Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Your friend, a young man of good natural stock, has been talking with me, and his very first conversation showed how much spirit he has, how much talent, how much progress already made. He gave us a taste of himself, and he will live up to it; for he did not speak from preparation—he was caught off guard. As he was collecting himself, he could hardly shake off his bashfulness, a good sign in a young man; the blush welled up in him from so deep. This blushing, I suspect, will stay with him even when he has strengthened himself and stripped away every fault—even when he is wise. For no wisdom removes the natural flaws of body or mind: whatever is fixed and inborn can be softened by training, not defeated. [2] Even in some of the steadiest men, sweat breaks out before a crowd, exactly as it does in men worn out and overheated; some men's knees shake when they are about to speak, some men's teeth chatter, the tongue stumbles, the lips clamp shut. Neither discipline nor practice ever drives these things off; nature exerts her force and uses that flaw to remind even the toughest of what they are. [3] Among these things, I know, is the blush that floods without warning over even the most dignified men. It shows more, admittedly, in the young, who have more heat and a thinner brow; but it touches veterans and old men too. Some men are never more to be feared than when they have blushed, as if they had poured out all their capacity for shame. [4] Sulla was at his most violent when the blood had rushed into his face. Nothing was softer than Pompey's face; he never failed to redden in front of a group, especially at public assemblies. I remember Fabianus blushing when he was brought into the senate as a witness, and the modesty was wonderfully becoming on him. [5] This does not come from weakness of mind but from the newness of the situation, which unsettles the unpracticed even when it does not shake them, if they lean that way through a natural readiness of the body; for as some men have placid blood, others have blood that is quick, restless, and fast to rush into the face. [6] Nothing in wisdom, as I said, drives these things away—otherwise, if it could scrub out every flaw, wisdom would hold nature herself under its command. Whatever the circumstances of one's birth and the mixture of one's body have assigned will cling, however much and however long the mind works to compose itself; none of these things can be forbidden, any more than they can be summoned. [7] Stage actors, who mimic the emotions, who express fear and trembling, who portray grief, imitate bashfulness by these signs: they drop the gaze, lower the voice, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them down. The blush they cannot force out of themselves; it can be neither prevented nor produced. Against these things wisdom promises nothing and accomplishes nothing: they are a law to themselves; they come unbidden, unbidden they leave.
[8] Now the letter demands its closing. Take it, and a useful and wholesome one too, which I want you to fasten to your mind: 'We must fix our affection on some good man and keep him always before our eyes, so that we live as though he were watching and do everything as though he could see.' [9] This, my dear Lucilius, is Epicurus's instruction. He has given us a guardian and an attendant, and rightly: a great share of wrongdoing is removed if a witness stands beside those about to do wrong. Let the mind have someone it holds in awe, someone whose authority makes even its privacy more sacred. Happy the man who improves others not only when present but even when thought of! And happy the man who can hold someone in such awe that he composes and orders himself at the mere memory of him! One who can revere someone like that will soon be worth revering himself. [10] So choose Cato; or if he strikes you as too rigid, choose a man of easier temper, Laelius. Choose someone whose life, whose speech, whose very face—the face that carries his soul in front of him—has won you over; keep him always before you, as guardian or as pattern. We need someone, I insist, against whom our conduct can measure itself: you will never straighten what is crooked without a ruler. Farewell.