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 [2] I have withdrawn not only from people but from affairs, my own affairs first of all: the business I'm conducting belongs to posterity.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