Letter 113

You wish me to write to you what I think of this question that is bandied about among our school: whether justice, courage, prudence, and the other virtues are living creatures. By this subtlety, dearest Lucilius, we have brought it about that we seem to exercise our wits among trifles and to waste our leisure on disputations that will profit nothing. I will do what you wish, and will set forth what our school thinks. But I declare that I am of another opinion: I think there are certain things that befit a man in Greek slippers and Greek cloak. So let me tell you what it is that moved the ancients, or what the ancients have moved.

It is agreed that the mind is a living creature, since it is the very thing that makes us living creatures, since from it living creatures have drawn this name. But virtue is nothing else than the mind in a certain condition; therefore it is a living creature. Next, virtue does something; but nothing can be done without impulse. If it has impulse, which belongs to nothing save a living creature, it is a living creature. "If virtue is a living creature," he says, "it has virtue itself."

Why should it not have itself? Just as the wise man does all things through virtue, so virtue acts through itself. "Therefore," he says, "all the arts too are living creatures, and all the things we think and grasp with the mind." It follows that many thousands of living creatures dwell in these narrow quarters of the breast, and that we are each many living creatures or have many living creatures. You ask what is answered against this? Each one of those things will be a living creature; they will not be many living creatures. Why? I will tell you, if you lend me your subtlety and your attention.

Single living creatures must have single substances; all those things have one mind; and so they can be single, they cannot be many. I am both an animal and a man, yet you will not say that we are two. Why? Because they ought to be separate. So I say: the one ought to be sundered from the other, that they may be two. Whatever is manifold in one falls under one nature; and so it is one.

Both my mind is a living creature and I am a living creature, yet we are not two. Why? Because my mind is a part of me. A thing will be counted by itself only when it stands by itself. But where it will be a member of another, it cannot be seen as a separate thing. Why? I will tell you: because that which is a separate thing must be its own and proper and whole and complete within itself.

I have declared that I am of another opinion. For not only will the virtues be living creatures, if this be accepted, but also the vices opposed to them and the passions, such as anger, fear, grief, suspicion. This thing will go further: all opinions, all thoughts will be living creatures. Which must in no way be accepted. For not whatever is done by a man is a man.

"What is justice?" he says. "The mind in a certain condition. And so, if the mind is a living creature, so is justice." By no means. For this is a habit of the mind and a certain force; the same mind is turned into various shapes and is not so many times a different living creature as it does a different thing. Nor is that which is done by the mind a living creature.

If justice is a living creature, if courage is, if the other virtues are, do they cease to be living creatures and then again presently begin, or are they always so? The virtues cannot cease. Therefore many living creatures, nay innumerable ones, dwell in this one mind.

"They are not many," he says, "because they are bound together out of one and are the parts and members of one." We picture to ourselves, then, such a face of the mind as the hydra has, which has many heads, each of which fights by itself and harms by itself. And yet none of those heads is a living creature, but the head of a living creature, while the hydra itself is one living creature. No one has said that in the Chimaera the lion is a living creature or the dragon; these were its parts; but parts are not living creatures. What is it from which you conclude that justice is a living creature?

"It does something," he says, "and is of profit. But what does something and is of profit has impulse; and what has impulse is a living creature." It is true, if it has its own impulse; but it has not its own, but the mind's.

Every living creature, until it dies, is what it began as; a man, until he dies, is a man, a horse a horse, a dog a dog. It cannot pass into something else. Justice, that is, the mind in a certain condition, is a living creature. Let us grant it; then courage is a living creature, that is, the mind in a certain condition. What mind? The one that just now was justice? It is held fast in the former living creature, it is not permitted to pass into another living creature; it must persist in that in which it first began to be.

Besides, one mind cannot belong to two living creatures, much less to several. If justice, courage, temperance, and the other virtues are living creatures, how will they have one mind? They must have single ones, or they are not living creatures.

One body cannot belong to several living creatures. This even they themselves admit. What is the body of justice? The mind. What? What is the body of courage? The same mind. And yet one body cannot belong to two living creatures.

"But the same mind," he says, "puts on the habit of justice and of courage and of temperance." This could happen, if at the time when there was justice there was no courage, at the time when there was courage there was no temperance; but as it is, all the virtues are present at once. So how will they singly be living creatures, since there is one mind, which cannot make more than one living creature?

Finally, no living creature is a part of another living creature. But justice is a part of the mind; therefore it is not a living creature. I seem to myself to be wasting my labour on a thing already admitted; for one ought rather to be indignant about this than to dispute it. No living creature is equal to another. Look round at the bodies of all things: not one but has its own colour and its own shape and its own size.

Among the other things on account of which the genius of the divine craftsman is marvellous, I count this too, that in so great an abundance of things he has never lighted upon the same thing twice; even the things that seem alike, when you have compared them, are different. He has made so many kinds of leaves: not one but is stamped with its own property. So many living creatures: the size of none agrees with another, there is always some difference. He demanded of himself that the things which were separate should also be unlike and unequal; but all the virtues, as you say, are equal. Therefore they are not living creatures.

Every living creature acts of itself. But virtue does nothing of itself, but together with a man. All living creatures are either rational, like men and gods, or irrational, like wild beasts and cattle. The virtues are certainly rational; and yet they are neither men nor gods; therefore they are not living creatures.

Every rational living creature does nothing unless it has first been stirred by the appearance of some thing, then has taken up an impulse, then assent has confirmed this impulse. I will tell you what assent is. I ought to walk: then at last I walk, when I have said this to myself and approved this opinion of mine. I ought to sit: then at last I sit. This assent is not in virtue.

For suppose virtue to be prudence; how will it assent: I ought to walk? Nature does not admit this. For prudence looks out for him whose it is, not for itself. For it can neither walk nor sit. Therefore it has not assent; it is not a rational living creature. If virtue is a living creature, it is rational.

But it is not rational; therefore neither is it a living creature. If virtue is a living creature, and virtue is a good, is not every good a living creature? It is. Our school admit this. To save one's father is a good, and to deliver an opinion prudently in the senate is a good, and to give a just verdict is a good; therefore to save one's father is a living creature and to deliver an opinion prudently is a living creature. The matter has gone so far that you cannot hold your laughter: to keep silent prudently is a good, to dine frugally is a good; so both to keep silent and to dine are living creatures.

I, by Hercules, will not cease to tickle myself and to make sport of these subtle absurdities. Justice and courage, if they are living creatures, are certainly terrestrial. Every terrestrial living creature is cold, hungry, thirsty; therefore justice is cold, courage is hungry, mercy is thirsty.

What further? Shall I not ask them what shape those living creatures have? That of a man, or of a horse, or of a wild beast? If they give them a round shape, like that which they have given to God, I will ask whether avarice and luxury and madness are equally round. For these too are living creatures. If they round these off as well, I will still ask whether a prudent walk is a living creature. They must necessarily admit it, and then say that walking is a living creature, and a round one at that.

But that you may not think that I am the first of our school not to speak by prescription but to hold my own opinion: between Cleanthes and his pupil Chrysippus there is no agreement as to what walking is. Cleanthes says it is breath sent from the governing part down to the feet, Chrysippus says it is the governing part itself. Why then should not each man, by Chrysippus's own example, claim himself for himself, and laugh at those living creatures, so many that the world itself cannot contain them?

"The virtues," he says, "are not many living creatures, and yet they are living creatures. For just as someone is both a poet and an orator, and yet one man, so those virtues are living creatures, but are not many. The mind is the same, and is both a mind and just and prudent and brave, being in a certain condition with regard to each single virtue."

The controversy is removed; we are agreed. For I too meanwhile admit that the mind is a living creature, intending to pass my verdict on that matter later; but I deny that its actions are living creatures. Otherwise all words too will be living creatures and all verses; for if prudent speech is a good, and every good is a living creature, then speech is a living creature. A prudent verse is a good, and every good is a living creature; therefore a verse is a living creature. So "Arms and the man I sing" is a living creature, which they cannot call round, since it has six feet.

"A spider's web, by Hercules, is the whole of this thing now being discussed." I burst with laughter when I picture to myself that a solecism is a living creature, and a barbarism, and a syllogism, and that, like a painter, I assign fitting faces to them. Are these the things we discuss with knitted brows, with wrinkled forehead? I cannot in this place help quoting Caelius's words: "O dismal trifles!" They are ridiculous. Why, then, do we not rather treat of something useful to us and wholesome, and inquire how we may be able to reach the virtues, what road may lead us to them?

Teach me, not whether courage is a living creature, but that no living creature is happy without courage, unless it has grown strong against the strokes of chance and has, by pondering them, mastered beforehand every accident before it should befall. What is courage? The impregnable bulwark of human weakness; he who has set it round himself holds out untroubled in this siege of life; for he uses his own strength, his own weapons.

At this point I wish to report to you the sentiment of our Posidonius: "There is no reason for you to think yourself ever safe in the arms of fortune; fight with your own. Fortune does not arm us against herself; and so men furnished against their enemies are unarmed against her."

Alexander indeed ravaged and put to flight the Persians and Hyrcanians and Indians and whatever nations the East extends as far as the ocean, but he himself, now having slain a friend, now having lost one, lay in the darkness, mourning at one time his crime, at another his loss, the conqueror of so many kings and peoples succumbing to anger and grief. For he had laboured to have all things rather than his passions in his power.

Oh, by how great errors are men possessed, who long to extend their right of dominion across the seas, and judge themselves most fortunate if they hold many provinces with their soldiery and add new ones to the old, ignorant of what that mighty realm, equal to the gods, may be!

To rule oneself is the greatest dominion. Let philosophy teach me how sacred a thing is justice, which looks to another's good and seeks nothing for itself save the use of itself. Let it have nothing to do with ambition and fame; let it please itself. Let each man before all things persuade himself of this: I ought to be just for nothing. It is too little; let him further persuade himself of this: let it delight me to spend myself freely upon this most beautiful virtue. Let his whole thought be turned as far as possible from private advantages. There is no reason for you to look to what the reward of a just deed may be; there is a greater one in the just deed itself. Fix this still upon yourself, what I was saying a little before: it does not matter to the case how many know your fairness.

He who wishes his own virtue to be made public labours not for virtue but for glory. Will you not be just without glory? But, by Hercules, you will often have to be just with infamy. And then, if you are wise, let an ill repute well earned delight you. Farewell.