Letter 13

I know that you have much spirit. For even before you had armed yourself with wholesome precepts that overcome hardships, you were sufficiently pleased with yourself against fortune; and much more so after you came to grips with her and tested your strength—a strength that can never give a sure confidence in itself, except when many difficulties have appeared on this side and on that, and sometimes indeed have drawn nearer. Thus is that true spirit proved, which will not pass under another's control.

This is its touchstone: the athlete cannot bring high spirit to the contest who has never been bruised; the man who has seen his own blood, whose teeth have cracked under the fist, who, when tripped, has borne his adversary with his whole body and not flung away his courage when flung down, who, as often as he fell, rose up more defiant—he goes down to the fight with high hope.

Therefore, to pursue this comparison: Fortune has often already had the upper hand of you, and yet you did not surrender yourself, but sprang up and took your stand the keener. For virtue, when challenged, adds much to itself. Yet, if it seems good to you, take from me the helps with which you may fortify yourself.

There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than that crush us, and more often we suffer in imagination than in reality. I do not speak with you in the Stoic tongue, but in this humbler one. For we Stoics say that all those things which wring groans and bellows from men are slight and to be despised; let us set aside these grand words, but—good gods!—true ones. This I enjoin upon you: do not be wretched before your time, since those things that you dread as though hanging over you may perhaps never come, and certainly have not yet come.

Some things, then, torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. Either we add to our pain, or we invent it, or we anticipate it. The first of these, since the matter is in dispute and the case is at issue between us, let us for the present put off. What I shall call slight, you will contend is most grievous; I know that some men laugh under the lash, others groan beneath a cuff. We shall see later whether these things prevail by their own strength or by our weakness.

Grant me this: that, as often as those gather round you who would persuade you that you are wretched, you consider not what you hear, but what you feel; that you deliberate with your own endurance and question yourself, who best know your own affairs: "What reason have these men to bewail me? What reason to be alarmed, to fear even the contagion of me, as if calamity could leap across? Is there some real evil here, or is the matter more notorious than evil?" Ask yourself: "Am I being tortured and grieving without cause, and making an evil of what is no evil?"

"How," you say, "shall I understand whether the things that vex me are empty or real?" Take this rule of the matter: we are tormented either by present things, or by future, or by both. About present things the judgment is easy; if your body is free and sound, and you feel no pain from any injury, we shall see later what is to come.

"But it is in the future." First, look closely whether the proofs of the coming evil are sure. For most often we suffer from suspicions, and that rumour which is wont to bring wars to an end deludes us—and far more it brings individuals to their end. So it is, my Lucilius; we quickly assent to opinion. We do not disprove the things that lead us into fear, nor shake them off, but we tremble and turn our backs, just as those do whom the dust raised by a fleeing herd has driven from their camp, or whom some tale, spread without an author, has terrified.

Somehow the empty things disturb us more. For the true have their own measure; whatever comes from the uncertain is handed over to conjecture and to the license of a frightened mind. No fears, therefore, are so ruinous, so irrevocable, as those that come of panic. For other fears are without reason, but these are without sense.

Let us, then, inquire diligently into the matter. It is likely that some evil is to come; it is not at once true. How many things have come unlooked for! How many looked-for things have never appeared! Even if it is to come, what does it avail to run to meet your own pain? You will grieve soon enough when it comes; in the meantime promise yourself better things.

What gain will you make? Time. Many things will intervene by which the near or even close-pressing danger may either halt, or cease, or pass on to another's head. A fire has opened a way to flight; a falling building has laid some men gently down; sometimes the sword has been recalled from the very neck; some man has outlived his executioner. Even bad fortune has its fickleness. Perhaps it will be; perhaps it will not be; in the meantime it is not. Set before yourself better things.

Sometimes, with no signs appearing to foretell any evil, the mind feigns false images for itself; either it twists some word of doubtful meaning into the worse sense, or it imagines someone's offence at it to be greater than it is, and considers not how angry that man is, but how much is permitted to an angry man. But there is no reason to live, no limit to miseries, if everything is feared that can possibly happen; here let prudence avail, here with strength of mind reject even a manifest fear. If not, drive out one fault with another; temper fear with hope. Nothing among the things that are feared is so certain that it is not more certain both that the dreaded things subside and that the hoped-for things deceive.

Therefore weigh hope and fear, and, as often as everything shall be uncertain, favour yourself; believe what you prefer. If fear has more votes, nevertheless incline to the other side and cease to disquiet yourself; turn this over again and again in your mind, that most mortals are tossed and tumbled about, even when nothing evil is present or assuredly to come. For no one resists himself when he has begun to be carried away, nor does he reduce his fear to the truth. No one says: "The author is empty; he has either invented this or believed it." We give ourselves to be carried away by every breeze.

We dread doubtful things as though certain. We keep no measure in our affairs. At once a slight uneasiness turns into fear. I am ashamed to speak with you so, and to soothe you with such feeble remedies. Let another say: "Perhaps it will not come." Do you say: "What then, if it does come? We shall see which of us conquers. Perhaps it comes on my behalf, and that death will do honour to my life." The hemlock made Socrates great.

I exhort you too long, since you have need rather of admonition than of exhortation. I am not leading you in a direction contrary to your nature; you were born to the things we speak of. So much the more, then, increase and adorn your good.

But now I will make an end of the letter, if I have set its seal upon it—that is, if I have charged it to bring you some splendid saying. Among its other evils, folly has this also: it is always beginning to live. Consider what that saying means, Lucilius, best of men, and you will understand how shameful is the fickleness of men who lay down new foundations of life every day, who begin new hopes even at their end.

Look round upon individuals one by one; old men will meet your eye who at this very moment are preparing themselves for ambition, for travel, for trade. But what is more shameful than an old man beginning to live? I would not add the name of an author to this saying, were it not somewhat more out of the way, and not among the published sayings of Epicurus, which I have allowed myself both to praise and to adopt as my own. Farewell.