Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] Today, without warning, the Alexandrian ships came into view — the ones customarily sent ahead to announce the arrival of the fleet behind them; they call them mail-boats. Campania is glad at the sight of them: the whole crowd stands on the piers of Puteoli and can pick out the Alexandrians, even among a great press of shipping, by the very cut of their sails; they alone are allowed to spread the topsail, which every ship carries on the open sea. [2] Nothing speeds a ship's run like the uppermost stretch of canvas; that is where she gets her strongest push. So whenever the wind has freshened and grown stronger than is useful, the yard is lowered: a gust has less force from down low. Once they have passed Capri and the headland from which
Pallas keeps watch from her storm-beaten summit,
the rest are ordered to make do with the mainsail: the topsail is the Alexandrians' badge.
[3] Amid all this rushing about, with everyone hurrying to the shore, I took great pleasure in my own laziness: though I was about to receive letters from my people, I was in no hurry to learn how my affairs stood over there or what news the letters brought. For a long time now nothing of mine is either lost or gained. Old age aside, I ought to have felt this already; now all the more so: however little I had, I would still have more travel-money left than road — especially since we have set out on a road we are not obliged to finish. [4] A journey is incomplete if you stop halfway, or short of your destination; a life is not incomplete if it is honorable. Wherever you leave off, if you leave off well, it is whole. Often, too, one must leave off bravely, and not for the weightiest of reasons — for neither are the reasons that hold us here the weightiest.
[5] Tullius Marcellinus — you knew him thoroughly — was a quiet young man who aged before his time; seized by an illness, not incurable, but long, wearisome, and full of demands, he began to deliberate about death. He called together a number of friends. Each one either urged on him, because he was timid, what he would have urged on himself, or, because he was a flatterer eager to please, gave the advice he guessed would be most welcome to the man deliberating. [6] Our Stoic friend, a remarkable man and — to praise him in the words he deserves — a brave, vigorous man, gave him, I think, the best encouragement. He began like this: 'Stop torturing yourself, my dear Marcellinus, as though you were deliberating about something great. Living is nothing great: all your slaves live, all the animals do. What is great is to die honorably, sensibly, bravely. Think how long you have been doing the same things: food, sleep, sex — we run round and round this circuit. The wish to die can come not only to the sensible man, the brave man, or the wretched: even a man who is simply fed up can wish it.' [7] What Marcellinus needed was not an adviser but a helper: his slaves refused to obey. So the friend first removed their fear, showing them that a household is in danger only when it is uncertain whether the master's death was voluntary; otherwise it would be as bad a precedent to prevent a master's death as to kill him. [8] Then he reminded Marcellinus himself that it would be no unkindness — just as when dinner is over the leftovers are divided among those standing by — for a man whose life is over to hand something to those who had been his life's attendants. Marcellinus had an easy, generous temper, even when the giving came out of his own pocket; so he distributed small sums to his weeping slaves and comforted them into the bargain. [9] He needed no blade, no bloodshed: he fasted for three days and had a tent set up in his own bedroom. Then a tub was brought in, in which he lay a long while, and as hot water was poured over him again and again, he gradually failed — not, as he kept saying, without a certain pleasure, the kind that a gentle fainting away tends to bring, a feeling not unknown to those of us whose heart has sometimes given out.
[10] I have wandered off into a little story, but not one you'll mind: you now know that your friend's departure was neither hard nor pitiable. Though he chose his own death, he slipped away most gently and simply glided out of life. And the story is not even without use, for necessity often demands examples of this kind. Often we ought to die and refuse; we die, and refuse still. [11] There is no one so untaught that he does not know he must die someday; yet when it draws near, he twists away, trembles, weeps. Wouldn't you call that man the greatest fool of all who cried because a thousand years ago he was not alive? He is just as great a fool who cries because a thousand years from now he will not be alive. These are on a level: you will not be, and you were not; neither stretch of time belongs to you. [12] You have been thrown onto this single point of time — and even if you stretch it, how far can you stretch it? Why cry? Why wish? You are wasting your effort.
Give up hoping that the gods' decrees can be bent by prayer.
They are settled and fixed, and driven by a vast, eternal necessity: you will go where everything goes. What is new in that for you? You were born under this law. This happened to your father, this to your mother, this to your ancestors, this to everyone before you, this to everyone after you. An unconquerable sequence, which no power can alter, has bound all things and drags them on. [13] What a multitude of people destined to die will follow you, what a multitude will keep you company! You would be braver, I suppose, if many thousands were dying along with you; and in fact many thousands, human and animal, at this very moment while you hesitate to die are giving up the breath of life in all sorts of ways. Did you really not think you would someday reach the point you were always traveling toward? No road is without an end.
[14] Do you expect me now to bring you examples of great men? I will bring you boys' examples. There is the story of the Spartan, still a child, who when captured kept shouting 'I will not be a slave!' in that Doric speech of his — and he made good on his words: at the very first order to do slave's work of a degrading kind (he was told to fetch a chamber pot), he dashed his head against the wall and broke it. [15] Freedom lies that close — and someone is still a slave? Wouldn't you rather your son died like that than grew old through spinelessness? Why be shaken, then, if dying bravely is something even a child can do? Suppose you refuse to follow: you will be dragged. Make your own what now belongs to another. Won't you take up that boy's spirit and say, 'I am no slave'? Poor wretch — you are a slave to men, a slave to things, a slave to life; for life, when the courage to die is missing, is slavery. [16] Have you anything worth waiting for? The very pleasures that delay and hold you, you have used up: none is new to you, none has not already turned loathsome from sheer glut. You know the taste of wine, the taste of honeyed wine: it makes no difference whether a hundred jars pass through your bladder or a thousand — you are a strainer. You know precisely how an oyster tastes, how a mullet does: your self-indulgence has kept nothing back untouched for the years ahead. And yet these are the things you are torn from against your will. [17] What else is there whose loss would grieve you? Friends? Do you even know how to be one? Your country? Do you value it enough to put off your dinner? The sun? You would put it out if you could — for what have you ever done worthy of the light? Confess it: it is not longing for the senate house, or the forum, or nature herself that makes you slow to die. What you hate leaving is the food market — where you have left nothing. [18] You fear death — yet how grandly you scorn it over a plate of mushrooms! You want to live: do you even know how? You fear dying: well then — isn't this life of yours a death? When Gaius Caesar was passing along the Latin Way and a man from a column of prisoners, his old beard hanging down to his chest, begged him for death, he replied, 'Why — are you alive now?' That is the answer for those whom death would rescue: 'You're afraid to die — why, are you alive now?' [19] 'But I,' someone says, 'want to live; I do many honorable things. I am unwilling to leave the duties of life, which I perform faithfully and diligently.' Really? Don't you know that dying is one of life's duties too? You are abandoning no duty, for there is no fixed number set that you must complete. [20] No life is anything but short. If you measure by the nature of things, even Nestor's life is short — even Sattia's, who ordered it carved on her tomb that she had lived ninety-nine years. You see: someone actually boasting of a long old age. Who could have endured her if she'd managed to fill out the hundredth? Life is like a play: what matters is not how long it ran but how well it was acted. The place where you break off is of no consequence. Break off where you please — only give it a good closing line. Farewell.