Moral Letters to Lucilius

’For,’ as Cleanthes used to say, ‘just as our breath produces a clearer sound when a trumpet has poured it out, drawn through the narrow spaces of a long pipe and finally through a wider opening, so the tight necessity of song makes our senses clearer.’ Those same things are heard more negligently and strike less as long as they are spoken in prose; but when meters have approached and certain feet have bound a choice sense, that same opinion is hurled as if from a more vigorously swung arm.

​Many things are said about the contempt of money, and in the longest speeches this is prescribed: that men should think riches to be in the mind, not in the patrimony, and that he is wealthy who has fitted himself to his poverty and made himself rich with a little; yet minds are struck more when verses of this kind are spoken: ‘ That mortal needs the least who desires the least. He has what he wishes who can wish for what is enough. ‘ ​When we hear these and suchlike things, we are led to the confession of truth. For those for whom nothing is enough admire, applaud, and declare hatred of money. When you see this affection of theirs, press them, drive this home, weigh them down with this, leaving behind ambiguities, syllogisms, sophistries, and the other playthings of useless sharpness. Speak against avarice, speak against luxury; when you see that you have made progress and have affected the minds of the hearers, press on more vehemently; it is beyond belief how much such a speech profits, intent on a cure and turned entirely to the good of the hearers. For tender minds are very easily won over to the love of the honorable and right, and truth lays its hand upon those who are still teachable and only lightly corrupted, if it has found a suitable advocate.

​I certainly, when I heard Attalus declaiming against vices, against errors, against the evils of life, often pitied the human race and believed him sublime and higher than the human limit. He himself used to say that he was a king, but he seemed to me to be more than reigning, to whom it was permitted to act as the censor of those who reign.

​But when he had begun to recommend poverty and to show how whatever exceeded use was a superfluous and heavy weight to the one carrying it, often I felt like leaving the school a poor man. When he had begun to expose our pleasures, to praise a chaste body, a sober table, a mind pure not only from illicit pleasures but also from superfluous ones, I felt like restricting my throat and belly.

​Hence some things have remained with me, Lucilius. For I had come with a great undertaking into all things. Then, brought back to the life of the city, I kept few of the things well begun. Hence oysters and mushrooms were renounced for my whole life; for they are not foods, but delicacies forcing those who are full to eat, which is most pleasing to gluttons and those stuffing themselves beyond what they can contain, things easy to go down, easy to come back up.

​Hence for my whole life we abstain from ointment, since the best odor on the body is none. Hence a stomach lacking wine. Hence for my whole life we flee the bath, we believed that to boil down the body and empty it with sweats was both useless and luxurious. Other things thrown away returned, yet in such way that, of those things whose abstinence I interrupted, I keep a limit, and indeed one closer to abstinence, and I know not whether more difficult, since some things are cut off more easily by the mind than tempered.

​Since I began to explain to you with how much greater impetus I approached philosophy as a youth than I proceed as an old man, it will not shame me to confess what love Pythagoras inspired in me. Sotion used to tell why he had abstained from animals, and why afterwards Sextius had. The cause for each was different, but for each magnificent.

​This man believed that for man there was enough nourishment without blood, and that a habit of cruelty was formed where slaughter was brought into pleasure. He added that the material of luxury should be contracted; he gathered that varied nourishments, alien to our bodies, were contrary to good health.

​But Pythagoras used to say that there was a kinship of all things among all things, and an intercourse of minds passing into other and other forms. No soul, if you believe him, perishes, nor does it even cease except for a very short time while it is being poured into another body. We shall see through what vicissitudes of times and when, after wandering through several dwellings, it returns to man; in the meantime he created in men a fear of crime and parricide, since they might unknowingly run into a parent’s soul and violate it with iron or bite, if in any body some kindred spirit were lodging.