Letter 104

I have fled to my villa at Nomentum, to escape what, do you suppose? The city? No, a fever, and one that was creeping up on me. It had already laid its hand upon me. The physician said it was the beginnings, since my pulse was disordered and irregular and disturbing its natural measure. And so I ordered a carriage to be made ready at once; though my Paulina held me back, I persisted in going out; I had on my lips the saying of my master Gallio, who, when he had begun to have a fever in Achaia, immediately went aboard ship, crying out that the sickness belonged not to his body but to the place.

This I said to my Paulina, who bids me take care of my health. For since I know that her breath of life is bound up in mine, I begin, in order to look after her, to look after myself. And although old age has made me braver against many things, I am losing this benefit of my years, for it comes into my mind that within this old man there is also a youth, who is spared. And so, since I cannot prevail upon her to love me more bravely, she prevails upon me to love myself more carefully.

For we must give way to honourable affections; and sometimes, even when reasons press upon us, the breath of life must, for the sake of our own people, be called back even with torment and held upon the very lips, since the good man must live not as long as it pleases him but as long as he ought. He who does not think wife or friend worth enough to linger longer in life, who persists in dying, is self-indulgent. Let the mind lay this command too upon itself, when the welfare of its own demands it, and let it, not only if it wishes to die, but if it has begun to die, break off and lend itself to its own.

It is the mark of a mighty mind to return to life for another's sake, as great men have often done. But this too I count a mark of the highest humanity, to guard one's old age the more attentively, whose greatest fruit is a more untroubled care of oneself and a more spirited use of life, if you know that you are dear, useful, desirable to some one of your own.

Moreover, this thing has in it no small joy and reward; for what is more delightful than to be so dear to your wife that on this account you become dearer to yourself? So my Paulina can charge to my account not only her own fear, but mine as well.

You ask, then, how the plan of my journey turned out? As soon as I had got clear of the oppressiveness of the city and that reek of smoking kitchens, which, when stirred, pour out with their dust whatever pestilent vapour they hold within, I at once felt my health changed. How much, then, do you suppose was added to my strength after I reached my vineyards? Turned loose into pasture, I fell upon my food. So now I have recovered myself; that languor of an uncertain and ill-disposed body did not last. I am beginning to study with my whole mind.

For this the place contributes little, unless the mind keeps faith with itself, which, if it will, shall have its retirement in the very midst of business; but the man who chooses regions and snatches at leisure will everywhere find something to distract him. For they say that Socrates answered a certain man who complained that his travels had done him no good: "It is no wonder this has happened to you; you were travelling in your own company."

Oh, how well it would be with certain men if they could wander away from themselves! As it is, they oppress themselves, harass, corrupt, terrify themselves. What good does it do to cross the sea and to change cities? If you wish to escape those things by which you are hard pressed, you must be, not in another place, but another person. Suppose you have come to Athens, suppose to Rhodes; choose at your discretion any city you please: what does it matter what manners that city has? You will bring your own.

You will judge riches to be a good: poverty will torment you, and, what is most wretched, a false poverty. For however much you possess, yet, because someone has more, you will think yourself as much in want as you are surpassed. You will judge honours to be a good: it will vex you that this man is made consul, that one re-elected; you will be envious whenever you read some name too often in the calendar of office. So great will be the frenzy of ambition that no one will seem behind you, if anyone has been before you.

You will judge death to be the greatest evil, though there is nothing of evil in it save what precedes it, the being afraid. You will be terrified not only by dangers but by suspicions; you will always be agitated by empty fears. For what will it profit to have escaped so many Argive cities and to have held one's flight through the midst of foes? Peace itself will supply you with terrors. No confidence will be felt even in safe things by a mind once thrown into confusion; which, when it has formed the habit of an improvident dread, is unfit even for the guarding of its own safety. For it does not avoid, but flees. And we lie more open to dangers when our backs are turned.

You will judge it the gravest evil to lose someone of those you love, while all the while this will be as foolish as to weep because leaves fall from the pleasant trees that adorn your house. Whatever delights you, look upon it as you do on green foliage; while it is green, enjoy it; chance will shake down one upon one day, another upon another. But just as the loss of leaves is easy to bear because they grow again, so the loss of those whom you love and think to be the delights of life is easy, because they are replaced, even if they do not grow again.

"But they will not be the same." Nor will you yourself be the same. Every day, every hour changes you; but in others the plundering is more easily seen, in your own case it is hidden, because it does not happen openly. Others are carried off, but we ourselves are filched from ourselves by stealth. You will think of none of these things, nor set remedies against your wounds, but will yourself sow for yourself the causes of anxieties, by hoping some things, despairing of others. If you are wise, mix the one with the other: neither hope without despair, nor despair without hope.

What good by itself could travel ever do anyone? It has tempered no pleasures, curbed no desires, repressed no fits of anger, broken no untamed impulses of love, in short has drawn no evils out of the mind. It has given no judgement, dispelled no error, but, as it holds a child marvelling at unfamiliar things, has detained the mind for a brief time by some novelty of objects.

For the rest, it irritates the inconstancy of a mind already most diseased, and this very tossing about makes it more restless and more fickle. And so the places they had sought most eagerly they leave still more eagerly, and like birds fly across them, and depart more quickly than they came.

Travel will give you acquaintance with nations, will show you new shapes of mountains, untrodden expanses of plains and valleys watered by perennial streams, the character of some river under observation, whether, like the Nile, it swells with its summer rising, or, like the Tigris, is snatched from sight and, after a course driven through hidden ways, is restored in its full magnitude, or, like the Maeander, the practised exercise and plaything of all the poets, winds in frequent bends, and often brought close to its own channel, before it can flow into itself, is turned aside; but it will make you neither better nor sounder.

We must busy ourselves among studies and among the authors of wisdom, that we may learn what has been discovered, and seek what has not yet been found; thus the mind is to be drawn out of its most wretched slavery and claimed for liberty. But so long as you are ignorant what is to be shunned and what sought, what is necessary and what superfluous, what just and what unjust, this will not be travelling, but wandering.

That running to and fro will bring you no help, for you travel in company with your passions, and your evils follow you. Would that they did but follow! They would be further off; as it is, you carry them, you do not lead them. And so they press upon you everywhere and burn you with equal vexations. It is medicine, not a region, that the sick man should seek.

A man has broken his leg or wrenched a joint: he does not climb into a carriage or a ship, but calls a physician, that the broken part may be set, that the dislocated may be put back in place. What then? Do you believe that a mind broken and wrenched in so many places can be healed by a change of place? That malady is too great to be cured by being carried about.

Travel does not make a physician, nor an orator; no art is learned from a place. What then? Is wisdom, the greatest of all arts, gathered upon a journey? There is no journey, believe me, that can set you beyond your desires, beyond your fits of anger, beyond your fears; or if there were such a one, the human race would march thither in a body. So long as you carry about with you the causes of your evils, those evils will press upon you and waste you as you wander over lands and seas.

Are you surprised that flight does you no good? The things you flee are with you. Mend yourself, then, take the burdens off yourself, and keep your cravings, which must be cut away, within a wholesome measure. Scrape away all wickedness from your mind. If you would have your journeys pleasant, heal your companion. Avarice will cling to you so long as you live with one greedy and sordid; arrogance will cling so long as you keep company with one who is proud. You will never lay aside cruelty in the fellowship of a torturer. The clubs of adulterers will inflame your lusts.

If you would be stripped of your vices, you must withdraw far from the examples of vice. The miser, the seducer, the cruel, the deceitful, who would have done you much harm had they been near you, are within you. Pass over to better men: live with the Catos, with Laelius, with Tubero. And if you take delight in living with Greeks too, keep company with Socrates, with Zeno; the one will teach you to die if it be necessary, the other before it is necessary.

Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: these will hand on to you the knowledge of things human and divine, these will bid you be at work, and not merely speak cleverly and toss about words for the entertainment of hearers, but harden the mind and rouse it against threats. For the one harbour of this surging and troubled life is to despise what is to come, to stand confident and ready to receive the weapons of fortune with breast set against them, neither skulking nor turning aside.

Nature has produced us high-souled, and just as she has given to some animals a fierce spirit, to some a cunning one, to some a fearful one, so to us she has given a glorious and lofty spirit, which seeks where it may live most honourably, not where most safely; a spirit most like the universe, which, so far as is permitted to mortal steps, it follows and emulates. It puts itself forward, and believes itself to be praised and gazed upon.

It is master of all, it is above all; therefore let it submit to nothing, let nothing seem to it grievous, nothing such as could bow a man down. "Shapes terrible to see, and death, and toil": not at all, indeed, if a man can look upon them with steady eyes and break through the darkness. Many things held to be terrors in the night the day turns to laughter. "Shapes terrible to see, and death, and toil": our Virgil said excellently that they are terrible not in fact, but to see, that is, they seem so, they are not.

What, I ask, is there in these things so dreadful as rumour has spread abroad? Why, I beg you, Lucilius, should a man fear toil, a human being fear death? How often these men come up against me, who do not think that anything can be done which they themselves cannot do, and who say that we speak of things greater than human nature can sustain!

But how much better an opinion of them I hold! They too can do these things, but they will not. In short, whom did such efforts ever fail when he tried? To whom did they not appear easier in the doing? It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

If, however, you require an example, take Socrates, an old man much-enduring, tossed through all hardships, yet unconquered both by poverty, which his domestic burdens made the heavier for him, and by labours, including those he bore as a soldier. With what trials he was exercised at home, whether we recall his wife, savage in her ways, shrill of tongue, or his children, unteachable and more like their mother than their father! If you truly reckon it up, he was either at war, or under tyranny, or in a freedom more savage than wars and tyrants.

For twenty-seven years there was fighting; when the war was ended, the state was given over to the punishment of the Thirty Tyrants, of whom most were his enemies. The last condemnation was carried through under the gravest charges: he was accused both of violating religion and of corrupting the youth, whom he was said to have set against the gods, against their fathers, against the commonwealth. After this came the prison and the poison. These things had so far failed to move the mind of Socrates that they did not even move his face. Oh, that marvellous and singular glory! To the very end no one saw Socrates either more cheerful or more downcast. He was the same amid so great an unevenness of fortune.

Do you wish for a second example? Take this Marcus Cato of more recent times, with whom fortune dealt both more hostilely and more persistently. When she had opposed him in every quarter, and at the last even in his death, he showed nonetheless that a brave man can live in fortune's despite, can die in her despite. His whole life was passed either in civil wars or under a peace already conceiving civil war. And of him too you may say that no less than Socrates he gave himself up, amid slaves, to liberty, unless perhaps you think that Gnaeus Pompey and Caesar and Crassus were the allies of liberty.

No one saw Cato changed, though the state was so often changed: he showed himself the same in every condition, in his praetorship, in his rejection, in accusation, in his province, on the platform, in the army, in death. In short, amid that alarm of the commonwealth, when on the one side was Caesar, supported by ten most warlike legions and by all the auxiliaries of foreign nations, on the other Gnaeus Pompey, one man enough against all, while some inclined toward Caesar, others toward Pompey, Cato alone formed a party also for the commonwealth itself.

If you wish to grasp in your mind the image of that time, you will see on the one side the commons and the whole rabble bent upon revolution, on the other the aristocracy and the equestrian order, whatever there was in the state of sacred and chosen, and two left in the midst, the commonwealth and Cato. You will marvel, I say, when you observe "the son of Atreus and Priam, and Achilles fierce against them both." For he disapproves of both, and disarms both.

He delivers this verdict on both: he says that, if Caesar conquer, he will die; if Pompey, he will go into exile. What had he to fear, who had appointed for himself, whether vanquished or victor, what could have been appointed by the most enraged of enemies? And so he perished by his own decree.

You see that men can endure toil: he led his army on foot through the midst of the deserts of Africa. You see that thirst can be borne: dragging the remnants of a defeated army over parched hills without any baggage, he bore the lack of water in his breastplate, and, whenever there was a chance of water, drank last. You see that honour and disgrace can be despised: on the very day on which he was rejected, he played at ball in the place of assembly. You see that the power of one's superiors can be unfeared: he challenged at once both Pompey and Caesar, of whom no one dared to offend the one save to win the favour of the other. You see that death can be despised as well as exile: he sentenced himself both to exile and to death, and in the meantime to war.

We can, then, have as much spirit against these things, if only we are willing to draw our neck from the yoke. But above all pleasures must be rejected; they unman and unstring us, and demand much, and much must be demanded of fortune. Next, riches must be scorned: they are the bonds of slaveries. Let gold and silver, and whatever else weighs down prosperous houses, be left behind; liberty cannot be had for nothing. If you value this highly, all else must be valued at little. Farewell.