Letter 60

I complain, I quarrel, I am angry. Do you even now wish for what your nurse wished for you, or your tutor, or your mother? Do you not yet understand how much evil they wished you? O how hostile to us are the prayers of our own people! And the more hostile the more happily they have turned out. I no longer wonder that all evils have followed us from earliest boyhood; we grew up amid the curses of our parents. May the gods at last hear our own voice too, raised on our behalf and asking for nothing.

How long shall we ask something of the gods, as though we could not yet feed ourselves? How long shall we fill the plains of great cities with our sowings? How long shall a whole people reap for us? How long shall many ships, and those from more than one sea, fetch the furnishings of a single table? A bull is filled with the pasture of a very few acres; one forest suffices for several elephants; man is fed by both land and sea.

What then? Did Nature give us so insatiable a belly, when she had given us such modest bodies, that we should outdo the greed of the vastest and most voracious of animals? By no means. For how little it is that is given to Nature! She is dismissed with little. It is not the hunger of our belly that costs us much, but our ambition.

These men, therefore, as Sallust says, "obedient to the belly," let us count in the rank of the animals, not of men; but certain of them not even of animals, but of the dead. He lives who is of use to many; he lives who makes use of himself; but those who lurk and lie torpid are in their house as in a tomb. Over such men, though you carve their name in marble on the very threshold, they have gone before their own death. Farewell.