Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] You want me to add to these letters, as I did to the earlier ones, some sayings of our leading men. They did not busy themselves with pretty phrases: the whole fabric of their work is masculine. Where the striking bits stand out, you may be sure the quality is uneven; a single tree draws no wonder where the whole forest has risen to the same height. [2] Poems are stuffed with sayings of that kind; so are the histories. So please don't take them for Epicurus's property: they belong to everyone, and most of all to us Stoics. In him, though, they get noticed more, because they turn up only now and then, because they come unexpected, because it startles people that something brave should be said by a man whose creed is softness. That, at least, is the common verdict; to my mind Epicurus is brave too, even if his sleeves hang to his wrists. Courage, hard work, a spirit ready for war can be found among Persians just as well as among men with their tunics belted high. [3] So there is no reason to demand extracts and quotable tags: what gets excerpted from other writers runs unbroken through ours. We keep no eye-catching wares in the window; we don't trick the buyer into walking in only to find nothing beyond what hangs at the entrance. We let readers take their sample from wherever they please. [4] Suppose we did want to pick individual maxims out of the crowd: under whose name would we enter them — Zeno's, Cleanthes's, Chrysippus's, Panaetius's, Posidonius's? We serve no king; each of us claims his own ground. Among the Epicureans, whatever Hermarchus said, whatever Metrodorus said, is booked to one account; everything anyone in that fellowship uttered was said under one man's command and auspices. We simply cannot, however hard we try, pull one item out of so vast a stock of equal goods:
it is the poor man who counts his flock.
Wherever you cast your eye, you will land on something that could stand out, if it were not being read among its equals. [5] So drop this hope of yours that the greatest minds can be tasted in summary form. You must look them over whole and work through them whole. The thing is built as a continuous whole; along its own lines the work of a mind is woven together, and nothing can be pulled out without the structure collapsing. I don't object to your examining the limbs one by one, provided you do it on the living body itself. A woman is not beautiful because her leg or her arm earns compliments; the beautiful one is she whose face as a whole leaves no attention to spare for the parts. [6] Still, if you insist, I won't deal with you like a miser; it will be by the fistful. There is an enormous crowd of such sayings lying about everywhere; they need to be picked up, not hunted down. They don't drop out in fragments; they flow, continuous and woven into one another. I don't doubt they do a great deal of good for beginners still listening from outside the door; single points settle in more easily when they come with clear edges, closed off like a line of verse. [7] That is why we set boys to memorize maxims, and the things the Greeks call chriae: a boy's mind can get its arms around them, and cannot yet hold more. But for a man of assured progress it is disgraceful to go chasing petals, to prop himself on a handful of very familiar tags and stand on memory alone. Let him lean on himself by now. Let him say such things, not recite them; it is shameful for an old man, or a man in sight of old age, to have a wisdom that lives in a notebook. 'Zeno said this.' And you — what do you say? 'Cleanthes said this.' And you? How long will you march under someone else's orders? Take command; say something worth handing down to memory; produce something from your own stock. [8] All these men, then, who are never authors and always interpreters, hiding in someone else's shadow, have, I think, nothing noble in them: they have never once dared to do what they spent so long learning. They trained their memory on other men's material. But remembering is one thing, knowing is another. To remember is to guard something deposited in the memory; to know is to make each thing your own — not to hang on a model and keep glancing back at the teacher. [9] 'Zeno said this; Cleanthes said that.' Put some distance between yourself and the book. How long will you be a student? Start teaching. What reason is there for me to hear what my own reading supplies? 'The living voice,' someone says, 'counts for much.' Not this voice, which is lent out to other men's words and does the work of a court clerk. [10] Add to this that people who never come of age follow their predecessors, first, in a field where everyone has broken with his predecessor, and second, in a field where the search is still on. And the answer will never be found if we rest content with what has been found already. Besides, a man who follows another discovers nothing — worse, he isn't even looking. [11] What then? Shall I not walk in the footsteps of the men before me? The old road I will take, certainly; yet should a nearer, smoother track appear, I will pave it myself. The men who worked on these questions before us are not our masters but our guides. Truth lies open to everyone; no one has staked a claim on it; a great deal of it is left even for those still to come. Farewell.