Moral Letters to Lucilius

​You command me to report to you my individual days, and indeed in their entirety; you judge well of me, if you think there is nothing in them for me to hide. Surely we ought to live in such a way, as if we were living in the sight of all; we ought to think in such a way, as if someone could look into our inmost breast; and he can. For what does it profit that something is secret from man? Nothing is closed to God. He is present in our minds and enters into the midst of our thoughts—enters, I say, not as if He ever departs.

​Therefore I will do what you command, and I will gladly write to you what I am doing and in what order. I will observe myself immediately and, what is most useful, review my day. This makes us worst of all, that no one looks back upon his own life. We think about what we are going to do. And yet, plans for the future come from the past.

​Today’s day is solid; no one has snatched anything from me out of it. It has been divided entirely between my couch and reading. Very little has been given to bodily exercise, and on this account I give thanks to old age: it does not cost me much; as soon as I move, I am tired. But this is the limit of exercise even for the strongest.

​Do you ask who my trainers are? One is enough for me, the boy Pharius, lovable, as you know, but he will be changed. I am already looking for someone younger. He, indeed, says that we have the same crisis, because teeth are falling out for both of us. But now I can scarcely catch him as he runs, and within a very few days I will not be able to; see what daily exercise accomplishes. Quickly a great interval is made between two going in opposite directions. At the same time he ascends, I descend, and you are not ignorant of how much faster the latter of these happens. I have lied; for now our age does not descend, but falls.

​However, do you ask how today’s contest turned out for us? What rarely happens to runners, we made a tie. After this fatigue rather than exercise, I went down into the cold bath; this is called “insufficiently warm” at my house. I, that great cold-bather, who on the Kalends of January used to greet the canal, who in the New Year, just as I would inaugurate reading, writing, and saying something, so used to leap down into the Aqua Virgo, have first transferred my camp to the Tiber, then to this bath-tub, which, even when I am at my bravest and everything is done in good faith, the sun warms. There is not much left for me to reach the warm bath.

​Then dry bread and a lunch without a table, after which hands do not need to be washed. I sleep very little. You know my custom: I take a very short sleep and, as it were, unyoke in the middle of the journey. It is enough for me to have ceased to be awake. Sometimes I know that I have slept, sometimes I suspect it.

​Behold, the roar of the games resounds. My ears are struck by some sudden and universal shout. Yet they do not shake my thought, nor do they even interrupt it. I bear the roar very patiently. Many voices confused into one are to me like a wave or the wind whipping a forest and other meaningless sounds.

​What is it, then, now to which I have applied my mind? I will tell you. A thought remains to me from yesterday: what did those most wise men mean, who made the proofs of the greatest things so trivial and intricate, which, even though they may be true, nevertheless resemble a lie.

​Zeno, that greatest of men, the founder of this most brave and holy sect, wishes to deter us from drunkenness. Hear, therefore, how he concludes that a good man will not be drunk: “To a drunkard no one commits a secret conversation; but to a good man one commits it; therefore, a good man will not be drunk.” Attend to how he is mocked by a similar opposed question. For it is enough to put forward one out of many: “To a sleeping man no one commits a secret conversation; but to a good man one commits it; therefore, a good man does not sleep.”

​In the only way possible, Posidonius pleads the cause of our Zeno, but not even in this way, as I think, can it be pleaded. For he says that a drunkard is spoken of in two ways: in one way, when someone is heavy with wine and not master of himself; in the other way, if he is accustomed to get drunk and is subject to this vice. That the latter, who is accustomed to get drunk, is meant by Zeno, not the former, who is actually drunk.