Letter 20

If you are well, and think yourself worthy at some time to become your own, I rejoice. For it will be my glory if I draw you out of that place where you toss about with no hope of escape. But this, my Lucilius, I beg and exhort you: let philosophy down into the deepest part of your breast, and take the proof of your progress not from speech nor from writing, but from firmness of mind and the diminishing of desires; prove your words by deeds.

Different is the aim of those who declaim and angle for the applause of the ring of listeners; different that of those who hold the ears of the young and the idle by varied or fluent disputation. Philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak, and exacts this, that each man live by her law, that his life be not at variance with his speech, that his life itself within itself be of one hue in all its actions without discord. This is the chief duty of wisdom, and its chief proof: that deeds should accord with words, that a man should everywhere be equal to himself and the same. "Who will furnish this?" Few; yet some. For it is hard; nor do I say that the wise man will always go at the same pace, but along the same road.

Observe yourself, then: see whether your dress and your house disagree, whether you are lavish with yourself, mean with your household, whether you dine sparingly but build extravagantly. Take up once for all some one rule by which to live, and bring your whole life into agreement with it.

I will tell you, further, whence comes that inconsistency and unlikeness of acts and counsels: no one sets before himself what he wants, and even if he has set it, he does not persist in it, but leaps across; nor does he merely change, but returns and rolls back into the very things he had forsaken and condemned.

And so, to leave aside the old definitions of wisdom and to embrace the whole measure of human life, I can content myself with this: What is wisdom? Always to will the same and to be unwilling for the same. You need not add that little proviso, that what you will be right; for nothing can always please anyone except what is right.

Men, therefore, do not know what they want, except at the very moment when they want it; in sum, no one's willing or unwilling is settled. Their judgment is varied daily and turned to its opposite, and most men pass their life as a game. Press on, then, with what you have begun, and perhaps you will be brought either to the summit, or to that which you alone understand is not yet the summit.

"What will become," you say, "of this throng of dependents if I have no estate?" That throng, when it has ceased to be fed by you, will feed itself; or what you cannot learn by your own bounty, you will learn by poverty. It will retain the true and sure friends; whoever was following not you but something else will depart. But is not poverty to be loved for this one thing, that it will show by whom you are loved? O when will that day come on which no one shall lie in your honour!

Hither, then, let your thoughts tend; this be your care, this your prayer—ready to remit all other vows to God—that you be content with yourself and with the goods that are born from yourself. What happiness can be nearer? Reduce yourself to small means, from which you cannot fall; and, that you may do this the more gladly, to this end will pertain the tribute of this letter, which I will at once pay over.

You may envy me, but even now Epicurus gladly pays for me. "Your speech, believe me, will seem more magnificent upon a pallet and in rags. For those things will not only be said, but proved." I, at any rate, hear what our Demetrius says in a different way when I have seen him with nothing about him, lying upon no bed but the bare ground—not so much the teacher of truths as the witness of them.

"What then? May one not despise riches when they are laid in one's lap?" Why not? He too is of mighty soul who, when they are poured about him, having long and much marvelled that they have come to him, laughs, and hears rather than feels that they are his. It is much not to be corrupted by living with riches; great is he who, amid riches, is a poor man.

"I do not know," you say, "how that fellow will bear poverty, if he falls into it." Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether that boastful poor man of yours despises riches if they fall to him, or how he will bear them. So in either case, the mind must be judged, and we must look into whether the one delights in poverty and the other does not delight in riches. Otherwise it is a slender proof of a good will, a bed of straw and rags, unless it appear that a man endures these things not by necessity but by choice.

For the rest, it is the mark of a great natural gift not to hasten to these things as though to better ones, but to prepare oneself as for things easy. And they are easy, Lucilius; but when you have come to them after meditating long beforehand, they are pleasant too; for in them is that without which nothing is pleasant—security.

I judge it necessary, then, to do what I have written to you that great men have often done: to set apart some days on which we may train ourselves by an imaginary poverty for the real one. This is the more to be done because we are soaked through with delights and judge all hard and difficult things to be intolerable. The mind must rather be roused from sleep, and pinched, and reminded that Nature has appointed for us the very least. No one is born rich. Whoever comes forth into the light has been bidden to be content with milk and a rag; from these beginnings kingdoms cannot contain us. Farewell.