Moral Letters to Lucilius

​I greet you from my country-seat at Nomentum, and I bid you have a sound mind—that is, to have all the gods propitious, whom anyone has pacated and favorable who has made himself propitious to himself. Put aside for the present the opinion that pleases certain people, namely, that to each of us a god is given as a guardian, not indeed of the regular rank, but one of lower mark from the number of those whom Ovid calls ‘plebeian gods.’ Yet I wish you to put this aside in such a way that you remember our ancestors, who believed this, were Stoics; for they assigned to individuals both ​a Genius and a Juno. We shall see later whether the gods have so much leisure that they take care of the affairs of private individuals; in the meantime, know this, whether we have been assigned guardians or neglected and given over to fortune, that you can pray for nothing more grievous upon anyone than if you pray that he may have himself angry. But there is no reason why you should wish for anyone whom you think worthy of punishment to have the gods hostile to him; he has them hostile, I say, even if he seems to be advanced by their favor.

​Apply your diligence and look into what our affairs are, not what they are called; and you will know that more evils befall us by our own doing than happen to us by chance. For how often has that which was called a calamity been both the cause and the beginning of happiness? How often has a thing received with great congratulation built a step for itself to a precipice, and raised someone who was already eminent even higher, as if he still stood there from where men fall safely?

​But that falling itself has nothing of evil in it, if you look to the end, beyond which nature has cast no one down. Near is the boundary of all things; near, I say, is both that from which the happy man is cast out, and that from which the unhappy man is released; we extend both of them and make them long by hope and fear. But if you are wise, measure all things by the human condition; at the same time, contract both what you rejoice in and what you fear. Moreover, it is worth your while to rejoice in nothing for a long time, so that you may fear nothing for a long time.

​But why do I limit that evil? There is no reason why you should think anything is to be feared. Vain are those things which move us, which keep us astonished. None of us has examined what was of truth, but one has handed down fear to another; no one has dared to approach that by which he was disturbed, and to know the nature and the value of his fear. Therefore a false and empty thing still has credit, because it is not refuted.

​Let us think it worth our while to direct our eyes; immediately it will appear how brief, how uncertain, how safe are the things that are feared. Such is the confusion of our minds, as it seemed to Lucretius: “For just as children tremble and fear everything in blind darkness, so we fear in the light.” What then? Are we not more foolish than any child, we who fear in the light?

​But it is false, Lucretius; we do not fear in the light; we have made everything darkness for ourselves. We see nothing, neither what harms nor what is expedient; we stumble along through our whole life, and we do not halt because of this or place our foot more circumspectly. And you see how mad a thing is a rush in the dark. But, by Hercules, we act so that we must be recalled from further off; and though we are ignorant of where we are being carried, we nevertheless persist swiftly toward that place where we are aiming.

​But it can grow light, if we wish. And it can in only one way: if someone receives this knowledge of human and divine things through systematic knowledge, if he has not merely sprinkled himself with it, but dyed himself in it; if, although he knows them, he has reconsidered the same things and often applied them to himself; if he has searched what things are good, what are evil, to which this name has been falsely attached; if he has inquired about honorable and shameful things, about providence.

​Nor is the sagacity of the human mind stopped within these limits; it pleases it to look forward even beyond the universe, where it is carried, from where it arose, to what end such great velocity of things hastens. Having drawn our mind away from this divine contemplation, we have dragged it down into sordid and humble things, so that it might serve avarice, so that, having abandoned the universe and its boundaries and the rulers who turn all things, it might scratch the earth and seek what evil it might dig out of it, not content with what is offered.

​Whatever was going to be for our good, God and our parent placed close at hand; he did not wait for our search and gave it of his own accord. The things that would harm us, he pressed down very deep. We can complain of nothing except ourselves; those things by which we would perish, we have brought forth against the will of nature and while she was hiding them. We have enslaved our mind to pleasure, to indulge in which is the beginning of all evils; we have handed it over to ambition and fame, and to other things equally vain and empty.