Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Idos will hold the fourth place. What this idos is, you must pay attention, and attribute to Plato, not to me, this difficulty of things. Yet there is no subtlety without difficulty. A little before, I was using the image of a painter. When he wished to reproduce Vergil in colors, he gazed at him. The idea was the face of Vergil, the exemplar of the future work. What the artist draws from this and has imposed on his work is the idos.

​What is the difference, you ask? The one is the exemplar, the other the form taken from the exemplar and imposed on the work. The one the artist imitates, the other he makes. The statue has a certain appearance; this is the idos. The exemplar itself has a certain appearance, gazing at which the craftsman shaped the statue; this is the idea. Furthermore, if you desire another distinction, the idos is in the work, the idea is outside the work, and not only outside the work, but before the work.

​The fifth genus is of those things which exist commonly; these begin to pertain to us; here are all things, men, cattle, things. The sixth genus is of those things which exist as it were: such as void, such as time. Whatever we see or touch, Plato does not number among those things which he thinks properly exist. For they flow and are in constant decrease and increase. None of us is the same in old age as he was when a young man; none of us is the same in the morning as he was the day before. Our bodies are swept away in the manner of rivers. Whatever you see runs with time. Nothing of those things which we see remains. I myself, while I speak of these things being changed, have been changed.

​This is what Heraclitus says: “We descend and do not descend into the same river twice.” For the same name of the river remains, but the water has passed on. This is more manifest in a river than in a man. But a no less rapid course carries us away too, and therefore I wonder at our madness, that we love so greatly a most fleeting thing, the body, and fear lest we should die at some time, since every moment is the death of the prior state. Do you not wish not to fear lest that happen once which happens daily!

​I have spoken of man, a fluid and falling matter and liable to all causes; the universe also, an eternal and invincible thing, is changed and does not remain the same. For although it has in itself all things which it had, it has them otherwise than it had them;

​it changes its order. “What will that subtlety profit me?” you say. If you ask me, nothing. But just as that engraver relaxes and turns away his eyes, long intent and fatigued, and, as is commonly said, feeds them; so we ought sometimes to relax our mind and refresh it with certain amusements. But let the amusements themselves be works. From these too, if you observe, you will take what can become salutary.

​This I, Lucilius, am accustomed to do: from every notion, even if it is very far removed from philosophy, I endeavor to extract something and make it useful. What is more remote from the reform of morals than those things which we have just treated? How can Platonic ideas make me better? What shall I draw from them that may suppress my desires? Or rather this very thing, that all those things which serve the senses, which inflame and irritate us, Plato denies to be among those things which truly exist.

​Therefore, these are imaginary and bear some appearance for a time; none of these is stable or solid; and yet we desire them, as if they will either exist forever or we shall possess them forever. Weak and fluid we stand among vain things; let us send our mind to those things which are eternal. Let us look with wonder at the forms of all things flying in the heights, and at God moving among them and providing for this, how he may defend from death those things which he could not make immortal because matter prevented, and by reason overcome the defect of the body.