Letter 17

Cast away all these things, if you are wise—nay, that you may be wise—and strive toward a sound mind with all speed and all your strength. If there is anything that holds you back, either disentangle yourself from it or cut it away. "My estate," you say, "delays me; I wish to arrange it so that it may suffice for a man doing nothing, lest poverty be a burden to me, or I to anyone."

When you say this, you do not seem to know the force and power of that good of which you are thinking. And though you discern the sum of the matter—how much philosophy profits—still you do not yet examine its parts subtly enough, nor do you yet know how much it helps us everywhere, how (to use Cicero's word) it brings aid in the greatest things and descends into the least. Believe me, call her into your counsel; she will persuade you not to sit over your accounts.

Surely this is what you are after, and what you wish to gain by this delay: that you may not have to fear poverty. But what if it is to be sought after? Riches have stood in the way of many who would philosophize; poverty is unencumbered, free from care. When the trumpet has sounded, it knows that it is not the one attacked; when the cry of "Water!" is raised, it looks for a way out, not for what it may carry off. If it has to go aboard ship, the harbours do not resound, nor does the bustle of one man's retinue trouble the shore. No great throng of slaves crowds round it, to feed whom the fertility of provinces beyond the sea must be sought.

It is easy to feed a few bellies, and those well-disciplined, and craving nothing else but to be filled. Hunger costs little, fastidiousness much. Poverty is content to satisfy the pressing desires. Why, then, should you refuse this companion, whose ways the sound-minded rich man imitates?

If you wish to be free for the mind, you must either be poor or be like the poor. No study can be made wholesome without the care of frugality; and frugality is voluntary poverty. Away, then, with those excuses: "I have not yet as much as is enough; when I have reached that sum, then I will give myself wholly to philosophy." But this thing which you put off and prepare after all the rest is the very thing to be prepared before all else; from this you must begin. "I wish," you say, "to provide the means whereby to live." But provide it while you are also learning; if anything forbids you to live well, nothing forbids you to die well.

There is no reason why poverty should call us back from philosophy—no, nor even destitution. For those who hasten toward this goal must endure even hunger. Some have endured it in sieges, and what other reward of their endurance was there than not to fall under the will of the victor? How much greater is this reward—everlasting liberty, to fear neither man nor god! This is the prize even amid hunger.

Armies have endured the want of all things, have lived on the roots of herbs, and have borne hunger upon things foul to name. All this they have suffered for a kingdom—and, that you may marvel the more, another man's kingdom. Will anyone hesitate to bear poverty, that he may free his mind from madness? One must not, then, acquire wealth first; one may come to philosophy even without travelling-money.

So it is. When you have everything, then you will wish to have wisdom too? Shall this be the last instrument of life and, so to speak, its appendage? No, but whether you have something—philosophize now, for how do you know whether you do not already have too much?—or whether you have nothing, seek this before anything else.

"But necessaries were lacking." First, they cannot be lacking, because Nature seeks the least, and the wise man accommodates himself to Nature. But if extreme necessities have fallen upon him, he will straightway go forth from life and cease to be a trouble to himself. But if there shall be but a little and a narrow store by which life can be sustained, he will reckon it a good, and, not anxious or troubled beyond what is necessary, will render to his belly and his shoulders their due, and, secure and glad, will laugh at the busy occupations of the rich and the rushings to and fro of those who run after riches, and will say:

"Why do you put yourself off into the distance? Will you wait for the profit of usury, or the gain from merchandise, or the will of a rich old man, when you can become rich on the instant?" Wisdom brings ready cash; she has given riches to whomever she has rendered riches superfluous. These things pertain to others; you are nearer to the rich. Change the age, and you have too much. But it is the same in every age—what is enough is the same. I could have closed the letter at this point, had I not spoiled you.

The kings of the Parthians cannot be greeted without a gift; you cannot be bidden farewell without payment. What of it? I will borrow from Epicurus: "For many men the acquisition of riches has been not an end of their miseries, but a change of them."

Nor do I wonder at this. For the fault is not in things, but in the mind itself. That which had made poverty a burden to us has made riches a burden too. Just as it makes no difference whether you lay a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one—wherever you carry him, he will carry his sickness with him—so it makes no difference whether a sick mind is set among riches or in poverty. Its evil follows it. Farewell.