Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. Each of us does what he can, my dear Lucilius: over there you have Etna, that most celebrated of Sicilian mountains—though why Messala, or Valgius (I have read the claim in both) called it unique, I cannot discover, since a great many places belch out fire, not only high ones, which happens more often, presumably because fire is naturally carried upward, but low-lying ones as well. As for me, I make do, as best I can, with Baiae, which I left the day after I arrived—a place to be avoided, even though it has certain natural charms, precisely because luxury has claimed it as a place to be celebrated in its own honor.
'What, then? Must every place be an object of hatred?' Not at all; but just as one garment suits a wise and upright man better than another—not that he hates any color, but he judges some colors ill-suited to a man who professes plain living—so too there are regions that a wise man, or one striving toward wisdom, should avoid as unsuited to good character.
And so, when thinking about a retreat, he will never choose Canopus, even though Canopus forbids no one to live a sober life—nor Baiae either: these places have begun to serve as lodging-houses for vice. At Baiae, luxury allows itself the greatest license; there, as though some special permission were owed to the place, people let themselves go still further. We ought to choose a place that is wholesome not only for the body but for our character; just as I would not want to live among torturers, so I would not want to live among taverns either. What need is there to watch drunks wandering the shore, boating parties in full riot, lakes echoing with the singing of musicians, and every other thing that luxury, as though released from all law, not only commits but flaunts openly?
We ought to make it our business to flee as far as possible from whatever incites us to vice; the mind needs to be toughened and dragged well away from the blandishments of pleasure. It was a single winter of soft living that undid Hannibal, and the comforts of Campania that sapped the strength of that man untamed by snow and the Alps: he conquered by arms, and was conquered by vices.
We too must serve as soldiers, and in a kind of campaign that never allows rest, never allows a furlough: it is above all our pleasures that must be fought down and defeated, since, as you see, they have dragged off toward themselves even fierce and savage natures. If a man reckons up how great a task he has taken on, he will know that nothing in it can be done delicately or softly. What business do I have with these steaming hot pools? What business with sweating-rooms, where the body is shut in to be drained by dry heat? Let all sweating come only from hard work.
If we did what Hannibal did—break off the course of our affairs, abandon the campaign, and devote ourselves to pampering the body—everyone would rightly condemn such untimely idleness, dangerous even to a conqueror, let alone to one still fighting to conquer. We have even less license than those who followed the Carthaginian standards: greater danger remains for those who retreat, and greater effort even for those who persevere.
Fortune is waging war on me: I will not do what she orders; I will not accept the yoke—no, what takes still greater courage, I shake it off. My mind must not be softened: if I give way to pleasure, I must also give way to pain, give way to hardship, give way to poverty; ambition and anger will claim the same right over me; torn among so many passions, I will be pulled apart, rather than merely pulled.
Freedom is the goal set before me; it is for this reward that I labor. You ask what freedom is? To be slave to no thing, to no necessity, to no chance happenings; to bring fortune down to my own level. On the day I recognize that fortune has more power than I do, she will have no power at all. Shall I put up with her, when death lies ready to my hand?
For a mind intent on such thoughts, it is fitting to choose serious, sacred places; excessive pleasantness of surroundings softens the mind, and there is no doubt a region can do something toward corrupting one's vigor. Pack-animals can endure any road, so long as their hooves have been hardened on rough ground; fattened on a soft, marshy pasture, they quickly wear away. A soldier, too, comes out stronger from rugged country; the city-bred recruit, the house-slave soldier, is sluggish. Hands that are transferred from the plow to weapons refuse no labor; it is the pampered, glistening dandy who gives out at the very first cloud of dust.
A stricter discipline of place strengthens character and makes it fit for great undertakings. Scipio spent his exile at Liternum with more honor than he would have at Baiae; a downfall of that kind should not be given so soft a setting. Even those men to whom fortune first transferred the public wealth of the Roman people—Gaius Marius, Gnaeus Pompeius, and Caesar—did build villas in the region of Baiae, but they set them on the very tops of the mountain ridges. This seemed more soldierly somehow—to survey the land spread out below from a height, far and wide. Look at the sites they chose, the places and the kind of buildings they raised there: you will know they are not villas, but forts.
Do you suppose Marcus Cato could ever have lived in such a place, counting up the adulteresses sailing past, the many kinds of skiffs painted in various colors, the roses floating over the whole lake, listening to singers howling their obscenities through the night? Would he not have preferred to stay within the rampart he himself had thrown up with his own hand for a single night's camp? Surely any real man would rather have his sleep broken by the trumpet than by an orchestra.
But I have quarreled with Baiae long enough—one can never quarrel long enough with vices, which, I beg you, Lucilius, pursue without limit, without end; for they too have neither end nor limit. Throw away whatever tears at your heart; if there were no other way to root such things out, the heart itself would have to be torn out along with them. Above all, drive out pleasures, and hold them in the deepest hatred: like the bandits the Egyptians call 'philetai,' they embrace us for this very purpose—to strangle us. Farewell.