Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] That letter you sent me from the road, as long as the road itself — I'll answer it later. I need to go off by myself and think through what advice to give. You, after all, before asking my counsel, spent a long time deciding whether to ask at all; how much longer should I take, when solving a question needs more time than posing one? Especially when what's good for you and what's good for me are two different things. [2] There I go, talking like an Epicurean again. In fact what's good for you IS what's good for me — otherwise I'm no friend, since anything that touches you is my business too. Friendship makes everything between us joint property. Nothing is good luck for one of us alone, nothing bad luck for one alone; we live in common. And nobody can live happily who looks only at himself, who bends everything toward his own advantage. If you want to live for yourself, you must live for another. [3] This fellowship — kept carefully and kept sacred — the one that binds human being to human being and holds that the human race has some law common to all, does the most to nurture that inner fellowship of friendship I was speaking of. A man who shares much with mankind will share everything with a friend.
[4] This, Lucilius, best of men, is what I'd rather have those hair-splitters teach me: what I owe a friend, what I owe a fellow human — not how many senses the word 'friend' carries or how many things 'man' can mean. Look at wisdom and folly heading in opposite directions! Which side do I join? Which way do you order me to march? For one man, every human counts as a friend; for the other, a friend doesn't even count as a human. The one is winning a friend for himself; the other is fitting himself for his friend — and you sit there twisting words and sorting syllables. [5] So apparently, unless I've rigged up the slyest possible trick-questions and cinched a lie onto the truth with a false conclusion, I'll never manage to tell what to pursue from what to flee. It embarrasses me: grown old men, playing games with a matter this serious.
[6] 'Mouse is a syllable; but a mouse gnaws cheese; therefore a syllable gnaws cheese.' Suppose I can't untangle that one — what danger hangs over me for my ignorance? What harm comes of it? No doubt I should worry that one day I'll catch syllables in my mousetrap, or that if I get careless my book will eat the cheese. Unless this chain of reasoning is sharper: 'Mouse is a syllable; but a syllable doesn't gnaw cheese; therefore a mouse doesn't gnaw cheese.' [7] What childish nonsense! Is this why we knit our brows? Is this why we let the beard grow long? Is this what we teach, grim-faced and pale? Do you want to know what philosophy promises the human race? Counsel. One man is being called by death, another is being scorched by poverty, another tormented by wealth — someone else's or his own; this one shudders at bad fortune, that one wants out from under his own success; men make life miserable for one, the gods for another. Why are you assembling these parlor games for me? This is no time for jokes: you've been called in to help the desperate. You promised to bring aid to the shipwrecked, the captive, the sick, the destitute, to those whose heads lie under the lifted axe — where are you wandering off to? What are you doing? The man you're playing games with is afraid: help him — everyone caught in the noose of these quibbles is begging for release. From every side, all of them stretch out their hands to you; lives ruined and about to be ruined implore some help; you are their hope and their strength. They beg you to drag them out of that enormous churning, to hold up the clear light of truth for the scattered and the straying. [9] Say which things nature has made needful and which are excess, how easy the laws she laid down are, how sweet and unobstructed life is for those who follow them, how bitter and tangled for those who trusted opinion more than nature *** if you first teach which part of their burden these subtleties will lift. Which of them removes cravings? Which reins any craving in? If only they were merely useless! They do damage. I'll make this perfectly plain to you whenever you like: a noble nature thrown into these quibbles is chipped away and crippled. [10] I'm ashamed to say what weapons they hand to men about to fight fortune, how they equip them for it. Is this the road to the highest good? Through philosophy's 'if-this-then-unless-that,' through evasions that would be shabby and disgraceful even in men sitting at the praetor's notice-board? When you knowingly lead the man you're questioning into a trap, what are you doing except making it look as if he lost his case on a technicality? But just as the praetor restores such litigants to their rights, philosophy restores these victims. [11] Why do you men walk away from your enormous promises? After the grand talk — that you'd see to it the glint of gold dazzles my eyes no more than the glint of a sword, that with immense steadiness I'd trample both what everyone prays for and what everyone dreads — why do you sink to the schoolmaster's ABCs? What is it you say?
this is the way to the stars
For that is what philosophy promises me: to make me the equal of a god. That's the invitation I accepted; that's what I came for. Keep your word.
[12] So pull back, my Lucilius, as far as you can from these philosophers' quibbles and legal dodges: goodness is suited by what is open and plain. Even if a great stretch of life were left to us, it would have to be budgeted carefully to cover what's necessary. As it is, what madness — to study the superfluous when time is this scarce! Farewell.