Letter 119

Whenever I have discovered something, I do not wait until you say, "into the common stock." I say it to myself. You ask what it is that I have discovered; open your lap, it is pure gain. I will teach you how you may become rich most quickly. How keenly you long to hear! And not without reason; I will lead you by a short cut to the greatest riches. Yet you will need a creditor; that you may do business, you must run into debt, but I would not have you borrow through a go-between, I would not have the brokers bandy your name about.

I will give you a creditor ready at hand, that Catonian one: you shall borrow from yourself. However little it is, it will be enough, if we ask of ourselves whatever shall be lacking. For there is no difference, my dear Lucilius, between not desiring and having. The sum of the matter is the same in both: you will not be tormented. Nor do I lay down this precept, that you deny something to Nature—she is stubborn, she cannot be conquered, she demands her due—but that you know whatever exceeds Nature to be a thing held on sufferance, not a necessity.

I am hungry; I must eat. Whether this bread be of the common sort or of fine wheat is nothing to Nature; she wishes the belly not to be delighted but to be filled. I am thirsty; whether this be the water I have drawn from the nearest pool, or that which I have shut up with much snow, that it may be cooled by a foreign chill, is nothing to Nature. She bids this one thing, that the thirst be quenched; whether the cup be of gold or crystal or murra or a Tibur goblet or the hollow of the hand, it matters not.

Look to the end of all things, and you will dismiss the superfluous. Hunger calls me; let the hand be stretched out to whatever is nearest; hunger itself has commended to me whatever I shall grasp.

The hungry man despises nothing. You ask what it is that has delighted me? It seems to me admirably said: "the wise man is the keenest seeker of natural riches." "You present me," you say, "with an empty platter. What is this? I had already got my money-bags ready. I was looking round in what sea I should launch myself to do business, what public revenues I should farm, what merchandise I should import." It is deceiving, this, to teach poverty when you have promised riches. So you judge that man poor to whom nothing is lacking? "By his own," you say, "and by the benefit of his own endurance, not of fortune." Do you therefore not judge him rich because his riches cannot come to an end? Do you prefer to have much or enough?

He who has much, desires more; which is a proof that he has not yet enough; he who has enough has attained what never fell to a rich man, an end. Or do you think that these are not riches because for their sake no one has been proscribed? Because for their sake no son has thrust poison upon anyone, no wife? Because in war they are safe? Because in peace they are at leisure? Because it is neither dangerous to have them nor laborious to administer them?

"But he has too little, who only does not freeze, does not hunger, does not thirst." Jupiter has no more. It is never too little that is enough, and never much that is not enough. After Darius and the Indians, Alexander is poor. Do I lie? He seeks what he may make his own, he searches unknown seas, he sends new fleets into the ocean, and breaks through, so to speak, the very bars of the world. What is enough for Nature is not enough for the man.

There has been found one who would covet something after all things; so great is the blindness of minds, and so great each man's forgetfulness of his own beginnings, once he has advanced. He who but lately was the lord, and that not without dispute, of an obscure corner, is sad on reaching the end of the earth at having to return through a world that is his own.

Money has made no one rich; nay, on the contrary, it has struck into every man a greater craving for itself. You ask what is the cause of this? He who has more begins to be able to have more. In short, you may bring forward into the midst any one you wish of those whose names are counted with Crassus and Licinus. Let him bring forward his rating, and reckon up at once both whatever he has and whatever he hopes for; that man, if you believe me, is poor, if you believe yourself, he can be poor.

But this man, who has composed himself to that which Nature requires, is not only beyond the feeling of poverty, but beyond the fear of it. But that you may know how difficult it is to confine one's affairs to the natural measure, this very man of whom we speak, whom you call poor, has even something superfluous.

But riches blind the people and turn it upon themselves, if much coined money is carried out of some house, if much gold is laid even upon its roof, if the household is choice in its persons or notable in its dress. The happiness of all these things looks to the public; but he whom we have withdrawn both from the people and from fortune is happy within.

For as to those men, among whom a busy poverty has falsely usurped the name of riches, they have riches in the way that we are said to have a fever, when in fact the fever has us. On the contrary, we are wont to say: the fever holds him. In the same way it should be said: riches hold him. There is nothing, therefore, of which I would rather warn you than this, of which no one is sufficiently warned, that you measure all things by natural desires, which can be satisfied either for nothing or for little; only do not mingle vices with desires.

You ask with what table, with what silver, by how matched and smooth attendants the food is brought? Nature desires nothing besides the food. "When thirst burns your throat, do you seek golden cups? When hungry, do you disdain everything except peacock and turbot?"

Hunger is not ambitious, it is content to cease; with what it ceases, it does not greatly care. These are the torments of an unhappy luxury; it seeks how it may be hungry even after satiety, how it may not fill the belly but stuff it, how it may call back a thirst quenched by the first draught. And so Horace says excellently that it makes no difference to thirst in what cup or by how elegant a hand the water is served. For if you judge it to concern you how long-haired a boy and how translucent a cup he hands you, you are not thirsty.

Among other things Nature has bestowed on us this chief one, that she has shaken fastidiousness out of necessity. The superfluous admit of choice: this is too little becoming, that too little praised, this offends my eyes. It was so ordained by that founder of the world, who laid down for us the laws of living, that we should be sound, not dainty. For soundness all things are ready and at hand, for daintiness all things are got together wretchedly and anxiously.

Let us, then, use this benefit of Nature, counting it among the great ones, and let us reflect that on no score has she deserved better of us than because whatever is desired out of necessity is taken without fastidiousness. Farewell.