Moral Letters to Lucilius

​We are distinguished by intervals, and equalized by our end. This which lies between the first day and the last is varied and uncertain: if you measure it by troubles, it is long even to a child; if by swiftness, it is narrow even to an old man. There is nothing that is not slippery and deceitful and more changeable than any weather. All things are tossed about and pass into their opposites at the bidding of fortune, and in such a tossing of human affairs nothing is certain to anyone except death. Yet everyone complains of that in which alone no one is deceived. ‘But a child has died.’ I do not yet say that it is better for him who quickly finishes his life; let us pass to him who has grown old.

​By how very little does he surpass the infant! Set before yourself the vastness of deep time and embrace the universe, then compare this which we call human lifetime with the boundless; you will see how tiny is that which we wish for, which we extend. Out of this, how much tears, how much anxieties occupy!

​How much death, before it comes, having been wished for, how much health, how much fear! How much do either ignorant or useless years hold! Half of this is slept away. Add labors, griefs, dangers, and you will understand that even in the longest life, that which is lived is the absolute minimum.

​But who will concede to you that he is not better off, who is allowed to return quickly, whose journey is finished before weariness? Life is neither a good nor an evil; it is the place of good and evil. Thus he has lost nothing except a gamble that was more certain to result in loss. He might have turned out modest and wise, he might have been shaped for the better under your care, but, which is more justly feared, he might have become like the majority.

​Look at those young men whom luxury has thrown from the noblest houses into the arena; look at those who exercise their own and others’ lust, mutually shameless, of whom no day ends without drunkenness, none without some notable disgrace; it will be manifest that more could have been feared than hoped. You ought not, therefore, to summon causes of grief, nor to accumulate slight inconveniences by being indignant.

​I do not exhort you to strive and rise; I do not judge so badly of you as to think that you must summon all your virtue against this. That is not pain, but a sting; you make it pain. Without doubt philosophy has made great progress, if you with a brave mind long for a boy who is still better known to his nurse than to his father.

​What? Do I now advocate hardness and want your face to stiffen in the funeral itself, and do not even allow your mind to be contracted? By no means. That is inhumanity, not virtue, to look at the funerals of one’s own with the same eyes as themselves, and not to be moved at the first tearing away of close ones. But suppose that I do forbid it; certain things have their own right. Tears fall even from those who hold them back, and having poured out, they relieve the mind.

​What is it then? Let us permit them to fall, let us not command them; let them flow as much as emotion casts out, not as much as imitation demands. Let us add nothing to our grief, nor increase it according to another’s example. Ostentation of grief demands more than grief: how few are sad for themselves! They groan more loudly when they are heard, and though silent and quiet while it is secret, when they see anyone, they are excited into fresh weeping. Then they lay hands upon their own head, which they could have done more freely with no one forbidding; then they pray for death upon themselves, then they roll off the bed; without a spectator, grief ceases.