Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, VIII

Seneca greets his Lucilius.

"You tell me," you say, "to avoid the crowd, to withdraw, and to be content with my own conscience? Where are those precepts of yours that bid us die at work?" What? Do I seem to you to be urging idleness? I have hidden myself away and shut my doors so that I can be of use to more people. No day of mine passes in leisure; I claim part of the night for study; I do not give myself up to sleep but give way to it, and I keep at their work eyes that are tired with waking and drooping.

I have withdrawn not only from people but from affairs, and above all from my own affairs: I am doing the business of those who come after. I am writing down some things that may be of use to them. I am committing to writing wholesome advice, like the recipes of useful medicines, having found it effective on my own sores, which, even if they are not wholly healed, have stopped spreading.

The right road, which I found late and weary with wandering, I point out to others. I cry out: "Avoid whatever pleases the crowd, whatever chance hands out; stop, suspicious and wary, before every good that comes by luck. The wild beast and the fish are both deceived by some delightful hope. Do you think these are gifts of fortune? They are traps. Whoever of you wishes to live a safe life, let him avoid as far as he can these limed favours, in which, wretched as we are, we are also deceived in this: we think we hold them, and we are held. That course leads over a precipice; the end of this lofty life is a fall. And then one cannot even resist, once prosperity has begun to drive one off course, nor go down at least upright, or all at once: fortune does not overturn us, she tips us headlong and dashes us down. Keep, then, to this sound and healthy rule of life: indulge the body only as much as good health requires. It must be treated rather harshly, so that it does not disobey the mind: let food quiet hunger, drink quench thirst, clothing keep off the cold, and a house be a shelter against the hostile weather. Whether it was raised in turf or in the many-coloured marble of foreign lands makes no difference: know that a person is sheltered as well by thatch as by gold. Despise everything that useless labour sets up as ornament and show; reflect that nothing is wonderful except the mind, to which, being great itself, nothing is great."

If I say these things to myself, if I say them to those who come after, do I not seem to you to do more good than when I went down to court to stand bail, or pressed my ring on the tablets of a will, or lent my voice and my hand to a candidate in the senate? Believe me, those who seem to be doing nothing are doing greater things: they are dealing with things human and divine at once.

But now I must make an end, and pay something for this letter, as I began to do. It will not come from my own store: I am still plundering Epicurus, in whom I read today this saying: "You must be the servant of philosophy, if true freedom is to be yours." Whoever has submitted and given himself to her is not put off from day to day; he is set free at once, for this very service of philosophy is freedom.

You may ask me why I quote so many good sayings of Epicurus rather than of our own school. But why should you think that these sayings belong to Epicurus and not to everyone? How many poets say what philosophers have said, or should say! I will not touch the tragedians, nor our plays in Roman dress (for these too have some seriousness, and stand midway between comedy and tragedy); but how many eloquent lines lie among the mimes! How many lines of Publilius ought to be spoken not by barefoot clowns but by actors in buskins! I will quote one line of his that belongs to philosophy, and to the part of it we had in hand just now, in which he denies that what chance brings is to be counted our own:

Whatever comes by wishing is another's.

I remember you putting this thought rather better and more tightly:

What fortune has made yours is not your own.

Nor shall I pass over a still better saying of yours:

A good that could be given can be taken away.

I do not count this against my debt: I am paying you from your own. Farewell.