Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Your letter delighted me and roused me from my languor, and it also summoned up my memory, which is already sluggish and slow for me. Why, my Lucilius, should you not think that the greatest instrument of a happy life is this conviction, that the only good is what is honorable? For he who judges other things to be goods comes under the power of fortune and becomes subject to another’s will; he who has circumscribed all good within the honorable is happy within himself.

​This one is sad because of lost children, that one is anxious for the sick, another is gloomy because of disgraceful deeds or having suffered some infamy. You will see that man tortured by love for another’s wife, this one by love for his own. There will not be lacking someone whom rejection distorts; there will be those whom public honor itself vexes.

​But indeed that greatest crowd of unfortunates from the entire population of mortals is the one which the expectation of death, impending from all sides, agitates. For there is no place from which it does not steal upon us. Therefore, just as for those traveling in hostile territory, one must look around this way and that and turn one’s neck at every sound; unless this fear is cast out from the breast, one lives with a throbbing heart.

​There will encounter us those driven into exile and stripped of their property. There will encounter us, which is the heaviest kind of need, those who are destitute in the midst of riches. There will encounter us the shipwrecked or those who have suffered things similar to shipwreck, whom either popular anger or envy, a deadly weapon against the best men, has scattered when they were unsuspecting and secure, like a storm that is wont to arise in the very confidence of calm weather, or like a sudden lightning bolt, at whose stroke even neighboring things trembled. For just as there, whoever stood closer to the fire was stunned as if struck, so in these events happening through some force, calamity oppresses one, but fear oppresses the rest, and the fact that one is able to suffer makes a sadness equal to those who have suffered.

​The misfortunes of others, when sudden, trouble the minds of all. Just as even the sound of an empty sling terrifies birds, so we are agitated not only by the blow but also by the noise. No one can therefore be happy who has trusted himself to this opinion. For nothing is happy unless it is intrepid; life is lived badly among suspected things.

​Whoever has given himself much to fortuitous things has made for himself a vast and inextricable material for perturbation; this is the only path for one walking toward safety: to despise external things and to be content with the honorable. For he who thinks anything is better than virtue or any good besides it, expands his lap to these things which are scattered by fortune, and anxiously awaits her missiles.

​For propose this image to your mind, that fortune is holding games and showering honors, riches, and favor upon this assembly of mortals, some of which are torn apart between the hands of those who plunder, others divided by treacherous partnership, others seized to the great detriment of those upon whom they had fallen. Some of these have fallen upon people who were doing something else, some were lost because they were too eagerly sought, and, while greedily snatched, were knocked away. Indeed, for no one, even him for whom the plunder turned out happily, did the joy of what was snatched last into the future. Therefore, every most prudent person, as soon as he sees the small gifts being brought in, flees from the theater and knows that small things cost a great price. No one joins hands in conflict with one who is leaving, no one strikes one who is going out; the brawl is around the prize.

​The same happens in these things which fortune throws down from above: we miserable people are excited, we are distracted, we desire to have many hands, we look now in this direction, now in that. The things that irritate our desires seem to us to be sent too slowly, reaching only a few, though expected by all.

​We desire to go to meet the falling things. We rejoice if we have seized anything, and a vain hope of seizing some things has deceived others; we pay for cheap prey with some great disadvantage, or, left destitute, we are deceived. Let us therefore withdraw from those games and give place to the plunderers; let them look at those goods hanging in the air, and let them hang in suspense even more themselves.

​Whoever decides to be happy, let him think that the only good is what is honorable. For if he estimates any other thing to be a good, first of all he judges ill of providence, because many disadvantages happen to just men, and because whatever it has given us is brief and tiny, if you compare it to the age of the whole world.