Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Once again you're making yourself out to be small, saying that nature treated you meanly at first, and fortune after her, when in fact you could lift yourself out of the crowd and rise to the very height of human happiness. If there's any good at all in philosophy, it's this: it doesn't look at your family tree. All of us, if we're traced back to our first origin, come from the gods. You're a Roman knight, and your own effort brought you to that rank; but heaven knows, for many the fourteen rows are closed off, not everyone is admitted to the senate, even the army chooses fastidiously whom it will accept for its labor and danger: a good mind is open to everyone, on this score we are all nobly born. Philosophy rejects no one and chooses no one: she shines on everyone alike. Socrates was no patrician; Cleanthes hauled water and hired out his hands to water a garden; philosophy did not receive Plato already noble -- she made him so. Why then should you despair of being able to become their equal? All of them are your ancestors, if you show yourself worthy of them; and you will show yourself worthy, if you convince yourself right now that no one surpasses you in nobility. All of us have just as many generations behind us; for no one does the origin fail to lie beyond memory. Plato says there is no king who is not descended from slaves, no slave who is not descended from kings. A long procession of change has mixed all this together and fortune has turned it upside down and right side up again. Who is well-born? The one well fitted by nature for virtue. This is the only thing to consider; otherwise, if you go back to ancient origins, everyone traces back to something before which there is nothing. From the very first origin of the world down to this present time, an alternating sequence of the splendid and the squalid has brought us along. An entrance hall full of smoke-blackened ancestral portraits doesn't make a man noble; no one lived for our glory, and what existed before us is not ours: it's the mind that confers nobility, and the mind, whatever its condition, can rise above fortune. So imagine yourself not a Roman knight but a freedman: you can still achieve this -- to be the only free man among the freeborn. "How?" you ask. By not judging good and bad according to popular opinion. What must be considered is not where things come from, but where they're headed. If there is anything that can make life happy, that thing is good in its own right; for it cannot be corrupted into something bad. Where, then, does the error lie, when everyone wants a happy life? In this: that people take its tools for the thing itself, and in pursuing it, flee from it. For since the sum of a happy life is unshakable security and unwavering confidence in that security, people gather up the causes of anxiety instead, and along life's treacherous road they don't just carry their burdens, they drag them; and so they draw farther and farther away from the very thing they're seeking, and the more effort they spend, the more they hinder themselves and are carried backward. This is what happens to people hurrying through a labyrinth: their very speed tangles them up. Farewell.