VIII

Seneca to his Lucilius, greeting. 'You,' you say, 'tell me to avoid the crowd, to withdraw, and to be content with my own conscience? Where are those teachings of yours that command a man to die in action?' What? Do I seem to you to be recommending idleness? I have hidden myself away and shut my doors for this purpose: that I might be of use to more people. No day passes for me in leisure; I claim part of my nights for study; I do not have time for sleep, but yield to it, and I hold my eyes, worn out by wakefulness and drooping, fixed on their work.

I have withdrawn not only from people but from affairs, and above all from my own affairs: I am attending to the business of posterity. For them I write down certain things that may be useful; wholesome counsels, like compounds of helpful medicines, I entrust to writing, having found them effective on my own wounds, which, even if they have not been completely healed, have ceased to spread.

The straight road, which I came to know late and when I was weary from wandering, I point out to others. I cry: 'Avoid everything that pleases the crowd, everything that chance bestows; before every accidental good, stop in suspicion and fear: both the wild beast and the fish are deceived by some hope that lures them on. Do you think these are gifts of fortune? They are snares. Whoever among you wishes to live a safe life should avoid, as much as he possibly can, those sticky benefits, in which we are most miserably deceived in this too: we think we possess them; we are caught by them.

That course leads down into precipices; the end of this towering life is a fall. Then it is not even possible to resist, once prosperity has begun to drive us sideways: one must at least fall straight, or fall once for all. Fortune does not merely overturn a man, but makes him tumble headlong and dashes him to pieces.

Hold fast, therefore, to this sound and wholesome pattern of life: indulge the body only so far as is enough for good health. It must be treated more sternly, so that it may not be a bad servant to the mind: food should quiet hunger, drink quench thirst, clothing ward off cold, and a house be a defense against hostile weather. Whether turf has raised it or varied stone from a foreign people, it makes no difference: know that a human being is sheltered as well by thatch as by gold. Despise everything that needless labor sets up as ornament and display; consider that nothing is admirable except the mind, and that for a great mind nothing is great.

If I speak these things with myself, if I speak them with those who come after us, do I not seem to you to do more good than when, as an advocate, I went down to a court appearance, or set my seal upon the tablets of 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 treating human and divine matters together.

But now I must make an end, and, as I have made my practice, pay something out for this letter. It will not come from my own store: we are still plundering Epicurus. Today I read this saying of his: 'You must serve philosophy, so that true freedom may fall to your lot.' The man who has submitted and handed himself over to her is not put off to another day: he is freed at once; for this very service to philosophy is freedom.

You may ask me why I quote so many fine sayings from Epicurus rather than from our own school. Yet why should you think those utterances belong to Epicurus, and not to all mankind? How many poets say things that either have been said by philosophers or ought to have been said by them! I shall not touch on the tragedians, nor on our Roman comedies in the toga, for these too have a certain severity and stand midway between comedy and tragedy; but how many most eloquent verses lie among the mimes! How many sayings of Publilius deserve to be spoken not by actors barefoot, but by actors in tragic boots!

I shall quote one verse of his, one that belongs to philosophy and to the very subject that has just been in our hands, in which he denies that things of chance should be counted as our own: whatever comes by wishing is another's property.

I remember this thought being expressed by you far better and more compactly: what fortune has made yours is not your own. And I shall not pass over another saying of yours, still better put: a good that could be given could also be taken away. I do not count this toward payment; I am giving you back something of your own. Farewell.