Letter 7

You ask what you think you should chiefly avoid? The crowd. You cannot yet be trusted to it in safety. I at least will confess my own weakness: I never bring back the character I took out. Something of what I had composed is thrown into disorder; something of what I had driven off returns. What happens to the sick, whom a long weakness has so affected that they cannot be brought out anywhere without harm, this happens to us, whose minds are recovering from a long sickness.

The company of many is harmful: there is no one who does not either recommend to us some vice, or stamp it upon us, or smear it on us while we are unaware. And surely the larger the throng we mingle with, the greater the danger. But nothing is so ruinous to good morals as to lounge at some show. For then, through pleasure, the vices steal in more easily.

What do you think I mean? I come back more grasping, more ambitious, more given to luxury—indeed, more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among men. By chance I dropped in on the midday show, expecting sport and wit and some relaxation by which men's eyes might find rest from human blood. It is the opposite. Whatever fighting there had been before was mercy; now, with the trifling laid aside, it is pure murder. The men have nothing to cover them; exposed with their whole bodies to the blow, they never send a hand in vain.

Most people prefer this to the regular pairs and to the favourites. And why should they not prefer it? It is not by helmet or shield that the steel is turned aside. What use are defences? What use is skill? All these things are but delays of death. In the morning men are thrown to lions and bears; at noon they are thrown to their own spectators. They order the slayers to be thrown to those who will slay them, and they keep the victor for another butchery. The outcome for the fighters is death; the business is carried on with sword and fire. This goes on while the arena stands empty between the bouts.

"But the fellow committed a robbery, he killed a man." What then? Because he killed, he deserves to suffer this; but you, poor wretch, what have you done to deserve to watch it? "Kill, flog, burn! Why does he rush so timidly upon the sword? Why does he kill with too little daring? Why does he die with too little willingness? Let him be driven on with blows; let them meet wounds with bared and willing breasts." The show is interrupted: "Meanwhile let men's throats be cut, that nothing may be doing." Come, do you not even understand this, that bad examples recoil upon those who set them? Give thanks to the immortal gods that you are teaching a man to be cruel who cannot learn it.

A mind that is tender and not firm enough in the right must be withdrawn from the crowd; it passes easily over to the side of the many. A multitude unlike themselves could have shaken even Socrates, Cato, and Laelius out of their character; so far is it beyond any one of us, even now while we are at our utmost in fashioning our minds, to bear the onset of vices that come with so great an escort.

A single example of luxury or greed works much harm: a dainty messmate gradually unstrings and softens us; a rich neighbour stirs up desire; a malicious companion rubs off some of his rust upon one ever so candid and unspoiled. What, then, do you suppose happens to those characters upon which the public has made its assault? You must of necessity either imitate them or hate them.

But both are to be avoided: do not become like the bad because they are many, nor an enemy to the many because they are unlike yourself. Retire into yourself, as much as you can. Associate with those who will make you better. Admit those whom you yourself can make better. These things are done by mutual exchange, and men, while they teach, learn.

There is no reason why the glory of publishing your talent should lead you out into the open, so that you should wish to recite to such men or hold disputations; this I would have you do, if you had wares suited to such a people; but there is no one who could understand you. Someone, perhaps—one or another—will turn up, and even he will have to be moulded and trained by you to the understanding of you. "For whom, then, did I learn these things?" You need not fear that you have lost your labour; you have learned them for yourself.

But that I may not have learned today for myself alone, I will share with you three sayings that have come my way, finely uttered upon about the same theme; of these, this letter will discharge one as my debt; the other two take as paid in advance. Democritus says: "One man is to me as a whole people, and a people as one man."

That other man, too, said it well—whoever he was, for there is dispute about the author—when he was asked to what end he aimed at so great a care in an art that would reach only the very few. "Few are enough for me," he said, "one is enough, none is enough." Excellently said this third saying of Epicurus, when he wrote to one of the partners in his studies: "These things I write," he said, "not for the many, but for you; for each of us is theatre enough for the other."

These things, my Lucilius, must be laid up in the mind, that you may despise the pleasure that comes from the assent of the many. Many men praise you: have you any reason to be pleased with yourself, if you are a man whom the many can understand? Let your good qualities face inward. Farewell.