IV

Seneca to his Lucilius, greeting. Persist as you have begun, and hurry as much as you can, so that you may be able to enjoy a corrected and well-ordered mind for a longer time. You will indeed enjoy it even while you are correcting it, even while you are setting it in order; yet that other pleasure is of a different kind, the one that comes from contemplating a mind pure and bright, free from every stain.

Surely you remember how much joy you felt when you laid aside the bordered toga, put on the toga of manhood, and were led down into the forum. Expect a greater joy when you have laid aside your childish mind and philosophy has enrolled you among men. For what still remains is not childhood, but, what is more serious, childishness; and this is even worse, because we possess the authority of old men, but the faults of boys, and not only of boys but of infants: boys fear trifles, infants fear what is unreal, and we fear both.

Only make progress: you will understand that certain things are less to be feared for the very reason that they bring much fear. No evil is great if it is the last. Death comes to you: it would be fearsome if it could remain with you; but it must either not arrive or pass on.

'It is difficult,' you say, 'to bring the mind to contempt for life.' Do you not see from what trivial causes life is despised? One man has hanged himself at his mistress's door; another has thrown himself from a roof so that he might no longer hear an angry master; another, to avoid being dragged back from flight, has driven a blade into his own vitals. Do you not think that virtue will accomplish what excessive fear accomplishes? A secure life can fall to no one who thinks too much about prolonging it, who counts many consulships among the great goods.

Practice this every day, so that you may be able to leave life with an even mind; many cling to it and grasp it just as those swept away by rushing water clutch at thorns and rough branches. Most people, wretched, are tossed between fear of death and the torments of life: they do not want to live, and they do not know how to die.

Therefore make life pleasant for yourself by laying aside all anxiety on its behalf. No good thing helps its possessor unless the mind is prepared for its loss; and the loss of nothing is easier than that which, once lost, cannot be missed. So strengthen and harden yourself against these things that can happen even to the most powerful.

A boy and a eunuch passed judgment on Pompey's head; a cruel and insolent Parthian passed judgment on Crassus. Gaius Caesar ordered Lepidus to offer his neck to the tribune Dexter, and he himself offered his own to Chaerea. Fortune has raised no one so high that she did not threaten him with as much as she had allowed him. Do not trust this calm: in a moment the sea is overturned; on the very day ships have played upon it, they are swallowed up.

Consider that both a robber and an enemy can set a sword against your throat; even if higher authority is absent, there is no slave who does not hold over you the power of life and death. I say this: whoever has despised his own life is master of yours. Recall the examples of those who have perished through plots within their own household, whether by open force or by deceit: you will understand that no fewer have fallen by the anger of slaves than by the anger of kings. What does it matter to you, then, how powerful the man you fear may be, when anyone at all can do the thing for which you fear him?

But if by chance you fall into the hands of enemies, the victor will order you to be led away—to the very place, of course, to which you are already being led. Why deceive yourself and only now understand, as though for the first time, what you have long been undergoing? I say this: from the moment you were born, you have been led toward death. These and thoughts of this kind must be turned over in the mind, if we wish to await calmly that final hour, fear of which makes all the others troubled.

But to put an end to the letter, receive the saying that pleased me today—and this too has been gathered from another man's little garden: “poverty ordered according to the law of nature is great wealth.” And do you know what limits that law of nature sets for us? Not to hunger, not to thirst, not to be cold. To drive away hunger and thirst, it is not necessary to sit at the proud thresholds of the great, nor to endure a haughty brow and even insulting courtesy; it is not necessary to test the seas or follow military camps: what nature requires is easy to obtain and lies close at hand.

It is for superfluities that men sweat; those are the things that wear out the toga, that force us to grow old beneath a tent, that drive us onto foreign shores: what is enough is within reach. The man who lives well with poverty is rich. Farewell.