Letter 19

I leap for joy as often as I receive your letters. For they fill me with good hope, and now they no longer promise concerning you, but pledge. So do, I pray and beseech you. For what better thing have I to ask of a friend than what I am about to ask for his own sake? If you can, withdraw yourself from those occupations; if not, tear yourself away. We have scattered time enough; let us begin, in old age, to gather in our gear.

Is this anything to be envied? We have lived upon the strait; let us die in the harbour. And I would not advise you to seek a name from your leisure, which you ought neither to boast of nor to hide. For never will I drive you so far, in my condemnation of the madness of the human race, that I should wish some hiding-place and oblivion to be prepared for you; rather, see to it that your retirement be such as not to be conspicuous, but to come into view of its own accord.

Next, let those see to that whose plans are still whole and at their start, whether they wish to pass their life through the dark; for you that is not free. The vigour of your talent, the elegance of your writings, your famous and noble friendships, have brought you out into the open. Already reputation has laid hold of you. Though you sink to the depths and bury yourself utterly, your earlier deeds will point you out.

You cannot have darkness; whithersoever you flee, much of your former light will follow you. You can claim repose without anyone's hatred, without longing or any gnawing of your own mind. For what will you leave behind that you could imagine yourself leaving unwillingly? Your clients? Of whom not one follows you yourself, but something of yours. Friendship was once sought, now plunder is; the forsaken old men will alter their wills, and the visitor at your morning levee will move to another threshold. A great thing cannot be had at a small price; reckon whether you would rather leave yourself or something of your possessions.

Would, indeed, that it had fallen to you to grow old within the measure of your birth, and that Fortune had not flung you on high! A swift prosperity has carried you far from the sight of the wholesome life—a province, and a procuratorship, and whatever is promised by these things; then greater offices will take you up, and others out of others.

What will the end be? What do you wait for, until you cease to have anything left to desire? That time will never come.

If you betake yourself to private affairs, all things will be smaller, but they will fill you abundantly; whereas now the very many things heaped on from every side do not satisfy. But which would you rather—fullness out of want, or hunger amid plenty? Prosperity is both greedy and exposed to another's greed. So long as nothing is enough for you, you yourself will be enough for no one.

"How," you say, "shall I get out?" Anyhow. Think how many things you have rashly attempted for money, how many laboriously for honour; something must be ventured for leisure too—or else you must grow old amid that anxiety of procuratorships and afterward of city offices, in turmoil and ever-new billows, which no modesty, no quietness of life has had the fortune to escape. For what does it matter to the case whether you wish to be at rest? Your Fortune does not wish it. And what if you allow it even now to grow? As much as is added to your successes, so much will be added to your fears.

I wish at this point to repeat to you a saying of Maecenas, who spoke the truth upon the very summit: "The very height thunder-strikes the topmost things." If you ask in what book he said it, in the one entitled Prometheus. He meant to say: the topmost things have the thunderbolt upon them. Is any power, then, worth so much that you should speak so drunkenly? A man of talent he was, destined to have given a great pattern of Roman eloquence, had not prosperity unstrung him—nay, unmanned him. This same end awaits you, unless you now haul in your sails, unless—what he wished too late—you hug the shore.

I could have squared my account with you by this saying of Maecenas. But you will raise a dispute with me, if I know you, and will not be willing to take what I owe in coin that is rough and base. As the case stands, I must make a loan from Epicurus. "Before all," he says, "consider with whom you eat and drink, rather than what you eat and drink. For feasting without a friend is the life of a lion and a wolf."

This will not fall to your lot unless you withdraw; otherwise you will have as guests those whom your name-caller has sorted out of the crowd of morning callers. But he errs who seeks a friend in the hall and tests him at the banquet. The busy man, beset with his goods, has no greater evil than that he thinks men his friends to whom he himself is not a friend, that he judges his benefits effective for winning friends, whereas certain men hate the more, the more they owe. A light debt makes a debtor; a heavy one, an enemy.

"What then? Do benefits not procure friendships?" They do, if it has been permitted to choose those who are to receive them, if they have been well placed and not scattered. And so, while you are beginning to be your own master, in the meantime use this counsel of the wise: think it matters more to the case who has received than what he has received. Farewell.