Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I will indeed put together the notes you're asking for, carefully arranged and compressed into a small compass. But watch that a systematic treatment doesn't end up more useful to you than what people nowadays commonly call a "summary" -- in the old days, when we still spoke proper Latin, it was called an "abstract." The full treatment is more necessary to someone still learning; the abstract, to someone who already knows. The one teaches; the other reminds. But I'll give you plenty of both. Only don't demand that I hand you this author or that one: whoever needs an introducer is a stranger to the subject. So I'll write what you want, but in my own way. Meanwhile you have many authors whose writings are, I'm not sure, arranged well enough. Pick up a list of the philosophers: the very sight of it will force you awake, once you see how many men have labored for your benefit. You'll want to be one of them yourself; for this is the best thing about a noble mind, that it's stirred to honorable ends. No man of lofty character finds pleasure in what is low and squalid: the spectacle of great things calls him on and lifts him up. Just as flame rises straight up and cannot be made to lie flat or sink, any more than it can stay still, so our mind is in motion, and the more vehement it is, the more mobile and active. But happy is the one who has directed that impulse toward better things: he will set himself outside the jurisdiction and dominion of fortune; he will keep prosperity in check, diminish adversity, and look down on what others find astonishing. It belongs to a great mind to despise great things and to prefer the moderate to the excessive; for the moderate is useful and life-sustaining, while the excessive harms precisely because it overflows its measure. So an overabundant harvest flattens the field, branches break under their own load, and excessive fruitfulness never reaches maturity. The same thing happens to minds too: unchecked success shatters them, and they use that success not only to injure others but even themselves. What enemy has ever been as vicious toward anyone as certain men's own pleasures are toward them? Their lack of self-control and their mad lust could almost be forgiven for this one reason -- that they suffer what they inflict. And it's not without reason that this madness torments them; for a desire that leaps past the natural limit is bound to run out into the boundless. Natural desire has its own end; what is empty and born of lust has none. Necessity is measured by usefulness: how do you measure what's superfluous? And so people drown themselves in pleasures which, once habitual, they can't do without -- and for this reason they are utterly wretched, that they've come to the point where what was once superfluous has become necessary. So they are slaves to their pleasures, not masters enjoying them, and they even love their own evils -- which is the worst evil of all -- and their unhappiness is complete when shameful things not only delight them but win their approval, and there's no room left for a cure once what were once vices have become their character. Farewell.