Moral Letters to Lucilius

​Oh, what a glory of the age it was, that Cato, a triumphal commander, a censor—and what is above all these things—was content with a single nag, and not even the whole of it! For baggage hanging down on both sides occupied a part of it. Would you not, then, prefer that single horse, rubbed down by Cato himself, to all those fat ponies, Asturians, and trotters?

​I see that there will be no end to this matter, except that which I shall make for myself. Here, therefore, I shall keep silent regarding those things which he who first called them “impediments” undoubtedly foresaw would be in the future just as they are now. Now I want to deliver to you a very few more of our school’s questions pertaining to virtue, which we contend is sufficient for a happy life.

”What is good makes people good. For even in the art of music, what is good makes a musician. Fortuitous things do not make a person good. Therefore, they are not goods.” To this the Peripatetics reply in such a way as to say that our first premise is false. “From that which is good,” they say, “men do not by all means become good. In music there is something good, such as a flute, or a string, or some instrument adapted for the use of singing. Yet none of these makes a musician.”

​Here we shall reply: “You do not understand how we have placed what is good in music. For we do not mean that which equips the musician, but that which makes him; you are coming to the equipment of the art, not to the art itself. But if there is any good in the art of music itself, that will by all means make a musician.”

​Even now I want to make this point clearer. Good in the art of music is spoken of in two ways: one by which the effect of the music is aided, the other by which the art itself is aided. To the effect belong the instruments, flutes and organs and strings; they do not belong to the art itself. For the artist exists even without them; he perhaps cannot use his art. This is not equally twofold in man; for the good of man and of life is the same.

”What can fall to the lot of any most contemptible and most shameful person is not a good. But riches fall to the lot of both a panderer and a gladiator-trainer. Therefore, they are not goods.” “It is false,” they say, “what you propose. For both in grammar and in the art of healing or of steering, we see that goods fall to the lot of any of the humblest persons.”

​But those arts do not profess greatness of soul, they do not rise to the heights nor despise fortuitous things. Virtue exalts man and places him above those things dear to mortals; it neither desires too much nor dreads those things which are called goods or evils. Chelidon, one of Cleopatra’s effeminates, possessed a grand patrimony. Recently, Natalis, a man with a tongue as wicked as it was impure—in whose mouth women were purified—was both heir to many and had many heirs. What then? Did money make him impure, or did he defile the money? Riches fall into certain men just as a denarius falls into a sewer.

​Virtue stands above those things. It is valued by its own currency. It judges none of those things that run in from any direction to be a good. Medicine and steering do not destroy themselves and their own by the admiration of such things. He who is not a good man can nevertheless be a physician, can be a pilot, can be a grammarian, just as much, by Hercules, as a cook. You would not call him an ordinary man who happens to have no ordinary thing; as each one has what kind of things, such is he.