Letters to Lucilius

Can you show me anyone who puts some value on time, who reckons what a day is worth, who understands that he is dying every day? This is where we go wrong: we look ahead to death, but a great part of it is already behind us. Whatever years lie in the past, death holds. So, my Lucilius, do what you write that you are doing: grasp every hour. That way you will depend less on tomorrow, if you lay hold of today. While we postpone, life speeds by.

Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others; only time is ours. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, fleeting and slippery as it is, and anyone who wants to can evict us from it. And such is the folly of mortals that they allow themselves to be charged for the smallest and cheapest things—things that can certainly be replaced—once they have obtained them; yet no one who has been given time thinks he owes anything, when this is the one thing that not even a grateful person can pay back.

You may ask what I do myself, I who lecture you like this. I will admit it frankly: I do what an extravagant but careful man does—I keep an account of my spending. I cannot say that I lose nothing, but I can tell you what I lose, and why, and how. I can give the reasons for my poverty. But what happens to me is what happens to most people who are reduced to want through no fault of their own: everyone forgives, nobody helps.

What, then? I do not consider a man poor if whatever little he has left is enough for him. Still, I would rather you held on to what is yours—and you will be starting at a good time. For as our ancestors thought, thrift comes too late at the bottom of the jar. What remains at the bottom is not only the least but the worst. Farewell.note

From what you write me, and from what I hear, I am forming high hopes of you. You don’t rush about, and you don’t unsettle yourself by changing places. That kind of tossing to and fro belongs to a sick mind. The first sign of a well-ordered mind, I think, is to be able to stay put and keep one’s own company.

But be careful that this reading of many authors and books of every kind doesn’t have something aimless and unsteady about it. You should linger over a select few minds and feed on them, if you want to draw from them something that will settle faithfully in your mind. Whoever is everywhere is nowhere. People who spend their lives traveling end up with many hosts but no friends. The same is bound to happen to those who attach themselves closely to no one mind, but let everything pass through them in a rush.

Food does no good and adds nothing to the body if it passes straight out as soon as it is eaten. Nothing hinders health so much as constantly switching remedies. A wound will not scar over if one medicine after another is tried on it. A plant that is often moved never grows strong. Nothing is so useful that it can help just in passing. A multitude of books pulls you in different directions. So since you cannot read as many books as you might own, it is enough to own as many as you can read.

“But,” you say, “I want to open this book now, and now that one.” It is the mark of a jaded stomach to nibble at many dishes; when they are varied and mixed, they pollute rather than nourish. So always read authors of proven worth, and if you ever feel like turning aside to others, come back to the ones before. Each day, acquire some help against poverty, some against death, and no less against the other plagues; and when you have run through many things, pick out one to digest that day.

I do this myself: of the many things I have read, I seize on one. Today’s is something I came across in Epicurus—for I often cross over even into the other side’s camp, not as a deserter but as a scout.note

“Cheerful poverty,” he says, “is an honorable thing.” But it is not poverty at all if it is cheerful. It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor. What difference does it make how much he has lying in his strongbox or in his granaries, how many herds he grazes or how much he lends at interest, if he is eyeing what belongs to others, if he counts not what he has gained but what is still to be gained? You ask what the proper limit of wealth is? First, to have what is necessary; next, to have what is enough. Farewell.

You have given your letters for me, you write, to a friend of yours to deliver. Then you warn me not to share with him everything that concerns you, since you yourself are not in the habit of doing so either. So in the same letter you have both called him a friend and denied it. Well, if you used that word, which has a precise meaning, as if it were common coin, and called him a friend the way we call all candidates for office “good men,” or greet people we meet as “sir” when their names escape us—let it pass.

But if you consider anyone a friend whom you do not trust as much as yourself, you are badly mistaken and do not really understand the force of true friendship. Do discuss everything with a friend—but first discuss the friend himself. After friendship comes trust; before friendship, judgment. Those people get their duties backward who, contrary to the precepts of Theophrastus, judge after they have come to love, and do not love after they have judged. Think long about whether to admit someone into your friendship. Once you decide to, welcome him with your whole heart, and speak as boldly with him as with yourself.note

Live, indeed, in such a way that you entrust nothing to yourself that you could not entrust even to your enemy. But since certain matters come up that custom treats as secret, share all your worries and all your thoughts with your friend. Think him loyal and you will make him so. For some people have taught others to deceive by fearing to be deceived, and by their suspicion have given them the right to do wrong. Why should I hold back any words in front of my friend? Why should I not think myself alone when I am with him?

Some people tell passersby what should be entrusted only to friends, and unload whatever is weighing on them into any ear at all. Others, by contrast, dread having even those dearest to them in on anything; if they could, they would not trust even themselves, and they bury every secret deep inside. Neither is right. Both are faults—trusting everyone and trusting no one—though I would call the one the more honorable fault, the other the safer;

just as you should blame both those who are always restless and those who are always at rest. For the bustle that delights in commotion is not industry but the scurrying of a harried mind. And the rest that counts every movement a nuisance is not rest but slackness and languor.

So you will commit to memory this line I read in Pomponius: “Some people have fled so far into hiding that they think whatever is in the light is in turmoil.” These two must be blended: the one at rest must act, and the one acting must rest. Consult nature: she will tell you that she made both day and night. Farewell.note

Keep on as you have begun, and hurry as much as you can, so that you may enjoy a mind that is corrected and settled for longer. You do enjoy it even while you are correcting it, even while you are settling it; but there is a different pleasure, the one that comes from contemplating a mind that is pure of every stain and shining.

You surely remember how much joy you felt when you laid aside the bordered toga of boyhood, put on the toga of manhood, and were escorted into the forum. Expect a greater joy when you have laid aside a boy’s mind and philosophy has enrolled you among men. For what still remains in us is not childhood but, what is worse, childishness. And this is all the worse because we have the authority of old men and the faults of boys—and not only of boys, but of infants. Boys fear trivial things, infants imaginary things; we fear both.note

Just keep making progress; you will understand that some things are less to be feared precisely because they bring us so much fear. No evil is great that is the last one. Death is coming to you: it would be something to fear if it could stay with you; but it must either not reach you or pass on.

“It is hard,” you say, “to bring the mind to the point of despising life.” But don’t you see for what trivial reasons life is despised? One man hanged himself at his mistress’s door; another threw himself from a roof so as not to hear his master’s temper any longer; another, to avoid being brought back after running away, drove a blade into his belly. Don’t you think virtue will achieve what excessive fear achieves? No one can have a life free from care who thinks too much about prolonging it, who counts many consulships among the great goods.note

Rehearse this every day, so that you can leave life with a calm mind—life, which many people clutch and cling to the way those swept away by a torrent grab at brambles and sharp rocks. Most people toss about wretchedly between fear of death and the torments of life: they do not want to live, and they do not know how to die.

So make your whole life pleasant by setting aside all anxiety about it. No good thing benefits its possessor unless the mind is prepared to lose it; and nothing is easier to lose than what, once lost, cannot be missed. So against these things, which can befall even the most powerful, encourage and toughen yourself.

A boy and a eunuch passed sentence on Pompey’s head; a cruel and arrogant Parthian on Crassus’s. Gaius Caesar ordered Lepidus to offer his neck to the tribune Dexter; he himself offered his own to Chaerea. Fortune has raised no one so high that she does not threaten him with as much as she has allowed him. Do not trust this calm: in a moment the sea is churned up. On the same day that boats were playing, they are swallowed.note

Remember that a robber or an enemy can put a sword to your throat. Even without any greater power, every slave holds the power of life and death over you. I put it this way: whoever despises his own life is master of yours. Go over the examples of those who died from plots in their own homes, by open force or by trickery: you will see that no fewer have fallen to the anger of slaves than to the anger of kings. So what does it matter to you how powerful the person you fear is, when what you fear him for is something anyone can do?

But suppose you fall into enemy hands: the victor will order you to be led away—yes, to the very place you are being led anyway. Why deceive yourself, and only now realize what you have been undergoing all along? I put it this way: from the moment you were born, you have been led there. These thoughts, and others like them, must be turned over in the mind if we want to await that last hour calmly—the hour whose fear makes all the others restless.

But to bring this letter to an end, here is what pleased me today. This too is picked from someone else’s garden: “Poverty brought into line with the law of nature is great wealth.” And do you know what limits that law of nature sets for us? Not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. To drive off hunger and thirst, you do not need to sit on proud men’s doorsteps or put up with their heavy frowns and even their insulting kindness; you do not need to brave the seas or follow the army. What nature requires is easy to get and close at hand.note

It is for superfluous things that we sweat. Those are what wear our togas threadbare, force us to grow old in a tent, and drive us onto foreign shores. What is enough is at hand. Whoever is on good terms with poverty is rich. Farewell.note

That you are studying persistently and, dropping everything else, doing this one thing—making yourself better every day—I both approve and rejoice at, and I not only urge you to keep at it, I beg you. But I do warn you of this: don’t be like those who want to be noticed rather than to make progress, and do things that make your dress or way of life conspicuous.

Avoid rough clothing, uncut hair, an unkempt beard, a declared hatred of silver, a bed laid on the ground, and whatever else self-promotion pursues by a perverse route. The very name of philosophy, even when handled modestly, draws enough resentment; what if we begin to set ourselves apart from people’s customs? Inwardly, let everything be different; outwardly, let us fit in with the public.

Let our toga not be gleaming, but not filthy either. Let us not have silver inlaid with solid gold, but let us not think that doing without gold and silver is proof of frugality. Let us aim to live a better life than the crowd, not an opposite one; otherwise we drive away and repel the very people we want to reform. We also bring it about that they want to imitate nothing of ours, for fear they would have to imitate everything.

The first thing philosophy promises is fellow feeling, humanity, and fellowship. Being different will cut us off from that promise. Let us make sure that the things by which we hope to win admiration are not ridiculous and offensive. Our aim, after all, is to live in accordance with nature; and it is contrary to nature to torment one’s body, to hate simple cleanliness, to seek out squalor, and to eat food that is not just cheap but foul and revolting.note

Just as craving dainty things is a sign of luxury, so shunning ordinary things that can be had cheaply is a sign of madness. Philosophy demands frugality, not punishment; and frugality can be neat. This is the balance I like: let life strike a mean between good morals and public ones; let everyone look up to our way of life, but recognize it.

“What, then? Are we to do the same things as everyone else? Will there be no difference between us and them?” A very great one. Let anyone who looks more closely know that we are unlike the crowd. Let whoever enters our house admire us rather than our furniture. Great is the man who uses earthenware as if it were silver; no less great is the man who uses silver as if it were earthenware. It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.

But to share with you this day’s little profit too: I found in our Hecaton that putting a limit on desires also helps to cure fear. “You will stop fearing,” he says, “if you stop hoping.” You will say, “How can things so different go together?” It is so, my Lucilius: though they seem at odds, they are joined. Just as the same chain links the prisoner and the soldier who guards him, so these two, so unlike each other, walk in step: fear follows hope.note

Nor am I surprised that they go together: both belong to a mind in suspense, a mind anxious with expectation of the future. But the chief cause of both is that we do not adapt ourselves to the present but send our thoughts far ahead. So foresight, the greatest good of the human condition, has been turned into an evil.

Wild animals flee the dangers they see; once they have escaped, they are free from care. We are tormented both by what is to come and by what is past. Many of our goods do us harm: memory brings back the torment of fear, and foresight brings it on early. No one is wretched from present things alone. Farewell.

I can tell, Lucilius, that I am not only being improved but transformed. I do not yet promise or hope that nothing is left in me that needs changing. Why shouldn’t I have many things that ought to be pulled together, or thinned down, or built up? And this very fact is proof that a mind has changed for the better: it sees its own faults, which until now it did not know. With some sick people, congratulations are in order when they have realized that they are sick.

So I would like to share with you so sudden a change in me. Then I would begin to have surer confidence in our friendship—that true friendship which neither hope nor fear nor concern for self-interest can tear apart, the kind people die with, and die for.

I can show you many who have lacked not a friend but friendship. That cannot happen when an equal will to seek what is honorable draws minds into partnership. Why can’t it? Because they know that they have everything in common—especially misfortunes. You cannot imagine how much difference I see each single day making to me.

“Send me too,” you say, “these things you have found so effective.” Indeed, I want to pour everything into you, and I am glad to learn something precisely so that I can teach it. Nothing will delight me, however outstanding and beneficial, if I am to know it only for myself. If wisdom were given to me on the condition that I keep it shut up and not speak of it, I would turn it down. No good thing is pleasant to possess without a companion.

So I will send you the books themselves, and so that you don’t spend much effort hunting here and there for what will be useful, I will put marks in them, so that you can go straight to the passages I approve and admire. Still, the living voice and life shared together will do you more good than any discourse. You should come and see for yourself: first, because people believe their eyes more than their ears; second, because the road through precepts is long, but through examples it is short and effective.

Cleanthes would not have become the image of Zeno if he had merely listened to him. He shared his life, saw into his private affairs, watched to see whether he lived by his own rule. Plato and Aristotle and the whole crowd of wise men who would go off in different directions took more from Socrates’ character than from his words. It was not Epicurus’ school but living under the same roof with him that made great men of Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus. And I am not summoning you only so that you can make progress, but so that you can help others; for we will each contribute a great deal to the other.note

Meanwhile, since I owe you your little daily payment, I will tell you what delighted me today in Hecaton. “You ask,” he says, “what progress I have made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” He has made great progress: he will never be alone. Know that such a man is a friend to everyone. Farewell.

You ask what I think you should especially avoid? The crowd. You cannot yet trust yourself to it safely. I, at least, will confess my weakness: I never bring home the character I went out with. Something I had set in order is disturbed; something I had driven away comes back. What happens to invalids whom long weakness has affected so much that they cannot be taken out anywhere without a setback happens to us, whose minds are recovering from a long illness.

Mixing with many people does us harm: there is no one who does not recommend some vice to us, or stamp it on us, or smear it on us without our knowing. Certainly, the bigger the crowd we mingle with, the greater the danger. But nothing is so ruinous to good character as sitting idle at some show. For then vices creep in more easily by way of pleasure.

Most people prefer this to the regular pairs and the fighters brought on by popular demand. Why wouldn’t they? No helmet, no shield wards off the sword. What need of armor? What need of skill? All that just delays death. In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears; at midday, to the spectators. The spectators order the killers to be thrown to those who will kill them, and keep the victor back for another slaughter. For those who fight, the only way out is death. The business is carried on with sword and fire. And all this happens while the arena is supposedly on break.

“But he committed robbery; he killed a man.” So what? Because he killed, he deserved to suffer this. But you, poor wretch, what have you done to deserve to watch it? “Kill him! Flog him! Burn him! Why does he run onto the sword so timidly? Why does he kill with so little nerve? Why does he die with so little relish? Drive him onto the wounds with the whip! Let them take each other’s blows on bare, facing chests!” There is an intermission: “Cut a few throats in the meantime, so there’s something going on.” Come now, don’t you even understand this—that bad examples recoil on those who set them? Thank the immortal gods that you are teaching cruelty to one who cannot learn it.

A young mind, not yet holding firmly to what is right, must be kept away from the crowd; it is easy to go over to the majority. A multitude unlike them could have shaken Socrates, Cato, and Laelius out of their character; so true is it that none of us, even at the very moment we are working hardest to shape our nature, can withstand the onslaught of vices arriving with so large a retinue.note

A single example of luxury or greed does a great deal of harm. A pampered companion gradually weakens and softens us; a rich neighbor stirs up desire; a malicious comrade rubs his rust off on someone, however pure and simple. What do you think happens to a character that is assailed by the public at large? You must either imitate it or hate it.

But both must be avoided: you should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor become an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Withdraw into yourself as far as you can. Spend your time with those who will make you better. Welcome those whom you can make better. The process is mutual: people learn while they teach.

There is no reason to let the glory of displaying your talent draw you out in public, so that you want to give readings or hold debates before these people. I would want you to, if you had wares suited to this crowd; but there is no one here who can understand you. Perhaps someone—one or two—will come your way, and even he will have to be shaped and trained by you to understand you. “Then for whom did I learn all this?” You needn’t fear that you have wasted your effort: you learned it for yourself.

But so that I have not learned today only for myself, I will share with you three fine sayings I came across, all on roughly the same idea. One of them will pay what this letter owes; take the other two as an advance. Democritus says: “One man is a whole people to me, and a people is one man.”note

Well said too by that other man, whoever he was—the author is disputed—who, when asked why he took such pains over an art that would reach very few, said: “A few are enough for me; one is enough; none is enough.” The third is excellent, from Epicurus, writing to one of his partners in study: “I say this not to the many, but to you; for each of us is a large enough audience for the other.”

These sayings, my Lucilius, must be stored away in your mind, so that you despise the pleasure that comes from the approval of the many. Many people praise you. But have you any reason to be pleased with yourself, if you are someone the many can understand? Let your goods face inward. Farewell.

“You tell me,” you say, “to avoid the crowd, to withdraw, and to be content with a good conscience? What about those precepts of your school that command us to die in the midst of action?” As for what I seem to you to be urging meanwhile: I have hidden myself away and shut my doors precisely so that I can be of use to more people. No day of mine passes in mere leisure. I claim part of my nights for study. I do not make time for sleep; I give in to it, and I keep my eyes at the work even when they are tired from staying awake and are closing.note

I have withdrawn not only from people but from business, and above all from my own business. I am working for posterity, writing down some things that may help them. I am committing to writing wholesome advice, like recipes for useful medicines, having found it effective on my own sores, which, even if they are not fully healed, have stopped spreading.

The right path, which I recognized late and worn out with wandering, I point out to others. I shout: “Avoid whatever pleases the crowd, whatever chance hands out. Stop short, suspicious and fearful, before every good that comes by luck: wild animals and fish alike are tricked by some tempting hope. You think these are gifts of fortune? They are traps. Whoever of you wants to live a safe life, let him steer as clear as he possibly can of these limed favors, in which we poor wretches are deceived in this way too: we think we hold them, but they hold us fast.”note

“That course leads over the cliff. The end of this lofty life is a fall. And then you cannot even stop, once prosperity has begun to drive you off course—or at least go down upright, or all at once. Fortune does not just overturn you: she pitches you headlong and dashes you to pieces.”

“So hold to this sound and healthy rule of life: indulge the body only as much as is enough for good health. It must be treated rather harshly, so that it does not disobey the mind. Let food quiet hunger, let drink quench thirst, let clothing keep off the cold, let a house be a defense against whatever threatens the body. Whether it was built of turf or of colored marble from some foreign land makes no difference: know that a person is sheltered as well by thatch as by gold. Despise everything that pointless labor adds as ornament and decoration. Reflect that nothing is admirable except the mind, to which, when it is great, nothing is great.”

If I say these things to myself, if I say them to posterity, don’t you think I am doing more good than when I went down to court to support someone answering bail, or pressed my seal-ring onto a will, or lent my voice and hand to a candidate in the senate? Believe me, those who seem to be doing nothing are doing greater things: they are dealing with the human and the divine at once.

But now I must stop, and pay something for this letter, as has been my practice. It will not come out of my own stock: I am still unrolling Epicurus, and today I read this saying of his: “You must be the slave of philosophy, if true freedom is to be yours.” Whoever has submitted and handed himself over to her is not kept waiting from one day to the next; he is set free on the spot. For this very slavery to philosophy is freedom.note

You may ask why I quote so many good sayings from Epicurus rather than from our own school. But why should you think these sayings belong to Epicurus and not to everyone? How many things poets say that philosophers have said or ought to say! I won’t touch on the tragedians or our Roman dramas in the toga, for these too have some seriousness and stand midway between comedy and tragedy. How many eloquent lines lie buried in the mimes! How many of Publilius’ lines ought to be spoken not by actors in slippers but by actors in tragic boots!note

I will quote one line of his that bears on philosophy, and on the very part of it we had in hand just now, in which he denies that gifts of chance should be counted as ours: “Whatever comes to you by wishing is not your own.”

I remember you expressing the same idea considerably better and more tightly: “What fortune has made yours is not yours.” Nor will I pass over a saying of yours that is better still: “A good that could be given can be taken away.” I am not counting this toward my payment: I have given you something of your own. Farewell.

You want to know whether Epicurus is right to criticize, in one of his letters, those who say that the wise man is content with himself and therefore has no need of a friend. This is the charge Epicurus levels at Stilbo and at those who held that the highest good is a mind incapable of suffering.note

We run into ambiguity if we try to render ἀπάθεια [apatheia, freedom from passion] quickly in one word as impatientia. For it could be taken to mean the opposite of what we intend. We mean someone who rejects all sense of evil; it will be understood as someone who cannot bear any evil. Consider, then, whether it is better to speak of an invulnerable mind, or a mind placed beyond all suffering.note

This is the difference between us and them: our wise man overcomes every hardship but feels it; theirs does not even feel it. What we have in common with them is this: the wise man is content with himself. But even so, he wants to have a friend, a neighbor, a companion, though he is sufficient for himself.

See how self-content he is: at times he is content with part of himself. If disease or an enemy cuts off his hand, if some accident knocks out one of his eyes, or both, what is left of him will satisfy him, and he will be as happy with his body diminished and maimed as he was with it whole. But though he does not miss those parts if they are gone, he prefers that they not be gone.

So the wise man is self-content, not in the sense that he wants to be without a friend, but that he can be. And by “can” I mean this: he bears the loss calmly. Without a friend, indeed, he will never be; it is in his power how quickly he replaces one. Just as Phidias, if he lost a statue, would immediately make another, so this craftsman of friendships will put another in the place of the one he lost.note

You ask how he will make a friend quickly. I will tell you, if you and I can agree that I pay you at once what I owe, and that as far as this letter goes we are square. Hecaton says: “I will show you a love potion without drugs, without herbs, without any witch’s spell: if you want to be loved, love.” And not only the experience of an old and sure friendship brings great pleasure, but also the beginning and acquiring of a new one.

The difference between a farmer reaping and a farmer sowing is the difference between the man who has acquired a friend and the man who is acquiring one. The philosopher Attalus used to say that it is more pleasant to make a friend than to have one, just as it is more pleasant for an artist to paint than to have painted. That anxious absorption in one’s work holds enormous delight in the absorption itself. The man who has taken his hand from a finished work does not take the same delight. Now he enjoys the fruit of his art; while he was painting, he enjoyed the art itself. Children are more fruitful in their youth, but sweeter in their infancy.note

Now let us return to the point. The wise man, even if he is content with himself, still wants to have a friend—if for no other reason, then to practice friendship, so that so great a virtue does not lie idle. Not for the reason Epicurus gave in this very letter, “so as to have someone to sit by him when he is sick, to help him when he is thrown into chains or is in need,” but to have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit, someone he himself may free when an enemy holds him captive. Whoever looks to himself and takes up friendship for that reason reckons badly. As it began, so it will end: he has acquired a friend to bring help against chains; the moment the chain clanks, that friend will be gone.

These are the friendships the public calls temporary. The man taken up because he is useful will be welcome only as long as he is useful. That is why the prosperous are besieged by crowds of friends, while around the ruined there is solitude, and friends run away just when they are being put to the test. That is why there are so many wicked examples of some deserting out of fear and others betraying out of fear. Beginnings and endings are bound to match. Whoever began to be a friend because it paid will stop because it pays. Some price will be preferred to friendship, if anything in it is valued besides friendship itself.

For what purpose do I acquire a friend? To have someone I can die for, someone I can follow into exile, someone whose death I can block and spend myself to prevent. What you describe is a business deal, not friendship—one that approaches for advantage and keeps an eye on what it will get.

Without doubt, the passion of lovers has something like friendship about it; you could call it friendship gone mad. Does anyone, then, love for the sake of profit? Or of ambition or glory? Love itself, on its own, heedless of everything else, fires minds with desire for beauty, not without hope of affection in return. What, then? Does a shameful passion spring from a more honorable motive than friendship?

“The question now,” you say, “is not whether friendship should 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 a man who is content with himself can approach it. “How, then, does he approach it?” As one approaches the most beautiful of things, not lured by gain nor frightened off by the swings of fortune. Whoever acquires friendship for the good times strips it of its majesty.

The wise man is content with himself. Many people, my Lucilius, misinterpret this: they banish the wise man from everything and confine him inside his own skin. But we must distinguish what the phrase promises and how far it goes. The wise man is content with himself for living happily, not for living. For living, he needs many things; for living happily, only a mind that is sound and upright and scornful of fortune.

I want to show you a distinction made by Chrysippus as well. He says that the wise man lacks nothing, and yet needs many things. “The fool, by contrast, needs nothing—for he knows how to use nothing—but lacks everything. The wise man needs hands and eyes and many things necessary for daily use, but lacks nothing. For to lack implies necessity, and nothing is necessary to the wise man.”note

So although he is content with himself, he needs friends. He wants to have as many as possible—but not in order to live happily, for he will live happily even without friends. The highest good seeks no tools from outside. It is cultivated at home and arises wholly from itself. It begins to be subject to fortune if it looks outside for any part of itself.

“But what sort of life will the wise man have if he is left without friends—thrown into prison, or stranded among some foreign people, or detained on a long voyage, or cast up on a deserted shore?” The life Jupiter has when the universe is dissolved and the gods are merged into one, and nature pauses for a while: he rests in himself, given over to his own thoughts. The wise man does something like this: he withdraws into himself; he keeps his own company.note

As long as he is allowed to order his affairs as he sees fit, he is content with himself—and he marries; he is content with himself—and he raises children; he is content with himself—and yet he would not live if he had to live without another human being. What brings him to friendship is not any advantage of his own but a natural impulse. For just as other things have an inborn sweetness for us, so does friendship. Just as there is a hatred of solitude and a desire for company, just as nature draws human beings to one another, so here too there is an instinct that makes us seek friendships.

Nevertheless, though he is utterly devoted to his friends, though he ranks them equal to himself and often above himself, he will confine all his good within himself, and will say what Stilbo said—the Stilbo whom Epicurus’ letter attacks. His city had been captured, his children lost, his wife lost, and he was walking out of the general blaze alone and yet happy, when Demetrius, who got the surname Poliorcetes, “the Besieger,” from his destruction of cities, asked whether he had lost anything. “All my goods,” he said, “are with me.”note

There is a brave and vigorous man! He conquered his enemy’s very victory. “I have lost nothing,” he said; he made him wonder whether he had won at all. “All my goods are with me”: that is precisely what it means to consider nothing good that can be taken away. We marvel at certain animals that pass through the middle of fire with their bodies unharmed; how much more marvelous is this man, who came out through sword and ruins and flames unhurt and unscathed! Do you see how much easier it is to conquer a whole people than one man? This saying he shares with the Stoic: the Stoic too carries his goods intact through burned cities. For he is content with himself; this is the boundary he sets to his happiness.

Don’t think we alone toss around noble words: Epicurus himself, Stilbo’s critic, uttered a saying like his—take it in good part, even though I have already paid off today’s debt. “If someone,” he says, “does not think what he has is ample, then even if he were master of the whole world, he is wretched.” Or, if it seems better to you put this way—for our aim must be to serve not words but meanings: “Wretched is he who does not judge himself supremely happy, even if he rules the world.”

And so that you may know that these sentiments are universal—nature, of course, dictating them—you will find in a comic poet: “He is not happy who does not think he is.” For what does your situation matter, if it seems bad to you?

“What, then?” you say. “If that man who is disgracefully rich, and that man who is master of many but slave of more, call themselves happy, will they become happy by their own verdict?” What matters is not what one says but what one feels—and not what one feels on a single day, but constantly. But there is no reason to fear that so great a thing will come to someone unworthy: only the wise man is pleased with what is his own. All folly suffers from disgust with itself. Farewell.

That’s how it is, and I’m not changing my opinion: avoid the crowd, avoid the few, avoid even one. I have no one I would want you to share yourself with. And see what a verdict on you this is: I dare to trust you to yourself. Crates, they say—a pupil of that very Stilbo I mentioned in my last letter—saw a young man walking by himself and asked him what he was doing there alone. “I’m talking with myself,” he said. To which Crates replied: “Be careful, I beg you, and pay close attention: you are talking with a bad man.”note

We usually keep watch over someone who is grieving or afraid, so that he won’t make bad use of being alone. No one who lacks wisdom should be left to himself. That is when such people hatch bad plans; that is when they build future dangers for others or for themselves; that is when they marshal their wicked desires. That is when the mind lays bare whatever it used to hide out of fear or shame; that is when it sharpens recklessness, stirs up lust, goads anger. In the end, the one advantage solitude has—confiding in no one, fearing no informer—is lost on the fool: he betrays himself. So see what I hope for you—or rather what I guarantee myself, since hope is just the name for an uncertain good: I can find no one I would rather you be with than yourself.

I recall how high-mindedly you tossed off certain words, and how full of strength they were. I congratulated myself at once and said: “Those didn’t come from the tip of the lips; these words have a foundation. This man is not one of the crowd; his eyes are on what will save him.”

Speak like that; live like that. See that nothing pushes you down. As for your old prayers, you may let the gods off them; take on new ones from scratch. Pray for a good mind, for good health of the spirit, and only then of the body. Why shouldn’t you make those prayers often? Ask god boldly: you won’t be asking him for anything that belongs to someone else.

But to send off this letter, as is my custom, with some small gift: here is a true saying I found in Athenodorus: “Know that you are free of all desires when you have reached the point where you ask god for nothing that you could not ask for openly.” For as things are, how mad people are! They whisper the most shameful prayers to the gods; if anyone brings an ear close, they fall silent. What they don’t want a human being to know, they tell to god. So consider whether this might be given as healthy advice: live with people as if god were watching; speak with god as if people were listening. Farewell.note

Your friend, a young man of good character, has been talking with me. How much spirit he has, how much talent, how much progress already—his very first conversation showed it. He gave me a taste, and he will live up to it. For he did not speak from preparation; he was caught off guard. As he collected himself he could hardly shake off his modesty—a good sign in a young man—so deeply did the blush spread over him from within. That blush, I suspect, will stay with him even when he has grown steady and stripped off all his faults—even when he is wise. For no wisdom removes the body’s natural failings. Whatever is fixed in us and inborn is softened by training, not conquered.

Some people, even the most self-possessed, break into a sweat in front of a crowd, just as the exhausted and overheated usually do. Some people’s knees shake when they are about to speak; others’ teeth chatter, their tongue stumbles, their lips clamp together. Neither training nor practice ever shakes these off; nature exerts her power, and through this weakness reminds even the strongest that she is there.

Among these, I know, is also the blush, which comes suddenly over even the most serious men. It shows more in the young, who have more heat and a tender complexion; but it touches veterans and old men too. Some people are never more to be feared than when they have blushed, as if they had poured out all their sense of shame.

Sulla was at his most violent when the blood had rushed to his face. Nothing was softer than Pompey’s face: he never failed to blush in front of a group, especially at public meetings. I remember Fabianus blushing when he was brought into the Senate as a witness, and the modesty suited him wonderfully.note

This comes not from weakness of mind but from the novelty of the situation, which, even if it doesn’t shake the inexperienced, does move them, since a natural tendency of the body makes them prone to it. For just as some people have calm blood, others have blood that is quick and mobile and rushes readily into the face.

This, as I said, no wisdom drives away; otherwise, if it could erase every flaw, wisdom would have the nature of things under its command. Whatever the circumstances of our birth and the makeup of our body have assigned us will stick, however much and however long the mind has composed itself. None of these can be forbidden, any more than they can be summoned.

Actors on the stage, who imitate the passions, who portray fear and agitation, who represent sadness, imitate shame by these signs: they lower their faces, drop their voices, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them down. A blush they cannot produce; it can be neither prevented nor brought on. Against these things wisdom promises nothing, achieves nothing. They are a law unto themselves: they come unbidden and they go unbidden.

Now the letter calls for its closing words. Here they are—useful and healthy, and I want you to fix them in your mind: “We should cherish some good man and always keep him before our eyes, so that we live as if he were watching and do everything as if he saw it.”

This, my Lucilius, is Epicurus’ advice. He has given us a guardian and a tutor—and rightly so. A great part of wrongdoing disappears if a witness stands by those about to do wrong. Let the mind have someone it reveres, someone whose authority makes even its private moments purer. Happy the man who improves others not only by his presence but even when he is thought of! Happy the one who can so revere someone that even the memory of him makes him compose and order himself! Whoever can revere someone that way will soon deserve reverence himself.

So choose Cato. If he seems too severe to you, choose Laelius, a man of gentler spirit. Choose someone whose life and speech have pleased you, and whose very face, showing his character, has pleased you too; keep him always before you, as either guardian or model. We need someone, I say, against whom our character can measure itself. You won’t straighten what is crooked without a ruler. Farewell.

Wherever I turn, I see proofs of my old age. I had gone to my place just outside the city and was complaining about the cost of a building that was falling apart. My estate manager told me it wasn’t his negligence at fault—he was doing everything—but the house was old. This house grew up under my own hands! What is going to become of me, if stones my age are this crumbly?

Angry with him, I seized the next excuse to vent. “These plane trees are obviously being neglected,” I said. “They have no leaves. How knotted and shriveled the branches are, how gloomy and scruffy the trunks! This wouldn’t happen if someone dug around them and watered them.” He swears by my guardian spirit that he is doing everything, that his care is slack in nothing, but that they are old. Between you and me, I had planted them; I had seen their first leaf.

Turning to the door, I said: “Who is that? That decrepit fellow, rightly placed by the doorway—he’s facing out already. Where did you get him? What pleasure was there in taking in someone else’s dead?” But he said: “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Felicio, the one you used to bring little figurines to. I’m the son of Philositus the estate manager, your little favorite.” “The man is completely raving,” I said. “So this little boy has become my favorite too? Well, it’s quite possible: his teeth are falling out right now.”note

I owe this to my place outside the city: wherever I turned, my old age showed itself to me. Let us embrace it and love it; it is full of pleasure if you know how to use it. Fruit is most welcome when it is going; boyhood is loveliest at its end; for those devoted to wine it is the last drink that delights—the one that drowns them, that puts the finishing touch on drunkenness.

Every pleasure saves its greatest delight for its end. The most delightful age is the one already on the downslope, but not yet at the drop. And even the age that stands on the last roof tile, I judge, has its own pleasures. Or else this itself takes the place of pleasures: to need none. How sweet it is to have worn out one’s desires and left them behind!

“It’s hard,” you say, “to have death before your eyes.” First, death should be before the eyes of the old man just as much as the young. We are not called up by the census rolls, oldest first. Next, no one is so old that it would be shameless to hope for one more day. And one day is a step of life. Our whole lifetime is made of parts, and has circles drawn one around another, larger around smaller. There is one that embraces and encircles them all: it reaches from birthday to last day. There is another that encloses the years of youth. There is one that binds all of childhood in its circuit. Then there is the year, a unit in itself, containing all the seasons; by multiplying years, life is built. The month is bound by a tighter circle. The day has the narrowest ring; but even it runs from beginning to end, from sunrise to sunset.

That is why Heraclitus, whose nickname came from the obscurity of his style, said: “One day is equal to every day.” People have taken this in different ways. One said it was equal in hours—and he isn’t wrong, for if a day is a span of twenty-four hours, all days must be equal to one another, since the night has what the day has lost. Another says that one day is equal to all days in likeness: the longest stretch of time holds nothing you would not also find in a single day—light and night—and through eternity the days only multiply these alternations; they are no different whether a day is shorter or longer.note

So every day should be arranged as if it were bringing up the rear, rounding off and completing our life. Pacuvius, who made Syria his own by long possession, used to hold his own funeral rites with wine and those funeral banquets, then be carried from dinner to his bedroom while, amid the applause of his kept boys, this was sung to music: βεβίωται, βεβίωται [“He has lived, he has lived!”].note

Not a day passed without his carrying himself out to burial. What he did from a bad conscience, let us do from a good one, and as we go to sleep let us say, glad and cheerful: “I have lived; the course that fortune gave me I have run.” If god adds tomorrow, let us accept it gladly. The happiest man, secure in possession of himself, is the one who waits for tomorrow without anxiety. Whoever has said “I have lived” gets up every day to a profit.note

But now I must close the letter. “So,” you say, “it will come to me without any pocket money?” Don’t worry: it brings something with it. Why did I say something? A lot. For what could be finer than this saying, which I hand to it to deliver to you: “It is bad to live under necessity; but there is no necessity to live under necessity.” Why should there be? On every side many roads lie open to freedom, short and easy. Let us thank god that no one can be held in life. We may trample on necessities themselves.

“Epicurus said that,” you say. “What are you doing with someone else’s property?” Whatever is true is mine. I will keep pressing Epicurus on you, so that those who swear by someone’s words, and weigh not what is said but who says it, may learn that the best things are common property. Farewell.

I know you have plenty of spirit. Even before you equipped yourself with healthy precepts that overcome hardship, you were confident enough of yourself against fortune—and much more so after you came to grips with her and tested your strength. Strength can never give reliable confidence in itself until many difficulties have appeared on this side and that, and some have even come close. That is how the true spirit, the one that will never fall under another’s control, is proved.

This is its assay. An athlete who has never been bruised cannot bring great spirit to a contest. The one who has seen his own blood, whose teeth have rattled under a fist, who has been tripped and borne his opponent’s full weight, who was thrown down but did not throw away his courage, who every time he fell got up more defiant—he goes down to the fight with high hopes.

So, to follow that comparison: fortune has often been on top of you, yet you did not give up; you sprang back up and stood firmer. For virtue gains a great deal when it is provoked. Still, if you like, accept from me some reinforcements with which to fortify yourself.

So some things torment us more than they should, some sooner than they should, some when they shouldn’t at all. We either magnify our pain, or invent it, or anticipate it. The first point, since the matter is in dispute and we have a case pending, can be postponed for now. What I call light, you will insist is very heavy; I know that some laugh under the whip and others groan at a slap. Later we’ll see whether these things are strong by their own power or through our weakness.

Just do this for me: whenever people crowd around you trying to convince you that you are miserable, think not about what you hear but about what you feel. Take counsel with your own endurance and question yourself, since you know your own affairs best: Why are these people pitying me? Why are they trembling, why do they even fear catching something from me, as if disaster could jump from one person to another? Is there anything bad here, or is this thing more disreputable than bad? Ask yourself: Am I tormenting myself and grieving for no reason, and making an evil out of what is not one?

“How,” you ask, “can I tell whether the things that distress me are empty or real?” Here is a rule for it: we are tormented either by things present, or by things to come, or by both. About the present it’s easy to judge: if your body is free and healthy, there is no pain from any injury. What is to come, we’ll see; today there’s no trouble.

“But it’s going to happen.” First, look into whether there is sure evidence of the coming evil. Mostly we suffer from suspicions, and we are fooled by rumor, which often settles wars, and settles individuals far more often. That’s how it is, my Lucilius: we quickly give in to opinion. We don’t test the things that drive us to fear, we don’t shake them out; we tremble and turn our backs, just like soldiers driven from their camp by the dust of a stampeding herd, or panicked by some tale spread without a source.

Somehow it’s the empty things that disturb us more. Real things have their limits; whatever comes from uncertainty is handed over to guesswork and the free rein of a frightened mind. So no fears are so destructive, so beyond recall, as the frenzied kind. Other fears are without reason; these are out of their minds.

So let us look into the matter carefully. It is likely that something bad will happen; that doesn’t make it true. How many things have come that weren’t expected! How many that were expected have never appeared! Even if it is going to happen, what good is it to run out to meet your pain? You’ll suffer soon enough when it comes; meanwhile, promise yourself better things.

What will you gain? Time. Many things will intervene, so that a danger near at hand, or even right upon you, either halts, or ends, or passes onto someone else’s head. A fire has left a way of escape; a collapsing building has set some people down gently; sometimes the sword has been called back from the very neck; some have outlived their own executioner. Even bad fortune is fickle. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t; meanwhile it isn’t happening. Set better prospects before you.

Sometimes, with no visible signs to foretell anything bad, the mind invents false images for itself. It twists some ambiguous word toward the worse, or imagines someone’s offense as greater than it is, and considers not how angry that person is but how much an angry person could do. But there is no point in living, no limit to our miseries, if we fear as much as is possible. Here let good sense help you; here, with strength of mind, reject even a fear that is well grounded. If you can’t, drive out one fault with another: temper fear with hope. Nothing we fear is so certain that it isn’t more certain still that feared things fade away and hopes deceive.

So weigh hope and fear, and whenever everything is uncertain, favor yourself: believe what you prefer. If fear has more votes, lean the other way anyway, and stop troubling yourself. And keep turning this over in your mind: most mortals, though nothing bad is happening to them and nothing is certain to happen, are in a fever and running about. For no one resists himself once he has begun to be driven, or reduces his fear to the truth. No one says: “The source is worthless; he’s a worthless man who either made this up or believed it.” We give ourselves up to be carried off by the breeze.

We are terrified of the doubtful as if it were certain. We don’t keep things in proportion. A pebble of worry instantly turns into fear. I’m ashamed both to talk to you so gloomily and to revive you with such mild remedies. Let someone else say, “Maybe it won’t come.” You say, “So what if it does? We’ll see who wins. Maybe it comes for my benefit, and that death will bring honor to my life.” Hemlock made Socrates great. Wrest from Cato the sword that won him his freedom, and you’ll have taken away a great part of his glory.note

I’ve been urging you on too long, when what you need is a reminder rather than encouragement. We are not leading you in a direction contrary to your nature; you were born for the things we are describing. All the more reason to increase and adorn the good that is yours.

But now I’ll finish the letter, once I’ve pressed its seal on it—that is, once I’ve entrusted it with some splendid saying to carry to you. “Among its other evils, folly has this one too: it is always beginning to live.” Think about what this saying means, Lucilius, best of men, and you’ll understand how disgraceful is the fickleness of people who every day lay new foundations for their lives and start new hopes even at the very end.

Look around at people one by one: you’ll come across old men who are, at this very moment, preparing themselves for political ambition, for travel, for business. And what is more disgraceful than an old man just beginning to live? I wouldn’t add the author of this saying if it weren’t one of Epicurus’ less familiar sayings, not among the well-known ones that I have allowed myself to praise and adopt. Farewell.

I admit that we have an inborn affection for our body; I admit that we are charged with its care. I don’t deny we should indulge it; I deny we should be its slave. For whoever is a slave to his body—who fears too much for it, who measures everything by it—will be a slave to many.

We should conduct ourselves not as though we ought to live for the body, but as though we cannot live without it. Loving it too much disturbs us with fears, weighs us down with worries, exposes us to insults. The honorable is cheap to someone who holds his body too dear. Let it be cared for most diligently—but in such a way that, when reason, dignity, or good faith demands it, it can be thrown into the fire.

Nonetheless, as far as we can, let us avoid discomforts as well as dangers, and withdraw to safety, constantly thinking out ways to ward off what is to be feared. There are, unless I’m mistaken, three kinds of these: we fear poverty, we fear disease, and we fear what comes through the violence of someone more powerful.

Of all these, nothing shakes us more than what hangs over us from another’s power. For it comes with great noise and commotion. The natural evils I mentioned, poverty and disease, creep up in silence and strike no terror into eyes or ears. The other evil comes in a huge parade. It has sword and fire around it, and chains, and a pack of wild beasts to set loose on human flesh.

Picture here the prison, and crosses, and the rack, and the hook, and the stake driven through a man until it comes out through his mouth, and limbs torn apart by chariots driven in opposite directions, and that tunic smeared with and woven from fuel for fire, and whatever else cruelty has devised besides these.note

So it’s no wonder that our fear of this is greatest, since its variety is great and its apparatus terrifying. For just as a torturer achieves more the more instruments of pain he lays out—people who would have held out under the suffering are beaten by the sight—so among the things that subdue and tame our minds, those that have something to display are more effective. Those other plagues are no less serious—I mean hunger and thirst, abscesses in the chest, and fever that scorches the very innards. But they are hidden; they have nothing to brandish, nothing to parade. The former, like great wars, win by their look and their array.

So let us take care to avoid giving offense. Sometimes it is the people we ought to fear; sometimes, if the state is organized so that most business is done through the Senate, the influential men in it; sometimes individuals who have been given power by the people and over the people. To have all these as friends is hard work; it is enough not to have them as enemies. So the wise man will never provoke the anger of the powerful; rather, he will steer clear of it, just as in sailing one steers clear of a storm.

When you were heading for Sicily, you crossed the strait. A reckless helmsman scorned the threats of the south wind—it’s the wind that roughens the Sicilian sea and churns it into whirlpools—and made not for the left-hand shore but for the one near which Charybdis whirls the waters. But a more careful one asks people who know the area what the currents are, what signs the clouds give; he holds his course far from that region notorious for whirlpools. The wise man does the same: he avoids power that could harm him, taking care above all not to be seen avoiding it. For part of safety lies in not seeking it openly, since what a person flees, he condemns.note

So we must look around for ways to be safe from the mob. First, let’s not desire the same things: there is strife among rivals. Next, let’s not have anything that can be snatched away at great profit to someone lying in wait. Let there be as little plunder on your person as possible. No one comes after human blood for its own sake—or very few do. More people calculate than hate. The robber lets the naked man pass; even on a road under siege, the poor man has peace.

Then, following an old precept, there are three things we must take care to avoid: hatred, envy, contempt. How to do this, wisdom alone will show. For the balance is difficult, and we must beware lest fear of envy carry us into contempt—lest, while we refuse to trample others, we seem fit to be trampled. Being able to inspire fear has given many people reasons to fear. Let us draw back on every side: being despised does no less harm than being looked up to.

So we must take refuge in philosophy. These studies serve as a sacred headband, not only among good people but among the moderately bad. For eloquence in the courts, and anything else that stirs up the people, has its opponents; but philosophy, peaceful and minding its own business, cannot be despised, since all the arts give it honor, even among the worst of people. Wickedness will never grow so strong, there will never be such a conspiracy against the virtues, that the name of philosophy will not remain venerable and sacred. However, philosophy itself must be practiced quietly and modestly.note

“What then?” you say. “Does Marcus Cato seem to you to practice philosophy modestly—the man who tries to check a civil war with his vote? Who steps in between the arms of raging leaders? Who, while some offend Pompey and others Caesar, provokes both at once?”

One could debate whether, at that time, a wise man should have taken part in public life. “What do you want, Marcus Cato? It’s no longer a question of freedom; that was ruined long ago. The question is whether Caesar or Pompey will own the state. What have you to do with that contest? Neither side is yours. A master is being chosen. What does it matter to you which one wins? The better man can win; the man who has won cannot help being the worse.” I have touched on Cato’s final role. But not even the earlier years were such as to admit a wise man into that plundering of the state. What else did Cato do but shout and send out useless words, when at one moment he was hoisted up by the hands of the mob and, covered with spit, dragged out of the forum, and at another led from the Senate to prison?

But we’ll see later whether the wise man should devote his efforts to the state. Meanwhile, I point you to those Stoics who, shut out of public life, withdrew to cultivate their lives and to establish laws for the human race, without offending anyone more powerful. The wise man will not disrupt the public’s customs, nor will he draw the people’s gaze with an unusual way of life.

“What then? Will whoever follows this plan be safe no matter what?” I can no more promise you that than I can promise good health to a temperate man—and yet temperance does produce good health. Some ship goes down in the harbor; but what do you think happens in the open sea? How much nearer at hand would danger be for someone busy with many schemes, when even leisure is not safe? The innocent sometimes perish—who denies it? But the guilty more often. A fighter’s skill still stands, even if he has been struck through his armor.

In short, the wise man looks at the plan behind every action, not the outcome. Beginnings are in our power; fortune judges the result, and I don’t grant her a verdict on me. “But it will bring some trouble, some adversity.” A robber who kills you has not condemned you.

Now you’re holding out your hand for the daily coin. I’ll fill it with a gold one, and since gold has come up, here is how its use and enjoyment can give you more pleasure: “He enjoys wealth most who needs wealth least.” “Tell me the author,” you say. So you’ll know how generous I am, my policy is to praise other people’s words: it’s from Epicurus, or Metrodorus, or someone from that workshop.

And what does it matter who said it? He said it for everyone. The man who needs riches fears for them. And no one enjoys a good that makes him anxious; he’s eager to add something to it. While he thinks about increasing it, he forgets to use it. He takes in accounts, wears out the forum, pores over his loan book: from master he becomes manager. Farewell.

The ancients had a custom, kept up to my own time, of adding to the first words of a letter: “If you are well, that’s good; I am well.” We rightly say: “If you are doing philosophy, that’s good.” For that alone is being well. Without it the mind is sick. The body, too, even if it has great strength, is healthy only in the way someone deranged or delirious is.

So take care above all of this health, and then of the other, second kind, which won’t cost you much if you want to be well. For it’s foolish, my Lucilius, and hardly fitting for an educated man, to busy himself with exercising his arms, broadening his neck, and strengthening his sides. Even when the fattening has gone well and your muscles have grown, you will never match the strength or the weight of a prize ox. Add now that the mind is crushed by the heavier load of the body and becomes less agile. So as far as you can, keep your body within bounds and make room for your mind.

Many drawbacks follow for those devoted to this pursuit. First, the exercises, whose effort drains the vital breath and makes it unfit for concentration and more demanding study. Next, a surfeit of food dulls mental sharpness. Then there are slaves of the worst sort taken on as trainers—men who divide their time between oil and wine, whose day has gone as they wished if they’ve had a good sweat and, in place of what flowed out, have poured back plenty of drink that will sink deeper on an empty stomach. Drinking and sweating: the life of a heart patient.

There are exercises both easy and short that tire the body quickly and save time—which must be our chief concern: running, moving the arms with a weight, and jumping—either the kind that lifts the body high, or the kind that sends it far, or the kind of the Salian priests, so to speak, or, to put it more insultingly, of the fullers. Choose any of these to practice: plain and easy.note

Whatever you do, return quickly from the body to the mind. Exercise it night and day; it is nourished by moderate labor. Neither cold nor heat will hinder this exercise, not even old age. Take care of the good that grows better with age.

I’m not telling you to be always bent over a book or writing tablets. The mind must be given some break—yet so that it is not unstrung, only eased. Being carried in a litter both shakes up the body and doesn’t hinder study: you can read, you can dictate, you can talk, you can listen—none of which even walking prevents.

Nor should you look down on exercising the voice—though I forbid you to raise it step by step through fixed scales and then lower it again. What if you then wanted to learn how to walk? Let in those people whom hunger has taught new trades: there will be someone to regulate your steps and watch your cheeks as you eat, and he will go as far as your patience and credulity let his impudence go. What then? Will your voice start straight off with shouting and full strain? It’s so natural to rise little by little that even people quarreling start with conversation and move on to shouting. No one begins by crying, “Citizens, help!”

So, however your mind’s impulse urges you, deliver your tirade now more forcefully, now more gently, leaning whichever way your voice, too, prompts you. When you take it back and call it in, let it come down with restraint, not collapse; let it go out at a middle pitch, and not rage in an untrained, rustic way. For our aim is not that the voice get exercise, but that it give exercise.

I’ve taken a good deal of trouble off your hands. To these favors will be added one small fee and one Greek saying. Here is a remarkable precept: “The foolish life is thankless and anxious; it is carried entirely into the future.” “Who says this?” you ask. The same man as before. What life do you think is meant here by the foolish one? Baba’s and Isio’s? Not so: it’s ours that’s meant—we whom blind desire hurls headlong toward things that will harm us and will certainly never satisfy us; we who, if anything could be enough, would have had enough by now; we who don’t consider how pleasant it is to ask for nothing, how magnificent to be full and not depend on fortune.note

So, Lucilius, keep recalling how much you have achieved. When you look at how many are ahead of you, think how many are behind. If you want to be grateful to the gods and to your own life, think how many you have passed. What do the rest matter to you? You have passed yourself.

Set a limit that you would not even want to pass if you could. Let those treacherous goods go at last—sweeter to hope for than to get. If there were anything solid in them, they would sometime fill us; as it is, they stir up thirst in those who drink them. Away with showy trappings. And as for what the uncertain lot of the future holds, why should I beg fortune to give it rather than beg myself not to ask? And why should I ask? Shall I pile things up, forgetting how fragile human life is? What should I toil for? Look—this day is the last. Suppose it isn’t: it’s near the last. Farewell.

I know it’s clear to you, Lucilius, that no one can live happily, or even tolerably, without the study of wisdom, and that a happy life is achieved by wisdom made perfect, but a tolerable one even by wisdom just begun. But what is clear must be strengthened and driven deeper by daily reflection. It takes more work to keep your resolutions than to make honorable ones. You must persevere and add strength by constant study, until what is now good will becomes a good mind.

So with me you no longer need many words or assurances: I understand that you’ve made great progress. I know where the things you write come from; they are not feigned or dressed up. Still, I’ll tell you what I think: I already have hope for you, but not yet confidence. I want you to do the same: there’s no reason to believe in yourself quickly and easily. Shake yourself out, search yourself from every angle, watch yourself. Above all, see whether you’ve made progress in philosophy or in life itself.

Philosophy is not a trade for the crowd, nor made for show. It lies not in words but in deeds. Nor is it used to pass the day with some amusement, to take the tedium out of leisure. It shapes and builds the mind, orders life, governs actions, shows what should be done and what left undone; it sits at the helm and steers our course as we toss through dangers. Without it no one can live without fear, no one free from care. Countless things happen every hour that call for advice, and that advice must be sought from philosophy.

Someone will say: “What use is philosophy to me, if there is fate? What use is it, if god is the ruler? What use is it, if chance commands? For what is fixed can’t be changed, and nothing can be prepared against what is uncertain. Either god has forestalled my planning and decided what I should do, or fortune leaves nothing to my planning.”

Whichever of these is true, Lucilius—or even if all of them are—we must practice philosophy. Whether the fates bind us with an inexorable law, or god as arbiter of the universe has arranged everything, or chance drives and tosses human affairs without order, philosophy must protect us. It will urge us to obey god willingly and fortune defiantly; it will teach you to follow god and to endure chance.

But we shouldn’t turn now to the debate over what is in our power if providence is in command, or if a chain of fates drags us along in bonds, or if sudden and unexpected events rule. I return now to my point: to warn and urge you not to let the impulse of your mind slip away and cool. Hold on to it and steady it, so that what is now an impulse becomes a settled disposition of the mind.

Right from the start, if I know you well, you’ll be looking around to see what little gift this letter has brought. Shake it out and you’ll find it. There’s no reason to admire my generosity: I’m still being liberal with other people’s property. But why did I say other people’s? Whatever has been well said by anyone is mine. This too was said by Epicurus: “If you live in accordance with nature, you will never be poor; if in accordance with opinion, you will never be rich.”

Nature desires little, opinion without limit. Let whatever many rich men have possessed be heaped upon you. Let fortune carry you beyond the wealth of any private citizen, cover you with gold, clothe you in purple, bring you to such a pitch of luxury and riches that you hide the earth under marble—so that you may not only own your riches but walk on them. Add statues and paintings, and whatever any art has worked up for luxury: from these you will learn to want still more.

Natural desires have limits; those born of false opinion have nowhere to stop. For there is no end to what is false. When you travel a road, there is an end to it; wandering has no limit. So pull yourself back from empty things, and when you want to know whether what you seek springs from a natural desire or a blind one, consider whether it can come to a stop anywhere. If, however far you’ve gone, there is always something farther left, know that it is not natural. Farewell.

Throw all that aside, if you are wise—or rather, so that you may be wise—and strive toward a sound mind at full speed and with all your strength. If anything holds you back, untie it or cut it. “My household affairs are holding me up,” you say. “I want to arrange them so that they can support me while I do nothing, so that neither poverty is a burden to me nor I to anyone else.”

When you say this, you seem not to know the force and power of the good you are thinking about. You do see the sum of the matter—how much philosophy helps—but you do not yet make out the parts precisely enough. You do not yet know how much it assists us everywhere: how, to use Cicero’s word, it both “lends aid” in the greatest matters and comes down to the smallest. Believe me, call it in as your adviser. It will counsel you not to sit down over your accounts.note

Surely this is what you are after, what you want to gain by this delay: not to have to fear poverty. But what if poverty is something to seek? Wealth has stood in the way of many who would have pursued philosophy; poverty travels light and without care. When the trumpet sounds, the poor man knows he is not the one being hunted. When the cry goes up for water against a fire, he asks how to get out, not what to carry out. If he has to go to sea, the harbor is not in an uproar, nor are the shores thrown into commotion by one man’s retinue. No crowd of slaves surrounds him, for whose feeding one must pray for the harvests of lands overseas.

It is easy to feed a few bellies—well-trained ones, too, that want nothing but to be filled. Hunger costs little; fussiness costs a great deal. Poverty is content to satisfy pressing needs. Why, then, should you refuse to take as your companion the one whose ways the sensible rich man imitates?

If you want to have time for your mind, you must either be poor or be like the poor. Study cannot be healthful without some attention to frugality—and frugality is voluntary poverty. So away with those excuses: “I don’t yet have enough; once I reach that sum, then I’ll give myself wholly to philosophy.” But nothing should be acquired before this thing that you put off and acquire after everything else. This is where you must begin. “I want to acquire the means to live,” you say. Then acquire and learn at the same time. If something forbids you to live well, it does not forbid you to die well.

There is no reason for poverty to call us away from philosophy—not even destitution. Those hurrying toward it must endure even hunger. Some have endured hunger under siege, and what other reward did they have for their endurance than not falling into the victor’s power? How much greater is what is promised here: lasting freedom, and fear of no one, human or divine. Truly, one must come to these things even starving.

Armies have endured the lack of everything; they have lived on the roots of plants and staved off hunger with foods too foul to name. All this they suffered for a kingdom—and, to make you marvel the more, someone else’s. Will anyone hesitate to bear poverty in order to free his mind from madness? So there is no need to acquire first. You can reach philosophy even without money for the journey.

So it is. When you have everything, then you will want to have wisdom too? Will it be the last furnishing of your life—an extra, so to speak? No: if you have something, start philosophizing now (for how do you know you don’t already have too much?); if you have nothing, seek this before anything else.

“But necessities were lacking.” First, they cannot be lacking, since nature asks for very little, and the wise man adapts himself to nature. But if the most extreme need has come upon him, he will promptly leave life and stop being a burden to himself. If his means of prolonging life are scanty and narrow, he will make the best of them. Without worry or anxiety beyond necessities, he will give his belly and his back what they are owed; and, free from care and cheerful, he will laugh at the busyness of the rich and the rushing about of those chasing riches, and say:

“Why put yourself off for so long? Will you wait for the interest on a loan, or the profit on your merchandise, or the will of some rich old man, when you can become rich at once? Wisdom pays out wealth on the spot: to whomever it has made wealth superfluous, it has given it.” These words concern others; you are closer to the rich. Change the age you live in, and you have too much. But in every age, what is enough is the same.

I could have ended the letter here, if I had not trained you badly. No one may greet the kings of Parthia without a gift; I am not allowed to say goodbye to you for free. What then? I will borrow from Epicurus: “For many, acquiring riches was not the end of their miseries, but a change in them.”note

Nor does this surprise me. The fault is not in things but in the mind itself. What had made poverty heavy for us has made riches heavy too. Just as it makes no difference whether you lay a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one—wherever you move him, he will take his illness with him—so it makes no difference whether a sick mind is placed in wealth or in poverty. Its trouble follows it. Farewell.

It is December: the very time when the city is in a sweat. License has been granted to public indulgence. Everything resounds with huge preparations, as if there were any difference between the Saturnalia and working days. So little difference is there that I think the man was not wrong who said December used to be a month and is now a year.note

If I had you here, I would gladly consult with you about what you think we should do: whether to change nothing in our daily routine, or, so as not to seem at odds with public custom, to dine more festively and take off the toga. For what used to happen only in times of unrest and public grief, we now do for pleasure and holidays: we change our dress.note

If I know you well, acting as arbiter you would have wanted us to be neither like the cap-wearing crowd in everything nor unlike it in everything—unless perhaps these are exactly the days when the mind must be ordered to abstain from pleasures on its own, just when the whole crowd has sprawled headlong into them. For it gets the surest proof of its own firmness if it neither goes toward the charms that drag us into luxury nor is led off by them.note

It is far braver to stay dry and sober while the populace is drunk and vomiting. But it is more balanced not to set oneself apart or make oneself conspicuous, and yet not to blend in with everyone—to do the same things, but not in the same way. For one can keep a holiday without extravagance.

Still, I am so keen to test the firmness of your mind that I will pass on to you, too, a precept of great men: set aside some days on which, content with the scantiest and cheapest food and with rough, coarse clothing, you say to yourself: “Is this what I was afraid of?”

It is in the very midst of freedom from care that the mind should prepare itself for hardship, and steel itself against fortune’s injuries while fortune is being kind. The soldier drills in the middle of peace; with no enemy anywhere, he throws up a rampart and wears himself out with needless labor, so that he can be equal to necessary labor. If you don’t want someone to panic when the moment comes, train him before it. This is the course followed by those who imitated poverty every month and came close to actual want, so that they would never be terrified by what they had often rehearsed.

Don’t think I mean Timon-style dinners and paupers’ cells and whatever else luxury uses to amuse itself when bored with riches. Let the pallet be a real one, and the cloak, and the bread hard and coarse. Endure this for three or four days, sometimes more, so that it is not a game but a test. Then, believe me, Lucilius, you will rejoice at being full for two coppers, and you will understand that freedom from care does not depend on fortune. For what is enough for necessity, fortune gives even when angry.note

Still, there is no reason for you to think you are doing something great. You will be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of poor people do. Admire yourself on this count: that you will be doing it under no compulsion, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it always as to try it now and then. Let us practice at the post. And so that fortune does not catch us unprepared, let poverty become familiar to us. We will be rich with less anxiety if we know how little of a burden it is to be poor.note

Epicurus, that famous teacher of pleasure, kept set days on which he satisfied his hunger stingily, to see whether anything was missing from full and complete pleasure—or how much was missing, and whether it was worth making up with great effort. He says so, at any rate, in the letters he wrote to Polyaenus in the year Charinus was archon. Indeed, he boasts that he fed himself for less than an as, while Metrodorus, who had not yet made as much progress, needed a whole one.note

Do you think such a diet fills a man? It gives pleasure too—and not that light, fleeting pleasure that must be constantly renewed, but pleasure that is stable and sure. Water and barley meal or a crust of barley bread are no delight in themselves; but it is the highest pleasure to be able to take pleasure even from these, and to have brought oneself down to what no unfairness of fortune can snatch away.

Prison rations are more generous; those set aside for execution are fed less meagerly by the man who is going to kill them. What greatness of mind it is to descend of one’s own accord to a level that even those condemned to death need not fear! This is to get ahead of fortune’s weapons.

So begin, my Lucilius, to follow their custom. Set aside some days on which to withdraw from your affairs and make yourself at home with the least; begin to have dealings with poverty. “Dare, my guest, to scorn wealth, and shape yourself, too, / worthy of the god.”note

No one else is worthy of the god than the one who has scorned wealth. I don’t forbid you to own it; I want you to be able to own it without fear. You will achieve that in only one way: if you convince yourself that you will live happily even without it, and if you always look on it as about to leave.

But now let us start folding up the letter. “First,” you say, “pay what you owe.” I will refer you to Epicurus; he will make the payment: “Anger beyond measure breeds madness.” How true this is you are bound to know, since you have had both a slave and an enemy.

This passion flares up against every sort of person. It is born of love as much as of hatred, no less amid serious matters than amid games and jokes. And what matters is not how great the cause it springs from, but what kind of mind it reaches. So too with fire: what matters is not how big it is but where it falls. Solid things have withstood even the largest; on the other hand, things that are dry and quick to catch nurse even a spark into a blaze. So it is, my Lucilius: the outcome of great anger is madness, and so anger must be avoided not for the sake of moderation, but for the sake of sanity. Farewell.

I am delighted every time I receive your letters. They fill me with good hope; they no longer promise things about you, they guarantee them. Go on this way, I beg and implore you. For what better request could I make of a friend than one I am making for his own sake? If you can, slip away from those occupations of yours; if not, tear yourself away. We have scattered enough of our time; let us start, in old age, to pack our bags.

Is there anything to resent in that? We have lived on the open sea; let us die in port. Not that I would advise you to seek fame from your leisure, which you should neither flaunt nor hide. For I will never drive you so far in condemning the madness of the human race that I would want some hiding place and oblivion prepared for you. Aim for this: that your leisure does not stand out, but can be seen.

Those whose plans are still fresh and untouched can decide later whether they want to pass their lives in obscurity; for you it is not an option. The vigor of your talent, the elegance of your writings, your illustrious and noble friendships have brought you into public view. Fame has already taken hold of you. Even if you sink into the remotest corner and bury yourself deep, your past will point you out.

You cannot have darkness; wherever you flee, much of your former light will follow. Quiet you can claim without anyone’s ill will, without regret or pangs of conscience. For what will you leave behind that you could think you left unwillingly? Your clients? Not one of them follows you yourself, only something of yours. Friendship used to be sought; now it is plunder. Abandoned old men will change their wills; the morning caller will move on to another doorstep. A great thing cannot come cheap: weigh whether you would rather give up yourself or something of your own.note

If only it had been your lot to grow old within the station of your birth, and fortune had not carried you into deep water! Swift success has swept you far out of sight of a healthy life—a province, a procuratorship, and everything these promise. After that, greater offices will await you, and one after another.

What will be the end of it? Are you waiting until you stop having something to desire? That time will never come. Just as we say there is a chain of causes from which fate is woven, so it is with desires: one is born from the end of another. You have been plunged into a life that will never of itself put an end to your miseries and your servitude. Pull your neck, rubbed raw, out of the yoke. Better to have it cut once than to be crushed forever.

If you withdraw to private life, everything will be smaller, but it will fill you amply; as it is, heaps gathered from every side do not satisfy you. Which would you rather have: plenty out of scarcity, or hunger amid abundance? Success is both greedy itself and exposed to the greed of others. As long as nothing is enough for you, you yourself will not be enough for others.

“How,” you ask, “shall I get out?” Any way you can. Think how many risks you have run rashly for money, how many laboriously for office. Something must be dared for leisure too—or else you must grow old amid the anxieties of procuratorships and then of official duties in Rome, in turmoil and in ever-new waves that no modesty and no quiet way of life has ever let anyone escape. For what does it matter whether you want to rest? Your fortune does not want it. What if you let it grow even now? Whatever is added to your successes will be added to your fears.

Here I want to quote you a saying of Maecenas, who spoke the truth on the very summit: “Height itself thunderstrikes the summits.” If you ask in which book he said it: the one titled Prometheus. He meant that summits are struck by thunder. Is any power worth so much that your speech should become so drunken? He was a gifted man, who would have set a great example of Roman eloquence had success not unmanned him—no, castrated him. This end awaits you, unless you now shorten sail, unless you do what he wanted too late: hug the shore.note

I could settle my account with you with this saying of Maecenas. But if I know you, you will dispute it and refuse to accept what I owe you in rough, bad coin. As things stand, I must take out a loan from Epicurus. “You should look around,” he says, “for the people you will eat and drink with before looking for what you will eat and drink. For feeding on meat without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.”

This will not happen for you unless you withdraw; otherwise you will have as dinner guests the people your name-prompter has sorted out of the crowd of morning callers. But he is mistaken who looks for a friend in his entrance hall and tests him at his dinner table. A busy man, besieged by his own possessions, has no greater evil than this: he believes people are his friends to whom he is no friend himself, and he thinks his favors effective at winning friends, when some hate you more the more they owe you. A small debt makes a debtor; a large one, an enemy.note

“What then? Don’t favors win friendships?” They do, if one was allowed to choose who would receive them, if they were placed with care, not scattered. So, while you are beginning to be master of your mind, use this advice of the wise in the meantime: consider it more important who receives something than what he receives. Farewell.

If you are well and think yourself worthy of becoming at last your own man, I am glad. The credit will be mine if I pull you out of the place where you are drifting with no hope of escape. But this, my Lucilius, I ask and urge you: let philosophy sink into the depths of your heart, and test your progress not by speech or writing but by firmness of mind and the lessening of desires. Prove your words by your deeds.

Those who declaim and angle for the applause of the crowd have one aim; those who hold the ears of young men and idlers with varied or fluent argument have another. Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak. It demands that each person live by his own law, that his life not be at odds with his words, and that his life be of one color throughout, with no discord among all his actions. This is the greatest duty of wisdom and its greatest proof: that deeds agree with words, that a man be equal to himself and the same everywhere. “Who will manage that?” Few; still, some. It is difficult. I do not say the wise man will always walk at the same pace—but on the same road.

So watch yourself: do your clothes and your house disagree? Are you generous to yourself and stingy to your household? Do you dine frugally and build extravagantly? Seize, once and for all, a single rule to live by, and bring your whole life into line with it. Some pull themselves in at home and spread and stretch themselves out in public. This inconsistency is a fault, and the sign of a wavering mind that has not yet found its steady course.

I will go further and tell you where this inconstancy comes from, this mismatch between actions and plans: no one sets himself a goal of what he wants, or, if he has, he does not stick to it but jumps to something else. Nor does he merely change; he goes back and slides once more into what he had abandoned and condemned.

So, to leave aside the old definitions of wisdom and embrace the whole manner of human life, I can be content with this. What is wisdom? Always to want the same thing and always to refuse the same thing. You need not add that little proviso—that what you want must be right—since nothing can always please anyone unless it is right.

People, then, do not know what they want except at the moment they want it. No one has settled once and for all what to want or not to want. Judgment shifts daily and turns into its opposite, and for most people life passes as a game. So press on with what you have begun, and perhaps you will be carried either to the summit or to a point that you alone know is not yet the summit.

“What will become of this crowd of household dependents,” you ask, “without household funds?” When that crowd stops being fed by you, it will feed itself; or what you cannot learn through your generosity, you will learn through poverty. Poverty will keep your true and reliable friends; anyone who was following not you but something else will leave. Is poverty not to be loved for this reason alone, that it will show you who loves you? Oh, when will that day come when no one lies to do you honor!

Let your thoughts aim here, then; care for this, pray for this, and release god from all your other prayers: that you be content with yourself and with the goods that spring from you. What happiness could be closer at hand? Bring yourself down to small things from which you cannot fall. And to help you do it more gladly, this letter’s tribute, which I shall pay at once, will serve.

You may resent it, but even now Epicurus gladly pays on my behalf: “Believe me, your words will seem more impressive from a camp bed and in rags. For they will not merely be spoken but proven.” I certainly hear what our friend Demetrius says differently since I have seen him lying naked, on less than straw. He is not a teacher of the truth, but a witness to it.note

“What then? Is one not allowed to despise riches that lie in one’s lap?” Why not? That man, too, has a great mind who, with riches pouring around him, after long and greatly wondering that they came to him, laughs at them, and hears rather than feels that they are his. It is a great thing not to be corrupted by living alongside riches; he is great who is poor amid riches.

“I don’t know,” you say, “how that man will bear poverty if he falls into it.” Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether your poor man will despise riches if he falls into them. So in both cases it is the mind that must be weighed, and we must examine whether the one is fond of his poverty and whether the other is not fond of his riches. Otherwise a camp bed or rags are slight proof of good intentions, unless it is clear that someone endures them not from necessity but by choice.

Besides, it is the mark of a great nature not to rush toward these things as if they were better, but to prepare for them as if they were easy. And they are easy, Lucilius—indeed, when you come to them after long rehearsal, even pleasant. For they contain the thing without which nothing is pleasant: freedom from care.

I therefore judge it necessary to do what I wrote to you great men have often done: to set aside some days on which we train for real poverty with an imaginary one. This must be done all the more because we have been soaked through with luxuries and judge everything hard and difficult. Instead, the mind must be roused from sleep, pinched, and reminded that nature has allotted us very little. No one is born rich. Everyone who comes into the light has been ordered to be content with milk and a rag. From such beginnings, kingdoms are not big enough for us. Farewell.

Do you think your trouble is with those people you wrote about? Your greatest trouble is with yourself: you are a nuisance to yourself. You don’t know what you want. You approve of the honorable more than you follow it. You see where happiness lies, but you don’t dare to reach it. Since you don’t see clearly enough yourself what is holding you back, I will tell you. You think the things you are about to leave are great; and when you have set before yourself that freedom from care into which you are about to cross, the glitter of this life you are leaving holds you back, as if you were about to fall into squalor and obscurity.

You are wrong, Lucilius: from this life one climbs up to that one. The difference between reflected shine and light—light has a sure source of its own, while the other gleams with borrowed brightness—is the difference between this life and that one. This one is lit by a glitter that comes from outside; anyone who stands in the way will at once cast a thick shadow over it. That one is bright with its own light. Your studies will make you famous and renowned.

I will cite the example of Epicurus. When he was writing to Idomeneus, trying to call him back from a showy life to faithful and stable glory—Idomeneus was then a minister of royal power and handling great affairs—he said: “If you are moved by glory, my letters will make you better known than all those things you court and for which you are courted.”note

Did he lie, then? Who would know of Idomeneus if Epicurus had not engraved him in his letters? All those grandees and satraps, and the king himself from whom Idomeneus’ title derived, have been buried in deep oblivion. Cicero’s letters do not let the name of Atticus perish. It would have done him no good to have Agrippa as his son-in-law, Tiberius as the husband of his granddaughter, and Drusus Caesar as his great-grandson; among such great names he would go unmentioned, had Cicero not attached him to himself.note

The deep flood of time will roll over us. A few talents will lift their heads above it, and, though bound one day to pass into the same silence, will resist oblivion and hold their own for a long time. What Epicurus could promise his friend, I promise you, Lucilius. I will find favor with posterity; I can take names with me that will last. Our Virgil promised two men eternal remembrance, and delivers it: “Fortunate pair! If my songs have any power, / no day will ever erase you from the memory of time, / so long as the house of Aeneas dwells by the Capitol’s unmoving rock / and the Roman father holds his empire.”note

Whomever fortune has brought into public view, whoever have been limbs and parts of another’s power—their influence flourished and their houses were thronged as long as they themselves stood; after them, their memory quickly faded. But the esteem of great minds grows, and not only are they themselves honored, but whatever has attached itself to their memory is preserved.

So that Idomeneus does not come into my letter for nothing, he shall pay his own way. It was to him that Epicurus wrote that famous saying, urging him to make Pythocles rich, but not by the common, risky road. “If you want to make Pythocles rich,” he says, “do not add to his money; subtract from his desires.”note

That saying is too clear to need interpreting, and too eloquent to need help. I remind you of just one thing: don’t think it was said only about riches. Wherever you transfer it, it will have the same force. If you want to make Pythocles honorable, do not add to his honors; subtract from his desires. If you want Pythocles to live in lasting pleasure, do not add to his pleasures; subtract from his desires. If you want to make Pythocles an old man with a full life, do not add to his years; subtract from his desires.

There is no reason to regard these sayings as Epicurus’ own: they are public property. What is usually done in the Senate I think should be done in philosophy too: when someone has made a proposal part of which I like, I ask him to divide it, and I vote for the part I approve. I quote Epicurus’ excellent sayings all the more gladly to prove to those who take refuge with him, led on by a bad hope, thinking they will have a cloak for their vices, that wherever they go they must live honorably.

When you approach his little gardens and read the inscription over them—“Stranger, here you will do well to stay; here the highest good is pleasure”—the keeper of that dwelling will be ready for you, hospitable and kindly. He will welcome you with barley porridge and serve you water generously too, and say: “Have you been well received?” “These gardens,” he says, “do not whet hunger; they quench it. They do not make thirst greater with the very drinks; they soothe it with a natural remedy that costs nothing. It is in this pleasure that I have grown old.”

I am speaking to you of those desires that accept no consolation, that must be given something to make them stop. As for the extraordinary ones, which can be postponed, chastised and suppressed, I will point out only this: that pleasure is natural, not necessary. You owe it nothing; if you spend anything on it, it is voluntary. The belly does not listen to precepts; it demands, it duns. Yet it is not a troublesome creditor: it is sent away with little, provided you give it what you owe, not what you can. Farewell.

You now understand that you must be led out of those showy and harmful occupations. But you ask how you can manage it. Some things can be shown only by someone who is present. A doctor cannot choose the time for food or a bath by letter; he must feel the pulse. There is an old proverb that the gladiator makes his plan in the arena: something in his opponent’s face, something in a movement of his hand, something in the very tilt of his body warns him as he watches.

What is usually done, what ought to be done, can be prescribed and written down in general terms; such advice is given not only to the absent but even to posterity. That other question—when or how something should be done—no one will advise on from a distance. It must be decided in the presence of the facts themselves.

It takes someone not only present but watchful to spot an opportunity as it hurries past. So look out for it, and when you see it, seize it, and with all your drive and all your strength work to strip yourself of those duties. And listen to the motion I put forward: I propose that you must leave either that life or life itself. But I also think you should go by a gentle path, so that you untie rather than break what you have badly tangled—provided that, if there is no other way to untie it, you break it. No one is so timid that he would rather hang forever than fall once.

Meanwhile—and this comes first—don’t entangle yourself further. Be content with the business you have gone down into, or, as you would rather have it seem, fallen into. There is no reason to strive for more, or you will lose your excuse, and it will be plain that you did not fall. For the things people usually say are false: “I couldn’t do otherwise.” “What if I hadn’t wanted to?” “It was necessary.” No one is obliged to chase success at a run. It is something, even if you do not resist, to stand still and not press forward when fortune is carrying you along.

Will you be offended if I not only come to the council myself but also call in others—wiser ones than I am, to whom I usually refer anything I am deliberating? Read Epicurus’ letter on this very matter, the one addressed to Idomeneus. He asks him to flee as fast as he can, hurrying before some greater force intervenes and takes away his freedom to withdraw.

Yet he adds that nothing should be attempted except when it can be attempted fittingly and at the right moment. But when that long-awaited moment comes, he says, you must leap. He forbids the man who is planning an escape to doze, and he hopes for a safe way out even from the most difficult straits, provided we neither hurry before the time nor hang back when it comes.

Now, I suppose, you want the Stoic view as well. There is no reason for anyone to slander them to you as reckless; they are more cautious than brave. Perhaps you expect them to tell you: “It is shameful to give way under a burden. Wrestle with the duty you have once taken on. No one who flees hard work is brave and energetic; he is so only if his spirit grows with the very difficulty of things.”

Those things will be said to you if perseverance will be worth the effort, if nothing unworthy of a good man will have to be done or endured. Otherwise he will not wear himself out in squalid and degrading toil, nor stay busy for the sake of being busy. He will not even do what you think he will—stay entangled in ambitious affairs and always bear their surges. When he sees that the matters he was wallowing in are heavy, uncertain and perilous, he will draw back his foot. He will not turn his back, but will retreat step by step to safety.

It is easy, my Lucilius, to escape occupations, if you despise the rewards of occupations. These are what delay and detain us: “What then? Shall I abandon such great hopes? Shall I leave just at harvest time? Will my side be bare, my litter unescorted, my hall empty?” So people withdraw from these things unwillingly; they love the wages of their miseries while cursing the miseries themselves.

They complain about ambition as they would about a mistress: that is, if you look at their true feelings, they don’t hate her, they are quarreling with her. Examine those who lament what they longed for and talk of escaping things they cannot do without: you will see that they linger willingly in what they say they bear with difficulty and misery.

So it is, Lucilius: slavery holds few people fast; more hold fast to slavery. But if you mean to lay it down, and freedom has won you over in good faith, and you seek counsel for this alone—to be able to do it without constant anxiety—why should the whole cohort of Stoics not approve of you? All the Zenos and Chrysippuses will advise what is moderate, honorable, and right for you.

But if you are hedging so that you can look around and see how much you can take with you and how much money you can furnish your leisure with, you will never find a way out. No one swims to shore with his baggage. Rise to the surface into a better life, with the gods’ favor—but not the kind of favor they show to those on whom, with kind and gracious faces, they have bestowed magnificent evils, excused only by this: that the things that burn and torture were given to those who prayed for them.

I was already pressing my seal on the letter; it must be opened again so that it can come to you with its customary little gift and bring some splendid saying along. And look, one occurs to me—I don’t know whether it is more true or more eloquent. “Whose?” you ask. Epicurus’; for I am still laying claim to other people’s baggage:

“No one leaves life otherwise than as if he had only just entered it.” Take anyone you like—young, old, middle-aged: you will find them equally afraid of death, equally ignorant of life. No one has anything finished, for we have put off our affairs into the future. Nothing in that saying delights me more than that it charges old men with infancy.

“No one,” he says, “leaves life otherwise than as one just born.” That is false: we die worse than we are born. That is our fault, not nature’s. Nature ought to complain of us and say: “What is this? I brought you into the world without desires, without fears, without superstition, without treachery and those other plagues. Leave as you entered.”

He has grasped wisdom who dies as free from care as he is born. As it is, we tremble when danger draws near; our courage fails, our color goes; tears fall that will do no good. What is more shameful than to be anxious on the very threshold of freedom from care?

The reason is this: we are empty of all goods, and we are in distress at losing life. For no part of it has settled with us; it has passed through and flowed away. No one cares how well he lives, only how long—though everyone can manage to live well, and no one to live long. Farewell.

Do you think I’m going to write to you about how kindly the winter has treated us—it was both mild and short—how spiteful the spring is, how unseasonable the cold, and the other trivia of people hunting for something to say? No: I will write something that can do both you and me some good. And what will that be, if not to urge you toward a sound mind? You ask what its foundation is? Do not take joy in empty things. I called this the foundation; it is the summit.

He has reached the top who knows what to rejoice in, who has not placed his happiness in another’s power. Anyone whom some hope keeps goading is anxious and unsure of himself—even if the thing is within reach, even if it is not hard to get, even if what he hoped for has never once let him down.

Above all, my Lucilius, do this: learn how to feel joy. Do you think I am now robbing you of many pleasures, since I clear away what chance brings and think hopes—the sweetest of delights—should be avoided? Quite the opposite: I never want you to lack gladness. I want it to be born for you at home; and it is, provided it is inside you. Other kinds of cheerfulness do not fill the heart; they smooth the brow, and they are shallow—unless perhaps you think that whoever laughs is joyful. The mind should be eager and confident, and raised above everything.

Believe me, true joy is a serious business. Or do you think anyone with a slack face and—as those dainty people put it—a jolly little look can despise death, open his house to poverty, keep his pleasures on a tight rein, rehearse the endurance of pain? Whoever turns these things over within himself is in great joy, but not a very soft one. That is the joy I want you to possess: it will never run short once you have found where to draw it from.

Mines of cheap metals yield at the surface; the richest are those whose vein lies hidden deep, and it will repay the digger ever more fully the longer he keeps at it. The things the crowd delights in give a thin, superficial pleasure, and any joy brought in from outside has no foundation. The joy I am speaking of, the one I am trying to lead you to, is solid, and opens out more the further in you go.

Please, dearest Lucilius, do the one thing that can make you happy: smash and trample those things that glitter on the outside, that are promised to you by someone else or from something else. Look to the true good, and rejoice in what is your own. But what does “your own” mean? Yourself, and the best part of you. Your poor body, too—even though nothing can be done without it—count as a necessary thing rather than a great one. It supplies empty pleasures, short-lived and soon regretted, and unless they are tempered with great moderation they will turn into their opposite. I mean this: pleasure stands on a slope and tips toward pain unless it keeps within limits. But it is hard to keep within limits in something you have believed to be good. Greed for the true good is safe.

What is that, you ask, and where does it come from? I’ll tell you: from a good conscience, from honorable intentions, from right actions, from contempt for what chance brings, from a calm and steady course of life that keeps to one road. For those who jump from one plan to another—or do not even jump, but are carried across by some accident—how can they have anything fixed or lasting, dangling and drifting as they are?

Few people arrange themselves and their affairs by deliberate plan; the rest are like things floating in a river: they do not go, they are carried. Some of these a gentler current has held back and borne along more softly; others a stronger one has swept away; some, as the flow slackened, it has set down near the bank; others a torrent’s rush has flung out to sea. So we must settle what we want, and stick to it.

This is the place to pay off my debt. I can hand you a saying of your Epicurus and so discharge this letter: “It is tiresome always to be beginning life.” Or, if the sense can be better expressed this way: “They live badly who are always beginning to live.”

“Why?” you ask—for that saying does need explaining. Because their life is always unfinished. And a man who is only just beginning to live cannot stand ready for death. We must act so that we have lived enough. No one thinks that who is just now setting out on life.

There is no reason to suppose these people are few; they are almost everyone. Some, indeed, begin only when it is time to stop. If you find that surprising, I’ll add something to surprise you more: some have stopped living before they began. Farewell.

You write that you are anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit that an enemy’s fury is threatening you with. You expect me to advise you to picture a better outcome for yourself and rest in comforting hope. After all, why go out and fetch troubles—they will have to be endured soon enough once they arrive—why anticipate them, and ruin the present through fear of the future? No doubt it is foolish to be miserable now because at some point you are going to be miserable. But I will lead you to freedom from care by another road.

If you want to shed all anxiety, assume that whatever you fear may happen will certainly happen. Whatever that evil is, measure it out in your own mind and put a price on your fear. You will surely see that what you fear is either not great or not long.

Nor do you need to spend long collecting examples to steady you: every age has produced them. Whatever part of history you turn your memory to, at home or abroad, you will meet characters of great achievement or great drive. If you are convicted, can anything harsher happen to you than to be sent into exile or led off to prison? Is there anything beyond that for anyone to fear than being burned, than dying? Set out each of these, and call up those who despised them—there is no need to hunt for them, only to choose among them.

Rutilius bore his conviction as if nothing troubled him except that the court judged badly. Metellus bore exile bravely, Rutilius even gladly: the one allowed himself to be recalled as a service to the state; the other refused his return to Sulla, who at that time was refused nothing. Socrates held discussions in prison; and though there were people promising him escape, he would not leave. He stayed, to free humanity from its fear of the two most dreadful things, death and prison.note

Mucius put his hand into the fire. It is bitter to be burned; how much more bitter if you suffer it at your own hands! Here you see a man who was not educated, not armed with any teachings against death or pain, equipped only with a soldier’s toughness, punishing himself for a failed attempt. He stood and watched his right hand dripping away on the enemy’s brazier, and did not withdraw that melting hand, down to the bare bones, until the enemy took the fire away from him. He could have done something more successful in that camp; nothing braver. See how much keener virtue is to seize on dangers than cruelty is to inflict them: Porsenna forgave Mucius for wanting to kill him more easily than Mucius forgave himself for failing to kill.note

“Those stories,” you say, “have been chanted to death in every school. Next, when we get to despising death, you’ll be telling me about Cato.” Why shouldn’t I tell of him on that last night, reading a book of Plato’s with a sword laid by his head? For his final hour he had provided these two instruments: one so that he would want to die, the other so that he could. So, having settled his affairs—as far as affairs so shattered and so near their end could be settled—he judged that he must see to it that no one should have the power to kill Cato or the luck to save him.note

And drawing the sword, which he had kept clean of all bloodshed until that day, he said: “Fortune, you have accomplished nothing by blocking all my efforts. I have fought until now not for my own freedom but for my country’s, and I pressed on so stubbornly not to live free myself but to live among the free. Now, since the cause of humanity is past saving, let Cato be led off to safety.”

Then he dealt his body a fatal wound. When the doctors had bound it up he had less blood and less strength, but the same spirit; angry now not only with Caesar but with himself, he drove his bare hands into the wound, and that noble spirit, contemptuous of all power, he did not release—he hurled it out.

I am not piling up examples now to exercise my wit, but to rally you against what seems most terrifying. And I will rally you more easily if I show that it was not only brave men who scorned this moment of breathing out the soul, but that some who were cowards in other respects matched the courage of the bravest in this one thing. Take Scipio, father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompey: driven back to Africa by a contrary wind, when he saw his ship being seized by the enemy, he ran himself through with a sword, and to those asking where the commander was, he said: “The commander is doing well.”note

Those words made him the equal of his ancestors and did not let the glory fated for the Scipios in Africa be broken off. It was a great thing to conquer Carthage, but a greater one to conquer death. “The commander,” he said, “is doing well.” Should a commander—and Cato’s commander at that—have died any other way?note

I am not calling you back to the history books, nor gathering from every century those who despised death—there are a great many. Look at these times of ours, whose sluggishness and luxury we complain of: they will supply people of every rank, every fortune, every age, who have cut their troubles short by death. Believe me, Lucilius, death is so far from being something to fear that, thanks to it, nothing is to be feared. So listen to your enemy’s threats without a care.

And although your conscience gives you confidence, still, since many things outside the merits of a case carry weight, both hope for what is fairest and prepare yourself for what is most unfair. Above all, remember this: strip things of their commotion and see what is in each one. You will find there is nothing terrible in them except fear itself.

What you see happen to children happens to us too, who are only slightly bigger children: if they see the people they love, whom they are used to, with whom they play, wearing masks, they are terrified. The mask must be taken off not only people but things, and their own face given back.

Why do you show me swords and fires and a crowd of executioners snarling around you? Take away that parade under which you hide and frighten fools! You are death, whom just recently my slave, my maidservant, despised. Why do you once again unroll before me whips and racks with such great display? Why the separate devices fitted to each separate joint to wrench it apart, and a thousand other instruments for butchering a man piece by piece? Put those things down; they stun us. Order the groans to fall silent, and the screams, and the harshness of cries forced out under torture! Of course—you are pain, which that man with gout despises, which that dyspeptic endures in the midst of his delicacies, which a girl bears in childbirth. You are light if I can bear you; you are short if I cannot.

Turn over in your mind these things you have often heard and often said. But prove by results whether you have truly heard them, truly said them. For the most shameful charge usually brought against us is this: that we handle the words of philosophy, not its deeds. What—have you only now learned that death hangs over you, only now exile, only now pain? You were born to these. Whatever can happen, let us think of it as going to happen.

What I am advising you to do, I know for certain you have done; now I am reminding you not to drown your mind in that anxiety. It will be dulled and have less vigor when it has to rise up. Lead it away from your private case to the common one. Tell yourself that you have a mortal and fragile little body, which will be threatened with pain not only by injury or by the might of someone more powerful. Pleasures themselves turn into torments: banquets bring indigestion; drinking bouts bring numbness and trembling of the nerves; lusts bring deformities of the feet, the hands, all the joints.

I may become poor: I will be among the majority. I may be exiled: I will think I was born where I am sent. I may be put in chains: so what? Am I unchained now? Nature has already bound me to this heavy weight of my body. I will die: you mean, I will stop being able to get sick, stop being able to be chained, stop being able to die.

I am not so foolish as to run through the Epicurean refrain here and say that the terrors of the underworld are empty—that Ixion is not spun on a wheel, nor a rock pushed uphill on Sisyphus’ shoulders, nor anyone’s entrails able to grow back every day and be torn out again. No one is so childish as to fear Cerberus and the darkness and the ghostly look of figures held together by bare bones. Death either consumes us or sets us free. If we are released, something better remains once the burden is lifted; if we are consumed, nothing remains—good and bad alike are taken away.note

Allow me here to quote a verse of yours—once I have first reminded you to consider that you wrote those lines not only for others but also for yourself. It is 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 do not fall into death suddenly but advance toward it little by little. We die every day.note

For every day some part of life is taken away, and even while we are growing, life is shrinking. We have lost infancy, then childhood, then youth. All the time that has passed, up to yesterday, is gone; this very day we are living we share with death. Just as it is not the last drop that empties the water clock, but all that has flowed out before, so the final hour, in which we cease to be, does not by itself make death; it only completes it. That is when we arrive at death, but we have been on our way a long time.

When you had described this in your usual style—always grand, but never more forceful than when you fit words to the truth—you said: “Death comes not once; the one that takes us is the last death.” I would rather you read yourself than my letter. For it will be clear to you that this death we fear is the last, not the only one.

I see what you are looking for: you want to know what I have slipped into this letter—what bold saying of someone’s, what useful precept. Something will be sent from this very subject we have had in hand. Epicurus rebukes those who long for death no less than those who fear it, and says: “It is absurd to run to death out of weariness with life, when it is your way of life that has made you have to run to death.”

Likewise he says in another place: “What is so absurd as to seek death when you have made your life restless through fear of death?” You may add to these another saying of the same stamp: that human thoughtlessness—no, madness—is so great that some people are driven to death by the fear of death.

Whichever of these you ponder, you will strengthen your mind to endure either death or life. For we need warning and strengthening on both sides: not to love life too much, and not to hate it too much. Even when reason advises ending it, the impulse is not to be taken up rashly or with a headlong rush.

The brave and wise man should not flee from life but walk out of it. And above all, let us avoid that passion which has seized many: the lust for dying. For, my Lucilius, there is an unconsidered leaning of the mind toward death, as toward other things, which often takes hold of noble men of the keenest temperament, and often of the lazy and listless: the first despise life, the second find it a burden.

Some are overtaken by a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things—not hatred of life but distaste for it. We slide into this with philosophy itself pushing us, when we say: “How long must it be the same things? Of course: I will wake, I will sleep; I will be hungry, I will be full; I will be cold, I will be hot. Nothing has an end; everything is linked in a circle; things flee and follow. Night presses on day, day on night; summer ends in autumn, winter presses on autumn, and is checked in turn by spring. Everything passes only to return. I do nothing new, I see nothing new.” At some point even this becomes nauseating. There are many who judge living not painful, but pointless. Farewell.

As for our two friends, we must take different roads: the faults of one need to be corrected, those of the other broken. I will use complete frankness. I don’t love him if I don’t offend him. “What?” you say. “Do you plan to keep a forty-year-old ward under your guardianship? Look at his age, already hardened and unmanageable. He can’t be reshaped; it’s soft things that get molded.”

Whether I will make headway I don’t know. I would rather lack success than loyalty. And don’t give up hope that even long-standing invalids can be cured, if you stand firm against their excess and force them to do and endure many things against their will. Even about the other one I have little enough confidence, except that he still blushes at doing wrong. That sense of shame must be nurtured; as long as it lasts in his mind, there will be some room for good hope. With this veteran I think I must go more gently, so that he does not fall into despair of himself.

And there has never been a better time to approach him than now, while he is resting, while he looks like a reformed man. This pause of his has fooled others; it doesn’t fool me. I expect his vices to return with heavy interest; I know they are now idle, not gone. I will devote some days to this, and find out whether anything can be done or not.

You, as you are doing, show yourself brave for us, and cut down your baggage. None of the things we own is necessary. Let us return to the law of nature; then riches are ready to hand. What we need is either free or cheap: nature wants bread and water. No one is poor with respect to these, and anyone who has confined his desire within them can compete in happiness with Jupiter himself, as Epicurus says; I will wrap one of his sayings into this letter.

“Do everything,” he says, “as if Epicurus were watching.” There is no doubt it helps to have set a guard over yourself, and to have someone to look to, someone you think is present at your thoughts. It is far nobler, of course, to live as if under the eyes of some good man who is always present; but I am content even with this: that whatever you do, you do as though someone were watching. Solitude talks us into every kind of wrong.

When you have progressed so far that you have respect even for yourself, you may dismiss your tutor. Meanwhile, guard yourself by the authority of others—let it be Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius, or someone whose arrival would make even ruined men suppress their vices—while you make yourself the kind of person in whose presence you would not dare to do wrong. When you have done this, and some self-esteem has begun to take hold in you, I will begin to allow you what Epicurus also recommends: “Withdraw into yourself most of all when you are forced to be in a crowd.”

You must make yourself unlike the many. Until it is safe for you to withdraw into yourself, look around at each person: there is no one who would not be better off with anyone at all than with himself. “Withdraw into yourself most of all when you are forced to be in a crowd”—if you are a good man, a calm one, a self-controlled one. Otherwise, you had better withdraw from yourself into the crowd; in there you are too close to a bad man. Farewell.

I was telling you just now that I was in sight of old age; now I’m afraid I have left old age behind me. Some other word now fits these years, or at any rate this body, since “old age” is the name for a time of life that is weary, not broken. Count me among the decrepit, those touching the very end.

Still, I congratulate myself in your presence: I do not feel the injury of age in my mind, though I feel it in my body. Only my vices, and the things that serve them, have grown old; my mind is vigorous and glad not to have much to do with the body. It has laid down a large part of its load. It exults and argues with me about old age: it says this is its prime.

Let us believe it; let it enjoy its good. It tells me to go into thought and discern how much of this tranquility and moderation of character I owe to wisdom and how much to age, and to sort out carefully what I cannot do and what I would not want to do [and to count whatever I am glad I cannot do as something I would not want]. For what complaint is there, what inconvenience, if whatever was bound to come to an end has run out?note

“The greatest inconvenience,” you say, “is to be worn down and waste away and—to put it precisely—to melt. For we are not suddenly struck down and laid low; we are nibbled away. Each day takes something from our strength.” But what end is better than to slip away to one’s own finish as nature gently unties us? Not that a blow and a sudden exit from life is anything bad; but this is a gentle road—to be withdrawn by degrees. I, certainly, as if the test were approaching and the day had come that will pass sentence on all my years, watch myself and address myself like this:

“So far,” I say, “what we have shown, in deeds or in words, is nothing. These are light and deceptive pledges of the mind, wrapped in many allurements. What progress I have made, I will leave to death to tell. So I am not fearful as I prepare for that day on which, with tricks and makeup put aside, I will pass judgment on myself: whether I only speak brave words or truly feel them, and whether all the defiant words I have hurled at fortune were pretense and play-acting.”

“Set aside people’s opinion: it is always doubtful and split both ways. Set aside the studies you have pursued all your life: death is going to pronounce on you. I mean this: debates and literary conversations and sayings gathered from the precepts of the wise and learned talk do not show true strength of mind. For speech is bold even in the most timid. What you have done will be clear only when you are doing your dying. I accept the terms; I do not dread the judgment.”

This is what I say to myself, but consider that I have said it to you too. You are younger: what does that matter? Years are not counted out. It is uncertain where death awaits you; so await it everywhere.

I was ready to stop, and my hand was heading for the close; but the rites must be completed, and this letter given its traveling money. Suppose I don’t say where I am going to borrow from: you know whose strongbox I use. Wait for me a little, and the payment will come from my own house; meanwhile Epicurus will lend it, who says: “Rehearse death”—or, if the sense comes across better this way, “Rehearse passing over to the gods.”

The meaning is plain: it is a splendid thing to learn death thoroughly. Perhaps you think it pointless to learn something that will be used only once. That is exactly why we ought to rehearse it: we must always be learning what we cannot test whether we know.

“Rehearse death”: whoever says this is telling us to rehearse freedom. Whoever has learned to die has unlearned slavery; he is above all power, certainly beyond its reach. What are prison, guards, and bars to him? He has an open door. There is one chain that keeps us bound: love of life. It should not be thrown off, but it should be reduced, so that if circumstances ever demand it, nothing holds us back or hinders us from being ready to do at once what must be done at some point anyway. Farewell.

“Are you advising me?” you say. “Have you already advised yourself, already corrected yourself? Is that why you have time to reform others?” I am not so shameless as to take up doctoring while I am sick myself; but as if I were lying in the same hospital, I am talking with you about the illness we share and passing on remedies. So listen to me as if I were talking to myself. I am admitting you into my private room, and with you there I am calling myself to account.

I shout to myself: “Count your years, and you will be ashamed to want the same things you wanted as a boy, to be pursuing the same things. At least do yourself this service as the day of your death approaches: let your vices die before you. Dismiss those turbulent pleasures that cost so dear: not only the ones to come do harm, but the ones past as well. Just as with crimes—even if they were not detected when committed, the anxiety does not go away with them—so with shameless pleasures, regret remains even after they are over. They are not solid, not reliable; even if they do no harm, they run away.”

“Look around instead for some good that will last. But there is none except what the mind finds for itself from within itself. Virtue alone provides joy that is lasting and free from care. Even if something gets in the way, it comes between only like clouds, which drift below and never overpower the daylight.”

When will it be my lot to reach this joy? Not that there has been any slacking so far—but let there be hurrying. Much work remains, on which you must spend your own wakeful nights, your own labor, if you want it done. This task cannot be handed off to someone else.

Another kind of learning does allow for help. Calvisius Sabinus, within our memory, was a rich man. He had a freedman’s fortune and a freedman’s mind; I never saw a man whose prosperity sat on him more unbecomingly. His memory was so bad that sometimes the name of Ulysses would slip his mind, sometimes Achilles’, sometimes Priam’s—names we know as well as those of our childhood attendants. No aged name-caller, who does not recall names but invents them, ever greeted the voting tribes as wrongly as he greeted the Trojans and the Greeks. Nevertheless, he wanted to be thought learned.

So he devised this shortcut: at great expense he bought slaves, one to know Homer by heart, another Hesiod; besides these he assigned one to each of the nine lyric poets. No wonder he paid a lot: he had not found them, he had them made to order. Once this household had been assembled, he began to pester his dinner guests. He kept these men at his feet and would ask them from time to time for lines to recite, yet often he broke down in the middle of a word.note

Satellius Quadratus, a sponger on rich fools—and, as follows from that, a smiler at them, and, as goes with both, a scoffer at them—advised him to keep scholars as crumb-gatherers. When Sabinus said that each of those slaves had cost him a hundred thousand sesterces, he said: “You could have bought as many bookcases for less.” Yet Sabinus held the view that whatever anyone in his house knew, he knew himself.note

The same Satellius began urging him to take up wrestling—a sickly, pale, skinny man. When Sabinus replied, “And how can I? I can barely stay alive,” he said: “Please, don’t say that. Don’t you see how many very strong slaves you have?” A sound mind can be neither borrowed nor bought. And I think that if it were for sale, it would find no buyer. But an unsound one is bought every day.

But take now what I owe you, and farewell. “Wealth is poverty brought into line with the law of nature.” Epicurus says this often, in one form or another; but what is never learned enough can never be said too often. To some people remedies need only be pointed out; into others they must be pounded. Farewell.

When someone complained of this same thing, Socrates said: “Why are you surprised that travel does you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? The same cause that drove you out is weighing on you.” What good can new landscapes do? Or getting to know cities or places? All that tossing about comes to nothing. You ask why this flight does not help you? You are fleeing with yourself. The burden on your mind must be laid down; until then no place will please you.

Picture your present state as like that of the prophetess Virgil brings on stage, already roused and goaded and full of a spirit not her own: “The prophetess raves, if she can only shake / the mighty god from her breast.” You go here and there to shake off the weight that sits on you, and it becomes more troublesome through the very tossing—just as on a ship, cargo that stays put presses less, while cargo that rolls around unevenly quickly sinks the side it lurches onto. Whatever you do, you do against yourself, and you harm yourself by the very motion: you are shaking a sick man.note

But once you have removed that evil, every change of place will be pleasant. You may be driven out to the ends of the earth, you may be settled in any corner of the barbarian world—that home, whatever it is, will be welcoming to you. What matters is who you are when you arrive, not where; and so we should not bind our minds to any one place. We must live with this conviction: “I was not born for one corner; this whole world is my homeland.”

If that were clear to you, you would not be surprised 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 place was yours. As it is, you are not traveling but wandering and being driven, swapping place for place, when what you are looking for—to live well—is to be found in every place.

Can anything be as turbulent as the forum? Even there one can live quietly, if one must. But if I were free to arrange my life, I would flee far even from the sight and neighborhood of the forum. For just as unhealthy places strain even the strongest constitution, so for a good mind, too, that is not yet perfect and is still convalescing, some places are not very wholesome.

I disagree with those who head into the middle of the waves and, approving of a stormy life, wrestle every day with great spirit against difficulties. The wise man will bear these things, not choose them, and will prefer to be at peace rather than at war. It does little good to have thrown off your own vices if you must brawl with other people’s.

“The Thirty Tyrants,” someone says, “surrounded Socrates and could not break his spirit.” What does it matter how many masters there are? Slavery is one. Whoever despises it is free, however great the crowd of those lording it over him.note

It is time to stop—but only after I have paid the harbor toll. “The beginning of health is awareness of one’s fault.” Epicurus seems to me to have put this excellently. For someone who does not know he is doing wrong does not want to be set right; you must catch yourself in the act before you can reform.

Some people boast of their vices; do you suppose those who count their evils as virtues give any thought to a cure? So, as far as you can, convict yourself, investigate yourself. Play first the part of prosecutor, then of judge, and last of the one pleading for mercy. Now and then, give yourself offense. Farewell.

You ask about our friend Marcellinus and want to know how he is doing. He rarely comes to see us, for no other reason than that he is afraid to hear the truth—a danger he is already well clear of. For truth should be spoken only to someone who will listen. That is why people often question whether Diogenes, and the other Cynics too, who used their frankness indiscriminately and lectured whoever they met, ought to have done so.note

For what if someone scolded the deaf, or people mute from birth or illness? “Why,” you say, “should I be sparing with words? They cost nothing. I can’t know whether I will help the person I admonish; I do know I will help someone if I admonish many. You have to scatter by the handful. Someone who tries many times cannot fail to succeed sometimes.”

This, my Lucilius, is not something I think a great man should do. His authority gets diluted and does not carry enough weight with those he could set right if it were less cheapened. An archer should not hit the mark only sometimes, but miss only sometimes. What reaches its goal by chance is not a skill. Wisdom is a skill: let it aim at a sure target, choose those who will make progress, withdraw from those it has given up on—yet not abandon them quickly, and, even when things look hopeless, try the last remedies.

I do not yet despair of our Marcellinus. He can still be saved, but only if a hand is held out to him quickly. There is a danger, admittedly, that he will pull in the one who reaches out; he has great force of character, but it is already tending toward the bad. Nevertheless I will face this danger and dare to show him his faults.

He will do what he usually does: he will call up those witticisms of his that could draw a laugh even from mourners, and make jokes first at his own expense, then at ours. He will get in ahead of everything I am going to say. He will rummage through our schools and throw in philosophers’ faces their handouts, their mistresses, their gluttony. He will show me one in adultery, another in a tavern, another at court.

He will show me Aristo, the philosopher of Marcus Lepidus, who used to lecture while being carried in his litter—for that was the time he had chosen for bringing out his work. When someone asked what school he belonged to, Scaurus said: “Well, he’s certainly not a Peripatetic.” When Julius Graecinus, an excellent man, was asked his opinion of him, he said: “I can’t tell you; I don’t know what he can do on foot”—as if he were being asked about a chariot-fighter.note

These street-corner hucksters, who would have neglected philosophy more honorably than they peddle it, he will throw in my face. Still, I have decided to put up with the insults. Let him move me to laughter; perhaps I will move him to tears. Or if he keeps on laughing, I will be glad, as one is amid misfortune, that the kind of madness he has happens to be a cheerful one. But that cheerfulness does not last long. Watch: you will see the same people laughing wildly and, within a short time, raging wildly.

My plan is to take him on and show him how much more he was worth when many thought him worth less. Even if I don’t cut out his vices, I will check them; they won’t stop, but they will pause. And perhaps they will stop, too, if they make a habit of pausing. Even this is not to be scorned, since for the gravely ill a good remission counts as health.

While I get ready for him, you meanwhile—since you can, since you understand where you have come from and where you have got to, and can guess from that how far you will get—put your character in order, lift up your mind, stand firm against what you fear. Don’t count the people who frighten you. Wouldn’t a man seem a fool if he feared a crowd in a place where only one at a time can pass? Just so, many cannot get at your death, even if many threaten it. Nature has arranged it this way: one person will take away your breath, just as one gave it.

If you had any shame, you would have let me off the last installment. But I won’t be stingy at the end of my debt either; I’ll hand over what I owe you. “I never wanted to please the people. For what I know, the people do not approve; what the people approve, I do not know.”

“Who said that?” you ask—as if you didn’t know whose account I draw on: Epicurus. But all of them will shout the same thing at you from every house: Peripatetics, Academics, Stoics, Cynics. For who can please the people if virtue pleases him? Popular favor is sought by bad arts. You would have to make yourself like them; they will not approve of you unless they recognize you as one of their own. But it matters much more what you seem to yourself than what you seem to others. The love of shameful people can be won only by shameful means.

What then will philosophy—so praised, and preferred to every art and every possession—provide? This, of course: that you would rather please yourself than the people; that you weigh judgments rather than count them; that you live without fear of gods or men; that you either overcome your troubles or end them. For the rest, if I see you celebrated by the applause of the crowd, if when you come in there is a din of shouting and clapping—the trappings of a pantomime dancer—if women and boys all over the city sing your praises, why shouldn’t I pity you, when I know what road leads to that kind of favor? Farewell.

I saw Aufidius Bassus, that excellent man, battered and wrestling with his years. But now they weigh on him more than can be lifted; old age has settled on him with its great, its entire weight. You know his body was always frail and wasted. For a long time he held it together—or, to put it more exactly, kept it patched together. Now it has suddenly given way.note

On a ship that is taking in water, you can plug one crack or another; but once she starts to loosen and give way in many places, nothing can save a vessel that is gaping open. Just so, in an old man’s body, frailty can be propped and shored up to a point. But when, as in a rotting building, every joint is pulling apart, and while one is being repaired another splits, you have to look around for a way out.

Still, our friend Bassus is keen in spirit. This is what philosophy provides: cheerfulness in sight of death, and courage and gladness in whatever state the body is in—never failing, though the body fails. A great helmsman sails on even with a torn sail, and if the storm has stripped his rigging, he still fits what is left of the ship to hold her course. That is what our Bassus does. He looks on his own end with a mind and a face you would think too unconcerned even in a man looking on someone else’s.

It is a great thing, Lucilius, and one that takes long to learn: when that inescapable hour arrives, to depart with a calm mind. Other kinds of death are mixed with hope. A disease runs its course; a fire is put out; a collapsing building sets down unhurt those it seemed about to crush; the sea throws back safe, with the same force with which it sucked them in, those it had swallowed; a soldier pulls back his sword from the very neck of the man about to die. But the man whom old age leads to death has nothing to hope for. Here alone there can be no reprieve. No kind of death is gentler—but none is longer either.

Our Bassus seemed to me to be attending his own funeral and laying himself out, living as if he had outlived himself, and bearing wisely the loss of himself. For he talks a great deal about death, and works hard to convince us that if there is anything unpleasant or frightening in this business, it is the fault of the dying man, not of death; that there is no more distress in death itself than after it.

For it is as mad to fear what you will not suffer as to fear what you will not feel. Or does anyone believe that the thing through which nothing is felt will itself be felt? “So,” he says, “death is so far beyond all evil that it is beyond all fear of evils.”

I know these things have often been said, and must often be said again. But they did not help me as much when I read them, or when I heard them from people who said there was nothing to fear while they were far from the things they told us not to fear. This man, though, carried the greatest authority with me, because he was speaking of a death close at hand.

I’ll tell you what I think: I believe a man in the very act of dying is braver than one who is merely near death. For death, once it is brought close, gives even the untrained the courage not to shun what cannot be shunned. So a gladiator who has been utterly fearful through the whole fight offers his throat to his opponent and guides the wavering sword to the spot. But a death that is near, and certain to come, demands a slow and steady firmness of mind. That is rarer, and only the wise man can supply it.

So I listened to him with the greatest pleasure, as though he were pronouncing a verdict on death and reporting what its nature is, like one who had inspected it at close range. I suppose you would give more credit, more weight, to someone who had come back to life and told you from experience that there is nothing bad in death. But what turmoil the approach of death brings, those will tell you best who have stood beside it, who have seen it coming and taken it in.

Among these you may count Bassus, who did not want us deceived. He says a man who fears death is as foolish as one who fears old age. For just as old age follows youth, so death follows old age. Whoever does not want to die did not want to live. Life was given to us on condition of death; death is where we are going. So it is madness to fear it: what is certain we wait for; only what is doubtful we dread!

Death binds us by a necessity that is equal and invincible. Who can complain of being in a condition that everyone is in? And the first part of fairness is equality. But there is no need now to plead nature’s case; she wanted our law to be no different from her own. Whatever she has put together, she takes apart; and whatever she takes apart, she puts together again.

And if someone has had the luck to be let go gently by old age—not torn suddenly from life but drawn away little by little—surely he ought to thank all the gods that, having had his fill, he has been brought to a rest that a human being needs and a tired one welcomes. You see some people longing for death, and more intensely than people usually beg for life. I don’t know which give us greater courage: those who demand death, or those who await it cheerfully and quietly. The first sometimes comes from frenzy and sudden indignation; the second is a tranquility that comes from settled judgment. Some go to death in anger; but no one welcomes death cheerfully as it comes, unless he has long prepared himself for it.

I admit, then, that I visited this man, dear to me for many reasons, rather often, to find out whether I would find him the same each time, and whether the vigor of his mind was waning with the strength of his body. But it was growing in him, the way a charioteer’s joy usually shows more plainly on the seventh lap, as he nears the prize.note

Following the teachings of Epicurus, he said, first, that he hoped there would be no pain in that last gasp; but if there were, there was some comfort in its very brevity, since no great pain is long. Besides, even at the very tearing apart of mind and body, if it came with agony, he would be helped by the thought that after that pain he could feel no pain at all. He had no doubt, though, that an old man’s soul was right at his lips and would not be wrenched from the body with great force. “A fire that has caught on fuel that feeds it has to be put out with water, sometimes by pulling the building down; one that runs short of fuel dies down of its own accord.”

I listen to these things gladly, my Lucilius, not as though they were new, but as though I had been brought face to face with the thing itself. Well then? Haven’t I watched many people cut their lives short? I have indeed; but those carry more weight with me who come to death without hating life, who let it in rather than drag it in.

He used to say that it is our own doing that we feel this torment, because we panic only when we believe death is near us. But from whom is it not near, when it stands ready in every place and at every moment? “But let us consider,” he said, “when some cause of death seems to be approaching, how many others are closer that we do not fear. An enemy was threatening someone with death; indigestion got there first.”

“If we are willing to sort out the causes of our fear, we will find that some are real and others only seem so. We do not fear death, but the thought of death. For from death itself we are always the same distance away. So if death is to be feared, it is always to be feared. For what time is exempt from death?”

But I should worry that you’ll hate such long letters worse than death. So I’ll stop. You, though—so that you never fear death, always think about it. Farewell.

I recognize my Lucilius: he is beginning to show the man he promised to be. Follow that impulse of the mind that was carrying you toward all that is best, trampling underfoot what the crowd counts as goods. I don’t wish you to become greater or better than you were striving to be. Your foundations have covered a great deal of ground; just complete what you set out to build, and carry out the plans you have been carrying in your mind.

In short, you will be wise if you close your ears—and it is not enough to stop them with wax; you need a tighter plug than the one Ulysses is said to have used for his crew. That voice, which was feared, was alluring, but it was not public; this one, which must be feared, sounds not from a single rock but from every part of the world. So sail past not one place suspected of treacherous pleasure, but every city. Make yourself deaf to those who love you most: they wish you ill with good intentions. And if you want to be happy, pray the gods that none of the things they wish for you comes true.note

Those things these people want to heap on you are not goods. There is one good, the cause and the foundation of a happy life: to trust yourself. But this cannot happen unless toil is despised and counted among the things that are neither good nor evil. For it is impossible for one and the same thing to be now bad, now good; now light and bearable, now terrifying.

Toil is not a good. What, then, is good? Contempt for toil. So I would blame those who toil for nothing. On the other hand, when people strive toward the honorable, the harder they press, and the less they let themselves be beaten and flag, the more I will approve of them and shout: “All the better! Get up, draw breath, and take that hill in a single breath if you can.”

Toil nourishes noble minds. So there is no reason for you to choose, out of that old prayer your parents made for you, what you would like to happen to you, what to wish for. And in general, for a man who has already passed through the highest offices, it is shameful to be still wearying the gods. What need is there for prayers? Make yourself happy. And you will, if you understand that the things mixed with virtue are good, and those joined with vice are shameful. Just as nothing is bright without a mixture of light, and nothing dark unless it holds darkness or has drawn some gloom into itself; just as nothing is hot without the help of fire, and nothing cold without air: so it is partnership with virtue or vice that makes things honorable or shameful.

What, then, is good? Knowledge of things. What is evil? Ignorance of things. Your man of wisdom and skill will reject or choose each thing as the occasion demands. But he neither fears what he rejects nor admires what he chooses, provided his mind is great and unconquered. I forbid you to bow down or be crushed. It is not enough not to refuse toil: ask for it.

“What?” you say. “Toil that is trivial and pointless, called up by petty causes—isn’t that bad?” No more than toil spent on fine things; for it is the endurance itself that belongs to the mind, the endurance that urges itself on to hard and rough tasks and says: “Why are you slacking? A man doesn’t fear sweat.”

Add to this that, for virtue to be perfect, there must be evenness and a course of life consistent with itself throughout. That cannot be unless one gains knowledge of things, and the art by which things human and divine are known. This is the highest good. If you seize it, you begin to be the gods’ companion, not their suppliant.

“How,” you ask, “does one get there?” Not over the Pennine or the Graian Alps, nor through the wastes of Candavia; you need not face the Syrtes, or Scylla, or Charybdis—though you have crossed all of these for the price of a paltry little procuratorship. The road is safe, it is pleasant, and nature has equipped you for it. She has given you gifts which, if you do not abandon them, will raise you to equal the god.note

But money will not make you equal to the god: the god owns nothing. A purple-bordered toga will not: the god is naked. Nor will fame, nor displaying yourself and spreading your name among the nations: no one knows the god, many think ill of him, and get away with it. Nor a crowd of slaves carrying your litter through the streets of town and abroad: that god, the greatest and most powerful, himself carries all things. Not even beauty and strength can make you happy: none of these withstands age.

We must look for something that does not get worse day by day, something that cannot be obstructed. What is it? The mind—but a mind that is upright, good, great. What else would you call such a mind but a god lodging as a guest in a human body? This mind can fall to a Roman knight just as well as to a freedman or a slave. For what is a Roman knight, or a freedman, or a slave? Names born of ambition or of injustice. From a humble corner one may leap up to heaven. Only rise, “and shape yourself, too, / worthy of the god.” But you will not shape yourself so with gold or silver; from that material no likeness of the god can be formed. Remember that when the gods were kind to us, they were shaped from clay. Farewell.note

I ask about you, and question everyone who comes from your part of the world: what are you doing, where are you spending your time, and with whom? You can’t fool me; I am with you. Live as if I were going to hear what you do—no, as if I were going to see it. You ask what pleases me most of what I hear about you? That I hear nothing: most of the people I ask don’t know what you are doing.

This is what keeps you healthy: not to keep company with people unlike you, who want different things. I am confident, indeed, that you cannot be twisted aside, and that you will hold to your purpose even if a crowd of tempters surrounds you. What, then? I don’t fear that they will change you; I fear they will hold you up. And even someone who only delays you does great harm, especially when life is so short—and we make it shorter by our inconstancy, making first one fresh start at it and then another. We split it into little pieces and tear it to shreds.

So hurry, dearest Lucilius, and think how much speed you would add if an enemy were pressing at your back, if you suspected cavalry were coming on, hard on the heels of those in flight. It is happening: they are pressing you. Speed up and get away; bring yourself to safety, and consider again and again what a fine thing it is to complete your life before death, and then to await the rest of your time free from care, asking nothing for yourself, secure in possession of a happy life—which does not become happier by becoming longer.

Oh, when will you see the time when you know that time is no concern of yours—when you will be tranquil and calm, careless of tomorrow, as one who has had his fill of himself! 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, on the contrary, wish you contempt for all the things they wished you plenty of. Their prayers rob many people to make you rich. Whatever they transfer to you has to be taken from someone.

I wish you mastery of yourself, so that your mind, tossed about by wandering thoughts, may at last stand firm and be steady; 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 added years. He alone has risen above necessity, he alone is discharged and free, who lives when his life is already complete. Farewell.

You want these letters, like the earlier ones, to have some sayings of our leading men attached. They were not busy with little flowers of style; their whole fabric is manly. You may be sure there is unevenness where the things that stand out are the notable ones. A single tree is no wonder when the whole forest has risen to the same height.note

Poems are packed with sayings of this kind, and so are histories. So I don’t want you to think they belong to Epicurus; they are public property, and ours above all. But in him they are noticed more, because they turn up only now and then, because they are unexpected, because it is surprising that something brave should be said by a man who professed softness. That, at any rate, is how most people judge. In my view Epicurus is brave too, even if he wears long sleeves. Courage and energy and a mind ready for war are found among Persians as much as among men with their tunics girded high.note

So there is no reason for you to demand extracts and repetitions; what others offer as excerpts, our writers offer throughout. And so we have no eye-catching window displays, and we don’t deceive the customer, who, once inside, would find nothing beyond what is hung up out front. We let people take their samples from wherever they like.

Suppose we wanted to separate individual maxims from the mass: to whom would we credit them? To Zeno, or Cleanthes, or Chrysippus, or Panaetius, or Posidonius? We are not under a king; each of us claims his own freedom. Among those others, whatever Hermarchus said, whatever Metrodorus said, is credited to one man. Everything anyone said in that fellowship was said under the leadership and command of one. We cannot, I say, even if we try, pick anything out of so great a mass of equal things. “It’s the poor man who counts his flock.” Wherever you cast your eye, you will meet something that could stand out, if it were not being read among its equals.note

So give up the hope that you can sample the talents of the greatest men in summary. They must be examined whole, handled whole. The work proceeds as a whole, and a product of genius is woven together along its own lines, so that nothing can be pulled out of it without collapse. Nor do I object to your considering the individual limbs, provided you consider them in the person as a whole. A woman is not beautiful when her leg or her arm is praised, but when her whole appearance draws admiration away from her separate parts.

If you insist, though, I won’t deal with you like a beggar; it will be done with a full hand. There is a huge crowd of them lying about everywhere; they need only be taken, not gathered up. For they don’t drop out here and there; they flow. They are continuous and interwoven. Nor do I doubt that they help a great deal those who are still beginners and listening from outside; for individual sayings sink in more easily when they are marked off and enclosed, like a line of verse.

That is why we give children maxims to learn by heart, and what the Greeks call chreiai [anecdotal sayings], because a child’s mind can grasp them, when it cannot yet hold more. For a man who has made definite progress, it is shameful to chase after little flowers, to prop himself up with a handful of the best-known sayings and rely on memory; he should lean on himself by now. Let him say such things, not memorize them. For it is shameful for an old man, or one within sight of old age, to have wisdom out of a notebook. “Zeno said this.” And you? “Cleanthes said this.” And you? How long will you march under someone else’s command? Take command, and say something worth handing down to memory. Bring out something of your own too.

So all these people—never authors, always interpreters, lurking in someone else’s shadow—I consider to have nothing noble in them; they have never dared at last to do what they spent so long learning. They have exercised their memory on other people’s words. But remembering is one thing, knowing another. To remember is to guard something entrusted to memory. To know, on the other hand, is to make everything your own, and not to hang on a model and keep looking back at the teacher.

“Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this.” Let there be some difference between you and a book! How long will you go on learning? Start teaching now. “Why should I listen to what I can read?” “The living voice,” someone says, “accomplishes a great deal.” Yes—but not this voice, which merely lends itself to someone else’s words and does the job of a clerk.

Add now that these people who never come of age follow their predecessors, first, in a matter where everyone has broken away from his predecessor; and second, in a matter that is still being investigated. But it will never be found if we are content with what has been found. Besides, whoever follows another finds nothing—in fact, he isn’t even looking.

Well then? Shall I not walk in the footsteps of those before me? I will indeed use the old road; but if I find one shorter and more level, I will build that one. Those who worked on these questions before us are not our masters but our guides. Truth lies open to all; no one has taken possession of it yet. Much of it has been left for those still to come. Farewell.

I grow, I leap for joy, I shake off old age and warm up again whenever I see, from what you do and write, how far you have risen above yourself—for you left the crowd behind long ago. If a farmer delights in a tree he has brought to fruit, if a shepherd takes pleasure in the young of his flock, if no one looks at his foster child without feeling that its youth is his own—what do you think happens to those who have reared minds, and suddenly see full-grown what they shaped when it was tender?

I claim you as mine; you are my work. When I saw your character, I laid my hand on you, urged you on, applied the spur, and did not let you go slowly, but kept driving you on. And I do the same now—but now I am cheering on a runner who is cheering me on in turn.

“What else?” you say. “I am still only at the stage of wanting.” That is most of it—though not in the way beginnings are said to be half of the whole task; this thing rests on the mind. So a great part of goodness is wanting to become good. Do you know whom I call good? The complete, finished man, whom no force and no necessity can make bad.

That is what I foresee you will be, if you persevere and apply yourself, and make it your aim that all your deeds and words agree and correspond with each other and are struck from a single die. A man whose actions are at odds with each other does not have a mind that is straight. Farewell.

When I beg you so earnestly to study, I am looking after my own interest. I want to have you as a friend, and that cannot happen for me unless you go on cultivating yourself as you have begun. For now you love me; you are not my friend. “What? Are these two different?” More than that: they are unlike. A friend loves; one who loves is not necessarily a friend. So friendship always helps, while love sometimes even harms. If for no other reason, make progress so that you learn how to love.

Hurry, then, while your progress is for my benefit, or you will end up having learned it for someone else. I, for one, am already enjoying the fruit, when I imagine that we will be of one mind, and that whatever vigor has left my age will come back to me from yours—though yours is not so very far from mine.

Still, I want to be glad in reality too. Joy does come to us from those we love even when they are absent, but it is slight and fleeting; seeing them, having them present, talking with them, holds something of a living pleasure—especially if you see not only the person you want, but the kind of person you want. So bring me yourself, a huge gift; and to make you press on harder, remember that you are mortal and I am old.

Hurry to me—but to yourself first. Make progress, and above all take care to be consistent with yourself. Whenever you want to test whether anything has been achieved, see whether you want the same things today as yesterday. A change of will shows that the mind is adrift, turning up here and there as the wind carries it. What is fixed and founded does not wander. This belongs to the perfect wise man, and to some degree to one who is making progress and is well advanced. What, then, is the difference? The one is moved, yes, but does not shift; he sways in his own place. The other is not even moved. Farewell.

Encourage your friend to despise, with a great spirit, those who scold him for having sought the shade and leisure, for having abandoned his rank, and for preferring quiet to everything when he could have risen higher. Let him show them every day how profitably he has managed his own affairs. Those who are envied will keep passing by: some will be crushed, others will fall. Prosperity is a restless thing; it harasses itself. It unsettles the brain in more ways than one, goading different people to different things—some to power, others to luxury. Some it puffs up; others it softens and dissolves entirely.

“But some people carry prosperity well.” Yes—the way some carry their wine. So don’t let these people persuade you that a man is happy who is besieged by many. They run to him as to a pool, which they drain and muddy. “They call him worthless and idle.” You know that some people use words perversely, to mean the opposite.

They used to call him happy. So what? Was he? Nor do I mind that to some he seems too rough and gloomy in temperament. Ariston used to say he preferred a young man who was serious to one who was cheerful and charming to the crowd. For wine that seemed harsh and rough when new becomes good; wine that was pleasant in the cask does not stand up to age. Let them call him gloomy and an enemy of his own advancement; that very gloom will turn out well with age, if only he keeps cultivating virtue and drinking deep of liberal studies—not those you need only be sprinkled with, but those in which the mind must be steeped.note

This is the time for learning. “What? Is there any time when one should not learn?” Not at all. But while it is honorable to study at every age, it is not honorable to be schooled at every age. An old man learning his ABCs is a shameful and ridiculous thing: the young man must acquire, the old man must use. So you will do yourself the greatest service if you make him as good as possible. These, they say, are the benefits to seek and to bestow—undoubtedly of the first rank—which it helps as much to give as to receive.

Besides, he no longer has any freedom in the matter: he has given his pledge. And it is less shameful to go bankrupt to a creditor than to high hopes. To pay off a debt of money, the merchant needs a prosperous voyage, the farmer needs fertile soil and a favorable sky; but what he owes can be paid by will alone.

Fortune has no jurisdiction over character. Let him order his character so that his mind may reach perfection in the greatest possible tranquility—a mind that feels nothing taken from it and nothing added, but stays in the same condition however things turn out. If ordinary goods are heaped upon it, it rises above its circumstances; if chance has knocked away some of these, or all of them, it is not diminished.

If he had been born in Parthia, he would be bending a bow as a baby; if in Germany, he would be brandishing a slender spear as a 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 people’s training urges on its members, and commands.

What, then, should he practice? What serves well against every weapon and every kind of enemy: contempt of death. No one doubts that death has something terrifying about it, enough to shock our minds, which nature has formed to love themselves. For there would be no need to prepare and sharpen ourselves for something we would go toward by a kind of willing instinct, the way all creatures are drawn to preserve themselves.

No one learns how to lie calmly on a bed of roses, if need be; what he is hardened for is this: not to give up his loyalty under torture, and, if need be, to stand watch all night on the rampart, sometimes even wounded, without so much as leaning on his spear, because sleep tends to creep up on those who rest against any support. Death has no disadvantage; for there has to be someone for whom it is a disadvantage.

But if such a desire for a longer life grips you, consider that none of the things that pass from our sight and are laid back in the nature of things—from which they came, and from which they will soon come forth again—is destroyed. They cease; they do not perish. And death, which we so dread and resist, interrupts life; it does not snatch it away. The day will come again that restores us to the light—a day many would refuse, if it did not bring us back having forgotten.

But later I will show more carefully that all things that seem to perish only change. One who is going to return ought to leave with a calm mind. Observe the cycle of things that come back around on themselves: you will see that nothing in this world is extinguished, but that things set and rise in turn. Summer has gone, but another year will bring it back; winter has fallen, and its months will bring it back again; night has buried the sun, but day will soon drive the night away. The wheeling of the stars repeats whatever it has passed; part of the sky is always rising, part sinking.

Finally, I will stop once I have added this one thing: neither infants nor children nor those whose minds have failed fear death, and it is utterly shameful if reason does not give us the freedom from care to which folly leads them. Farewell.

You have promised to be a good man; you have taken the oath—the strongest bond there is to a sound mind. Anyone who tells you this service is soft and easy will be making fun of you. I don’t want you deceived. The words of this most honorable enlistment and of that most shameful one are the same: “to be burned, to be bound, to be killed by the sword.”note

From those who hire out their hands to the arena, who eat and drink what they must pay back in blood, a guarantee is taken that they will endure these things even against their will; from you, that you will endure them willingly and gladly. They may lower their weapons and try for the pity of the crowd; you will neither lower yours nor beg for your life. You must die on your feet and unconquered. Besides, what is the good of gaining a few days or years? We are born with no reprieve.note

“How, then,” you ask, “am I to get myself free?” You cannot escape necessities, but you can conquer them. “Force forges a way.” And philosophy will give you this way. Go to her if you want to be safe, free from care, happy—and finally, if you want to be what matters most: free. This cannot come about any other way.note

Folly is a lowly thing—abject, squalid, servile, subject to many passions, and the cruelest ones. These harsh masters, who rule sometimes in turn and sometimes together, are sent away from you by wisdom, which alone is freedom. One road leads to it, and a straight one; you won’t go astray. Walk with a sure step. If you want to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason. You will rule many, if reason rules you. From her you will learn what to undertake and how; you won’t blunder into things.

You won’t find me anyone who knows how he came to want what he wants. He was not led there by deliberation; he was driven there by impulse. Fortune runs into us no less often than we run into her. It is shameful not to walk but to be carried along, and suddenly, in the middle of a whirlwind of events, to ask in a daze: “How did I get here?” Farewell.

You are right to ask that we keep up this exchange of letters more often. Conversation does the most good, because it creeps into the mind little by little. Lectures prepared in advance and poured out before an audience have more noise and less intimacy. Philosophy is good counsel, and no one gives counsel at the top of his voice. Sometimes we must use those harangues, so to speak, when someone who hesitates needs a push; but when the aim is not to make him want to learn, but to make him learn, we must come down to these quieter words. They enter more easily and they stick; for we do not need many words, but effective ones.

They should be scattered like seed. However tiny a seed is, once it has found a suitable spot, it unfolds its powers and spreads from the smallest beginnings into the greatest growth. Reason does the same: to look at, it does not extend far; in the working, it grows. What is said is little, but if the mind has received it well, it gains strength and springs up. The condition of precepts, I say, is the same as that of seeds: they achieve much, and yet they are small. Only, as I said, let a suitable mind take them in and draw them into itself. It will produce much in its turn, and give back more than it received. Farewell.

I will indeed put together the notes you ask for, carefully arranged and compressed into a small space. But consider whether a regular, systematic treatment will not do you more good than what is now commonly called a breviarium [abridgment], and was once called, when people spoke proper Latin, a summarium [summary]. The first is more necessary to the learner, the second to one who already knows: the first teaches, the second reminds. But I will supply you with both. There is no reason for you to ask me for this authority or that; whoever produces a guarantor is himself unknown.

So I will write what you want, but in my own way. Meanwhile you have many authors whose writings are, I suspect, orderly enough. Take a list of the philosophers in hand: that alone will force you to wake up, when you see how many have worked on your behalf. You will long to be one of them yourself. For a noble mind has this finest quality: it is roused toward the honorable. No man of lofty talent takes pleasure in what is low and mean; the sight of great things calls him to itself and lifts him up.

As a flame shoots straight up and cannot lie flat or be pressed down, any more than it can rest, so our mind is always in motion, and the more vigorous it is, the more restless and active. But happy the man who has turned this drive toward better things! He will place himself beyond fortune’s jurisdiction and dominion. He will temper prosperity, cut adversity down to size, and look down on what others admire.

It is the mark of a great mind to despise great things and to prefer the moderate to the excessive. For the moderate is useful and life-giving, while the excessive harms by its very overflow. So too rich a growth flattens the crop; so branches break under too heavy a load; so excessive fruitfulness never comes to ripeness. The same happens to minds: unrestrained prosperity bursts them, since they use it to injure not only others but themselves.

What enemy was ever as insulting to anyone as their own pleasures are to some people? Their lack of self-control and their mad lust you could forgive for this one reason: they suffer what they have done. And this frenzy torments them deservedly; for desire that leaps beyond nature’s limit must run on into the boundless. What is natural has its own limit; empty desires, born of lust, have no end.

Need is the measure of what is necessary; by what will you bring the superfluous to measure? So people sink themselves in pleasures which, once they have become habits, they cannot do without. And they are most wretched for this very reason: they have come to the point where what was superfluous has become necessary to them. So they are slaves to their pleasures, not enjoyers of them; and—the worst of evils—they even love their own ills. Unhappiness is complete when shameful things not only give delight but win approval; and there is no longer room for a remedy when what were vices have become ways of life. Farewell.

Thank you for writing to me so often. It is the one way you can show yourself to me. I never receive a letter from you without our being together at once. If portraits of absent friends give us pleasure—renewing our memory and easing our longing with a false and empty comfort—how much more pleasure do letters give, which bring us real traces, real marks of an absent friend? For the sweetest thing about seeing a friend face to face—recognizing him—is what a friend’s hand, imprinted on a letter, gives us.

You write that you heard the philosopher Serapion when he put in at your shores: “He tends to wrench out his words in a great rush, not letting them pour out one at a time but pressing and crowding them together. More of them come than one voice can manage.” I don’t approve of this in a philosopher. His delivery, like his life, should be orderly; and nothing that tumbles headlong in a hurry is ordered. That is why, in Homer, the rapid speech that comes on without a break, like a snowstorm, is given to the younger speaker, while from the old man flows speech that is gentle and sweeter than honey.note

So take it from me: that rapid, overflowing force of speech suits a street-corner showman better than a man who is handling and teaching a great and serious subject. I don’t want him to drip any more than to race; let him neither strain our ears nor swamp them. True, the opposite—poverty and thinness of speech—leaves the listener less attentive, worn out by its halting slowness; still, what we wait for sinks in more easily than what flies past. Finally, we speak of teachers “handing down” precepts to their pupils; but you can’t hand over what runs away.

Add to this that speech devoted to truth should be unstudied and simple. This popular style has nothing true about it. It wants to stir up the crowd and carry off unthinking ears by sheer force; it doesn’t let itself be examined; it is swept away. And how can something govern when it cannot be governed? Besides, speech used to heal minds has to sink into us. Remedies do no good unless they stay.

Besides, it has a great deal of emptiness and hollowness; it has more sound than substance. What terrifies me must be soothed, what provokes me checked, what deceives me dispelled; extravagance must be curbed, greed rebuked. Which of these can be done in a rush? What doctor cures the sick in passing? And another thing: such a clatter of words, tumbling out without selection, doesn’t even give any pleasure.

But just as it is enough to have seen once many things you wouldn’t have believed could be done, so it is plenty to have heard once these people who put their words through their paces. What would anyone want to learn from them, or imitate? What is he to think of the mind of people whose speech is disordered and runs loose and cannot be reined in?

When people run down a slope, they don’t stop where they meant to; the momentum of the body carries them off and further than they wanted. So too this speed of speech is not in its own control, and not becoming enough for philosophy, which ought to place its words, not fling them, and to move forward step by step.

“What, then? Shouldn’t it sometimes rise higher?” Why not? But with the dignity of character preserved, which that violent, excessive force strips away. Let it have great strength, but controlled; let it be a steady stream, not a torrent. I would hardly allow even an orator such velocity of speech, unstoppable and running on without rule. For how could a juror keep up—sometimes one who is inexperienced and untrained at that? Even when showing off or emotion beyond his control has carried the speaker away, let him hurry and pile it on only as much as ears can bear.

So you will do right not to go and hear those who care how much they say, not how they say it; and if you must, you yourself should prefer to speak like Publius Vinicius, who stammers. When someone asked how Publius Vinicius spoke, Asellius said, “He drags it out.” (Indeed Geminus Varius said, “I don’t know how you can call that man eloquent: he can’t string three words together.”) Why shouldn’t you prefer to speak like Vinicius?note

Someone may come along as tactless as the man who, while Vinicius was plucking out his words one at a time, as though dictating rather than speaking, said to him, “Speak! Have you anything to say?” As for the racing pace of Quintus Haterius, the most celebrated orator of his day, I want it kept far away from any sensible man: he never hesitated, never paused; he started once and he stopped once.note

Still, I think some styles suit some nations more or less. In a Greek you might put up with this license; we Romans, even when we write, are used to separating our words. Our own Cicero, too, from whom Roman eloquence sprang, was a steady pacer. Roman speech looks about itself more, weighs itself, and offers itself to be weighed.note

Fabianus, a man outstanding in his life and his learning and also—a point that comes after those—in eloquence, used to discourse fluently rather than excitedly, so that you could call it ease, not speed. This I accept in a wise man; I don’t demand it. Let his speech come out without hindrance; but I would rather it be brought forth than let flow.

I warn you away from this disease all the more because it can’t come to you unless you have stopped feeling shame. You would have to harden your face and not listen to yourself. That unchecked rush will carry along many things you would want to find fault with.

It cannot, I say, come to you without loss of modesty. Besides, it requires daily practice, and you would have to shift your attention from things to words. And even if the words are there and can run on without any effort from you, they still need to be held in check. For just as a more restrained walk suits a wise man, so does speech that is compact, not reckless. Here, then, is the sum of it all: I bid you be slow of speech. Farewell.

I mean it, Lucilius: a holy spirit dwells within us, the watcher and guardian of our evil and our good. As we treat it, so it treats us. No one is a good man without god: can anyone rise above fortune unless he helps him? He gives noble and lofty counsel. In every good man “a god dwells—which god, is uncertain.”note

If you come upon a grove thick with ancient trees that have grown beyond the usual height, shutting out the sight of the sky with the screen of branches overlapping one another, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the place, and your wonder at a shade so dense and unbroken in the open air will convince you of a divine presence. If a cave, its rocks eaten deep away, holds a mountain suspended over it—not made by hand, but hollowed out to such a width by natural causes—it will strike your mind with a kind of intimation of the sacred. We revere the sources of great rivers; where a mighty river bursts suddenly from hiding, there are altars; springs of hot water are worshiped; and some pools have been made holy by their darkness or their immense depth.

If you see a man unafraid of dangers, untouched by desires, happy in adversity, calm in the midst of storms, who looks at men from a higher place and at the gods from their own level, won’t reverence for him steal over you? Won’t you say, “This thing is too great and too lofty to be thought of the same kind as this puny body it lives in? A divine power has come down into it.”

A mind that is outstanding and controlled, that passes over everything as beneath it and laughs at whatever we fear and long for, is moved by a heavenly power. So great a thing cannot stand without the support of a divinity. So the greater part of it remains there, where it came down from. Just as the sun’s rays do touch the earth but are really there where they are sent from, so a great and holy mind, sent down here so that we might know the divine more closely, keeps company with us but clings to its origin. It hangs from there, looks and strives toward there; it takes part in our affairs as a being better than we are.

What, then, is this mind? One that shines with no good but its own. For what is more foolish than to praise in a man what belongs to others? What is more insane than to admire things that can be handed over to someone else in an instant? Golden bridles don’t make a horse better. A lion with a gilded mane, who has been handled and, worn out, forced to put up with the ornament, is sent into the arena very differently from one untamed, his spirit unbroken. The second—fierce in his charge, as nature meant him to be, beautiful in his very shagginess, whose glory is that no one can look at him without fear—is preferred to the other, limp and covered in gold leaf.

No one should take pride in anything but what is his own. We praise a vine if it loads its shoots with fruit, if by the weight of what it bears it drags its very props to the ground. Would anyone prefer to this vine one hung with golden grapes and golden leaves? Fruitfulness is the proper virtue of a vine; in a man, too, what deserves praise is what is his own. He has a handsome staff of slaves and a beautiful house, he sows a great deal and lends a great deal at interest: none of these things is in him; they are around him.

Praise in him what can be neither taken away nor given, what belongs to a man as such. You ask what that is? The mind, and reason made perfect in the mind. For man is a rational animal. His good, then, is complete if he has fulfilled what he was born for.

And what does this reason demand of him? The easiest thing in the world: to live in accordance with his own nature. But the general madness makes it hard; we push one another into vices. And how can people be called back to health when no one holds them back and the crowd drives them on? Farewell.

Has that fellow already convinced you that he is a good man? Yet a good man can neither be made nor recognized so quickly. Do you know what kind of good man I mean here? One of the second rank. For the other kind is perhaps born, like the phoenix, once in five hundred years. And it’s no wonder that great things are produced at long intervals: the ordinary ones, born for the crowd, fortune often brings forth; the exceptional she commends by their very rarity.

But this man is still a long way from what he claims to be. If he knew what a good man was, he would not yet believe himself one; he might even despair of ever becoming one. “But he thinks badly of bad men.” So do bad men themselves; and there is no greater punishment for wickedness than that it is displeasing to itself and its own.

“But he hates those who wield great, sudden power with no power over themselves.” He will do the same when he has the same power. Many men’s vices lie hidden because they are weak; once their strength pleases them, they will dare no less than those that prosperity has already brought into the open.

They lack the tools to unfold their wickedness. In the same way even a deadly snake can be handled safely while it is stiff with cold: it doesn’t lack venom then; the venom is simply numb. In many people cruelty, ambition and extravagance lack only fortune’s favor to dare as much as the worst. You will soon find that they want the same things, this way: give them the power to do as much as they want.

You remember how, when you insisted that a certain man was in your power, I said he was flighty and fickle, and that you were holding not his foot but a feather. Did I lie? You were holding a plume, which he let go of, and flew off. You know what tricks he played on you afterward, how many things he attempted that were bound to fall on his own head. He didn’t see that in endangering others he was rushing into danger himself. He didn’t consider how burdensome the things he was after were, even if they had not been superfluous.

So in the things we aim at and strive for with great effort, we ought to look for this: either there is nothing advantageous in them, or more that is disadvantageous. Some things are superfluous; some are not worth the price. But we don’t see this clearly, and things seem free to us that cost us very dearly.

Our stupidity shows in this: we think we buy only what we pay money for, and we call free the things we spend ourselves on. Things we would refuse to buy if we had to give our house for them, or some pleasant or profitable estate, we are all too ready to obtain at the cost of anxiety, of danger, of the loss of self-respect and freedom and time. So true is it that nothing is cheaper to anyone than himself.

So in all our plans and affairs let us do what we usually do whenever we go up to a dealer in some merchandise: let us see what price is being asked for the thing we want. Often the thing for which no price is paid costs the most. I could show you many things whose getting and receiving has wrung our freedom from us. We would belong to ourselves if these things did not belong to us.

So turn these thoughts over with yourself, not only when it is a question of gain but also when it is one of loss. “This is going to be lost.” Well, it came to you from outside; you will live without it as easily as you lived before. If you have had it a long time, you lose it after you have had your fill of it; if not long, you lose it before you grow used to it. “You’ll have less money.” Yes, and less trouble.

“Less influence.” Yes, and less envy. Look around at the things that drive us mad, that we lose with floods of tears: you will see that what troubles us in them is not the loss but the idea of loss. No one feels that they are gone; he thinks it. He who has himself has lost nothing. But how few have the good luck to have themselves! Farewell.

You ask how this reached me—who told me what you were thinking, when you had told no one? The one who knows the most: rumor. “What?” you say. “Am I important enough to set rumor going?” There is no reason to measure yourself by looking back at this place here; look at the one where you are living.

Whatever stands out among its neighbors is great in the place where it stands out. For greatness has no fixed measure; comparison raises it or lowers it. A ship that is big on a river is tiny on the sea. A rudder that is big for one ship is small for another.

You, now, in your province, are a great man, however little you think of yourself. What you do, how you dine, how you sleep—people ask, and they find out. So you must live all the more carefully. Consider yourself truly happy when you can live in public, when your walls shelter you but don’t hide you—walls we generally assume we have built around us not so that we may live more safely, but so that we may do wrong more secretly.

I’ll tell you something by which you can judge our morals: you will hardly find anyone who could live with his door open. It is our conscience, not our pride, that has posted doorkeepers; we live in such a way that to be seen without warning is to be caught. But what good is it to hide away and avoid the eyes and ears of men?

A good conscience calls in the crowd; a bad one is anxious and troubled even in solitude. If what you do is honorable, let everyone know it; if it is shameful, what does it matter that no one knows, when you know? How wretched you are if you despise this witness! Farewell.

Once again you are making yourself small to me, and saying that first nature, then fortune, treated you meanly—when you can lift yourself out of the crowd and rise to the greatest happiness men can have. If there is anything else good in philosophy, it is this: it doesn’t look at your family tree. All men, if traced back to their first origin, come from the gods.

You are a Roman knight, and your own hard work brought you into that order. But, heavens, to many people the fourteen rows are closed; the senate house does not admit everyone; even the army is choosy about whom it takes on for toil and danger. A sound mind is open to all; for this we are all noble. Philosophy neither rejects anyone nor picks anyone out; it shines for all.note

Socrates was not a patrician. Cleanthes drew water and hired out his hands to water a garden. Philosophy did not find Plato noble; it made him so. Why should you despair of becoming equal to these men? They are all your ancestors, if you conduct yourself in a way worthy of them; and you will, if you convince yourself here and now that no one surpasses you in nobility.note

We all have just as many ancestors behind us; everyone’s origin lies beyond memory. Plato says there is no king who is not descended from slaves, and no slave not descended from kings. A long succession of changes has mixed all this up, and fortune has turned it upside down.note

Who is well born? The one whom nature has well fitted for virtue. That is the one thing to look at. Otherwise, if you go back to ancient times, everyone comes from a point before which there is nothing. From the first beginning of the world down to this day, an alternating line of the illustrious and the lowly has brought us here. A hall full of smoke-blackened portrait masks does not make a man noble. No one lived for our glory, and what came before us is not ours. It is the mind that makes a man noble, and from any condition it can rise above fortune.note

So imagine you are not a Roman knight but a freedman: you can still manage to be the only free man among the freeborn. “How?” you ask. If you distinguish evil from good without taking the crowd as your authority. You must look not at where things come from but at where they are going. Whatever can make life happy is good in its own right; for it cannot be corrupted into evil.

Where, then, is the mistake, since everyone wants a happy life? It is that they take the instruments of it for the thing itself, and while they seek it, they run from it. For though the height of a happy life is solid freedom from care and an unshaken confidence in it, they collect reasons for anxiety, and on life’s treacherous road they don’t just carry their baggage, they drag it. So they keep getting further from achieving what they are after; the more effort they spend, the more they get in their own way and are carried backward. It is what happens to people hurrying through a maze: their very speed entangles them. Farewell.

You complain that there is a shortage of books where you are. It doesn’t matter how many books you have, but how good they are. Focused reading does you good; varied reading only entertains. Someone who wants to reach the destination he has set himself should follow one road and not wander along many. That is not traveling; it is straying.

“I would rather,” you say, “you gave me advice than books.” For my part, I am ready to send you whatever books I have and to empty out my whole granary. I would carry myself over there too, if I could; and if I did not hope that you would soon be released from your post, I would have ordered this old man’s expedition for myself, and not even Charybdis and Scylla and that fabled strait could have frightened me off. I would have swum across, not just sailed across, if only I could embrace you and judge in person how much you have grown in spirit.

As for your wanting my own books sent to you, I don’t think myself eloquent on that account any more than I would think myself handsome if you asked for my portrait. I know that comes from affection, not judgment. And if it does come from judgment, affection has deceived you.

But whatever they are like, read them as if I were still seeking the truth, not knowing it—and seeking it stubbornly. For I have not made myself anyone’s property; I bear no one’s name. I put great trust in 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 sought; and perhaps they would have found what was necessary if they had not also gone looking for what was superfluous.

A great deal of their time was stolen by quibbling over words and by captious arguments that exercise a pointless ingenuity. We tie knots, binding ambiguous meanings onto words, and then untie them. Do we have that much time to spare? Do we already know how to live, how to die? We must go with our whole mind to where we need to take care that it is not things—rather than words—that deceive us.

Why do you draw distinctions for me between similar-sounding words, which have never trapped anyone except in the middle of an argument? It is things that deceive us: distinguish those. We embrace evils in place of goods; we pray for the opposite of what we prayed for before. Our prayers fight with our prayers, our plans with our plans.

How like friendship flattery is! It doesn’t merely imitate it; it outdoes and outstrips it. It is welcomed by open, well-disposed ears and sinks to the bottom of the heart, pleasing for the very reason that it harms. Teach me how to tell this likeness apart. An enemy comes to me in the guise of a friend, all charm. Vices creep up on us under the names of virtues: recklessness hides under the label of courage, restraint is called cowardice, the timid man passes for cautious. In these matters we go wrong at great peril. Stamp them with sure marks.

Anyway, a man who is asked whether he has horns is not so stupid as to feel his forehead, nor again so silly or dull as not to know he has none, however subtle the syllogism you have convinced him with. These tricks deceive without doing harm, like a conjurer’s cups and pebbles, where the very deception is what delights me. Make me understand how it is done, and I have lost all interest. I say the same of these catches—for what better name could I give sophisms? They neither harm the man who doesn’t know them nor help the man who does.note

If you really want to untangle ambiguities in words, teach us this: that the happy man is not the one the crowd calls happy, into whose lap great wealth has flowed, but the one whose every good is in his mind. He is upright and lofty, and tramples on what is changeable; he sees no one he would want to change places with; he values a man only in that part by which he is a man; he takes nature as his teacher, shapes himself by her laws, and lives as she has prescribed. No force can shake his goods from him; he turns evils into good; he is sure in his judgment, unshaken, fearless. Some force may move him, but none throws him into turmoil. When fortune has hurled the deadliest weapon she has with all her might, it grazes him but does not wound him—and that rarely. For her other weapons, with which she conquers the human race, bounce off him like hail, which rattles on the roof and melts without any harm to the one living inside.

Why do you hold me up with the one you yourself call the pseudomenos [“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 are clever. It judges things necessary when a great many of them are superfluous. And even what is not superfluous has no weight in itself toward making anyone fortunate and happy. For a thing is not automatically a good because it is necessary; otherwise we debase the good, if we give that name to bread and barley meal and the other things without which life cannot go on.note

What is good is always necessary; what is necessary is not always good, since some necessary things are also the cheapest. No one is so ignorant of the dignity of the good as to lower it to the level of these everyday conveniences.

Well then? Won’t you rather turn your efforts to showing everyone that superfluous things are pursued at a great cost of time, and that many people have gone through life while collecting the instruments of life? Review individuals, consider people as a whole: there is no one whose life is not looking toward tomorrow.

You ask what harm there is in that? Infinite harm. For they are not living; they are about to live. They put everything off. Even if we paid attention, life would still outrun us; as it is, while we hesitate, it runs past as though it belonged to someone else, and though it ends on the last day, it is lost on every day. But so as not to exceed the proper length of a letter, which ought not to fill the reader’s left hand, I will put off to another day this dispute with the logicians—who are far too subtle, and care only about this, not about that as well. Farewell.note

I have received the book of yours that you promised me. I opened it meaning to read it at my leisure, and wanted only a taste. Then the book itself coaxed me into going further. How eloquent it was you may judge from this: it seemed short to me, though it was not on the scale of your writings or mine, but at first glance might have been taken for something by Livy or Epicurus. It held me and drew me on with such sweetness that I read it through without a break. The sun was calling me out, hunger was reminding me, the clouds were threatening; still, I drank it all down.note

I was not merely pleased; I rejoiced. What talent it had, what spirit! I would say “what dash,” if it had paused and then surged up again after an interval; as it is, it was not dash but a steady drive, a composition manly and pure. And yet now and then there came that sweetness, gentle in its proper place. You are grand and lofty; I want you to keep to this, to go on this way. The subject matter played its part too; so you should choose a fertile one, one that engages your talent and spurs it on.

I will write more about the book when I have gone over it again; for now my judgment is not settled, as if I had heard it rather than read it. Let me look into it, too. You have nothing to fear: you will hear the truth. How lucky you are, to have nothing that would make anyone lie to you from so far away! Except that nowadays we lie even when the reason has been removed—out of habit. Farewell.

So I laugh at those who think it degrading to dine with one’s slave. And why, except that a most arrogant custom surrounds the master at dinner with a crowd of standing slaves? He eats more than he can hold, and with enormous greed loads his swollen belly, which has by now forgotten a belly’s proper work, so that it takes more effort to throw everything up than it did to cram it in;

but the wretched slaves are not allowed to move their lips even to speak. Every murmur is suppressed with the rod; not even accidental sounds are exempt from beatings—a cough, a sneeze, a hiccup. Any word that breaks the silence is paid for with harsh punishment. All night long they stand there, hungry and mute.

So it happens that those who may not speak in front of their master speak about him. But those slaves who could talk not only in front of their masters but with them, whose mouths were not sewn shut, were ready to offer their necks for their master and to turn aside onto their own heads the danger that threatened him; they talked at dinner, but under torture they kept silent.

Then there is the proverb, born of the same arrogance, that you have as many enemies as you have slaves. We don’t have them as enemies; we make them so. Meanwhile I pass over other cruel and inhuman things: that we misuse them not even as human beings, but as beasts of burden. When we have reclined to dine, one wipes up the spit; another, crouched under the couch, gathers up the leavings of the drunken guests.

Another carves costly birds: guiding his trained hand in precise strokes around the breast and rump, he slices off the portions. Unhappy man, to live for this one thing, carving fowl with elegance—except that the man who teaches this for pleasure’s sake is more wretched than the one who learns it out of necessity.

Another, the wine server, dressed up like a woman, wrestles with his age: he cannot escape boyhood; he is dragged back to 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 all night, dividing it between his master’s drunkenness and his lust; in the bedroom he is a man, at the banquet a boy.

Another, who has been given the job of assessing the guests, stands there, poor fellow, watching for those whose flattery and lack of restraint, of appetite or of tongue, will get them invited back tomorrow. Add the caterers, with their fine knowledge of their master’s palate, who know what flavor will rouse him, what sight will delight him, what novelty can revive him when he feels queasy, what he is now sick of from sheer surfeit, what he is hungry for that day. With these men he cannot bear to dine; he thinks it a diminishing of his dignity to come to the same table as his slave. The gods forbid!

And how many masters he has from among such people! I have seen the former master of Callistus standing at Callistus’ door, and seen him shut out while others went in—the man who had hung a sale placard on him and put him up among the rejects. That slave, thrown into the first lot of ten, on which the auctioneer tries out his voice, repaid the favor: he in turn rejected his old master and judged him unworthy of his house. The master sold Callistus—but how much Callistus has made the master pay!note

Won’t you reflect that this man you call your slave sprang from the same seeds as you, enjoys the same sky, and breathes, lives and dies just as you do? You can as easily see him as freeborn as he can see you as a slave. In the disaster of Varus, fortune brought low many men of the most distinguished birth, who were entering on a senatorial career through military service: one she made a shepherd, another a keeper of a hut. Despise now a man of that fortune into which, even while you despise him, you may pass.note

I don’t want to launch into a huge subject and debate how slaves are treated—toward whom we are extremely arrogant, cruel and insulting. But here is the sum of my advice: live with your inferior as you would want your superior to live with you. Whenever it occurs to you how much power you have over your slave, let it occur to you that your master has just as much over you.

“But I,” you say, “have no master.” You are young yet; perhaps you will have one. Don’t you know at what age Hecuba became a slave, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?note

Treat your slave with kindness, and courtesy too; admit him to your conversation, your counsel and your company. At this point the whole crowd of the pampered will shout at me, “Nothing could be more degrading, nothing more shameful!” These same men I will catch kissing the hands of other people’s slaves.

Don’t you even see how our ancestors took all odium away from masters and all insult away from slaves? They called the master “father of the household” and the slaves—a usage that still survives in the mimes—“members of the household.” They established a festival day—not the only day on which masters would eat with their slaves, but one on which they certainly would. They allowed slaves to hold offices in the house and to pronounce judgments, and they regarded the household as a miniature commonwealth.note

“What, then? Shall I bring all my slaves to my table?” No more than all free men. You are mistaken if you think I will turn some away as doing dirtier work—that mule driver, say, or that cowherd. I will judge them not by their jobs but by their character. Each man gives himself his character; chance assigns his job. Let some dine with you because they are worthy, others so that they may become so. For if there is anything slavish in them from mixing with low company, association with more honorable people will shake it out of them.

There is no reason, my Lucilius, to look for a friend only in the forum and the senate house; if you pay careful attention, you will find one at home too. Good material often lies idle for lack of a craftsman: try it and see. Just as a man is a fool who, when buying a horse, inspects not the horse but its saddlecloth and bridle, so he is the greatest fool of all who judges a man by his clothes, or by his condition in life, which is wrapped around us like clothing.

“He’s a slave.” But perhaps free in spirit. “He’s a slave.” Will that count against him? Show me who isn’t. One man is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition; all are slaves to fear. I will show you an ex-consul who is slave to a little old woman, a rich man slave to a young maidservant; I will show you young men of the noblest families who are the property of pantomime dancers! No slavery is more shameful than one freely chosen. So there is no reason for these fastidious people to deter you from showing yourself good-humored to your slaves, and not arrogantly superior. Let them respect you rather than fear you.

Someone will say now that I am summoning slaves to the cap of liberty and throwing masters down from their high place, because I said, “Let them respect their master rather than fear him.” “Just so,” he says. “Respect him the way clients do, the way morning callers do?” Whoever says this will forget that what is enough for a god is not too little for masters. One who is respected is also loved; and love cannot be mixed with fear.

So I think you are doing exactly right in not wanting to be feared by your slaves, and in using words to correct them; blows are for correcting brute animals. Not everything that offends us also harms us. But our pampered habits drive us to fury, so that whatever does not answer to our wishes calls up our anger.

We take on the temper of kings. For they, too, forgetting both their own strength and others’ weakness, blaze up and rage as if they had been wronged, when the greatness of their fortune makes them entirely safe from any danger of that. Nor are they unaware of this; but by complaining they seize an opportunity to do harm. They have received an injury so that they may inflict one.

I don’t want to keep you any longer; you don’t need encouragement. Among its other merits, good character has this: it is content with itself, and it lasts. Wickedness is fickle; it changes often—not for the better, just into something else. Farewell.

I’ll answer later the letter you sent me from the road—a letter as long as the road itself. I need to withdraw and look around for what advice to give. After all, you who are asking for advice spent a long time wondering whether to ask; how much more must I do the same, since it takes longer to solve a question than to pose one? Especially when one thing is to your advantage and another to mine. Am I talking like an Epicurean again?note

No—what is to your advantage is to mine too. Otherwise I am no friend, unless whatever concerns you is my concern as well. Friendship makes us partners in everything. Neither good fortune nor bad belongs to one of us alone; we live in common. No one can live happily who looks only to himself and turns everything to his own profit. You must live for another if you want to live for yourself.

This fellowship, kept carefully and devoutly, which joins us as human beings to other human beings and holds that there is a law common to the whole human race, also does a great deal to foster that inner fellowship I was speaking of, friendship. For the man who shares much with his fellow human being will share everything with his friend.

This, Lucilius, best of men, is what I would rather those subtle thinkers taught me: what I owe a friend, what I owe a human being—rather than in how many senses the word “friend” is used, and how many things “man” can mean. Look: wisdom and folly go off in opposite directions. Which shall I join? Which way do you tell me to go? For one, every human being is a friend; for the other, a friend is not even a human being. The one wins a friend for himself; the other gives himself to a friend. And you twist words for me and sort out syllables.

Of course: unless I build the craftiest of arguments and tie up a lie, born from the truth, in a false conclusion, I won’t be able to tell what to pursue from what to avoid. I am ashamed. At our age we play games in a matter so serious.

“‘Mouse’ is a syllable. A mouse nibbles cheese. Therefore a syllable nibbles cheese.” Suppose now that I can’t untangle this. What danger threatens me from that ignorance? What inconvenience? No doubt I must worry that someday I’ll catch syllables in a mousetrap, or that, if I’m careless, a book might eat my cheese. Unless perhaps this is the sharper inference: “‘Mouse’ is a syllable. A syllable does not nibble cheese. Therefore a mouse does not nibble cheese.”note

What childish nonsense! Is this why we knit our brows? Is this why we let our beards grow? Is this what we teach, grim-faced and pale? Do you want to know what philosophy promises the human race? Counsel. One man is summoned by death, another is scorched by poverty, another is tormented by wealth—someone else’s or his own. This one dreads bad fortune; that one longs to escape his own good fortune. This man is ill-treated by men, that one by the gods.

Why do you put together these toys for me? This is no place for jokes; you have been called in to help the wretched. You promised to bring aid to the shipwrecked, the captive, the sick, the needy, to those offering their heads beneath the raised axe. Where are you wandering off to? What are you doing? This man you are playing with is afraid. Come to his rescue, and free those caught in the noose. From every side all hands stretch out to you; lives that are ruined or on the brink of ruin beg for some help. In you are their hope and their resources. They ask you to drag them out of all this floundering, to show the bright light of truth to the scattered and the lost.note

Tell them what nature has made necessary and what superfluous; how easy the laws she has laid down; how pleasant and unencumbered life is for those who follow them, and how bitter and tangled for those who have trusted opinion more than nature. I would believe these toys of yours had some power to relieve such people’s troubles, if you first showed me what part of them they will relieve. Which of them takes away desires? Which moderates them? If only they were merely useless! They do harm. Whenever you like, I will make it perfectly plain to you that a noble character is worn down and weakened when it is thrown into these quibbles.

I am ashamed to say what weapons they hand to men about to fight against fortune, how they equip them. Is this the road to the supreme good? Through that philosophy of “or if not,” and through pleas shameful and disreputable even to those who sit at the praetor’s board? For what else are you doing, when you knowingly trap the man you are questioning, except making it look as if he has lost his case on a technicality? But just as the praetor restores the one, so philosophy restores the other to his former position.note

Why do you retreat from your huge promises? You spoke grandly: you would make the gleam of gold dazzle my eyes no more than the gleam of a sword; I would trample with great steadfastness both what all men long for and what all men fear. Why then do you descend to a grammar teacher’s ABCs? What do you say? “This is the way to the stars”? For this is what philosophy promises me: to make me the equal of god. This is what I was invited to, this is why I came. Keep your word.note

So, my Lucilius, pull yourself back as far as you can from these exceptions and objections of the philosophers. Goodness suits what is open and simple. Even if we had plenty of life left, we should have to spend it sparingly so it would suffice for necessities. As it is, what madness it is to learn superfluous things when time is so scarce! Farewell.

My Lucilius, a man is lazy and careless if some place has to remind him of a friend before he thinks of him. And yet familiar places sometimes do call up the longing stored away in our minds. They don’t bring back a memory that had died out; they stir one that was dormant—just as, for mourners, even when their grief has been softened by time, the sight of a favorite slave of the one they lost, or a garment, or a house, renews it. Look: it is unbelievable how fresh my longing for you has become at the sight of Campania, and above all of Naples and your Pompeii. You are right before my eyes. I am taking leave of you this very moment. I see you swallowing your tears and not quite holding back your feelings, which break out even as you try to check them. I seem to have lost you just now.note

For what is not “just now,” when you remember it? Just now I sat as a boy in the school of the philosopher Sotion; just now I began pleading cases; just now I stopped wanting to plead; just now I stopped being able to. Time’s speed is boundless, and it is clearest to those who look back. For it slips past those intent on the present, so smooth is the passage of its headlong flight.note

Just now I saw you off. And yet this “just now” is a good part of our lifetime, and let us reflect that its brevity will one day run out. Time did not use to seem so swift to me; now its speed seems unbelievable, whether because I feel the finish line drawing near, or because I have begun to pay attention and count up my losses.

So I am all the more indignant that some people spend the greater part of this time—which cannot suffice even for necessities, however carefully it is guarded—on superfluous things. Cicero says that if his lifetime were doubled, he still would not have time to read the lyric poets. Put the logicians in the same class; they are foolish in a gloomier way. The poets are openly frivolous; the logicians think they are actually doing something.

I don’t deny that we should take a look at these things—but only a look, a greeting from the doorway, for this one purpose: so that we aren’t fooled into thinking there is some great secret good in them. Why do you torture yourself and waste away over a question that it is cleverer to scorn than to solve? Collecting odds and ends is for someone moving house at leisure and at his convenience. When the enemy is pressing from behind and the soldier is ordered to march, necessity shakes out whatever idle peacetime had gathered.

I have no time to chase after words with doubtful meanings and to test my cunning on them. “Look what peoples gather, what walls have shut their gates / And sharpen steel.” I must listen with a great spirit to this din of war that sounds all around me.note

Everyone would rightly think me mad if, while old men and women were piling up stones to fortify the walls, while the armed young men inside the gates waited for—or demanded—the signal to sally out, while the enemy’s spears quivered in the gates and the very ground shook with mines and tunnels, I sat at leisure posing little questions like this: “What you have not lost, you have. You have not lost horns. Therefore you have horns,” and other things fashioned on the model of this clever lunacy.

And yet you may just as well think me mad if I spend effort on such things; for I am under siege now as well. Back then, though, the danger threatening me under siege would come from outside, and a wall would separate me from the enemy; now the deadly things are inside with me. I have no time for this nonsense; I have an enormous task in hand. What am I to do? Death pursues me, life flees me. Teach me something against these.

Make it so that I don’t flee death and life doesn’t flee me. Encourage me against hardships; give me calm in the face of the inevitable. Loosen the narrow limits of my time. Teach me that the good of life lies not in its length but in its use, and that it can happen—indeed it happens very often—that a man who has lived long has lived little. Say to me as I go to sleep: “You may not wake up.” Say to me when I have woken: “You may not sleep again.” Say to me as I go out: “You may not come back.” Say to me as I come back: “You may not go out again.”

You are wrong if you think that only on a voyage is the gap that separates life from death very small. In every place the interval is just as thin. Death does not show itself so near everywhere, but everywhere it is just as near. Scatter this darkness, and you will more easily teach me the things I have been prepared for. Nature brought us forth teachable, and gave us reason—imperfect, but capable of being perfected.

Discuss justice with me, and duty, and frugality, and both kinds of chastity—the one that keeps away from another’s body, and the one that takes care of one’s own. If you won’t lead me along byways, I will more easily reach the place I’m heading for. For as the tragic poet says, “The speech of truth is simple.” So it should not be made tangled; nothing suits minds that attempt great things less than that sly cleverness. Farewell.note

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 a very good memory indeed if he remembered! And yet I hope you are now living in such a way that wherever you are, I know what you are doing. For what else are you doing but making yourself better every day, laying aside some of your errors, understanding that the faults you blame on circumstances are your own? For we ascribe certain faults to places and times. But they will follow us wherever we go.

Harpaste, my wife’s household jester, has stayed on in my house, as you know, a burden I inherited. I myself have a strong dislike for such curiosities; if I ever want to be amused by a fool, I don’t have to look far—I laugh at myself. This jester suddenly went blind. I’m telling you something incredible, but true: she doesn’t know she is blind. Again and again she asks her attendant to move house. She says the house is dark.note

What we laugh at in her, be sure of it, happens to all of us. No one realizes he is greedy, no one that he is covetous. Yet the blind look for a guide; we wander without one and say: “I’m not ambitious, but no one can live any other way in Rome. I’m not extravagant, but the city itself demands great expense. It’s not my fault that I’m hot-tempered, that I haven’t yet settled on a fixed way of life; it’s my youth that does it.”

Why do we deceive ourselves? Our evil is not outside us; it is within us, it sits in our very innards. And we find it hard to reach health precisely because we don’t know we are sick. Even if we begin to be treated, when will we shake off the great strength of so many diseases? As it is, we don’t even look for a doctor, who would have less work to do if he were called in when the fault was fresh. Tender and unformed minds would follow someone pointing out the right way.

No one finds it hard to be brought back to nature except the one who has deserted her. We blush to learn good sense. But, by Hercules, if it is shameful to look for a teacher of this, then we must give up hope that so great a good can fall into our lap by chance. We must work. And to tell the truth, the work isn’t even great—provided, as I said, we begin to shape and correct our mind before its crookedness hardens. But even when it has hardened, I don’t despair.

There is nothing that persistent effort and intent, careful attention cannot conquer. You can straighten oak however bent. Heat unbends curved beams, and wood that grew otherwise is shaped into what our needs require. How much more easily does the mind take shape, pliable as it is, and more yielding than any liquid! For what else is the mind but breath in a certain state? And you see that breath is more tractable than any other material, just as it is finer.note

My Lucilius, there is no reason for you to stop hoping well of us because wickedness already holds us, because it has long been in possession of us. Good sense comes to no one before bad sense. We have all been taken over in advance. To learn virtues is to unlearn vices.

We ought to approach correcting ourselves with all the greater spirit because once the good is handed over to us, we possess it forever. Virtue is not unlearned. For opposites cling poorly in a place not their own, and so they can be driven out and thrown out; what comes into its own place sits fast. Virtue is in accordance with nature; vices are hostile and at war with it.

But though virtues, once received, cannot leave and are easy to guard, the first step toward them is hard, because it is the mark of a weak and sick mind to dread what it has not tried. So the mind must be forced to begin. After that the medicine isn’t bitter; it delights at the same moment that it heals. With other remedies the pleasure comes after recovery; philosophy is at once healthful and sweet. Farewell.

Each as best he can, my Lucilius! You have Etna there, that lofty and most famous mountain of Sicily. Why Messala—or was it Valgius? I have read it in both—called it unique, I can’t discover, since many places spew out fire: not only high ones, which happens more often (evidently because fire is 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 for this reason, though it has certain natural gifts: luxury has chosen it as her playground.note

“What then? Should we declare hatred against any place?” Not at all. But just as some clothing suits a wise and upright man better than other clothing—he doesn’t hate any color, but thinks some are hardly suitable for one who professes frugality—so there is also a region that a wise man, or one heading toward wisdom, will avoid as foreign to good character.

So when he thinks of a retreat, he will never choose Canopus, though Canopus forbids no one to be sober—nor Baiae either. They have begun to be vice’s inns. There luxury allows herself the most; there, as if some license were owed to the place, she lets herself go further.note

We should choose a place healthy not only for the body but also 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 see drunks wandering along the beaches, the revels of boating parties, the lakes ringing with bands and songs, and all the other things by which luxury, as though set free from the laws, not only does wrong but makes a public show of it?

Our aim should be to flee as far as possible from the incitements to vice. The mind must be hardened and dragged far from the charms of pleasure. A single winter quarters undid Hannibal; the comforts of Campania unmanned a man whom snows and Alps had not tamed. He conquered by arms; he was conquered by vices.note

We too must fight as soldiers, and in a kind of warfare that never grants rest, never grants leisure. First of all, pleasures must be conquered—pleasures that, as you see, have carried off even savage natures. If anyone sets before himself how great a task he has undertaken, he will know that nothing must be done delicately, nothing softly. What have I to do with those hot pools? What with sweat baths, where dry steam is shut in to drain the body? Let all sweat come out through toil.

If we did what Hannibal did—broke off the course of events, dropped the war, and devoted ourselves to pampering our bodies—everyone would rightly condemn this untimely idleness, dangerous even to a victor, let alone to one still winning. We are allowed less than those who followed the Punic standards: more danger remains for us if we give way, more work even if we persevere.

Fortune is waging war on me. I am not going to do as I am told. I don’t accept the yoke—no, what takes greater courage, I shake it off. The mind must not be softened. If I yield to pleasure, I must yield to pain, yield to toil, yield to poverty; ambition and anger will want the same power over me. I will be pulled apart among so many passions—no, torn to pieces.

Freedom is the goal; this is the prize we labor for. What is freedom, you ask? To be a slave to nothing—to no necessity, to no chance—and to bring fortune down to equal terms. The day I understand that I am the stronger, she will have no power. Shall I put up with her, when death is in my own hands?

A man intent on these thoughts should choose places that are serious and pure. Too much charm makes minds soft, and without doubt a region has some power to corrupt one’s vigor. Pack animals whose hooves have been hardened on rough ground can handle any road; those fattened on soft, marshy pasture are soon worn lame. The braver soldier comes from rugged country; the city-bred and the home-born slave are sluggish. Hands that pass from the plow to arms refuse no toil; the sleek, perfumed fellow gives out at the first dust.

A sterner discipline of place strengthens the character and makes it fit for great efforts. Scipio spent his exile more honorably at Liternum than he would have at Baiae; a downfall like his should not be settled so softly. Even those men to whom the fortune of the Roman people first handed over the state’s power—Gaius Marius, Gnaeus Pompey, and Caesar—did build villas in the district of Baiae, but they set them on the highest ridges of the hills. It seemed more soldierly to survey far and wide, from a height, what lay below. Look at the position they chose, the sites where they raised their buildings, and what kind of buildings: you will know they are not villas but military camps.note

Do you think Cato would ever have lived in a pleasure pavilion, so he could count the adulteresses sailing past, and all the kinds of boats painted in various colors, and the roses floating across the whole lake, and listen to the brawling of singers at night? Wouldn’t he have preferred to stay inside a rampart he had dug with his own hands for a single night? Why wouldn’t any real man prefer to have his sleep broken by a trumpet rather than by a band?

But we have quarreled with Baiae long enough—never enough with vices. Pursue them, Lucilius, I beg you, without limit and without end, for they too have neither end nor limit. Throw out whatever is mangling your heart; if it could not be pulled out any other way, the heart itself would have to be torn out with it. Above all, drive out pleasures and hold them in utter hatred. Like the bandits the Egyptians call φιλητάς [“lovers”], they embrace us in order to strangle us. Farewell.note

What is it, Lucilius, that drags us one way when we are heading another, and pushes us toward the place we long to get away from? What is it that wrestles with our mind and won’t let us want anything once and for all? We waver between different plans. Nothing we want freely, nothing wholeheartedly, nothing always.

“It is folly,” you say, “for which nothing is fixed, nothing pleases for long.” But how or when will we tear ourselves away from it? No one is strong enough by himself to rise out of it. Someone must reach out a hand, someone must pull him out.

Epicurus says that some people have made their way to the truth without anyone’s help, cutting a path for themselves. He praises these most of all, the ones whose impulse came from within, who brought themselves forward. Others, he says, need someone else’s aid: they will not go unless someone goes ahead, but they will follow well. Metrodorus, he says, was one of these—an excellent mind too, but of the second rank. We are not of that first class; we are doing well if we are admitted to the second. Don’t despise even the man who can be saved by another’s kindness. This too is a great deal: to want to be saved.

Besides these you will find yet another kind of person, and not one to be scorned either: those who can be forced and driven to what is right, who need not just a guide but a helper—and, so to speak, a driver. This is the third type. If you want an example of this too, Epicurus says Hermarchus was such a man. So he congratulates the one more, but admires the other more; for though both arrived at the same goal, it deserves greater praise to have achieved the same result with more difficult material.

Imagine two buildings put up, unlike from the ground up, but equally tall and magnificent. One was given a clean site, and the work rose there at once. For the other, the foundations wore out the builders, sunk as they were into soft, shifting soil, and a great deal of labor was spent before solid ground was reached. To anyone looking at both, everything the first builder did is out in the open; a large and more difficult part of the second one’s work is hidden.

Some minds are easy and ready to go; others, as they say, must be made by hand, and are taken up with their own foundations. So I would call the first man luckier, who had no trouble with himself; but the second, I would say, has done better by himself, who has overcome the meanness of his own nature and has not so much led himself to wisdom as dragged himself there.

You may be sure that this hard and laborious kind of mind has been given to us. We are going through obstacles. So let us fight, and let us call on the help of others. “Whom,” you ask, “shall I call on? This man or that?” Go back to earlier thinkers too; they have time to spare. Not only those who are alive can help us, but those who have been.

But of those who are alive, let us choose not the ones who rattle off words at great speed, roll out commonplaces, and put on shows for private audiences, but those who teach by their lives: who, when they have said what should be done, prove it by doing it; who teach what should be avoided and are never caught doing what they have said to shun. Choose as your helper the one you admire more when you see him than when you hear him.

I wouldn’t forbid you, though, to hear those too who make a practice of admitting the public and lecturing—provided they come before the crowd with this purpose: to become better and to make others better, and don’t do it for the sake of ambition. For what is more shameful than philosophy angling for applause? Does a sick man praise the surgeon who is cutting him?

Be silent, be reverent, and submit to the treatment. Even if you shout, I will hear it only as groaning when your vices are touched. Do you want to testify that you are paying attention and are moved by the greatness of the subject? Very well, let that be allowed. And if you want to judge and cast your vote for the better course, why shouldn’t I allow it? Among Pythagoras’ followers, pupils had to keep silent for five years. Do you think, then, that they were allowed to speak and applaud right away?note

How mad is the man whom the shouts of the ignorant send away from the lecture hall in high spirits! Why are you glad to be praised by people you cannot praise yourself? Fabianus used to lecture to the public, but he was heard with restraint. At times a great shout of praise burst out, but it was called forth by the greatness of the subject, not by the sound of speech gliding along smoothly and softly.

There should be some difference between the shouting of the theater and that of the school; there is a decorum even in praising. Everything about everything, if you observe it, is a sign, and you can take evidence of character even from the smallest things. The lecher is revealed by his walk, by the movement of a hand, sometimes by a single answer, by a finger raised to his head, by the turn of his eyes. The rogue is shown by his laugh, the deranged by his face and bearing. For these things come out into the open through their marks. You will know what each person is like if you observe how he praises and how he is praised.note

From this side and that the audience stretch out their hands at the philosopher, and a crowd of admirers stands right over his head. He is not being praised now, if you understand me—he is being given a funeral cry. Let those shouts be left to the arts whose aim is to please the public. Let philosophy be worshiped.note

Young men will sometimes have to be allowed to follow the impulse of their feelings—but only when they act on impulse, when they cannot command themselves to be silent. Praise of that kind brings some encouragement to the listeners themselves and spurs on young minds. Let them be moved by the substance, not by well-arranged words. Otherwise eloquence does them harm, if it makes them long not for the subject but for itself.

I’ll put this off for now, since it calls for a long treatment of its own: how one should lecture to the public, how much a speaker may allow himself before the public, and how much he may allow the public before him. There will be no doubt that philosophy has suffered damage since she was prostituted. But she can still be displayed in her sanctuary, provided she has found not a peddler but a priest. Farewell.

What can’t I be persuaded to do, when I was persuaded to go on a sea voyage? I set sail on a calm sea. The sky, no doubt about it, was heavy with dirty clouds, the kind that usually turn into either rain or wind. But I thought I could steal the few miles from your Parthenope to Puteoli, even under a doubtful, threatening sky. So to get clear faster, I headed straight across open water for Nesis, meaning to cut across all the bays.note

When we had gone so far that it made no difference to me whether I went on or turned back, first that calm which had seduced me disappeared. It was not yet a storm, but already the sea was heaving and the waves were coming more and more often. I began to ask the helmsman to put me ashore somewhere. He said the coast there was rugged and harborless, and that in a storm there was nothing he feared so much as land.

But I was too badly tormented for danger to occur to me. For that sluggish, endless seasickness was racking me, the kind that stirs up bile without bringing it up. So I pressed the helmsman and forced him, willing or not, to make for the shore. As soon as we got near it, I didn’t wait for anything to be done according to Virgil’s instructions—“They turn their prows to sea” or “The anchor is cast from the prow.” Mindful of my skill, as a longtime devotee of cold water, I threw myself into the sea, just as a cold-water bather should—in my woolen cloak.note

What do you think I went through while I crawled over the rocks, while I looked for a path, while I made one? I understood that sailors have good reason to fear land. What I endured when I couldn’t endure myself is beyond belief. Know this: Ulysses was not born to so angry a sea that he was shipwrecked everywhere—he was seasick. I too, wherever I have to sail, will arrive in the twentieth year.note

As soon as I had pulled my stomach together—which, as you know, doesn’t escape seasickness just by escaping the sea—and restored my body with a rubdown of oil, I began to think to myself how completely we forget our faults, even the bodily ones, which keep reminding us of themselves—let alone those that hide all the more, the greater they are.

A slight touch of fever can fool someone; but when it has grown and a real fever has flared up, it wrings a confession even from a tough, long-suffering man. The feet ache, the joints feel little prickling pains; we still pretend, and say we have twisted an ankle or overdone it at some exercise. While the illness is doubtful and just beginning, we look for a name for it; but once it starts to swell the ankles and has made both feet into right feet, we have to admit it is gout.note

The opposite happens with the diseases that afflict the mind: the worse off someone is, the less he feels it. No need to be surprised, dearest Lucilius. For a light sleeper sees images while he rests and sometimes, while asleep, thinks that he is asleep; but heavy slumber blots out even dreams and sinks the mind too deep for it to have any awareness of itself.

Why does no one confess his faults? Because he is still in them. Telling a dream belongs to someone awake, and confessing one’s faults is a sign of health. So let us wake up, so that we can expose our errors. But only philosophy will rouse us; only philosophy will shake off that heavy sleep. Devote yourself wholly to her. You are worthy of her, she is worthy of you: go into each other’s arms. Say no to everything else—firmly, openly. There’s no reason to philosophize only on sufferance.

If you were sick, you would have stopped looking after your household affairs, your business in the courts would have slipped from your mind, and you would not think anyone important enough to go down and plead for him during a remission. With your whole mind you would be working to be free of the illness as soon as possible. What then? Won’t you do the same now? Dismiss all obstacles and make time for good sense: no one reaches it while busy. Philosophy exercises her own sovereignty; she gives time, she doesn’t receive it. She is not a spare-time pursuit; she is a regular one. She is mistress; she commands your presence.

When a certain city promised Alexander part of its territory and half of all its property, he said: “I came to Asia intending not to accept what you gave me, but to let you keep what I left you.” Philosophy says the same to all things: “I don’t intend to accept the time you have left over; you will have what I myself reject.”note

Turn your whole mind here, sit by her side, cultivate her. A huge distance will open up between you and everyone else. You will far outstrip all mortals, and the gods will not far outstrip you. Do you ask what the difference between you and them will be? They will last longer. But, by Hercules, it is the mark of a great artist to have enclosed the whole in a small space. For the wise man his own lifetime lies as open as all eternity does for a god. There is one respect in which the wise man surpasses god: god is free of fear by the gift of nature, the wise man by his own.

Here is something great: to have the frailty of a human being and the freedom from care of a god. The power of philosophy to blunt every assault of chance is unbelievable. No weapon lodges in her body; she is fortified, solid. Some she wears out and, as if they were light missiles, lets them slip off in the loose folds of her robe; others she shatters and hurls back at the one who threw them. Farewell.

Ill health had given me a long furlough; suddenly it attacked me. “What kind?” you ask. You’re quite right to ask, since there is none I don’t know. Yet there is one disease to which I am, so to speak, assigned. I don’t know why I should call it by its Greek name; it can quite aptly be called “gasping.” Its attack is very brief and like a squall; it usually ends within an hour. For who takes long to breathe his last?note

Every bodily ailment and danger has passed through me; none seems to me more troublesome. Why not? Any other thing is being ill; this is breathing out your life. So doctors call it “rehearsing death.” For one day that breath will succeed in doing what it has so often tried.

Do you think I am cheerful writing this to you because I have escaped? I would be as ridiculous, taking pleasure in this ending as though it were good health, as a man who thinks he has won his case when he has merely had his court date postponed. But even while I was choking, I never stopped finding rest in cheerful and brave thoughts.

“What is this?” I say. “Does death test me so often? Let it. I tested it long ago.” “When?” you ask. Before I was born. Death is not being; I already know what that is like. What was before me will be after me. If there is any torment in this state, it must also have existed before we came into the light; yet we felt no distress then.

I ask you: wouldn’t you call someone utterly foolish if he thought a lamp was worse off when it had been put out than before it was lit? We too are put out and lit. In the time between we suffer something, but on either side there is deep freedom from care. This, my Lucilius, unless I am mistaken, is our mistake: we think death follows, when it has both gone before and will follow. Whatever was before us is death. For what does it matter whether you don’t begin or you end, since the result of both is the same: not being?

With these and similar encouragements—silent ones, of course, since there was no room for words—I kept talking to myself. Then gradually that gasping, which had already begun to be a panting, came at longer intervals, slowed down, and stayed that way. Even now, though it has stopped, my breath doesn’t flow naturally; I feel a kind of catch in it, a delay. Let it be as it will, so long as my sighs don’t come from the heart.note

Take this assurance from me about myself: I will not tremble at the end. I am already prepared; I make no plans for a whole day ahead. Praise and imitate the man who does not mind dying though he enjoys living. For what virtue is there in leaving when you are thrown out? Yet there is virtue even here: I am being thrown out, but as if I were leaving. And so the wise man is never thrown out, because to be thrown out is to be expelled from a place you leave unwillingly. The wise man does nothing unwillingly; he escapes necessity because he wills what it is going to force on him. Farewell.

I have just this moment come back from being carried about in my litter, as tired as if I had walked as far as I sat. Being carried for a long time is also work—perhaps even harder work, because it goes against nature, which gave us feet so that we could walk for ourselves, and eyes so that we could see for ourselves. Luxury has sentenced us to weakness: what we long refused to do, we are no longer able to do.note

Still, I needed to give my body a shaking, so that if bile had settled in my throat it might be shaken loose, or if my breathing itself had for some reason grown thick, the jolting might thin it out; I have felt that it did me good. So I kept on riding longer, drawn on by the shore itself, which curves between Cumae and the villa of Servilius Vatia and is closed in on one side by the sea and on the other by the lake, like a narrow causeway. It was packed firm after a recent storm. For, as you know, frequent rough waves level the sand, while a long calm loosens it once the moisture that binds the grains has drained away.note

Out of habit, though, I began to look around to see whether I could find something there that might do me good, and I turned my eyes to the villa that once belonged to Vatia. There that rich ex-praetor, known for nothing but his leisure, grew old, and for that one thing alone he was thought happy. For whenever friendship with Asinius Gallus, or the hatred and later the love of Sejanus, had ruined someone—it was as dangerous to have offended Sejanus as to have loved him—people would exclaim: “Vatia, you alone know how to live!”note

But what he knew was how to hide, not how to live. It makes a great difference whether your life is one of leisure or of idleness. Whenever I passed this villa while Vatia was alive, I never failed to say: “Here lies Vatia.” But philosophy, my Lucilius, is something so sacred and venerable that even a counterfeit of it wins approval if it bears some resemblance. For the crowd thinks a man of leisure is withdrawn, free from care, content with himself, living for himself—none of which can happen to anyone except the wise man.note

Can a man full of anxiety know how to live for himself? Indeed—and this comes first—does he know how to live at all? A man who has fled from affairs and from people, who has been sent into exile by the failure of his desires, who could not bear to see others more fortunate, who has gone into hiding out of fear like a timid, sluggish animal—that man is not living for himself but, most shamefully of all, for his belly, his sleep and his lust. Living for no one does not mean living for yourself. Yet constancy and persistence in one’s purpose are so great a thing that even stubborn idleness carries some authority.

About the villa itself I can tell you nothing definite. I know only its front and the parts on display, which it shows even to passers-by. There are two grottoes, great feats of work, each as large as any spacious hall, made by hand; one never gets the sun, the other keeps it right up to sunset. A stream fed from both the sea and the Acherusian lake cuts through a grove of plane trees like a channel, and could support fish even if it were fished constantly. But it is spared while the sea is open; when a storm has given the fishermen a holiday, a hand reaches for what is ready to hand.note

But the most convenient thing about the villa is that it has Baiae just the other side of the wall: it is free of the resort’s drawbacks and enjoys its pleasures. These merits I know for myself; I believe it is a house for every season. It faces the west wind and catches it so fully that it keeps it from Baiae. Vatia seems to have been no fool in choosing this spot to bring his leisure to, sluggish and elderly as it already was.

But place contributes little to tranquility; it is the mind that makes everything agreeable to itself. I have seen people gloomy in a cheerful, lovely villa; I have seen people in the middle of a wilderness who looked busy. So there is no reason to think you are unsettled because you are not in Campania. And why aren’t you? Just send your thoughts here.

We can converse with absent friends—as often as we like and for as long as we like. We enjoy this pleasure, the greatest there is, all the more while we are apart. For presence spoils us: because we sometimes talk, walk and sit together, once we have parted we give no thought to those we have just seen.

And so we ought to bear absence calmly, because everyone is often absent even from those who are present. Count up, first, the nights spent apart, then the different business each of us has, then private studies and trips out of town: you will see that travel does not rob us of much.

A friend must be possessed in the mind, and the mind is never absent. It sees whomever it wishes every day. So study with me, dine with me, walk with me. We would be living in cramped quarters if anything were closed to our thoughts. I see you, my Lucilius; this very moment I hear you. I am so much with you that I wonder whether I should start writing you not letters but little notes. Farewell.note

Add to this a brawler, and a thief caught in the act, and the man who loves the sound of his own voice in the bath. Add those who leap into the pool with an enormous splash. Besides these, whose voices, if nothing else, are at least natural, think of the hair-plucker, forever letting out his thin, shrill cry to get himself noticed, and never silent except while he is plucking armpits and making someone else yell instead. Then there are the drink-seller’s various cries, and the sausage man, and the pastry man, and all the hawkers from the cookshops, each selling his wares with his own distinctive singsong.

“You must be made of iron,” you say, “or deaf, if your mind holds steady amid so many shouts, so varied, so discordant, when constant callers at his morning reception are driving our friend Chrysippus to his death.” But, heaven help me, I care no more about that roar than about waves or falling water—though I hear that one people moved their city for this reason alone: they could not stand the thunder of the Nile’s falls.note

A voice, it seems to me, distracts more than a clatter. A voice draws the mind to it; a clatter only fills and batters the ears. Among the things that din around me without distracting me I count carriages racing past, the carpenter who lodges in the building, the saw-seller next door, or the fellow by the Sweating Post who tries out his little trumpets and pipes and doesn’t play so much as bellow.note

Even so, a sound that keeps breaking off bothers me more than a continuous one. But by now I have so hardened myself to all these things that I could even listen to a coxswain calling the stroke to his rowers in the harshest of voices. For I force my mind to attend to itself and not be drawn off to what is outside. Everything outside may resound, so long as there is no uproar within, so long as desire and fear are not brawling, so long as greed and self-indulgence are not at odds, one harassing the other. What good is the silence of a whole district if the passions are roaring?

“All things lay composed in the calm quiet of night.” False. No quiet is calm except what reason has composed. Night brings trouble rather than removing it; it only changes our worries. Even the dreams of sleepers are as turbulent as their days. True tranquility is the state in which a sound mind unfolds itself.note

Look at the man who seeks sleep in the silence of a sprawling house: so that no sound may disturb his ears, his whole crowd of slaves has fallen silent, and anyone coming near walks on tiptoe. Yet of course he tosses this way and that, snatching a light sleep between spells of distress.

He complains of hearing things he has not heard. What do you think is the cause? His mind is making the noise. That is what must be calmed; that is where the mutiny must be put down. You have no reason to think the mind calm just because the body is lying still. Sometimes rest is restless. And so, whenever an idleness that cannot bear itself is doing us harm, we must rouse ourselves to action and keep busy with worthwhile studies.

Great generals, when they see their soldiers growing unruly, keep them in check with hard labor and occupy them with campaigns; men who are fully occupied never have time to run riot, and nothing is more certain than that the vices of leisure are dispelled by work. We often seem to have retired out of weariness with public life and regret for an unhappy, thankless post; yet in the hiding place into which fear and fatigue have thrown us, ambition sometimes breaks out afresh. For it has not stopped because it was cut out, but because it was worn out, or even resentful at things not going its way.

I say the same of love of luxury. It sometimes seems to have given up; then it tempts those who have professed frugality, and in the midst of their thrift it goes after pleasures that were not condemned but merely left behind—and all the more fiercely the more hidden it is. For every vice is milder out in the open; diseases, too, are on the way to recovery when they break out of hiding and show their full force. So you may be sure that greed, ambition and the other evils of the human mind are at their most destructive when they subside under a pretense of health.

We seem to be at leisure, and we are not. For if we are in good faith, if we have sounded the retreat, if we despise outward show, as I was saying a little while ago, then nothing will distract us; no chorus of people or of birds will interrupt our good thoughts, which by then are solid and settled.

A mind that starts up at every voice and every chance event is flighty and has not yet withdrawn into itself. It has some anxiety inside, and some fear it has taken in, which makes it jumpy, as our Virgil says: “And I, whom no weapons hurled at me could move a while ago, / nor Greeks massed in hostile ranks against me, / now every breeze alarms, every sound startles, / on edge, and fearing alike for my companion and my burden.”note

The first man is the wise one: brandished weapons, the clash of arms in a close-packed column, the crash of a city being stormed do not frighten him. The second is untrained: he fears for his belongings and panics at every rattle; any single voice he takes for a roar throws him down; the slightest movement unnerves him. His baggage makes him a coward.

Pick anyone you like from among those fortunate people who drag and carry so much around with them, and you will see him “fearing alike for companion and burden.” So know that you are composed only when no shouting reaches you, when no voice shakes you out of yourself—not if it flatters, not if it threatens, not if it rattles around you with empty, meaningless noise.

“Well then? Isn’t it sometimes more convenient to be free of the racket?” I admit it. That is why I am going to move out of this place. I wanted to test and train myself. Why should I be tortured any longer, when Ulysses found so easy a remedy for his companions even against the Sirens? Farewell.

When I had to go back from Baiae to Naples, I was easily persuaded that there was a storm, so as not to try a ship again; and the whole road was so deep in mud that I might be thought to have made the trip by sea after all. That day I had to endure the whole fate of an athlete: after the oiling came the sprinkling with dust, in the Naples tunnel.note

Nothing is longer than that prison, nothing dimmer than those torches, which let us see not through the darkness but the darkness itself. And even if the place had light, the dust would take it away. Dust is a heavy, troublesome thing even in the open air; what must it be like there, where it swirls around on itself and, shut in without any ventilation, 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 kind of jolt to my mind, and a change, though without fear, produced by the novelty of an unaccustomed thing combined with its ugliness. I am not speaking to you now about myself—I am far from being a tolerable human being, let alone a perfect one—but about the man over whom fortune has lost its power. His mind too will be struck; his color too will change.

For there are some things, my Lucilius, that no virtue can escape; nature reminds it of its own mortality. And so virtue will knit its brow at sad events, shudder at sudden ones, and grow dizzy if it stands on the brink of a vast height and looks down. This is not fear but a natural reaction that reason cannot overcome.

That is why some brave men, entirely ready to shed their own blood, cannot look at someone else’s. Some faint and lose consciousness when a fresh wound is handled and examined, some when it is an old, festering one. Others find it easier to receive a sword than to look at one.

So, as I was saying, I felt not a disturbance, exactly, but a change. Then at the first sight of daylight returning, my good spirits came back of their own accord, without thought or command. Next I began to say to myself how foolish it is that we fear some things more and others less, when the end of them all is the same. What difference does it make whether a watchman’s hut collapses on someone or a mountain does? You will find none. Yet there will be people who fear the second kind of collapse more, though both are equally fatal; so true is it that fear looks not at the effect but at what produces it.

Do you suppose I am now going to talk about the Stoics, who hold that the soul of a man crushed by a great weight cannot survive and is scattered at once, because it had no free way out? No, I am not; those who say this seem to me mistaken.

Flame cannot be smothered, for it escapes around whatever presses on it; air is not harmed by a blow or a stroke, is not even cut, but flows back around whatever it has given way to. In the same way the soul, which is made of the finest substance, cannot be caught or crushed inside the body, but thanks to its fineness bursts out through the very things that press on it. Just as lightning, even when it has struck and flashed over the widest area, has a way back through a tiny opening, so the soul, which is finer still than fire, has an escape route through every part of the body.

So the question to ask about the soul is whether it can be immortal. Of this at least be certain: if it survives the body, it cannot be crushed out of existence in any way, since it does not perish; for there is no immortality with exceptions, and nothing can harm what is eternal. Farewell.

How poor—no, how destitute—our vocabulary is, I have never understood better than today. We happened to be talking about Plato, and a thousand things came up that needed names and had none, and some that had once had names but had lost them through our fastidiousness. But who can put up with fastidiousness in the midst of destitution?

The insect the Greeks call oestrus, which drives cattle before it and scatters them across whole woodlands, our people used to call asilus. You can take Virgil’s word for it: “Around the groves of Silarus and Alburnus, green with holm oaks, / swarms a flying pest whose Roman name is asilus; / the Greeks have rendered it, calling it oestrus—/ fierce, with a harsh buzz, at which whole herds in terror / scatter through the woods.”note

You can see, I think, that this word has died out. Not to keep you long: some simple verbs used to be in use, as when people said cernere ferro inter se [to settle it between them with the sword]. The same Virgil will prove it to you: “that mighty men, born in far-apart parts of the world, / had met together to settle it with the sword.” Now we say decernere for this. The use of that simple verb has been lost.note

The ancients said si iusso, that is, iussero [if I shall have ordered]. Don’t take my word for it, but the same Virgil’s: “Let the rest of the band bring up arms with me where I command.”note

My point in all this careful attention is not to show how much time I wasted with the grammar teacher, but to let you see from it how many words in Ennius and Accius have been buried in mold, when even from this poet, who is pored over every day, some have been snatched away from us.note

“What is the point,” you ask, “of all this preamble? What is it leading up to?” I won’t hide it from you: I want, if possible, to say essentia [essence] with your ears’ blessing; if not, I shall say it even if they are angry. I have Cicero as authority for this word—a rich enough source, I think. If you want someone more recent, Fabianus, eloquent and elegant, with a style polished enough even for our fastidious taste. For what else can we do, my Lucilius? How else are we to express οὐσία [being, essence], a thing we cannot do without, a nature that contains the foundation of all things? So I ask you to allow me to use this word. All the same, I shall take care to exercise the right you grant me very sparingly; perhaps I shall be content just to have permission.note

But what good will your indulgence do me, when, look, there is no way I can express in Latin the very thing for which I picked a quarrel with our language? You will condemn Roman narrowness even more once you learn there is a single syllable I cannot translate. What is it, you ask? τὸ ὄν [being, that which is]. You think I am slow-witted: the obvious answer is to translate it as quod est [that which is]. But I see a great difference: I am forced to put a verb in place of a noun.

But if it must be so, I shall put quod est. Our friend, a very learned man, was saying today that Plato uses this term in six senses. I shall explain them all to you, once I have pointed out that there is such a thing as a genus, and also a species. What we are looking for now is that first genus on which the other species depend, from which all division begins, which embraces everything. It will be found if we start tracing particular things backward; that way we shall be led to the first.

Man is a species, as Aristotle says; horse is a species; dog is a species. So we must look for some common bond among them all, which embraces them and holds them beneath it. What is it? Animal. So animal has become the genus of all those I just mentioned: man, horse, dog.

But some things have a soul and are not animals. For it is agreed that plants and trees have a soul; that is why we say they live and die. So living things will hold a higher place, since both animals and plants fall under this category. But some things lack a soul, like stones. So there will be something prior to living things—body, of course. I shall divide it by saying that all bodies are either living or lifeless.note

There is something higher even than body. For we say that some things are corporeal and some incorporeal. What, then, will be the thing from which these are derived? The one to which we just gave a not very fitting name, “that which is.” It will be divided into species this way: we shall say that “that which is” is either corporeal or incorporeal.

This, then, is the first and most ancient genus—the “general” genus, so to speak. The others are genera, but specific ones. Man, for example, is a genus. It contains species of nations: Greeks, Romans, Parthians; of colors: white, black, blond; it contains individuals: Cato, Cicero, Lucretius. So insofar as it contains many, it counts as a genus; insofar as it falls under something else, as a species. That genus, “that which is,” is general and has nothing above it; it is the beginning of things; everything falls under it.

The Stoics want to place above this yet another, still more primary genus; I shall speak of it shortly, once I have shown that the genus I have been describing is rightly put first, since it has room for all things.

“That which is” I divide into these species: corporeal and incorporeal. There is no third. How do I divide body? By saying that bodies are either living or lifeless. Again, how do I divide living things? By saying that some have mind and some only soul. Or like this: some have impulse, walk and move from place to place; others, fixed to the ground by roots, take nourishment and grow. Again, into what species do I cut animals? They are either mortal or immortal.

Some Stoics think the first genus is “something.” I shall add why they think so. “In the nature of things,” they say, “some things exist and some do not. But the nature of things also embraces those that do not exist—things that come into the mind, such as Centaurs, Giants, and whatever else, formed by false thinking, has come to have some image, though it has no substance.”note

Now I return to what I promised you: how Plato divides everything that is into six modes. The first, “that which is,” is grasped neither by sight nor by touch nor by any sense; it can be thought. What exists generally—man in general, for example—does not come before our eyes; but the specific does, like Cicero and Cato. Animal is not seen; it is thought. But its species are seen: horse and dog.

Second among the things that are, Plato places what stands out and surpasses everything. This, he says, is being par excellence. “Poet” is used in a general sense, since everyone who writes verse has this name; but among the Greeks it has come to mark out one man: when you hear “the poet,” you understand Homer. What, then, is this? God, of course, greater and more powerful than all.

The third class is of things that exist in the proper sense. These are countless, but they are placed beyond our sight. What are they, you ask? They are Plato’s own special furniture: he calls them ideas, from which all things we see come into being and on the model of which everything is formed. These are immortal, unchangeable, inviolable.note

Hear what an idea is, that is, what Plato takes it to be: “An idea is the eternal pattern of the things that come into being by nature.” I shall add an explanation to the definition, to make the matter clearer to you. Suppose I want to paint your portrait. I have you as the model for my painting, and from you my mind takes a certain form to impose on its work. So that face which teaches and guides me, and which I try to imitate, is the idea. Nature has countless such patterns—of people, fish, trees—on which whatever she must produce is modeled.

Fourth place will go to the eidos. You must pay attention to what this eidos is, and blame Plato, not me, for the difficulty of the subject. But there is no subtlety without difficulty. A moment ago I used the image of a painter. When he wanted to render Virgil in colors, he gazed at Virgil himself. The idea was Virgil’s face, the pattern for the future work. What the artist draws from it and has imposed on his work is the eidos.note

What is the difference, you ask? The one is the pattern; the other is the form taken from the pattern and imposed on the work. The artist imitates the one and creates the other. A statue has a certain look: that is the eidos. The pattern itself, which the craftsman looked at as he shaped the statue, has a certain look: that is the idea. If you want yet another distinction: the eidos is in the work, the idea outside the work—and not only outside it, but before it.

The fifth class is of things that exist in the ordinary sense; here things begin to concern us. Here is everything: people, cattle, things. The sixth class is of things that quasi-exist, such as the void, or time. Whatever we see or touch Plato does not count among the things he thinks exist in the proper sense. For they are in flux, constantly shrinking and growing. 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 with time. Nothing we see stays. I myself, even as I say that these things change, have changed.

This is what Heraclitus says: “We step into the same river twice and do not.” The river keeps the same name, but the water has flowed past. This is plainer in a river than in a person. But we too are swept past by a current no less swift. And so I marvel at our madness in loving so dearly that most fleeting of things, the body, and fearing that we may die someday, when every moment is the death of our former state. Won’t you stop fearing that what happens every day will happen once!

I have been speaking of man, a fluid and perishable material exposed to every cause of harm; but the universe too, an eternal and invincible thing, changes and does not stay the same. For though it contains everything it contained before, it contains it differently; it changes its arrangement.

“What good,” you ask, “will this subtlety do me?” If you ask me: none. But just as an engraver rests his eyes when they have been strained and tired for a long time, draws them away and, as the saying goes, “feeds” them, so we should sometimes relax the mind and refresh it with some amusements. But let the amusements themselves be work. From these too, if you watch closely, you will take something that can become wholesome.

This is what I usually do, Lucilius: from every idea, even one very far removed from philosophy, I try to dig something out and make it useful. What could be more remote from the reform of character than what we have just been discussing? How can Plato’s ideas make me better? What can I draw from them to curb my desires? This very thing: all those things that serve the senses, that inflame and provoke us, Plato says are not among the things that truly exist.

So these things are imaginary and wear some appearance only for a while; none of them is stable or solid. And yet we desire them as though they would always exist or we would always possess them. Weak and fluid ourselves, we stand among empty things. Let us turn our minds to what is eternal. Let us marvel at the forms of all things, flying on high, and at God moving among them and seeing to it that what he could not make immortal, because matter prevented it, he defends from death, and overcomes the defect of the body by reason.

For all things endure not because they are eternal but because they are protected by the care of the one who rules them; immortal things would need no guardian. The craftsman preserves them, overcoming the fragility of matter by his power. Let us despise all the things that are so far from precious that it is doubtful whether they exist at all.

Let us also consider this: if providence exempts the universe itself from dangers, though it is no less mortal than we are, then to some extent our own providence, too, can prolong the stay of this poor little body—if we can govern and restrain the pleasures by which most people perish.

Plato himself brought himself to old age by taking care. He had indeed been given a strong, sturdy body—his broad chest had even earned him his name—but sea voyages and dangers had greatly sapped his strength. Still, frugality, moderation in the things that stir up appetite, and careful looking after himself brought him to old age despite many obstacles.note

You know, I think, that thanks to his carefulness Plato had the luck to die on his birthday, having completed exactly eighty-one years, not a day short. That is why some Magi who happened to be in Athens offered sacrifice to him after his death, believing his lot to have been more than human, since he had completed the most perfect number, the one made by multiplying nine by nine. I have no doubt he would have been ready to give up a few days of that total, and the sacrifice too.note

Frugality can prolong old age, which I do not think should be longed for, but should not be refused either. It is pleasant to be with oneself as long as possible, once one has made oneself worth enjoying. So we shall give our verdict on this question: should one disdain the last stretch of old age and not wait for the end, but bring it about with one’s own hand? The man who sluggishly waits for his fate is not far from a coward, just as the man who drains the jar and gulps down the dregs as well is overly devoted to wine.

But we shall ask this too: is the last part of life the dregs, or the clearest and purest part—provided the mind is unimpaired, the senses are sound and support the spirit, and the body is not worn out and dead before its time? For it makes a great deal of difference whether one is prolonging life or prolonging death.

But if the body is useless for its duties, why should one not release the struggling soul? And perhaps it should be done a little before it has to be, so that when it has to be done you are not unable to do it. And since the danger of living badly is greater than that of dying soon, he is a fool who will not buy his way out of a gamble for high stakes at the small price of a little time. Very long old age has brought few people to death unimpaired; many have lain inert in a life of no use to themselves. How much crueler, then, do you think it is to have lost some part of life than to have lost the right to end it?

Don’t listen to me reluctantly, as if this opinion already applied to you; weigh what I say. I shall not abandon old age if it keeps me whole for myself—whole, that is, in my better part. But if it begins to shake my mind, to tear away its parts, if it leaves me not life but mere breath, I shall leap out of the rotting, collapsing building.

I shall not flee disease by dying, so long as it is curable and does not hinder the mind. I shall not lay hands on myself because of pain; to die like that is to be defeated. But if I know I shall have to suffer it forever, I shall depart—not because of the pain itself, but because it will stand in the way of everything we live for. He is weak and cowardly who dies because of pain; he is a fool who lives for the sake of pain.

But I am running on too long. Besides, there is material here that could fill a whole day. And how will a man be able to put an end to his life if he cannot put an end to a letter? So farewell—a word you will read more gladly than all this talk of death. Farewell.

I got great pleasure from your letter. Allow me to use words in their everyday sense, and don’t hold them to their Stoic meaning. We believe that pleasure is a vice. Granted; yet we commonly use the word to indicate a cheerful state of mind.

I know, I say, that if we align our words with our school’s official register, pleasure is a thing of ill repute, and joy comes to no one but the wise man. For joy is the elation of a mind that trusts in its own true goods. Yet in common speech we say we took great joy in a friend’s consulship, or his marriage, or his wife’s giving birth—things so far from being joys that they are often the beginnings of sorrow to come. But it is the mark of joy that it does not cease and does not turn into its opposite.

So when our Virgil speaks of “the mind’s evil joys,” he speaks eloquently, but not quite precisely. For there is no such thing as an evil joy. He gave this name to pleasures, and so expressed what he meant: he was pointing to people glad at their own harm.note

Still, I had good reason for saying I took great pleasure from your letter. For even when an untrained man rejoices for an honorable reason, I still call his feeling pleasure: it is uncontrolled, ready at once to swing the other way, prompted by a belief in a false good, immoderate and excessive. But to return to my point, hear what delighted me in your letter: you have your words under control. Your language does not carry you away or drag you farther than you intended.

Many writers are lured by the charm of some attractive word into something they had not planned to write. That doesn’t happen to you: everything is concise and fitted to the subject. You say as much as you want, and you mean more than you say. This is a sign of something greater: it shows that your mind, too, has nothing superfluous, nothing inflated.

I do find metaphors, though—not reckless ones, but ones that have been put to the test. I find images; and anyone who forbids us to use them, and thinks they are allowed to poets alone, seems to me never to have read any of the ancients, in whose day speech that angled for applause was not yet the fashion. Those men, who spoke plainly and only to make a point clear, are full of comparisons. I consider these necessary—not for the same reason poets need them, but as props for our weakness, to bring both speaker and listener face to face with the matter at hand.

Here I am, reading Sextius at this very moment—a keen man, who does philosophy in Greek words but by Roman morals. I was struck by an image he offers: an army marches in a hollow square, ready for battle, when the enemy is expected from every side. “The wise man,” he says, “must do the same. He should deploy all his virtues on every side, so that wherever some threat arises, defenses are ready there and answer the commander’s nod without confusion. We see this in armies drawn up by great generals: all the troops feel the leader’s command at once, arranged so that a signal given by one man runs through infantry and cavalry together.” This, he says, is far more necessary for us.note

For armies often fear an enemy for no reason, and the road they suspected most turns out to be the safest. But folly has no peace. It fears what is above as much as what is below; both its flanks tremble; dangers follow behind it and meet it head on. It panics at everything, it is unprepared, and it is frightened even by its own reinforcements. The wise man, however, fortified and alert against every assault, will not give ground, whether poverty attacks, or grief, or disgrace, or pain. Undaunted, he will march both against them and through them.

We are held back by many things, weakened by many. We have lain long in these vices, and washing them out is hard. For we are not stained, but dyed through. Rather than pass from one image to another, let me ask something I often consider: why does folly hold us so stubbornly? First, because we don’t push it away bravely or strive for health with all our might. Second, because we don’t put enough faith in what wise men have discovered, or drink it in with open hearts, and we tackle so great a task lightly.

But how can anyone learn enough to fight his vices, when he learns only in the time his vices leave free? None of us goes deep. We have only plucked at the surface, and busy people have thought it more than enough to spend a little time on philosophy.

What especially hinders us is that we are quickly pleased with ourselves. If we find someone to call us good men, sensible, upright, we recognize ourselves in it. We are not content with modest praise: whatever flattery has shamelessly heaped on us we grab as our due. We agree with those who say we are the best and wisest of men, though we know they often tell many lies. We indulge ourselves so far that we want to be praised for the very quality whose opposite we are practicing at that moment. One man hears himself called most merciful in the midst of inflicting tortures, another most generous in the midst of plunder, another most temperate in the midst of drunkenness and lust. So it follows that we refuse to change precisely because we believe we are already the best.

When Alexander was roaming through India, laying waste in war to peoples not well known even to their neighbors, he was struck by an arrow during the siege of a city, as he rode round the walls looking for the weakest point in the fortifications. For a long time he stayed in the saddle and kept at what he had begun. Then the bleeding stopped, the pain of the drying wound grew, and his leg, hanging from the horse, gradually went numb. Forced to withdraw, he said: “Everyone swears I am the son of Jupiter, but this wound shouts that I am a man.”note

Let us do the same. Flattery makes a fool of each of us in proportion to our standing. Let us say: “You tell me I am sensible, but I see how many useless things I crave, how many harmful things I wish for. I don’t even understand what satiety teaches the animals—what limit there should be to food, what to drink. I still don’t know how much I can hold.”

Now I’ll show you how to tell that you are not wise. The wise man is full of joy, cheerful and calm, unshaken; he lives on equal terms with the gods. Now consult yourself. If you are never sad, if no hope troubles your mind with expectation of the future, if day and night your mind keeps an even, steady course, lifted up and content with itself, then you have reached the summit of human good. But if you seek pleasures of every kind from every quarter, know that you fall as far short of wisdom as you do of joy. Joy is what you long to reach, but you go astray in hoping to get there amid riches and honors—that is, you are looking for joy amid worries. These things you pursue as if they would give you gladness and pleasure are causes of pain.

All of them, I say, are striving toward joy, but they don’t know where to get a joy that is lasting and great. One looks for it in banquets and luxury, another in ambition and a crowd of clients around him, another in a mistress, another in a vain display of liberal studies and literature that heals nothing. All of them are deceived by delights that are false and brief—like drunkenness, which pays for one hour’s cheerful madness with a long stretch of misery; like applause and the favor of a cheering crowd, which costs great anxiety both to win and to pay for.

So consider this: the effect of wisdom is a joy that stays even. The wise man’s mind is like the universe above the moon: there it is always clear. So here, too, is a reason for wanting to be wise: the wise man is never without joy. And this joy is born only from the awareness of one’s virtues.note

No one can rejoice unless he is brave, just, and self-controlled. “What?” you say. “Don’t fools and wicked men rejoice?” No more than lions that have caught their prey. When they have worn themselves out with wine and lust, when night has run out on them amid their vices, when pleasures crammed into a small body beyond its capacity have begun to fester, then the poor wretches cry out that line of Virgil: “For you know how we spent that last night / amid false joys.”note

The self-indulgent spend every night amid false joys—and, indeed, as if it were their last. But the joy that comes to the gods and to those who rival the gods is not interrupted and does not cease. It would cease if it were drawn from somewhere else. Because it is no one else’s gift, it is not subject to anyone else’s will either. What fortune has not given, it cannot take away. Farewell.

I complain, I argue, I’m angry. Do you still wish for what your nurse, or your tutor, or your mother wished for you? Don’t you understand yet how much evil they wished on you? Oh, how hostile to us are the prayers of those close to us! And all the more hostile the more luckily they have come true. I’m no longer surprised that every evil has followed us from earliest childhood: we grew up amid our parents’ curses. May the gods hear our own voice too, praying for us—and asking them for nothing.

How long will we keep asking the gods for things, as if we still couldn’t feed ourselves? How long will we fill the fields of great cities with our crops? How long will a whole people do our harvesting? How long will many ships—and from more than one sea—carry in the furnishings of a single table? A bull is filled by a pasture of a very few acres; one forest is enough for many elephants; man feeds on 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 hugest and most voracious animals? Not at all. For how little it is that we give to nature! She is sent away satisfied with little. It is not our belly’s hunger that costs us so much, but our ambition.

So let us count those who, as Sallust says, are “slaves to their bellies” among animals, not men—and some not even among animals, but among the dead. He lives who is of use to many; he lives who makes use of himself. But those who lurk and grow sluggish are in their homes as if in a tomb. You may as well carve their names in marble on the very threshold: they have gone ahead of their own death. Farewell.note

Let us stop wanting what we once wanted. I, at least, am doing just that: in old age I have stopped wanting what I wanted as a boy. To this one end go my days, to this my nights; this is my work, this my thought: to put an end to old evils. I am working to make each day equal to a whole life. And, heaven knows, I don’t snatch at it as if it were the last, but I look at it as one that may well be the last.

In this spirit I am writing you this letter, as if death were about to call me away in the very act of writing. I am ready to leave, and so I will enjoy life, because I don’t worry too much about how long that will last. Before old age I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well. And to die well is to die willingly. Make an effort never to do anything unwillingly.

Whatever will be a necessity if you resist is no necessity if you are willing. Here is what I mean: the man who accepts orders gladly escapes the bitterest part of slavery—doing what he does not want to do. It is not the man who does something on command who is wretched, but the one who does it unwillingly. So let us set our minds to want whatever circumstances demand, and above all to think of our own end without sadness.

We must prepare for death before we prepare for life. Life is well enough equipped, but we are greedy for more equipment. Something always seems to be missing, and always will. Whether we have lived enough depends not on years or days, but on the mind. I have lived, my dearest Lucilius, as long as was enough; I await death with my fill. Farewell.

They are lying, those who want it to look as if a crowd of business keeps them from liberal studies. They pretend to be busy, they exaggerate it, and they keep themselves busy. I am free, Lucilius, I am free, and wherever I am, there I belong to myself. For I don’t hand myself over to my affairs; I only lend myself. Nor do I chase after excuses to waste time. And wherever I have stopped, there I turn over my thoughts and ponder something wholesome in my mind.

When I have given myself to my friends, I still don’t withdraw from myself. Nor do I linger with those whom some occasion has thrown together with me, or some matter arising from civic duty. Instead I am with all the best people: to them, whatever place or whatever age they lived in, I send my mind.

I carry Demetrius, the best of men, around with me. Leaving the purple-clad behind, I talk with him, half-naked as he is, and I admire him. Why shouldn’t I admire him? I have seen that he lacks nothing. Anyone can despise everything; no one can have everything. The shortest road to riches runs through contempt for riches. Our Demetrius, though, lives not as if he had despised all things, but as if he had left them to others to own. Farewell.

I am sorry that your friend Flaccus has died, but I don’t want you to grieve more than is right. That you should not grieve at all I will hardly dare demand—though I know that would be better. But who will attain such firmness of mind, except someone already raised far above fortune? Even he will feel the sting of this—but only the sting. We, though, may be forgiven for slipping into tears, provided they have not flowed too freely and we have checked them ourselves. When a friend is lost, our eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. We may weep, but we must not wail.

Do I seem to set you a harsh rule, when the greatest of Greek poets granted the right to weep for one day only, and said that even Niobe thought about food? Do you ask where laments come from, and excessive weeping? Through tears we seek proof of our longing; we don’t follow our grief, we display it. No one is sad just for himself. What wretched folly! Even grief has its vanity.note

“What, then?” you say. “Shall I forget my friend?” It’s a short memory you promise him if it is to last only as long as your grief. Soon any chance thing will turn that frown into a smile. I am not putting it off to some distant time, when every longing is soothed and even the sharpest mourning subsides. As soon as you stop watching yourself, this picture of sadness will vanish. Right now you are guarding your grief yourself. But even as you guard it, it slips away, and the sharper it is, the sooner it ends.

Let us make sure that remembering those we have lost becomes a pleasure to us. No one willingly returns to a thought that is going to torment him. Still, it is bound to happen that the names of those we loved and lost come to us with a certain sting. But this sting, too, has its own pleasure.

For, as our Attalus used to say, “The memory of dead friends is pleasant in the way certain fruits are pleasantly tart, or the way, in a very old wine, the bitterness itself delights us. But when time has passed, all that pained us is extinguished, and pure pleasure comes to us.”

If we believe him, “To think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying honey and cake; recalling those who are gone gives pleasure, but not without a certain sharpness. Yet who would deny that sharp things like these, with something austere about them, also stimulate the appetite?”

I don’t feel the same. For me the thought of dead friends is sweet and soothing. For I had them as one who would lose them; I have lost them as one who still has them. So, my Lucilius, act as befits your fair-mindedness: stop misinterpreting fortune’s kindness. She has taken away, but she has also given.

So let us enjoy our friends eagerly, since it is uncertain how long this will be granted us. Let us think how often we have left them when setting out on some long journey, how often, while staying in the same place, we have not seen them. We will realize that we lost more time with them while they were alive.

And can you put up with people who treat their friends with utter neglect, then mourn them most wretchedly, and love no one until they have lost him? They grieve more lavishly then precisely because they fear there may be doubt whether they loved at all. They are looking for belated proofs of their affection.

If we have other friends, we both wrong them and think poorly of them if they count for so little in consoling us for the one we have buried. If we have none, we have done ourselves a greater injury than we have received from fortune: fortune took away one friend, but we took away every one we failed to make.

Besides, a man who could love no more than one did not love even that one very much. If someone stripped of his only tunic would rather lament than look around for a way to escape the cold and find something to cover his shoulders, wouldn’t you think him an utter fool? You have buried the one you loved; look for someone to love.

It is better to replace a friend than to weep for him. I know that what I am about to add is well worn by now, but I won’t leave it out just because everyone has said it: even the man who has not ended his grief by choice finds an end to it in time. But for a sensible man the most shameful cure for sorrow is being tired of sorrowing. I would rather you left grief than have grief leave you. And stop as soon as possible doing what, even if you wanted to, you could not keep doing for long.

Our ancestors fixed a year as the period of mourning for women—not so they would mourn that long, but so they would mourn no longer. For men there is no lawful period, because no period is honorable. Yet of all those women who could barely be dragged from the pyre or torn from the corpse, which one can you show me whose tears lasted a whole month? Nothing becomes hateful more quickly than grief. When fresh, it finds someone to comfort it and draws people to it; but once it is old, it is laughed at, and rightly. For it is either feigned or foolish.

I who write this to you am the man who wept for Annaeus Serenus, my dearest friend, so immoderately that—much against my will—I am among the examples of those whom grief has conquered. Today, though, I condemn what I did, and I understand that the chief reason I mourned like that was that I had never considered he might die before me. The only thing that occurred to me was that he was younger, much younger—as if the fates kept to the order of age.note

So let us constantly reflect on our own mortality and on that of all those we love. Back then I ought to 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 struck me suddenly, unprepared. Now think of everything as mortal, and mortal under no fixed law. Whatever can ever happen can happen today.

So let us reflect, my dearest Lucilius, that we will soon arrive where he has arrived, the one we mourn. And perhaps, if what wise men say is true and there is some place to receive us, the one we think has perished has only been sent on ahead. Farewell.

You were with us yesterday. You could complain, if it were only yesterday. That’s why I added “with us”: with me you always are. Some friends had dropped in, on whose account a bigger smoke went up—not the kind that usually bursts from the kitchens of the rich and alarms the fire watch, but a modest one, to signal that guests had arrived.

The conversation was varied, as at a dinner party, taking no subject through to the end but jumping from one to another. Then a book by Quintus Sextius the Elder was read—a great man, if you trust me, and a Stoic, though he denies it.

Good gods, what vigor there is in him, what spirit! You won’t find this in every philosopher. The writings of some with famous names are bloodless. They lay down rules, they argue, they quibble; they don’t put spirit into you, because they have none. When you read Sextius, you will say: “He is alive, he is vigorous, he is free, he is more than human; he sends me away full of tremendous confidence.”

I’ll confess to you what frame of mind I am in when I read him: I want to challenge every misfortune, I want to cry out, “Why are you holding back, Fortune? Come fight! You see I’m ready.” I put on the spirit of the man who looks for a place to test himself, a place to show his virtue: “Among the sluggish herds he prays / a foaming boar may come, or a tawny lion descend from the hills.”note

I want something to overcome, something to exercise my endurance on. For Sextius has this excellent quality too: he will show you the greatness of the happy life without making you despair of it. You will see that it is on a height, but a height that anyone who is willing can reach.

Virtue itself will do the same for you: make you admire it and yet hope. For my part, the mere contemplation of wisdom often takes up much of my time. I gaze at it in amazement, just as I gaze at times at the universe itself, which I often look upon as if I were seeing it for the first time.

So I revere the discoveries of wisdom and their discoverers. I love to enter upon them as an inheritance from many people. It was for me they were acquired, for me they were worked out. But let us act like a good head of a household: let us increase what we have received. Let this inheritance pass from me to those who come after, larger than before. Much work still remains, and much will remain, and no one born a thousand ages from now will be denied the chance to add something more.

But even if everything has been discovered by the ancients, this will always be new: the application, the understanding, and the arrangement of what others have discovered. Suppose we have been left remedies for healing the eyes. I have no need to look for others, but these still have to be adapted to particular diseases and times. This one relieves soreness of the eyes; this one reduces swelling of the eyelids; this one wards off a sudden inflammation and discharge; this one sharpens vision. You have to grind them up, choose the right time, and apply the right amount of each. The remedies of the mind were discovered by the ancients; how and when to apply them is our work to find out.

Those before us achieved a great deal, but did not finish the job. Still, they deserve to be looked up to and worshiped as gods are. Why shouldn’t I keep portraits of great men as spurs to the mind, and celebrate their birthdays? Why shouldn’t I always address them with titles of honor? The reverence I owe my own teachers I owe equally to those teachers of the human race, from whom the beginnings of so great a good have flowed.

If I see a consul or a praetor, I will do everything customarily done to show respect for an office: I will jump off my horse, uncover my head, step aside from the path. What, then? Shall I welcome into my mind both Marcus Catos, and Laelius the Wise, and Socrates with Plato, and Zeno and Cleanthes, without the deepest respect? No—I revere them, and I always rise for names so great. Farewell.note

I shared yesterday with ill health: it claimed the morning for itself and yielded the afternoon to me. So first I tested my mind with reading. Then, when it had coped with that, I dared to demand more of it—or rather, to allow it more. I wrote something, and with more concentration than usual, as I grappled with a difficult subject and refused to be beaten—until some friends came by who used force on me and restrained me like an unruly patient.

Conversation took the place of the pen, and from it I will bring you the part that is in dispute. We have appointed you arbiter. You have more 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 to be: cause and matter. Matter lies inert, a thing ready for anything, but idle if no one moves it. Cause—that is, reason—shapes matter, turns it whichever way it wishes, and produces various works from it. So there must be that from which something is made, and then that by which it is made. The latter is cause, the former matter.

All art is imitation of nature. So apply what I was saying about the universe to the things that humans have to make. A statue had both matter, which submitted to the artist, and an artist, who gave the matter a form. So in a statue the matter was bronze, the cause the craftsman. All things are in the same condition: they consist of what is made and what makes.

The Stoics hold that there is one cause: that which makes. Aristotle thinks “cause” is used in three ways. “The first cause,” he says, “is the matter itself, without which nothing can be produced; the second is the craftsman; the third is the form, which is imposed on each work—as on a statue.” For this is what Aristotle calls eidos [form]. “A fourth,” he says, “is added to these: the purpose of the whole work.”note

Let me explain what this means. Bronze is the first cause of the statue, for it would never have been made unless there had been something from which it could be cast or shaped. The second cause is the artist, for that bronze could not have been fashioned into the shape of a statue without skilled hands. The third cause is the form, for this statue would not be called the Doryphoros [Spear-Bearer] or the Diadumenos [Youth Binding His Hair] unless this appearance had been impressed on it. The fourth cause is the purpose in making it, for if this had not existed, it would not have been made.note

What is the purpose? What attracted the artist, what he pursued in making it. It may be money, if he made it to sell; or glory, if he worked for a name; or piety, if he prepared it as a gift for a temple. So this too is a cause: that for the sake of which a thing is made. Or don’t you think that something whose removal would mean the work had never been made should be counted among the causes of the work?

To these Plato adds a fifth, the model, which he himself calls the idea [form]; for this is what the artist looks at in producing what he intended. It makes no difference whether he has his model outside, to fix his eyes on, or inside, conceived and placed there by himself. God has within himself these models of all things, and has embraced in his mind the numbers and measures of everything that is to be done. He is full of these shapes, which Plato calls ideas—immortal, unchangeable, unwearying. So human beings perish, but humanity itself, on which a human being is modeled, endures; and while humans suffer and die, it suffers nothing.

So there are five causes, as Plato says: that from which, that by which, that in which, that toward which, and that for the sake of which. Last comes what results from these. Take the statue, since we began with it: that from which is the bronze; that by which, the artist; that in which, the form fitted to it; that toward which, the model the maker imitates; that for the sake of which, the maker’s purpose; and what results from these is the statue itself.

The universe too, as Plato says, has all these. The maker: that is God. That from which it is made: that is matter. The form: that is the shape and order of the universe that we see. The model, of course: that to which God looked in making this vast and most beautiful work.

The purpose, for the sake of which he made it. Do you ask what God’s purpose is? Goodness. That, at any rate, is what Plato says: “What was God’s reason for making the universe? He is good; the good begrudges no good thing to anyone. So he made it as good as he could.” Now, judge, give your verdict and declare who seems to you to speak most truly—not who does speak most truly. That is as far above us as truth itself.note

This crowd of causes put forward by Aristotle and Plato takes in either too many or too few. For if they judge that anything without which a thing cannot be produced is a cause of its making, they have named too few. Let them put time among the causes: nothing can happen without time. Let them put place: if there is nowhere for something to happen, it won’t happen. Let them put motion: without it nothing comes to be or passes away. Without motion there is no art, no change.

But what we are looking for now is the first and general cause. This must be simple, for matter too is simple. Do we ask what the cause is? Creative reason, of course—that is, God. For all those things you have listed are not many separate causes; they depend on one, the one that makes.

Do you say the form is a cause? The artist imposes it on the work: it is part of the cause, not the cause. The model, too, is not a cause, but an instrument the cause needs. The artist needs a model the way he needs a chisel or a file; without these, art cannot proceed. Yet they are not parts of the art, or causes.

“The artist’s purpose,” someone says, “for the sake of which he sets about making something, is a cause.” Even if it is a cause, it is not an efficient cause but an additional one. And such causes are countless; we are asking about the general cause. But this they said without their usual subtlety: that the whole universe, the finished work, is a cause. For there is a great difference between a work and the cause of a work.

So either give your verdict, or—easier in matters like this—declare that it isn’t clear to you, and order us to argue again. “Why do you enjoy wasting time on these things,” you say, “which rid you of no passion, drive away no desire?” For my part, I do deal with those more important matters, the ones that bring the mind peace, and I examine myself first, and then this universe.note

Not even now am I wasting time, as you think. For all these questions, provided they are not chopped too fine and drawn out into this useless hair-splitting, lift and lighten the mind, which is weighed down by a heavy load and longs to be set free and to return to the things it once belonged to. For this body is a weight and a punishment for the mind. Under its pressure the mind is burdened and in chains—unless philosophy has come and bidden it breathe freely at the spectacle of nature, and released it from earthly things to divine. This is its freedom, this its roaming abroad: for a while it slips away from the prison where it is held and is refreshed by the heavens.

Craftsmen who work at something delicate that tires the eyes with the strain, if the light they have is poor and uncertain, go out into the street, and in some district set aside for public recreation they refresh their eyes with free daylight. In the same way the mind, shut up in this gloomy, dark dwelling, seeks the open air whenever it can and rests in contemplating nature.

The wise man, and the seeker after wisdom, is indeed attached to his body, but with the best part of himself he is absent, directing his thoughts to lofty things. As if bound by a soldier’s oath, he regards his life as a term of service. And he is so formed that he feels neither love nor hatred for life, and he endures mortal things, though he knows greater things remain.

Do you forbid me to study nature? Do you drag me away from the whole and confine me to a part? Shall I not ask what the beginnings of all things are? Who shaped them? Who separated everything when it was all merged in one mass and wrapped up in inert matter? Shall I not ask who the maker of this universe is? By what plan so vast a thing came under law and order? Who gathered what was scattered, separated what was confused, and gave each thing its own form when all lay in one shapeless mass? Where does so much light pour from? Is it fire, or something brighter than fire?

Shall I not ask these things? Shall I not know where I came down from? Am I to see this world only once, or be born many times? Where am I to go from here? What home awaits the soul once it is freed from the laws of human slavery? Do you forbid me a share in heaven—that is, do you order me to live with my head bowed?

I am greater, and born for greater things, than to be the slave of my body, which I regard as nothing but a chain fastened around my freedom. So I put it in fortune’s way as a buffer, and let no wound pass through it to me. This is the only thing in me that can suffer injury. In this vulnerable dwelling lives a free mind.

This flesh will never drive me to fear, never to a pretense unworthy of a good man. I will never lie to honor this poor body. When it seems right, I will dissolve my partnership with it. And even now, while we are bound together, we will not be equal partners: the mind will claim all authority for itself. Contempt for one’s own body is sure freedom.

To return to my subject: that study of nature we were just speaking of will also contribute much to this freedom. All things, of course, are made up of matter and God. God governs them; they surround him and follow him as their ruler and guide. And what makes—that is, God—is more powerful and more precious than matter, which is acted on by God.

The place God holds in this universe, the mind holds 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 the blows of chance. Let us not tremble at injuries, at wounds, at chains, at poverty. What is death? Either an end or a passage. I do not fear ending, for that is the same as never having begun; nor passing over, for nowhere will I be so cramped. Farewell.

I have seen Claranus, my old schoolmate, after many years. You don’t expect me, I imagine, to add that he is old—but, by Hercules, he is green and vigorous in mind, and wrestling with his frail little body. Nature has treated him unfairly and housed such a mind badly. Or perhaps she wanted to show us exactly this: that the bravest and happiest of spirits can lie hidden under any skin. Still, he overcomes every obstacle, and from despising himself he has come to despise everything else.

The poet who said “Virtue is more pleasing when it comes in a beautiful body” was wrong, I think. Virtue needs no ornament. It is its own great glory, and it makes its body holy. I have certainly begun to look at our Claranus differently: he seems handsome to me, and as upright in body as he is in mind.note

A great man can come out of a hovel; a beautiful and great spirit can come out of an ugly, lowly little body. So I think nature produces some people like this in order to prove that virtue can be born anywhere. If she could bring forth naked spirits, she would have done so. As it is, she does something more: she brings forth some who are hampered by their bodies and yet break through the obstacles.

Claranus seems to me to have been produced as an example, so that we could learn that the mind is not disfigured by the ugliness of the body, but the body is beautified by the beauty of the mind. Although we spent only a very few days together, we had many conversations, which I will write down in turn and send on to you.

On the first day the question was this: how can goods be equal if they come in three kinds? Some, in the view of our school, are primary goods, such as joy, peace, the safety of one’s country. Some are secondary, formed out of unhappy material, such as endurance under torture and self-control in a serious illness. The first goods we will wish for outright; the second, only if we must. There is also a third kind, such as a modest walk, a calm and honest face, and bearing that befits a sensible man.

How can these be equal to one another, when some are to be wished for and others shunned? If we want to distinguish them, let us go back to the primary good and consider what it is. It is a mind that looks upon the truth; that knows what to avoid and what to seek; that sets a value on things not by opinion but by nature; that inserts itself into the whole universe and turns its contemplation on all the universe’s workings; that is intent on both thought and action; that is equally great and forceful; unconquered alike by hardship and by flattery; submitting to neither kind of fortune; rising above everything that happens and befalls it; supremely beautiful, perfectly ordered in grace as well as in strength; sound and sober, unshaken, fearless; a mind that no force can break, that chance neither lifts up nor casts down. Such a mind is virtue.

That is its face, if it could come under a single view and show itself whole at once. But it has many aspects. They unfold according to the variety of life and of our actions, while virtue itself becomes neither less nor greater. For the highest good cannot shrink, and virtue is not allowed to go backward. Rather, it turns into one quality after another, shaped to suit the character of the task it is about to perform.

Whatever it touches, it brings into its own likeness and dyes with its own color. It adorns actions, friendships, sometimes whole households that it has entered and set in order. Whatever it handles, it makes lovable, conspicuous, admirable. So its power and greatness cannot rise any higher, since what is greatest admits no increase. You will find nothing straighter than the straight, no more than you will find anything truer than the true or more temperate than the temperate.

All virtue lies in measure, and measure has a fixed limit. Constancy has nowhere further to go, any more than confidence, truthfulness or loyalty. What can be added to the perfect? Nothing—or what was added to was not perfect. So nothing can be added to virtue either: if anything could be added to it, it was lacking something. The honorable, too, admits no addition, for it is honorable precisely because of the qualities I have listed. What next? Do you not think that the seemly, the just and the lawful are of the same form, contained within fixed bounds? The capacity to grow is the mark of something imperfect.note

Every good falls under the same laws. Private and public benefit are joined together—as inseparable, by Hercules, as what is praiseworthy and what is desirable. Therefore the virtues are equal to one another, and so are the works of virtue, and so are all the people fortunate enough to possess them.

The virtues of plants and animals, being mortal, are also frail, perishable and unstable. They rise and fall, and so they are not valued at the same price. Human virtues are held to a single rule, for right reason is one and simple. Nothing is more divine than the divine, more heavenly than the heavenly.

Mortal things shrink, fall, wear away, grow, are drained and are refilled. So in their uncertain lot there is inequality; divine things have one nature. And reason is nothing other than a portion of the divine spirit plunged into a human body. If reason is divine, and there is no good without reason, then every good is divine. Moreover, there is no difference among divine things; so there is none among goods either. Therefore joy and the brave, unyielding endurance of torture are equal, for in both there is the same greatness of mind—relaxed and cheerful in the one, combative and strained in the other.

What? Do you not think the virtue of the man who bravely storms the enemy’s walls is equal to that of the man who endures a siege with the greatest patience? Great was Scipio, who shut in and squeezed Numantia and forced its unconquered defenders to turn their hands to their own destruction. Great too was the spirit of the besieged, who knew that no one is shut in who has death open to him, and who breathed their last in the embrace of freedom. In the same way the other virtues are equal to one another: tranquility, simplicity, generosity, constancy, equanimity, endurance. Beneath them all lies a single virtue, which makes the mind upright and unswerving.note

“What then? Is there no difference between joy and unbending endurance of pain?” None, as far as the virtues themselves are concerned; a very great one between the circumstances in which each virtue is displayed. In the one there is a natural relaxing and easing of the mind; in the other, pain, which is against nature. So these circumstances, which admit a very wide gap between them, are in between; the virtue in each is equal.

Material does not change virtue. Hard and difficult material does not make it worse; cheerful and happy material does not make it better. So it must be equal. In both cases what is done is done equally rightly, equally wisely, equally honorably. Therefore the goods are equal: the one man cannot conduct himself better in his joy, nor the other better in his torments. And two things than which nothing can be done better are equal.

For if things placed outside virtue can either lessen or increase it, then the honorable ceases to be the only good. Grant that, and everything honorable is lost. Why? I will tell you: because nothing is honorable that is done unwillingly, under compulsion. Everything honorable is voluntary. Mix in reluctance, complaint, evasion, fear, and it has lost the best thing it has—its satisfaction with itself. What is not free cannot be honorable, for whatever is afraid is a slave.

Everything honorable is free from care and tranquil. If it balks at something, laments it, judges it an evil, it has admitted disturbance and is tossed about in great conflict: on this side the vision of what is right calls it on, on that side the suspicion of evil pulls it back. So when a man is about to do something honorable, whatever stands in his way, even if he thinks it a hardship, let him not think it an evil; let him will it and do it gladly. Everything honorable is unbidden and uncompelled, pure and mixed with no evil.

I know what someone may reply to me here: “Are you trying to persuade us that it makes no difference whether a man is enjoying himself or lying on the rack and wearing out his torturer?” I could reply that Epicurus too says the wise man, if he is being burned alive in the bull of Phalaris, will cry out, “How sweet this is, and how little it concerns me!” Why be surprised if I say the goods of one man reclining at a banquet and another standing firm and brave under torture are equal, when Epicurus says something harder to believe: that being roasted is sweet?note

But my reply is this: there is a very great difference between joy and pain. If I were asked to choose, I would seek the one and avoid the other. The one is in accordance with nature, the other against it. As long as they are valued in this way, a great distance separates them. But when it comes to virtue, the virtue is equal in both—the one that moves through happy things and the one that moves through sad ones.

Torment and pain and every other hardship carry no weight, for virtue overwhelms them. Just as the brilliance of the sun blots out small lights, so virtue by its greatness crushes and smothers pains, troubles and injuries. Wherever it shines, anything that appears without it is put out. Hardships that meet virtue count for no more than a rain shower in the sea.

To show you that this is so: the good man will rush without the least hesitation to every noble deed. Though the executioner stand there, though the torturer and the fire stand there, he will persist, looking not at what he will suffer but at what he will do. He will entrust himself to the honorable deed as he would to a good man, and judge it useful to him, safe, favorable. An honorable deed that is grim and harsh will hold the same place in his eyes as a good man who is poor, or exiled, or pale with sickness.

Come now, set on one side a good man overflowing with wealth, and on the other one who has nothing, but has everything in himself. Each will be equally a good man, even if their fortunes differ. As I said, we judge things as we judge people: virtue is equally praiseworthy whether it is placed in a body that is healthy and free or in one that is sick and in chains.

So you will not praise your own virtue more if fortune has granted it a sound body than if it has been maimed in some part. Otherwise you will be judging the master by how his slaves are dressed. For all those things over which chance holds sway are slaves: money, the body, public honors—weak, fleeting, mortal, of uncertain tenure. The works of virtue, by contrast, are free and unconquered. They are no more to be sought if fortune treats them kindly, and no less if they are weighed down by some unfairness of circumstance.

What friendship is among people, desire is among things. You would not, I think, love a good man more for being rich than poor, or strong and muscular rather than slight and frail. So neither will you desire or love a thing more because it is cheerful and peaceful rather than harried and laborious.

Or if you do, then of two equally good men you will love the sleek, perfumed one more than the dusty, unkempt one. Next you will go so far as to love the one who is whole and unhurt in every limb more than the one who is disabled or blind in one eye. Little by little your fastidiousness will reach the point where, of two equally just and wise men, you prefer the one with long, curly hair. Where virtue is equal in both, inequality in other things does not show. All those other things are not parts, but extras.

Does anyone judge his own family so unfairly that he loves a healthy son more than a sick one, or a tall, lofty one more than one who is short or of middling height? Wild animals make no distinction among their young, and lie down to feed them all alike; birds share out food equally. Ulysses hurries to the rocks of his Ithaca just as Agamemnon does to the noble walls of Mycenae. For no one loves his country because it is great, but because it is his.

What is the point of all this? To make you see that virtue looks on all its works as if they were its children, with the same eyes, indulging them all equally—and indeed more lavishly those who are struggling, since even parents’ love leans more toward the children it pities. Virtue, too, does not love more those of its works it sees afflicted and oppressed, but, in the manner of good parents, it embraces and cherishes them more.

Why is no good greater than another? Because nothing is more fitting than the fitting, nothing flatter than the flat. You cannot say that this thing is more equal to something than that; so nothing is more honorable than the honorable either.

But if the nature of all the virtues is equal, the three kinds of goods are on a level. I mean this: to rejoice with self-control and to grieve with self-control are on a level. The first kind of gladness does not outrank the second—that firmness of mind which swallows its groans under the torturer. The one kind of good is to be wished for, the other to be admired, but both are nonetheless equal, since any hardship is covered over by the power of a good so much greater.

Whoever judges them unequal turns his eyes away from the virtues themselves and looks around at externals. True goods all weigh the same and are all the same size. False goods have much emptiness in them. So they look splendid and grand to those who gaze on them, but once they are put on the scales, they disappoint.

So it is, my Lucilius: whatever true reason recommends is solid and eternal. It strengthens the mind and lifts it up, to stay forever on the heights. The things that are praised thoughtlessly and are goods in the opinion of the crowd puff up with empty things those who delight in them. The things, again, that threaten us as evils strike fear into minds and alarm them, just as the mere look of danger alarms animals.

Both kinds of thing, then, swell or sting the mind without cause; the one deserves no joy, the other no fear. Reason alone is unchanging and holds fast to its judgment, for it does not serve the senses but commands them. Reason is equal to reason, as straight is to straight; so virtue is equal to virtue. Virtue is nothing other than right reason. All virtues are forms of reason. They are forms of reason if they are right. If they are right, they are also equal.

As reason is, so are actions; so all actions are equal. For since they resemble reason, they also resemble one another. I say actions are equal to one another insofar as they are honorable and right. Otherwise they will differ greatly as their material varies: now broader, now narrower, now illustrious, now obscure, now touching many people, now few. Yet in all of them what is best is equal: they are honorable.

In the same way, all good men are equal insofar as they are good. But they differ in age: one is older, another younger. They differ in body: one is handsome, another ugly. They differ in fortune: this one is rich, that one poor; this one influential, powerful, known to cities and peoples, that one unknown to most and obscure. But in that by which they are good, they are equal.

The senses do not judge of good and evil; they do not know what is useful and what is useless. They cannot pass a verdict unless they are brought face to face with the thing itself. They do not foresee the future or remember the past; they do not know what follows from what. Yet it is from this knowledge that the order and sequence of things is woven, and the unity of a life that is to travel on a straight path. Reason, then, is the judge of good and evil. It counts things foreign and external as worthless, and judges the things that are neither good nor evil to be tiny, trivial extras. For all its good lies in the mind.

Still, reason considers some goods primary, which it pursues by deliberate choice, such as victory, good children, the safety of one’s country. Some are secondary, which appear only in adversity, such as bearing a serious illness or exile with equanimity. Some are intermediate, which are no more in accordance with nature than against it, such as walking sensibly or sitting with composure. For sitting is no less in accordance with nature than standing or walking.

The two higher kinds of goods are different. The primary ones are in accordance with nature: delighting in the devotion of one’s children and in the safety of one’s country. The secondary ones are against nature: bravely resisting torture and enduring thirst when a disease is burning one’s insides.

“What then? Is any good against nature?” Not at all. But the situation in which the good arises is sometimes against nature. To be wounded, to waste away over a fire placed beneath you, to be afflicted with ill health—that is against nature. But to keep an unwearied mind amid such things is in accordance with nature.

To put what I mean briefly: the material of a good is sometimes against nature; the good never is, since there is no good without reason, and reason follows nature. “What, then, is reason?” The imitation of nature. “What is the highest good for a human being?” To conduct oneself according to nature’s will.

“There is no doubt,” someone says, “that a peace never disturbed is happier than one restored at the cost of much blood. There is no doubt,” he says, “that unshaken health is a happier thing than health brought back to safety, by some effort of strength and endurance, from grave and life-threatening illness. In the same way, there will be no doubt that joy is a greater good than a mind struggling to endure the torments of wounds or fire.”

Not at all. Things that depend on chance admit a great deal of difference, for they are valued by their usefulness to those who take them. Goods have one aim: to agree with nature. In this they are all equal. When we follow someone’s motion in the Senate, one cannot say, “This man agrees more than that one”; all go over to the same motion. I say the same of the virtues: they all agree with nature. I say the same of goods: they all agree with nature.

One man died young, another old, and another, besides these, as a baby, who got no more than a glimpse of life. All of them were equally mortal, even if death let some lives go on longer, cut others off in full flower, and broke off others at their very beginning.

One man died in the middle of dinner. Another’s sleep flowed on into death. Another was carried off in the act of love. Set against these those run through with a sword, or killed by a snake’s bite, or crushed by a collapsing building, or twisted bit by bit through a long cramping of the sinews. Some deaths may be called better, some worse; but death itself is equal for all. The ways by which they leap down differ; the place into which they leap is one. No death is greater or smaller, for it has the same measure in all: to have ended life.

I tell you the same about goods. This good exists amid pure pleasures, that one amid sorrow and bitterness. The one governed fortune’s indulgence; the other tamed her violence. Each is equally good, though the one traveled a smooth, soft road and the other a rough one. The end of all of them is the same: they are goods, they are praiseworthy, they go hand in hand with virtue and reason. Virtue makes equal whatever it acknowledges as its own.

There is no reason to be surprised at finding this among our doctrines. Epicurus has two goods, out of which that highest, blessed good is made up: that the body be free from pain and the mind free from disturbance. These goods do not grow once they are complete. How can what is full grow? The body is without pain; what can be added to this painlessness? The mind is at one with itself and calm; what can be added to this tranquility?

Just as a clear sky, once scoured to its purest brilliance, admits no further brightness, so the condition of a man who cares for his body and mind and weaves his good out of both is perfect, and he has reached the height of his prayers, if there is no turmoil in his mind and no pain in his body. If any pleasures come to him from outside, they do not increase the highest good; they season it, so to speak, and make it more agreeable. For that complete good of human nature is content with peace of body and mind.

I will show you, further, in Epicurus a division of goods very like this one of ours. For there are some things with him that he would prefer to happen to him, such as rest for the body free from every hardship, and relaxation of a mind that delights in contemplating its own goods. There are others which, though he would not want them to happen, he nonetheless praises and approves—such as the one I spoke of a little earlier, the endurance of ill health and the most severe pains, which Epicurus underwent on that last and most blessed day of his. He says that he was bearing torments of the bladder and of an ulcerated stomach that could admit no further increase of pain, and yet that day was a blessed one for him. But no one can spend a blessed day unless he possesses the highest good.note

So even with Epicurus there are goods you would rather not experience, but which, since things have turned out so, must be embraced, praised and put on a level with the highest. One cannot say that the good which set the seal on a blessed life, and for which Epicurus gave thanks with his last words, is not equal to the greatest goods.

Allow me, Lucilius, best of men, to say something rather bolder: if any goods could be greater than others, I would have preferred these, which seem grim, to those soft and delicate ones; I would have called these greater. For it is a greater thing to break through difficulties than to keep joys within bounds.

It is the same reason, I know, that makes a man bear good fortune well and disaster bravely. The man who stood guard before the rampart, untroubled, while no enemy attacked the camp, can be as brave as the man who, with his hamstrings cut, sank onto his knees and did not let go of his weapons. But it is to those returning bloodied from battle that people say, “Well done—bravo!” So I would rather praise these goods that have been tested, that are brave, that have come to blows with fortune.

Should I hesitate to praise that maimed and shriveled hand of Mucius more than the uninjured hand of any hero at all? He stood there, scorning his enemies and the flames, and watched his own hand melt away in the enemy’s brazier, until Porsenna, who had been cheering on his punishment, came to envy his glory and ordered the fire to be taken away from him against his will.

Why should I not count this good among the primary ones, and think it as much greater than those safe goods that fortune never tested, as it is rarer to beat an enemy after losing one’s hand than with a hand still armed? “What then?” you say. “Will you wish this good for yourself?” Why not? For only the man who is able to wish for it is able to do it.

Or should I rather wish to stretch out my joints for my kept boys to knead? Or to have some girl, or some man made up to look like one, pull at my little fingers? Why should I not think Mucius the more fortunate, for handling fire as if he had offered that hand to a masseur? He made good his whole mistake. Unarmed and maimed, he finished a war, and with that stump of a hand he defeated two kings. Farewell.note

To begin with commonplace things: spring has begun to open up, but just as it was about to turn toward summer, at the time when it ought to be warm, it has cooled off, and it still cannot be trusted, for it often slides back into winter. Do you want to know how uncertain it still is? I don’t yet trust myself to truly cold water; I still take the chill off it. “That,” you say, “is standing neither heat nor cold.” So it is, my Lucilius. At my age I am content with my own chill; it hardly thaws in midsummer.

So I spend most of my time bundled in clothes. I am grateful to old age for having fastened me to my couch. Why shouldn’t I be grateful to it on that account? Whatever I ought not to want, I am no longer able to do. My chief conversation is with my books. Whenever your letters arrive, I seem to be with you, and I feel as though I were not writing back to you but answering you aloud. So let us look into your question together, as if we were talking face to face, and see what the answer is.

You ask whether every good is to be wished for. “If it is a good,” you say, “to be tortured bravely, to be burned with a great spirit, to be ill patiently, it follows that these things are to be wished for. But I see nothing among them worth praying for. At any rate I have never yet heard of anyone paying a vow in thanks for being flogged, or twisted by gout, or stretched longer on the rack.”

Draw distinctions, my Lucilius, and you will see that there is something in these things to be wished for. I would like torture to stay far from me. But if it has to be endured, I will wish to bear myself in it bravely, honorably, courageously. Of course I would prefer that war not break out. But if it does, I will wish to bear wounds, hunger and everything the necessities of war bring with nobility. I am not so mad as to want to be ill. But if I have to be ill, I will wish to do nothing without self-control, nothing soft. So it is not hardships that are to be wished for, but the virtue with which hardships are borne.

Some of our school think that brave endurance of all these things is not something to be wished for—though not something to be recoiled from either—because what we pray for should be a good that is pure, tranquil and beyond trouble. I disagree. Why? First, because it cannot be that something is good and yet not to be wished for. Next, if virtue is to be wished for, and there is no good without virtue, then every good is to be wished for. Finally, even brave endurance of torture is to be wished for.

I ask you further: surely courage is to be wished for? Yet it scorns dangers and challenges them. Its most beautiful and most admirable part is this: not to give way before fire, to go to meet wounds, sometimes not even to dodge weapons but to take them full in the chest. If courage is to be wished for, then bearing torture patiently is to be wished for, for that is a part of courage. Only separate these things, as I said, and there will be nothing to lead you astray. It is not suffering torture that is to be wished for, but suffering it bravely. It is that “bravely” I wish for—and that is virtue.

“But who has ever wished this for himself?” Some prayers are open and declared, when they are made item by item; others are hidden, when many things are included in a single prayer. For instance, I wish myself an honorable life. But an honorable life consists of various actions. In it are Regulus’ chest, Cato’s wound torn open by his own hand, Rutilius’ exile, the poisoned cup that carried Socrates from prison to heaven. So when I wished myself an honorable life, I also wished for these things, without which a life sometimes cannot be honorable.note

“O three and four times blessed, / Those whose lot it was to die before their fathers’ eyes / Beneath the lofty walls of Troy!” What difference does it make whether you wish this for someone or admit that it was worth wishing for?note

Decius devoted himself for the Republic: spurring his horse, he charged into the midst of the enemy, seeking death. After him the second Decius, rivaling his father’s courage, spoke the solemn words—by now a family formula—and rushed into the thickest of the battle line, anxious only that his sacrifice be accepted, and thinking a good death a thing to be wished for. Can you doubt, then, that it is best to die memorably, in some act of virtue?note

When someone bears torture bravely, he is using all the virtues. Perhaps one is ready to hand and shows most plainly: endurance. But courage is there too, of which endurance, suffering and patience are branches. Prudence is there, without which no plan is undertaken, and which advises bearing as bravely as possible what you cannot escape. Constancy is there, which cannot be dislodged from its post and gives up its purpose under no force that wrenches at it. There is that inseparable company of the virtues: whatever is done honorably, one virtue does, but by the decision of the whole council. And what all the virtues approve, even if it seems to be done by one, is to be wished for.

What? Do you think only those things are to be wished for that come through pleasure and leisure, that are welcomed with garlanded doors? Some goods wear a grim face. Some prayers are celebrated not by a crowd offering congratulations but by people kneeling in reverence and worship.

So you don’t think Regulus wished to reach Carthage? Put on the spirit of a great man and step away for a while from the opinions of the crowd. Form as grand an image as you ought of virtue, the most beautiful and magnificent of things—a virtue we must worship not with incense and garlands but with sweat and blood.

Look at Marcus Cato laying his pure hands on that sacred breast and tearing open wounds that had not been driven deep enough. Will you say to him, “I wish you what you wish” and “I am sorry for your trouble”—or “Good luck in what you are doing”?note

Here our friend Demetrius comes to mind, who calls a life free from care, untouched by any of fortune’s assaults, “a dead sea.” To have nothing to rouse you, nothing to spur you on, nothing whose threat and onslaught would test your firmness of mind, but to lie idle in unshaken leisure—that is not tranquility. It is a dead calm.

Attalus the Stoic used to say: “I would rather fortune kept me in her camp than in her luxuries. I am tortured, but bravely: all is well. I am killed, but bravely: all is well.” Listen to Epicurus: he will even say, “It is sweet.” I would never give so soft a name to something so honorable and so stern.

I am burned, but unconquered. Why should I not think this worth wishing for—not that the fire burns me, but that it does not conquer me? Nothing is more excellent than virtue, nothing more beautiful. And whatever is done at its command is both good and to be wished for. Farewell.

I agree with your plan: hide yourself away in leisure. But hide your leisure too. You may know that in this you will be following the example of the Stoics, even if not their teaching. But you will be following their teaching as well; you will be able to justify it to yourself and to anyone you like.

We do not send the wise man into every state, nor at every time, nor without any limit. Besides, since we have given the wise man a state worthy of him—namely, the universe—he is not outside public life even if he withdraws. Indeed, perhaps, leaving one little corner behind, he passes into greater and wider realms, and, set up in the heavens, he understands how lowly a seat he had when he mounted the magistrate’s chair or the tribunal. Take this to heart: the wise man is never more active than when things divine and human have come into his view.note

Now I return to what I had begun to urge on you: let your leisure be unknown. There is no need to label yourself with philosophy or retirement. Give your plan another name: call it poor health, weakness, laziness. To boast of one’s leisure is idle ambition.

Some animals, so as not to be found, confuse their tracks right around their lair. You must do the same. Otherwise there will always be people following you. Many pass by what is open and pry into what is hidden and tucked away; a seal tempts the thief. Whatever lies open seems cheap; the burglar passes over what is unlocked. This is the way of the public, the way of every ignorant person: they long to break into secrets. So the best thing is not to show off one’s leisure.

But hiding too much and withdrawing from the sight of men is a kind of showing off. One man has buried himself in Tarentum, another has shut himself up in Naples, another has not crossed his own threshold in many years. Anyone who has built some story around his leisure draws a crowd.

When you have withdrawn, your aim should not be to have people talk about you, but to talk with yourself. And what will you say? What people most love to do about others: think ill of yourself, to yourself. You will grow used both to speaking the truth and to hearing it. Above all, work on what you feel is weakest in you.

Everyone knows the weak points of his own body. So one man relieves his stomach by vomiting, another props it up with frequent meals, another drains and purges his body with an occasional fast. Those whose feet are gripped by recurring pain abstain from wine or from the baths. Careless about everything else, they head off the thing that often troubles them. So too in our mind there are, as it were, ailing parts, to which treatment must be applied.

What do I do in my leisure? I tend my sore. If I showed you a swollen foot, a livid hand, or the withered sinews of a shriveled leg, you would let me lie in one place and nurse my disease. This is a greater evil, which I cannot show you: the gathering, the abscess, is in my very breast. No, no, don’t praise me, don’t say, “What a great man! He has scorned everything, condemned the madness of human life, and escaped it.”

I have condemned nothing but myself. There is no reason to come to me in hope of making progress. You are wrong if you expect any help from here: it is not a doctor who lives here, but a patient. I would rather you said as you leave, “I thought that man was happy and learned. I pricked up my ears—and I was let down. I saw nothing, heard nothing, that I wanted or would come back for.” If that is what you feel and say, some progress has been made. I would rather you pardoned my leisure than envied it.

“Leisure, Seneca?” you say. “Are you recommending leisure to me? You are slipping into Epicurean talk.” I recommend leisure to you in which you may do greater and finer things than those you have left behind. Knocking at the haughty doors of the powerful, keeping an alphabetical list of childless old men, wielding great influence in the Forum—that is power that draws envy and is short-lived, and, if you value it truly, shabby.note

One man will far outstrip me in influence at the bar, another in military service and the rank won by it, another in his throng of clients. It is worth being beaten by everyone, so long as fortune is beaten by me. In the crowd I cannot be her equal: she has more pull.

I only wish you had had the will to follow this plan long ago! I only wish we were not discussing the happy life within sight of death! But even now let us not delay. For many things we would have believed on reason’s word to be superfluous and hostile, we now believe on the word of experience.

Let us do what people usually do who have set out too late and want to make up the time by speed: let us use the spur. This time of life is just right for these studies. It has already boiled off its froth. The vices, untamed in the first heat of youth, it has already worn out; it does not have much left to do to put them out altogether.

“And when,” you say, “will this thing you are learning on your way out do you any good—and for what?” For this: that I may leave a better man. But you should not think any age is better suited to a sound mind than the one that has tamed itself through many trials and long, repeated regret for things, and that has reached what is wholesome with its passions calmed. This is the season for this good. Whoever comes to wisdom as an old man comes to it through his years. Farewell.

I don’t want you changing places and hopping from one spot to another. First, because moving so often is the mark of an unsteady mind. The mind cannot grow firm in leisure unless it stops looking around and wandering. If you want to hold your mind in place, first stop your body from running away.

Second, remedies do the most good when they are kept up without a break. Your quiet, and your forgetting of your former life, must not be interrupted. Let your eyes unlearn; let your ears grow used to healthier words. Whenever you go out, things will meet you on your very way that rekindle your desires.

Someone trying to shake off a love affair must avoid every reminder of the beloved body—for nothing flares up again more easily than love. In the same way, anyone who wants to lay aside his longing for all the things he once burned to have should turn both eyes and ears away from what he has left behind. Passion is quick to rebel.

Wherever it turns, it will see some reward close at hand for its pursuit. No vice comes without its wages. Greed promises money; luxury, many and varied pleasures; ambition, the purple and applause, and from these, power and whatever power can do.

The vices tempt you with pay; here you must live for nothing. A whole lifetime can hardly bring vices swollen by such long license to submit and take the yoke—much less if we chop so short a time into pieces. Constant watchfulness and effort can barely bring any single thing to perfection.

If you will listen to me, practice and rehearse this: to be ready both to receive death and, if circumstances advise it, to summon it. It makes no difference whether death comes to us or we go to it. Convince yourself that this saying of every ignorant man is false: “It is a fine thing to die one’s own death.” No one dies any death but his own. And you may reflect on this as well: no one dies except on his own day. You lose nothing of your own time; for what you leave behind belongs to someone else. Farewell.note

After a long interval I have seen your Pompeii. I was brought face to face with my youth again. Whatever I had done there as a young man, I felt I could still do, and had done only a little while ago.

We have sailed past life, Lucilius. At sea, as our Virgil says, “lands and cities fall away”; just so, on this voyage of swiftest time, we first lose sight of boyhood, then youth, then whatever lies between young and old, on the border of both, then the best years of old age itself. Last of all, the common end of the human race begins to come into view.note

We think it a reef—how utterly mad we are! It is a harbor: one we must make for someday, and must never refuse. If anyone is carried into it in his earliest years, he has no more cause to complain than a man who has had a quick crossing. For one sailor, as you know, is toyed with and held back by sluggish winds and worn out by the tedium of a dead calm; another is carried through at top speed by a steady gale.

He will consider where he is to live, with whom, how, and what he is to do. He always thinks about the quality of his life, not its quantity. If many troubles come his way that disturb his tranquility, he sets himself free. And he does this not only in the last extremity: as soon as fortune begins to look suspect to him, he looks around carefully to see whether he should stop then and there. He thinks it makes no difference to him whether he brings about his end or receives it, whether it comes later or sooner. He does not fear it as a great loss; no one can lose much from a dripping trickle.

Dying sooner or later is not the point; dying well or badly is. And to die well is to escape the danger of living badly. That is why I think that Rhodian’s words utterly spineless: thrown into a cage by a tyrant and fed like some wild animal, when someone urged him to stop eating, he said, “While a man lives, he may hope for anything.”note

Even if that is true, life is not to be bought at any price. Some things may be great, may be certain, yet I will not come to them by a shameful confession of weakness. Am I to reflect that fortune can do anything to a man who is alive, rather than that fortune can do nothing to a man who knows how to die?

Sometimes, though, even if certain death is at hand and he knows his execution has been decided, the wise man will not lend a hand to his own punishment—though he would lend it for his own sake. It is folly to die from fear of dying. Someone is coming to kill you. Wait for him. Why get in first? Why take on the management of someone else’s cruelty? Do you begrudge your executioner his work, or are you sparing him the trouble?

Socrates could have ended his life by fasting and died of starvation rather than poison. Yet he spent thirty days in prison awaiting death—not in the belief that anything might still happen, or that so long a time left room for many hopes, but to submit himself to the laws, and to let his friends enjoy the last of Socrates. What could have been more foolish than to despise death but fear poison?

Scribonia, a woman of dignity, was the aunt of Drusus Libo, a young man as stupid as he was well-born, whose hopes were higher than anyone could have hoped for in that age, or he himself in any age. He had been carried home ill from the Senate in a litter, with a far from crowded funeral procession—for all his relatives had undutifully abandoned him, as no longer a defendant but a corpse—and he began to deliberate whether to take his own life or wait for death. Scribonia said to him: “What pleasure is there in doing someone else’s work?” She did not persuade him; he laid hands on himself, and not without reason. For a man who is going to die in two or three days at his enemy’s pleasure is, if he goes on living, doing someone else’s work.note

So you cannot lay down a general rule on whether, when an outside force announces death, one should anticipate it or wait for it. Many considerations can pull either way. If one death comes with torture and the other is simple and easy, why not seize the second? Just as I will choose a ship when I am about to sail, or a house when I am about to settle somewhere, so I will choose a death when I am about to leave life.

Besides, just as a longer life is not necessarily better, a longer death is certainly worse. In nothing should we humor the mind more than in death. Let it go out by the way its impulse has chosen: whether it reaches for the sword, or the noose, or some draught that takes over the veins, let it go on and break the chains of slavery. Everyone must make his life acceptable to others as well; his death, only to himself. The best death is the one you like.

It is foolish to think: “Someone will say I acted without enough courage, someone else too rashly, someone that there was a braver kind of death.” Won’t you realize that the decision in your hands is one that reputation has nothing to do with? Look to this one thing: snatching yourself away from fortune as fast as you can. Otherwise there will always be people who think badly of what you did.

Should I wait for the cruelty of disease, or of man, when I can go out through the midst of torments and shake off my troubles? This is the one reason we cannot complain about life: it holds no one back. Human affairs are well arranged in this, that no one is wretched except by his own fault. You like it? Live. You don’t? You may go back where you came from.

To relieve a headache you have often had blood let. To reduce the body, a vein is opened. There is no need to split the chest open with a huge wound: a lancet opens the way to that great freedom, and a pinprick buys freedom from care. What is it, then, that makes us sluggish and inert? None of us reflects that some day he must move out of this dwelling. So old tenants are kept in place by fondness for the house and by habit, even when they are badly treated.

Do you want to be free where this body is concerned? Live in it as if you were about to move out. Keep in view that someday you will have to give up this companionship, and you will be braver when you have to leave. But how will their own end come to mind for those who crave everything without end?

There is nothing we need to rehearse so much. Other things we may practice for nothing. The mind was prepared against poverty—and the wealth stayed. We armed ourselves to despise pain—and the good fortune of a sound, healthy body never demanded a test of that virtue. We taught ourselves to bear the loss of those we lose bravely—and fortune kept alive everyone we loved. But for this one thing, a day will come that demands its use.

You need not think that only great men have had the strength to break through the bars of human servitude. You need not judge that no one but Cato could do it—Cato, who tore out with his hand the soul he had failed to release with the sword. Men of the lowest station have escaped to safety with a mighty effort; and when they were not allowed to die at their convenience or to choose their instruments of death as they wished, they snatched up whatever lay at hand, and by their own force made weapons of things harmless by nature.

Not long ago, at a training school for beast-fighters, one of the Germans, who was being readied for the morning show, withdrew to relieve himself—the only privacy he was allowed without a guard. There he took the stick with a sponge attached that is kept for cleaning oneself, rammed the whole thing down his throat, blocked his windpipe, and choked the breath out of himself. That was an insult to death. Yes, indeed—not very clean, and not very decent. But what is more foolish than to be fastidious about how one dies?note

What a brave man! How worthy to be given his choice of fate! How bravely he would have used a sword, how boldly he would have flung himself into the depths of the sea or off a sheer cliff! Stripped of everything, he still found a way to supply himself both with death and with a weapon—so that you may know that nothing delays us from dying but the will. Let each judge the deed of this most spirited man as he sees fit, so long as this is agreed: the filthiest death is to be preferred to the cleanest slavery.

Since I have begun using lowly examples, I will keep on. Everyone will demand more of himself if he sees that this thing can be despised even by the most despised. We think the Catos and the Scipios, and the others we are used to hearing of with admiration, are beyond imitation. I will now show that this virtue has as many examples in the beast-fighters’ school as among the leaders of the civil war.

Not long ago a man was being carried under guard to the morning show. As if nodding off with drowsiness, he let his head sink until he thrust it between the spokes, and he kept himself on his seat until the turning wheel broke his neck. By the very cart that was carrying him to his punishment, he escaped.

Nothing stops a man who wants to break out and leave. Nature keeps us in an open prison. Let the man whose circumstances allow it look around for a gentle way out. Let the one who has many means at hand of claiming his freedom make his choice and consider by which he may best be set free. Let the one for whom the opportunity is hard to find seize whatever is nearest as the best, however unheard of, however new. He who does not lack courage will not lack ingenuity for dying.

Do you see how even the lowest slaves, once pain has goaded them, rouse themselves and outwit the tightest guard? That man is great who has not only ordered death for himself but invented it. I promised you more examples from the same games.

At the second staged sea battle, one of the foreign fighters plunged the whole spear he had been given for use against his opponents into his own throat. “Why,” he said, “why have I not long since escaped all this torment, all this mockery? Why should I wait for death with a weapon in my hand?” This was a finer spectacle by as muchnote

as it is more honorable for men to learn to die than to kill. What, then? What desperate and condemned men have, will those lack who have been equipped against such misfortunes by long reflection and by reason, the mistress of all things? Reason teaches us that the approaches to fate are many but the end is the same, and that it makes no difference where what is coming begins.

That same reason advises you to die as you please, if you may; if not, as you can, and to seize on whatever comes to hand for doing violence to yourself. It is wicked to live by plunder; but to die by seizing whatever you can is the finest thing of all. Farewell.

You keep consulting me about particular matters, forgetting that a vast sea separates us. Since much of good advice depends on timing, it is bound to happen that my opinion on some questions reaches you when the opposite course is already better. For advice is fitted to circumstances, and our circumstances are carried along—no, whirled along. So advice ought to be born on the day; even that is too slow: it should be born, as they say, on the spot. But I will show you how it may be found.

Whenever you want to know what to avoid or what to seek, look to the highest good, the goal of your whole life. Everything we do must agree with that. No one will arrange the details unless he has already set before himself the sum of his life. No painter, however ready his colors, will produce a likeness unless he has already settled what he wants to paint. We go wrong because we all deliberate about the parts of life, and no one deliberates about the whole.

Some people, moreover, happen not to know that they know certain things. Just as we often look for people who are standing beside us, so, for the most part, we fail to see that the goal of the highest good lies right next to us. You will not need many words or a long detour to grasp what the highest good is: it should be pointed out with a finger, so to speak, not scattered over many things. What is the point of breaking it into little pieces, when you can say: the highest good is what is honorable? And, more surprising still: the only good is what is honorable; all other goods are false and counterfeit.

If you convince yourself of this and come to love virtue passionately—for merely loving her is too little—then whatever she has touched will be lucky and blessed for you, however it looks to others. Being tortured, provided you lie there calmer than your torturer; being ill, provided you do not curse fortune or give in to the disease—in short, everything that seems evil to others will be tamed and will turn into good, if you rise above it. Let this be clear: nothing is good except what is honorable; and all hardships will rightly be called goods, once virtue has made them honorable.

Many think we promise more than the human condition allows—and not without reason, for they are looking at the body. Let them turn back to the mind, and they will soon measure man by God. Lift yourself up, Lucilius, best of men, and leave that elementary school of the philosophers, who reduce the grandest of subjects to syllables and who drag the mind down and wear it out by teaching trivia. You will become like those who discovered these truths, not those who teach them and set about making philosophy seem difficult rather than great.

Socrates, who brought all of philosophy back to conduct, and said that the highest wisdom was to distinguish good from evil, said: “Follow them, if I have any authority with you, so that you may be happy; and let someone think you a fool. Let anyone who likes insult and injure you; you will still suffer nothing, provided virtue is with you. If you want to be happy,” he said, “if you want in good faith to be a good man, let someone despise you.” No one will achieve this unless he has made all goods equal, since there is no good without the honorable, and the honorable is equal in all things.

“What, then? Is there no difference between Cato’s winning the praetorship and his defeat? No difference whether Cato is beaten in the battle line at Pharsalus or wins?” Was this good of his, by which he could not be beaten even when his side was beaten, equal to the good by which he would have returned victorious to his homeland and settled the peace? Why should it not be equal? For it is the same virtue by which bad fortune is overcome and good fortune set in order. And virtue cannot become greater or smaller; it has one stature.note

“But Gnaeus Pompey will lose his army; that finest ornament of the Republic, the nobility, and the front rank of Pompey’s party, the Senate in arms, will be crushed in a single battle; and the ruin of so great an empire will burst apart across the whole world: some of it will fall in Egypt, some in Africa, some in Spain. The wretched Republic will not even be granted the mercy of falling once.”

Let it all happen. Let Juba be helped neither by his knowledge of the country in his own kingdom nor by the stubborn courage of his people fighting for their king; let the loyalty of the people of Utica, broken by misfortune, fail as well; let the good luck of his name desert Scipio in Africa. Long ago provision was made that Cato should come to no harm.note

“Still, he was beaten.” Count this, too, among Cato’s electoral defeats: he will bear it with as great a spirit that something stood between him and victory as that something stood between him and the praetorship. On the day he lost the election, he played games; on the night he was to die, he read. Losing the praetorship and losing his life were all one to him; he had convinced himself that whatever happened must be borne.

Why should he not bear a change of government with a brave and even mind? For what is exempt from the danger of change? Not the earth, not the sky, not this whole fabric of all things, though it is guided by God’s hand. It will not always keep this order; some day will throw it out of its present course.

All things move in their fixed times: they must be born, grow, and be extinguished. Whatever you see running its course above us, and these things among which we are set and on which we stand as if on the most solid ground, will be worn away and will cease. Nothing is without its old age. Nature sends all these things to the same place, though at unequal intervals. Whatever exists will cease to exist—yet it will not perish, but be dissolved.

To us, being dissolved means perishing, for we look only at what is nearest. The dull mind, which has enslaved itself to the body, does not look further ahead. Otherwise it would bear its own end, and the end of those it loves, more bravely, if it hoped that life and death, like everything else, take turns: that what is composed is dissolved, and what is dissolved is composed, and that the eternal art of God, who governs all things, is at work in this.

So Marcus Cato, when he has run through the ages in his mind, will say: “The whole human race, present and future, is condemned to death. All the cities that hold power anywhere in the world, and all that are the great glories of foreign empires—one day people will ask where they stood, and they will be swept away by various kinds of destruction. Some will be demolished by wars; others will be consumed by idleness, by peace turned to sloth, and by luxury, the ruin of great wealth. All these fertile plains will be hidden by a sudden flood of the sea, or carried off as the ground subsides and slides into a sudden chasm. Why, then, should I be indignant or grieve, if I go a tiny moment ahead of the common fate?”

A great mind should obey God and suffer without hesitation whatever the law of the universe commands. Either it is released into a better life, to dwell in greater light and peace among the divine, or at any rate, without any harm to itself, it will be mingled again with nature and return to the whole. So for Marcus Cato an honorable life is not a greater good than an honorable death, since virtue admits no increase. Socrates used to say that truth and virtue were the same. Just as truth does not grow, neither does virtue: it has its full measure; it is complete.

So you need not be surprised that goods are equal—both those to be chosen deliberately and those that circumstances have brought. For if you admit this inequality, and count bravely enduring torture among the lesser goods, you will also count it among evils. You will call Socrates unhappy in prison, Cato unhappy as he reopened his wounds more boldly than he had made them, and Regulus the most wretched of all as he paid the penalty for keeping faith even with his enemies. Yet no one, not even the softest of men, has dared to say this. They deny that he was happy—but they deny too that he was wretched.

The philosophers of the Old Academy admit that a man is happy even amid such torments, but not perfectly or fully. That cannot be accepted at all. Unless he is happy, he is not in possession of the highest good. And the highest good has no rung above it—provided virtue is in it, provided adversity does not diminish virtue, provided virtue remains unharmed even when the body is crushed. And it does remain. For by virtue I mean something spirited and lofty, spurred on by whatever assails it.note

This spirit, which young men of noble nature often put on when the beauty of something honorable has struck them, so that they despise everything that chance can bring—this spirit wisdom will surely pour into us and pass on to us. It will convince us that the only good is the honorable; that it can be neither relaxed nor tightened, any more than you can bend the ruler by which we usually test what is straight. Whatever you alter in it is an injury to straightness.

We will say the same of virtue, then: it too is straight; it admits no bending. How can something already rigid be stretched any tighter? Virtue judges all things; nothing judges virtue. If it cannot itself become straighter, neither are the things done by it straighter one than another. They must correspond to it; so they are equal.

“What?” you say. “Reclining at a banquet and being tortured are equal?” Does this seem strange to you? You may be more surprised at this: reclining at a banquet is an evil, and being on the rack a good, if the first is done shamefully and the second honorably. It is not the material that makes these things good or evil, but virtue. Wherever virtue has appeared, all things are of the same measure and value.

At this point the man who judges everyone’s mind by his own is shaking his fists in my face, because I say that the goods of one who judges honorably and of one who faces danger honorably are equal; because I say that the good of the man who celebrates a triumph is equal to that of the man paraded before his chariot, unconquered in spirit. For such people think that whatever they cannot do cannot be done; they pass judgment on virtue from their own weakness.

Why are you surprised if being burned, wounded, killed, or chained does a man good—and is sometimes even welcome? To the self-indulgent, frugality is a punishment; to the lazy, work is a kind of torture; the pampered pity the hardworking; for the idle, studying is torment. In the same way we believe that these things, against which we are all weak, are hard and unbearable, forgetting how many find it torture to go without wine or to be woken at first light. These things are not hard by nature; we are flabby and spineless.

Great matters must be judged with a great mind; otherwise the fault that is ours will seem to be theirs. So certain objects that are perfectly straight look bent and broken to onlookers when they are dipped in water. It matters not only what you see but how; our mind is clouded when it comes to seeing the truth.

Give me a young man unspoiled and lively of mind: he will say that the more fortunate man, in his view, is the one who lifts the whole weight of adversity on an unbending neck, who stands above fortune. It is no wonder not to be shaken in calm weather. Marvel at this instead: that someone is lifted up where everyone is pressed down, and stands where everyone lies fallen.

What is there evil in torture, or in the other things we call adversities? This, I think: that the mind gives way, bends, and collapses. None of these can happen to the wise man. He stands upright under any weight. Nothing makes him smaller; nothing he has to endure displeases him. Whatever can fall on a human being, he does not complain that it has fallen on him. He knows his strength. He knows he was made to bear burdens.

I am not removing the wise man from the ranks of humanity, nor shutting pain away from him as from some rock that admits no feeling. I remember that he is made up of two parts. One is irrational: this is bitten, burned, feels pain. The other is rational: this holds unshaken convictions, is fearless and unconquered. In this lies that highest good of man. Before it is complete, the mind is uncertain and tossed about; once it is perfected, it is immovably stable.

So the beginner, who is on his way to the heights and cultivates virtue, even if he is approaching the perfect good but has not yet put the finishing touch to it, will at times slip backward and relax some of his mental effort. For he has not yet passed beyond uncertainty; he is still on slippery ground. But the happy man, the man of perfected virtue, loves himself most when he has been most bravely tested; and the things others fear, if they are the price of some honorable duty, he not only bears but embraces. He would much rather hear “So much the better a man” than “So much the luckier.”

Now I come to the point your expectation is calling me to. So that our virtue may not seem to wander outside the nature of things: the wise man will tremble, feel pain, and turn pale. For these are all feelings of the body. Where, then, is disaster; where is that true evil? There, surely—if these things drag the mind down, if they bring it to confess itself a slave, if they make it regret itself.

The wise man, it is true, overcomes fortune by virtue; but many who profess wisdom have sometimes been terrified by the slightest threats. Here the fault is ours, for demanding the same from one who is progressing as from the wise man. I am still urging on myself the things I praise; I have not yet convinced myself. And even if I had, I would not yet have them so ready or so well trained that they would rush out to meet every misfortune.

Just as wool takes some dyes at a single dipping, but will not soak up others unless it is steeped and boiled again and again, so other kinds of learning show their results as soon as minds take them in. But this one, unless it has sunk deep and settled for a long time, and has not merely tinted the mind but saturated it, delivers nothing of what it promised.

It can be passed on quickly and in very few words: virtue is the only good; there is certainly no good without virtue; and virtue itself is seated in the better part of us, the rational part. What will this virtue be? A true and unshakable judgment. From it the mind’s impulses will come; by it every impression that stirs an impulse will be made clear.note

It will accord with this judgment to hold that everything virtue has touched is good, and that all such things are equal to one another. Goods of the body are indeed goods for the body, but they are not goods absolutely. They will have some value, but no true worth; they will differ widely among themselves, some lesser, some greater.

Among those who pursue wisdom, too, we must admit there are great differences. One has progressed so far that he dares to raise his eyes against fortune—but not steadily, for they drop, dazzled by its excessive glare. Another has progressed so far that he can meet it face to face—if, that is, he has already reached the summit and is full of confidence.

Things that are imperfect inevitably totter: now they move forward, now they slip back or give way. And they will slip back unless they keep going and keep striving; if they relax at all in their zeal and faithful effort, they must go backward. No one finds his progress where he left it. So let us press on and persevere.

More remains than we have got through; but a great part of progress is wanting to progress. This I know about myself: I want it, and I want it with my whole mind. You too, I see, are fired up and rushing with great momentum toward the finest things. Let us hurry; only then will life be a blessing. Otherwise it is a delay, and a shameful one at that, for people living among foul things. Let us see to it that all our time is our own. But it will not be, unless we first begin to be our own.

When will it be granted us to despise both kinds of fortune? When will it be granted us, with every passion crushed and brought under our control, to utter the cry “I have conquered”? Whom have I conquered, you ask? Not the Persians, nor the farthest Medes, nor any warlike people beyond the Dahae, but greed, ambition, and the fear of death, which has conquered the conquerors of nations. Farewell.note

The question you put to me was once clear to me by itself, so thoroughly had I learned the subject. But I have not tested my memory for a long time, so it does not follow me easily. I feel that what happens to scrolls whose pages have stuck together from disuse has happened to me: the mind must be unrolled, and whatever has been deposited in it must be shaken out now and then, so that it is ready whenever need demands. So let us put this off for now, for it calls for much work and much care. As soon as I expect to stay longer in one place, I will take it in hand.

For some things you can write even in a light carriage; others need a couch, leisure, and privacy. Nevertheless, even on busy days like these something should be done—and on every one of them. For new occupations will never stop coming: we sow them, and so from one spring several more. Then we grant ourselves postponements: “When I have finished this, I will apply myself wholeheartedly,” and “If I settle this annoying business, I will devote myself to study.”

Philosophy is not something to do when you have free time. Everything else must be neglected so that we may attend to this, for which no amount of time is long enough, even if life stretches from boyhood to the farthest limits of the human span. It makes little difference whether you abandon philosophy or interrupt it; for it does not stay where it was broken off, but—like things that snap apart when stretched—it runs back all the way to its beginning, because it has broken its continuity. We must resist our occupations; they are not to be untangled but pushed away. No time is unsuitable for wholesome study; and yet many do not study amid the very things that are the reason for studying.

“Something will crop up to hinder me.” Not, surely, the man whose mind is glad and eager in every business. It is in those still imperfect that happiness is cut to pieces; the wise man’s joy is woven all of a piece. No cause breaks it, no fortune; he is always and everywhere at peace. For he does not depend on anything outside himself, nor wait for the favor of fortune or of men. His happiness is homegrown: it would leave his mind if it had come in from outside; it is born there.

Sometimes something from outside intervenes to remind him of his mortality—but it is slight, the kind of thing that grazes the surface of the skin. Some inconvenience, I say, may brush against him; but that supreme good of his is fixed. This is what I mean: there are some external inconveniences, as sometimes in a strong, sound body there are breakouts of pimples and little sores; but there is no evil deep inside.

This, I say, is the difference between the man of perfected wisdom and the one still progressing: the difference between a healthy man and someone emerging from a severe and prolonged illness, for whom a milder bout passes for health. Unless the latter takes care, he soon grows worse again and falls back into the same state. The wise man cannot relapse, nor even fall ill any more. For the body, good health is temporary: even if the doctor has restored it, he cannot guarantee it, and often he is called out again to the same patient who sent for him. The mind is healed once and for all.

I will tell you how I recognize a healthy mind: if it is content with itself, if it trusts itself, if it knows that all the prayers of mortals, all the favors that are given and sought, carry no weight in a happy life. For whatever can have something added is imperfect; whatever can have something taken away is not lasting. The man whose joy is to last should rejoice in what is his own. Everything the crowd gapes after ebbs and flows. fortune gives nothing to own outright. But even these gifts of chance give pleasure when reason has tempered and blended them. It is reason that makes even external things agreeable—things that the greedy use without enjoyment.

Attalus used to use this image: “Have you ever seen a dog snapping with open jaws at scraps of bread or meat thrown by its master? Whatever it catches, it gulps down whole at once, and always gapes in hope of the next. It is the same with us: whatever fortune tosses us as we wait, we swallow immediately without any pleasure, alert and eager to snatch the next.” This does not happen to the wise man; he is full. Even if something comes his way, he calmly receives it and puts it aside.

He enjoys the greatest joy, continuous and his own. Another man has good will and has made progress, but is still far from the summit: he is pushed down and lifted up by turns, now raised to the sky, now brought down to earth. For the untrained and ignorant there is no end to the fall: they drop into that chaos of Epicurus, the void without limit.note

There is also a third kind: those who are playing at the edges of wisdom. They have not reached it, but they have it in sight and, so to speak, within striking distance. These people are not shaken; they do not even drift. They are not yet on dry land, but they are already in harbor.

So, since the gaps between the highest and the lowest are so great, and since even those in the middle are dogged by their own swell—dogged by the grave danger of sliding back into worse—we must not indulge our busy affairs. They must be shut out: once they get in, they will bring in others to take their place. Let us resist them at the start. Better that they never begin than that they have to stop. Farewell.

In my view, people are mistaken who think that those faithfully devoted to philosophy are stubborn and defiant, scorners of magistrates or kings or of those who run public affairs. On the contrary, no one is more grateful to them—and with good reason. For rulers do more for no one than for those who are free to enjoy peaceful leisure.

So those whose aim of living well owes much to public security must honor the author of this good as a parent—far more, in fact, than those restless people who stand in the thick of things. These owe much to their rulers, but they also charge much to their account, and no generosity can ever meet their desires so fully as to satisfy them, for those desires grow as they are filled. Whoever is thinking about getting has forgotten what he got; and greed has no worse evil than that it is ungrateful.

Add, too, that no one engaged in public life looks at how many he has surpassed, only at who has surpassed him. It gives such people less pleasure to see many behind them than pain to see anyone ahead. All ambition has this fault: it never looks back. And it is not only ambition that is restless, but every desire, because it always starts over from where it finished.

But that sincere and upright man who has left the Senate house and the Forum and all public administration, to withdraw to greater things, loves those who make it safe for him to do so. He alone bears them witness without being paid for it, and he owes them a great debt without their knowing it. Just as he reveres and looks up to his teachers, whose kindness led him out of those trackless ways, so he honors those under whose protection he pursues his noble studies.

“But the king protects others with his strength too.” Who denies it? Yet among those who have enjoyed the same calm sea, the one who carried more and costlier cargo on it judges that he owes more to Neptune; a merchant pays his vow more eagerly than a passenger; and among the merchants themselves, the one who carried perfumes and purple and goods worth their weight in gold is more lavishly grateful than the one who had loaded the cheapest wares, fit only for ballast. In the same way, the blessing of this peace, though it reaches everyone, reaches more deeply those who use it well.

For many of these men in togas find peace more laborious than war. Or do you think that those who spend peace on drunkenness or lust or other vices—vices that would be worth breaking up even by a war—owe as much for it? Unless perhaps you think the wise man so unfair as to judge that he owes nothing personally for goods shared by all. I owe a great deal to the sun and the moon, and they do not rise for me alone. I am personally indebted to the year and to the god who regulates the year, though none of their arrangements was made in my honor.

The foolish greed of mortals distinguishes possession from ownership, and believes nothing its own that is public. But the wise man judges nothing more his own than what he shares with the human race. For these things would not be common unless a part of them belonged to each individual; even the smallest share in something common makes one a partner.

Add, too, that great and true goods are not divided so that only a sliver falls to each person; they come whole to every single one. From a public handout, people carry off only as much as was promised per head. A public banquet, a distribution of meat, anything else that is taken by hand, gets split into portions. But these indivisible goods, peace and freedom, belong as wholly to all as to each.note

So he thinks about who it is that gives him the use and enjoyment of these things—who ensures that the needs of the state do not call him to arms, or to stand watch, or to guard the walls, or to pay the many taxes of war—and he thanks his helmsman. This above all is what philosophy teaches: to owe favors well and to repay them well; and sometimes the repayment is the acknowledgment itself.

He will acknowledge, then, that he owes much to the man whose government and foresight give him rich leisure, control of his own time, and a quiet undisturbed by public business. “O Meliboeus, a god has made this leisure for us: / For he will always be a god to me.”note

If even that leisure owes much to its author—leisure whose greatest gift is this: “He has let my cattle roam, as you see, and let me / Play what I please upon my rustic reed”—how highly should we value this leisure, which is spent among the gods, and which makes us gods?note

That is what I say, Lucilius, and I am calling you to heaven by a shortcut. Sextius used to say that Jupiter has no more power than a good man. Jupiter has more things to give to human beings; but of two good men the richer is not the better, any more than, of two men equally skilled at steering, you would call the better one the man with the bigger and handsomer ship.

In what way does Jupiter surpass the good man? He is good for longer. The wise man thinks no less of himself because his virtues are confined to a shorter span. Just as, of two wise men, the one who died older is not happier than the one whose virtue ended within fewer years, so God does not surpass the wise man in happiness, even if he surpasses him in age.

Virtue is not greater for lasting longer. Jupiter has everything—but of course he has handed it over for others to have. The only use of it that belongs to him is this: he is the cause of everyone’s using it. The wise man sees everything in the hands of others and despises it with as calm a mind as Jupiter; and he thinks the more of himself because Jupiter cannot use these things, while the wise man does not want to.

So let us believe Sextius when he points out the most beautiful road and cries: “This is the way ‘to the stars’—the way of thrift, the way of self-control, the way of courage. The gods are not disdainful, not envious; they let you in, and as you climb, they hold out a hand.”note

Are you surprised that a human being goes to the gods? God comes to human beings—no, nearer still, he comes into human beings. No mind is good without God. Divine seeds are scattered in human bodies. If a good farmer receives them, they come up like their source and grow to equal what they sprang from; if a bad one, then, just like barren and marshy soil, he kills them, and then produces weeds instead of grain. Farewell.

Your letter delighted me and roused me from my torpor; it also called up my memory, which is now slow and sluggish. Of course, my Lucilius, you are right to count this conviction the greatest instrument of the happy life: that the only good is the honorable. For whoever judges other things to be good falls into fortune’s power and becomes subject to another’s will; whoever has bounded all good within the honorable is happy from within.

This man is grieving for lost children, that one is anxious over sick ones, another is saddened by children who are disgraceful and have suffered some scandal. You will see one tormented by love for another man’s wife, another by love for his own. There will be no lack of people twisted by an electoral defeat; there will be others whom office itself torments.

But the largest crowd of the wretched in the whole mortal population is the one harried by the expectation of death, which looms from every side—for there is no quarter from which it cannot steal up. So, as when moving through enemy country, one must look around this way and that and turn one’s head at every noise. Unless this fear is driven out of the breast, one lives with a pounding heart.

You will meet people driven into exile and stripped of their property. You will meet—the worst kind of want—people poor in the midst of riches. You will meet the shipwrecked, or those who have suffered something like shipwreck: people whom popular anger or envy, a weapon deadly to the best, has scattered while they were unsuspecting and carefree, like a storm that tends to burst out in the very confidence of fair weather, or a sudden thunderbolt whose strike makes even the neighborhood tremble. For just as there anyone standing near the fire is stunned like the one struck, so in misfortunes that come by some violence, disaster crushes one person and fear crushes the rest; and being able to suffer brings as much sorrow as having suffered.

Everyone’s mind is unsettled by the sudden misfortunes of others. As birds are frightened even by the whir of an empty sling, so we are alarmed not only by the blow but by the sound. No one, then, can be happy who has put his trust in this belief. For nothing is happy unless it is fearless; living amid suspicions is living badly.

Whoever has given himself over to chance has made himself a vast and inextricable store of turmoil. There is one road for anyone heading toward safety: to look down on externals and be content with the honorable. For whoever thinks anything better than virtue, or any good besides it, holds open the fold of his robe for whatever fortune scatters, and anxiously waits for her to throw.

Picture this in your mind: Fortune is putting on games and showering honors, riches, and influence on this crowd of mortals. Some of these gifts have been torn apart between the hands of those grabbing for them; some divided in faithless partnerships; some seized at great cost to those they landed on. Some fell to people who were not paying attention; some were lost because they were grabbed at too hard, and knocked away in the very eagerness of the snatching. And no one, not even the one whose snatch succeeded, enjoyed his prize for long. So all the most sensible people, as soon as they see the little presents being brought in, flee the theater, knowing that small things cost dearly. No one comes to blows with a man who is leaving; no one strikes a man on his way out; the brawl is around the prize.note

The same happens with what fortune throws down from above. We poor wretches seethe, we are pulled every which way, we wish we had many hands, we look now this way, now that. The things that provoke our desires seem to be thrown far too slowly; they reach only a few, while everyone is waiting for them.

We want to run and meet them as they fall. We rejoice if we have grabbed something—and some have been cheated by an empty hope of grabbing. We pay for a cheap prize with some great trouble, or we are left empty-handed and deceived. So let us withdraw from these games and make room for the snatchers. Let them gaze up at those goods dangling in the air, and dangle in suspense themselves even more.

Whoever resolves to be happy should hold that the only good is the honorable. For if he thinks there is any other, then, first, he passes a bad judgment on providence, because many misfortunes befall just men, and because whatever it has given us is brief and meager compared with the lifespan of the whole universe.

From this complaining it comes about that we are ungrateful interpreters of the divine: we complain that what falls to us is not permanent, is little, uncertain, and bound to leave. Hence we want neither to live nor to die: hatred of life grips us, and fear of death. Every plan wavers, and no good fortune can fill us. The reason is that we have not reached that immense and unsurpassable good where our wishes must come to rest, since there is no place beyond the highest.

Do you ask why virtue needs nothing? It rejoices in what it has and does not crave what is absent. Whatever is enough is great in its eyes. Depart from this judgment, and neither devotion nor good faith will survive. For whoever wants to show both must endure much of what is called evil, and give up much of what we indulge in as good.

Courage perishes, which must put itself to the test. Greatness of soul perishes, which cannot stand out unless it has despised as trifles everything the crowd longs for as the greatest things. Gratitude perishes, and the repaying of kindness, if we fear hardship, if we know of anything more precious than good faith, if we do not look to what is best.

But to pass over these points: either the things called goods are not goods, or man is happier than God, since God has no use for the things provided for us. Lust has nothing to do with him, nor sumptuous banquets, nor wealth, nor any of the things that bait human beings and lead them on by cheap pleasure. So either it is not incredible that God lacks goods, or the very fact that God lacks them proves they are not goods.

Add that many things that want to pass for goods fall more abundantly to animals than to man. Animals eat with greater appetite, they are not so exhausted by sex, and their strength is greater and steadier. It follows that they are much happier than man. For they live without wickedness, without deceit. They enjoy pleasures that they both take in more fully and have more easily, with no fear of shame or regret.

So consider whether we should call something a good in which God is outdone by man. Let us keep the highest good within the mind. It is debased if it passes from the best part of us to the worst and is transferred to the senses, which are sharper in brute animals. The sum of our happiness must not be placed in the flesh. The true goods are those that reason gives: solid and everlasting, unable to fall, or even to shrink or be diminished.

The rest are goods by opinion. They share the name with the true ones, but the essential quality of a good is not in them. So let them be called “advantages” and—to speak in our own language—“promoted things.” Still, let us know that they are our possessions, not parts of us; let them be with us, but in such a way that we remember they are outside us. Even while they are with us, let them be counted among lowly, subordinate things, over which no one should puff himself up. For what is more foolish than for someone to be pleased with himself for something he did not do himself?note

Let all these things be attached to us, not stuck fast, so that if they are taken away they come off without tearing any part of us. Let us use them, not boast of them, and use them sparingly, as things deposited with us that will soon leave. Whoever has held them without reason has not held them long, for prosperity, unless it is tempered, crushes itself. If he has trusted in the most fleeting goods, he is soon deserted—and even if he is not deserted, he is afflicted. Few have been allowed to set down their good fortune gently; the rest fall along with the things among which they stood high, and the very things that had raised them up drag them down.

So prudence will be called in, to impose a limit or thrift on these things, since license hurls its own riches headlong and runs them down. Nothing immoderate has ever lasted unless reason, the great moderator, has reined it in. The fate of many cities will show you this: their empires fell through luxury in their very prime, and whatever had been won by virtue was ruined by excess. We must fortify ourselves against such disasters. But no wall is impregnable against fortune; let us arm ourselves within. If that part is safe, a man can be attacked, but he cannot be captured.

Do you want to know what this armor is? That he resent nothing that happens to him, and know that the very things that seem to harm him serve to preserve the universe and are among the things that complete the course and work of the world. Let whatever has pleased God please man. Let him admire himself and what is his for this very reason: that he cannot be conquered, that he holds evils themselves beneath him, that by reason—and nothing is stronger than reason—he subdues chance, pain, and injury.

Love reason! Love of it will arm you against the hardest things. Love for their cubs drives wild beasts onto the hunting spears, and their fierceness and headlong charge make them untamable. The desire for glory has sometimes driven young minds to despise sword and fire alike. The mere appearance and shadow of virtue pushes some people to a voluntary death. By as much as reason is braver and steadier than all of these, so much the more forcefully will it make its way through fear and danger themselves.

“You achieve nothing,” someone says, “by denying that there is any good besides the honorable. This fortification will not make you safe and immune from fortune. For you say that dutiful children, a well-ordered country, and good parents are among the goods; you cannot watch these in danger without anxiety. The siege of your country, the death of your children, the enslavement of your parents will shake you.”

I will set out the answer usually given on our behalf against these critics; then I will add what I think should be answered besides. The case is different with things that, when taken away, put some disadvantage in their place. Good health, when ruined, turns into bad; the eyes’ sight, when put out, afflicts us with blindness; when the hamstrings are cut, not only is speed lost, but weakness takes its place. There is no such risk with the things we mentioned just now. 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 undutifulness take their place.

Second, what dies there is not friends or children but bodies. And a good perishes in one way only: if it turns into evil—which nature does not allow, since every virtue and every work of virtue remains uncorrupted. Then again, even if friends have died, even if children have died who were upright and answered their father’s prayers, there is something that can fill their place. You ask what it is? The thing that had made them good as well: virtue.

Virtue leaves no place empty. It fills the whole mind and takes away the longing for everything else; it alone is enough, for the power and source of all goods lie in it. What does it matter if running water is cut off and drains away, as long as the spring it flowed from is safe? You will not say that a life is more just with children alive than with children lost, nor more orderly, nor wiser, nor more honorable; so not better, either. Adding friends does not make one wiser, and losing them does not make one more foolish; so not happier or more wretched either. As long as virtue is safe, you will not feel whatever has gone.

“What then? Is a man not happier surrounded by a crowd of friends and children?” Why should he be? The highest good is neither broken down nor built up; it stays at its own measure, however fortune has behaved. Whether he has been granted a long old age or his life ended short of old age, the measure of the highest good is the same, though the measure of years differs.

Whether you draw a larger or a smaller circle affects its area, not its shape. One may have lasted a long time, while you rubbed out the other at once and dissolved it into the dust it was drawn in; yet both had the same shape. What is right is not measured by size, or number, or time; it can no more be stretched than shrunk. Take an honorable life of a hundred years, cut it down as much as you like, and compress it into a single day: it is just as honorable.

Sometimes virtue spreads out widely: it governs kingdoms, cities, provinces; it makes laws, cultivates friendships, distributes duties among relatives and children. Sometimes it is hemmed in by the narrow limits of poverty, exile, bereavement. Yet it is no smaller if it is brought down from a loftier height to private life, from a royal station to a humble one, or if it contracts from a broad public jurisdiction into the narrow space of a house or a corner.

It is just as great even when it has withdrawn into itself, shut out on every side. For it is still the mark of a great and upright spirit, of perfect prudence, of unswerving justice. So it is equally happy. For happiness is lodged in one place only, in the mind itself—great, stable, tranquil—and it cannot be produced without knowledge of things divine and human.

Now comes the answer I said I would give myself. The wise man is not crushed by the loss of children or of friends. He bears their death with the same mind with which he awaits his own. He no more fears his own death than he grieves over theirs. For virtue consists in consistency: all its works agree and harmonize with it. That harmony is lost if the mind, which ought to be lofty, is brought low by grief or longing. All trepidation and anxiety is dishonorable, and so is sluggishness in any action. For the honorable is free from care and unencumbered; it is fearless; it stands ready for battle.

“What then? Will he feel nothing like distress? Will his color not change, his face not be disturbed, his limbs not grow cold?”—and whatever else happens not at the mind’s command but by some unthinking impulse of nature. I grant it. But he will keep the same conviction: that none of these things is an evil, or worth a sound mind’s giving way. Whatever has to be done, he does boldly and promptly.

One might say that this is the special mark of folly: to do whatever it does sluggishly and grudgingly, to drive the body one way and the mind another, and to be torn between the most opposite impulses. For folly is despised for the very things it prides itself on and admires, and it does not willingly do even the things it boasts of. And if it fears some evil, then while it waits, it is weighed down by it just as if it had come; whatever it fears to suffer, it already suffers through fear.

In the body, signs run ahead of an illness that is settling in: a limp sluggishness, weariness without any exertion, yawning, a shiver running through the limbs. In the same way a weak mind is shaken by evils long before it is overwhelmed by them. It anticipates them and falls before its time. But what is madder than to be tormented by the future, and, instead of saving oneself for torment, to summon miseries and draw them near?

If you cannot dispel them, it is best to postpone them. Do you want to know that no one should be tortured by the future? Anyone who hears that he must undergo torture fifty years from now is not disturbed—unless he has leapt over the time in between and plunged himself into an anxiety that lies a lifetime ahead. In the same way it happens that minds that like being sick, and go hunting for reasons to grieve, are saddened by things long past and forgotten. What is past and what is to come are both absent; we feel neither. And there is no pain except from what you feel. Farewell.

You complain that the letters I send you are not written with enough care. But who speaks with care, unless he wants to speak affectedly? I want my letters to be like my conversation would be if we were sitting or walking together: unlabored and easy. They have nothing forced or artificial about them.

If it were possible, I would rather show you what I feel than tell it. Even if I were arguing a case, I would not stamp my foot or throw my arm about or raise my voice; I would leave those things to orators, content to have conveyed my thoughts to you without either dressing them up or cheapening them.

This one thing I would like to prove to you fully: that I feel everything I say, and not only feel it but love it. People kiss a lover one way and their children another; yet even in this embrace, so pure and restrained, the affection shows plainly enough. Heavens, I do not want what is said about such great matters to be thin and dry; philosophy does not renounce talent. Still, one should not spend much effort on words.

Let this be the sum of our purpose: let us say what we feel, and feel what we say; let our speech agree with our life. That man has kept his promise who is the same whether you see him or hear him.

We will see what sort of man he is, how great a man: let him be one and the same. Let our words not delight but help. If, however, eloquence can come to someone without anxious effort, if it is ready to hand or costs little, let it be present and accompany the finest subjects. Let it be such as to display the subject rather than itself. Other arts belong wholly to cleverness; here the business of the soul is at stake.

A sick man does not look for an eloquent doctor. But if it happens that the same man who can cure him also speaks elegantly about what must be done, he will take it in good part. Still, he will have no reason to congratulate himself on having found a doctor who is also articulate. It is as if a skilled helmsman were also handsome.

Why tickle my ears? Why entertain me? There is other work to do: I need to be cauterized, cut, put on a diet. That is what you were called in for. You have to treat a disease that is old, serious, and widespread. You have as much on your hands as a doctor in a plague. Are you busy with words? Be glad right now if you are equal to the facts. When will you learn all there is to learn? When will you fix what you have learned so firmly in yourself that it cannot slip away? When will you put it to the test? For with these things, unlike others, it is not enough to have committed them to memory; they must be tried out in practice. The happy man is not the one who knows them, but the one who does them.

“What then? Are there no steps below him? Is there a sheer drop just below wisdom?” No, in my view. For the one who is making progress is still counted among the fools, yet he is separated from them by a great distance. Among those making progress, too, there are great differences. As some hold, they are divided into three classes:

first are those who do not yet have wisdom but have already taken their stand near it. Yet even what is near is still outside. You ask who these are? Those who have already laid aside all passions and vices, and have learned what they had to embrace; but their confidence is still untested. They do not yet have their good in use, yet they can no longer fall back into what they have escaped. They have already reached the point from which there is no slipping back, but they are not yet clear about this themselves. As I remember writing in a certain letter, “they do not know that they know.” They have already been granted the enjoyment of their good, but not yet confidence in it.

Some describe this class of those making progress, which I have been speaking of, as having already escaped the diseases of the mind but not yet the passions, and as still standing on slippery ground, since no one is beyond the danger of vice except one who has shaken it off entirely. And no one has shaken it off except one who has taken on wisdom in its place.note

I have often said before what the difference is between diseases of the mind and passions; now too I will remind you. Diseases are vices that are ingrained and hardened, like greed and ambition; they have entwined the mind far too tightly and have become its permanent evils. To define it briefly, disease is a persistent judgment in error, that things are greatly to be sought which are only slightly to be sought. Or, if you prefer, let us define it this way: to strain too hard after things that should be sought slightly or not at all, or to set a high value on things that deserve some value or none.

Passions are objectionable movements of the mind, sudden and agitated. When they are frequent and neglected, they produce disease, just as a single head cold, not yet habitual, produces a cough, while a constant, chronic one produces consumption. So those who have made the most progress are beyond the diseases; but, though very close to perfection, they still feel passions.

The second class consists of those who have laid aside both the greatest evils of the mind and the passions, but in such a way that they do not have a secure hold on their freedom from care. For they can slip back into the same state.

The third class is beyond many great vices, but not beyond all. It has escaped greed, but still feels anger; it is no longer troubled by lust, but is still troubled by ambition; it no longer craves, but it still fears. And even in its fear it is firm enough against some things but gives way to others. It despises death but dreads pain.

Let us give this point some thought. We will be doing well if we are admitted to this group. The second grade is reached through great natural gifts and great, sustained intensity of study; but even this third shade is not to be despised. Think how many evils you see around you; look how no crime lacks a precedent, how much ground wickedness gains every day, how much wrong is done in public and in private. You will realize we achieve enough if we are not among the worst.

“But I hope,” you say, “that I can rise to a higher rank as well.” I would wish this for us rather than promise it. We are preoccupied. We strive for virtue while pulled apart by vices. I am ashamed to say it: we cultivate the honorable when we have spare time. But what a great reward awaits us if we break off our busy affairs and our most tenacious evils! Neither desire nor fear will drive us.

Unshaken by terrors, uncorrupted by pleasures, we will fear neither death nor the gods. We will know that death is not an evil, and that the gods do no evil. What harms is as weak as what is harmed; the best things have no power to harm.

If we ever escape from these dregs to that sublime and lofty height, there await us tranquility of mind and, once our errors are driven out, complete freedom. You ask what that is? To fear neither men nor gods; to want nothing shameful and nothing excessive; to have supreme power over oneself. It is a priceless good to become one’s own. Farewell.

You threaten to be my enemy if I keep from you anything I do day to day. See how openly I live with you: I will confide even this. I am attending a philosopher’s lectures. In fact, this is the fifth day I have been going to his school and hearing him lecture from the eighth hour on. “A fine age for it!” you say. Why not a fine age? What is more foolish than refusing to learn because you have not learned for a long time?note

“What then? Am I to do the same as the dandies and the young men?” I am doing well if this is the only thing unbecoming to my old age. This school admits people of every age. “Are we to grow old just to trail after the young?” Shall I go to the theater as an old man, have myself carried to the circus, let no pair of gladiators fight it out without me—and then blush to go to a philosopher?note

One should go on learning as long as one does not know—and, if we believe the proverb, as long as one lives. And nothing fits this better than the thing itself: as long as you live, keep learning how to live. Still, I also teach something there. You ask what I teach? That even an old man must learn.

But I am ashamed of the human race every time I enter the lecture hall. As you know, anyone heading for Metronax’s house has to go right past the theater of the Neapolitans. That place is packed, and people judge with tremendous zeal who is a good pipe player; the Greek trumpeter and the herald also draw a crowd. But in the place where the question is what makes a good man, where one learns to be a good man, very few sit, and most people think these few have nothing worthwhile to do; they are called idle fools. Let that mockery fall on me. The insults of the ignorant must be heard with equanimity, and whoever is heading toward the honorable must despise contempt itself.note

Go on, Lucilius, and hurry, so that the same thing does not happen to you as to me—learning as an old man. Or rather, hurry all the more because you have only now taken up a subject you could scarcely master even by old age. “How much progress will I make?” you ask. As much as you attempt.

What are you waiting for? No one has become wise by chance. Money will come of its own accord; office will be offered; influence and rank may be thrust on you; but virtue will not fall into your lap. It is not come to know through light effort or small labor; but it is worth all the labor for one who will gain every good at a stroke. For there is only one good, the honorable; in all the things that reputation favors, you will find nothing true, nothing certain.

But I will tell you why the only good is the honorable, since you judge that I did not pursue the point far enough in my previous letter, and think the doctrine was more praised to you than proved; and I will condense what has been said.

Everything is valued for its own particular good. A vine is commended for its fruitfulness and the flavor of its wine, a stag for its speed. With pack animals, you ask how strong their backs are, since their one use is carrying loads. In a dog, keenness of scent comes first if it must track wild animals, speed if it must catch them, boldness if it must bite and attack. In each thing, what ought to be best is the quality it is born for, the one by which it is judged.

What is best in a human being? Reason. By it he outstrips the animals and follows the gods. So perfected reason is the good proper to him; everything else he shares with animals and plants. He is strong—so are lions. He is handsome—so are peacocks. He is swift—so are horses. I am not saying he is beaten in all these things; I am not asking what is greatest in him, but what is his own. He has a body—so do trees. He has impulse and voluntary movement—so do beasts and worms. He has a voice—but how much clearer is a dog’s, how much shriller an eagle’s, how much deeper a bull’s, how much sweeter and more nimble a nightingale’s!

What is proper to a human being? Reason. When it is right and complete, it fills up a human being’s happiness. So if everything that has perfected its own good is praiseworthy and has reached the goal of its nature, and a human being’s own good is reason, then if he has perfected it, he is praiseworthy and has reached the goal of his nature. This perfected reason is called virtue, and it is the same as the honorable.

So the only good in a human being is the one thing that belongs to a human being alone. For we are not now asking what the good is, but what the good of a human being is. If nothing else belongs to a human being but reason, this will be his one good—but one to be weighed against all the rest. If someone is bad, I think he will be condemned; if good, I think he will be approved. So that is the first and only thing in a human being by which he is both approved and condemned.

You don’t doubt that this is a good; you doubt whether it is the only good. If someone has everything else—health, wealth, many ancestral portraits, a crowded front hall—but is admittedly bad, you will condemn him. Likewise, if someone has none of the things I have listed, lacks money, a throng of clients, noble birth and a long line of grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but is admittedly good, you will approve of him. So this is the one good of a human being: whoever has it deserves praise even if he is stripped of everything else; whoever lacks it is condemned and rejected amid an abundance of everything else.note

What holds for things holds for people. A ship is called good not because it is painted in costly colors, or has a silver or gold ram, or its guardian image is carved in ivory, or it is laden with treasure and royal riches, but because it is steady and firm, its seams tight and keeping out the water, sturdy enough to bear the onslaught of the sea, obedient to the helm, swift, and unbothered by the wind.

You will call a sword good not because its belt is gilded or its scabbard studded with gems, but because its edge is fine for cutting and its point will break through any defense. With a carpenter’s rule, we ask not how handsome it is but how straight. Each thing is praised for the quality it is acquired for—the one that is its own.

So in a human being, too, it makes no difference how much land he plows, how much money he lends at interest, how many people call on him in the morning, how costly the couch he reclines on, how translucent the cup he drinks from—only how good he is. And he is good if his reason is fully developed, upright, and adapted to what his nature wants.

This is called virtue; this is the honorable and the one and only good of a human being. For since reason alone perfects a human being, reason alone, when perfected, makes him happy; and the one thing that alone makes him happy is the one good. We also call good the things that proceed from virtue and are bound up with it—that is, all its works. But virtue itself is the one good, because there is no good without it.

If every good lies in the mind, then whatever strengthens, raises, and enlarges the mind is good; and virtue makes the mind stronger, loftier, and larger. Everything else that inflames our desires also weighs the mind down and weakens it, and when it seems to lift the mind up, it only puffs it up and fools it with a great deal of emptiness. So the only good is what will make the mind better.

All the actions of a whole life are governed by regard for the honorable and the shameful; by these the reasoning about what to do and not do is steered. Let me explain. A good man will do what he thinks it honorable to do, even if it will be laborious; he will do it even if it will be costly; he will do it even if it will be dangerous. Conversely, what is shameful he will not do, even if it brings money, or pleasure, or power. Nothing will scare him away from the honorable; nothing will lure him to the shameful.

So if he will follow the honorable in every case and avoid the shameful in every case, and in every act of his life keep these two in view—no good but the honorable, no evil but the shameful—if virtue alone is incorruptible and alone holds its course, then virtue is the one good, and nothing can now happen to it that would make it cease to be good. It has escaped the danger of change. Folly creeps up toward wisdom; wisdom does not slide back into folly.

I said, if you happen to remember, that many people have trampled on what the crowd desires and dreads, driven by a thoughtless impulse. Men have been found who would put their hand into the flames; whose laughter the torturer could not interrupt; who shed no tear at their children’s funeral; who met death without trembling. Love, anger, desire have courted danger. If a brief stubbornness of mind, roused by some goad, can do this, how much more can virtue, whose strength does not come from impulse or suddenness but is steady, and whose vigor never fails.note

It follows that things often despised by the thoughtless and always by the wise are neither good nor evil. So virtue itself is the one good, striding proudly between this fortune and that, with great contempt for both.

If you accept the belief that anything besides the honorable is good, every virtue will be in trouble. For none can be maintained if it looks to anything outside itself. And if that happens, it conflicts with reason, from which the virtues come, and with truth, which does not exist without reason. And any belief that conflicts with truth is false.

You must grant that a good man is supremely devoted to the gods. So whatever happens to him he will bear calmly, for he will know it has happened by the divine law by which the universe moves forward. If so, his one good will be the honorable; for that consists in obeying the gods, not flaring up at sudden blows, not bewailing his lot, but patiently accepting fate and doing what he is ordered.

If anything other than the honorable is good, we will be pursued by greed for life, and greed for the things that equip life—which is unbearable, endless, and aimless. So the only good is the honorable, which has a limit.

We said that if things the gods have no use for, such as money and public honors, are goods, then human life will be happier than the life of the gods. Now add this: if souls, once released from the body, survive, a happier state awaits them than they have while living in the body. Yet if the things we use through the body are goods, the souls will be worse off once set free—and it is beyond belief that souls shut up and besieged are happier than souls set free and given to the universe.

I had also said that if the things that fall to human beings and brute animals alike are goods, then brute animals too will live a happy life—which is utterly impossible. Everything must be endured for the sake of the honorable; and that would not be so if there were any other good than the honorable. Though I pursued these points at greater length in my previous letter, here I have compressed them and run through them briefly.

But such a view 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 only patiently but gladly? If you would, there is no other good. For you are giving up everything to have this. See how great the power of the honorable is: you will die for the commonwealth, even if you are to do so at once, the moment you know you must.

Sometimes a great joy is drawn from a noble deed even in a short, brief moment; and though no fruit of the finished act reaches the man who has died and passed out of human affairs, still the mere contemplation of the act to come delights him. The brave and just man, when he sets before himself the rewards of his death—his country’s freedom, the safety of all, for whom he is paying with his life—is in the height of pleasure and enjoys his own danger.

But even the man robbed of this joy, which comes from carrying out his greatest and last act, will leap into death without a moment’s hesitation, content to do what is right and dutiful. Now set before him many arguments to dissuade him; tell him, “Your deed will soon be forgotten, and your fellow citizens will think little of it and feel little gratitude.” He will answer you: “All that lies outside my act. I consider the act itself. I know that this is honorable. So wherever it leads and calls, I come.”

This, then, is the one good, and not only the perfected mind perceives it, but also the noble mind of good disposition. Everything else is trivial and changeable. That is why one owns such things anxiously. Even if favoring fortune has heaped them all on one man, they sit heavy on their owners and always weigh them down, and sometimes crush them.

None of those you see dressed in purple is happy, any more than those to whom the play assigns a scepter and cloak on the stage: they strut before the audience broad-shouldered and on high boots, but the moment they exit, the boots come off and they return to their own height. None of these men whom wealth and honors set on a higher pedestal is great. Then why does he seem great? You are measuring him along with his base. A person of short stature is not tall, even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus will keep its size even if it stands in a well.note

This is the error we labor under; this is how we are deceived: we value no one by what he is, but add to him the trappings he is adorned with. Yet when you want to make a true estimate of a person and know what he is like, look at him naked. Let him lay aside his inheritance, lay aside his honors and fortune’s other lies; let him strip off his very body. Look at his mind—what kind it is, how great it is, whether its greatness is borrowed or its own.

If he looks at flashing swords with unflinching eyes; if he knows it makes no difference to him whether his life leaves through his mouth or through his throat, call him happy. If, when he is threatened with bodily tortures, whether they come by chance or by the injustice of the powerful; if he hears of chains and exile and the empty terrors of human minds, untroubled, and says: “No face of hardship, / O maiden, rises new or unforeseen for me; / I have anticipated all and run through them in my mind. You announce these things today; I have always announced them to myself, and prepared a human being for the human lot.”note