Letter 24

You write that you are anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit which an enemy's fury threatens you with, and you suppose that I will counsel you to set before yourself better things and to rest in a flattering hope. For what need is there to summon up evils, soon enough to be borne when they come, to anticipate them, and to lose the present time through fear of the future? It is, without doubt, foolish, because you are at some time to be wretched, to be wretched already. But I will lead you to security by another road.

If you wish to put off all anxiety, whatever you fear may happen, propose to yourself that it will happen in any case; and whatever that evil is, measure it for yourself and appraise your fear; you will surely understand that what you dread is either not great or not long.

Nor need examples to confirm you be long in the gathering; every age has brought them forth. Into whatever part of affairs, whether of our own state or of foreign ones, you cast your memory, there will meet you natures of great talent, or of great progress, or of great force. Can anything harder befall you, if you are condemned, than that you be sent into exile, that you be led to prison? Is there anything beyond this for anyone to fear, than that he be burned, that he perish? Set out each of these things singly and call up those who have despised them, who are not to be sought for but chosen.

Rutilius bore his own condemnation as though nothing else were grievous to him than that he was being ill judged. Metellus bore exile bravely, Rutilius even gladly; the one granted to the commonwealth that he should return, the other refused his return to Sulla, to whom at that time nothing was refused. In prison Socrates held a disputation and, when there were those who promised him flight, refused to go out, and remained, that he might take from men the fear of two most grievous things, death and prison.

Mucius placed his hand upon the fire. It is bitter to be burned; how much more bitter, if you suffer it by your own doing! You see a man not learned nor furnished with any precepts against death or pain, equipped only with a soldier's hardihood, exacting punishment from himself for his vain attempt; he stood the spectator of his own right hand dripping upon the enemy's brazier, nor did he draw back the hand flowing away over the bare bones until the fire was withdrawn from him by his enemy. He might have done something more successful in that camp, nothing braver. See how much keener virtue is to seize dangers than cruelty is to inflict them: more easily did Porsenna pardon Mucius for having wished to kill him than Mucius pardoned himself for not having killed.

"Those tales," you say, "are chanted in all the schools; presently, when we come to the despising of death, you will tell me of Cato." Why should I not tell of him, reading on that last night Plato's book with a sword laid at his head? He had provided himself with these two instruments in the extremity: the one, that he might wish to die; the other, that he might be able. So, having set his affairs in order—as far as broken and ruined affairs could be set in order—he judged that he must so act that it should be in no one's power either to kill Cato or to have the fortune of saving him.

And, drawing the sword which up to that day he had kept pure of all bloodshed: "You have accomplished nothing, Fortune," he said, "by withstanding all my endeavours. I have fought thus far not for my own liberty, but for my country's; nor did I act with such stubbornness that I might live free, but that I might live among the free. Now, since the affairs of the human race are past hope, let Cato be conveyed to safety."

He then drove a deadly wound into his body. When this had been bound up by the physicians, and he had less blood, less strength, but the same spirit, now angry not only with Caesar but with himself, he thrust his bare hands into the wound, and that noble spirit, that despiser of all power, he did not let go, but flung forth.

I do not heap up these examples now to exercise my wit, but to exhort you against that which seems most terrible. And I shall exhort you the more easily if I show that not only brave men have despised this moment of breathing out the soul, but that certain men, cowardly in other things, have in this matter equalled the spirit of the bravest—like that Scipio, the father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompey, who, carried back to Africa by a contrary wind, when he saw his own ship taken by the enemy, ran himself through with the steel, and, when they asked where the commander was, said: "The commander is well."

This saying made him equal to his ancestors and did not suffer the glory fated for the Scipios in Africa to be broken off. It was much to conquer Carthage, but more to conquer death. "The commander," he said, "is well." Ought a commander, and a Scipio at that, to die otherwise?

I do not call you back to histories, nor gather from all the ages the despisers of death, who are very many. Look to these times of ours, of whose languor and luxury we complain; they will furnish men of every rank, of every fortune, of every age, who have cut short their evils by death. Believe me, Lucilius, death is so far from being to be feared that, by its benefit, nothing is to be feared.

And although your conscience gives you confidence, nevertheless, because many things prevail outside the case, both hope for what is most fair, and prepare yourself for what is most unfair. But above all remember this: to strip from things their tumult, and to see what is in each; you will know that there is nothing terrible in them except the very fear.

What you see happening to children happens to us too, who are children grown a little bigger: if they see those whom they love, with whom they are familiar, with whom they play, wearing masks, they are frightened. The mask must be plucked off not only from men, but from things, and their own face restored to them.

Why do you show me swords and fires and a throng of executioners raging around you? Take away that pageantry under which you lie hidden and frighten fools! You are Death, whom but lately my slave, whom my serving-maid, despised. Why do you again spread out before me with great display the whips and the racks, and the instruments fitted to each limb for tearing a man to pieces bit by bit? Put away those things that stupefy us. Bid the groans fall silent, and the cries, and the bitterness of voices wrung out amid the mangling! Surely you are Pain, whom that gouty fellow despises, whom that dyspeptic endures amid his very dainties, whom the girl bears in childbed. Slight you are, if I can bear you; short, if I cannot.

Turn over in your mind these things, which you have often heard, often said. But whether you have truly heard, whether you have truly said, prove it by the effect. For this is the most shameful thing, which is wont to be thrown in our teeth, that we handle the words of philosophy, not its works. What? Have you only now learned that death hangs over you, only now exile, only now pain? Into these things you were born. Let us think of whatever can happen as bound to happen.

What I advise you to do, I know for certain you have done; now I admonish you not to plunge your mind into that anxiety. For it will be blunted and have less vigour, when it must rise up. Lead it away from your private case to the public one. Say that your poor body is mortal and frail, to which pain comes not only from injury or from the violence of one more powerful: the very pleasures turn into torments. Banquets bring indigestion, drunkenness numbness and trembling of the sinews, lusts a distortion of the feet and hands and all the joints.

"I shall become poor": then I shall be among the more. "I shall become an exile": then I shall think myself born in the place to which I am sent. "I shall be bound": what then? Am I now unfettered? To this Nature has bound me—the heavy weight of my own body. "I shall die": that is to say, I shall cease to be able to fall sick, I shall cease to be able to be bound, I shall cease to be able to die.

I am not so foolish as to run through here the Epicurean refrain and say that the fears of the world below are empty—that Ixion is not whirled upon his wheel, that the stone is not pushed uphill on the shoulders of Sisyphus, that no man's vitals can be devoured and grow again daily; no one is so much a child as to fear Cerberus and the darkness and the ghostly garb of skeletons clinging together by their bare bones. Death either consumes us or strips us bare. To those set free, better things remain, the burden taken off; for those consumed, nothing remains, goods and evils alike removed.

Allow me at this point to repeat a verse of your own, if first I warn you to judge that you wrote those things not for others, but for yourself too. It is base to say one thing and feel another; how much baser to write one thing and feel another! I remember that you once handled that theme, that we do not fall into death suddenly, but advance toward it little by little; we die daily.

For daily some part of life is taken away, and even while we are growing, life is diminishing. We have lost infancy, then boyhood, then youth. Up to yesterday, whatever time has passed is perished; this very day which we are spending we share with death. As it is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but whatever has flowed out before, so the last hour, in which we cease to be, does not by itself make death, but by itself completes it; then we arrive at death, but we have long been coming.

When you had described these things with that eloquence which is always yours—great indeed always, yet never keener than where you lend your words to truth—you said: "Death is not one thing, but the last that comes." I would rather you read yourself than my letter. For it will appear to you that this death which we fear is the last, not the only one.

I see where you are looking; you ask what I have stuffed into this letter, what spirited saying of someone's, what useful precept. Out of this very matter that has been in hand, something shall be sent. Epicurus reproaches no less those who covet death than those who fear it, and says: "It is ridiculous to run to death from weariness of life, when by your manner of life you have brought it about that one must run to death."

Likewise in another place he says: "What is so ridiculous as to seek death, when by the fear of death you have made your life unquiet?" To these you may add this too, of the same stamp: that so great is the imprudence of men, nay, their madness, that some are driven to death by the fear of death.

Whichever of these things you handle, you will strengthen your mind either for the endurance of death or for the endurance of life. For both we need to be admonished and confirmed: not to love life too much, and not to hate it too much. Even when reason persuades us to make an end, the impulse is not to be taken up rashly nor at a rush.

The brave and wise man ought not to flee from life, but to go out of it. And above all let that passion too be avoided which has seized upon many—the lust to die. For there is, my Lucilius, as toward other things, so also toward dying, an ill-considered inclination of the mind, which often seizes upon men of noble and most ardent nature, often the slothful and prostrate; the former despise life, the latter are weighed down by it.

Some are overtaken by a satiety of doing and seeing the same things, and not a hatred but a loathing of life, into which we slip with philosophy herself impelling us, while we say: "How long the same things? To be sure, I shall wake, I shall sleep, I shall be hungry, I shall be cold, I shall be hot. There is no end of anything, but all things are linked in a circle; they flee and follow." There are many who judge it not bitter to live, but superfluous. Farewell.