Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
I recognize my Lucilius: he is beginning to show himself as he promised. Follow that impulse of spirit which was carrying you, trampling on popular goods, toward all that is best. I don't ask you to become anything greater or better than what you were striving for. Your foundations have taken up a great deal of ground: only accomplish as much as you have attempted, and bring to completion what you carried with you in your mind.
In sum, you will be wise if you close your ears - and for that, plugging them with wax isn't enough: you need something more solid than the stuff Ulysses is said to have used on his crew. The voice that was feared then was seductive, but it wasn't public; the voice that must be feared now sounds around us not from a single cliff but from every corner of the earth. So sail past not one place suspected of treacherous pleasure, but every city there is. Be deaf to the very people who love you most: they wish evil on you with the best of intentions. And if you want to be happy, beg the gods that none of the things they pray for on your behalf should come to pass.
What those people want heaped upon you are not good things at all. There is one good, the cause and foundation of the happy life: trust in oneself. But this cannot be achieved unless hard work is despised and counted among the things that are neither good nor bad; for it is impossible for any single thing to be bad at one moment, good at another, sometimes light and bearable, sometimes to be dreaded.
Hard work is not a good. What, then, is good? Contempt for hard work. So I would blame those who toil to no purpose; but as for those who strain toward honorable things, the harder they press on and the less they allow themselves to be beaten or to falter, the more I will admire them and cry out: 'All the better - rise up, draw a breath, and clear that slope in a single breath if you can!'
Hard work nourishes noble spirits. So there is no reason for you to choose, from that old prayer of your parents, what you want to happen to you, what to wish for; and for a man who has already achieved the greatest things, it is shameful even now to keep pestering the gods. What need is there of prayers? Make yourself happy. And you will, if you understand that the things mixed with virtue are good, and the things joined with wickedness are shameful. Just as nothing shines without an admixture of light, nothing is black except what contains darkness or has drawn something dark into itself, just as nothing is warm without the help of fire and nothing cold without air, so it is the partnership of virtue and vice that produces what is honorable and what is shameful.
What, then, is good? Knowledge of things. What is bad? Ignorance of things. The person who is wise and skilled will reject or choose according to circumstance; but he neither fears what he rejects nor marvels at what he chooses, so long as his spirit is great and unconquered. I forbid you to be brought low or bowed down. If you do not refuse hard work, that is not enough - demand it.
'What then,' you say, 'is hard work that is frivolous and superfluous, work summoned by petty causes, not bad?' No more than work spent on beautiful things, since it is the mind's own endurance that spurs it toward what is hard and rough, and says: 'Why do you hold back? It's not a man's part to fear sweat.'
Add to this, so that virtue may be perfect, an evenness and a consistency of life harmonizing with itself throughout - which cannot exist unless one attains knowledge of things and the skill by which human and divine matters are understood. This is the highest good; and if you seize it, you begin to be a companion of the gods, not a supplicant.
'How,' you ask, 'is that reached?' Not through the Pennine or Graian pass, nor through the deserts of Candavia; you need not approach the Syrtes, or Scylla, or Charybdis - and yet you crossed all of those for the price of a petty appointment. The road is safe, the road is pleasant; nature equipped you for it. She gave you what, if you do not abandon it, will let you rise equal to a god.
Money will not make you equal to a god: a god has nothing. A purple-bordered robe will not do it: a god is naked. Fame will not do it, nor showing yourself off, nor sending your name abroad to be known among the nations: no one knows god, and many think badly of him, with impunity. It is not a crowd of slaves carrying your litter through the streets of the city or on journeys abroad: that greatest and most powerful god carries everything himself. Not even beauty and strength can make you happy: none of these withstands the passage of time.
What must be sought is something that does not grow worse day by day, something nothing can obstruct. What is this? The mind - but a mind that is upright, good, great. What else would you call this but a god lodging as a guest in a human body? This mind can fall to a Roman knight as much as to a freedman, as much as to a slave. For what is a Roman knight, or a freedman, or a slave? Names born of ambition or of injustice. One may leap into heaven from the meanest corner: only rise up
...and fashion yourself worthy of god too.
But you will not fashion yourself out of gold or silver: from that material no image resembling god can be made. Consider that when the gods were kindly disposed toward us, their images were made of clay. Farewell.