Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. To start with the ordinary things: spring has begun to show itself, but it's already tilting toward summer, when it ought to be hot—instead it's merely gone lukewarm, and I still don't trust it, since it often folds back into winter. You want to know how uncertain it still is? I don't yet dare a real cold bath—I only take the edge off the chill. 'That,' you say, 'is neither hot nor cold.' Just so, my dear Lucilius: my age by now is content with its own chill; it barely thaws in the middle of summer. So most of it is spent wrapped in clothes. I'm grateful to old age for pinning me to my couch—and why shouldn't I be grateful to it on that score? Whatever I ought to have stopped wanting, I now can't do anyway. My conversation these days is mostly with my books. And whenever your letters come along, I feel as if I were with you, and I'm affected in my mind as though I weren't writing back to you but talking with you. So, on this question you're asking, let's examine what it amounts to as if we were in conversation.
You ask whether every good is something to be wished for. 'If it's good,' you say, 'to endure torture bravely, to be burned with great courage, to be sick patiently, then it follows that these things are worth wishing for; but I see nothing in them worthy of a prayer. Certainly I don't know of anyone who has yet paid a vow because he'd been flogged, or twisted with gout, or stretched longer on the rack.' Make a distinction here, my dear Lucilius, and you'll see there's something in these things worth wishing for after all. I would wish torments away from me; but if they have to be endured, I will wish to bear myself in them bravely, honorably, with spirit. Why wouldn't I prefer that war never come my way? But if it does come, I will wish to bear wounds, hunger, and everything war's necessity brings, with nobility. I'm not so mad as to want to fall sick; but if I must fall sick, I will wish to do nothing intemperate, nothing unmanly. So it isn't hardships that are to be wished for, but the virtue by which hardships are endured.
Some of our school hold that the brave endurance of all such things is not to be wished for—though not to be shunned either—because a wish ought to aim at a good that is pure, calm, and set outside of trouble. I disagree. Why? First, because it can't be that something is genuinely good and yet not to be wished for; next, if virtue is to be wished for, and no good exists without virtue, then every good is to be wished for; and further, even if [text uncertain] the brave endurance of torments is to be wished for.
Let me press the question again: surely courage is to be wished for? And yet courage despises dangers and even provokes them; its finest and most admirable part is precisely this—not yielding to fires, going out to meet wounds, sometimes not even dodging a weapon but taking it full in the chest. If courage is to be wished for, then bearing torments patiently is to be wished for too, since that is part of courage. But separate the elements, as I said, and nothing will mislead you. It isn't enduring torments that is to be wished for, but enduring them bravely: what I wish for is the 'bravely'—that is the virtue.
'But who has ever wished this for himself?' Some prayers are open and declared, when they're made item by item; others lie hidden, when a single wish takes in many things at once. For instance, I pray for an honorable life; but an honorable life is made up of varied actions—in it is Regulus's chest, Cato's wound torn open again by his own hand, Rutilius's exile, the cup of poison that carried Socrates from prison up to heaven. So when I have prayed for an honorable life, I have also prayed for these things, without which an honorable life sometimes cannot be.
"O three and four times blessed, those who were granted to meet their deaths before their fathers' eyes beneath Troy's high walls!"
What difference does it make whether you wish this for someone, or simply admit that it was something to be wished for?
Decius devoted himself for the republic and, driving his horse into the thick of the enemy, seeking death, charged in. Another after him, rivaling his father's courage, ran into the densest battle-line with the solemn, now-familiar words already formed, anxious only that the sacrifice go well, counting a noble death a thing to be prayed for. Do you doubt, then, whether it is the best thing to die memorably, in some act of virtue?
When someone endures torments bravely, he is exercising all the virtues at once. Perhaps one alone is on display and most visible—endurance; but courage is there too, of which endurance and suffering and forbearance are the branches; prudence is there, without which no plan is undertaken, which advises bearing what you cannot escape as bravely as possible; constancy is there, which cannot be dislodged from its place and abandons its resolve under no force's compulsion; the whole undivided company of the virtues is there. Whatever is done honorably, one virtue does it, but by the judgment of counsel; and whatever is approved by all the virtues together, even if it seems to be done by one alone, is to be wished for.
What—do you suppose that only the things that come through pleasure and leisure are to be wished for, the things welcomed at garlanded doorways? Some goods wear a grim face; some prayers are celebrated not by a crowd offering congratulations, but by people bowing in awe and reverence.
So do you not think Regulus wished to reach the Carthaginians? Put on the spirit of a great man, and withdraw for a moment from popular opinion; grasp, as you should, the full and splendid image of the most beautiful and magnificent virtue—one that must be honored by us not with incense or garlands, but with sweat and blood.
Look at Marcus Cato laying his own pure hands upon that sacred chest, widening the wound that had not gone deep enough. Would you really say to him, 'I wish you hadn't wanted this,' and 'I'm sorry for you'—or rather, 'How fortunate, what you're doing'?
At this point our friend Demetrius comes to mind, who calls a life of security, untouched by any assault of fortune, a dead sea. To have nothing to rouse you, nothing to stir you, nothing whose threat and onset tests the firmness of your spirit, but to lie in undisturbed leisure—that is not tranquility; that is stagnation.
Attalus the Stoic used to say, 'I would rather fortune keep me in her camp than among her indulgences. I'm tortured, but bravely: that's good. I'm being killed, but bravely: that's good.' Listen to Epicurus, and he'll say it's sweet too. I will never put so soft a name on something so honorable and severe a thing.
I am burned, but unconquered—why shouldn't this be something to be wished for? Not because the fire burns me, but because it does not defeat me. Nothing surpasses virtue, nothing is more beautiful; and whatever is carried out under its command is both good and to be wished for. Farewell.