Letter 8

"Do you," you say, "bid me avoid the crowd, withdraw, and be content with my own conscience? Where are those precepts of your school, which command us to die in action?" As for that—that I seem to you for the present to be counselling inaction—it is for this that I have shut myself away and barred the doors, that I might be able to help the greater number. No day passes for me in idleness. I claim part of the nights for my studies. I do not give myself to sleep, but yield to it, and hold my eyes, wearied and sinking with watching, to their task.

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, and chiefly from my own affairs; I am doing the business of posterity. For them I write down some things that may be of use. Wholesome admonitions, like the prescriptions of useful medicines, I commit to writing, having found them effective upon my own sores, which, even if they are not wholly healed, have at least ceased to spread.

The straight road, which I came to know late and wearied with wandering, I point out to others. I cry aloud: "Avoid whatever pleases the crowd, whatever chance has bestowed. Halt suspicious and trembling before every fortuitous good; both wild beast and fish are caught by some enticing hope. Do you think these the gifts of Fortune? They are snares. Whoever of you would lead a safe life, let him as far as ever he can shun these limed benefits, in which we too, most wretched of all, are deceived: we think we possess them, when we are caught fast.

That course leads down into the abyss. The end of this lofty life is to fall. Then it is not even permitted to make a stand, once prosperity has begun to drive us sidelong; or it must, if not in a straight line, at least overturn us at one blow. Fortune does not overthrow; she dashes headlong and impales."

Hold fast, then, to this sound and wholesome rule of life: indulge the body only so far as is enough for good health. It must be treated rather harshly, lest it obey the mind ill. Let food appease hunger, drink quench thirst, clothing keep off the cold, the house be a defence against what assails the body. Whether walls have been raised by turf or by the varied stone of a foreign people makes no difference; know that a man is sheltered just as well by thatch as by gold. Despise all those things that superfluous labour sets up as ornament and adornment. Reflect that nothing is to be wondered at except the mind, to which, being great, nothing is great.

If I speak thus with myself, if I speak thus with posterity, do I not seem to you to be of more use than when I used to go down as advocate to a court appearance, or set my seal upon the tablets of a will, or lend my voice and hand in the Senate to a candidate? Believe me, those who seem to do nothing are doing greater things; they are handling things human and divine together.

But now an end must be made, and, as I have established, something must be paid out for this letter. It shall not be done out of my own purse; I am still rifling Epicurus, whose saying I read this very day: "You must be a slave to philosophy, that true freedom may fall to your lot." He who has submitted and given himself over to her finds his cause not put off from day to day; he is set free at once. For this very thing, to be a slave to philosophy, is freedom.

It may be that you will ask me why I quote so many fine sayings from Epicurus rather than from our own school. But why should you suppose these to be Epicurus's words, and not common property? How many poets say things that have been said, or ought to be said, by philosophers! I will not touch the tragedians, nor our own toga-clad plays; for these too have something of seriousness, and stand midway between comedies and tragedies. How many most eloquent verses lie buried among the mimes! How many lines of Publilius ought to be spoken not by actors in slippers, but by actors in the buskin!

One verse of his that bears upon philosophy and upon this very part that was just now in our hands, I will quote—the verse in which he denies that what is fortuitous should be reckoned our own: "Whatever comes by our wishing is another's."

This thought you yourself put better, in fewer words: "What Fortune has made yours is not your own." And this, still better said by you, I will not pass over: "The good that could be given can be taken away." I do not charge this to the account as repayment; I have given you what was your own. Farewell.