Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] After a long interval I have seen your beloved Pompeii again. I was brought back into the sight of my own youth; whatever I had done there as a young man, it seemed to me I could still do, and had done only a little while ago. [2] We have sailed past life, Lucilius, and just as at sea, as our Virgil says,
so in this course of swiftly rushing time, we first leave behind us childhood, then youth, then whatever lies between young and old, set on the border of both, then the best years of old age itself; last of all, the end common to the whole human race begins to come into view. [3] Only fools think that end is a reef; it is a harbor, one we must sometimes make for, and never one to refuse. If a person is carried into it in his early years, he has no more right to complain than someone who has made a quick voyage. For as you know, sluggish winds toy with one sailor and hold him back, wearying him with the tedium of a dead calm, while a steady, driving wind carries another along at great speed. [4] Assume the same happens to us: life brings some people swiftly to the point they had to reach even if they lingered, while it wears others down slowly, cooking them over time. Life, as you know, is not something always to be clung to; for living is not itself the good - living well is.
So the wise person will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. [5] He will consider where he is going to live, with whom, how, and doing what. He always thinks about the quality of life, not its length. If many troubles arise that disturb his peace, he lets himself go; and he does this not only as a last resort, but as soon as fortune first begins to look suspect to him, he looks carefully around to see whether it's time to stop there. He thinks it makes no real difference to him whether he brings the end about himself or merely accepts it, whether it comes sooner or later: he does not fear it as some great loss - no one can lose much from a mere trickle. [6] Dying sooner or later doesn't matter; dying well or badly does. And dying well means escaping the danger of living badly. That's why I think the words of that Rhodian were thoroughly unmanly: thrown into a cage by a tyrant and fed like some wild animal, when someone urged him to refuse food, he said, 'While a man lives, he should hope for everything.' [7] Even granting that this is true, life should not be bought at any price. Some things, however great and certain, I still will not stoop to purchase by such a shameful confession of weakness. Should I really think that fortune has power over everything, so long as a man lives - rather than think that fortune has no power at all over a man who knows how to die?
[8] Yet sometimes, even when death is certain and closing in and a person knows the punishment set for him, he will not lend a hand to his own execution - he would be lending it to himself. It is foolish to die from fear of dying: your killer is coming - wait for him. Why anticipate it? Why take over the administration of someone else's cruelty? Are you begrudging your executioner his job, or sparing him the trouble? [9] Socrates could have ended his life by refusing food, dying of starvation rather than by poison; yet he spent thirty days in prison awaiting death, not with the attitude that anything could still happen, that so long a stretch of time still held out many hopes, but so as to make himself available to the laws, and to let his friends enjoy Socrates right up to the very end. What could have been more foolish than to scorn death but fear poison? [10] Scribonia, a woman of great dignity, was the aunt of Drusus Libo, a young man as stupid as he was well-born, hoping for things greater than anyone in that age could hope for - or than he himself could really hope for. When he was carried home from the Senate ill, in a litter, with hardly a crowd attending him - since all his connections had already abandoned him out of disloyalty, treating him now not as an accused man but as a corpse - he began to deliberate whether to take his own life or wait it out. Scribonia said to him, 'What pleasure do you find in doing someone else's business?' She did not persuade him: he laid hands on himself, and not without reason. For a man who lives on three or four more days only to die at his enemy's discretion is indeed doing someone else's business.
[11] So you cannot make a blanket pronouncement about whether, when death is being threatened by some outside force, one should seize it first or wait for it; there are many considerations that can pull the matter either way. If one death comes with torture, and the other is simple and easy, why not reach for the latter? Just as I would choose a ship if I were about to sail, or a house if I were about to live in one, so I would choose a death if I were about to leave life. [12] Furthermore, just as a longer life is not necessarily a better one, a longer death is necessarily a worse one. In no matter should we defer to the spirit's own inclination more than in death. Let it leave by whatever impulse it has seized on: whether it reaches for the sword, the noose, or some drink that seizes the veins, let it go forward and break the chains of its servitude. Everyone is obliged to justify his life to others, but his death only to himself: the best death is the one you like. [13] It is foolish to worry about things like this: 'someone will say I didn't act bravely enough, someone else that I was too rash, someone else that some other kind of death would have shown more spirit.' Do you really want to consider that what's in your hands here is a decision that has nothing to do with reputation? Look only to this: to tear yourself free of fortune as quickly as you can. Otherwise there will always be people ready to think ill of what you've done.
[14] You will even find people who profess wisdom and yet deny that one should use force against one's own life, and judge it a sin to become one's own killer: we must, they say, wait for the end that nature has decreed. Whoever says this fails to see that he is closing off the road to freedom: the eternal law did nothing better than to give us one entrance into life, but many exits. [15] Am I to wait for the cruelty of disease or of a man, when I can walk out through the middle of my torments and shake off my troubles? This is the one thing we cannot complain about in life: it holds no one against his will. Human affairs stand in a good position, because no one is wretched except by his own fault. If you like it, live; if you don't, you may go back to where you came from. [16] To relieve a headache, you have often had blood let; a vein is opened to reduce the body's fullness. There's no need to slash open the chest with some huge wound: a scalpel opens the way to that great freedom, and a single puncture secures your liberty. What is it, then, that makes us sluggish and idle? None of us thinks that someday he will have to leave this house; that's how old tenants are kept in place by fondness for the location and long habit, even amid its injuries. [17] Do you want to be free with respect to this body? Live in it as though you are about to move out. Picture to yourself that at some point you'll have to do without this shared lodging: you'll be stronger in facing the necessity of leaving it. But how will the thought of an end ever occur to people who crave everything without end? [18] No exercise of thought is more necessary than this one - other exercises, perhaps, are performed to no purpose. We have prepared our minds against poverty: yet our wealth remained intact. We have armed ourselves to scorn pain: yet the good fortune of a sound, healthy body has never demanded that we actually put that virtue to the test. We have trained ourselves to bear bravely the loss of those we love: yet fortune has kept alive, safe and unharmed, everyone we ever loved. [19] But the day will come that demands we put this one skill to use. You should not suppose that only great men have had the strength to break through the bars of human servitude, or judge that no one but Cato could have done it, Cato who tore out with his own hand the life he had failed to release with the sword: men of the meanest condition have, in a great burst of will, escaped to safety, and when they were not permitted to die at their own convenience or to choose the instruments of death as they pleased, they seized whatever lay in their path and made deadly weapons, by sheer force, out of things that by nature were harmless. [20] Recently, at a training school for beast-fighters, one of the Germans, while getting ready for the morning show, withdrew to relieve himself - the only privacy allowed him without a guard - and there he took the stick fitted with a sponge, used for cleaning the more shameful parts, and rammed the whole thing down his throat, choking off his breath and crushing his own windpipe. That was to insult death itself. Just so, and none too clean or decent about it: but then what is more foolish than to be squeamish about dying? [21] O brave man, worthy to have been given the choice of his own fate! How courageously he would have wielded a sword, how boldly he would have hurled himself into the depths of the sea or off some sheer cliff! Stripped of everything, he still found a way to provide himself both a death and a weapon, so you can see that nothing else delays a person's dying except the will to do it. Let each person judge this fierce man's act as he sees fit, so long as this much is agreed: even the filthiest death is to be preferred to the cleanest slavery.
[22] Since I've begun using low examples, I'll keep at it - for a person will demand more of himself if he sees that even the most despised people can hold death in contempt. We think of Catos and Scipios, and others we're used to hearing about with admiration, as set beyond our imitation; but I will now show you that this same virtue has just as many examples in a school for beast-fighters as among the generals of the civil war. [23] Recently, as one of the condemned men, under guard, was being carried to the morning show, he began to nod as though overcome by sleep, and let his head droop lower and lower until he could slip it between the spokes of the wheel, and he held himself there in his seat until the wheel's turning broke his neck. He escaped by means of the very cart that was carrying him to his punishment. [24] Nothing stands in the way of a person eager to burst out and escape: nature keeps us guarded only in the open. Whoever's circumstances allow it should look around for a gentle way out; whoever has several means close at hand for asserting his freedom should make a choice among them and consider by which one he might best be freed; whoever finds the opportunity difficult should seize whatever comes closest to hand as though it were the best, even if it is unheard of, even if it is strange. Ingenuity for dying will never fail the person who has not failed to summon the will. [25] You see how even the lowliest slaves, once pain has driven its goad into them, rouse themselves and outwit the most closely watched guards? That man is truly great who has not merely obeyed the command to die, but has invented his own way of doing it. I promised you more examples from that same show. [26] At the second staged sea-battle, one of the barbarians drove clean through his own throat the spear he had been given to use against his opponents. 'Why, why,' he said, 'don't I escape at once from every torment, every mockery? Why do I wait for death armed?' This spectacle was all the more striking because it shows men learning to die more nobly than they learn to kill. [27] What, then? Will those whom long meditation and reason, the teacher of all things, have equipped against such misfortunes, not have the same capacity that even ruined, guilty minds possess? Reason teaches us that the roads to our fated end vary, but the end itself is the same, and that it makes no difference at all where the thing that is coming begins. [28] That same reason advises that if you are permitted, you should die as you please; if not, then as you can, and you should seize whatever comes to hand to use force against yourself. It is criminal to live by plunder, but on the contrary, it is a most beautiful thing to die by plunder. Farewell.