Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. So it stands, I am not changing my judgment: avoid the crowd, avoid the small group, avoid even a single companion. There is no one I would want you to share yourself with. And see what a high opinion I hold of you: I dare to trust you to yourself. Crates, so they say - a student of this very Stilbo I mentioned in my last letter - once saw a young man walking off alone and asked him what he was doing there by himself. 'I am talking with myself,' the young man said. To which Crates replied, 'Be careful, please, and pay close attention: you are talking with a bad man.' We usually keep watch over someone who is grieving or afraid, so that he does not put his solitude to bad use. No fool ought to be left to himself; that is when he stirs up bad plans, when he plots dangers to come, whether for others or for himself, when he lines up shameful desires; that is when the mind lays out in the open whatever it had been hiding out of fear or shame, when it sharpens its recklessness, provokes its lust, stirs up its temper. In short, the one advantage solitude has - entrusting nothing to anyone, not fearing an informer - is wasted on a fool: he betrays himself. So consider what I hope for you - or rather, what I promise myself, since hope is only a name for an uncertain good: I cannot find anyone I would rather have you be with than yourself. I recall from memory how boldly you tossed off certain words of yours, how full of strength they were: I congratulated myself on the spot and said, 'those words did not come from the surface of his lips, they have a foundation; that man is not one of the crowd, he has his eye on his own salvation.' Speak like that, live like that; take care that nothing weighs you down. As for your old prayers, you may thank the gods and let them go, but take up new ones from scratch: pray for a sound mind, for health of soul, and only then for health of body. Why shouldn't you make such prayers often? Ask the gods boldly: you will be asking for nothing that belongs to someone else.
But so that I may send this letter along, as is my custom, with a small gift attached: what I found in Athenodorus is true - 'know that you are free of all cravings once you reach the point where you ask the gods for nothing you would not be willing to ask for in the open.' But as things stand now, what madness there is in people! They whisper the most shameful prayers to the gods; if anyone puts an ear near, they fall silent, and what they do not want a human being to know, they tell a god. So consider whether this could be a wholesome rule: live with human beings as though a god were watching, speak with a god as though human beings were listening. Farewell.