Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I complain, I quarrel, I lose my temper. And even now do you still wish for what your nurse wished for you, or your tutor, or your mother? Do you not yet understand how much harm they wished on you? How hostile to us are the prayers of our own people! And all the more hostile the more successfully they turn out. I no longer wonder that misfortunes have dogged us from earliest childhood: we grew up amid our parents' curses. Let the gods, for once, hear a prayer we make freely for our own good, and without cost to anyone.
How much longer will we go on asking the gods for something, as if we still could not feed ourselves? How long will we go on filling the fields around great cities with our sowing? How long will whole nations reap for us? How long will many ships, and not from one sea only, bring supplies for a single table? A bull is filled by the pasture of just a few acres; a single forest is enough for many elephants; man alone is fed by both land and sea.
What then? Did nature give us so insatiable a belly, when she gave us such modest bodies, that we should outdo the greed of the vastest, most voracious beasts? Not at all; for how little is given to nature! She is dismissed with very little: it is not the hunger of our stomach that costs us dearly, but our ambition.
So let us count these people, as Sallust says, 'slaves of their bellies,' in the rank of animals, not of men—and some of them not even in the rank of animals, but of the dead. The man who is of use to many is alive; the man who makes use of himself is alive. But those who hide away and grow torpid are as good as in their tombs while still in their own houses. You might as well carve their names in marble right on the threshold: they have gone ahead of their own death. Farewell.