Moral Letters to Lucilius

​That you are troubled by frequent catarrhs and slight fevers, which follow long-continued and habitual catarrhs, is the more painful to me because I have experienced this kind of illness, which in its early stages I despised; youth was still able to bear the injuries and to behave defiantly against diseases. Then I succumbed and was brought to such a point that I myself dripped with catarrh, having been reduced to extreme thinness.

​I often formed the impulse of putting an end to my life; the old age of my most indulgent father held me back. For I thought not how bravely I could die, but how little he would be able bravely to bear my loss. And so I commanded myself to live. For sometimes even to live is an act of bravery.

​I shall tell you what was then a consolation to me, if I first say this: that these very things in which I found rest had the force of medicine. Noble consolations turn into a remedy, and whatever has cheered the mind is also of benefit to the body. Our studies were my salvation. I attribute it to philosophy that I got up and recovered. I owe my life to her, and I owe her nothing less than that.

​My friends contributed much to my good health, by whose encouragements, vigils, and conversations I was relieved. Nothing, Lucilius, best of men, so refreshes and helps a sick man as the affection of his friends; nothing so steals away the expectation and fear of death. I did not judge myself to be dying when I left them surviving. I thought, I say, that I would live not with them, but through them. I seemed to myself not to pour out my breath, but to hand it over. These things gave me the will to help myself and to suffer every torment; otherwise, it is most wretched, when you have cast away the desire of dying, not to have that of living.

​Betake yourself therefore to these remedies. The doctor will show you how much you should walk, how much you should exercise; do not indulge in idleness, towards which inactive health inclines; that you should read more clearly and exercise your breath, whose passage and receptacle are struggling; that you should sail and shake your viscera with gentle tossing; what foods you should use, when you should summon wine for the sake of strength, and when you should omit it, lest it irritate and worsen your cough. I prescribe to you that which is a remedy not only for this disease, but for your whole life: despise death. Nothing is grim when we have escaped the fear of it.

​These three things are heavy in every disease: fear of death, bodily pain, interruption of pleasures. Of death enough has been said; I shall say this one thing, that this is not the fear of disease, but of nature. Disease has postponed the death of many, and it has been a salvation to them to seem to perish. You will die, not because you are sick, but because you live. That destiny awaits you even when cured; when you have recovered, you will escape not death, but ill health.

​Let us now return to that peculiar inconvenience: disease has great tortures. But intervals make these tolerable. For the intensity of the greatest pain finds an end. No one can suffer intensely and long; nature, most loving of us, has so disposed us as to make pain either tolerable or brief.

​The greatest pains consist in the thinnest parts of the body; nerves, joints, and whatever other thin part there is, rage most fiercely when they have conceived disease in a narrow space. But quickly these parts grow numb and by the pain itself lose the sense of pain, whether because the breath, hindered from its natural course and changed for the worse, loses its power by which it thrives and admonishes us, or because the corrupted fluid, when it has ceased to have a place to flow, is squeezed itself and shakes out the sense from those parts which it has overfilled.

​Thus gout in the feet and in the hands, and all pain of the vertebrae and nerves, rests when it has numbed those parts which it was torturing; the first itching of all these vexes, but the onset is extinguished by delay, and the end of pain is to have grown numb. Pain of teeth, eyes, and ears is most acute for this very reason, that it is born among the narrow parts of the body, no less, by Hercules, than of the head itself; but if it is more violent, it turns into distraction and sleep.

​This, therefore, is the consolation of vast pain: that you must cease to feel it if you have felt it excessively. But this is what affects the ignorant ill in the vexation of the body: they are not accustomed to be content in mind. They have had much to do with the body. Therefore, a great and wise man separates his mind from the body, and associates much with the better and divine part, and with this complaining and fragile part only as much as is necessary.