Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] I greet you from my Nomentan estate and bid you have a good mind - that is, all the gods well-disposed toward you, for a man secures the gods' favor and goodwill by first making himself well-disposed toward himself. Set aside for the moment the view held by some, that each of us is assigned a god as tutor - not one of the highest rank, but one of that lesser kind Ovid calls 'gods of the common people.' Still, set this aside remembering that our ancestors, who we're told were Stoics, believed it too; for they gave each individual both a Genius and a Juno. [2] Later we'll see whether the gods have enough leisure to attend to private business. For now, know this: whether we are assigned a guardian or left neglected and given over to fortune, you can wish nothing worse on anyone than that he have the gods angry with him. But there is no reason to wish, on anyone you think deserves punishment, that he have the gods hostile to him - he has them so already, I say, even if he seems to be advanced by their favor. [3] Apply your attention and look at what our circumstances actually are, not what they are called, and you will find that more evils befall us than actually happen to us. How often has what was called a disaster been the cause and the beginning of good fortune! How often has something received with great congratulation built for itself a stair down into ruin, lifting some man already prominent still higher - as though he still stood where men fall safely! [4] But the fall itself has nothing evil in it, if you look to its end, beyond which nature has cast down no one. The limit of all things is near - near, I say, both the point from which the fortunate man is thrown down and the point from which the unfortunate man is released: we stretch both of these out and make them long through hope and fear. But if you are wise, measure everything by the human condition; contract at once both what delights you and what frightens you. And nothing is worth rejoicing over for long, so that you need not fear anything for long.
[5] But why do I confine the evil to that alone? There is no reason to think anything need be feared: the things that stir us, that keep us stunned, are hollow. None of us has ever shaken out what is true; we have simply handed our fear from one to another; no one has dared approach the thing that disturbed him and learn the nature and true measure of his fear. And so a false and empty thing still commands belief, because it is never exposed. [6] Let us think it worth our while to fix our eyes on it steadily; then it will at once appear how brief, how uncertain, how safe are the things we fear. Our minds are as confused as Lucretius saw them to be:
for just as children tremble and fear everything
in the blind dark, so we in the light fear things.
Well then? Are we not more foolish than any child, we who fear in broad daylight? [7] But it is false, Lucretius - we do not fear in the light: we have made darkness for ourselves in every direction. We see nothing, neither what will harm us nor what will help us; we go stumbling through our whole life, and for all that we neither stop nor plant our feet more carefully. Yet you can see how mad a thing it is to rush forward in the dark. And, by heaven, what we actually do is arrange things so that we would be even harder to call back - even while ignorant of where we are being carried, we press on all the faster toward wherever it is we are headed. [8] But daylight can come, if we are willing. And it can come in one way only: if a person acquires a real understanding of things human and divine, if he does not merely sprinkle himself with it but is dyed through by it, if he goes over the same things again and again, however well he knows them, and refers them constantly back to himself, if he asks what things are truly good, what truly bad, and which have been falsely given that name, if he inquires into what is honorable and what is base, and into providence. [9] Nor does the reach of the human mind stop at these things: it delights also in looking ahead, beyond the world itself, to ask where it is being carried, from what it arose, toward what end this great velocity of things is hurrying. But we have dragged the mind away from this divine contemplation and pulled it down into squalid, low things, to make it slave to greed, so that, abandoning the world and its boundaries and the lords who govern the whole of it, it might grub through the earth and search for whatever evil it could dig out of it, unsatisfied with what was freely offered. [10] Whatever was going to be good for us, God, our parent, placed close at hand; he did not wait for us to go looking, and gave it freely; but whatever would harm us, he buried deep. We can complain of nothing but ourselves: we have brought into the light, against the will and despite the concealment of nature, the very things by which we perish. We have made the mind a slave to pleasure - to indulge which is the beginning of every evil - we have handed it over to ambition and to fame, and to the other things equally empty and hollow.
[11] What, then, do I urge you now to do? Nothing new - for new evils do not call for new remedies - but this first of all: that you consider for yourself what is necessary and what is superfluous. Necessary things will meet you everywhere; superfluous things must always be sought out, with the whole mind bent on the search. [12] There is no reason for you to congratulate yourself too much if you have scorned golden couches and furniture set with gems; for what virtue is there in scorning what is superfluous? Admire yourself only when you have scorned what is necessary. It is no great feat that you can live without royal display, that you do not crave boars weighing a thousand pounds, or flamingo tongues, or the other monstrosities of a luxury already sick of whole animals and picking out particular parts from each: I will admire you only when you have scorned even coarse bread, when you have persuaded yourself that grass, where it must, grows not only for cattle but for man too, when you have realized that treetops are just filler for a belly into which we heap up costly things as though it kept whatever it received. It must be filled without fastidiousness; for what does it matter what it receives, when it is going to destroy whatever it receives? [13] You take pleasure in the elaborate arrangement of what is caught on land and sea, some the more welcome for being brought fresh to the table, others for having been long fattened and force-fed until they run with grease and can scarcely contain their own fat; you take pleasure in the polish these things acquire through art. But, by heaven, once all this anxiously hunted, variously seasoned food has gone down into the belly, one and the same foulness will take hold of it. Do you want to scorn the pleasure of food? Look to its end.
[14] I remember Attalus saying this, to the great admiration of everyone: 'For a long time,' he said, 'wealth deceived me. I was awestruck whenever some part of it flashed out in one place or another; I assumed the parts I could not see were like the parts on display. But at a certain lavish spectacle I once saw the entire wealth of a city laid out - things wrought in gold and silver, and things whose price outstripped gold and silver; rare dyes and garments brought not only from beyond our own borders but from beyond the territory of our enemies; here whole troops of boys, glittering in their finery and beauty, there of girls, and other things which the fortune of a supreme empire, taking stock of its own possessions, had brought forth. [15] 'What is this,' I said to myself, 'but stirring up appetites in men that are already violent enough on their own? What is the point of this parade of money? Have we gathered here to be taught greed?' But, by heaven, I came away from there with less desire, not more. I had come to scorn riches - not because they are superfluous, but because they are trivial. [16] Did you see how, within a few hours, that whole procession - slow-moving and elaborately arranged as it was - had passed by? Is this to occupy our entire life, this thing that could not even fill out one whole day? And there was this too: these things looked just as superfluous to those who owned them as they had to those of us watching. [17] So this is what I say to myself whenever something of this sort dazzles my eyes, whenever I come upon a splendid house, a well-groomed troop of slaves, a litter set on the shoulders of handsome bearers: 'Why do you marvel? Why are you dumbstruck? It's a parade. These things are put on display, not truly possessed, and even while they please, they are passing away.' [18] Turn instead to the true riches; learn to be content with little, and cry out, greathearted and bold, that saying: we have water, we have barley meal; let us set ourselves in rivalry with Jupiter himself over happiness. Let us do so, I beg you, even if we lack those very things; it is shameful to place a happy life in gold and silver, and just as shameful to place it in water and barley meal. 'But what shall I do, then, if I have neither?' [19] You ask what the remedy for poverty is? Hunger ends hunger: otherwise, what does it matter whether the things that force you into servitude are great or small? What difference does it make how little a thing is, if fortune can still use it to say no to you? [20] This very water and barley meal fall under someone else's control; but a free man is not one over whom fortune has little power, but one over whom it has none at all. That is how it is: you must want nothing, if you wish to challenge a Jupiter who wants nothing.'
This is what Attalus told us; nature tells it to everyone. If you are willing to dwell on it often, you will manage to be happy, not merely to appear so, and to appear so to yourself, not to others. Farewell.