Letter 11

Your friend, a youth of good natural parts, has talked with me; and his first conversation showed how much spirit, how much talent, and how much progress too there was already in him. He gave us a foretaste, to which he will live up. For he spoke not from preparation, but caught off his guard. When he was collecting himself, he could scarcely shake off his bashfulness—a good sign in a young man; so deeply did the blush spread over him from within. This, so far as I suspect, will attend him even when he has steadied himself and stripped off all his faults—will attend him even when he is wise. For no wisdom drives off the natural defects of the body; what is implanted and inborn may be softened by practice, but not overcome.

Upon some men, even of the firmest, a sweat breaks out in the sight of the people, just as it usually does upon the weary and the heated; with some the knees tremble when they are about to speak, with others the teeth chatter, the tongue stumbles, the lips come together. Neither training nor practice ever drives these things out; rather, Nature exerts her own power and by that defect reminds even the strongest of what she is.

Among these things, I know, is the blush, which suddenly suffuses even the gravest of men. It appears, indeed, more in the young, who have both more heat and a tender brow; nonetheless it touches the veterans and the old as well. Some men are never more to be feared than when they have blushed, as if they had poured out all their sense of shame.

Sulla was at his most violent when the blood had mounted to his face. Nothing was softer than the countenance of Pompey; he never failed to blush before a number of people, especially in the public assemblies. Fabianus, when he was brought in as a witness before the Senate, blushed, I remember, and this modesty wonderfully became him.

This happens not from weakness of mind, but from the novelty of the thing, which moves the inexperienced, even if it does not shake them, since they are prone to it by a natural readiness of the body in this respect. For as some men are of a full-blooded sort, so others are of a quick and mobile blood that rushes swiftly to the face.

These things, as I said, no wisdom drives away; otherwise it would have Nature herself under its command, if it could rub out every defect. Whatever the condition of one's birth and the temper of one's body has assigned will cling fast, however much and however long the mind has composed itself. None of these things can be forbidden, any more than they can be summoned.

Stage-players, who imitate the passions, who portray fear and trepidation, who represent sorrow, imitate bashfulness by this token: they cast down the face, lower the voice, fix and droop their eyes to the ground. But they cannot force a blush upon themselves; it can neither be forbidden nor induced. Against these things wisdom promises nothing, profits nothing; they are their own masters, they come unbidden and unbidden depart.

Now the letter demands its close. Take this, and indeed a profitable saying that I would have engraved upon your mind: "We must choose some good man and always keep him before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching, and do everything as if he saw it."

This, my Lucilius, Epicurus enjoined. He has given us a guardian and a tutor, and not without reason. A great part of our sins is removed if a witness stands by those about to sin. Let the mind have someone whom it may reverence, by whose authority it may make even its inner self more sacred. O happy the man who improves another, not only when present, but even when imagined! O happy the man who can so reverence another that he composes and orders himself even by the memory of him! He who can so reverence another will soon himself be worthy of reverence.

Choose, therefore, Cato. If he seems to you too rigid, choose a man of milder mind, Laelius. Choose the man whose life and speech and very face, bearing the mind before it, have pleased you; ever set him before yourself, whether as guardian or as model. There is need, I say, of someone by whom our characters may measure themselves; you will never set straight what is crooked except by a rule. Farewell.