When I searched into myself, Seneca, certain faults showed themselves laid out in the open, where I could lay a hand on them; others more hidden, in the recesses; others not continuous, but returning at intervals — and these I would call the most troublesome of all, like a roving enemy that springs out as the chance offers, by whom one is allowed neither course: to be neither armed as in war nor secure as in peace. Yet the state I detect in myself most of all is this (for why should I not confess the truth to you as to a physician?): that I am neither honestly freed from the things I feared and hated, nor again in their power. I am set in a condition that, if not the worst, is the most querulous and peevish of all: I am neither sick nor well. There is no use in your saying that the beginnings of all the virtues are tender, that hardness and strength come to them with time. I am well aware that even the things which labor for outward show — I mean rank, and the fame of eloquence, and whatever depends on another’s vote — grow strong with delay; both the things that build true powers and those got up with a kind of paint to please must wait out the years until length of time slowly draws on their color. But I am afraid that habit, which brings constancy to things, may fix this fault in me the deeper: long acquaintance breeds love of bad things as much as of good. What this weakness is, of a mind in doubt between the two, leaning neither boldly to the right nor to the wrong, I cannot show you all at once so well as piece by piece. I will tell you what happens to me; you will find the disease its name. I am held by a deep love of thrift, I admit: it pleases me to have a bed made up not for display, clothes not brought out from a chest, not pressed into a shine by weights and a thousand devices, but homely and cheap, neither stored away nor put on with any fuss; it pleases me to have food that the household neither prepares nor stares at, not ordered many days ahead nor served by many hands, but easy to come by and ready, with nothing far-fetched or costly in it, nowhere to be lacked, a burden neither to the estate nor to the body, not bound to come back up the way it went down; it pleases me to have for a servant an unpolished home-born slave-boy, untrained; heavy silver that was my plain father’s, with no craftsman’s name on it; and a table not conspicuous for the variety of its markings nor known to the town through many successions of elegant owners, but set there for use, one that holds no guest’s eye either with delight or kindles it with envy. When all this has pleased me well, the outfitting of some boys’-school of a household dazzles the mind: slaves dressed more carefully than for a procession and decked in gold, and a column of glittering attendants; a house where even the ground you tread on is precious, and, with riches strewn into every corner, the very ceilings ablaze, and a crowd to escort and keep company with squandered fortunes. Why should I speak of waters clear to the bottom and flowing round the banquets themselves, of feasts worthy of their own stage-set? Luxury has poured itself around me, coming as I do out of a long stretch of frugality, with all its splendor, and has rung on every side: my sight wavers a little; I can lift my mind against it more easily than my eyes. So I withdraw, not worse, but sadder; I do not walk so tall among those trifles of mine, and a silent gnawing creeps over me, a doubt whether those things are not the better. None of this changes me, but none of it fails to shake me. It pleases me to follow the commands of my teachers and to go into the thick of public life; it pleases me to take up offices and the fasces — not, of course, drawn on by the purple or the rods, but that I may be readier and more useful to my friends and kin and all my fellow citizens, and then to all mortals. Eager and unschooled, I follow Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus — and yet none of them entered public life, and none of them failed to send another to it. Whenever something unaccustomed has struck and battered my mind, whenever something crosses me — either an outrage, as there are many in all human life, or a matter that flows too little smoothly, or affairs not to be greatly valued have demanded much of my time — I turn back to leisure, and, just as with cattle, even when tired, the step toward home is quicker. It pleases me again to confine my life within my own walls: let no one carry off a single day of mine who will give back nothing worth so great an outlay; let the mind cling to itself, tend itself, do nothing of another’s business, nothing that looks to a judge; let that tranquility be loved which is free of public and private care. But when some stronger reading has roused the mind and noble examples have set their goads to it, I long to leap into the forum, to lend one man my voice, another my help — help that, though it will do no good, will at least try to do good — to check in the forum the pride of someone lifted up by his ill-deserved success. In my studies, by Hercules, I think it better to look at the things themselves and to speak for their sake, and for the rest to leave the words to the matter, so that, wherever it has led, the speech may follow there unlabored. Why compose things to last for the ages? Will you not give up the very aim of keeping posterity from being silent about you! You were born to die: a funeral attended in silence has less trouble in it. And so, to fill your time, write something in a plain style for your own use, not for proclaiming: less labor is needed by those who study for the day. Again, when the mind has lifted itself by the grandeur of its thoughts, it grows ambitious for words, and longs to breathe higher and so to speak higher, and the language rises to the dignity of its subject. Then, forgetful of my rule and of stricter judgment, I am borne up loftier, and by a mouth no longer my own. Not to pursue the details further: in all things this weakness of a sound mind follows me, and I am afraid either that I am slowly slipping away from it, or — what is more worrying — that I hang forever like a man about to fall, and that there is perhaps more wrong than I myself can see. For we look on our own affairs with a familiar eye, and favor always stands in the way of judgment. I think many could have reached wisdom, had they not thought they had reached it, had they not dissembled certain things in themselves and leapt over others with eyes shut. For you have no reason to judge that we are ruined more by others’ flattery than by our own. Who has dared to tell himself the truth? Who, set among the herds of those who praise and fawn, has not nonetheless flattered himself most of all? So I ask: if you have any remedy by which to stay this tossing of mine, count me worthy to owe my tranquility to you. These motions of the mind are not dangerous, I know, and bring nothing of tumult; to put what I complain of into a true comparison for you — I am troubled not by a storm but by seasickness. Take away, then, whatever this affliction is, and come to the aid of one in distress within sight of land.

For a long time now, Serenus, by Hercules, I have been asking myself in silence what I should think this state of mind resembles, and I could bring it close to no example so nearly as to those who, freed from a long and grave illness, are still brushed now and then by slight twinges and small upsets, and who, though they have escaped the remnants of it, are nonetheless disquieted by suspicions, and, though now well, hold out their hand to the doctors and read a charge into every bit of warmth in their bodies. With these men, Serenus, the body is not insufficiently sound, but it is insufficiently used to soundness — just as there is a certain trembling and stir even in a calm sea, when it has just settled after a storm. What you need, then, is not those harsher measures we have already run past — to stand in your own way here, to grow angry with yourself there, to press hard on yourself somewhere else — but that last thing: to have faith in yourself and to believe you are going by the right road, drawn aside by none of the crossing tracks of the many who run this way and that, some of them straying about the very road itself. But what you long for is something great and supreme and next to a god: not to be shaken. This steady seat of the mind the Greeks call euthymia — Democritus has a fine book on it — I call tranquility: for there is no need to imitate and carry words over into their shape; the thing itself, which is our subject, must be marked by some name, one that ought to have the force of the Greek term, not its face. So we are asking how the mind may always go on an even and favorable course, be gracious to itself, look with gladness on its own, and not break off this joy but remain in a placid state, never raising itself up nor casting itself down. That will be tranquility. Let us ask in general terms how it may be reached; you will take from the common remedy as much as you please. Meanwhile the whole disease must be dragged out into the open, where each man will recognize his own share of it. At the same time you will see how much less trouble you have with your self-disgust than those whom, bound to a showy profession and laboring under a vast title, shame rather than will keeps in their pretense. All are in the same case: both those harried by fickleness and boredom and the constant changing of their purpose, who always prefer what they have left behind, and those who grow slack and yawn. Add those who toss like men for whom sleep comes hard, settling themselves this way and that, until from sheer weariness they find rest. By reshaping the condition of their life again and again, they come to rest at last in that state in which not a hatred of changing but an old age too sluggish for novelty has caught them. Add too those who are too little easy not from a fault of constancy but of inertia, and who live not as they wish but as they began. There are countless varieties after this, but the fault has one effect: to be displeased with oneself. This springs from a distemper of the mind, and from desires that are timid or insufficiently successful, where men either do not dare as much as they covet or do not attain it, and lean out wholly into hope. They are always unstable and shifting — which must happen to those who hang in suspense. They strive toward their wishes by every road, and teach and force themselves to dishonorable and difficult things, and, where the labor is without reward, a fruitless disgrace racks them; they grieve not that they wanted what was wrong, but that they wanted in vain. Then both regret for what they began and dread of beginning take hold of them, and there creeps in that tossing of a mind that finds no way out, because they can neither command their desires nor obey them; and the hesitation of a life that fails to unfold itself, and the stagnation of a mind lying torpid among abandoned wishes. All this is heavier when, out of hatred for their toilsome misfortune, they have fled to leisure and to private studies — which a mind reared for public life, eager for action and by nature restless, cannot endure, having too little solace in itself. And so, when the diversions that the very business of life offers to men on the move are stripped away, such a mind cannot bear the house, the solitude, the walls; it looks unwillingly upon itself left to itself. Hence that boredom and self-displeasure, the rolling of a mind that settles nowhere, and the sad and sickly endurance of its own leisure — above all where shame forbids confessing the causes, and self-consciousness has driven the torments inward, and desires shut up in a narrow space with no outlet strangle themselves. Hence grief and languor and the thousand fluctuations of an unsettled mind, which hopes half-begun keep in suspense and hopes given up keep gloomy; hence that mood of men who loathe their own leisure and complain that they have nothing to do, and the most spiteful envy at other men’s advancement (for an unhappy idleness feeds malice, and they want all to be destroyed because they could not get on themselves); then, out of this aversion to others’ successes and despair of its own, the mind grows angry at fortune and complains of the age and draws back into corners and broods over its own punishment, while it is sick and weary of itself. For by nature the human mind is nimble and prone to motion. Every occasion for rousing and distracting itself is welcome to it — more welcome to all the worst natures, which wear themselves down gladly in busyness: as certain sores reach out for the hands that will hurt them and take pleasure in the touch, and whatever chafes delights the foul itch of the body, just so I would say of these minds, on which desires have broken out like evil sores, that toil and vexation are a pleasure to them. For there are some things that delight even our body along with a kind of pain — to turn over and shift a side not yet tired, and to fan oneself by one posture after another: such is Homer’s Achilles, now on his face, now on his back, setting himself in one position after another — which is the mark of the sick man: to endure nothing for long and to use changes as remedies. Hence men take up aimless travels and wander the coastlines, and a fickleness forever hostile to the present tests itself now by sea, now by land: “Now let us make for Campania.” Soon the soft places pall: “Let us see wild country; let us push on to Bruttium and the woodlands of Lucania.” Yet amid the wastes something pleasant is wanted, where eyes used to luxury may be relieved after the long squalor of rough places: “Let us make for Tarentum, and its famous harbor, and the milder winters of its sky, and a region opulent enough even for its old throng.”... “Now let us bend our course back to the City: too long have our ears been idle of applause and uproar; it is a pleasure now even to enjoy human blood.” One journey is taken up after another, and shows are exchanged for shows. As Lucretius says: “In this way each man is always fleeing himself.” But what good is it, if he does not escape himself? He follows himself and presses on, his own most oppressive companion. And so we must know that the fault we suffer from is not in the places but in ourselves: we are weak for bearing anything, patient neither of toil nor of pleasure nor of ourselves nor of anything for very long. This has driven some men to death: because by changing their plans often they kept rolling back into the same things and had left no room for novelty, life and the very world began to pall on them, and there crept up the cry of rotted self-indulgence: “How long the same things?”

You ask what help I think should be used against this boredom. The best thing, as Athenodorus says, would be to hold oneself fast by action, by the handling of public affairs, and by the duties of a citizen. For as some men pass the day with sun and exercise and care of the body, and for athletes it is by far the most useful thing to nourish, through the greater part of their time, their arms and the strength to which alone they have dedicated themselves, so for us, who are preparing the mind for the contest of public life, it is by far the finest thing to be at our work: for, since a man’s aim is to make himself useful to his fellow citizens and to mortals, he both exercises and advances himself who has set himself in the midst of his duties, administering public and private business according to his ability. “But because,” he says, “amid this so insane ambition of men, with so many slanderers twisting straight things to the worse, simple honesty is too little safe, and there will always be more to block us than to bring us through, one must indeed withdraw from the forum and from public life. Yet a great mind has room to unfold itself freely even in private; and the energies of men are not, like the rush of lions and beasts, penned in by cages — for their greatest deeds are done in retirement.” “Yet let him so retire that, wherever he has hidden his leisure, he means to be of use to individuals and to all alike, by his talent, his voice, his counsel. For not he alone serves the state who brings forward candidates and defends the accused and votes on peace and war; he too who exhorts the young, who instills virtue into minds in so great a dearth of good teachers, who lays hold of those rushing headlong after money and luxury and drags them back and, if nothing else, at least delays them — he does public business in private.” “Does he do more, the praetor between foreigners and citizens, or the city praetor, who pronounces to those who come before him the words his assessor prompts, than the man who teaches what justice is, what piety, what endurance, what courage, what contempt of death, what understanding of the gods — and what a freely given good a good conscience is?” “So, if you put into studies the time you have withdrawn from your duties, you will not have deserted nor refused your service: for not he alone soldiers who stands in the battle line and defends the right wing and the left, but also he who guards the gates and fills a post less dangerous yet not idle, who keeps the watches and has charge of the armory — duties which, though bloodless, count among the terms of service.” “If you recall yourself to studies, you will escape all weariness of life; you will not long for night to come out of loathing for the light, nor will you be a burden to yourself or superfluous to others; you will draw many into friendship, and all the best men will flock to you. For virtue, however obscure, is never hidden, but sends out signs of itself: whoever is worthy will track it by its prints.” “For if we do away with all society and renounce the human race and live turned wholly in upon ourselves, this solitude, devoid of every pursuit, will be followed by a lack of things to do: we shall begin to put up some buildings and pull others down, to push back the sea and lead waters out against the difficulty of the ground, and to dispense badly the time that nature gave us to spend.” “Some of us use it sparingly, some lavishly; some of us spend it so that we can render an account, others so that we have no remainder left — and nothing is more shameful than that. Often a man great in years has no other proof by which to show that he has lived long, except his age.”

To me, dearest Serenus, Athenodorus seems to have submitted too much to the times, to have retreated too soon. I would not deny that one must sometimes give ground, but step by step, falling back in order, the standards saved, the soldier’s honor saved: they are more inviolable and safer with their enemies who come to terms with their arms still in hand. This, I think, is what virtue and the seeker of virtue must do: if fortune prevails and cuts off the power of action, let him not at once turn his back and flee unarmed, looking for a hiding-place — as if there were any place fortune could not pursue him to — but let him take up his duties more sparingly and with discrimination find something in which he may be useful to the state. He is not allowed to soldier: let him seek office. He must live as a private man: let him be an advocate. Silence has been laid on him: let him help his fellow citizens by a silent advocacy. Even to enter the forum is dangerous: in households, at the games, at banquets, let him play the good comrade, the faithful friend, the temperate guest. He has lost the duties of a citizen: let him practice those of a man. It is for this reason that, with a great mind, we have shut ourselves within the walls of no single city, but have sent ourselves out into intercourse with the whole world and have declared the universe our fatherland — that virtue might be given a wider field. The tribunal is closed to you, you are barred from the rostra or the assemblies: look behind you at how vast a stretch of broadest regions lies open, how many peoples. Never will so great a part be blocked to you that a greater is not left. But see that this is not entirely a fault of your own. For you are unwilling to administer the state except as consul or prytanis or herald or suffete. What if you should refuse to soldier except as general or tribune? Even if others hold the front line and the lot has placed you among the triarii, soldier from there — by your voice, your encouragement, your example, your spirit: even with his hands cut off, a man finds in battle something to contribute to his side, if he only stands his ground and helps with his shout. Do something of that kind: if fortune has removed you from the front rank of the state, still stand your ground and help with your shout; and if someone has gripped you by the throat, still stand and help by your silence. The service of a good citizen is never useless: he is of use heard and seen. By his look, his nod, his silent steadfastness, his very gait, he does good. As certain wholesome things do good by their scent, short of taste and touch, so virtue pours out its usefulness even from far off and in concealment: whether it walks abroad and exercises its own right, or has only a sufferance to come forth and is forced to take in sail, or is idle and mute and hemmed in narrowly, or stands open — in whatever condition it is, it does good. Do you think the example of one who rests well is of too little use? And so it is by far the best to mix leisure with affairs, whenever an active life is hindered by chance obstacles or by the condition of the state; for never is everything so shut off that there is no room left for honorable action.

Can you find a city more wretched than that of the Athenians was, when the Thirty Tyrants were tearing it apart? They had killed thirteen hundred citizens, every best man among them, and were not for that reason making an end, but their very savagery goaded itself on. In a city where there was the Areopagus, that most sacred court, where there was a senate and a people like its senate, there gathered daily a grim college of executioners, and a council-house too cramped for so many tyrants. Could that city be at peace, in which there were as many tyrants as there might have been guardsmen? Not even any hope of recovering liberty could be held out to men’s minds, nor did any room for a remedy appear against so great a force of evils: for whence should a wretched city find so many Harmodiuses? Yet Socrates was there in their midst, and consoled the grieving fathers, and exhorted those who despaired of the republic, and reproached the rich who feared for their wealth with their late repentance of a dangerous greed, and to those willing to imitate him carried about a great pattern, walking free among thirty masters. Yet this man Athens herself killed in prison, and the freedom of him who had safely defied a whole column of tyrants liberty could not bear: that you may know both that in a stricken republic there is occasion for a wise man to come forward, and that in a flourishing and prosperous one wantonness, envy, and a thousand other cowardly vices hold sway. However, then, the republic presents itself, however fortune permits, so shall we either spread ourselves out or draw ourselves in — but move we shall, and not lie numb, bound fast by fear. Indeed he will have proved a man who, with dangers pressing on every side, with arms about him and chains clashing, neither dashes his virtue to pieces nor hides it away: for to bury oneself is not to save oneself. As I recall, Curius Dentatus used to say he would rather be dead than alive — meaning that the worst of evils is to go out of the number of the living before you die. But if you fall on a less manageable season of the state, you will have to claim more time for leisure and letters, and, just as in a dangerous voyage, make for harbor again and again; do not wait until affairs release you, but cut yourself loose from them.

But we shall have to examine first ourselves, then the affairs we are about to undertake, then those for whose sake or with whom we act. Above all one must take one’s own measure, because we generally seem to ourselves able to do more than we can: one man slips through trust in his eloquence; another has demanded of his estate more than it could bear; another has crushed a weak body under a laborious duty. Some men’s modesty is ill-suited to public affairs, which call for a firm front; some men’s obstinacy does not serve for the court; some have not their anger in their power, and any indignation carries them off into rash words; some cannot keep their wit in check nor refrain from dangerous jests: for all these, quiet is more useful than business. A fierce and impatient nature should avoid the provocations of a freedom that will do it harm. You must consider whether your nature is fitter for doing things or for unhurried study and contemplation, and you must lean the way the bent of your talent carries you: Isocrates laid a hand on Ephorus and drew him away from the forum, judging him more useful for composing records of history. For talents forced respond badly; when nature resists, the labor is wasted. Next, the very things we undertake must be weighed, and our strength compared with the matters we are going to attempt. For there must always be more strength in the doer than in the deed: burdens that are greater than their bearer must crush him. Some things, moreover, are not so much great as prolific, and bring much business in their train: these too must be avoided, the ones from which a new and manifold occupation will be born. Nor should you approach a thing from which there is no free return: lay your hand to those whose end you can either make or at least hope for; leave alone those that spread wider in the doing and do not stop where you had meant them to. In any case a choice of men must be made — whether they are worthy that we should spend a portion of our life on them, whether the loss of our time reaches them as a gain: for some men actually charge us for the services we do them. Athenodorus says he would not so much as go to dinner with a man who would owe him nothing in return for it. You see, I suppose, that he would go far less to those who settle the score of their friends’ services with their table, who count the dishes as largesses, as though they were intemperate to do another man honor. Take away their witnesses and spectators, and a private cookshop will give them no pleasure....

Yet nothing will delight the mind so much as a faithful and sweet friendship. How great a good it is, when there are breasts made ready into which every secret may safely descend, whose knowledge of you you fear less than your own, whose talk soothes your anxiety, whose opinion clears your counsel, whose cheerfulness scatters your sadness, whose very sight delights you! Such friends, of course, we shall choose as empty as may be of desires: for vices creep, and leap across to whoever is nearest, and do harm by their touch. And so, as in a plague we must take care not to sit beside bodies already seized and burning with the disease, because we shall draw the danger to ourselves and suffer from the very breath of it, so in choosing the characters of friends we shall be at pains to take on the least tainted we can: it is the beginning of sickness to mix the sound with the sick. Yet I would not lay this rule on you, to follow or draw to yourself none but the wise man: for where will you find him, whom we have sought for so many ages? In place of the best, take the least bad. You would scarcely have the means of a happier choice if you were seeking good men among the Platos and Xenophons and that crop of the Socratic stock, or if there were given you the age of Cato, which bore many men worthy to be born in Cato’s time (just as it bore many worse than any other age, and contrivers of the greatest crimes; for both crowds were needed for Cato to be understood: he had to have both the good, to whom he might prove himself, and the bad, on whom he might try his strength). But now, in so great a dearth of good men, let the choice be less fastidious. Above all, however, let the gloomy be avoided, those who lament everything, to whom no occasion fails to please for complaints. Though his loyalty and goodwill stand firm, still a companion who is agitated and groans at everything is an enemy to tranquility.

Let us pass on to estates, the greatest material of human troubles. For if you compare all the other things by which we are tormented — deaths, illnesses, fears, longings, the endurance of pains and toils — with the evils our money holds out to us, this side will weigh far the heavier. And so we must reflect how much lighter a grief it is not to have than to lose, and we shall understand that poverty has the less material for torment in that it has the less for loss. For you are wrong if you think the rich bear their losses with more spirit: in the greatest bodies and the least the pain of a wound is equal. Bion says neatly that it is no less painful for the bald than for the long-haired to have their hairs plucked. You may know the same of the poor and the rich: their torment is equal; for to each his money has stuck fast, and cannot be torn away without his feeling it. But it is more bearable, as I said, and easier not to acquire than to lose, and so you will see those happier whom fortune has never regarded than those whom she has deserted. Diogenes saw this — a man of enormous spirit — and brought it about that nothing could be snatched from him. Call that poverty, want, destitution; lay on his security whatever disgraceful name you please: I will grant this man is not happy, if you find me any other to whom nothing can be lost. Either I am deceived, or it is a kingship, among the greedy, the swindlers, the robbers, the kidnappers, to be the one man who cannot be harmed. If anyone doubts the happiness of Diogenes, he can doubt likewise the condition of the immortal gods — whether they live too little blessedly because they have no estates, no gardens, no costly farms with a tenant to till them, no great interest out at the forum. Are you not ashamed, whoever you are that stand agape at riches? Look, then, at the universe: you will see the gods naked, giving all things, having nothing. Do you think this man poor, or like the immortal gods, who has stripped himself of all that is fortune’s? Do you call happier Demetrius, Pompey’s freedman, who was not ashamed to be richer than Pompey? The count of his slaves was reported to him daily, like an army to its general — a man for whom long since two under-slaves and a roomier cell ought to have been riches. But from Diogenes his one slave ran off, and when the man was pointed out to him he did not think it worth so much to bring him back: “It is a disgrace,” he said, “that Manes can live without Diogenes, and Diogenes cannot without Manes.” He seems to me to have said: “Go about your business, Fortune; there is nothing of yours now with Diogenes: my slave has run off — no, it is I that have come away a free man.” A household demands clothing and food; so many bellies of the greediest of animals must be provided for, garments bought, the most thieving hands watched, and the services used of people who weep and curse you. How much happier is the man who owes nothing to anyone but the one he can most easily refuse — himself! But since we have not so much strength, our estates at least must be narrowed, that we may be less exposed to the injuries of fortune. In war those bodies are handier that can be drawn together within their own armor than those that spill over and on every side offer their bulk to wounds; the best measure of money is that which neither falls into poverty nor departs far from poverty.

This measure will please us if first thrift has pleased us, without which no wealth is enough and none fails to fall short — especially since the remedy is close at hand, and poverty itself can, by calling in frugality, turn itself into riches. Let us accustom ourselves to put away display, and to measure things by their use, not their adornment. Let food master hunger, drink master thirst, let desire flow where it must. Let us learn to rest on our own limbs, to order our dress and diet not to the newest fashions but as the ways of our ancestors counsel. Let us learn to increase self-restraint, to curb luxury, to temper the craving for glory, to soften anger, to look on poverty with level eyes, to cultivate frugality even if many are ashamed of the thing, to apply cheaply got remedies to our natural wants, to keep unbridled hopes and a mind straining toward the future as though under bonds, and to make it our aim to seek riches from ourselves rather than from fortune. So great a variety and unfairness of chances can never be so warded off that no great storm bursts on those who spread great rigging. Affairs must be forced into a narrow compass, that the missiles may fall in vain; and it is for this reason that exiles and disasters have at times turned to a remedy, and graver troubles have been healed by lighter ones. When the mind hears its precepts too little and cannot be cured more gently, why should it not be helped if poverty and disgrace and the overthrow of one’s fortune are brought to bear? An evil is met with an evil. Let us accustom ourselves, then, to be able to dine without a throng, to be served by fewer slaves, to get our clothes for the purpose they were invented, and to live in a smaller space. Not in the race and the contest of the circus alone, but in these courses of life too, we must turn in nearer the post. Even of studies, which is the most liberal of expenditures, the expense is reasonable only so long as it keeps measure. What use are countless books and libraries, whose owner in his whole life scarcely reads through the catalogues? The crowd of them burdens the learner, it does not instruct him, and it is far better to hand yourself over to a few authors than to wander through many. At Alexandria forty thousand books burned. Another may praise it as the fairest monument of royal wealth, as Livy too does, who says it was an outstanding work of the kings’ taste and care. It was no taste or care, but a studious luxury — no, not even studious, since they had got the books together not for study but for show, just as for very many men, ignorant even of a child’s letters, books are not the instruments of study but the ornaments of a dining-room. So let just as many books be acquired as are enough, none for display. (“More honorably,” you say, “would the expense pour itself out here than into Corinthian bronzes and painted panels.”) Whatever is excessive is faulty everywhere. What reason have you to pardon a man who hunts after bookcases of citron-wood and ivory, who collects the texts of authors unknown or disapproved, and yawns amid so many thousands of books, the man whom the front edges of his rolls and their title-tags please most of all? So in the houses of the most slothful you will see whatever there is of oratory and history, the shelves built up to the ceiling: for now, among the bathrooms and the hot-rooms, a library too is finished off as a necessary furnishing of the house. I would readily pardon it, if men went astray through an excessive passion for study; but as it is, these collected works of sacred genius, arranged with their portraits, are got together for show and to decorate the walls.

But you have fallen into some difficult kind of life, and, without your knowing it, either public fortune or private has thrown a noose on you that you can neither loose nor break. Think how prisoners in fetters at first bear hard the weights and shackles on their legs; then, when they have resolved not to chafe at them but to endure them, necessity teaches them to bear them bravely, and habit to bear them easily. In any kind of life whatever you will find amusements and respites and pleasures, if you are willing to think your evils light rather than to make them hateful. On no better count has nature earned our gratitude than this: that, knowing into what troubles we are born, she devised habit as the softener of calamities, swiftly bringing even the heaviest things into familiarity. No one would hold out, if the persistence of adversity had the same force as its first blow. We are all coupled to fortune: some men’s chain is gold and loose, others’ tight and base — but what does it matter? The same custody has surrounded us all, and even those who have bound others are themselves bound, unless perhaps you think a chain lighter on the left arm. One man is fettered by office, another by wealth; some are pressed down by high birth, some by low; over some are the commands of others overhead, over some their own; some are held in one place by exile, some by a priesthood. All life is servitude. And so one must grow used to one’s condition, complain of it as little as may be, and lay hold of whatever advantage it has about it: nothing is so bitter that a level mind does not find in it some solace. Small plots have often, by the skill of the man who lays them out, opened to many uses, and arrangement has made a cramped footing habitable. Bring reason to bear on your difficulties: hard things can be softened, narrow ones widened, and heavy ones press less on those who carry them with skill. Furthermore, our desires must not be sent far afield; let us allow them to go out only into the neighborhood, since they will not endure being shut in entirely. Leaving those things that either cannot be had or can be had only with difficulty, let us follow what is set near and smiles on our hope — but let us know that all things are equally trifling, with different faces on the outside, within alike empty. And let us not envy those who stand higher: what looked lofty is sheer drop. Those, again, whom an unfair lot has placed on a precarious height will be safer if they take the pride away from things that are of themselves proud, and bring down their fortune onto the level as much as they can. There are many indeed who must of necessity cling to their pinnacle, from which they can come down only by falling; but let them bear witness that this very thing is their greatest burden — that they are forced to be a weight on others, and are not raised aloft but nailed up there. By justice, by mildness, by kindness, with a generous and open hand, let them lay up many defenses against future reverses, in the hope of which they may hang there more securely. Yet nothing will free us so well from these surgings of the mind as always to fix some limit to our increases, and not to leave to fortune the decision when to stop, but to halt of our own accord well short of it. Thus some desires will still spur the mind, and yet, being bounded, will not carry it out into the measureless and uncertain.

This discourse of mine concerns the imperfect and the middling and the unsound, not the wise man. For him there is no walking timidly or step by step: so great is his confidence in himself that he does not hesitate to go to meet fortune, and will never yield her his ground. Nor has he where to fear her, since he counts among things merely lent not only his slaves and possessions and rank, but his body too, and his eyes and his hand, and whatever makes life dearer, and his very self; and he lives as one lent to himself, ready to give all back without grief to those who reclaim it. Nor is he therefore cheap in his own eyes because he knows he is not his own; but he will do all things as carefully, as circumspectly, as a scrupulous and holy man is wont to guard what has been entrusted to his good faith. And whenever he is ordered to give it back, he will not quarrel with fortune, but will say: “I thank you for what I have possessed and held. I have tended your property at a great cost, but, since you so command, I give it up, I yield it, grateful and glad. If you wish me to have anything of yours still, I will keep it; if it is your pleasure otherwise, then my wrought and stamped silver, my house and household, I hand back, I restore.” Should nature call in what she first lent us, to her too we will say: “Take back a mind better than you gave; I do not turn away or shrink back. You have ready, from one willing, what you gave to one who did not feel it: take it away.” What is so hard in returning whence you came? He will live ill who does not know how to die well. So from this thing first its price must be taken away, and breath be counted among cheap things. Gladiators, as Cicero says, we hold in hatred if they are eager to win their life by any means whatever; we favor them if they show contempt for it. Know that the same befalls us: for often the cause of dying is to die in fear. That Fortune, who makes herself a show of us, says: “For what should I keep you, you bad and trembling creature? You will be the more gashed and run through, because you do not know how to offer your throat. But you will both live longer and die more readily, who take the steel not with your neck drawn back nor your hands held up against it, but with spirit.” He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man; but he who knows that this was the condition laid on him at the very moment he was conceived will live by the bond, and at the same time, with the same strength of mind, will see to it that nothing of what happens comes upon him as a surprise. For by foreseeing whatever can happen as though it were going to happen, he will soften the onset of all evils, which bring nothing new to those who are prepared and waiting, but come heavy upon those who look for nothing but good fortune. There is sickness, captivity, ruin, fire: none of these is sudden. I knew into how turbulent a barracks nature had shut me. So often in my neighborhood the death-wail has been raised; so often past my threshold the torch and the taper have led untimely funerals; often the crash of a collapsing building has sounded at my side; many of those whom the forum, the senate-house, and conversation had brought into company with me, a single night has carried off and has cut apart the joined and clasped hands of comrades: should I wonder that dangers have at some time reached me, that have always been roving about me? A great part of mankind, when about to set sail, gives no thought to the storm. I shall never be ashamed of a good saying from a bad author: Publilius, more forceful than the talents of tragedy and comedy whenever he laid aside the inanities of the mime and words aimed at the topmost gallery, said, among many other things stronger than the buskin, not merely than the curtain, this also: “Whatever can befall anyone can befall everyone.” If a man lets this sink into his very marrow, and looks on all the evils of others — of which there is each day an enormous store — as though the road were open for them to reach him too, he will arm himself long before he is attacked. Too late is the mind furnished to endure dangers after the dangers are come. “I did not think this would happen,” and: “Would you ever have believed this would come about?” But why not? What riches are there that want and hunger and beggary do not follow at the back? what rank, whose bordered robe and augur’s staff and patrician thongs are not attended by the filth of disgrace and the reproach of a censor’s mark and a thousand blots and the lowest contempt? what kingship is there for which ruin and trampling, a master and an executioner, are not made ready? And these things are not parted by great intervals: there is the space of an hour between a throne and another man’s knees. Know, then, that every condition is liable to be overturned, and that whatever has befallen anyone can befall you too. You are wealthy: but are you richer than Pompey? When Gaius — an old kinsman, a new host — opened Caesar’s house to him only to close his own, Pompey went short of bread and water. Though he owned so many rivers, rising in his own land and falling in his own, he begged for drippings of rain; he perished of hunger and thirst in the palace of his kinsman, while his heir was contracting for a public funeral for the starving man. You have held the highest offices: but offices as great, as unhoped-for, as all-embracing as Sejanus’s? On the day the senate had escorted him in honor, the people tore him into pieces. Of the man on whom gods and men had heaped everything that could be heaped, there was nothing left for the executioner to drag away. You are a king: I will not send you to Croesus, who both mounted his own pyre at command and saw it put out — outliving not only his kingdom but his own death; nor to Jugurtha, whom the Roman people, within a year of fearing him, looked at as a show: Ptolemy, king of Africa, and Mithridates, king of Armenia, we have seen with our own eyes among the guards of Gaius; the one was sent into exile, the other prayed that he might be sent off under better faith. In so great a tumbling of things that go up and down, unless you reckon whatever can happen as bound to happen, you give adverse fortune its power over you — power that whoever has seen it first has broken.

Next after these will be that we labor neither at superfluous things nor for a superfluous end — that is, that we neither covet what we cannot attain, nor, having got it, come to understand the emptiness of our desires too late, after much sweat; that is, that our labor be not fruitless and without effect, nor the effect unworthy of the labor. For from these grief generally follows, if either it has not succeeded, or the success brings shame. The running about must be cut back that belongs to a great part of mankind, who range through houses and theaters and forums: they offer themselves to other men’s business, always looking like men with something to do. If you ask one of them as he leaves his house, “Where are you off to? what have you in mind?” he will answer you: “By Hercules, I don’t know; but I’ll see some people, I’ll do something.” They wander without a purpose, looking for business, and do not the things they intended but the things they have stumbled into. Their course is aimless and empty, like that of ants crawling over bushes, that are driven up to the topmost tip and from there down to the bottom with nothing to show for it. Most men lead a life like theirs, which one might not unfairly call a restless idleness. Some of them you will pity as they run as if to a fire: so do they shove those they meet and send themselves and others headlong, when all the while they have been running either to greet a man who will not greet them back, or to follow the funeral of someone they did not know, or to the trial of a chronic litigant, or to the betrothal of a chronic bride, and, dancing attendance on a litter, in some places have even carried it. Then, coming home with a needless weariness, they swear they do not themselves know why they went out, where they have been — and the next day will wander over those same tracks. So let every labor be referred to some end, let it look toward something. It is not industry that drives the restless, but, as it drives madmen, false images of things: for not even they are stirred without some hope; the appearance of some object provokes them, whose emptiness their captured mind does not expose. In the same way each of those who go out to swell the crowd is led round the city by empty and trivial reasons, and the risen day drives him out though he has nothing to work at; and when, after dashing in vain against many men’s doors, he has paid his round of greetings through the nomenclators, shut out by many, he finds no one of them all harder to meet at home than himself. On this evil hangs that foulest vice — eavesdropping, the prying into things public and secret, and the knowledge of many matters that can neither be told nor heard in safety.

It was following this, I think, that Democritus began thus: “Whoever would live tranquilly, let him do little business either in private or in public” — referring, of course, to superfluous matters: for if they are necessary, both in private and in public not many things only but countless must be done; but where no solemn duty summons us, our doings must be reined in. For he who does many things often gives fortune power over himself; and it is safest to put her to the test but rarely, yet to think always of her and to promise oneself nothing on her faith: “I will sail, unless something happens”; and “I will become praetor, unless something gets in the way”; and “My business will answer my hopes, unless something comes between.” This is why we say nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation: we exempt him not from the chances of mankind but from its errors, and not everything falls out for him as he wished, but as he reckoned. And above all he reckoned that something might stand against his plans. The grief of a disappointed desire, moreover, must reach the mind more lightly when you have not in any case promised it success.

We must also make ourselves adaptable, not to indulge our fixed plans too much, and to pass over into those things to which chance has led us, and not to dread a change either of plan or of condition — provided that fickleness, the vice most hostile to repose, does not catch us up. For obstinacy must needs be anxious and wretched, since fortune is forever wrenching something from it, and fickleness is far heavier still, nowhere holding itself in. Both are foes to tranquility: to be able to change nothing, and to endure nothing. In any case the mind must be called back from all outward things into itself: let it trust in itself, rejoice in itself, look up to its own, withdraw as far as it can from what is another’s, and apply itself to itself; let it not feel its losses, and even put a kind interpretation on adversity. When the wreck was announced, our Zeno, hearing that all his goods were sunk, said: “Fortune bids me philosophize more lightly equipped.” A tyrant was threatening the philosopher Theodorus with death, and unburied death at that: “You have,” he said, “reason to be pleased with yourself: half a pint of blood is in your power; for as to burial, what a fool you are, if you think it matters to me whether I rot above ground or below.” Julius Canus, a man great among the first, to whose admiration not even this is a hindrance, that he was born in our own age — after wrangling long with Gaius, when that Phalaris said to him as he was leaving, “Lest you flatter yourself with some foolish hope, I have ordered you led off to execution,” answered: “I thank you, most excellent prince.” What he meant I am in doubt; for many things occur to me. Did he mean to be insolent, and to show how great the cruelty was under which death was a kindness? Or did he reproach Gaius with his daily madness? For men gave thanks even whose children had been killed and whose goods had been taken away. Or did he take it gladly, as though it were freedom? Whatever it is, he answered with a great mind. Someone will say: after this Gaius might have ordered him to live. Canus had no fear of that: the good faith of Gaius in commands of that kind was well known. Do you believe that he passed the ten intervening days, up to his execution, without any disquiet? It passes belief — what that man said, what he did, how calm he was. He was playing at draughts. When the centurion, dragging along the column of the doomed, ordered him too to be roused, at the summons he counted his pieces and said to his partner: “See that after my death you do not falsely claim to have won.” Then, with a nod to the centurion: “You will be witness,” he said, “that I am one piece ahead.” Do you think Canus was merely playing at that board? He was making a mockery of it. His friends were sad, about to lose such a man: “Why are you downcast?” he said. “You are asking whether souls are immortal; I shall know in a moment.” Nor did he cease to search out the truth at the very end, and to make a question of his own death. His own philosopher walked at his side, and now they were not far from the mound on which the daily sacrifice was made to Caesar, our god. He said: “What, Canus, are you thinking of now? what is in your mind?” “I have resolved,” said Canus, “to watch, in that swiftest of moments, whether the soul will feel itself going out.” And he promised that, if he found anything out, he would make the round of his friends and report what the state of souls was. Behold tranquility in the midst of the storm; behold a mind worthy of eternity, that calls its own fate to be a proof of the truth, that, set on that last step, questions the departing soul, and learns something not only up to death but even out of death itself: no one ever philosophized longer. Not in haste shall so great a man be let go, one to be spoken of with care: we will give you over to all remembrance, most illustrious head, you great portion of the carnage of Gaius!

But it does no good to have thrown off the causes of private sadness: for sometimes a hatred of the human race takes hold of us, and there rises up the throng of so many prosperous crimes. When you have considered how rare simplicity is, and how unknown innocence, and how scarcely ever faith is kept except when it pays, and how the gains and losses of lust are alike odious, and how ambition now so little keeps itself within its own bounds that it shines through baseness — the mind is driven into night, and, as though the virtues were overthrown, which it is no longer permitted to hope for nor profitable to possess, darkness comes up. In this, then, we must be bent round, so that all the vices of the crowd may seem to us not hateful but laughable, and that we may imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus: for the latter, whenever he came out in public, would weep, the former laugh; to the one all that we do seemed miseries, to the other absurdities. So everything must be made light of and borne with an easy mind: it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it. Add that he too deserves better of the human race who laughs at it than he who mourns over it: the one leaves something of good hope, while the other foolishly weeps over what he despairs of being able to correct; and, to one who surveys the whole, it is the mark of a greater mind not to hold back laughter than not to hold back tears, since he stirs the lightest of the emotions, and thinks nothing in all this great show great, nothing grave, not even anything wretched. Let each man set before himself the several things on account of which we are glad and sad, and he will know that what Bion said is true: that all the doings of men are very like their beginnings, and that their life is no more holy or grave than their conception. But it is better to take the common ways of men and the vices of mankind calmly, falling neither into laughter nor into tears; for to be tormented by others’ evils is an everlasting misery, and to take delight in others’ evils an inhuman pleasure. Just as that kindness is useless — to weep because someone is burying a son, and to compose one’s face — so in one’s own troubles too one ought to behave so as to give to grief only as much as nature demands, not as much as custom. Most men shed tears for show, and have dry eyes as often as a spectator is wanting, judging it disgraceful not to weep when everyone weeps: so deeply has this evil fixed itself, to hang on others’ opinion, that even the simplest thing of all, grief, comes round to pretense.

There will follow a part that is wont, not without reason, to sadden and to bring on anxiety. When the ends of good men are evil — when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, that Cato, the living image of the virtues, leaning on his sword, to make plain at once his verdict on himself and on the republic — one cannot but be tormented that fortune pays out rewards so unjust. And what is each man then to hope for himself, when he sees the best suffering the worst? What, then, is the answer? See how each of them bore it, and, if they were brave, long for them with the very spirit that was theirs; if they died womanishly and cravenly, nothing is lost. Either they are worthy that their virtue should please you, or unworthy that their cowardice should be missed. For what is more shameful than if the greatest men, by dying bravely, make others timid? Let us praise the man worthy of praise as often as he deserves it, and say: “So much the braver! so much the happier! You have escaped all chances — envy, sickness; you have come out of custody; you were judged by the gods not as deserving of an evil fortune, but as one over whom fortune could no longer have any power.” But on those who shrink back and, even in death, look back toward life, hands must be laid. I will weep for no man who is glad, for no man who weeps: the one has himself wiped away my tears, the other by his own tears has made himself worthy of none. Shall I weep for Hercules because he is burned alive, or for Regulus because he is pierced with so many nails, or for Cato because he reopens his own wounds? All these, at a slight expense of time, found how to become eternal, and came to immortality by dying.

There is also that no slight material of anxieties: if you compose yourself with care and show yourself to none in plain simplicity — such as the life of many is, feigned, got up for display: for the constant watching of oneself is a torment, and one dreads to be caught looking other than usual. Nor are we ever released from care, when we think ourselves appraised as often as we are looked at. For many things happen that strip us bare against our will, and, granting that so great a carefulness of oneself succeeds, still the life is neither pleasant nor secure of those who live forever behind a mask. But how much pleasure there is in that sincere simplicity, unadorned of itself, drawing no veil over its own character! Yet this life too runs some risk of contempt, if everything lies open to everyone: for there are those who despise whatever they have come nearer to. But there is no danger that virtue, brought close to the eyes, will grow cheap, and it is better to be despised through simplicity than to be racked by an unending pretense. Yet let us apply measure to the matter: there is a great difference between living simply and living carelessly. We must also withdraw much into ourselves: for conversation with the unlike upsets what has been well composed and renews the passions and chafes raw whatever in the mind is weak and not fully healed. Yet the two must be mixed and made to alternate, solitude and company. The one will make us long for men, the other for ourselves, and each will be a remedy for the other: solitude will cure the hatred of a crowd, the crowd the weariness of solitude. Nor must the mind be held at the same tension evenly, but it must be called off to jests. Socrates was not ashamed to play with little boys, and Cato would relax with wine a mind wearied by public cares, and Scipio would move that triumphal and soldierly body of his to the measure — not breaking himself up softly, as is the fashion now for men who flow, even in their very gait, beyond a woman’s softness, but as those men of old were wont, in times of play and festival, to dance in a manly style, taking no harm by it even if they were watched by their own enemies. Relaxation must be given to minds: rested, they will rise up better and keener. As fertile fields must not be driven hard (for an unbroken fruitfulness will quickly exhaust them), so unremitting labor will break the force of minds; they will recover their strength when a little loosened and relaxed. From the unbrokenness of toils there is born a certain dullness and languor of minds. Nor would the desire of men reach so eagerly toward this, were there not some natural pleasure in play and jesting. Yet too frequent a use of them will rob minds of all their weight and all their force: for sleep too is necessary to recovery, and yet, if you keep it up through day and night, it will be death. There is a great difference between slackening a thing and dissolving it. The founders of laws established festal days, that men might be compelled in public to cheerfulness, as though setting a necessary tempering in among their labors; and certain men of great judgment used to give themselves monthly holidays on fixed days, while some would divide every single day between leisure and cares. Such was Asinius Pollio, the great orator, as we remember him, whom no business detained beyond the tenth hour: he would not so much as read letters after that hour, lest some new care should arise, but laid down the whole day’s weariness in those two hours. Some have broken the day in the middle and put off to the afternoon hours some lighter task. Our ancestors too forbade any new motion to be brought before the senate after the tenth hour. The soldier divides his watches, and the night is exempt for those returning from an expedition. The mind must be indulged, and leisure given it now and again, to stand in the place of food and strength. And we must wander in open walks, that under a free sky and with deep breaths the mind may grow and lift itself; sometimes a drive and a journey and a change of country will give vigor, and good company, and a more generous draught. Now and then we must come even as far as drunkenness — not to drown us, but to lay us low: for it washes away cares and stirs the mind from the bottom, and, as it heals certain diseases, so it heals sadness; and Liber was called the discoverer of wine not on account of the license of the tongue, but because he frees the mind from the servitude of cares and lays claim to it and quickens it and makes it bolder for all undertakings. But, as of freedom, so of wine, the wholesome thing is moderation. Solon and Arcesilaus are believed to have been given to wine; against Cato drunkenness was charged: his accusers will more easily make the charge honorable than make Cato base. But it must not be done often, lest the mind contract a bad habit; and yet now and then it must be drawn out into exultation and freedom, and a gloomy sobriety put off for a little while. For, whether we believe the Greek poet — “sometimes it is sweet even to be mad”; or Plato — “in vain has the man master of himself knocked at the doors of poetry”; or Aristotle — “there has been no great genius without a mixture of madness.” A mind cannot utter anything great and above the rest unless it is moved. When it has scorned the common and the customary and risen higher by a sacred impulse, then at last it sings something grander than a mortal mouth could. It cannot reach anything sublime and set on a height so long as it is in its own keeping: it must break away from the customary and be carried up and bite the bridle and run off with its rider and bear him up where, of itself, it would have feared to climb. You have, dearest Serenus, the things that can guard tranquility, that can restore it, that resist the vices as they creep in. Yet know this: that none of these is strong enough to preserve so frail a thing, unless an intent and unremitting care surrounds the slipping mind.