Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Thence we arrive at these words: ”Virtue and philosophy and justice are but a rattle of empty words. The only happiness is to treat one’s life well. To eat, to drink, to enjoy one’s patrimony, this is to live, this is to remember that one is mortal. The days flow by, and irreparable life runs away; do we hesitate to be wise? What does it profit to force frugality upon an age that will not always receive pleasures, in the meantime, while it is able, while it demands them? Therefore anticipate death, and whatever she is destined to take away, let it already perish for you. You have no mistress, no boy to move the mistress to jealousy; daily you go out sober; you dine as if you were about to approve your account-book to your father: that is not to live, but to be a bystander to another’s life.

​What madness it is to manage the property of one’s heir and deny oneself everything, so that a large inheritance may make an enemy out of a friend for you! For he will rejoice more in your death, the more he receives. Do not value at a single as those gloomy and supercilious censors of other people’s lives, enemies of their own, and public pedagogues; nor hesitate to prefer a good life to a good reputation.”

​These voices must be fled no differently than those which Ulysses was unwilling to sail past unless bound. They have the same power; they lead away from country, from parents, from friends, from virtues, and dash people into a shameful life by a miserable, or rather, shameful hope. How much better it is to follow the straight path and bring oneself to the point where only those things are pleasant to you which are honorable.

​This we shall be able to attain if we know that there are two kinds of things which either attract us or repel us. Things like riches, pleasures, beauty, ambition, and other seductive and smiling things attract us; labor, death, pain, disgrace, and a more restricted diet repel us. We ought, therefore, to be exercised so that we do not fear the latter, nor desire the former. Let us fight in the opposite direction, and withdraw from the attracting things, and rouse ourselves against the attacking things.

​Do you not see how different is the posture of those descending and those ascending? Those who go down a slope lean their bodies back, while those who go up a steep incline lean forward. For if you descend, to give your own weight to the forward part, and if you ascend, to draw it back, is, Lucilius, to agree with vice. We descend into pleasures; we must climb up into rough and hard things; here let us push our bodies forward, there let us rein them in.

​Do you think I am now saying this, that only those are destructive to our ears who praise pleasure, who strike in us the fear of pain—things formidable in themselves? I think those also do us harm who, under the appearance of the Stoic sect, exhort us to vices. For they boast of this: that only the wise and learned man is a lover. “He alone is wise in this art; equally, in drinking together and banquetting together, the wise man is the most skilled. Let us inquire up to what age young men are to be loved.”

​Let these things be granted to Greek custom; let us rather direct our ears to those words: “No one is good by chance. Virtue must be learned. Pleasure is a lowly and petty thing, and to be held in no value, common with mute animals, to which the smallest and most contemptible creatures fly. Glory is a vain and fleeting thing, and more changeable than the breeze. Poverty is an evil to no one unless he resists it. Death is not an evil; what do you seek? It alone is the equal law of the human race. Superstition is the error of a madman; it fears those who ought to be loved; those whom it worships, it violates. For what difference does it make whether you deny the gods or defame them?”

​These things must be learned, or rather, learned by heart; philosophy ought not to suggest excuses for vice. A sick man has no hope of health whom the physician exhorts to intemperance. FAREWELL.