Retirement
“withdrawal from public duty”
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
retirement · desertion · leisure · repose · retiring · your retreat
in the texts
Orations
The concept of withdrawing from civic or social obligations, examined to distinguish true philosophical retirement from cowardly flight or desertion.
May not, then, the retirement into oneself, and attending to one's own affairs, be the best and most profitable of all—whether one chance to be in Babylon or at Athens, or in a camp or on a little island and alone?
What, then, ever is the meaning of retirement, and whom must we set down as men who retire?
We must not, then, say that those who go away from useless affairs and from occupations that do not befit them, and procure for themselves some leisure from things that vainly trouble them, are retiring.
Letters to Lucilius
Withdrawal from public/political life for philosophical self-examination, to be practiced without ostentation.
Now I return to what I had begun to advise you, that your retirement be unknown.
Those whose feet are attacked by pain abstain either from wine or from the bath.
But it is a kind of flaunting to lie hidden too much and to withdraw from the sight of men.