Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] I have fled to my place at Nomentum — escaping what, do you suppose? The city? No: a fever, and one of the creeping kind; it had already laid its hand on me. My doctor said it was in its early stage — the pulse was disturbed, irregular, throwing off its natural rhythm. So I ordered the carriage made ready at once; my Paulina tried to keep me back, but I insisted on leaving. What I had on my lips was the remark of my master Gallio, who, when a fever came on him in Achaia, boarded a ship immediately, protesting loudly that the disease belonged to the place, not to his body. [2] I said as much to my Paulina, who is always urging my health on me. Since I know her life-breath turns on mine, I am beginning, in order to look after her, to look after myself. And though old age has made me braver about many things, I am losing this advantage of my years; for it occurs to me that in this old man there is also a young woman who is being spared. So, since I cannot get her to love me with more courage, she gets me to love myself with more care. [3] One must indulge honorable feelings. Sometimes, even when there are pressing reasons, the breath must be called back — in honor of those we love — even at the cost of torment, and held right there at the lips; for a good man ought to live not as long as it pleases him but as long as he ought. The man who does not value a wife or a friend enough to stay longer in life, who insists on dying, is self-indulgent. Let the mind command itself in this too, when the interest of loved ones requires it: not only if it wishes to die, but even if it has begun, let it pause and put itself at their disposal. [4] It takes greatness of soul to turn back toward life for someone else's benefit, and great men have often done it. But I count this too as the highest humanity: to take more careful care of one's old age — whose greatest reward is a more relaxed guardianship of oneself and a bolder use of life — if you know that this is sweet, useful, and dearly wished for by someone who loves you. [5] Besides, the thing carries no small joy and reward in itself. What is more delightful than being so dear to your wife that you become, on that account, dearer to yourself? So my Paulina can charge to my account not only her fear for me but my own.
[6] You ask, then, how my plan of getting away worked out? The moment I left behind the city's oppressive air and the stench of its smoking kitchens which, once stirred up, pour out whatever pestilential vapor they have soaked up, together with the dust, I felt my condition change at once. And how much do you think my strength gained once I reached my vineyards? Turned out to pasture, I attacked my food. So I have already recovered myself; that limpness of a body unsure of itself and brooding on the worst did not last. I am beginning to study with my whole mind. [7] The place contributes little to that, unless the mind makes itself available to itself — a mind that will have its retreat even in the thick of business, if it wants one. But the man who picks his locations and hunts for leisure will find something to distract him everywhere. The story goes that when someone complained to Socrates that his travels had done him no good, he answered: 'It serves you right — you were traveling with yourself.' [8] How well off some people would be, if they could only wander away from themselves! As it is, they press on themselves, harass, corrupt, and terrify themselves. What is the use of crossing the sea and changing cities? If you want to escape the things that weigh on you, you need to be not somewhere else, but someone else. Suppose you have arrived in Athens, suppose in Rhodes; choose a city at your own discretion — what does it matter what character that city has? You will bring your own. [9] Count wealth a good, and poverty will torture you — and, most wretched of all, a false poverty; for however much you own, still, because someone has more, you will feel short by exactly the margin you are beaten. Count office a good, and it will gall you that this man was made consul, that man even re-elected; you will feel envy every time you read a name repeated in the public lists. The frenzy of ambition will be so great that if anyone is ahead of you, no one will seem to be behind you. [10] Count death the greatest of evils, though there is nothing bad in it except what comes before it — being feared. Not only dangers will terrify you but suspicions of danger; you will be tormented perpetually by phantoms. For what good will it do
to have slipped past so many Argive cities and held your flight through the middle of the enemy?
Peace itself will supply terrors. Once the mind has been thrown into panic, it will not trust even what is safe; once it has made a habit of unthinking fright, it becomes incapable even of protecting its own life. It does not evade danger — it flees; and we are more exposed to dangers when our backs are turned. [11] Count it the heaviest of evils to lose someone you love, though all the while that will be as silly as weeping because the leaves fall from the lovely trees that ornament your house. Look on everything that delights you the same way you look at leaves in their green: enjoy them while they last. One day or another, chance will strip away one or another of them; but just as the loss of foliage is easy to bear because it grows back, so is the loss of those you love and think of as the delights of your life — because they are replaced, even if they are not reborn. [12] 'But they will not be the same.' You yourself will not be the same. Every day, every hour changes you; but in others the theft shows more easily, while here it hides, because it does not happen in the open. Others are taken from us; we are stolen from ourselves by stealth. Will you take none of this into account, apply no remedies to the wounds — and instead sow the causes of your own anxieties, hoping for one thing and despairing of another? If you are wise, mix the one with the other: do not hope without despairing, or despair without hoping.
[13] What benefit could travel on its own confer on anybody? It has never tempered pleasures, never bridled desires, never suppressed anger, never broken the wild assaults of love — in short, it has drawn no evil out of the mind. It has given no judgment, dissolved no error; it merely holds us for a little while with some novelty, like a child gaping at the unfamiliar. [14] For the rest, it aggravates the instability of the mind — the sickest thing about it; the very jolting about makes it more restless and more fickle. So the places people sought most eagerly they abandon more eagerly still; like birds they fly through and are gone faster than they came. [15] Travel will give you acquaintance with peoples, will show you new shapes of mountains, unfamiliar stretches of plain, and valleys watered by unfailing streams; it will set before your observation the peculiar character of some river — how the Nile swells with its summer flood, or how the Tigris is snatched from sight and, after running its course underground, is given back at full size, or how the Maeander, the training-ground and plaything of every poet, tangles itself in loop after loop, and often, drawn close to its own channel, bends away again before it can flow into itself. But it will make you neither better nor saner. [16] We must spend our time among studies and among the masters of wisdom, learning what has been discovered and searching for what has not; that is how the mind is claimed out of the most miserable slavery into freedom. As long as you do not know what is to be fled and what pursued, what is necessary and what superfluous, what is just and what unjust, what is honorable and what disgraceful, this will not be traveling but straying. [17] All this rushing about will bring you no help, for you are traveling in company with your emotions, and your troubles follow along. If only they did follow! They would be further off; as it is, you carry them — you are not leading them. So they press on you everywhere and chafe you with the same discomforts wherever you are. It is medicine the sick man needs to look for, not scenery. [18] Someone has broken a leg or wrenched a joint: he does not climb into a carriage or aboard a ship; he calls a doctor, so the fracture can be set and the dislocation put back into place. Well then — do you believe a mind broken and wrenched in so many places can be healed by a change of location? That ailment is too big to be cured by a ride. [19] Travel makes no one a doctor, no one an orator; no art is learned from a locale. Well then — is wisdom, the greatest art of all, to be picked up on a journey? Believe me, there is no route that will set you down beyond desires, beyond angers, beyond fears; if there were, the human race would march there in column. These evils will keep pressing and wearing you down as you wander over land and sea, as long as you carry the causes of your evils with you. [20] Are you surprised that running away does you no good? What you are running from is with you. Correct yourself, then; take the loads off your own back; keep your desires within a healthy limit; scrape every trace of wickedness out of your mind. If you want your travels to be pleasant, cure your traveling companion. Greed will stick to you as long as you live with a greedy miser; puffed-up pride will stick as long as you keep company with the arrogant; you will never lay aside cruelty while you share quarters with a torturer; the fellowship of adulterers will set your lusts alight. [21] If you want to strip off your vices, you must withdraw far from the examples of vice. The miser, the seducer, the brute, the cheat — men who would have done great harm if they had merely been near you — are inside you. Cross over to better men: spend your life with a Cato, with Laelius, with Tubero. And if you enjoy living with Greeks as well, keep company with Socrates and Zeno: the one will teach you to die if it becomes necessary, the other to die before it becomes necessary. [22] Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: they will hand you the knowledge of things human and divine; they will order you to be at work, and not merely to talk cleverly and toss out words to entertain an audience, but to harden your mind and raise it against threats. For the one harbor of this heaving, turbulent life is to despise what may happen, to stand confidently and ready, and to take fortune's missiles full in the chest — not skulking, not turning away. [23] Nature produced us with greatness of soul; and as she endowed some animals with ferocity, some with cunning, some with timidity, so she gave us a proud, soaring spirit that looks for the place where it may live most honorably, not most safely — a spirit very like the universe, which it follows and strives to match as far as mortal steps allow; it puts itself forward, confident of being praised and looked at. [24] It is master of everything, above everything; therefore let it bow to nothing, let nothing seem heavy to it, nothing such as to bend a man double.
Shapes dreadful to see, Death and Toil:
not dreadful in the least, if anyone can look at them with a steady eye and break through the darkness. Many things held terrifying by night the daylight turns to laughter.
Shapes dreadful to see, Death and Toil:
our Virgil put it superbly: they are dreadful not in fact but 'to see' — that is, they seem so; they are not. [25] What, I ask, is there in these things as fearsome as report has made out? What reason is there, I beg you, Lucilius, for a man to fear toil, or a human being to fear death? Again and again I run into those people who think nothing can be done that they cannot do, and who say we talk of things bigger than human nature can bear. [26] But how much better I think of them than they do! They too can do these things — they simply refuse. In any case, whom have these things ever failed when he made the attempt? To whom have they not proved easier in the doing? It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
[27] Still, if you want an example, take Socrates, that old man built for endurance, knocked about by every hardship yet unbeaten — by poverty, which the burdens of his household made heavier, and by labors, including those he bore as a soldier. He was drilled by his troubles at home, whether you think of a wife fierce in her ways and unruly with her tongue, or of children intractable and more like their mother than their father; and outside the home his life was passed in war, or under tyranny, or in a liberty more savage than wars and tyrants. [28] The war lasted twenty-seven years; when arms were laid down, the state was handed over to the injury of the Thirty Tyrants, most of whom were his enemies. Last came the condemnation, framed under the gravest charges: he was accused of violating religion and corrupting the young — the young whom he was said to have set against the gods, against their fathers, against the state. After that, prison and the poison. All of this so failed to move the mind of Socrates that it did not even move his face. What marvelous, unmatched praise that is! To the very end no one saw Socrates more cheerful or more downcast; he stayed even through all that unevenness of fortune.
[29] Do you want a second example? Take this Marcus Cato, the more recent one, with whom fortune dealt more aggressively and more stubbornly. She blocked him at every turn, at the last even in his death; yet he proved that a courageous man can both live against fortune's will and die against it. His whole life was spent either in civil wars or under a peace already pregnant with civil war; and you may say that he, no less than Socrates, gave his allegiance to liberty — unless perhaps you think Gnaeus Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus were partners of freedom. [30] No one ever saw Cato changed, though the state changed so many times; he showed himself the same in every circumstance — in his praetorship, in electoral defeat, under prosecution, in his province, at the public assembly, in the army, in death. Finally, in that panic of the republic, when on one side stood Caesar propped up by ten legions of hardened fighters and the entire strength of foreign nations, and on the other Gnaeus Pompey, by himself a match for everything, and while some leaned toward Caesar and others toward Pompey, Cato alone made the republic a party too. [31] If you are willing to embrace in your mind a picture of that time, you will see on one side the common people, the whole mob straining toward revolution, and on the other the aristocracy and the equestrian order, everything sacred and select in the state — and two left standing in the middle: the republic and Cato. You will be amazed, I tell you, when you notice
Atreus's son, and Priam, and Achilles, savage against both;
for he condemns both, and disarms both. [32] This is the verdict he delivers on the pair: if Caesar wins, he says, he will die; if Pompey, he will go into exile. What had he to fear, when he had fixed for himself, in defeat and in victory alike, terms as harsh as his angriest enemies could have fixed for him? So he perished by his own decree. [33] You see that men can endure toil: he led an army on foot through the middle of the African deserts. You see that thirst can be borne: dragging the remnants of a beaten army over parched hills, with no supply train, he endured the want of water in full armor, and whenever there was a chance of water, he drank last. You see that honor and disgrace can be despised: on the very day he lost the election he played ball in the assembly-place. You see that the power of superiors need not be feared: Pompey and Caesar — men no one dared offend, one without courting the other — he challenged both at once. You see that death can be despised as fully as exile: he sentenced himself to exile, and to death, and in the interval to war. [34] So we can have just as much courage against these things, if only we choose to draw our neck out from under the yoke. But first of all, pleasures must be spat out: they unnerve and effeminize, and they demand a great deal — and a great deal must then be demanded from fortune. Next, wealth must be scorned: it is the wage that binds us into slavery. Let gold and silver and everything else that loads down prosperous houses be left behind: liberty cannot be had for nothing. If you set a high price on it, everything else must be priced low. Farewell.