Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] It is December, and the city is sweating as never before. License for indulgence has been granted officially; everything echoes with enormous preparations, as if the Saturnalia differed at all from an ordinary working day. The difference is so nil that the man who said December was once a month and is now a year seems to me to have got it exactly right. [2] If I had you here, I would gladly talk over with you what you thought should be done: change nothing in the daily routine, or — so as not to seem at odds with the public mood — dine more cheerfully and shed the toga? For what once happened only in a crisis, in the city's dark hours, we now do for pleasure and for the holidays: we change our dress. [3] If I know you, playing the umpire you would have wanted us neither like the crowd in its liberty-caps in every respect, nor unlike it in every respect — unless perhaps these are precisely the days when the mind should be given its orders, told to stand alone in abstaining from pleasures at the very moment the whole mob has flung itself upon them. For it wins the surest proof of its own solidity if it neither goes toward the things that entice and pull toward excess, nor gets dragged there. [4] It takes far more nerve to stay dry and sober while the populace is drunk and vomiting; but it takes more moderation not to cut yourself off, not to make yourself conspicuous, not to blend in with everyone either — to share the crowd's actions without sharing its manner. A holiday can be kept without dissipation.
[5] All the same, I am so set on testing the firmness of your mind that, following the prescription of great men, I will give you a prescription too: set aside a stretch of days in which you content yourself with the scantiest and cheapest food and with rough, coarse clothing, and say to yourself, 'Is this what I was afraid of?' [6] Let the mind ready itself for hard conditions while conditions are safe; let it fortify itself against fortune's blows while fortune is still handing out favors. The soldier runs his drills in the depths of peace, throws up a rampart with no enemy in sight, and wears himself out with unnecessary labor so that he may be equal to the necessary kind; the man you do not want panicking in the crisis you must train before the crisis. This was the practice of those who every month acted out poverty, coming close to real want, so that they would never be terrified by what they had rehearsed so often. [7] Do not imagine I mean 'Timon dinners' and 'poor men's garrets' and all the other games by which luxury toys with riches out of sheer boredom. Let the cot be a real cot, the cloak a soldier's cloak, the bread hard and coarse. Endure this for three or four days, sometimes more, so that it is a trial and not a game; then, believe me, Lucilius, you will jump for joy at being full for two coppers, and you will grasp that peace of mind does not depend on fortune — for even an angry fortune still grants what necessity requires. [8] Not that you should count it any great feat — you will only be doing what many thousands of slaves and many thousands of the poor do every day. Take credit rather on this score: that you will be doing it uncompelled, and that it will be as easy for you to endure it forever as to try it once. Let us drill at the practice-post; and so that fortune never catches us unprepared, let poverty become an intimate of ours. We shall be richer with less anxiety once we know how little hardship there is in being poor. [9] Even Epicurus, that master of pleasure, kept fixed days on which he grudgingly fed his hunger, to see whether anything would be missing from full and finished pleasure, or how much would be missing, and whether it was worth anyone's paying great effort to make up. He says so, at any rate, in the letters he wrote to Polyaenus in the magistracy of Charinus; indeed he boasts that he himself was fed for less than a whole as, while Metrodorus, whose progress was not yet so great, needed the whole as. [10] Do you think a man can be full on such rations? He can — and there is pleasure in it too; not the flighty, fleeting pleasure that needs constant topping-up, but pleasure steady and sure. Water and barley-meal and a scrap of barley bread are no delicacy; but it is the highest pleasure to be able to draw pleasure even from these, and to have brought oneself down to a level that no unfairness of fortune can snatch away. [11] Prison rations are more generous than that; the executioner does not feed men set apart for capital punishment so meagerly. What greatness of soul it is, then, to descend of one's own accord to a level that need not be feared even by men under final sentence! That is how you get your blow in before fortune's weapons land. [12] So begin, my dear Lucilius, to follow the custom of those men: mark out some days on which you withdraw from your affairs and make yourself at home with the bare minimum. Begin to do business with poverty.
Dare, stranger, to look down on wealth, and shape yourself, too, into someone worthy of a god.
[13] No one is worthy of a god except the man who has looked down on riches. I am not forbidding you to own them; I want to bring you to own them without fear. And there is only one way to manage that: convince yourself that you will live happily even without them, and always look at them as if they were on their way out.
[14] But it is time to start folding up this letter. 'Not before you pay what you owe,' you say. I will refer you to Epicurus; he will count out the payment: 'Anger beyond measure breeds madness.' How true that is you are bound to know, since you have had both a slave and an enemy. [15] This passion flares up against every kind of person; it is born of love as much as of hatred, and no less in serious business than amid games and jokes. What matters is not how great the cause it springs from, but what kind of mind it lands in. Just so with fire: the question is not how big it is, but where it falls; solid materials have withstood even the greatest blaze, while dry stuff, quick to catch, will nurse a mere spark all the way to a conflagration. So it is, my dear Lucilius: the end of towering anger is madness — and therefore anger is to be shunned not for moderation's sake but for sanity's. Farewell.