The greater part of mortals, Paulinus, complain of nature’s spite: that we are born for a brief span, that these stretches of time given to us run out so swiftly, so headlong, that — a very few excepted — life abandons the rest just as they are getting ready to live. And it is not only the mob and the unthinking crowd that have groaned at this evil they take to be universal; the same feeling has drawn complaints even from men of renown. Hence that cry of the greatest of physicians: that life is short, art long. Hence Aristotle’s quarrel with nature — a suit ill-befitting a wise man: that she has indulged animals so far as to draw out five generations of life or ten, while to man, born for so many and so great things, a limit so much nearer is set. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and granted in generous measure for the accomplishment of the greatest things, if the whole of it were well invested; but when it drains away through luxury and carelessness, when it is spent on no good thing, then at last, under the compulsion of the final necessity, we feel that the life we did not notice was passing has passed. So it is: we do not receive a short life, but we make it short; we are not poor in it, but wasteful of it. Just as great and royal wealth, once it has come to a bad master, is squandered in a moment, while wealth however modest, if it is handed over to a good keeper, grows with use — so our span lies open wide to the one who orders it well.

Why do we complain of nature? She has dealt generously: life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is gripped by insatiable greed, another by a laborious diligence at useless tasks; one is sodden with wine, another numb with sloth; one is worn out by an ambition that hangs forever on the verdicts of others, another driven by a headlong lust for trade over every land and every sea in the hope of gain; some are tortured by a passion for soldiering, never not bent on others’ dangers or anxious over their own; there are those whom a thankless court paid to their betters consumes in voluntary servitude. Many have been held fast by the pursuit of another’s beauty or by complaint about their own; very many, chasing nothing fixed, have been flung from one new scheme to another by a fickleness that is shifting, unstable, and displeased with itself; some find nothing they care to steer their course toward, but death overtakes them slack and yawning — so that I cannot doubt the truth of what the greatest of poets uttered like an oracle: “It is a small part of life that we truly live.” For all the rest of the span is not life but time. Vices press and surround them on every side and do not let them rise again or lift their eyes to discern the truth. They hold them down, sunk and driven deep into their cravings; never are they free to return to themselves. If by chance some quiet has fallen to them, then — as on a deep sea where there is a heaving even after the wind has dropped — they are tossed, and their cravings never grant them rest. Do you think I am speaking of the men whose evils are admitted? Look at the men toward whose good fortune people come running: they are choked by their own blessings. How many find their riches a burden! From how many does eloquence, and the daily strain of showing off their talent, draw out the very blood! How many are pale from unbroken pleasures! How many are left no freedom by the throng of clients pressing round them! Run through them all, in short, from the lowest to the highest: this one summons counsel, this one attends; that one stands trial, that one defends, that one judges — no one claims himself for himself, each is used up over another. Ask about the men whose names are learned by heart, and you will see them marked off by these tokens: this one courts that one, that one another — no one belongs to himself. Then there is the utterly mad indignation of some: they complain of the disdain of their superiors, that these had no time for them when they wished to call! Does anyone dare complain of another’s arrogance, who never has time for himself? Yet he, whoever you are, did look at you at last, however haughty his face; he did lower his ears to your words; he did take you to his side: you have never deigned to look at yourself, or to listen to yourself. So there is no reason to charge these attentions to anyone’s account, since when you paid them, it was not that you wished to be with another, but that you could not be with yourself.

Though all the minds that ever shone should agree on this one point, they will never wonder enough at this fog over human minds: men suffer no one to seize their estates, and if there is some trifling dispute over boundaries they run for stones and arms; yet they let others trespass into their lives — indeed, they themselves bring in the very men who will come to possess them. No one is found willing to share out his money, yet to how many does each man parcel out his life! Men are tight-fisted in keeping their patrimony, but the moment it comes to wasting time, they are most lavish with the one thing in which to be grasping is honorable. And so I should like to seize one out of the crowd of the old: “We see that you have reached the last stage of human life; your hundredth year, or beyond, presses upon you. Come now, call your age to a reckoning. Reckon how much of that time a creditor has taken, how much a mistress, how much a patron, how much a client; how much your quarrels with your wife, the punishing of slaves, the dutiful dashing about the city; add the diseases we have made with our own hands; add the time that has lain idle and unused: you will see that you have fewer years than you count. Call back in memory: when were you ever sure of your purpose? how few of your days went off as you had appointed them? when were you ever at your own disposal? when did your face wear its natural look, your mind go unafraid? what work of your own have you to show for so long an age? how many have plundered your life while you did not feel what you were losing? how much has been carried off by empty sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the charm of company? how little of your own is left to you? — then you will understand that you are dying before your time.” What, then, is the cause? You live as though you would live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you do not mark how much time has already gone by. You squander it as though from a full and overflowing store, when all the while the very day that is given to some person or some affair may be your last. You fear everything as mortals, you crave everything as immortals. You will hear very many saying: “At fifty I shall retire into leisure; my sixtieth year will discharge me from duties.” And what surety, pray, do you take for a longer life? Who will let things go just as you arrange them? Are you not ashamed to keep for yourself only the leavings of life, and to set aside for a sound mind only the time that can be put to no other use? How late it is to begin to live just when life must end! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality, to put off sound counsel to one’s fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to mean to begin life at a point few have reached!

From the most powerful men, raised to the heights, you will see words slip out in which they long for leisure, praise it, set it above all their blessings. Now and then they long to step down from that pinnacle of theirs, if it could be done in safety; for even with nothing outside to provoke or shake it, fortune collapses upon itself. The deified Augustus, to whom the gods granted more than to any other, never ceased to pray for rest for himself and to seek release from public affairs; all his talk came round always to this — that he hoped for leisure. With this sweet, if false, consolation he beguiled his labors: that one day he would live for himself. In a letter sent to the Senate, where he had promised that his rest would not be wanting in dignity nor at odds with his former glory, I find these words: “But these things can be done more handsomely than they can be promised. Still, the longing for that time, most wished-for by me, has carried me so far that, since the joy of the thing itself is delayed yet, I take some foretaste of pleasure from the sweetness of the words.” So great a thing did leisure seem to him that, because he could not have it in fact, he took it in advance in thought. He who saw all things hanging upon himself alone, who dealt out fortune to men and nations, thought most gladly of the day on which he would put off his greatness. He had learned by experience how much sweat those blessings, blazing across every land, wrung out of him, how many hidden anxieties they covered: forced to fight it out by arms — first with his fellow citizens, then with his colleagues, last with his kinsmen — he shed blood by land and sea. Driven through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and along nearly every shore in war, he turned armies weary of Roman slaughter to foreign wars. While he pacified the Alps and subdued the enemies mixed in among a peace and an empire already settled, while he pushed the frontiers beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates and the Danube, in the city itself the daggers of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being sharpened against him. He had not yet escaped their plots when his daughter, and so many noble young men bound by adultery as if by an oath, were terrorizing his already broken age — and Paulus, and once again the woman to be feared, in league with an Antonius. These ulcers he had cut away along with the limbs themselves; others grew up in their place: like a body heavy with too much blood, it kept bursting now in one part, now in another. And so he longed for leisure; in the hope and the thought of it his labors found their rest; this was the prayer of the man who could grant the prayers of others.

Marcus Cicero, tossed among the Catilines and Clodiuses and Pompeys and Crassuses — some open enemies, some doubtful friends — while he is storm-driven along with the republic and holds it back as it goes under, at the last swept off, neither calm in prosperity nor able to bear adversity, how often he curses that very consulship of his, praised not without reason but without end! What tearful words he wrings out in one of his letters to Atticus, when the father, Pompey, was already beaten and the son was still in Spain nursing the shattered arms back to life! “What am I doing here, you ask?” he says. “I linger in my Tusculan villa, half-free.” He adds more in turn, in which he bewails his earlier life, complains of the present, and despairs of the future. Cicero called himself half-free: but, by Hercules, the wise man will never sink to so lowly a name, will never be half-free — always of whole and solid liberty, unbound, his own master, and higher than the rest. For what can stand above the man who stands above fortune?

Livius Drusus, a fierce and headstrong man, when he had set in motion new laws and the mischief of the Gracchi, hemmed in by a vast concourse from all Italy, not foreseeing the outcome of measures that he was not allowed to carry through and was no longer free to abandon once begun, is said to have cursed his life, restless from its very beginnings, and to have declared that to himself alone, not even as a boy, had a holiday ever fallen. For while still a ward and still in the boy’s bordered toga, he dared to commend defendants to the jurors and to throw his influence into the Forum — and so effectively, indeed, that it is agreed certain verdicts were carried off by him. Where would so premature an ambition not have broken out? You might have known that such precocious daring would issue in great evil, both private and public. Too late, then, did he complain that no holiday had fallen to him — a man seditious from boyhood and a burden to the Forum. It is disputed whether he laid hands on himself: for he collapsed from a sudden wound through the groin, some doubting whether his death was self-willed, none whether it was timely. It is needless to recall the many who, though they seemed to others the most fortunate of men, bore true witness against themselves, loathing every act of their years; but by these complaints they changed neither others nor themselves — for once the words had burst out, their passions slid back into the old habit. Your life, by Hercules, though it should run beyond a thousand years, will be drawn into the narrowest compass: those vices of yours will devour any and every age; but this present span, which nature makes to run yet reason can lengthen, must needs slip from you quickly — for you do not lay hold of it or hold it back or put any check on the swiftest of all things, but let it go as though it were superfluous and could be replaced.

First among them I count those who have time for nothing but wine and lust; for no men are occupied more shamefully. The rest, even if they are held by an empty image of glory, at least go astray in a fine-looking way; name me the greedy, name me the wrathful, or men waging unjust hatreds or wars — all of these sin more like men: the disgrace of those flung down into the belly and into lust is a rot. Sift through all their hours, see how long they spend calculating, how long laying snares, how long fearing, how long courting, how long being courted, how much their own bail-bonds and others’ take up, how much banquets, which by now are themselves a kind of duty: you will see how their evils, or their goods, leave them no room to breathe. In short, it is agreed among all that no pursuit can be practiced well by a busy man — not eloquence, not the liberal studies — since a mind pulled in many directions takes in nothing deeply but spits out everything as if forced upon it. There is nothing the busy man does less than live: of no thing is the knowledge harder. Teachers of the other arts are everywhere and many; some of these mere boys have been seen to grasp so well that they could even teach them: how to live must be learned one’s whole life long, and — what perhaps will surprise you more — one’s whole life long must one learn how to die. So many of the greatest men, having laid aside every encumbrance, having renounced riches, offices, pleasures, made this one thing their business to the very end of their age: to know how to live; yet most of these departed from life confessing that they did not yet know — much less, then, do those others know. It is the mark of a great man, believe me, one who stands above human errors, to let nothing be skimmed away from his own time; and for that reason his life is the longest, because, however much it lay open, the whole of it was free for himself. None of it lay uncultivated and idle, none of it under another’s control; for, the most sparing keeper of it, he found nothing worth exchanging for his time. And so he had enough; but those must needs have fallen short out of whose life the public carried off much. And do not suppose that they never understand their loss: at any rate you will hear very many of those whom great prosperity weighs down cry out at times, amid their herds of clients or their pleading of cases or their other honorable miseries: “I am not allowed to live.” Why should you be allowed? All those who summon you to themselves draw you away from yourself. That defendant — how many days has he carried off? That candidate, how many? That old woman, worn out with burying her heirs? That man feigning sickness to whet the greed of the legacy-hunters? That more powerful friend who keeps you not for friendship but for show? Check them off, I say, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few, and those the rejects, have stayed behind with you. That man, having won the rods of office he had longed for, longs to lay them down and keeps saying: “When will this year be over?” That man puts on the games whose allotment he had reckoned a great prize: “When,” he says, “shall I be rid of them?” That advocate, torn at by the whole Forum, fills the entire place with a great crowd, farther than he can be heard: “When,” he says, “will the courts adjourn?” Each man hurls his life headlong and labors with longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who turns every moment to his own uses, who orders each day as though it were his last, neither longs for the morrow nor fears it. For what is there that any hour could now bring of new pleasure? All is known, all has been savored to the full. For the rest, let luck and fortune order things as they will: his life is now in safety. To it something may be added, nothing taken away — and added as a little food is to a man already sated and full, who takes it without wanting it. So there is no reason to think a man has lived long because of his grey hairs or his wrinkles: he has not lived long, but existed long. For would you think a man had sailed far whom a savage storm caught the moment he left harbor and carried this way and that, and drove round in a circle over the same stretches by the turns of winds raging from opposite quarters? He did not sail far, but was tossed far.

I often marvel when I see some men asking for time, and those who are asked so very ready to give it: each looks to the thing for which the time is asked, neither to the time itself; it is asked as though it were nothing, given as though it were nothing. They make sport with the most precious thing of all; but it deceives them, because it is a thing without body, because it does not come before the eyes, and so is reckoned the cheapest thing — nay, has almost no price at all. Men accept their pensions and largesses as a great prize, and for them they hire out their labor or their service or their diligence: no one puts a value on time; they use it freely, as if it cost nothing. But see those same men when they fall sick: if the danger of death has drawn nearer, clasping their physicians’ knees; if they fear a capital sentence, ready to spend all they have to live! So great is the discord of their passions! But if the number of each man’s coming years could be set before him as the number of his past ones can, how those who saw few remaining would tremble, how sparing of them they would be! And yet it is easy to manage even a small store when it is certain; what must be guarded more carefully is what you do not know when it will run out. And yet do not suppose that they are ignorant how dear a thing it is: they are wont to say to those they love most deeply that they are ready to give them a part of their own years: they give, and do not understand; they give, moreover, in such a way as to subtract from themselves without adding to the others. But this very thing — whether they are subtracting — they do not know; and so the loss is bearable to them, because the damage is hidden. No one will restore your years, no one will give you back to yourself a second time. Your life will go the way it began, and will neither call back its course nor check it; it will make no commotion, give no reminder of its speed: it will glide on in silence. It will not stretch itself out longer at a king’s command or at the people’s favor: as it was launched on the first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere linger. What will come of it? You are busy, life hurries on; meanwhile death will be at hand, for which, willing or not, you must find time.

Can anything be more foolish than the thinking of certain men — I mean those who boast of their foresight? They are busy with toilsome care. To be able to live better, they build a life at the cost of life. They lay out their plans far ahead; but the greatest waste of life is postponement: it strips away each day as it comes, it snatches the present from us while it promises what is further off. The greatest hindrance to living is expectation, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You arrange what lies in fortune’s hand, you let go what lies in your own. What are you looking toward? Where are you stretching yourself? All that is to come lies in uncertainty: live at once. Look how the greatest of bards cries out, and, as if stirred by a divine awe, sings a saving song: For wretched mortals each best day of life is first to flee. “Why do you delay?” he says. “Why hold back? Unless you seize it, it flees.” And even when you have seized it, still it will flee: so you must contend with the speed of time by the speed of using it, and drink quickly, as from a rushing torrent that will not always run. This too is most finely put, to reproach our boundless planning: that he speaks not of each best year but of each best day. Why, untroubled and slow amid so great a flight of time, do you spread out for yourself months and years in a long series, however it has suited your greed? He speaks to you of a day — and of this very one, as it flees. Is there any doubt, then, that the first and best day flees from wretched mortals — that is, from the busy? Old age crushes their minds, still childish, and they come to it unprepared and unarmed; for nothing was provided against it: they fell into it suddenly, unawares, not feeling it draw nearer day by day. Just as conversation, or reading, or some deeper thought beguiles a traveler so that he finds he has arrived before he knew he was drawing near, so this unceasing and headlong journey of life, which waking and sleeping we make at the same pace, does not appear to the busy until it is at its end.

If I should wish to break what I have proposed into its parts and arguments, many things would come to me by which to prove that the busy man’s life is the shortest of all. Fabianus used to say — not one of these armchair philosophers, but of the true and ancient kind — that one must fight against the passions by charge, not by subtlety; that the battle-line must be turned by a charge, not by little wounds. He did not approve of hair-splitting: the passions, he said, must be crushed, not pinched. Still, that they may be reproached for their error, they must be taught, not merely lamented. Life is divided into three times: what has been, what is, what is to be. Of these, what we are doing is brief; what we are going to do is doubtful; what we have done is certain. For this is the time over which fortune has lost her right, which can be brought back under no one’s control. This the busy lose; for they have no leisure to look back at the past, and if they had the leisure, the memory of a thing to be repented of is unwelcome. Unwillingly, then, do they recall their minds to ill-spent times, and they do not dare to handle again the years whose vices — even those that were filched away under some allurement of present pleasure — lie exposed when handled over again. No one turns himself back gladly into the past except the man all of whose deeds have passed under his own censorship, which is never deceived. The man who has coveted much in ambition, scorned much in pride, conquered without self-command, deceived by treachery, snatched in greed, poured out in waste — he must needs fear his own memory. And yet this is the part of our time that is sacred and set apart, raised above all human chances, withdrawn beyond the kingdom of fortune, untroubled by want, by fear, by the onset of diseases; it can neither be disturbed nor snatched away: the possession of it is perpetual and unafraid. Only single days are present, and these only moment by moment; but all the days of past time, when you bid them, will be at hand, and will suffer themselves to be examined and held at your pleasure — a thing the busy have no leisure to do. It belongs to an untroubled and quiet mind to range over all the parts of its life; the minds of the busy, as though under a yoke, cannot bend round and look back. And so their life goes off into the depths; and just as it does no good, pour in however much you will, if there is nothing beneath to catch and keep it, so it makes no difference how much time is given, if there is nowhere for it to settle: it passes straight through minds cracked and full of holes. The present time is the briefest of all — so brief, indeed, that to some it seems to be none at all; for it is always on the move, it flows and is hurried along; it ceases to be before it has come, and it admits of delay no more than the heavens or the stars, whose restless motion never stays in the same track. To the busy, therefore, only the present time belongs — which is so brief that it cannot be seized, and even that is stolen from them while they are pulled apart among many things.

In short, do you wish to know how short a time they live? See how greatly they long to live long. Decrepit old men beg with their prayers for the addition of a few years; they pretend to themselves that they are younger than they are; they flatter themselves with the lie and deceive themselves as gladly as though they were cheating the fates along with themselves. But when at last some weakness has reminded them of their mortality, how terrified they die — not as though they were going out of life, but as though they were being dragged from it. They cry out that they have been fools never to have lived, and that, if only they escape this illness, they will live in leisure; then they reflect how vainly they had acquired things they would never enjoy, how all their labor has fallen to nothing. But for those whose life is passed far from all business — why should it not be spacious? None of it is handed over to others, none scattered this way and that, none of it given up to fortune, none lost through carelessness, none subtracted by lavishness, none superfluous: the whole of it, so to speak, yields a return. And so, however small it is, it is amply enough; and therefore, whenever the last day comes, the wise man will not hesitate to go to his death with steady step.

You ask, perhaps, whom I call busy? Do not suppose I mean only those whom the dogs let loose drive out of the law-court at last, those whom you see crushed — more grandly in their own crowd or more contemptibly in another’s — those whom their duties call out from their own houses to dash them against another’s doors, those whom the praetor’s spear keeps at work for a disgraceful gain that will one day fester. Some men’s very leisure is busy: in their country house or on their couch, in the midst of solitude, though they have withdrawn from everyone, they are a burden to themselves: theirs is a life to be called not leisured, but a slothful busyness. Do you call that man leisured who arranges his Corinthian bronzes, made precious by the madness of a few, with anxious nicety, and spends the greater part of his days over rusted scraps of metal? who sits in the wrestling-ground (for — the outrage of it! — not even our vices are Roman now) as a spectator of brawling boys? who sorts the droves of his pack-animals into matched pairs by age and color? who feeds the newest athletes? What? Do you call those men leisured who pass many hours at the barber’s, while anything that grew in the past night is plucked away, while a council is held over each single hair, while the disordered locks are set right or the thinning ones driven forward from here and there onto the forehead? How angry they grow if the barber has been a little careless, as if he were shearing a man! How they flare up if anything has been cut from their mane, if anything has lain out of order, if everything has not fallen back into its own ringlets! Which of them would not rather have the republic thrown into disorder than his own hair? who is not more anxious about the elegance of his head than about its safety? who would not rather be better groomed than more honorable? Do you call these men leisured, busy as they are between comb and mirror? What of those busied in composing, hearing, learning songs, while they twist the voice — whose straight course nature made best and simplest — into the windings of a most spiritless tune, whose fingers, beating out some melody within themselves, are always tapping, whose silent humming is overheard even when they are called to serious matters, often even sad ones? These men have not leisure, but a do-nothing busyness. Their banquets, by Hercules, I would not place among their free hours, when I see how anxiously they arrange the silver, how carefully they belt up the tunics of their favorite boys, how on edge they are over how the boar comes out from the cook, with what speed at a given signal the smooth-skinned attendants run to their duties, with how much art the birds are carved into pieces not too large, how fastidiously the wretched little slaves wipe up the spittle of the drunk: from such things a reputation for elegance and refinement is angled after, and their evils follow them so far into every retreat of life that they neither drink nor eat without display. Nor would you count among the leisured those who have themselves carried this way and that in sedan and litter and turn up for the hours of their rides as though it were not allowed to give them up, whom another reminds when they ought to bathe, when to swim, when to dine: so far are they unstrung by the excessive slackness of a pampered mind that they cannot know of themselves whether they are hungry. I hear that one of these dainty folk — if it is to be called daintiness, this unlearning of life and of human custom — when he had been lifted out of the bath in others’ arms and set down in his chair, asked: “Am I sitting now?” Do you think that this man, who does not know whether he is sitting, knows whether he is alive, whether he sees, whether he is at leisure? I could not easily say which I should pity more — that he was ignorant of this, or that he pretended to be. They truly feel the forgetfulness of many things, but of many they also feign it; certain vices please them as proofs, so to speak, of their good fortune; it seems to belong to too low and despised a man to know what one is doing. Go now and suppose that the mimes invent much to reproach our extravagance! More, by Hercules, they pass over than they invent, and so great a supply of incredible vices has come forth in an age ingenious in this one thing alone, that we can now convict the mimes of negligence. To think that there should be a man so far perished by daintiness that he takes another’s word for whether he is sitting! This man, then, is not at leisure; give him some other name; he is sick — nay, he is dead; the man at leisure is the one who has also a sense of his leisure. But this half-living creature, who needs a prompter to understand the postures of his own body — how can he be master of any time at all?

It would be long to go through one by one the men whose lives have been used up by draughts, or ball-play, or the care of baking the body in the sun. They are not at leisure whose pleasures carry much business with them. For no one will doubt that those are laboriously doing nothing who are held fast by the study of useless letters — of whom, by now, even among the Romans there is a great band. It was the Greeks’ disease, this — to ask how many oarsmen Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, whether besides they were by the same author, and other things in turn of this stamp, which, if you keep them to yourself, do nothing for your silent self-knowledge, and if you bring them out, make you seem not more learned but more tiresome. Behold, an empty zeal for learning superfluous things has invaded the Romans too; in these days I heard a man reporting what each Roman general had been the first to do: Duilius was the first to win a battle at sea, Curius Dentatus the first to lead elephants in a triumph. Even so, these things, though they do not tend to true glory, at least turn upon examples of deeds done for the state; such knowledge will do no good, yet it is the kind that holds us with a fine-seeming emptiness of matter. Let us forgive those who ask this too — who first persuaded the Romans to go aboard ship (it was Claudius, called Caudex for this very reason, because a structure of several planks bound together was called a caudex by the ancients, whence public records are called codices, and the boats which carry up supplies along the Tiber are even now, by ancient custom, called codicariae); and let this too, by all means, be to the point — that Valerius Corvinus was the first to conquer Messana and the first of the Valerian family to be called Messana, the name of the captured city transferred to himself, and was little by little called Messala as the common people changed the letters. Will you allow anyone to care about this too — that Lucius Sulla was the first to set loose lions in the circus, when otherwise they were exhibited chained, javelin-throwers being sent by King Bocchus to dispatch them? And let this too be pardoned: does it bear on anything good that Pompey was the first to put on in the circus a battle of eighteen elephants, condemned men being matched against them in the manner of a real fight? A leading man of the state, and (as report has handed down) of an exceptional kindness even among the leaders of old, he thought it a memorable kind of spectacle to destroy men in a new fashion. Do they fight it out to the death? Too little. Are they torn to pieces? Too little: let them be crushed by the huge bulk of beasts! It would have been better for such things to pass into oblivion, lest some later man of power should learn of it and envy a deed utterly inhuman. O what a fog does great prosperity cast over our minds! He believed himself to be above the nature of things at the very moment when he was throwing so many troops of wretched men to beasts born under another sky, when he was joining battle between creatures so unmatched, when he was pouring out much blood before the eyes of the Roman people — he who would soon be forced to pour out more of his own; but this same man, later betrayed by Alexandrian treachery, offered himself to be run through by the lowest of slaves, then at last understanding the empty boast of his surname. But, to return to the point from which I digressed and to show in the same matter the superfluous diligence of certain men — the same man related that Metellus, triumphing over the Carthaginians defeated in Sicily, alone of all the Romans led a hundred and twenty captured elephants before his chariot; that Sulla was the last of the Romans to extend the pomerium, which it was the custom among the ancients to extend only when Italian, never provincial, land had been gained. Is it more useful to know this than that the Aventine hill lies outside the pomerium — as he asserted — for one of two reasons, either because the plebs had seceded to it, or because, when Remus took the auspices, the birds had not given their sanction there, and countless other things in turn that are either stuffed with lies or close to it? For grant that they say all this in good faith, that they write to be answerable for it — still, whose errors will such things lessen? whose desires will they curb? whom will they make braver, whom juster, whom more generous? Our friend Fabianus used to say that he sometimes doubted whether it were not better to apply oneself to no studies at all than to be entangled in these.

Of all men, only those are at leisure who give their time to wisdom; only they truly live; for they do not merely keep their own age well guarded: they annex every age to their own. Whatever years were lived before them have been won for them. Unless we are utterly ungrateful, those most illustrious founders of sacred doctrines were born for us, prepared a way of life for us. By another’s labor we are led to the fairest things, dug out of darkness into the light; we are barred from no age, we are admitted into all; and if it pleases us, by greatness of mind, to step out beyond the narrow bounds of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which to range. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find rest with Epicurus, conquer human nature with the Stoics, go beyond it with the Cynics. Since nature allows us to enter into partnership with every age, why should we not give ourselves, with our whole soul, away from this brief and perishable passage of time, to the things that are measureless, that are eternal, that we share with our betters? Those men who dash about on their duties, who disquiet themselves and others, when they have raved their fill, when they have made the daily round of everyone’s thresholds and passed by no open door, when they have carried their mercenary morning-call through houses the most far apart — how few of so vast a city, pulled apart by its various cravings, will they manage to see? How many there will be whose sleep, or luxury, or rudeness shuts them out! How many who, when they have tortured them with long waiting, hurry past them with feigned haste! How many will avoid coming out through an entrance-hall packed with clients and slip away through dark passages of the house — as if it were not more unkind to deceive than to shut out! How many, half-asleep and heavy with yesterday’s drinking, will give back — their lips scarcely parted — the name whispered a thousand times to those wretches who break their own sleep to wait upon another’s, and give it back with a most arrogant yawn! We may rightly say that those men spend their time on true duties who wish to have Zeno and Pythagoras daily, and Democritus and the other high priests of the good arts, who wish to have Aristotle and Theophrastus as their most intimate friends. None of these will fail to have time for you; none will fail to send the one who comes to him away happier and more in love with him; none will let anyone depart from him empty-handed: they can be met by night and by day, by all mortals.

None of these will force you to die; all will teach you how; none of these wears away your years — each contributes his own to you; with none of them is conversation dangerous, friendship deadly, attendance costly. You will carry away from them whatever you wish; it will not be their doing if you do not drink as deeply as you most desire. What happiness, what a fair old age awaits the man who has put himself under their patronage! He will have those with whom to deliberate on the smallest things and the greatest, whom to consult daily about himself, from whom to hear the truth without insult, to be praised without flattery, to whose likeness he may shape himself. We are wont to say that it was not in our power which parents fell to our lot — that they were given us by chance: but to the good it is granted to be born by their own choosing. There are families of the noblest minds: choose the one into which you wish to be enrolled; you will be adopted not into the name alone, but into the very goods, which will not have to be guarded meanly or grudgingly: the more men you divide them among, the greater they will grow. These will give you a road to eternity and will raise you up to that place from which no one is cast down. This is the one way of prolonging mortality — nay, of turning it into immortality. Honors, monuments, whatever ambition has ordered by decree or reared in works of stone, is soon thrown down; there is nothing that long age does not demolish and dislodge; but to the things that wisdom has consecrated it can do no harm; no age will abolish them, none diminish them; the next, and then each one ever further off, will add something to their veneration, since envy works close at hand, while what is set far off we admire more frankly. The wise man’s life, therefore, lies open wide; the same boundary that closes in the rest does not close in him; he alone is released from the laws of the human race; all the ages serve him as they serve a god. Has some time gone by? He grasps it by recollection. Is some present? He uses it. Is some to come? He anticipates it. The gathering of all times into one makes his life long.

Theirs is the briefest and most anxious life who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future: when they have come to the end, too late do the wretches understand that for so long they were busy doing nothing. And do not think it proved by this argument that they lead a long life, because they sometimes call upon death: their folly torments them with uncertain passions that run them onto the very things they fear; they often wish for death for the very reason that they fear it. Nor is this an argument that you should take for the long-lived: that the day often seems long to them, that, until the appointed hour of dinner comes, they complain that the hours go slowly; for if ever their occupations have deserted them, left in leisure they seethe, and do not know how to dispose of it or to draw it out. And so they reach for some occupation, and all the time that lies between is a burden — just as, by Hercules, when the day for a gladiatorial show has been announced, or when the appointed time of some other spectacle or pleasure is awaited, they want to leap over the days in between. Every postponement of a hoped-for thing is long to them; but the time they love is short and headlong, and much shorter still by their own fault; for they flee from one place to another and cannot settle in a single desire. Their days are not long to them, but hateful; yet on the other hand, how short the nights seem that they spend in the embrace of harlots or in wine! Hence too the frenzy of the poets, who feed human errors with their fables, in which Jupiter, charmed by the pleasure of a night’s union, was thought to have doubled the night; what else is it to inflame our vices than to set the gods down as their authors and to give to the disease, by the example of divinity, an excused license? Can the nights they buy at so dear a price seem anything but the shortest to such men? They lose the day in waiting for the night, the night in fear of the light.

Their very pleasures are nervous and made restless by various terrors, and at the very height of their exultation an anxious thought steals in: “How long will this last?” From this feeling kings have wept over their own power, and the greatness of their fortune did not delight them, but the end that would come one day terrified them. When the most insolent king of the Persians was spreading his army over the great expanses of the plains and could not take its number but only its measure, he poured out tears that within a hundred years none of so vast a host of youth would survive; yet the very man who wept was himself about to bring their doom upon them, and to lose some at sea, some on land, some in battle, some in flight, and within a brief time to use up those for whom he feared the hundredth year. And what of the fact that their very joys are nervous? For they do not rest on solid grounds, but are troubled by the same emptiness from which they arise. But what do you suppose those times to be, wretched even by their own confession, when even these moments, by which they raise themselves up and carry themselves above the human, are little untainted? All the greatest goods are full of anxiety, and no fortune is trusted less safely than the best; one needs further good fortune to guard one’s good fortune, and for the very prayers that have succeeded fresh prayers must be made. For everything that comes by chance is unstable: the higher it has risen, the more exposed it is to its fall. Now things destined to fall delight no one; the life of those who win with great labor what they must possess with greater must therefore be not only the shortest but the most wretched. Laboriously they attain what they want, anxiously they hold what they have attained; meanwhile no account is taken of time that will never come back again: new occupations are put in the place of the old, hope rouses hope, ambition ambition. The end of miseries is not sought, only their matter is changed. Have our own offices tormented us? Others’ take up more of our time. Have we ceased to toil as candidates? We begin to canvass for others. Have we laid down the trouble of prosecuting? We come by that of judging. Has a man ceased to be a judge? He is a president of the court. Has he grown old in the hired management of others’ goods? He is held fast by his own wealth. Has the soldier’s boot discharged Marius? The consulship keeps him at work. Does Quinctius hasten to push through his dictatorship? He will be called back from the plough. Scipio will go against the Carthaginians, not yet ripe for so great a task; conqueror of Hannibal, conqueror of Antiochus, the ornament of his own consulship, surety for his brother’s, who, were it not that he himself stood in the way, would be set up beside Jupiter — him civil discords will harry, the savior of the state; and after, as a young man, he had scorned honors equal to a god’s, now, an old man, the ambition of a stubborn exile will please him. There will never be lacking causes for anxiety, whether happy or wretched; life will be shoved along through occupations; leisure will never be had, only ever wished for.

Withdraw yourself, then, from the crowd, dearest Paulinus, and at last, tossed beyond what your years warrant, retreat into a calmer harbor. Reflect how many waves you have gone under, how many storms you have borne in private life and how many, in public life, you have turned upon yourself; your virtue has already shown itself well enough through laborious and restless proofs; try what it can do in leisure. The greater part of your life — and surely the better part — has been given to the state: take some of your time now for yourself as well. I do not call you to a sluggish or idle rest, nor to drown whatever there is in you of lively talent in sleep and the pleasures dear to the crowd; that is not to find rest: you will find tasks greater than all those you have so far handled with energy, which you may pursue once set aside and free from care. You, to be sure, manage the accounts of the whole world as abstemiously as if they were another’s, as carefully as if they were your own, as conscientiously as if they were the state’s. In an office in which it is hard to avoid hatred you win love; yet, believe me, it is better to know the account of one’s own life than that of the public grain. Call back that vigor of mind, most capable of the greatest things, from a service honorable indeed but little suited to the happy life, and reflect that you did not labor, from your earliest years, at every cultivation of the liberal studies in order that many thousand measures of grain might be safely entrusted to you; you had promised something greater and higher of yourself. There will be no lack of men of exact thrift and of laborious capacity for the work; slow beasts of burden are so much fitter for carrying loads than noble horses — whose well-bred swiftness has anyone ever weighed down with a heavy pack? Reflect besides how much anxiety it is to throw yourself against so great a mass: your business is with the human belly; a hungry people neither submits to reason, nor is softened by fairness, nor bent by any prayer. Only the other day, within those few days in which Gaius Caesar perished — bearing this most heavily (if those below have any feeling) that he was departing while the Roman people survived him — there was food left, for certain, of seven days, or at most eight! While he was joining bridges with ships and toying with the strength of empire, there was at hand the last of evils, the one that besieged cities too must face: a dearth of provisions. His imitation of a mad and foreign and disastrously arrogant king nearly cost destruction and famine, and the ruin of all things that follows famine. What state of mind, then, did those men have to whom the charge of the public grain had been committed — men who were about to face stones, steel, fire, Gaius? With the utmost concealment they hid so great an evil lurking among the vital parts — and with reason, of course: for some diseases must be treated while the sick are kept ignorant of them; to know their own disease has been, for many, the cause of dying.

Take yourself off to these calmer, safer, greater things! Do you think it one and the same — whether you take care that the grain is poured into the granaries undamaged, kept safe both from the fraud of those who haul it and from negligence, lest it spoil and grow hot from gathered moisture, that it answer to its measure and weight; or whether you approach these sacred and lofty matters, to learn what the substance of god is, what his pleasure, his condition, his form; what fate awaits your soul; where nature lays us once we are dismissed from our bodies; what it is that holds up the heaviest parts of this universe in the center, suspends the light ones above, carries fire to the topmost height, rouses the stars in their turnings; and, in their order, the other things, full of vast wonders? Will you not leave the ground and look up with your mind to these things! Now, while the blood is warm, while our powers are in their vigor, we must go to better things. In this kind of life there awaits you much of the good arts, the love and the practice of the virtues, the forgetting of desires, the knowledge of how to live and how to die, a deep repose of things.

The condition of all the busy is wretched, but the most wretched is that of those who labor not even at their own occupations, who sleep to another’s sleep, walk to another’s pace, and are ordered to love and to hate — the freest things of all. If these men wish to know how short their own life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own. So when you see the bordered robe now often assumed, when you see a name famous in the Forum, do not envy: such things are bought at the cost of life. That one year may be counted to their name, they will wear away all their years. Some, before they could struggle up to the summit of ambition, life left amid their first strivings; some, when they had crept to the consummation of their rank through a thousand indignities, were struck by the wretched thought that they had labored only for an inscription on a tomb; some, while their extreme old age was being laid out for new hopes as though it were youth, gave out, too weak amid great and shameless attempts. Disgraceful is the man whom, far advanced in years, pleading in court for the most obscure of litigants and angling for the applause of an ignorant ring of bystanders, his breath has left; shameful the man who, worn out by living sooner than by working, collapsed in the very midst of his duties; shameful the man at whom, as he died over the accounts he was taking in, his long-deferred heir laughed. I cannot pass over the example that occurs to me: Turannius was an old man of exact diligence, who, after his ninetieth year, when he had received a discharge from his procuratorship from Gaius Caesar unasked, ordered himself to be laid out on his bed and to be mourned, as though dead, by the household standing round him. The house went into mourning for the leisure of its aged master, and did not end its grief until his work had been restored to him. Does it so please men to die busy? Most men have the same mind; their craving for work lasts longer than their capacity for it; they fight against the weakness of the body, and judge old age itself a burden on no other ground than that it sets them aside. The law does not enroll a soldier after his fiftieth year, does not summon a senator after his sixtieth: men obtain leisure from themselves with more difficulty than from the law. Meanwhile, while they are snatched along and snatch at others, while each breaks another’s rest, while they are wretched by turns, life is without fruit, without pleasure, without any advance of the mind; no one keeps death in view, no one but stretches his hopes far off; some even arrange the things that lie beyond life — vast piles of tombs, dedications of public works, gifts of shows at the pyre, and ostentatious funerals. But, by Hercules, the funerals of such men, as though they had lived the briefest time, ought to be conducted by torches and wax tapers, like a child’s.