Letter 44

Again you make yourself out a little man to me and say that Nature dealt grudgingly with you first, then fortune, when you can withdraw yourself from the common herd and rise to the highest happiness of men. If there is any other good thing in philosophy, it is this, that it does not look into the family tree. All men, if they are recalled to their first origin, come from the gods.

You are a Roman knight, and to this rank your industry has brought you; but, by Hercules, to many the fourteen rows are closed; not all does the senate-house admit; the camp too chooses fastidiously those whom it receives for toil and peril. A good mind lies open to all; in this respect we are all noble. Philosophy neither rejects anyone nor chooses; it shines for all.

Socrates was no patrician. Cleanthes drew water and hired out his hands to water a garden. Plato philosophy did not receive a nobleman, but made one. Why should you despair that you can become their equal? They are all your forebears, if you bear yourself worthy of them; and you will bear yourself so, if you straightway persuade yourself of this, that no one surpasses you in nobility.

We all have just as many forebears before us; no man's origin does not lie beyond memory. Plato says that there is no king who is not sprung from slaves, no slave who is not sprung from kings. All these things a long succession of changes has mingled, and fortune has tossed up and down.

Who is well-born? He who is well fitted by nature to virtue. This alone must be regarded; for otherwise, if you recall the ancient line, everyone comes from that before which there is nothing. From the first beginning of the world down to this present time a series alternating between the splendid and the sordid has led us along. An entrance-hall full of smoke-stained portraits does not make a man noble. No one lived for our glory, nor is what was before us our own; the mind makes a man noble, which from whatever condition is free to rise above fortune.

Suppose, then, that you are not a Roman knight, but a freedman; you can attain this, that you alone be free among the freeborn. "How?" you say. If you distinguish goods and evils without the people for your authority. We must look not whence things come, but whither they go. If there is anything that can make life happy, it is good by its own right. For it cannot be debased into an evil.

What then is it in which men err, when all desire the happy life? That they take its instruments for the thing itself, and, while they seek it, flee from it. For although the sum of the happy life is solid security and an unshaken trust in it, men gather up the causes of anxiety, and along the treacherous road of life not only carry their burdens but drag them; thus they are always retreating farther from the attainment of what they seek, and the more pains they have spent, the more they entangle themselves and are borne backward. This happens to those who hurry in a labyrinth; their very speed entangles them. Farewell.