Moral Letters to Lucilius

”To the immortal gods alone,” he says, “have both virtue and the happy life fallen; to us, a certain shadow and likeness of those goods. We approach them, we do not reach them.” But reason is common to gods and humans; this is perfected in them, and perfectible in us.

​But our vices lead us to despair; for that other is second, like someone not steady enough to guard the best things, whose judgment even now wavers and is uncertain. He may desire the sense of eyes and ears, good health, a not unsightly appearance of the body, and besides, a longer span of age with his physical state remaining intact.

​Through this reason, a life not to be repented of can be led, yet in this imperfect man there is a certain force of malice, because he has a mind movable toward crooked things. That visible and driven malice is absent; he is not yet good, but is being shaped toward the good. But whoever lacks anything for the good is bad. But if anyone has virtue and spirit present in his body, he equals the gods, and mindful of his origin, he strives thither. ​No one is wicked in striving to ascend to that place whence he had descended. What is there, moreover, why you should not think something divine exists in him who is a part of God? This whole in which we are contained is both one and God; and we are his companions and members. Our mind is capable of this, and is carried thither, if vices do not weigh it down. Just as the posture of our bodies is upright and looks toward heaven, so the mind, which is allowed to be stretched as far as it wishes, has been formed by the nature of things for this purpose, to wish for things equal to the gods. And if it uses its own powers and extends itself into its own space, it strives to the summit not by an alien path.

​It was a great labor to go to heaven; it returns. When it has obtained this journey, it goes boldly, a contemner of all things, nor does it look back at money, and it values gold and silver—things most worthy of the darkness in which they lay—not by this splendor with which they strike the eyes of the unskilled, but by the old filth from which our desire separated and dug them out. It knows, I say, that riches are placed elsewhere than where they are piled up; that the mind ought to be filled, not the money-chest.

​One may place this man in dominion over all things, and lead him into possession of the nature of things, so that he may limit his own possessions by the boundaries of the east and west, and possess all things in the manner of the gods, and from above look down upon the rich with their wealth, of whom no one is so pleased with his own things as he is saddened by another’s.

​When he raises himself into this sublimity, he is not a lover but a manager of the body as a necessary burden, nor does he subject himself to that upon which he has been placed. No one is free who serves the body. For even if you pass over other masters whom excessive anxiety for the body finds, the command of the body itself is moody and fastidious.

​From this body he departs sometimes with an even mind, sometimes he leaps out unexpectedly, nor does he ask what the future end of his abandoned body will be. But just as we neglect the shaved hair from a beard and head, so that divine mind, about to depart from the man, judges where its receptacle is gathered—whether fire burns it, a stone encloses it, the earth crushes it, or wild beasts tear it apart—to pertain to itself no more than the afterbirth to a newborn infant. Whether, cast out, the birds tear it apart, or it is consumed as prey given to marine dogs, what is that to him who is no more?

​But even then, when he is among men, he does not fear any threats after death from those for whom being feared up to death is not enough. “Neither the hook,” he says, “nor the foul tearing apart of the cast-out body for those who will see it as an insult, will terrify me. I ask no one for the last service, I commend my remains to no one. Nature has provided that no one should be unburied. Time will cover him whom cruelty has cast out.” Maecenas eloquently says: “I care not for a tomb. Nature buries those left behind.” You might think a man girt up had said this. For he had a grand and manly genius, if only he had not loosened it in prosperity. FAREWELL.