Letter 64

You were with us yesterday. You may complain, if only yesterday. That is why I added "with us." For with me you are always. Some friends had come in, on whose account a larger smoke was made — not the kind that is wont to burst from the kitchens of the fashionable and frighten the night-watch, but a modest one, such as signifies that guests have come.

Our talk was varied, as at a banquet, carrying no subject through to the end, but leaping from one thing to another. Then there was read a book of Quintus Sextius the father — a great man, if you believe me at all, and, though he denies it, a Stoic.

What vigor is in him, good gods, what spirit! This you will not find in all philosophers; the writings of some who have a famous name are bloodless. They lay down rules, they dispute, they cavil; they do not make the spirit, because they have none. But when you have read Sextius you will say: "He is alive, he is vigorous, he is free, he is above man; he sends me away full of vast confidence."

In what posture of mind I am when I read him, I will confess to you: I long to challenge every chance, I long to cry out: "Why do you delay, Fortune? Come on; you see I am ready." I put on the spirit of that man who seeks where to try himself, where to show his courage, who "prays among the spiritless cattle that a foaming boar be given him, or a tawny lion come down from the mountain."

I long to have something to conquer, by whose endurance I may be exercised. For this too Sextius has, a thing excellent: he will both show you the greatness of the happy life and not make you despair of it; you will know that it is on a height, but accessible to one who wills.

This same thing virtue herself will grant you: that you both admire her and yet hope for her. For me at least the very contemplation of wisdom is wont to take away much time; I gaze on her, struck with wonder, no otherwise than I do at times on the universe itself, which I often behold as though a new spectator.

And so I venerate the discoveries of wisdom and their discoverers; it is a pleasure to enter, as it were, upon the inheritance of many. For me these things were acquired, for me they were toiled over. But let us play the good head of a household; let us make larger what we have received. Let this inheritance pass enlarged from me to those who come after. Much work still remains, and much will remain, and to no one born even after a thousand ages will the chance be shut off of still adding something.

But even if all things have been discovered by the ancients, this will always be new: the use, and the knowledge and the arrangement of things discovered by others. Suppose remedies had been left us by which the eyes might be healed; there is no need for me to seek others, but these must nonetheless be fitted to the diseases and the occasions. By this the roughness of the eyes is smoothed; by this the thickness of the eyelids is thinned; by this a sudden inflammation and rheum is turned aside; by this the sight is sharpened; you must grind these and choose the time and apply to each its measure. The remedies of the mind have been discovered by the ancients; but how they are to be applied, or when, it is our task to seek.

Those who came before us did much, but they did not finish. Yet they are to be looked up to and worshipped after the manner of the gods. Why should I not keep images of great men as goads to my spirit, and celebrate their birthdays? Why should I not always address them for honor's sake? The reverence I owe my own teachers, the same I owe to those teachers of the human race, from whom the beginnings of so great a good have flowed.

If I see a consul or a praetor, I shall do all by which honor is wont to be paid to honor: I shall leap down from my horse, uncover my head, give way upon the path. What then? Shall I receive both the Marci Catones, and Laelius the Wise, and Socrates with Plato, and Zeno and Cleanthes into my mind without the highest reverence? I indeed venerate them, and always rise before such great names. Farewell.