Letter 14

I confess that an affection for our own body is implanted in us; I confess that we have the care of it. I do not deny that it should be indulged; I deny that it should be served. For the man who serves his body will serve many masters—the man who fears overmuch for it, who refers everything to it.

We ought to bear ourselves not as though we ought to live for the body's sake, but as though we could not live without the body. Excessive love of it disquiets us with fears, burdens us with cares, exposes us to insults. The honourable is held cheap by the man to whom his body is too dear. Let care of it be taken most diligently, yet on this condition: that when reason, when dignity, when good faith demands, it must be sent into the fire.

Nonetheless, as much as we can, let us avoid discomforts too, not only dangers, and withdraw ourselves into safety, thinking out from time to time the means by which the things to be feared may be driven off. Of these there are three kinds, unless I am mistaken: poverty is feared, diseases are feared, and the things that come about through the violence of one more powerful.

Of all these, nothing shakes us more than what hangs over us from another's power. For it comes with great din and tumult. The natural evils that I mentioned—poverty and disease—steal up in silence and strike no terror into the eyes or ears. The other evil has a vast pageantry. It has around it steel and fire and chains and a herd of wild beasts to set upon human flesh.

Picture here the prison and crosses and racks and the hook, and the stake driven through the middle of a man so as to come out at his mouth, and limbs torn asunder by chariots driven in opposite directions, and that tunic smeared with and woven of the fuel of fire, and whatever else besides these cruelty has devised.

It is no wonder, therefore, if the fear of this is greatest, whose variety is great and whose apparatus is terrible. For as the torturer accomplishes more the more instruments of pain he sets out—since men are conquered by the mere sight who would have held out under the suffering—so, of the things that subdue and tame our minds, those accomplish more which have something to display. Those plagues are no less grievous—hunger, I mean, and thirst, and the festering of the inward parts, and fever scorching the very vitals; but they lie hidden, they have nothing to brandish, nothing to flaunt; the others, like great wars, conquer by their look and array.

Let us therefore take pains to abstain from giving offence. Sometimes it is the people whom we ought to fear; sometimes, if such is the constitution of the state that most things are transacted through the Senate, the men of influence in it; sometimes individuals, to whom the power of the people, and over the people, has been given. To have all these as friends is laborious; it is enough not to have them as enemies. And so the wise man will never provoke the wrath of the powerful, but rather will turn aside from it, just as on a voyage one turns aside from a storm.

When you were making for Sicily, you crossed the strait. A rash helmsman scorned the threats of the south wind—for it is the wind that roughens the Sicilian sea and gathers it into whirlpools—and made not for the left-hand shore, but for that near which Charybdis throws the seas into confusion. But a more cautious one asks of those who know the place what the current is, what signs the clouds give, and holds his course far from that region notorious for its eddies.

We must therefore look about us, how we may be safe from the common herd. First, let us covet nothing the same; there is a quarrel among competitors. Next, let us have nothing that could be snatched away with great profit to the one who plots against us. Let there be as little spoil as possible upon your body. No one comes after human blood for its own sake, or very few do. More men reckon than hate. The robber lets the naked man pass; even on a beset road there is peace for the poor.

Three things, then, according to the old precept, must be guarded against and avoided: hatred, envy, contempt. How this may be done, wisdom alone will show. For the balance is hard to keep, and one must beware lest, in our fear of envy, we fall into contempt, lest, while we are unwilling to seem to tread others down, we seem ourselves able to be trodden down. The power of being feared has given many men cause to fear.

To philosophy, then, we must flee for refuge; these studies are, I will not say among good men, but among the moderately bad, in the place of priestly fillets. For forensic eloquence, and whatever else stirs the people, has its adversaries; but this study, quiet and minding its own business, cannot be despised—a study to which there is honour from all the arts, even among the worst of men. Never will wickedness grow so strong, never will men so conspire against the virtues, that the name of philosophy will not remain venerable and sacred. For the rest, philosophy itself must be handled calmly and modestly.

"What then?" you say. "Does Marcus Cato seem to you to philosophize modestly, who checks a civil war by his vote? Who interposes himself in the midst of the arms of raging chiefs? Who, while some offend Pompey and others Caesar, provokes the two at once?"

One may dispute whether at that time the wise man ought to have taken part in public affairs. "What do you mean to do, Marcus Cato? It is no longer a question of liberty; that was ruined long ago. The question is whether Caesar or Pompey is to possess the state; what have you to do with that contest? No party is yours; a master is being chosen. What is it to you which conquers? The better may win, but the one that wins cannot but be the worse." I have touched upon Cato's last role. But not even the earlier years were such as would admit the wise man to that plundering of the commonwealth; what else did Cato do but cry out and send forth unavailing words, when at one moment, lifted by the hands of the people and covered with their spittle, he was carried off from the forum, and at another, led away from the Senate into prison?

But we shall see later whether the wise man ought to give his labour to public affairs; in the meantime I summon you to those Stoics who, shut out from public life, have withdrawn to the cultivation of life and the framing of laws for the human race, without any offence to those in power. The wise man will not disturb the public customs, nor draw the attention of the people upon himself by a strange manner of living.

"What then? Will he at any rate be safe who follows this purpose?" I can no more promise you this than I can good health in a temperate man—and yet temperance does produce good health. Some ship perishes in harbour; but what do you think happens in the open sea? How much readier would the peril be for the man busy and contriving many things, for whom not even leisure is safe? Innocent men sometimes perish; who denies it? Yet the guilty more often. A man's skill stands firm who has been struck through his very ornaments. In short, the wise man looks to the design of all things, not to their outcome.

The beginnings are in our own power; of the event Fortune judges, to whom I do not grant the right of passing sentence upon me. "But she will bring some vexation, some adversity." The robber does not condemn when he kills.

Now you stretch out your hand for the daily dole. I will fill it with a golden dole; and, since mention has been made of gold, take this, that the use and enjoyment of it may be more pleasing to you. "He enjoys riches most who has least need of riches." "Name the author," you say. That you may know how generous we are, it is our purpose to praise the sayings of others; it is from Epicurus, or Metrodorus, or someone of that workshop.

And what does it matter who said it? He said it to all men. The man who is in want of riches fears for them. But no one enjoys a good thing that brings anxiety; he is eager to add something to it. While he thinks of increasing his store, he forgets the use of it. He receives accounts, wears out the forum, turns over his ledger; from a master he becomes a steward. Farewell.