Moral Letters to Lucilius

​You complain that you have run into an ungrateful man. If this is now for the first time, give thanks either to fortune or to your diligence. But in this matter, diligence can do nothing except make you unkind. For if you wish to avoid this danger, you will not give benefits; thus, lest they perish in the hands of another, they will perish in your own. Let them rather not be returned than not be given. And one must sow even after a bad harvest; often, whatever had perished by the continuous barrenness of an unproductive soil, the fertility of a single year restores.

​It is worth the cost, in order that you may find a grateful person, to try even the ungrateful. No one has so certain a hand in giving benefits as not to be often deceived; let them go astray, so that they may sometimes cling. After a shipwreck, the seas are tried again. A bankrupt does not drive a moneylender from the forum. Life will soon grow numb in inert laziness, if whatever offends must be abandoned; indeed, let this very thing make you more generous. For that whose outcome is uncertain, in order that it may succeed sometimes, must be tried often.

​But about that matter we have spoken enough in those books which are entitled “On Benefits”. That rather seems to be investigated, which has not been sufficiently explained, as I think: whether he who has benefited us, if he later has harmed us, has made things equal and released us from our debt. Add, if you wish, this also: he later harmed us much more than he had previously benefited us.

​If you seek that straightforward opinion of a rigid judge, he will acquit the one by the other and say: “Although the injuries outweigh, yet let that which remains of the injury be forgiven to the benefits.” He did more harm; but he benefited first. Therefore, let account of time also be taken.

​Now those things are too obvious for you to need to be reminded that we must ask how willingly he benefited, how unwillingly he harmed, since both benefits and injuries consist in the mind. “I did not want to give a benefit; I was overcome either by shame, or by the persistence of the one pressing me, or by hope.”

​Each thing is owed with the same mind with which it is given, and it is weighed not by how much it is, but from what sort of will it proceeded. Now let conjecture be set aside; both that was a benefit, and this, which exceeded the measure of the prior benefit, is an injury. A good man sets both counters in such a way that he cheats himself; he adds to the benefit, and subtracts from the injury. That other, more lenient judge, which I prefer myself to be, will order us to forget the injury, and to remember the service.

”This certainly,” you say, “agrees with justice, to render to each his own: gratitude for a benefit, retaliation for an injury, or at least ill-will.” That will be true when one person has done the injury, and another has given the benefit; for if it is the same person, the force of the injury is extinguished by the benefit. For to one whom it would be proper to forgive even if no merits had preceded, more than pardon is owed when he harms after benefits.

​I do not place an equal price on both. I value a benefit more than an injury. Not all grateful people know how to owe a benefit; even an imprudent and unrefined person, and one of the crowd, can do so, especially while he is close to the receipt of it; but he is ignorant of how much he owes for it. To the wise man alone is it known at what rate each thing is to be valued. For he of whom I was just speaking, the fool, even if he is of good will, returns either less than he ought, or at another time than he ought, or in a place where he ought not. That which is to be returned, he pours out and throws away.