Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Whether you draw a larger or a smaller circle, it concerns its size, not its shape. Even though one has remained for a long time, and you have immediately erased the other and dissolved it into the dust in which it was written, each was in the same shape. What is right is estimated neither by size, nor by number, nor by time; it can no more be extended than it can be contracted. Shorten an honorable life as much as you wish from a span of a hundred years and compress it into a single day; it is equally honorable.

​At one time virtue is poured out more widely, governs kingdoms, cities, and provinces, enacts laws, cultivates friendships, distributes duties among relatives and children; at another time it is enclosed within the narrow boundary of poverty, exile, or childlessness. Yet it is not smaller if it is withdrawn from a higher summit to a private station, from a kingly to a humble one, or if it contracts from public and spacious authority into the narrowness of a house or a corner.

​It is equally great, even if, shut out on all sides, it has retreated into itself. For nonetheless it is of a great and lofty spirit, of precise prudence, of unswerving justice. Therefore it is equally happy. For that happy state is placed in one location, in the mind itself, grand, stable, and tranquil, which cannot be brought about without the knowledge of things divine and human.

​Next follows that which I was saying I would answer. The wise man is not afflicted by the loss of children, nor by that of friends. For he bears their death with the same mind with which he awaits his own. He no more fears the former than he grieves for the latter. For virtue consists in harmony; all its works agree and accord with itself. This harmony perishes if the mind, which ought to be lofty, is cast down by grief or longing. Dishonorable is all agitation and anxiety, and sluggishness in any action. For the honorable is secure and unencumbered, it is undaunted, it stands ready for battle.”

”What then? Will he not suffer something similar to disturbance? Will not his color change, his countenance be agitated, and his limbs grow cold? And whatever else is done not by the command of the mind, but unreflectingly by some impulse of nature?” I admit it; but the same conviction will remain with him, that none of those things is an evil, nor worthy of causing a sound mind to fail. All things that will have to be done, he does boldly and promptly.

​For who would not say that this is characteristic of folly: to do what it does sluggishly and rebelliously, and to impel the body in one direction while the mind is dragged in another, and to be torn apart between the most diverse impulses? For on account of those very things by which it exalts and admires itself, it is despised, and it does not even do willingly those things of which it boasts. But if some evil is feared, it is pressed by it while awaiting it, just as if it had arrived, and whatever it fears lest it suffer, it already suffers through fear.

​Just as in bodies signs of an oncoming illness run before—for there is a certain enervated sluggishness, and weariness without any labor, and yawning, and a shudder running through the limbs—so the weak mind is shaken long before it is overwhelmed by evils. It anticipates them and falls before the time. But what is more insane than to be tortured by future things, and not to reserve oneself for the torment, but to summon miseries to oneself and bring them near?

​Which it is best to postpone, if one cannot dispel them. Do you wish to know that no one ought to be tortured by the future? Whoever hears that he must suffer punishments after his fiftieth year will not be disturbed unless he leaps over the intervening space and throws himself into that anxiety which is to be a generation later; in the same way it happens that old and forgotten things sadden minds that are willingly sick and capturing causes of grief. What has passed and what is future are absent; we feel neither. Moreover, there is no pain except from that which you feel. FAREWELL.