—from being good. [16] I want to be wise precisely so that I may be wise. What then? Is that not a good, without which the other is not a good either? You yourselves say that wisdom, if given without any use, would not be worth accepting. What is the use of wisdom? Being wise: this is the most precious thing in it, and take it away and wisdom becomes worthless. If torments are evils, then being tormented is an evil—so much so that torments would not be evils at all if you removed what follows from them. Wisdom is the settled state of a perfected mind; being wise is the exercise of a perfected mind. How can the exercise of something fail to be good, when that thing is not good at all without its exercise? [17] I ask you whether wisdom is to be sought: you admit it is. I ask whether the exercise of wisdom is to be sought: you admit that too. For you say you would not accept wisdom if you were forbidden to use it. Whatever is to be sought is good. Being wise is the exercise of wisdom, just as speaking is the exercise of eloquence, and seeing the exercise of eyes. So being wise is the exercise of wisdom, and the exercise of wisdom is to be sought; therefore being wise is to be sought; and if it is to be sought, it is good.
[18] But I've long since condemned myself, imitating the very people I'm accusing, spending words on something obvious. Who can doubt that if heat is an evil, then being hot is an evil; if cold is an evil, then being cold is an evil; if life is a good, then living is a good? All these questions circle around wisdom without touching its core; but we ought to dwell in its core. [19] Even if one feels like wandering off, wisdom offers wide and spacious excursions: let us ask about the nature of the gods, about the nourishment of the stars, about the varied courses of the constellations—whether our own movements are moved by theirs, whether the impulse behind all bodies and souls comes from that source, and whether even the things we call accidental are in fact bound by fixed law, so that nothing in this universe tumbles along at random or outside order. These questions have already moved away from the shaping of character, but they lift the mind and raise it to the grandeur of the very things they deal with; whereas the questions I was just discussing shrink and depress the mind, and, contrary to what you suppose, don't sharpen it but thin it out. [20] I beg you—shall we spend, on some question that is perhaps false and certainly useless, the same careful attention we owe to greater and better things? What good will it do me to know whether wisdom is one thing and being wise another? What good will it do me to know that the one is good and the other not? Let me be reckless, let me risk this wager: may wisdom fall to you, and being wise to me. We'll come out even. [21] Better that you show me the road that leads to these things. Tell me what I should avoid, what I should pursue, what studies will steady my wavering mind, how I can drive off the things that strike and harass me from the side, how I can hold my own against so many misfortunes, how I can get rid of the disasters that have burst in upon me, and how to deal with those I've burst in upon myself. Teach me how to bear hardship without groaning and prosperity without another's resentment, and how not to wait for the final, inevitable release but to make my own escape, whenever I judge the moment right. [22] Nothing seems to me more shameful than wishing for death. For if you want to live, why do you wish to die? And if you don't want to live, why ask the gods for what they already gave you at birth? That you will die at some point is settled even against your will; that you may die when you wish is in your own hands. The one is necessary; the other is permitted.
[23] I recently read—shamefully, by heaven—the opening of an otherwise eloquent man's work: 'And so,' he says, 'may I die as soon as possible.' Madman, you're wishing for something already yours! 'And so may I die as soon as possible'—perhaps you grew old repeating those very words; otherwise, what's the holdup? No one is holding you back: escape by whatever route you like; choose any part of nature you please and order it to provide you an exit. These, after all, are the very elements that govern this universe—water, earth, air—all of them causes of living just as much as roads to death. [24] 'And so may I die as soon as possible': what do you mean by 'as soon as possible'? What day are you setting for it? It can happen sooner than you're wishing for. These are the words of a feeble mind, wheedling for pity with this kind of curse: whoever merely wishes for death does not truly want to die. Ask the gods for life and health; if you've decided to die, this is the reward death offers—that you get to stop wishing for it.
[25] These are the things we should be handling, my dear Lucilius, these the things that should shape our minds. This is wisdom, this is being wise—not chasing after empty little disputes with a hollow subtlety. Fortune has set you so many real questions, and you haven't yet solved them—and already you're quibbling over trifles? How foolish, to be polishing your sword once the signal for battle has sounded. Put down these toy weapons; you need the real, decisive ones. Tell me how no sorrow, no dread, may disturb my mind, how I can pour out this weight of secret desires. Let's get something done. [26] 'Wisdom is a good, being wise is not a good': this is how we end up denying that we are wise at all, how this whole pursuit gets mocked as busywork over trifles.
What if you knew that people also debate whether future wisdom is a good? For is there any doubt, I ask you, that the granary doesn't yet feel the harvest to come, nor does childhood, for all its strength or vigor, sense the adulthood that is coming? Meanwhile, future health does the sick man no good at all, any more than rest, still many months away, refreshes the man who is right now running and struggling. [27] Who doesn't know that the very fact something is future means it is not yet good? For whatever is good must be of benefit, and only what is present can be of benefit. If it doesn't benefit, it isn't good; if it does benefit, it already exists. I will be wise one day; this will be a good once it happens; meanwhile it is not. Something must first exist before it can have a particular quality. [28] How, I ask you, can something that is as yet nothing already be good? And how could you want better proof that a thing doesn't exist than by saying 'it is going to exist'? For clearly what is coming has not yet arrived. Spring is coming: I know that means it's winter now. Summer is coming: I know that means it isn't summer yet. I have the strongest proof that what is future is not yet present. [29] I hope to be wise, but meanwhile I am not wise; if I already had that good, I would already be free of this evil. That I will one day be wise is proof enough that I am not wise yet. I cannot be in that good and in this evil at the same time; the two do not meet, and evil and good are not both present in the same person at once.
[30] Let's hurry past these clever trifles and rush toward the things that can actually help us. No one who's anxiously calling a midwife for his laboring daughter stops to read through the festival edict and the order of the games; no one running toward his burning house pauses to check a game board to see how a trapped piece might escape. [31] But by heaven, news comes pouring in on you from every side—your house on fire, your children in danger, your homeland under siege, your property being plundered—add to that shipwrecks, earthquakes, and whatever else is frightening; and in the middle of all that, distracted by nothing but things meant to amuse the mind, do you have leisure to spare? You ask what the difference is between wisdom and being wise? You're tying and untying knots while such a weight hangs over your head? [32] Nature has not given us so generous and free a stretch of time that we can afford to waste any of it. And see how much even the most careful people lose: illness takes some of it from each of us, the illness of our loved ones takes more; necessary business takes some, public duties take more; sleep divides our life with us. Out of this span of time, so narrow, so swift, so busy carrying us away—what good does it do to spend the greater part of it on nonsense? [33] Add to this that the mind grows used to entertaining itself rather than healing itself, and turns philosophy into amusement when it is meant to be medicine. I don't know what the difference is between wisdom and being wise—but I do know it makes no difference to me whether I know that or not. Tell me: once I've learned what the difference between wisdom and being wise is, will I then be wise? Why then do you keep me stuck among the vocabulary of wisdom rather than among its actual works? Make me braver, make me more secure, make me a match for fortune, make me its master. And I can be its master, if I direct everything I learn toward that one end. Farewell.

======== Letter 118 ========

(1) You demand that I write more often. Let's compare accounts: you won't be able to pay off the balance. It was agreed, in fact, that yours would come first: you would write, and I would write back. But I won't be difficult about it: I know I can trust you. So I'll give you an advance, though I won't go so far as Cicero, that most eloquent of men, tells Atticus to do — namely, to write whatever comes into his mouth even if he has nothing to say. (2) I can never lack something to write about, even leaving aside all the things that fill Cicero's letters: which candidate is struggling; who is fighting with someone else's resources and who with his own; who is standing for the consulship on Caesar's backing, who on Pompey's, who on the strength of his money-chest; how harsh a moneylender Caecilius is, from whom even his relatives can't pry a single coin at less than twelve percent. It's better to handle one's own troubles than other people's — to shake oneself out and see how many things one is a candidate for, without ever casting a vote for oneself. (3) This, my dear Lucilius, is the outstanding thing, the safe and free thing: to seek nothing, and to pass by the whole electoral assembly of fortune. How pleasant do you think it is, when the tribes have been called and the candidates hang about their little shrines, one man announcing coins for votes, another working through a go-between, another wearing out with kisses the hands of men who, once elected, will refuse to let their hand be touched — while everyone waits breathless for the herald's voice — how pleasant to stand there at leisure and simply watch that market, buying nothing and selling nothing? (4) How much greater is the joy of the man who looks on undisturbed not at the elections for a praetorship or a consulship, but at those great elections in which some seek offices renewed yearly, others permanent powers, others successful outcomes of wars and triumphs, others riches, others marriages and children, others their own safety and that of their families! What greatness of spirit it takes to seek nothing at all, to beg no one, and to say, 'I want nothing from you, Fortune; I won't put myself at your disposal. I know that with you the Catos are turned away and the Vatiniuses are made consul. I ask for nothing.' This is how you make fortune your own private property. (5) So we may write such things to each other in turn, and this subject will never be exhausted, since there are so many thousands of restless people to look around at, who, in order to get hold of something pestilential, struggle through evil toward evil and pursue things they will soon have to flee, or even come to despise. (6) For who, once he has attained it, has ever found enough in what, while he was still wanting it, seemed like too much? Prosperity is not, as people suppose, greedy — it is petty; and so it satisfies no one. You believe those heights to be lofty because you are lying far below them; but to the man who has actually reached them, they are lowly. I'm lying if he isn't still trying to climb further: what you think is the summit is only a rung on the ladder. (7) Everyone, though, is plagued by ignorance of the truth. Deceived by rumor, people are carried toward what seem like goods; then, once they've attained them, they see that these are bad, or empty, or smaller than they had hoped, and they have suffered a great deal in the process. And most people marvel, from a distance, at things that deceive them — and in the popular view, goods are measured by their size.
(8) So that this doesn't happen to us as well, let's ask what the good actually is. Its definition has varied; different people have expressed it differently. Some define it this way: 'The good is what invites the mind, what calls it to itself.' To this the objection immediately arises: what if it invites, yes, but toward ruin? You know how many bad things are alluring. But the true and the plausible are different from each other. So what is good is bound up with the true; nothing is good unless it is true. But what invites and entices toward itself is merely plausible: it creeps in, stirs, and draws one along. (9) Others have defined it this way: 'The good is what arouses the desire for itself, or what arouses the impulse of a mind reaching toward it.' And the same objection applies to this too, for many things arouse the mind's impulse which are sought to the detriment of those seeking them. Better are those who defined it this way: 'The good is what arouses the mind's impulse toward itself in accordance with nature, and is only then to be sought once it has begun to be worth seeking.' Now it is also honorable — for this is what is perfectly worth seeking. (10) The subject itself prompts me to say what the difference is between the good and the honorable. They have something mixed together and inseparable: nothing can be good unless it has some honor in it, and whatever is honorable is certainly good. What, then, is the difference between the two? The honorable is the perfect good, by which a happy life is completed, and by contact with which other things too become good. (11) What I mean is this: there are certain things that are neither good nor bad — such as military service, an embassy, a judgeship. When these are administered honorably, they begin to be good, and pass from being uncertain into being good. The good comes into being through association with the honorable; the honorable is good in itself. The good flows from the honorable; the honorable stems from itself. What is good could have been bad; what is honorable could not have failed to be good.
(12) Some have offered this definition: 'The good is what is in accordance with nature.' Pay attention to what I'm about to say: what is good is in accordance with nature; but it doesn't follow that whatever is in accordance with nature is also good. Many things are indeed in agreement with nature, but they are so trivial that the name of 'good' doesn't suit them; they are slight, contemptible. But no good, however small, is contemptible; for as long as it is trifling, it isn't good — once it has begun to be good, it is no longer trifling. How, then, is the good recognized? If it is perfectly in accordance with nature. (13) 'You admit,' you say, 'that the good is in accordance with nature — that this is its defining property. You also admit that other things are indeed in accordance with nature but are not good. How, then, is the one good while the other is not, when the trait each shares in common, being in accordance with nature, is the very same?'
(14) Simply by its magnitude, of course. And there's nothing new in this — that certain things change by growing. A child was once an infant; he becomes a youth: his defining trait changes, for the one is irrational, the other rational. Some things, through growth, don't merely become greater but become something else. (15) 'What becomes greater,' you say, 'doesn't become something else. It makes no difference whether you fill a flask or a cask with wine: in either case the property is wine. And a small weight of honey and a large one don't differ in taste.' You're giving mismatched examples: in those cases the quality stays the same; however much it increases, it remains what it was. (16) But some things, when magnified, persist within their own kind and their own defining property; others, after many increments, are finally transformed by the last addition, which stamps upon them a new and different condition from the one they were in. A single stone makes an arch — the one that wedges the leaning sides and, by its interposition, binds them together. Why does the final addition accomplish so much, even though it's a small one? Because it doesn't merely enlarge — it completes. (17) Some things, in the course of a process, shed their earlier form and pass into a new one. When the mind has extended something for a long time and, wearied from tracking its magnitude, has begun to call it infinite — that has become something quite different from what it was when it merely seemed large but finite. In the same way, we once thought some things were hard to cut; as this difficulty kept increasing, we finally found something that couldn't be cut at all. So we proceeded from what moved only with difficulty and effort to what is immovable. By the same reasoning, something was once merely in accordance with nature: its own magnitude transferred it into a different property and made it good. Farewell.

======== Letter 119 ========

(1) Whenever I've discovered something, I don't wait for you to say 'share it': I tell myself first. You ask what it is I've discovered? Open your pocket wide — it's pure profit. I'll teach you how you can become rich as quickly as possible. How badly you want to hear this! And not without reason: I'm going to lead you by a shortcut to the greatest riches. You'll need a creditor, though: in order to do business, you have to take on debt — but I don't want you borrowing through a middleman, and I don't want brokers throwing your name around. (2) I'll provide you a ready creditor, the one Cato spoke of: you'll borrow from yourself. However little it is, it will be enough, provided that whatever is lacking we ask from ourselves. For it makes no difference at all, my dear Lucilius, whether you don't want something or whether you have it. The bottom line is the same in both cases: you won't be tormented. And I'm not telling you to deny nature anything — she is stubborn, she can't be beaten, she demands what's hers — but only that you recognize that whatever exceeds nature is a matter of borrowed time, not necessity.
(3) I'm hungry: I have to eat. Whether the bread is coarse or fine wheat makes no difference to nature: nature doesn't want the stomach delighted, only filled. I'm thirsty: whether the water is what I've drawn from the nearest pool or what I've chilled with a great deal of snow so that it's cooled by borrowed cold, makes no difference to nature. Nature demands only one thing — that thirst be quenched; whether the cup is gold or crystal or myrrhine glass, or a Tiburtine goblet, or the cupped hollow of your hand, makes no difference. (4) Look to the end of all things, and you'll cast off what's superfluous. Hunger calls out to me: let my hand reach for whatever is nearest; hunger itself will recommend to me whatever I manage to grasp. A hungry man scorns nothing. (5) You ask, then, what it is that has delighted me? It seems to me splendidly said: 'The wise man is the keenest seeker of natural riches.' 'You're giving me an empty dish,' you say. 'What is this? I had already prepared my money-bags; I was looking around for what sea I might launch into as a trader, what public contract I might pursue, what merchandise I might import.'
That's a trick — teaching poverty when you've promised riches. 'Do you really judge as poor a man who lacks nothing?' 'Only,' you say, 'thanks to his own resources and his patience, not thanks to fortune.' So you refuse to call him rich for the very reason that his riches cannot come to an end? (6) Which would you rather have — a great deal, or enough? The man who has a great deal wants more, which is proof that he doesn't yet have enough; the man who has enough has attained something that a rich man never attains: an endpoint. Or do you think these aren't real riches just because no one was ever proscribed on their account? Because no son ever poisoned anyone, no wife ever poisoned anyone, for the sake of them? Because they're safe in war? Because they're untroubled in peace? Because having them isn't dangerous and arranging them isn't laborious?
(7) 'But he has too little who merely doesn't feel cold, doesn't feel hunger, doesn't feel thirst.' Jupiter has no more than that. What is enough is never too little, and what isn't enough is never a great deal. After defeating Darius and the Indians, Alexander is poor. Am I lying? He keeps searching for something to make his own, scours unknown seas, sends new fleets into the ocean, and, so to speak, breaks through the very barriers of the world. What is enough for nature is not enough for man. (8) There was found a man who craved something even after having everything: such is the blindness of minds, such is each person's forgetfulness of his own starting point once he's advanced beyond it. That man, once — not without dispute — the lord of some obscure corner of land, having touched the boundary of the earth, is gloomy as he prepares to return through his own realm. (9) Money has never made anyone rich; on the contrary, it has only ever driven each person's own greed to a greater pitch. You ask what the reason for this is? The man who has more begins to be able to have still more. In short, you may drag out into the open, if you like, any of those men whose names are counted alongside Crassus and Licinus; let him bring forward his entire estate, add up all he has and all he hopes for at once: that man, if you believe me, is poor — if you believe himself, he merely could be. (10) But the man who has fitted himself to what nature demands is not only beyond any sense of poverty, but beyond the fear of it. Yet, so that you may know how hard it is to bring one's affairs down to nature's proper measure, even this man whom we've pared down, whom you call poor, still has something superfluous. (11) But wealth blinds the crowd and draws attention to itself if a great deal of coined money is carried out of some house, if a great deal of gold is smeared even on its roof, if the household staff is chosen for their looks or notable for their dress. The prosperity of all such people looks outward, toward the public; but the man whom we've withdrawn from both the crowd and from fortune is happy on the inside. (12) As for those in whom the false name of riches has settled upon an occupied poverty, they possess riches the way we're said to have a fever, when in fact the fever has us. Just as we're accustomed to say, on the other hand, 'a fever holds him,' so it should be said, 'riches hold him.' So there's nothing I would rather have advised you than this — though no one is ever advised enough of it — that you measure all things by natural desires, which can be satisfied either for free or for very little: only don't mix vices in with your desires. (13) You ask with what kind of table, what kind of silverware, with how matched and light-footed a staff your food ought to be served? Nature desires nothing beyond the food itself.
'When thirst scorches your throat, do you go looking for a golden cup? When you're hungry, do you turn up your nose at everything except—'
(14) Hunger is not ambitious; it's content to come to an end — it doesn't much care how it ends. Those are the torments of unhappy luxury: it looks for ways to be hungry again even after being full, ways not to fill the stomach but to stuff it, ways to reawaken a thirst already quenched by the first drink. Horace says it excellently, denying that it matters to thirst from what cup, or by how elegant a hand, the water is served. For if you judge it matters to you how curly-haired the boy is and how clear the cup that hands it to you, then you aren't thirsty.
(15) Among its other gifts, nature has granted us this outstanding one: it has stripped fastidiousness away from necessity. Superfluous things admit of preference: 'this isn't quite fitting, that isn't quite elegant, this offends my eyes.' But the founder of this world, who laid down for us the terms of living, arranged things so that we might be safe, not so that we might be pampered: everything needed for safety is ready and at hand, while everything needed for indulgence is procured miserably and with great anxiety. (16) Let's make use, then, of this gift of nature, counting it among the great things, and let's reflect that nature has deserved well of us on no other ground more than this: that whatever is required out of necessity is obtained without any distaste. Farewell.

======== Letter 120 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Your letter wandered through several little questions, but it settled on one and wants that one worked out: how did the notion of the good and the honorable first come to us? Among others these two are different things; with us they are only divided. What do I mean by that? Some people think the good is simply what is useful. So they apply that name to wealth as well, and to a horse, a wine, a shoe; among them the good sinks to something so cheap that it descends all the way to the sordid. The honorable, they think, is whatever answers to a rational sense of duty — a pious care for an aging father, help given to a friend's poverty, a brave campaign, a wise and measured judgment. We do make that same distinction, but out of a single thing.
Nothing is good unless it is honorable; and whatever is honorable is certainly good. I judge it unnecessary to add what the difference between these is, since I have often said it. I will say just this one thing: nothing seems good to us that a person can also put to bad use — and you see how many people put wealth, high birth, and strength to bad use. So now let me come back to what you want discussed: how did the first notion of the good and the honorable reach us? Nature could not teach us this: she gave us the seeds of knowledge, not knowledge itself. Some say we stumbled upon the notion — which is hard to believe, that the appearance of virtue fell to anyone by chance. It seems to us instead that observation gathered it, and the frequent comparison of one thing done with another; our people judge both the honorable and the good by analogy. Since Latin grammarians have granted that word citizenship, I do not think it should be condemned — rather, it should be brought fully into its own city. So I will use it not merely as accepted but as customary. Let me tell you what this analogy is. We knew bodily health: from this we conceived that there is some health of the mind as well. We knew bodily strength: from this we gathered that there is a strength of mind too. Certain kind acts, certain humane ones, certain brave ones had struck us with wonder — we began to admire these as though they were perfect. There were, underneath, plenty of flaws that the striking appearance of some deed, its glow, concealed — these we overlooked. Nature bids us magnify what deserves praise, and everyone has carried glory beyond the truth — so from these things we drew our notion of a vast good. Fabricius refused King Pyrrhus's gold, and judged that being able to despise a king's wealth was a greater thing than a kingdom. The same man, when Pyrrhus's own doctor promised to poison his king, warned Pyrrhus to be on his guard against the plot.
It took the same spirit not to be conquered by gold and not to conquer by poison. We admired that enormous man whom neither a king's promises nor promises against a king could bend — a man who held fast to a good example, which is the hardest thing, innocent even in war, who believed that there was such a thing as wrong even against enemies, and who, in the depths of a poverty he had made into his own glory, fled riches exactly as he would flee poison. 'Live, Pyrrhus,' he said, 'by my kindness, and be glad, you who have been grieving all this while, that Fabricius cannot be bought.' Horatius Cocles alone filled the narrow width of the bridge and ordered that his own retreat be cut off from behind him, so long as the enemy's road forward was taken away, and he held off his attackers until, torn loose, the beams crashed down with a great roar. When he looked back and felt, at his own peril, that his country was now out of danger, he said, 'Let whoever wants to, come and follow me on this road,' and flung himself headlong, no less anxious, in that swift channel of the river, to come out armed than to come out alive — and, having kept the honor of his victorious weapons, he returned as safely as if he had come by the bridge. These deeds, and others like them, show us the image of virtue.
I will add something that may perhaps seem strange: sometimes evils have offered the appearance of the honorable, and the best has shone out from its very opposite. For, as you know, vices border on virtues, and even ruined and shameful things bear a resemblance to what is right — so the spendthrift falsely poses as generous, though it matters enormously whether a person knows how to give or simply does not know how to keep. There are many, Lucilius, I tell you, who do not give but throw away; I do not call a man generous who is simply angry at his own money. Carelessness imitates ease, recklessness imitates courage. This resemblance has forced us to pay attention and to distinguish things that are close in appearance but very much at odds in reality. While we were watching those whom some outstanding deed had made conspicuous, we began to notice that a given person had done something with a noble spirit and a great impulse, but only once. We have seen this man brave in war, timid in the forum; bearing poverty with spirit, but disgrace meanly: we praised the deed, and despised the man.
We have seen another kind and generous toward friends, restrained toward enemies, managing both public and private affairs with holiness and care; not lacking patience in what had to be endured, nor good judgment in what had to be done. We have seen him give with a full hand where giving was called for, and where effort was called for, hold firm and press on, lifting his body's weariness with the strength of his mind. Besides this, he was always the same, consistent with himself in every act — no longer good by deliberate choice, but brought by habit to the point where he could not only act rightly but could not act otherwise than rightly. We understood that in him virtue was perfect. We divided this virtue into parts: desires had to be reined in, fears repressed, what must be done foreseen, what is owed distributed fairly — so we gathered together temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice, and gave to each its own proper task. From what, then, did we come to understand virtue? Its order showed it to us, and its grace, and its constancy, and the harmony of all its actions with one another, and a greatness rising above everything else. From this we came to understand that happy life which flows on in an easy course, wholly its own master. How, then, did this itself become clear to us? I will tell you. That perfect man, who had attained virtue, never cursed fortune, never received what befell him with sadness; believing himself a citizen and soldier of the universe, he took up his labors as though they had been ordered of him. Whatever happened to him he did not spurn as an evil, as something dropped on him by chance, but rather as something entrusted to him. 'Whatever this is,' he said, 'it is mine; it is rough, it is hard — let us put our labor into this very thing.'
So he necessarily appeared great, this man who never groaned over misfortunes, never complained of his fate; he made himself understood by many, and shone out exactly like a light in the darkness, and turned everyone's attention onto himself, being at the same time calm and gentle, equally fair to human and to divine affairs. He had a perfect mind, brought to the very summit of itself, above which there is nothing but the mind of god, from which a part has flowed down even into this mortal breast — and that mind is never more divine than when it considers its own mortality, and knows that a human being was born for this, to serve out his life, and that this body is not a home but a lodging, and indeed a brief lodging, one that must be left behind once you see that you have become a burden to your host.
This, my dear Lucilius, is the greatest proof of a mind that comes from a loftier seat: if it judges the things among which it moves to be lowly and confined, if it does not fear to leave them; for one who remembers where he came from knows where he is going to leave for. Do we not see how many troubles harass us, how badly this body suits us? Now we complain of the head, now of the stomach, now of the chest and throat; at one time our nerves torment us, at another our feet; now it is looseness of the bowels, now catarrh; sometimes there is too much blood, sometimes too little — we are attacked and driven out from this side and that. This tends to happen to those living in someone else's house. Yet we, allotted a body so decaying, nonetheless set eternal things before ourselves, and to whatever extent a human lifetime can be stretched out, we fill that whole span with hope, satisfied with no amount of money, no amount of power. What could be more shameless than this, what more foolish? Nothing is enough for people who are going to die — no, who are dying; for every day we stand a little closer to the end, and every hour pushes us toward that place from which we must fall. See in what great blindness our mind lives: this thing I call 'future,' as I speak it, is already happening, and a large part of it has already happened; for the time we have lived stands in the same place it stood before we lived it at all. We are wrong to fear our last day, as if each of the others did not contribute just as much to our death. It is not the last step that produces the exhaustion in which we collapse — it only declares it; every day arrives at death, only the last one gets there. Death does not seize us suddenly, it gathers us bit by bit. So a great mind, conscious of its own better nature, does take care to conduct itself honorably and diligently in the post where it has been stationed, but judges none of the things around it to be its own — using them, rather, as things merely lent, like a traveler passing through in a hurry.
When we saw someone with this kind of steadiness, why should the impression of an unusual nature not have struck us — especially since, as I said, evenness of conduct showed that this greatness was real? The genuine keeps its tenor; the false does not last. Some people are by turns Vatinius and by turns Cato; and now Curius seems to them not stern enough, Fabricius not poor enough, Tubero not frugal or content enough with cheap things, and then, a moment later, they outdo Licinus in riches, Apicius in feasting, Maecenas in luxuries. The greatest sign of a bad character is this wavering, this constant tossing back and forth between a pretense of virtues and a love of vices.
often ten slaves; now kings and tetrarchs,
speaking always of great things, now: 'let me have a three-legged table and
a shell of plain salt, and a toga that can keep off the cold,
however coarse it may be.' Give a million sesterces
to this man content with little, satisfied with few things: within five days
Many people are just like the man Horace describes here — never the same, not even consistent with himself; so far does he stray in different directions. Did I say many? It is nearly true of everyone. There is no one who does not change his plan and his wish every single day; now he wants to have a wife, now a mistress; now he wants to rule, now he works at being no more than a servile drudge; now he swells himself up to the point of being envied, now he sinks and shrinks below the humility of those who are genuinely lowly; one moment he scatters money, the next he snatches it up. In this way an unsteady mind is exposed most clearly of all: it comes out first as one thing, then as another, and — which I judge the most shameful thing of all — it is not even consistent with itself. Consider it a great thing for one man to play a single role. Only the wise person plays one role; the rest of us are many-shaped. At one moment we will seem to you thrifty and serious, at the next wasteful and shallow; we keep changing masks, and put on the opposite of the one we just took off. So this is what I demand of you: whatever character you have set out to display, keep displaying that same one right up to the end. Manage to be praised for it, or failing that, at least to be recognized for it. Of a man you saw yesterday it can rightly be asked, 'who is this?' — so great is the change. Farewell.

======== Letter 121 ========

Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You are going to quarrel with me, I can see it, once I have laid out for you today's little question, over which we lingered quite a while; you will cry out again, 'What has this to do with character?' Cry out, then — but first let me set against you some others for you to quarrel with, Posidonius and Archidemus (they will submit to judgment), and then I will say: not everything that touches on morals actually shapes good character.
One thing has to do with feeding a person, another with training him, another with clothing him, another with teaching him, another with giving him pleasure; yet all of these have to do with the person, even if not all of them make him better. Different things touch on character in different ways: some correct and set it in order, others examine its nature and its origin.
When I ask why nature produced the human being, why she preferred him to all other animals, do you judge that I have wandered far away from questions of character? That is false. For how will you know what qualities a person ought to have unless you have first found what is best for a human being, unless you have examined his nature? Only then will you understand what you ought to do and what you ought to avoid, once you have learned what you owe to your own nature. 'I,' you say, 'want to learn how to desire less, fear less. Shake superstition out of me; teach me that this thing called happiness is a light and empty matter, needing only the easiest addition of one syllable to become unhappiness.' I will satisfy your wish: I will urge on the virtues and thrash the vices. Someone may judge me too excessive and unrestrained on this front, but I will not stop hunting down wickedness, holding back the wildest passions, checking pleasures that are headed toward pain, and shouting down our own prayers. Why not? Since we have wished for the greatest of evils, and whatever we say to congratulate ourselves has been born out of that very wishing.
Meanwhile, allow me to work through some things that seem a little further removed from the point. We were asking whether every living creature has a sense of its own constitution. That it does is most apparent from the fact that creatures move their limbs aptly and readily, exactly as if they had been trained in this; there is not one that lacks agility in the use of its own parts. A craftsman handles his tools with ease, a ship's helmsman skillfully turns the rudder, a painter, out of the many varied colors he has set before himself to render a likeness, picks out the right one with great speed and moves between the wax and the work with an easy face and hand — in just this way, an animal is nimble in every use of itself.
We are used to marveling at skilled dancers, because their hands stand ready for every meaning of things and feelings, and their gesture keeps pace with the speed of words: what art gives to dancers, nature gives to animals. No creature struggles to move its limbs, none hesitates in the use of itself. They do this the moment they are born; they come forward already possessing this knowledge; they are born already trained.
'Animals move their parts aptly for this reason,' someone objects, 'because if they moved otherwise they would feel pain. So, as you Stoics yourselves say, they are compelled, and it is fear, not will, that moves them straight.' That is false; for whatever is driven by necessity is sluggish, while agility belongs to what moves of its own accord. And so far is fear of pain from driving them to this that they strain toward their natural motion even when pain is actively holding them back.
So an infant who is practicing standing and getting used to carrying his own weight, the moment he begins to try out his strength, falls, and gets up again and again in tears, until through the pain itself he has trained himself into what nature demands. Certain creatures with a hard shell, turned over, keep twisting themselves and stretching out and turning their feet this way and that until they are set back in place. An overturned tortoise on its back feels no torment, and yet it remains restless with longing for its natural position, and does not stop straining and shaking itself until it stands again on its feet. So every creature has a sense of its own constitution, and from this comes the ready handling of its limbs; and we have no greater proof that this awareness comes to them along with the knowledge needed to live than the fact that no animal is clumsy in the use of itself.
'Constitution,' the objector says, 'is, as you Stoics put it, the ruling part of the mind disposed in a certain way toward the body. How does an infant understand something so tangled and subtle, something that even you can barely put into words? Every animal would have to be born a master of logic to grasp such a definition — something that is obscure even to a great many educated men.' What you object would be true if I were claiming that animals grasp the definition of constitution, rather than the constitution itself. Nature is more easily understood than described. And so that infant does not know what constitution is, but he does know his own constitution; he does not know what an animal is, but he feels that he is one. Besides, he understands his own constitution only crudely, in the rough, and dimly. We too know that we have a mind; what the mind is, where it is, of what sort it is, we do not know. Just as our own sense of our mind comes to us, even though we do not know its nature or its seat, so is the sense that every animal has of its own constitution. For it is necessary that they perceive that by means of which they perceive everything else; it is necessary that they have some sense of the thing they obey, by which they are ruled.
Every one of us understands that there is something that sets our impulses in motion; what that thing is, he does not know. And he knows that he has an effort, an impulse, in himself; who or what that is, he does not know. So it is with infants too, and with animals: the sense of their own ruling part is present, though not fully clear or distinctly expressed.
'You say,' the objector goes on, 'that every animal is first drawn toward its own constitution, but that the human constitution is rational, and so a human being is drawn toward himself not as an animal but as a rational being; for it is in the part by which he is human that a human being holds himself dear. How, then, can an infant be drawn toward a rational constitution, when he is not yet rational?'
Every age has its own constitution — one for the infant, another for the boy, another for the young man, another for the old man; all of them are drawn toward whatever constitution they are currently in. The infant is toothless: he is drawn toward that particular constitution of his. His teeth come in: he is drawn toward that constitution instead. For even that plant which is going to grow into standing grain and fruit has one constitution while it is tender and barely rising above the furrow, another once it has grown strong and stands, on a stalk soft enough yet firm enough to bear its own weight, and another still when it turns golden, faces toward the threshing floor, and its ear has hardened: whatever constitution it comes into, it holds onto that one, it is composed to fit that one.
The age of the infant is one thing, of the boy another, of the young man another, of the old man another; yet I am the same person who was once an infant, and a boy, and a young man. So, although each person's constitution is different at different times, the way he is drawn toward his own constitution is the same throughout. For nature does not commend to me the boy, or the youth, or the old man, but simply me. So the infant is drawn toward the particular constitution that belongs to an infant at that moment, not toward the one that will belong to the youth he will become; for even if something greater remains, into which he is going to pass, this does not mean that the constitution in which he is now born is not, itself, in accordance with nature.
An animal is drawn first of all to itself; for there must be something to which everything else is referred. I seek pleasure. For whom? For myself; so I am taking care of myself. I flee pain. On whose behalf? On my own; so again I am taking care of myself. If I do everything for the sake of caring for myself, then care for myself comes before everything else. This is present in every animal, and it is not implanted from outside but is born in along with it.
Nature brings forth her offspring, she does not cast them aside; and because the surest protection is the one nearest at hand, each creature is entrusted to itself. And so, as I said in earlier letters, even the tenderest creatures, freshly poured out from the mother's womb or the egg, know at once, on their own, what is dangerous to them, and avoid what is deadly; even the shadow of birds flying overhead makes them cower, exposed as they are to birds that live by prey. No animal comes forward into life without a fear of death.
'How,' the objector asks, 'can a newborn animal have any understanding of what is life-saving or life-destroying?' First the question is whether it understands, not how it understands. That they do have such an understanding is evident from this, that if they understood any further, they would do nothing more than they already do. Why is it that a hen does not flee a peacock or a goose, but flees a hawk that is far smaller and not even known to her? Why do chicks fear a cat but not fear a dog? It is clear that they possess a knowledge of what is going to harm them that has not been gathered by experience; for they take precautions before they could possibly have had any experience at all.
Next, so that you do not think this happens by chance: they do not fear the wrong things, and they never forget this protective vigilance; their flight from what is destructive is constant and unvarying. Moreover, they do not grow more timid the longer they live; and this in fact shows that they do not arrive at this behavior through practice, but through a natural love of their own safety. What experience teaches is slow and inconsistent; whatever nature hands down is uniform for all and immediate.
Still, if you press me, I will tell you how every animal is compelled to understand what is harmful. It feels that it is made of flesh; and so it feels what can cut that flesh, what can burn it, what can crush it, which animals are armed to do it harm: it draws from these the image of an enemy, something hostile. These things are bound up together; for at the very moment a creature is drawn toward its own safety, it also seeks what will help it and dreads what will injure it. Impulses toward what is beneficial, and aversions from what is opposed to it, are natural; nothing dictates this by any process of thought, nothing is done by deliberation — whatever nature has prescribed simply happens.
Do you not see what subtlety bees show in constructing their homes, what concord there is in dividing up and carrying out the labor from every side? Do you not see how the spider's web — something no mortal can imitate — required what a labor to lay out its threads, some sent out straight to serve as the framework, others running in circles, moving from dense to sparse, so that the smaller creatures, for whose destruction those threads are stretched, may be caught in them as if in nets?
This skill is born, not learned. And so no animal is more accomplished than another of its own kind at this task: you will find spiders' webs all alike, and the same shape of cell repeated in every corner of the honeycomb. Whatever art hands down is uncertain and uneven; what nature distributes comes out equal. Nature has handed down nothing more than the care of self-preservation and the skill for it, and that is exactly why creatures begin to learn and to live at the very same moment.
Nor is it surprising that they are born already possessing the thing without which being born would be pointless. The very first tool nature gave them for enduring was this: an inclination toward themselves and a love of self. They could not have preserved themselves unless they wished to; and this wish by itself would not have been enough, but without it nothing else would have helped at all. Yet in no creature will you find contempt for itself, nor even carelessness; even in the silent and the dumb, however sluggish they may be in other respects, there is a shrewdness for staying alive. You will find that the things useless to others are not lacking to themselves. Farewell.

======== Letter 122 ========

The daylight has already felt its loss; it has shrunk back noticeably, though there is still a generous stretch of it for anyone who rises, so to speak, with the day itself. More dutiful still, and better, is the man who waits for it and catches the first light; disgraceful is the one who lies half-asleep when the sun is high, whose waking begins at midday — and for many, even that counts as before dawn. There are people who have flipped the functions of daylight and darkness, and do not open eyes heavy with yesterday's hangover until night begins to come on. Their condition is like that of the people whom nature, as Vergil says, has placed under our feet, on earth's far side,
and when the rising Sun first breathes on us with panting horses,
for them glowing Vesper is kindling his late lamps —
except that with these men it is not their region but their life that runs contrary to everyone. There are antipodeans in this very city who, as Marcus Cato says, have never once laid eyes on the sun coming up or going down. Do you imagine such men know how to live, when they don't know when to?
And do these people fear death — the very thing they have buried themselves alive in? They are as ill-omened as the birds of the night. Though they spend their darkness amid wine and perfume, though they use up the whole span of their backwards waking on banquets cooked up into course after course, they are not dining; they are performing their own funeral rites. The dead, at least, get their offerings by day. But truly, no day is long to a man in action. Let us stretch our life: its duty and its proof lie in activity. Cut the night short, and carry some of it over into the day. Birds being fattened for the table are kept in the dark so that they plump easily without moving; just so, in bodies that lie about without any exercise, swelling invades the idle flesh and a sluggish fat creeps up in their pampered shade. And the bodies of these men who have consecrated themselves to darkness are foul to look at — their color is more alarming than that of the sick and pale, since illness at least explains those. Limp and washed out, they are white, and on living men the flesh is corpse-flesh. Yet I would call that the least of their evils: how much more darkness there is in the soul! Inside, such a man is stupefied at himself, he gropes in fog, he envies the blind. Whoever had eyes for the sake of the dark?
You ask how the soul comes by this perversity of shunning the day and shifting one's whole life into the night? All vices fight against nature; all desert the proper order. This is the whole program of decadence: to delight in the backwards, and not merely to depart from the right way but to get as far from it as possible — finally, to stand at the opposite pole. Don't you think men live against nature who drink on an empty stomach, who take wine into empty veins and come to their food already drunk? Yet this is a common vice of the young, who work up their strength so as to drink — no, to swill — practically on the threshold of the bath, among the naked bathers, and then scrape off, again and again, the sweat they have raised with hot drink after hot drink. Drinking after lunch or dinner is common stuff; that is what country householders do, men ignorant of true pleasure. The wine that delights them is the wine that doesn't float on food, that goes straight to the nerves unimpeded; the intoxication they enjoy is the kind that arrives on an empty stomach. Don't you think men live against nature who trade clothes with women? Don't men live against nature who arrange for boyhood to keep its shine past its season? What could be done more cruel, or more wretched? Is he never to be a man, so that he can go on submitting to a man? And when his sex ought to have rescued him from that outrage, will not even his age rescue him? Don't men live against nature who crave a rose in winter, and by hot-water forcing and careful shifting of position squeeze out a lily — a spring flower — at midwinter? Don't men live against nature who plant orchards on the tops of towers, whose woods sway on the roofs and gables of their houses, the roots springing from a level to which the treetops would have had no right to climb? Don't men live against nature who lay the footings of their warm baths out in the sea, and don't consider themselves swimming in style unless their heated pools are lashed by wave and storm? Once they have set themselves to want everything contrary to nature's usage, in the end they defect from her altogether. 'It's light out: time for sleep. All is quiet: now let's take our exercise, our drive, our lunch. Now the daylight approaches: time for dinner. One mustn't do what the crowd does; it's a shabby business to live in the worn, common way. Let ordinary daytime be abandoned: let us have a morning of our very own, private and reserved.' To my mind such people are as good as dead; how far are they, really, from a funeral — and an untimely one — living by torches and wax lights? I remember that many men led this life at one time, among them the ex-praetor Acilius Buta, to whom Tiberius, when Buta had run through an enormous inheritance and was confessing his poverty, said: 'You woke up too late.' Julius Montanus was once giving a reading of a poem — a tolerable poet, known for his friendship with Tiberius, and for its cooling. He loved to sprinkle his verse with sunrises and sunsets; so when someone was fuming that he had recited all day long and swearing that his readings should be boycotted, Natta Pinarius said: 'Could I make him a fairer offer? I am ready to listen to him from sunrise to sunset.'
When Montanus had recited these lines —
Phoebus begins to lead out his blazing fires,
the reddening day to scatter itself; now the sad swallow
begins to bring food back to the chirping nests
and deals it out, sharing with her soft beak —
Varus, a Roman knight, a companion of Marcus Vinicius and a hanger-on at good dinners, which he earned by the wickedness of his tongue, called out: 'Buta begins to sleep.' Then, when Montanus went on to recite —
now the herdsmen have stalled their cattle in the byres,
now sluggish night begins to give its silence to the drowsing lands —
the same Varus said: 'What's that? Night already? I'll go pay my morning call on Buta.' Nothing was more notorious than this life of his spun round to its opposite — a life which, as I said, many led at the same period. The reason some people live this way is not that they think night itself holds anything more delightful, but that nothing ordinary pleases them; also, daylight lies heavy on a bad conscience, and to a man whose desiring or despising of everything depends on whether it cost much or little, light that is free of charge is beneath contempt. Besides, the extravagant want their life talked about while they are still living it; if there's silence, they think their effort wasted. So every now and then they do something to set tongues wagging. Plenty of men eat through their fortunes; plenty keep mistresses. To make a name among that crowd, you need to stage something not merely extravagant but conspicuous; in a city this busy, run-of-the-mill wickedness doesn't get itself talked about. We once heard Albinovanus Pedo telling a story — he was the most elegant of raconteurs — of how he had lived above the house of Sextus Papinius. Papinius was one of this tribe of light-shunners. 'Around the third hour of the night,' Pedo said, 'I hear the crack of whips. I ask what he's doing: I'm told he's auditing his accounts. Around the sixth hour of the night I hear an excited shouting. I ask what that is: I'm told he's exercising his voice.
'Around the eighth hour of the night I ask what that rumble of wheels means: I'm told he's out for his drive. Around dawn there's running to and fro, slaves being summoned, butlers and cooks in an uproar. I ask what's happening: I'm told he has called for honeyed wine and spelt porridge — he's just out of his bath.' 'His dinner, then,' someone said, 'ran past the day?' Not at all — he lived very frugally; he consumed nothing but the night. And so, when some people called Papinius a stingy miser, Pedo said: 'You might as well call him a lamp-liver.' You shouldn't be surprised to find so many individual varieties of vice: vices are various, their faces are beyond counting, their kinds cannot be catalogued. Care for the right is simple, care for the wrong is manifold and takes as many new swerves as you like. The same holds for character: in those who follow nature, characters are easy, unconstrained, with only slight differences between them; the twisted are utterly at odds with everyone and with each other. But the chief cause of this disease, it seems to me, is disdain for ordinary life. As such men mark themselves off from everyone else by their dress, by the refinement of their dinners, by the elegance of their carriages, so they want to stand apart in their scheduling of the hours too. Men whose reward for sinning is notoriety have no wish to sin in the usual manner. Notoriety is what every one of them is chasing — these men whose lives run, as it were, backwards. That, Lucilius, is why we must hold to the road nature has laid down, and not swerve from it: for those who follow it, everything is easy and lies ready to hand; for those who strain against it, life is nothing but rowing against the current. Farewell.

======== Letter 123 ========

Worn out by a journey more uncomfortable than long, I reached my place at Alba late in the night: I find nothing prepared — except myself. So I lay my weariness down on my little bed and take this delay of cook and baker in good part. For I am talking with myself about exactly this: how nothing is heavy if you take it up lightly, how nothing deserves anger so long as you don't pile anger of your own on top of it. My baker has no bread; but the farm manager has some, the steward has some, the tenant has some. 'Bad bread,' you say. Wait: it will turn good; hunger will make even that loaf soft and fine-wheaten for you. That is why one should not eat before hunger gives the order. So I will wait, and not eat until I either start having good bread or stop being fussy about bad. It is essential to get used to little: many obstacles of place and circumstance will crop up even for the rich and well-equipped and block what they want. No one can have whatever he wants; what anyone can do is this — not want what he doesn't have, and use cheerfully whatever is put before him. A well-mannered stomach, one that can take a snub, is a great part of freedom. There is no reckoning the pleasure I take in the fact that my weariness is settling down by itself: no masseurs, no bath, no other remedy do I ask for except time. What toil has brought on, rest removes. This dinner, whatever it turns out to be, will be pleasanter than an inaugural banquet. For I have taken a sudden test of my mind, and this kind is more candid and more true. When a mind has prepared itself and ordered itself in advance to be patient, it is not so clear how much genuine firmness it has; the most certain evidence is what it produces unrehearsed, on the instant — if it has looked at annoyances not merely with equanimity but with serenity; if it has not flared up or picked a quarrel; if it has made up for what ought to have been provided by not missing it, and has reflected that something may be lacking to its habits, but nothing to itself.
How many things are superfluous we never understood until they began to run out; we had been using them not from any need, but simply because they were there. And how much we acquire simply because others have acquired it, because most people have it! Among the causes of our troubles is this: we live by other people's examples; we are not arranged by reason but carried off by custom. If only a few did a thing, we would refuse to copy it; once many take it up, we follow — as if a practice were more honorable for being more frequent — and error, once it has become public, holds the place of right among us. Everyone now travels with Numidian cavalry galloping in advance and a file of runners leading the way: it is a disgrace to have no one to shove oncomers off the road, no great cloud of dust to announce that a gentleman is on his way. Everyone now has mules to carry his crystal and his murrine ware and the pieces chased by the hands of great craftsmen: it is a disgrace to look as though your baggage were the kind that could be jolted without risk. Everyone's train of pages rides with faces smeared with cream, lest sun or cold injure their tender skin: it is a disgrace if there is a single boy in your entourage whose healthy face needs no cosmetic.
The conversation of all such people is to be avoided: these are the men who hand vices around, who carry them from one place to another. We used to think the worst class of men were the carriers of gossip; but there are men who carry vices. Their talk does great harm; even when it doesn't take effect at once, it leaves seeds in the mind, and it follows us even after we have left their company — an evil that will spring up again later. Just as people who have heard a concert carry off in their ears the melody and the sweetness of the singing, which gets in the way of their thinking and won't let them concentrate on serious things, so the talk of flatterers and praisers of vice sticks long after it is heard. It is not easy to shake a sweet sound out of the mind: it follows along, it persists, it comes back at intervals. Therefore the ears must be shut to harmful voices, and to the very first of them; once such talk has made a beginning and been let in, it grows bolder. From there it comes to speeches like this: 'Virtue and philosophy and justice are the rattle of empty words. The one happiness is to do well by your life. To eat, to drink, to enjoy the estate — that is living; that is remembering you are mortal. The days flow past, and life runs down its course beyond recall. Do we hesitate? What good is it to be wise — to force frugality on a time of life that won't always be able to take its pleasures, in the meantime, while it can, while it demands them? Outrun death, and whatever death is going to carry off, spend on yourself here and now. You keep no mistress, no boy to stir the mistress's jealousy; you appear in public sober, day after day; you dine as though you had to show your day-book to your father for approval: that isn't living — that's attending someone else's life. What lunacy, to manage your heir's affairs and deny yourself everything, so that a big inheritance turns your friend into your enemy — for the more he stands to receive, the more he will rejoice at your death. As for those grim, beetle-browed censors of other men's lives and enemies of their own, those self-appointed tutors of the public — don't rate them at a penny, and never hesitate to prefer a good life to a good reputation.' Voices like these must be fled no less than the ones Ulysses would not sail past until he was bound fast to his ship. Their power is the same: such voices lead a man away from country, from parents, from friends, from the virtues, and mock him with a life that is wretched unless it is shameful. How much better to follow the straight path and bring yourself to the point where only what is honorable is pleasant to you! And we will be able to reach that point if we know there are two classes of things that either draw us on or drive us back. What draws us on: wealth, pleasures, beauty, ambition, and everything else that flatters and smiles. What drives us back: toil, death, pain, disgrace, plainer living. We ought therefore to train ourselves not to fear the second class and not to crave the first. Let us fight the opposite way: retreat from what beckons, and charge at what attacks.
Don't you see how different the posture of men going downhill is from that of men climbing? Those moving down a slope lean their bodies back; those moving up a steep grade lean into it. To throw your weight forward when descending, Lucilius, and to pull it backward when climbing, is to take the side of the fault. The way to pleasures is downhill; the rough and the hard must be climbed: here let us drive our bodies forward, there rein them in. Do you suppose I am saying now that only those men are ruinous to our ears who praise pleasure and instill the fear of pain — a thing frightening enough in itself? I hold that those men also harm us who urge us to vice under cover of the Stoic school. This is their boast: that only the wise and educated man is a lover. 'He alone is suited to this art; the wise man is likewise the greatest expert at drinking together and dining together. Let us inquire up to what age young men are lovable.' Let all that be handed over to Greek custom; let us turn our ears instead to this: 'No one is good by accident: virtue has to be learned. Pleasure is a low, paltry thing, to be held at no value, shared with the dumb animals — the tiniest, most despicable creatures fly to it. Glory is empty, fluttering, more restless than a breeze. Poverty is an evil to no one except the man who fights against it. Death is not an evil: you ask what it is? The one law of the human race that plays fair. Superstition is a lunatic error: it fears those it should love; those it worships, it wrongs. For what difference is there between denying the gods and defaming them?' These things must be learned — no, learned by heart. Philosophy has no business supplying vice with excuses. A sick man has no hope of recovery when his doctor prescribes him excess. Farewell.

======== Letter 124 ========

(1) I could give you many maxims of the ancients,
if you did not shrink from them and find it tiresome to learn such fine-grained matters.
But you do not shrink from them, and no subtlety drives you off: it is not in keeping with your refinement to chase only after grand themes -- indeed I approve of the fact that you bring everything back to some practical gain, and that you are put off only when the utmost subtlety accomplishes nothing. That is not what I shall be doing now, at any rate.
The question is whether the good is grasped by sense-perception or by intellect; bound up with this is the claim that it is not present in dumb animals and infants. (2) Whoever puts pleasure at the summit judges the good to be something perceptible by the senses; we, on the contrary, hold it to be an object of intellect, something we assign to the mind. If the senses judged what is good, we would reject no pleasure; for there is none that does not entice, none that does not delight; and conversely we would willingly undergo no pain, for there is none that does not offend the senses. (3) Besides, people who are excessively fond of pleasure and who fear pain above all else would not deserve blame. And yet we do condemn those enslaved to gluttony and lust, and we despise the spineless who, out of fear of pain, will never dare to act like men. But what wrong are they doing, if they obey the senses -- the very judges, on your view, of good and evil? For it is to the senses that you have handed over the decision of what to seek and what to flee. (4) But of course reason has been set in charge of this matter: just as it settles questions about the happy life, about virtue, about what is honorable, so too it settles questions about good and evil. Among your opponents, though, the verdict on the better course is entrusted to the meanest part -- so that sense-perception pronounces on the good, a dull and blunted thing, and slower in a human being than in other animals. (5) What if someone wanted to distinguish fine details not with the eyes but by touch? No sense is more refined or more attentive than sight for telling good from bad. See in what deep ignorance of the truth a man is caught, and how low he drags things sublime and divine, when he lets touch pronounce judgment on the highest good and evil. (6) 'Just as,' he says, 'every branch of knowledge and every art must have something evident and grasped by sense from which it arises and grows, so too the happy life takes its foundation and its starting point from what is evident, from what falls under the senses. Surely you yourselves say that the happy life takes its beginning from what is evident.' (7) We say that things are happy which accord with nature; but what accords with nature is plain and obvious at once, just as it is plain what a whole, uninjured thing is. What accords with nature, what befalls a being the instant it is born, I do not call the good, but the beginning of the good. You, however, hand over the highest good, pleasure, to infancy, so that the newborn should start out at the very point the fully developed human being arrives at; you are putting the treetop where the root should be. (8) If someone said that a being still hidden in the mother's womb, of uncertain sex even, tender and unformed and incomplete, is already in possession of some good, he would clearly seem to be mistaken. And yet how little difference is there between one who has just this moment received life and one who still lies hidden as a burden in the maternal womb? Both, as far as understanding of good and evil goes, are equally unripe, and the infant is no more capable of the good at this point than a tree or some dumb animal. Why is there no good in a tree or a dumb animal? Because there is no reason in them. For this same cause there is none in the infant either; for reason is lacking in the infant too. It will arrive at the good only when it arrives at reason. (9) There is an animal without reason, there is one not yet possessed of reason, there is one that has reason but imperfectly: in none of these is the good present -- reason itself brings the good with it. What, then, is the difference between them you may ask? In the one that is without reason, the good will never be present; in the one not yet possessed of reason, it cannot yet be present; in the one that has reason, but imperfectly, the good is now possible, but is not yet actual. (10) So I say, Lucilius: the good is not found in just any body, at just any age, and it is as far removed from infancy as the last is from the first, as the finished is from the beginning; therefore it is not present in the tender little body still just coalescing. Why should it not be? No more than it is present in the seed. (11) Put it this way: we recognize some good proper to a tree or a planted crop -- this is not present in the first shoot that has just now broken through the soil. There is some good proper to wheat -- this is not yet present in the milky blade, nor when the soft ear pushes its way out of the husk, but only when summer and due ripeness have brought the grain to fullness. Just as every nature brings forth its own good only when it has reached completion, so the good proper to man is not present in man until reason in him is perfected. (12) But what is this good? I will tell you: a free and upright mind, one that subjects all else to itself and itself to nothing. Infancy is so incapable of receiving this good that childhood cannot even hope for it, and adolescence hopes for it only presumptuously; it is well managed if old age, through long and intent effort, arrives at it. If this is the good, then it is an object of intellect. (13) 'You have said,' he objects, 'that there is some good proper to a tree, some good proper to a plant; therefore there can also be some good proper to an infant.' But the true good is present neither in trees nor in dumb animals: what is called good in them is called good only by courtesy. 'What is it, then?' you ask. It is that which accords with each thing's own nature. But the good cannot possibly fall to a dumb animal; it belongs to a happier and better nature. Only where there is room for reason is there room for the good. (14) There are these four natures: that of the tree, of the animal, of man, of god. The latter two, which possess reason, share the same nature; they differ in this, that the one is immortal, the other mortal. Of these, then, nature itself brings one -- god's, of course -- to perfection; effort brings the other, man's, to perfection. The rest are perfect only within the limits of their own kind, not truly perfect, since reason is absent from them. For that alone is truly perfect which is perfect according to universal nature, and universal nature is rational; the rest can only be perfect within their own particular kind. (15) In that which cannot possess the happy life, neither can there be present that by which the happy life is achieved; and the happy life is achieved by goods. In the dumb animal there is no happy life, nor is there present that by which the happy life is achieved: in the dumb animal there is no good. (16) The dumb animal grasps by sense only what is present; it recalls the past only when it happens upon something that jogs the senses -- as a horse recalls the road when it is brought to its starting point. In the stable, though, it has no sense of any road at all, however often it has trodden it and however fresh the memory. But the third time, the future, has no bearing on dumb creatures at all. (17) How, then, can the nature of beings be thought perfect when they have no use of a complete span of time? For time consists of three parts -- past, present, future. To animals is given only the briefest part, granted in mere passing, the present: memory of the past is rare, and is never recalled except when jogged by the encounter with something present. (18) The good proper to a perfect nature cannot, then, be present in an imperfect nature; or if such a nature does possess it, then plants possess it too. Nor do I deny that toward things that appear to accord with nature, dumb animals show great and vehement impulses -- but disordered and turbulent ones; and the good is never disordered or turbulent. (19) 'What, then,' you say, 'do dumb animals move about in a disturbed and disordered way?' I would say they move in a disturbed and disordered way if their nature were capable of order: as it is, they move in accordance with their own nature. For 'disturbed' properly describes something that is capable, at some time, of being undisturbed; 'anxious' describes something that can be free of care. No creature has a fault unless it is also capable of virtue: the motion dumb animals display arises from their nature as it is. (20) But not to keep you too long: there will be some good in a dumb animal, some virtue, something complete -- but neither the good absolutely, nor virtue, nor completeness. These belong to rational beings alone, to whom alone it is given to know why, to what extent, and how. So the good exists nowhere except where reason exists. (21) You ask what this whole discussion is aiming at, and what good it will do your mind. I will tell you: it exercises the mind, sharpens it, and in any case keeps it occupied with something worthy while it is bound to be busy with something. It also helps by delaying those who are rushing toward what is base. But I will say this too: there is no way I can do you more good than by showing you your own good, by separating you from dumb animals, by placing you beside god. (22) . (23) Will you not, then, leave behind those contests in which you are bound to be defeated, so long as you strain after things that are not your own, and turn back to the good that is truly yours? What is this good? A mind, of course, corrected and pure, a rival of god, lifting itself above human concerns, placing nothing of itself outside itself. You are a rational animal. What, then, is the good in you? Perfected reason. Summon this out toward its own proper end, and let it grow to the greatest extent it can. (24) Judge yourself happy only when every joy will be born in you from yourself, when, looking at the things men seize, pray for, and guard, you find nothing -- I do not say that you would prefer, but that you would even wish for. I will give you a brief measure by which to gauge yourself, by which to know that you are already perfect: you will possess what is your own only when you understand that the most fortunate of men are in fact the most wretched. Farewell.