To live happily, Gallio my brother, is what all men want; but when it comes to seeing clearly what it is that makes a life happy, they are in the dark. And so far is it from being easy to attain the happy life that the harder a man drives toward it, the farther he falls back from it, if he has taken the wrong road; for once the road leads in the opposite direction, the very speed makes the distance greater. So the first thing to settle is what it is we are after; the next, to look about for the route by which we can press toward it most quickly, meaning to learn on the journey itself — if only it is the right one — how much ground we cover each day, and how much nearer we are to the goal toward which our natural longing drives us. As long as we wander at random, following no guide but the din and the discordant shouting of those who call us in different directions, life will be worn away among our errors — a short life, even if we toil day and night for a sound mind. So let it be decided where we are heading and by what road, and not without some expert who has explored the country we are entering; for the conditions here are not the same as on other journeys. On those, some marked-out track, and the natives when we question them, keep us from going astray; here it is the most beaten and the most frequented road that deceives us most. Nothing, then, is more to be insisted on than that we not follow, like cattle, the herd that goes before us, making our way not where we ought to go but where the others are going. And nothing entangles us in greater evils than our adjusting ourselves to rumor, reckoning those things best that have been received with wide assent, taking our many examples for proofs, and living not by reason but by imitation. Hence that vast pile of men toppling one upon another. What happens in a great crush of human beings, when the crowd presses upon itself — no one falls without dragging another down upon him, and the front ranks are the ruin of those behind — you may see happening all through life. No one goes wrong for himself alone; each is the cause and author of another’s error. It is harmful to attach oneself to those in front, and, since every man would rather believe than judge, life is never judged, only believed, and an error handed on from hand to hand keeps us spinning and flings us down. We perish by other men’s examples: we shall be cured if only we are set apart from the throng. But as it is, the people stands against reason, the defender of its own affliction. So it goes as at the elections, where the very men who made the praetors marvel that they were made, once the fickle current of favor has swung round: we approve the same things, we condemn the same things; this is the upshot of every verdict reached by the majority.

When the happy life is the question, you must not answer me as they do at a division of the house: “This side seems to be the larger.” For that is just why it is the worse. Human affairs are not so well ordered that the better things please the more; the crowd is proof of the worst. Let us ask, then, what is best to do, not what is most customary; what will establish us in possession of an everlasting happiness, not what is approved by the mob, that worst interpreter of truth. And by the mob I mean men in court dress as much as men in crowns; I do not look at the color of the garments in which their bodies are draped. In judging a man I do not trust my eyes; I have a better and surer light by which to tell the false from the true: let the mind discover the good of the mind. The mind, if ever it has leisure to draw breath and withdraw into itself — how it will confess the truth to itself, racked by its own hand, and say: “Whatever I have done up to now, I would rather had been left undone; whatever I have said, when I think it over, I envy the dumb; whatever I have wished, I count a curse laid on me by my enemies; whatever I have feared — good gods, how much lighter it was than what I coveted! With many men I have carried on feuds, and come back from hatred into favor again — if there is any favor among the wicked: with myself I am not yet a friend. I have spent all my effort to lift myself out of the multitude and make myself remarkable by some gift: what have I done but set myself up as a target and show malice something to bite? Do you see those men who praise eloquence, who chase after wealth, who fawn on favor, who exalt power? They are all either enemies, or — what comes to the same — they can be; the throng of admirers is as great as the throng of the envious. Why do I not rather seek some good I can put to use — one I can feel, not one I can display? These things that are gazed at, before which men halt, that one points out to another in amazement, glitter without and are wretched within.”

Let us seek something good not in appearance but solid and even, and more beautiful on its more hidden side; this let us dig out. It does not lie far off: it will be found; we need only know where to stretch out our hand. As it is, we pass over what is close by, as if in the dark, stumbling on the very things we long for. But not to drag you round by detours, I will pass over the opinions of others — for both to list them is long, and to refute them — and give you ours. When I say “ours,” though, I do not bind myself to any one of the leaders of the Stoa: I too have the right to a vote. And so I will follow one man, and bid another divide his motion, and perhaps, called on after them all, I will reject nothing of what my predecessors have decreed and say: “This further I propose.” Meanwhile, in what is agreed among all the Stoics, I assent to nature; not to stray from her and to be shaped by her law and pattern — that is wisdom. The happy life, then, is the one in harmony with its own nature, and it cannot fall to anyone except where, first, the mind is sound and in perpetual possession of its own soundness; then brave and vigorous, and beyond that nobly patient, adapted to the times, attentive to the body and to what concerns it but without anxiety, and careful of the other things that furnish life without being in awe of any of them — meaning to use the gifts of fortune, not to be their slave. You understand, even if I do not add it, that there follows a perpetual tranquility and freedom, once we have driven off the things that either provoke or terrify us; for in place of pleasures and of those gratifications that are small and frail and noxious in their very depravities, there enters a vast joy, unshaken and even, and then peace and concord of mind and greatness joined with gentleness; for all savagery is born of weakness.

Our good can also be defined in another way — that is, the same idea grasped in different words. Just as one and the same army may now be spread out more widely, now drawn up into a narrow space, and may be either curved at the center into bowed wings or deployed in a straight front, while its strength, however it is ordered, stays the same, and its will to stand for the same side — so the definition of the highest good can at one time be spread out and extended, at another gathered and folded in on itself. It will come to the same thing, then, whether I say “the highest good is a mind that despises the gifts of chance and takes its joy in virtue,” or “an unconquerable strength of mind, expert in affairs, calm in action with much humanity and care for those it deals with.” It may also be defined this way: that we call a man happy for whom there is no good or evil except a good or evil mind, a man who cultivates the honorable, content with virtue, whom the gifts of chance neither lift up nor break, who knows no greater good than the one he can give himself, for whom the true pleasure will be contempt of pleasures. You may, if you care to range further, carry the same idea over into one shape after another, its force untouched and whole. For what forbids us to call the happy life a mind that is free and upright and undaunted and steadfast, set beyond fear, beyond desire, for which the one good is the honorable, the one evil baseness, while the rest is a worthless crowd of things that neither subtract anything from the happy life nor add to it, coming and going without increasing or diminishing the highest good? A man so founded must, whether he will or not, be attended by a continual cheerfulness and a deep gladness that comes from deep within, since he rejoices in what is his own and craves nothing greater than what is at home. Why should he not set these things well against the petty, trivial, fleeting motions of his poor little body? On the day he sinks below pleasure, he will sink below pain too; but you see how foul and harmful a slavery he must serve who is possessed by turns by pleasures and pains, those most fickle and most tyrannous of masters: so he must escape into freedom. This nothing grants but indifference to fortune; then will rise that good beyond all reckoning, the quiet of a mind set in safety, and its loftiness, and — once its errors are expelled — from the knowledge of the truth a joy great and unmoving, and graciousness, and an expansiveness of mind, in which it will delight not as in goods, but as in things sprung from its own good.

Since I have begun to deal generously, the man can be called happy who, by the benefit of reason, neither craves nor fears; though stones too are free of fear and sadness, and so no less are cattle — yet no one would on that account call those things happy that have no apprehension of happiness. Put in the same class the men whom a dull nature and ignorance of themselves have reduced to the rank of cattle and beasts. There is no difference between these and those, since the beasts have no reason at all, while these have a reason that is warped and clever to their own hurt and in a perverse direction; for no one can be called happy who has been cast out beyond the truth. The happy life, then, is the one made stable upon a right and sure judgment, and unalterable. For then the mind is pure and released from all evils, having escaped not only the great wounds but the small nips too, ready to stand always where it has taken its stand and to hold its seat even against an angry and assailing fortune. For as to pleasure — though it pour round on every side and flow in by every channel and soothe the mind with its blandishments and bring on one allurement after another to work upon the whole of us and our parts — what mortal, who has any trace of a man left in him, would wish to be tickled day and night and, abandoning his mind, to give his service to the body?

“But the mind too,” he says, “will have its own pleasures.” Let it have them, by all means, and sit as arbiter of luxury and of pleasures; let it fill itself with all the things that delight the senses, then look back on the past and, remembering pleasures now grown stale, exult in the old ones and already reach ahead to those to come, marshaling its hopes, and, while the body lies in its present fattening, send its thoughts on ahead to the future: this man will seem to me the more wretched for it, since to choose evils in place of goods is madness. No one is happy without soundness of mind, and no one is sound who reaches after the worst things as though they were the best. Happy, then, is the man of right judgment; happy the man content with his present circumstances, whatever they are, and a friend to his own lot; happy the man to whom reason commends every condition of his affairs.

Even those who have located the highest good in the belly see in what a shameful place they have set it. And so they deny that pleasure can be sundered from virtue, and say that no one can live honorably without living pleasantly, nor pleasantly without living honorably too. I do not see how these things, so utterly different, are thrown into one couple. What is there, I beg you, to keep pleasure from being separated from virtue? Is it, forsooth, that since every beginning of goods is from virtue, even the things you love and seek spring from her roots? But if these were really inseparable, we should not see some things pleasant but dishonorable, and others most honorable but harsh, to be got through only by way of pains. Add now that pleasure comes even to the most shameful life, while virtue does not admit an evil life; and some men are unhappy not without pleasure — nay, on account of the very pleasure. This could not happen if pleasure had mingled itself with virtue — virtue, which often goes without pleasure, never wants it. Why do you yoke together things unlike, nay opposite? Virtue is something lofty, exalted and kingly, unconquered and untiring: pleasure is low and slavish, weak and perishable, whose station and lodging are the brothels and the cookshops. Virtue you will meet in the temple, in the forum, in the senate-house, standing before the walls, dusty and sunburnt, her hands calloused: pleasure more often in hiding and hunting the shadows, around the baths and the sweat-rooms and the places that dread the aedile, soft and nerveless, dripping with wine and perfume, pale or rouged and embalmed with cosmetics. The highest good is immortal; it does not know how to depart, and has in it neither glut nor regret; for a right mind never turns, and is neither hateful to itself nor changed in anything, being the best. But pleasure is snuffed out at the very moment it most delights; it has not much room, and so fills it quickly and palls and droops after the first onset. Nor is anything ever sure whose nature is in motion: so there cannot even be any substance to a thing that comes and passes most swiftly, doomed to perish in the very use of itself; for it strains toward the point where it leaves off, and even as it begins it has its eye on the end.

And what of the fact that pleasure belongs to the wicked as much as to the good, and that the base delight in their own disgrace no less than the honorable in their high deeds? This is why the ancients enjoined us to follow the best life, not the most pleasant, so that pleasure should be not the guide of a right and good will but its companion. For nature is the guide we must use; this reason watches, this it consults. To live happily, then, is the same as to live according to nature. What that is I will now make plain: if we keep the endowments of the body and the gifts suited to nature carefully but without fear, as things given for a day and fleeting; if we do not submit to their slavery nor let what is foreign possess us; if the things pleasing to the body and brought in from outside stand to us where auxiliaries and light-armed troops stand in a camp — let them serve, not command — then at last they are of use to the mind. Let a man be uncorrupted by externals and unconquerable, an admirer only of himself, an artificer of his own life; let his confidence be not without knowledge, his knowledge not without constancy; let what he has once resolved abide with him, and let there be no erasure in his decrees. It is understood, even if I do not add it, that such a man will be composed and well-ordered, and in what he does magnificent joined with courtesy. Let true reason, stirred by the senses and taking from them its first principles — for it has nothing else from which to make its attempt or from which to take its drive toward the truth — return into itself. For the universe too, embracing all things, and god the ruler of the whole, reaches indeed into the outward parts, but yet from every side returns inward into himself. Let our mind do the same: when, having followed its senses, it has through them stretched out to external things, let it be master both of them and of itself. In this way there will be wrought one force and one power at concord with itself, and that sure reason will be born, not at variance nor hesitating in its opinions and apprehensions nor in its conviction; and this reason, when it has set itself in order and reached agreement among its parts and, so to speak, found its harmony, has touched the highest good. For nothing crooked is left, nothing slippery, nothing on which it may strike or slip; it will do all things by its own command, and nothing unlooked-for will befall it, but whatever is done will turn out for the good, easily and readily and without any shuffling on the part of the doer; for sluggishness and hesitation betray a struggle and inconstancy. So you may boldly declare that the highest good is concord of mind; for the virtues must be where agreement and unity are: the vices are at odds.

“But you too,” he says, “cultivate virtue for no other reason than that you hope for some pleasure from it.” First, even if virtue is going to afford pleasure, it is not on that account sought for the sake of pleasure; for it affords not this but this as well, and it does not labor for this, but its labor, though it aims at something else, will attain this too. Just as in a field broken up for the crop some flowers spring up among it, and yet it was not for this little plant, though it delights the eye, that so much toil was spent — the sower had another purpose, this came over and above — so pleasure is not the wage nor the cause of virtue but an accession, and it does not please because it delights, but, if it pleases, it delights as well. The highest good is in the judgment itself and in the disposition of a mind at its best, which, when it has filled out its own measure and girt itself within its own bounds, has completed the highest good and desires nothing further; for there is nothing outside the whole, any more than there is beyond the end. And so you go wrong when you ask what it is for the sake of which I seek virtue; for you are asking for something above the highest. You ask what I seek from virtue? Herself. For she has nothing better; she is her own reward. Is this too little? When I say to you, “the highest good is the unbreakable firmness of a mind, and foresight and loftiness and soundness and freedom and concord and grace,” do you still demand something greater to which these may be referred? Why do you name pleasure to me? I am seeking the good of a man, not of the belly — the belly, which is roomier in cattle and beasts.

“You misrepresent,” he says, “what I am saying; for I deny that anyone can live pleasantly unless at the same time he lives honorably too, which cannot fall to dumb animals, nor to those who measure their good by food. Plainly, I say, and openly I testify that this life which I call pleasant cannot be had except with virtue added.” And yet who does not know that the biggest fools are the fullest of your pleasures, that wickedness abounds in pleasant things, and that the mind itself supplies kinds of pleasure many and depraved? — first of all, insolence and an excessive estimate of oneself, and a swelling pride lifted above the rest, and a love of one’s own affairs that is blind and improvident, and an exultation over the smallest and most childish causes; and then biting wit and an arrogance that delights in insults, and idleness and the dissolution of a sluggish mind that melts away in indulgences and falls asleep over itself. All these things virtue scatters; it tweaks the ear, and weighs pleasures before it admits them, and the ones it has approved it does not rate highly — it merely admits them — and it is glad not in the use of them but in self-restraint. But self-restraint, since it lessens pleasures, is an injury to your highest good. You embrace pleasure, I rein it in; you enjoy pleasure, I use it; you think it the highest good, I do not even think it a good; you do everything for pleasure’s sake, I nothing.

When I say that I do nothing for pleasure’s sake, I am speaking of that wise man, to whom alone you grant pleasure. But I do not call a man wise above whom anything stands, much less pleasure. And besides, possessed by this, how will he resist toil and danger, want, and the threats that roar on every side of human life? How will he bear the sight of death, how pains, how the crashing of the world and so many fiercest enemies, conquered as he is by so soft an adversary? “He will do whatever pleasure urges.” Come, do you not see how many things it will urge? “It will be able,” he says, “to urge nothing base, because it is joined to virtue.” Do you not see, again, what sort of highest good it is that needs a guardian to be good? And how is virtue to govern pleasure, which it follows — since to follow is the part of one who obeys, to govern of one who commands? Do you put in the rear the thing that gives orders? A fine office virtue has among you — to taste pleasures first! But we shall see whether, among those by whom virtue has been so insultingly handled, she is still virtue, for she cannot keep her own name if she has yielded her place; meanwhile, on the matter at hand, I will show you many men beset by pleasures, on whom fortune has poured out all her gifts, whom you must needs confess to be wicked. Look at Nomentanus and Apicius, hunting down the goods, as they call them, of land and sea, and reviewing on their table the animals of every nation; see these same men looking down from a couch of roses upon their kitchen, delighting their ears with the sound of voices, their eyes with spectacles, their palate with savors; their whole body is teased with soft and gentle compresses, and, that their nostrils meanwhile not go idle, the very place in which the rites of luxury are celebrated is steeped with sundry perfumes. You will say these men are in the midst of pleasures, and yet it will not be well with them, because they rejoice not in a good.

“It will be ill with them,” he says, “because many things will come between to trouble the mind, and opinions at war with one another will unsettle it.” That this is so I grant; but none the less these very men, foolish and unbalanced and exposed to the stroke of regret, will receive great pleasures, so that one must admit they are as far from all distress as from a sound mind, and — as happens to most — they rave a merry madness and rage by way of laughter. The pleasures of the wise, on the contrary, are subdued and modest and almost languid, kept down and scarcely noticeable, since they come neither summoned nor, though they have come of themselves, held in any honor, nor received with any joy by those who feel them; for the wise mingle them and slip them into life as a game and a jest among serious things. Let them cease, then, to join incompatibles and to entangle pleasure with virtue, a vice by which they flatter all the worst men. The man sunk in pleasures, forever belching and drunk, because he knows he lives with pleasure believes he lives with virtue too (for he hears that pleasure cannot be separated from virtue); then he inscribes his vices with the name of wisdom and professes openly what ought to be hidden. And so it is not spurred on by Epicurus that they run riot, but, given over to their vices, they hide their luxury in the bosom of philosophy and flock to where they may hear pleasure praised. Nor do they reckon how sober and dry that pleasure of Epicurus is — for so, by Hercules, I judge it to be — but they fly to the mere name, seeking some patronage and cloak for their lusts. And so they lose the one good they had among their evils, shame at sinning; for they praise the things they used to blush at, and glory in their vice; and so it is not even open to them to recover, once an honorable title has been added to base sloth. This is why that praise of pleasure is ruinous: because the honorable precepts lie hidden within, while what corrupts is on show.

For my part I am of this opinion — I will say it though our own side dislike it — that Epicurus enjoins holy and upright things, and, if you come closer, austere ones; for that pleasure of his is reduced to something small and meager, and the law we lay down for virtue he lays down for pleasure: he bids it obey nature; but what is enough for nature is too little for luxury. What follows, then? Whoever calls idle ease and the alternation of gluttony and lust happiness is seeking a good sponsor for a bad cause, and, when he has come to it drawn on by the beguiling name, follows a pleasure not the one he hears of but the one he has brought with him; and when he has begun to think his vices like the precepts, he gives himself up to them not timidly nor in secret, but goes riotous from then on with his head uncovered. So I will not say, as most of our school do, that the sect of Epicurus is a teacher of crimes, but this I do say: it is ill spoken of, it is of bad repute — and undeservedly. Who can know that except one admitted within? Its very front gives occasion to the tale and provokes an evil expectation. It is as if a brave man wore a woman’s gown: your chastity stands firm, your manhood is safe, your body is given over to no shameful submission — but there is a tambourine in your hand. So let an honorable title be chosen, and an inscription that itself rouses the mind: the one that stands as it is, the vices have invented. Whoever has come over to virtue has given proof of a noble nature; the man who follows pleasure looks nerveless, broken, a degenerate from manhood, bound to come to baseness unless someone distinguishes his pleasures for him, so that he may know which of them stop within natural desire, and which rush headlong and are boundless and the more they are filled the more they cannot be filled. Come, let virtue lead the way, and every step will be safe. And pleasure in excess does harm: in virtue there is no fearing that anything be excessive, because in virtue itself is the measure; that is no good which suffers from its own greatness. To creatures allotted a rational nature, what better thing is set before them than reason? And if that partnership pleases you, if it pleases you to go to the happy life in this company, let virtue lead, let pleasure attend and play about the body like a shadow: to hand over virtue, the most exalted mistress, as a handmaid to pleasure is the part of a man whose mind grasps nothing great.

Let virtue go first, let her carry the standards: we shall have pleasure none the less, but we shall be its masters and moderators; it will coax something out of us, it will compel nothing. But those who have handed the command to pleasure have lost both: for they lose virtue, and besides they do not possess pleasure — pleasure possesses them, and they are either tortured by the lack of it or strangled by the glut, wretched if it deserts them, more wretched if it overwhelms them; like men caught in the Syrtic sea, now left high and dry, now tossed on a rushing wave. And this comes of an excessive intemperance and a blind love of the thing; for to him who seeks evils in place of goods it is dangerous to attain them. As we hunt wild beasts with toil and danger, and even when they are caught their keeping is full of anxiety — for often they maul their masters — so it is with great pleasures: they have turned out a great evil, and the captured have captured. The more and the greater they are, the smaller is that man and the slave of the more, whom the crowd calls happy. Let me linger still in this image of the thing. As the man who tracks the lairs of beasts, and counts it much to snare wild game with the noose, and to ring the broad glades round with hounds, so as to press upon their tracks, abandons better things and renounces many duties, so the man who pursues pleasure puts all else second and neglects his first good, freedom, and pays it out for his belly; nor does he buy pleasures for himself, but sells himself to pleasures.

“Yet what,” he says, “forbids that virtue and pleasure be fused into one, and the highest good so made up that the same thing is both honorable and pleasant?” Because a part of the honorable cannot be anything but honorable, and the highest good will not keep its purity if it sees in itself anything unlike the better part. Even the joy that springs from virtue, though it be a good, is yet not a part of the absolute good, any more than gladness and tranquility are, though they are born of the fairest causes; for these are indeed goods, but they follow the highest good, they do not complete it. But whoever makes a partnership of virtue and pleasure — and not even an equal one — by the frailty of the one good blunts whatever vigor is in the other, and sends under the yoke that freedom which is unconquered only so long as it knows nothing more precious than itself. For — and this is the greatest slavery — it begins to have need of fortune; there follows a life anxious, suspicious, fearful, dreading every chance, hanging on the moments of time. You do not give virtue a foundation heavy and immovable, but bid her stand on slippery ground; and what is so slippery as the expectation of chance events and the changefulness of the body and of the things that affect the body? How can such a man obey god and take whatever befalls with a good will, and not complain of fate, a kindly interpreter of his own mischances, if he is shaken by the little pricks of pleasures and pains? But he is not even a good guardian or champion of his country, nor a defender of his friends, if he leans toward pleasures. Let the highest good, then, climb up to the height from which no force drags it down, where there is no entrance for pain, for hope, or for fear, nor for anything that would make worse the right of the highest good; and to climb up there virtue alone can. By her steps that slope must be scaled; she will stand bravely and bear whatever befalls, not enduring only but even willing it, knowing that every difficulty of the times is a law of nature; and like a good soldier she will bear her wounds, count her scars, and, run through with weapons, dying, will love the general for whom she falls. She will keep in mind that old precept: follow god. But whoever complains and weeps and groans is compelled by force to do what is commanded, and dragged unwilling to the orders none the less. And what madness it is to be dragged rather than to follow! Just as much, by Hercules, as it is folly and ignorance of one’s own condition to grieve that something is wanting to you, or that something harder has befallen — to marvel equally, or take it amiss, at the things that happen to the good as much as to the bad: I mean sicknesses, deaths, infirmities, and the rest that break in crosswise upon human life. Whatever by the constitution of the universe is to be suffered, let it be taken up with a great mind: to this oath we have been sworn, to bear what is mortal and not to be disturbed by the things it is not in our power to avoid. We have been born in a kingdom: to obey god is freedom.

True happiness, then, is placed in virtue. What will this virtue counsel you? That you reckon nothing good or evil that comes neither from virtue nor from wickedness; then, that you be immovable both against evil and out of the good, so that, as far as is permitted, you may model god. What does she promise you for this campaign? Great things, and equal to the divine: you will be under no compulsion, you will lack nothing, you will be free, safe, unharmed; you will attempt nothing in vain, you will be hindered in nothing; everything will fall out for you as you intend, nothing adverse will happen, nothing against your expectation and will. “What then? Is virtue enough for living happily?” Perfect and divine as she is, why should she not be enough — nay, more than enough? For what can be wanting to a man set beyond all desire? What need is there of anything from outside to him who has gathered all that is his into himself? But the man who is still making his way toward virtue, even if he has advanced far, has need of some indulgence from fortune while he is still struggling among human things, until he loosens that knot and every mortal bond. What, then, is the difference? That some are tightly bound, others fettered, others stretched out as well: this man, who has gone forward to the higher reaches and lifted himself further up, drags a loosened chain, not yet free, but already as good as free.

If, then, one of those who bark at philosophy should say, as they are wont: “Why, then, do you talk more bravely than you live? Why do you both soften your words before a superior, and reckon money a necessary instrument for you, and are moved by loss, and let fall tears at the news of a wife’s or friend’s death, and have an eye to reputation, and are touched by spiteful talk? Why is your estate more cultivated than natural use requires? Why do you not dine by your own prescription? Why is your furniture more gleaming? Why is wine drunk at your house older than yourself? Why is gold laid out? Why are trees planted that will give nothing but shade? Why does your wife wear on her ears the income of a wealthy house? Why is your train of pages decked in costly stuff? Why is waiting at table at your house an art, and the silver not set down carelessly and as one pleases but skillfully arranged, and why is there a master of the craft of carving the meat?” Add, if you like: “Why do you hold property across the sea? Why more than you know of? Are you so shamefully careless that you do not know your handful of slaves, or so luxurious that you have more than your memory can keep acquaintance with?” I will abet your taunts presently and bring against myself more than you think; for now I answer this: I am not a wise man, and — to feed your malice — I never shall be. Demand of me, then, not that I be the equal of the best, but that I be better than the bad: it is enough for me to take away each day something from my vices and to rebuke my errors. I have not reached health, nor shall I reach it; I compound palliatives rather than remedies for my gout, content if it comes on more rarely and twinges less: compared with your feet, crippled though I am, I am a sprinter. I say this not for myself — for I am deep in every vice — but for the man who has accomplished something.

“You speak one way,” you say, “and live another.” This, you most spiteful heads, most hostile to every best man, was thrown at Plato, thrown at Epicurus, thrown at Zeno; for all these said not how they themselves lived, but how they themselves ought to live. Of virtue, not of myself, I speak, and when I make war on vices, I make it first on my own: when I am able, I will live as I ought. That malice of yours, steeped in so much venom, will not frighten me away from the best things; nor will that poison with which you bespatter others, with which you kill yourselves, hinder me from persevering to praise the life — not the one I lead but the one I know ought to be led — nor from worshiping virtue and following her, crawling on, at an enormous distance. Shall I look, forsooth, for malice to spare anything, when to it neither Rutilius nor Cato was sacred? Will anyone care whether he seems too rich to men in whose eyes Demetrius the Cynic is not poor enough? A man most fierce and at war with all the desires of nature, poorer than the rest of the Cynics in this, that, having forbidden himself to have, he has forbidden himself to ask as well — and they say he does not go short enough! You see: it is not the knowledge of virtue but of destitution that he has professed.

Diodorus, the Epicurean philosopher, who within a few days laid the end upon his own life by his own hand, they deny acted by the decree of Epicurus when he cut his own throat: some would have this deed of his seem madness, others rashness. Meanwhile he, happy and full of a good conscience, bore witness to himself as he passed from life, and praised the calm of an age brought into harbor and ridden at anchor, and said — what you heard against your will, as though you too must do the like: I have lived, and the course that fortune gave I have run. Of one man’s life, of another’s death, you dispute, and at the name of men great for some surpassing merit you bark, as little dogs do at the approach of strangers; for it serves your turn that no one seem good, as though another’s virtue were a reproach of all your faults. Envious, you set your splendid things against your own squalor, and do not understand at how great a loss to yourselves you dare it. For if those who follow virtue are greedy, lustful, and ambitious, what are you, to whom the very name of virtue is hateful? You deny that anyone makes good what he says or lives up to the pattern of his own speech: what wonder, when they speak of things brave and vast, escaping all the storms of men? When they try to unnail themselves from the crosses — into which each one of you drives his own nails — yet, brought to punishment, they hang each on a single stake: these men who turn the executioner’s stroke upon themselves are racked by as many crosses as they have lusts. But they are witty at slandering, at insulting another. I would believe they had leisure for it, were it not that some of them spit on the spectators from their own gibbet.

“Philosophers do not make good what they say.” Yet they make good much by what they say, by what they conceive in an honorable mind. Would indeed that their deeds matched their words: what would be happier than they? Meanwhile there is no reason to despise good words and breasts full of good thoughts: the pursuit of wholesome studies is praiseworthy even short of effect. What wonder if they do not climb to the top when they have attempted the steep? But, if you are a man, look up to those who attempt great things, even if they fall. It is a noble thing to make one’s attempt with an eye not to one’s own strength but to the strength of one’s nature, to try high things and to conceive in the mind greater designs than can be carried out even by those furnished with a mighty spirit. The man who has set himself this: “I will look on death with the same face with which I hear of it. I will submit to toils, however great they be, propping the body with the mind. I will despise riches present and absent alike, neither sadder if they lie elsewhere nor prouder if they shine about me. I will feel fortune neither coming nor going. I will look on all lands as mine, on mine as all men’s. I will so live as knowing I was born for others, and on this account give thanks to the nature of things: for in what better way could she have managed my affairs? She gave me, one man, to all, and all men to me, one. Whatever I have I will neither hoard sordidly nor scatter prodigally; nothing shall I believe myself to possess more truly than what is well given away. I will not count benefits by number or weight, nor weigh them by anything but the worth of the receiver; never will that be much to me which a worthy man receives. Nothing will I do for opinion’s sake, all for conscience’s. Whatever I do with myself alone as witness, I will believe done before the people watching. The end of my eating and drinking shall be to slake nature’s desires, not to fill the belly and empty it. I will be pleasant to friends, gentle and easy to enemies. I will be won over before I am asked, and meet honorable prayers halfway. I will know that my country is the world and the gods its governors, and that these stand above me and around me, censors of my deeds and words. Whenever nature reclaims my breath or reason dismisses it, I will go forth bearing witness that I loved a good conscience and good pursuits, that through me no man’s freedom was lessened, least of all my own” — the man who proposes, wishes, attempts to do these things is making his way to the gods; and even if he does not reach them, he yet falls in great endeavors. But you, in that you hate virtue and her votary, do nothing new. For sick eyes dread the sun too, and creatures of the night turn from the bright day, and at its first rising stand stupefied and seek their hiding-holes everywhere, burrowing into any crevice, in terror of the light. Groan, and ply your wretched tongue in reviling good men, gape and bite: far sooner will you break your teeth than leave a mark.

“Why is that man a student of philosophy and yet lives so rich a life? Why does he say riches are to be despised and have them, think life is to be despised and yet live, think health is to be despised and yet guard it most carefully and prefer it at its best? And does he think exile an empty word and say, ‘for what evil is there in changing one’s region?’ and yet, if he may, grow old in his fatherland? And does he judge there is no difference between a longer time and a shorter, yet, if nothing forbids, prolong his years and flourish serene in a ripe old age?” He says these things ought to be despised — not that he may not have them, but that he may not have them in anxiety; he does not drive them away from himself, but when they go he sees them off untroubled. And where indeed will fortune lay up riches more safely than there, whence she will get them back without complaint from the one who returns them? Marcus Cato, when he praised Curius and Coruncanius and that age in which to possess a few small plates of silver was a censor’s charge, himself owned four million sesterces — less, no doubt, than Crassus, but more than the Cato who was Censor. By a greater interval, if they were compared, had he outdone his great-grandfather than he was outdone by Crassus; and had greater riches fallen to him, he would not have scorned them. For the wise man does not think himself unworthy of any gifts of chance: he does not love riches, but he prefers them; he receives them not into his mind but into his house, and does not refuse them when possessed but keeps them in hand, wishing a greater material to be furnished to his virtue.

And what doubt is there that the wise man has a greater material for unfolding his mind in riches than in poverty, since in poverty there is but one kind of virtue — not to be bent down or crushed — while in riches self-restraint and liberality and diligence and orderliness and magnificence have an open field? The wise man will not despise himself even if he is of the smallest stature, yet he will wish to be tall. Feeble in body or with an eye lost he will be sound, yet he will rather there were strength in his body — and this in such a way that he knows there is something in him stronger; bad health he will tolerate, good he will wish for. For some things, even if in the sum of the matter they are small and can be withdrawn without ruin to the principal good, yet add something to that perpetual gladness which is born of virtue: riches affect and cheer him as a following and favorable wind cheers the sailor, as a fine day and a sunny spot in midwinter’s cold. And which of the wise — ours, I mean, for whom the one good is virtue — denies that even these things which we call indifferent have some worth in them, and that some are preferable to others? To some of them some honor is granted, to some much; so, that you not be mistaken, riches are among the preferable things. “Why then,” you say, “do you mock me, since they hold the same place with you as with me?” Do you wish to know how far they do not hold the same place? With me, if riches slip away, they will take nothing but themselves; you will stand aghast and seem to yourself left behind without yourself, if they withdraw from you; with me riches hold some place, with you the highest; in the end, my riches are mine, you belong to your riches.

Cease, then, to forbid philosophers money: no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. The philosopher will have ample means, but means wrested from none nor stained with another’s blood, got without injury to anyone, without sordid gains, whose going out is as honorable as their coming in, at which no one groans but the spiteful. Heap them up as high as you will: they are honorable, in which, though there be much that each man would wish called his own, there is nothing that anyone can call his own. He indeed will not put away from himself the kindness of fortune, and over a patrimony got by honorable means he will neither boast nor blush. Yet he will have something to boast of, if, with his house thrown open and the city admitted to his affairs, he can say: “Let each man take away what he recognizes as his.” O great man, O best in his wealth, if after this word he still has as much! I mean: if safely and securely he has offered himself to the people’s scrutiny, if no one has found anything at his house to lay hands on, boldly and openly he will be rich. The wise man will admit within his threshold no single denarius that comes in wrongly; yet great riches, the gift of fortune and the fruit of virtue, he will not repudiate or shut out. For what reason has he to grudge them a good place? Let them come, let them be his guests. He will neither flaunt them nor hide them — the one is the part of a foolish mind, the other of a fearful and petty one, that keeps a great good as it were within its bosom — nor, as I said, will he cast them out of his house. For what would he say? Either “You are useless,” or “I do not know how to use riches”? As a man, though he can make his journey even on his own feet, will yet prefer to mount a carriage, so, though he could be poor, he will wish to be rich. And so he will have means, but as light things ready to fly away, and he will not let them be a burden either to anyone else or to himself. He will give — why have you pricked up your ears? why do you spread out your laps? — he will give either to the good or to those whom he can make good, he will give choosing the most worthy with the greatest deliberation, as one who remembers that an account must be rendered of expenses as well as of receipts, he will give from a right and approvable cause; for among shameful losses a bad gift is one; he will have a lap that is easy, not full of holes, from which much goes out and nothing falls.

He is mistaken who thinks giving an easy matter: it has very much of difficulty in it, if only it is bestowed by deliberation and not scattered by chance and impulse. This man I oblige, to that one I repay; this one I succor, that one I pity; that one I furnish, a worthy man whom poverty must not drag down nor keep in its grip; to some I will not give though they are in need, because even if I gave it would still be wanting; to some I will offer, on some even press it. I cannot be careless in this matter; never do I keep better account than when I give. “What?” you say. “Do you give meaning to get back?” Nay, meaning not to lose. Let a gift be placed where it need not be demanded back, yet can be repaid. Let a benefit be laid up like a treasure buried deep, which you would not dig out unless it were necessary. What! The very house of a rich man, how great a material for doing good it has! For who calls liberality only to men in togas? It is to human beings that nature bids me be of use. Whether these be slaves or free, freeborn or freedmen, of a freedom lawfully granted or given among friends, what does it matter? Wherever there is a human being, there is room for a kindness. And so money can be poured out even within one’s own threshold, and liberality exercised, which is so named not because it is owed to the free but because it issues from a free mind. With the wise man it is never thrust upon the base and unworthy, and never so wearied out that it does not, as often as it finds a worthy object, flow as from a full store. There is no reason, then, why you should mishear the things that are said honorably, bravely, spiritedly by the students of wisdom. And mark this first: it is one thing to be a student of wisdom, another to have already attained wisdom. The first will say to you: “I speak excellently, but I still wallow among many evils. There is no reason for you to hold me to my own rule: at this very moment I am making and forming myself and lifting myself to a vast model; if I shall have advanced as far as I have proposed, demand that my deeds answer my words.” But the one who has attained the sum of the human good will deal with you otherwise, and say: “First, there is no reason for you to allow yourself to pass sentence on your betters; for me it has already happened — which is a proof of rightness — to displease the wicked. But, to give you the account by which I envy no mortal, hear what I promise and at what I value each thing. I deny that riches are a good; for if they were, they would make men good: now, since what is found among the wicked cannot be called a good, I refuse them that name. But that they are to be had, and are useful, and bring great conveniences to life, I admit.”

Hear, then, why I do not number them among goods, and what I do with them differently from you, since on both sides it is agreed they are to be had. Set me in the most opulent house, set me where gold and silver are in common use: I will not look up to myself on account of these things which, even if they are at my house, are yet outside me. Carry me off to the Sublician bridge and fling me down among the beggars: I will not therefore despise myself because I sit in the number of those who stretch out a hand for alms. What does it matter to the point whether a crust of bread is wanting to a man to whom the power to die is not wanting? What then? I prefer that splendid house to the bridge. Set me among gleaming furniture and a dainty service: I will not believe myself a whit happier because I shall have a soft mantle, because purple is spread beneath my guests. Change my bedding: I shall be not a whit more wretched if my weary neck rests on a wisp of hay, if I lie on a circus cushion spilling its stuffing through the seams of worn-out linen. What then? I prefer to show what spirit I have robed and in good standing rather than with bare shoulders and in rags. Let all my days fall out to my wish, let new congratulations be woven on to the former ones: I will not on this account be pleased with myself. Change this indulgence of the time into its opposite, let my mind be struck from this side and that by loss, by grief, by sundry assaults, let no hour be without some complaint: I will not on that account call myself, among the most wretched, wretched, I will not on that account curse any day; for I have provided that no day be black for me. What then? I prefer to temper my joys than to choke down my griefs. This is what that famous Socrates will say to you: “Make me conqueror of all nations, let that dainty chariot of Liber carry me in triumph from the sun’s rising all the way to Thebes, let kings seek laws of me: I will think most of all that I am a man, at the moment when on every side I am hailed as a god. To this so lofty pinnacle join straightway a headlong reversal; let me be set upon another’s bier to deck out the procession of a proud and savage victor: I shall be carried beneath another’s chariot no humbler than I had stood in my own. What then? Still I had rather conquer than be captured. The whole kingdom of fortune I will despise, but out of it, if the choice be given, I will take the better things. Whatever comes to me will turn to good, but I would rather the easier and pleasanter things came, the ones that will give less trouble to him who handles them. For there is no reason to think any virtue is without labor, but some virtues need the spur, some the rein. As the body must be held back on a downslope and driven against the steep, so some virtues are on the downslope, some climb the hill. Is there any doubt that patience, fortitude, perseverance, and every other virtue set against hardships, and that masters fortune, climbs, strains, struggles? What then? Is it not equally plain that liberality, self-restraint, and gentleness go down a slope? In these we hold the mind in, that it not slip forward; in those we exhort and spur it most keenly. Therefore to poverty we will apply those stronger virtues that know how to fight, to riches those more careful ones that set a cautious step and bear their own weight. Since the division is thus made, I would rather have in use those that are exercised more peaceably than those whose trial is blood and sweat. So I do not,” says the wise man, “live otherwise than I speak; but you hear otherwise: only the sound of the words reaches your ears; what it means you do not ask.”

“What, then, is the difference between me, the fool, and you, the wise, if both of us wish to have?” The most: for riches with the wise man are in servitude, with the fool in command; the wise man allows riches nothing, to you riches are everything; you, as though someone had promised you everlasting possession of them, grow used to them and cling to them, while the wise man, then most of all, meditates on poverty when he has taken his stand in the midst of riches. Never does a general so trust the peace as not to make ready for a war which, even if not waged, has been declared: you a fine house makes insolent, as though it could neither burn nor fall; you riches stupefy, as though they had passed beyond all danger and were greater than fortune has strength enough to consume. You play at idleness with your riches and do not foresee their peril, as barbarians for the most part, shut in and ignorant of siege-engines, watch idly the labor of the besiegers and do not understand to what end the works raised far off are tending. The same befalls you: you grow soft amid your possessions and do not consider how many chances threaten on every side, ready any moment now to carry off your precious spoils. Whoever takes away the wise man’s riches will leave him all that is his own; for he lives glad in the present, careless of the future. “Nothing have I more firmly persuaded myself of,” says that Socrates, or some other who has the same feeling toward human things and the same power over them, “than that I should not bend the conduct of my life to your opinions. Heap up your wonted words from every side: I will not think you are reviling me, but wailing like most wretched infants.” These things will he say to whom wisdom has fallen, whom a mind free of vices bids upbraid others, not because he hates them, but for their cure. He will add to these: “Your estimation moves me not in my own name but in yours, since to hate and harass virtue is a renouncing of good hope. You do me no injury, but neither do men do injury to the gods who overturn their altars. Yet an evil purpose shows itself, and an evil design, even there where it could do no harm. So I bear your ravings as Jupiter Best and Greatest bears the follies of the poets, of whom one has put wings on him, another horns, another brought him in as an adulterer staying out all night, another savage against the gods, another unjust to men, another a ravisher of freeborn youths and of kinsmen too, another a parricide and the usurper of another’s kingdom and his father’s: by which nothing else has been brought about than that men should be relieved of shame at sinning, if they believed the gods to be such. But although these things wound me not at all, yet for your own sakes I warn you: look up to virtue, believe those who, having long followed her, cry out that they are following something great and that appears greater day by day, and worship her as you worship the gods, and her professors as her high priests, and, whenever mention of the sacred writings comes between, keep holy silence. This word does not, as most suppose, derive from ‘favor,’ but commands silence, that the rite may be duly performed with no evil voice breaking in; which it is far more needful to command of you, that, whenever anything is brought forth from that oracle, you may listen intent and with hushed voice. When some man, shaking the rattle, lies at command; when some artist of gashing his own arms bloodies his forearms and shoulders with a hovering hand; when some woman, crawling on her knees along the road, howls, and a linen-clad old man, bearing a laurel and a lamp in broad day, cries out that one of the gods is angry — you run together and listen and, feeding each other’s stupor in turn, declare him to be divine.”

Behold, Socrates, out of that prison which he purged by entering it and made more honorable than any senate-house, proclaims: “What is this madness, what is this nature at enmity with gods and men, to defame the virtues and to violate holy things with spiteful talk? If you can, praise the good; if not, pass them by; but if it pleases you to ply that foul license, fall upon one another. For when you rave against heaven, I do not say you commit sacrilege, but you waste your effort. I once furnished Aristophanes matter for his jokes; that whole band of comic poets poured out upon me their poisoned wit: my virtue was made the brighter by the very means through which it was attacked; for it serves her to be brought out and tried, and none understand how great she is more than those who felt her strength by assailing it: the hardness of flint is known to none better than to those who strike it. I offer myself no otherwise than some rock standing out in a shoaly sea, which the waves cease not, from whatever quarter they are stirred, to lash, yet neither move it from its place nor through so many ages wear it away by their frequent onset. Leap upon me, make your assault: by enduring I will conquer you. Whatever strikes against what is firm and unsurpassable spends its own force to its own hurt: so seek some soft and yielding stuff in which your darts may stick. But have you leisure to pry into others’ evils and to pass sentence on anyone? ‘Why does this philosopher live in a roomier house? Why does this one dine more sumptuously?’ You mark the pimples of others, covered yourselves with countless sores? This is as if someone should mock the moles or warts on the fairest bodies while a foul scab gnawed at him. Reproach Plato that he sought money, Aristotle that he took it, Democritus that he neglected it, Epicurus that he spent it; throw Alcibiades and Phaedrus in my own teeth — O you most fortunate in the chance, when first it shall fall to you to imitate our vices! Why do you not rather look about at your own evils, which stab you on every side, some ravaging from without, some burning in your very vitals? Human affairs do not stand — even if you know too little of your own state — in such a place that you have so much leisure to spare that you have time to wag your tongue at the reproach of your betters.”

This you do not understand, and you wear a face out of keeping with your fortune, like the many who, while they sit idle in the circus or the theater, already have a house in mourning and the bad news not yet brought. But I, looking out from on high, see what storms either threaten you, to burst their cloud a little later, or, already near, have come closer to snatch away you and yours. And what more? Even now, though you feel it too little, does not a whirlwind of a kind spin your minds and roll them, as you flee and pursue the same things, now lifted on high, now dashed to the depths...