Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
(1) Whenever I've discovered something, I don't wait for you to say 'share it': I tell myself first. You ask what it is I've discovered? Open your pocket wide — it's pure profit. I'll teach you how you can become rich as quickly as possible. How badly you want to hear this! And not without reason: I'm going to lead you by a shortcut to the greatest riches. You'll need a creditor, though: in order to do business, you have to take on debt — but I don't want you borrowing through a middleman, and I don't want brokers throwing your name around. (2) I'll provide you a ready creditor, the one Cato spoke of: you'll borrow from yourself. However little it is, it will be enough, provided that whatever is lacking we ask from ourselves. For it makes no difference at all, my dear Lucilius, whether you don't want something or whether you have it. The bottom line is the same in both cases: you won't be tormented. And I'm not telling you to deny nature anything — she is stubborn, she can't be beaten, she demands what's hers — but only that you recognize that whatever exceeds nature is a matter of borrowed time, not necessity.
(3) I'm hungry: I have to eat. Whether the bread is coarse or fine wheat makes no difference to nature: nature doesn't want the stomach delighted, only filled. I'm thirsty: whether the water is what I've drawn from the nearest pool or what I've chilled with a great deal of snow so that it's cooled by borrowed cold, makes no difference to nature. Nature demands only one thing — that thirst be quenched; whether the cup is gold or crystal or myrrhine glass, or a Tiburtine goblet, or the cupped hollow of your hand, makes no difference. (4) Look to the end of all things, and you'll cast off what's superfluous. Hunger calls out to me: let my hand reach for whatever is nearest; hunger itself will recommend to me whatever I manage to grasp. A hungry man scorns nothing. (5) You ask, then, what it is that has delighted me? It seems to me splendidly said: 'The wise man is the keenest seeker of natural riches.' 'You're giving me an empty dish,' you say. 'What is this? I had already prepared my money-bags; I was looking around for what sea I might launch into as a trader, what public contract I might pursue, what merchandise I might import.'
That's a trick — teaching poverty when you've promised riches. 'Do you really judge as poor a man who lacks nothing?' 'Only,' you say, 'thanks to his own resources and his patience, not thanks to fortune.' So you refuse to call him rich for the very reason that his riches cannot come to an end? (6) Which would you rather have — a great deal, or enough? The man who has a great deal wants more, which is proof that he doesn't yet have enough; the man who has enough has attained something that a rich man never attains: an endpoint. Or do you think these aren't real riches just because no one was ever proscribed on their account? Because no son ever poisoned anyone, no wife ever poisoned anyone, for the sake of them? Because they're safe in war? Because they're untroubled in peace? Because having them isn't dangerous and arranging them isn't laborious?
(7) 'But he has too little who merely doesn't feel cold, doesn't feel hunger, doesn't feel thirst.' Jupiter has no more than that. What is enough is never too little, and what isn't enough is never a great deal. After defeating Darius and the Indians, Alexander is poor. Am I lying? He keeps searching for something to make his own, scours unknown seas, sends new fleets into the ocean, and, so to speak, breaks through the very barriers of the world. What is enough for nature is not enough for man. (8) There was found a man who craved something even after having everything: such is the blindness of minds, such is each person's forgetfulness of his own starting point once he's advanced beyond it. That man, once — not without dispute — the lord of some obscure corner of land, having touched the boundary of the earth, is gloomy as he prepares to return through his own realm. (9) Money has never made anyone rich; on the contrary, it has only ever driven each person's own greed to a greater pitch. You ask what the reason for this is? The man who has more begins to be able to have still more. In short, you may drag out into the open, if you like, any of those men whose names are counted alongside Crassus and Licinus; let him bring forward his entire estate, add up all he has and all he hopes for at once: that man, if you believe me, is poor — if you believe himself, he merely could be. (10) But the man who has fitted himself to what nature demands is not only beyond any sense of poverty, but beyond the fear of it. Yet, so that you may know how hard it is to bring one's affairs down to nature's proper measure, even this man whom we've pared down, whom you call poor, still has something superfluous. (11) But wealth blinds the crowd and draws attention to itself if a great deal of coined money is carried out of some house, if a great deal of gold is smeared even on its roof, if the household staff is chosen for their looks or notable for their dress. The prosperity of all such people looks outward, toward the public; but the man whom we've withdrawn from both the crowd and from fortune is happy on the inside. (12) As for those in whom the false name of riches has settled upon an occupied poverty, they possess riches the way we're said to have a fever, when in fact the fever has us. Just as we're accustomed to say, on the other hand, 'a fever holds him,' so it should be said, 'riches hold him.' So there's nothing I would rather have advised you than this — though no one is ever advised enough of it — that you measure all things by natural desires, which can be satisfied either for free or for very little: only don't mix vices in with your desires. (13) You ask with what kind of table, what kind of silverware, with how matched and light-footed a staff your food ought to be served? Nature desires nothing beyond the food itself.
'When thirst scorches your throat, do you go looking for a golden cup? When you're hungry, do you turn up your nose at everything except—'
(14) Hunger is not ambitious; it's content to come to an end — it doesn't much care how it ends. Those are the torments of unhappy luxury: it looks for ways to be hungry again even after being full, ways not to fill the stomach but to stuff it, ways to reawaken a thirst already quenched by the first drink. Horace says it excellently, denying that it matters to thirst from what cup, or by how elegant a hand, the water is served. For if you judge it matters to you how curly-haired the boy is and how clear the cup that hands it to you, then you aren't thirsty.
(15) Among its other gifts, nature has granted us this outstanding one: it has stripped fastidiousness away from necessity. Superfluous things admit of preference: 'this isn't quite fitting, that isn't quite elegant, this offends my eyes.' But the founder of this world, who laid down for us the terms of living, arranged things so that we might be safe, not so that we might be pampered: everything needed for safety is ready and at hand, while everything needed for indulgence is procured miserably and with great anxiety. (16) Let's make use, then, of this gift of nature, counting it among the great things, and let's reflect that nature has deserved well of us on no other ground more than this: that whatever is required out of necessity is obtained without any distaste. Farewell.