Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You were with us yesterday. You can complain, if only 'yesterday'; that's why I added 'with us' - for you're always with me. Some friends had dropped in, on whose account a bigger smoke was made, not the kind that bursts out of the kitchens of the wealthy and terrifies the night watch, but the modest kind that signals guests have arrived.
Our talk ranged widely, as it does at a dinner party, never carrying any one subject through to the end, but leaping from one thing to another. Then a book of the elder Quintus Sextius was read, a great man, believe me, even though he denies being a Stoic.
Good gods, what force there is in him, what vigor of spirit! You won't find this in all philosophers: the writings of some men of famous name are bloodless. They lay down rules, they argue, they split hairs, they don't put spirit into you because they don't have any themselves. When you've read Sextius you'll say, 'he's alive, he's vigorous, you are free, he is above the human, he sends me away full of tremendous confidence.'
I'll admit to you the state of mind I'm in when I read him: I want to challenge every disaster, I want to shout, 'why the delay, fortune? come at me: you see I'm ready.' I put on the spirit of a man looking for somewhere to test himself, somewhere to show his courage,
and prays that a foaming boar be sent among the idle cattle, or a tawny lion come down from the mountain.
I want to have something to conquer, something whose endurance will train me. For this too is a splendid thing in Sextius, that he'll show you the greatness of the happy life while never making you despair of reaching it: you'll know that it stands on the heights, but that it can be scaled by anyone willing to try. Virtue itself will give you this very same gift, that you admire it and yet hope for it. For my part, the contemplation of wisdom itself often takes up a great deal of my time; I gaze on it, stunned, just as I sometimes gaze on the universe itself, which I often view like a spectator seeing it for the first time.
And so I venerate the discoveries of wisdom and its discoverers; it's a pleasure to approach them as though claiming the inheritance of many men. These things were acquired for me, worked out for me. But let's play the good head of household, let's increase what we've received; let this inheritance pass on greater still from me to those who come after. Much work still remains, and much will still remain, and no one born a thousand generations from now will be shut out from the chance to add something more.
But even if everything had already been discovered by the ancients, this will always be new: the use of what has been discovered, and the knowledge and arrangement of it by others. Suppose remedies had been left to us for healing the eyes: I wouldn't need to look for others, but even so they must be fitted to the disease and to the occasion. This remedy soothes irritated eyes; this thins swollen eyelids; this drives away a sudden rush of fluid; this sharpens the sight: you have to grind these together, choose the right time, and apply the right dose to each case. Remedies for the mind were discovered by the ancients; but how they're to be applied, and when, is the work that falls to us.
Those who came before us accomplished much, but they didn't finish the job. Still, they deserve to be looked up to and honored the way we honor the gods. Why shouldn't I keep images of great men, too, to spur my spirit, and celebrate their birthdays? Why shouldn't I always address them with a title of honor? The same reverence I owe my own teachers, I owe those teachers of the human race, from whom the beginnings of so great a good first flowed. If I see a consul or a praetor, I'll do everything by which honor is customarily paid to honor: I'll dismount from my horse, bare my head, give way in the road. Well then? Am I to admit both Marcus Cato and Laelius the Wise, and Socrates with Plato, and Zeno and Cleanthes, into my mind without the utmost respect? No - I venerate them, and I always rise to my feet before such great names. Farewell.