Moral Letters to Lucilius

”Do you advise me?” you say. “For have you already advised yourself, already corrected yourself? Is that why you find time for the emendation of others?” I am not so shameless as to administer cures while myself sick, but, as if lying in the same hospital, I talk with you about our common illness and share the remedies. Hear me, therefore, just as if I were talking to myself. I admit you into my secret chamber, and, with you summoned to attend, I examine myself.

​I cry out to myself: “Count your years, and you will be ashamed to want the same things you had wanted as a boy, to prepare the same things. Provide this for yourself at last as death’s day approaches: let your vices die before you do. Dismiss those turbid pleasures, to be paid for at a high price; not only those that are to come but those that are past do harm. Just as crimes, even if they were not caught when they were committed, does anxiety not depart along with them; so too there is repentance for wicked pleasures even after they themselves are gone. They are not solid, they are not faithful; even if they do not harm, they flee.

​Look rather for some good that will last. But there is none, except what the mind finds for itself from within itself. Virtue alone affords a perpetual and secure joy; even if something obstructs it, it intervenes only in the manner of clouds, which drift below and never conquer the day.”

​When will it be granted to reach this joy? To be sure, there is no slackening even now, but let us make haste. Much work remains, upon which you yourself must expend your vigilance, you yourself your labor, if you desire it to be accomplished. This matter does not admit of delegation.

​Another kind of literature admits of assistance. Calvisius Sabinus was a rich man within our memory. He had both the patrimony of a freedman and the intellect of one; I have never seen a rich man behave more indecently. He had so bad a memory that now the name of Ulysses would escape him, now that of Achilles, now that of Priam—men whom we know as well as our own tutors. No old name-caller, who does not return names but invents them, ever greeted the tribes as incorrectly as he used to salute the Trojans and Achaians. Nevertheless, he wished to seem learned.

​Therefore he devised this short-cut: he bought slaves for a large sum, one to hold Homer in mind, another to hold Hesiod; besides, he assigned one to each of the nine lyric poets. There is no reason for you to wonder that he bought them at a high price; he had not found them ready-made, but contracted for them to be trained. After this household was procured for him, he began to plague his dinner guests. He kept these slaves at his feet, and whenever he asked them for verses to repeat, he would often forget them in the middle of a word.

​Satellius Quadratus, a hanger-on of foolish rich men, and, what follows, their flatterer, and, what is joined to these two, their ridiculer, persuaded him to have grammarians as his food-gatherers. When Sabinus had said that each individual slave cost him a hundred thousand sesterces; “For less,” he said, “you could have bought as many book-boxes.” Yet he was under the opinion that he thought he knew what anyone in his house knew.

​The same Satellius began to exhort him to wrestle, a man who was sick, pale, and slender. When Sabinus replied: “And how can I? I am scarcely alive,” “Do not, I beseech you,” he said, “say that; do you not see how many very strong slaves you have?” A good mind is neither lent nor bought. And I think, if it were for sale, it would have no buyer. But a bad mind is bought every day.

​But receive now what I owe and farewell. “Wealth is poverty adjusted to the law of nature.” Epicurus says this often in one way or another; but that is never said too often which is never learned enough. To some, remedies must be shown; into others, they must be drummed. FAREWELL.