Moral Letters to Lucilius

​I received your letter many months after you had sent it. And so I thought it superfluous to ask the man who brought it how you were doing. For he must have an excellent memory if he remembers! And yet I hope that you are already living in such a way that, wherever you are, I may know what you are doing. For what else are you doing than making yourself better every day, laying aside some of your errors, and understanding that the faults you think belong to circumstances are actually your own? For we attribute certain things to places and times; but those things will follow us, wherever we migrate.

​You know that Harpaste, my wife’s fool, has remained in my house as an inherited burden. For I myself am utterly averse to such monsters; if ever I want to be amused by a fool, I do not have to look far for one; I laugh at myself. This female fool has suddenly lost her sight. I am telling you an incredible but true thing: she does not know that she is blind. She repeatedly asks her keeper to move; she says the house is dark.

​Let it be clear to you that this which we laugh at in her happens to all of us; no one understands that he is greedy, no one that he is lustful. Yet the blind seek a guide; we wander without a guide and say: ‘I am not ambitious, but no one can live otherwise in Rome. I am not extravagant, but the city itself demands great expenses. It is not my fault that I am quick-tempered, that I have not yet established a certain way of life; youth does this.’

​Why do we deceive ourselves? Our evil is not from without; it is within us, it sits in our very bowels, and we arrive at health with difficulty for this reason, that we do not know we are sick. If we begin to be cured, when shall we dispel such great powers of so many diseases? But now we do not even seek a physician, who would have less trouble if he were applied to a fresh fault. Tender and untutored minds would follow one who points out the right way.

​No one is with difficulty brought back to nature, except him who has revolted from her. We blush to learn a good mind; but, by Hercules, if it is shameful to seek a teacher of this thing, we must despair of this, that so great a good can be put on by us by chance. We must labor, and to tell the truth, not even is the labor great, if only, as I said, we begin to mold and correct our mind before its wickedness hardens. But I do not despair even of what has hardened.

​There is nothing which persistent labor and intense and diligent care cannot conquer; you will recall oak trees to straightness, however much they have been bent. Heat straightens bent beams, and wood grown in one way is fashioned into what our use demands; how much more easily does the mind receive a shape, being flexible and more yielding than any liquid! For what else is the mind than a spirit in a certain state? And you see that spirit is as much more easily worked than any other matter as it is thinner.

​My dear Lucilius, this is not a thing to prevent you from hoping well of us, namely, that malice already holds us and has long been in possession of us; a good mind comes to no one before a bad one. We are all pre-occupied. To learn virtues is to unlearn vices.

​We ought to approach our self-improvement with all the greater courage because once the good is delivered to us, it is a perpetual possession; virtue is not unlearned. For opposites cling badly in a place not their own, and therefore they can be driven out and expelled; but things which come into their own place sit faithfully. Virtue is according to nature; vices are hostile and plague-like.

​But just as virtues, once received, cannot depart and their guardianship is easy, so the beginning of the journey toward them is difficult, because this is characteristic of a weak and sick mind: to dread untried things. Therefore, it must be forced to begin; thereafter, the medicine is not bitter. For it delights immediately while it cures. In the case of other remedies, the pleasure comes after the cure; philosophy is at once both healing and sweet. FAREWELL.