Letter 70

After a long interval I have seen your Pompeii again. I was brought back into the sight of my own youth. Whatever I had done there as a young man, I seemed to myself still able to do, and to have done a little while ago.

We have sailed past life, Lucilius, and as on the sea, as our Virgil says, "the lands and cities recede," so in this course of most rapid time we first put behind us our boyhood, then our youth, then whatever lies between the young man and the old, set in the borderland of both, then the best years of old age itself. Last of all begins to show itself the universal end of the human race.

We, in our utter madness, think it a reef; it is a harbor, sometimes to be sought, never to be refused, into which if anyone has been carried within his first years, he ought no more to complain than one who has had a quick voyage. For one man, as you know, sluggish winds mock and detain and weary with the tedium of a most lingering calm; another a steady gale carries swiftly through.

Think that the same befalls us: some life has brought most swiftly to the goal to which they must come even though they lingered; others it has soaked and stewed. Which, as you know, is not always to be held on to. For it is not living that is good, but living well. And so the wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can.

He will see where he is to live, with whom, how, what he is to do. He always considers what kind of life it is, not how much of it. If many troublesome things befall and disturb his tranquility, he sends himself forth. And this he does not only in the last extremity, but as soon as fortune has begun to be suspect to him, he looks about carefully whether he should not on that account make an end. He thinks it makes no difference to him whether he makes the end or accepts it, whether it comes later or sooner. He does not fear it as though it were a great loss; no one can lose much from a leaking drip.

To die sooner or later is not to the point; to die well or ill is to the point. But to die well is to escape the danger of living ill. And so I think most effeminate that saying of the Rhodian, who, when he had been thrown into a cage by a tyrant and was fed like some wild beast, said to one who advised him to abstain from food: "While a man lives, he must hope for all things."

Even if this be true, life is not to be bought at every price. Some things, though they be great, though they be certain, I will yet not come to by a shameful confession of weakness. Shall I reflect that, in the man who lives, fortune can do all things, rather than reflect that, in the man who knows how to die, fortune can do nothing?

Yet sometimes, even if certain death is at hand and he knows the punishment marked out for him, he will not lend his hand to his own penalty; he would be lending it to himself. It is folly to die through fear of death. The one who is to kill you is coming. Wait. Why anticipate him? Why take upon yourself the management of another's cruelty? Do you grudge your executioner the deed, or spare him?

Socrates could have ended his life by abstinence and died of hunger rather than of poison. Yet he spent thirty days in prison and in the expectation of death — not in the spirit that all things might come to pass, that so long a time held many hopes, but that he might submit himself to the laws, that he might give his friends a Socrates to be enjoyed to the last. What was more foolish than to despise death and fear the poison?

Scribonia, a woman of weight, was the aunt of Drusus Libo, a young man as stupid as he was noble, who hoped for greater things than anyone in that age could hope, or than he himself could in any. When he had been carried back ill from the senate in a litter, with no very thronged escort — for all his connections had impiously deserted him, now no longer a defendant but a corpse — he began to take counsel whether to bring death upon himself or to wait for it. Scribonia said to him: "What pleasure do you take in doing another's business?" She did not persuade him; he laid hands upon himself, and not without reason. For if a man who is to die in three or four days at the will of his enemy goes on living, he is doing another's business.

You cannot therefore pronounce on the matter in general, when an outward force threatens death, whether it is to be anticipated or to be awaited. For there are many things that can draw one either way. If the one death is with torment, the other simple and easy, why should not a hand be laid on the latter? As I shall choose a ship when about to sail and a house when about to dwell, so I shall choose a death when about to depart from life.

Besides, just as a longer life is not necessarily better, so a longer death is necessarily worse. In nothing more than in death ought we to humor the mind. Let it go out by the way it has taken its impulse; whether it seeks the sword or the noose or some draught that seizes the veins, let it proceed and break the chains of slavery. His life every man ought to make approved to others also, his death to himself alone. The best is that which pleases.

Foolishly are these things thought: "Someone will say I acted with too little courage, someone that I acted too rashly, someone that there was some more spirited kind of death." Will you reflect that the counsel which is in hand is one to which reputation does not pertain? Look to this one thing, to snatch yourself from fortune as quickly as possible; otherwise there will be those who think ill of your deed.

You will find even men who profess wisdom who deny that force should be brought to bear upon one's own life, and judge it a crime to become one's own slayer; one should wait, they say, for the end that Nature has decreed. He who says this does not see that he is shutting off the road of liberty. The eternal law has done nothing better than that it gave us one entrance into life, but many exits.

Shall I await the cruelty either of disease or of man, when I can go out through the midst of torments and shake off adversities? This is the one thing for which we cannot complain of life: it holds no one. Human affairs are in a good case, in that no one is wretched save by his own fault. Does it please you? Live. Does it not please you? You may return whence you came.

To relieve a headache you have often let blood. To reduce the body a vein is opened. There is no need to cleave the vitals with a vast wound; the road to that great liberty is opened with a lancet, and security stands fast in a tiny prick. What is it, then, that makes us slow and inert? None of us reflects that he must someday go forth from this dwelling; so the indulgence of the place and habit keep old tenants there even amid wrongs.

Do you wish to be free against this body? Dwell in it as one about to move out. Set before yourself that you must someday do without this lodging; you will be the braver for the necessity of going forth. But how shall its own end come into the mind of men who desire all things without end?

The meditation of no thing is so necessary. For other things perhaps are practiced in vain. The mind is prepared against poverty; the riches have remained. We have armed ourselves for the contempt of pain; the good fortune of a whole and sound body has never demanded the trial of this virtue from us. We have instructed ourselves to bear bravely the loss of those we love; fortune has kept alive all whom we loved. The day will come which demands the practice of this one thing.

There is no reason for you to suppose that only great men have had this strength to break through the bars of human servitude; no reason to judge that this can be done by none but a Cato, who drew out with his hand the life he had not let out with the sword. Men of the meanest lot have escaped to safety with a vast impulse, and when they were not permitted to die conveniently, nor to choose at their own will the instruments of death, they have snatched up whatever was at hand and made weapons by their own force of things that were not by nature harmful.

Lately in the school of the beast-fighters one of the Germans, while he was being made ready for the morning shows, withdrew to relieve himself; no other privacy without a guard was allowed him. There that stick which, with a sponge attached, is set there for cleaning the filth, he crammed whole down his throat, and, stopping his windpipe, choked out his breath. This was to do an insult to death. Just so; not very cleanly nor very decently. What is more foolish than to die fastidiously?

O brave man, O worthy that the choice of his fate should be given him! How bravely he would have used the sword, how spiritedly he would have flung himself into the deep height of the sea or down a sheer cliff! Forsaken on every side, he found how to bring upon himself both death and a weapon, that you may know that for dying nothing else stands in the way but the will. Let the deed of that most keen-spirited man be judged as each shall see fit, provided this stand fast: that the foulest death is to be preferred to the cleanest slavery.

Since I have begun to use sordid examples, I will persevere. For each man will demand more of himself if he sees that this thing can be despised even by the most despised. The Catos and the Scipios and others whom we are wont to hear with admiration we think set beyond imitation; but now I will show that this virtue has as many examples in the school of the beast-fights as in the leaders of the civil war.

Lately, when a certain man, sent to the morning show, was being carried along among the guards, as though nodding with oppressive sleep he let his head sink down until he thrust it into the spokes, and held himself in his seat long enough for the turning of the wheel to break his neck. In the very vehicle in which he was being borne to punishment he escaped.

Nothing stands in the way of one who longs to break out and depart. In the open Nature guards us. Whoever is permitted by his necessity looks about for a soft exit; whoever has more things at hand by which to free himself, let him make his choice and consider by which he had best be freed; whoever has but a hard occasion, let him snatch the nearest as the best, though it be unheard of, though it be new. There will be no lack of ingenuity for death in one who has not lacked the spirit.

Do you see how even the lowest slaves, when pain has driven its goads into them, are roused and cheat the most intent guards? He is a great man who has not only commanded death to himself, but found it. From the same spectacle I promised you more examples.

At the second show of the sea-fight one of the barbarians plunged the whole lance which he had received against his adversaries into his own throat. "Why, why," he said, "do I not this long while escape every torment, every mockery? Why do I, armed, await death?" This spectacle was the more glorious by as much

as it is more honorable for men to learn to die than to kill. What then? Shall those whom long meditation, and reason the mistress of all things, has equipped against these chances not have what abandoned and guilty minds have? Reason teaches us that the approaches of fate are various, the end the same, and that it makes no difference whence that begins which comes.

That same reason advises that, if you may, you die as you please; if not, as you can, and that you seize upon whatever comes to hand for bringing force upon yourself. It is wrongful to live by plunder, but on the contrary most beautiful to die by plunder. Farewell.