Moral Letters to Lucilius

​I rejoice as often as I receive your letters. For they fill me with good hope and no longer merely promise regarding you, but guarantee. Do so, I pray and beseech you. For what better thing do I have to ask of a friend than what I am about to ask on his own behalf? If you can, withdraw yourself from those occupations; if not, tear yourself away. We have scattered enough time; let us begin to pack our baggage in old age.

​Is this at all invidious? We have lived in the deep, let us die in the harbor. Nor would I advise you to seek a name from leisure, which you ought neither to boast of nor to hide. For I will never drive you away so far, having condemned the madness of the human race, that I should wish some hiding-place and oblivion to be prepared for you; do this, so that your leisure does not stand out, but is apparent.

​Then they will see about that, who have intact and first plans, whether they wish to pass their life in obscurity; for you it is not free. The vigor of your intellect, the elegance of your writings, and your bright and noble friendships have brought you forward into the public eye. Already fame has seized you. Even if you merge into the depths and are deeply hidden, nevertheless your former achievements will show you.

​You cannot have darkness; a great deal of your former light will follow, wherever you flee. You can claim quiet without anyone’s hatred, without regret or the bite of your own mind. For what will you leave behind, which you can think was left by you unwillingly? Clients? Of whom no one follows you yourself, but something from you. Friendship was once sought, now plunder; abandoned old men will change their wills, the morning caller will migrate to another threshold. A great thing cannot cost little; estimate whether you prefer to leave yourself behind, or some of your belongings.

​Would indeed that it had fallen to your lot to grow old within the measure of your birth, and fortune had not cast you into the deep! Rapid prosperity has carried you far from the sight of a wholesome life—the province, the procuratorship, and whatever is promised by those; next greater duties will receive you, and one after another.

​What end will there be? What do you expect, until you cease to have what you desire? That time will never be. Just as we say the series of causes is, from which fate is woven, so is that of desires; one is born from the end of another. You have been cast down into that life which will never of itself make an end of miseries and of slavery for you. Withdraw your neck worn by the yoke; it is better that it be cut through once for all than always pressed.

​If you return yourself to private life, all things will be smaller, but they will fill you abundantly; but now, very many things heaped up from all sides do not satisfy. But which do you prefer: satiety from scarcity, or hunger in abundance? Prosperity is both greedy itself and exposed to the greed of others. As long as nothing is enough for you, you yourself will not be enough for others.

”How,” you say, “shall I get out?” Somehow or other. Think how many things you have attempted rashly for money, how many laboriously for honor; something must be dared also for leisure, or you must grow old in that anxiety of procuratorships and then of city duties, in the tumult and always new waves, which to escape has fallen to the lot of no modesty, no quiet of life. For what does it matter to the matter, whether you wish to rest? Your fortune does not wish it. What if you permit it to grow even now? As much as is added to successes, will be added to fears.

​I wish in this place to relate to you a saying of Maecenas, who spoke the truth at the very summit: “For height itself thunders down upon the highest things.” If you ask in which book he said it: in that which is entitled “Prometheus.” He wished to say this: it keeps the highest things thunderstruck. Is any power of such great value, therefore, that your speech should be so drunken? He was a talented man, about to give a great example of Roman eloquence, had not prosperity enervated, or rather, castrated him. This end awaits you, unless you now furl your sails, unless, which he wished too late, you hug the shore.

​I could have made the account even with you by this opinion of Maecenas. But you will raise a dispute against me, if I know you, nor will you wish to receive what I owe in rough and bad coin. As the case stands, a loan must be made from Epicurus. “Before,” he says, “you look around for what you eat and drink, you must look around for with whom you eat and drink. For without a friend, a feasting on meat is the life of a lion and a wolf.”

​This will not fall to your lot, unless you withdraw; otherwise you will have guests whom the nomenclator has selected from the crowd of morning callers. But he errs who seeks a friend in the atrium and tests him at the banquet. A busy man, besieged by his own goods, has no greater evil than that he thinks those are friends to him, to whom he himself is not a friend, and that he judges his benefits effective for winning friends, when some, the more they owe, the more they hate. “A light debt makes a debtor, a heavy one an enemy.”

”What then? Do benefits not procure friendships?” They do, if it was permitted to choose those who are to receive them, if they were invested, not scattered. Therefore, while you begin to be of your own mind, meanwhile use this advice of wise men, that you think it matters more to the business who received, than what he received. FAREWELL.