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