Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
As for our two friends, we need different approaches for each: one man's faults need correcting, the other's need breaking. I'll use complete frankness with him: I don't love him unless I offend him. "What?" you say. "Do you mean to keep a forty-year-old ward under your guardianship? Consider his age—it's already hardened and unyielding; it can't be reshaped. Only the pliable can be molded." I don't know whether I'll make any progress; I'd rather lack success than lack faith. Don't lose hope that even chronic invalids can be healed, if you stand firm against their excess, if you force them, unwilling, to do and to endure a great deal. Even with the other man I don't have enough confidence, except for this: he still blushes when he does wrong. That sense of shame needs to be nurtured; as long as it endures in his mind, there's some room for good hope. With this veteran, I think we should proceed more gently, so he doesn't fall into despair about himself. And no time is better for making the attempt than now, while he's resting, while he seems like a reformed man. This lull has fooled others, but it doesn't fool me: I'm waiting for his faults to return with heavy interest—faults I know are merely dormant now, not gone. I'll spend some days on this business and find out whether anything can be done or not.
As for you, keep showing yourself brave, as you're doing, and pack your bags light—nothing we own is necessary. Let's go back to the law of nature; wealth stands ready there. What we need is either free or cheap: nature wants only bread and water. No one is poor by that standard—and whoever has confined his wants within it can rival Jupiter himself in happiness, as Epicurus says, and I'll wrap up one of his sayings in this letter. "Act," he says, "in all things as though Epicurus were watching." There's no doubt it helps to have set a guardian over yourself, someone you can look to, someone you can imagine present at your thoughts. It's certainly far grander to live as though under the eyes of some good man, always present—but I'll settle even for this: that you act, whatever you do, as though someone were watching. Solitude persuades us to every kind of wrongdoing. Once you've made enough progress that you have some regard for yourself too, you may dismiss your tutor; meanwhile, guard yourself under the authority of others—let it be Cato, or Scipio, or Laelius, or someone else in whose presence even ruined men would suppress their vices, while you make yourself into someone in whose presence you wouldn't dare do wrong. Once you've achieved that, and some self-respect has begun to take root in you, I'll start letting you do what Epicurus also advises: "Withdraw into yourself especially when you're forced to be in a crowd." You need to become different from the many, as long as it isn't yet safe for you to withdraw into yourself. Look at people one by one: there's no one who wouldn't be better off with just about anyone else than alone with himself. "Withdraw into yourself especially when you're forced to be in a crowd"—if you are a good man, a calm one, a moderate one. Otherwise you should withdraw from yourself into the crowd; there you're closer to a bad man than you are within yourself. Farewell.