Moral Letters to Lucilius

​When I had to return to Naples from Baiae, I easily convinced myself that there was a storm, so that I would not have to try a ship again; and there was so much mud along the entire road that I might seem to have sailed nonetheless. The whole fate of athletes had to be endured by me on that day; from the ointment we were received by the dust in the Neapolitan tunnel.

​Nothing is longer than that prison, nothing dimmer than those torches, which serve us not so that we may see through the darkness, but so that we may see the darkness itself. Besides, even if the place had light, the dust would take it away, a thing heavy and annoying even in the open; what about there, where it rolls upon itself and, since it is shut in without any vent, falls back upon the very people by whom it was stirred up? We endured two contrary inconveniences at the same time: on the same road, on the same day, we suffered from both mud and dust.

​Yet that darkness gave me something to think about; I felt a certain shock of the mind and a change without fear, which the novelty as well as the foulness of the unusual thing had produced. I am not speaking now with you about myself, who am far from being a tolerable man, let alone a perfect one, but about him over whom fortune has lost her power. His mind too will be struck, his color will change.

​For there are certain things, my Lucilius, which no virtue can escape; nature reminds virtue of its own mortality. And so it will contract its countenance at sad things, shudder at sudden things, and grow dizzy if, standing on the edge of a vast height, it looks down; this is not fear, but a natural affection unconquerable by reason.

​Thus, some brave men, who are most ready to shed their own blood, cannot bear to see another’s. Some fall down and faint at the treatment and inspection of a fresh wound, or an old and suppurating one. Others receive a sword-blow more easily than they look at it.

​I felt, therefore, as I was saying, not indeed a disturbance, but a certain change. Again, at the first sight of the restored light, my alacrity returned unthought and unbidden. Then I began to say to myself how foolishly we fear some things more or less, when the end of all is the same. For what difference does it make whether a watchtower or a mountain collapses on someone? You will find none. Yet there will be those who fear this collapse more, although both are equally fatal; so much does fear look not to the effect, but to the efficient cause.

​Now you think I am speaking of the Stoics, who think that the soul of a man crushed by a great weight cannot remain and is immediately scattered, because it had no free exit? Indeed, I do not; those who say this seem to me to be in error.

​Just as a flame cannot be crushed, for it escapes around the object by which it is pressed; just as the air is not damaged by a blow or a stroke, nor is it even cleft, but pours back around the thing to which it yielded; so the mind, which consists of the finest substance, cannot be caught nor crushed within the body, but by virtue of its subtility breaks through the very things by which it is pressed. Just as lightning, even when it has struck and flashed most widely, has its return through a tiny opening, so the mind, which is even finer than fire, has its escape through the entire body.

​Therefore, concerning the mind, it must be asked whether it can be immortal. Hold this for certain: if it survives the body, it can in no way be destroyed by that because of which it does not perish, since there is no immortality with an exception, nor is anything harmful to the eternal. FAREWELL.