Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] 'You are giving me advice?' you say. 'Have you already advised yourself, then—already straightened yourself out? Is that why you have leisure for correcting other people?' I am not so shameless as to take up doctoring while I am sick myself. No—think of me as a fellow patient in the same sickroom, talking with you about our common disease and passing along the remedies. So hear me as one talking to himself: I am letting you into my private room and calling myself to account with you standing by. [2] I shout at myself: 'Count your years, and you will be ashamed to want the same things you wanted as a boy, to be laying in the same supplies. As the day of your death nears, secure yourself this much at least: let your vices die before you do. Dismiss those churning pleasures that cost so much to pay off: they do harm not only when they are coming but after they have gone. Just as with crimes—even when they were not caught in the act, the anxiety does not leave when they do—so with dishonest pleasures: regret outlasts them. They have no substance and no loyalty; even when they do no harm, they run away. [3] Look around instead for some good that will stay. And there is none, except what the mind finds for itself, out of itself. Virtue alone supplies a joy that is unbroken and secure; even if something gets in its way, it comes between like clouds, which drift below and never defeat the daylight.' [4] When will it fall to you to reach this joy? So far there has been no dawdling, true—but pick up the pace. A great deal of the work remains, and for it you must spend your own late nights and your own sweat, if you want the thing accomplished; this business cannot be handed off to an agent. [5] A different branch of learning does admit outside help. Within my memory there was Calvisius Sabinus, a rich man; he had a freedman's fortune and a freedman's mind. I never saw wealth worn with less decency. So faulty was his memory that the name Ulysses would slip from him one moment, Achilles the next, then Priam—men he knew as well as we know our childhood tutors. No doddering name-prompter, the kind who no longer reports names but invents them, ever miscalled the voting tribes as badly as Sabinus miscalled the Trojans and the Greeks in his greetings. [6] Even so, he wanted to look educated. So he devised this shortcut: he paid a huge sum for slaves, one to hold Homer in his head, another Hesiod, and he assigned one apiece to the nine lyric poets. That he paid a fortune should not surprise you: he could not find such slaves ready-made, so he contracted to have them manufactured. Once this staff had been assembled, he began tormenting his dinner guests. He kept these men at his feet, and though he was constantly asking them for verses to repeat, he would often break down mid-word. [7] Satellius Quadratus—a nibbler at rich fools, and, as follows from that, a fawner on them, and, as goes with both, a mocker of them—suggested he acquire scholars to pick up his crumbs. When Sabinus said each slave had cost him a hundred thousand sesterces, Satellius said: 'For less money you could have stocked that many book-chests.' Sabinus nonetheless held the settled view that he himself knew whatever anyone in his household knew. [8] The same Satellius began urging him to take up wrestling—a sickly man, pale, scrawny. When Sabinus answered, 'How can I? I can barely stay alive,' he said, 'Please, do not say that. Look how many superbly muscled slaves you have!' A sound mind can be neither borrowed nor bought—and I suspect that if it were for sale, it would find no buyer. Yet an unsound one is bought every day.
[9] But now take what I owe you, and goodbye. 'Poverty arranged according to nature's law is wealth.' Epicurus says this often, in one form after another; but a thing is never said too often that is never learned well enough. To some people remedies need only be pointed out; into others they must be pounded. Farewell.