Letter 76

You threaten me with hostility if I keep you in the dark about any of my daily doings. See, then, how openly I live with you: I shall confide even this. I am attending the lectures of a philosopher; this is now the fifth day that I have been going to his school and listening to him hold forth from the eighth hour. "A fine age to begin!" you say. Fine indeed. And what is more foolish than to refuse to learn simply because you have not learned for a long time?

"What then? Shall I do as the fops and the young men do?" I am well off if this is the one thing that disgraces my old age. This school admits men of every age. "Shall we grow old only to trail after the young?" I, an old man, will go to the theatre, be carried to the games, let no pair of gladiators fight it out without me; and shall I blush to go to a philosopher?

As long as you are ignorant, you must keep learning; indeed, if we believe the proverb, as long as you live. And nothing fits the case better than this: as long as you live you must keep learning how to live. Yet there I also teach something myself. You ask what I teach? That even an old man must keep learning.

But I am ashamed of the human race each time I enter that school. As you know, the road to the house of Metronax compels me to pass by the very theatre of the Neapolitans. It is packed, and with great zeal they decide who is a good flute-player; the Greek herald and the trumpeter draw their crowd. But in the place where the question is, who is a good man, where men learn what it is to be good, the benches sit nearly empty, and the great majority think those who gather there have no business of any worth on hand: they are called idlers and loafers. May such mockery fall to my lot. The insults of the ignorant must be heard with an unruffled mind, and toward honourable ends the very scorn of men is to be despised.

Press on, Lucilius, and make haste, lest the same thing happen to you that happened to me, that you go on learning as an old man. Make haste all the more because you have now taken up a subject which you can scarcely master even in old age. "How much progress shall I make?" you ask. As much as you attempt.

Why do you wait? Wisdom has fallen to no one by chance. Money will come of its own accord, office will be thrust upon you, influence and station will perhaps be heaped on you; virtue will not fall into your lap. It is not learned by light effort or small labour; but it is worth the toil, since by it you take possession of every good at one stroke. For there is but one good, the honourable; in all those things that win the world's applause you will find nothing true, nothing certain.

Why the honourable is the one good I shall now explain, since you judge that I dealt with the matter too briefly in my earlier letter, and think that I praised the thesis to you rather than proved it; and I shall draw together into a small compass what has been said.

Everything is valued by its own particular good. The vine is commended by its fruitfulness and the flavour of its wine, the stag by its swiftness. You ask how strong of back the pack-mules are, whose one use is to carry a load. In a dog the first thing is keenness of scent, if it must track game; speed, if it must run them down; boldness, if it must seize and attack. That should be best in each thing for which it is born and by which it is judged.

In a human being what is best? Reason; by this he surpasses the animals and follows close behind the gods. Reason, then, made perfect, is his proper good; the rest he shares with animals and even with plants. He is strong; so are lions. He is handsome; so are peacocks. He is swift; so are horses. I do not say that in all these he is outdone. I am not asking what is greatest in him, but what is his own. He has a body; so do trees. He has impulse and voluntary motion; so do beasts and worms. He has a voice; but how much clearer is the dog's, how much shriller the eagle's, how much deeper the bull's, how much sweeter and more varied the nightingale's?

What is peculiar to a human being? Reason. When this is upright and brought to its fullness, it completes a man's happiness.

Therefore that one thing is the good in a man which alone belongs to a man. For now we are not asking what the good is, but what the good of a man is. If a man has nothing else of his own but reason, this will be his one good, but a good to be weighed against all others. If a man is bad, I take it he will be disapproved; if good, approved. That, then, is the first and only thing in a man by which he is approved or disapproved.

You do not doubt that this is a good; you doubt whether it is the only good. Suppose a man has everything else, health, riches, ancestral portraits in plenty, a thronged hall, but is by common admission bad: you will disapprove of him. Likewise, suppose a man has none of the things I have mentioned, lacks money, a crowd of clients, noble birth, a long line of ancestors, but is by common admission good: you will approve of him. Therefore this is the one good of a man, which whoever has it deserves praise even though stripped of all else, and whoever lacks it is condemned and rejected amid an abundance of all else.

The same standing that holds for things holds for human beings. A ship is called good not when it is painted with costly colours, nor when its beak is of silver or gold, nor when its figurehead is carved in ivory, nor when it is laden with treasure and royal wealth, but when it is steady and firm, its joints caulked tight to shut out the water, solid enough to bear the sea's onslaught, obedient to the helm, swift, and unmoved by the wind.

You will call a sword good not when its belt is gilded nor its scabbard set with gems, but when its edge is fine for cutting and its point will pierce any defence. The question asked of a ruler is not how handsome it is but how straight. Each thing is praised for that which is proper to it, for which it is meant.

So in a human being too it makes no difference how many acres he ploughs, how much he lends at interest, by how many he is courted, on how costly a couch he reclines, from how translucent a cup he drinks, but how good he is. And he is good if his reason is unfolded and upright and fitted to the will of his own nature.

This is called virtue; this is the honourable and the one good of man. For since reason alone makes a man complete, reason alone made perfect makes him happy; and this is the one good by which alone he is pronounced happy. We say that those things too are good which spring from virtue and are gathered together by it, that is, all its works; but virtue itself is the one good for this reason, that without it none of them exists.

If every good lies in the mind, then whatever strengthens, exalts, and enlarges the mind is good; and virtue makes the mind stronger, loftier, and ampler. For the other things, which inflame our desires, also press the mind down and undermine it, and when they seem to lift it up, they merely puff it up and mock it with much emptiness. The one good, therefore, is that by which the mind is made better.

All the actions of a whole life are governed by regard for the honourable and the base; to these the reckoning of what to do and not to do is referred. Let me explain. A good man will do what he judges he can do honourably, even if it is toilsome; he will do it though it costs him money; he will do it though it brings him danger; again, he will not do what is base, though it bring him money, pleasure, or power. Nothing will turn him aside from the honourable, nothing entice him toward the base.

Therefore, if he is at all costs to follow the honourable and at all costs to shun the base, and in every act of life to keep these two before his eyes, holding nothing good but the honourable and nothing evil but the base; if virtue alone in him is unwavering and unchanged by any chance, then this one good is unconquered, and the man is happy.

I said, if you happen to remember, that things commonly coveted and dreaded have been trampled underfoot by many in a rash burst of feeling. A man was found to lay his hand in the flames; one whose laughter the torturer could not interrupt; one who shed no tear at the funeral of his children; one who met death without trembling. For love, anger, and greed have braved dangers. If a brief stubbornness of will can do this when roused by some goad, how much more can virtue, which acts not by sudden impulse but with a steady force, and whose strength is lasting?

It follows that the things often despised by the thoughtless, and always by the wise, are neither goods nor evils. The one good, then, is virtue itself, which marches proudly between this fortune and that, holding both in great contempt.

If you once admit the opinion that there is some good besides the honourable, every virtue will be made to suffer. For no virtue can be maintained if it looks to anything outside itself. And if it does so, it is at war with reason, from which the virtues spring, and with truth, which does not exist without reason. But any opinion that is at war with truth is false.

You must grant that a good man is full of the highest reverence toward the gods. And so, whatever befalls him, he will bear it with an even mind; for he will know that it has come about by the divine law by which all things proceed. If this is so, the one good for him will be the honourable; for in this it lies, to obey the gods, not to flare up at sudden turns, not to bewail his lot, but to receive his fate with patience and to do what is commanded.

If there is any other good than the honourable, we shall be pursued by a greed for life, a greed for the things that furnish life, and this is unbearable, boundless, without rest. The one good, then, is the honourable, which has a measure.

We said that the life of men would be happier than that of the gods, if those things are goods which the gods have no part in, such as money and offices. Moreover, since souls set free, if souls are anything when free of the body, attain a happier state than while they dwell in the flesh, yet if those things are goods which we use through the body, the soul will be worse off when set free; but it is incredible that the soul should be more wretched when penned in and weighed down than when at liberty and given back to the universe.

I had also said: if those things are goods which fall to a human being as much as to dumb animals, then dumb animals too would lead a happy life; which can in no way be. All things must be endured for the honourable's sake; which would not have to be done, if there were any other good than the honourable. Although I treated these matters more fully in my earlier letter, I have here drawn them tight and run over them briefly.

But a doctrine of this kind will never seem true to you unless you lift up your mind and put the question to yourself: if circumstances should demand that you die for your country and buy the safety of all your fellow citizens with your own life, would you offer your neck not only with patience but even gladly? If you would do this, there is no other good. For you give up everything in order to keep this. See how great is the power of the honourable: you will die for the commonwealth, even if you are to do so the moment you learn that it must be done.

Sometimes from a most beautiful deed great joy is gathered even in a short and fleeting span; and although no fruit of the finished work touches the man who is dead and withdrawn from human affairs, yet the mere contemplation of the work to come gives delight, and the brave and just man, when he has set before himself the prizes of his death, the freedom of his country, the safety of all for whom he pays out his life, is in the highest pleasure and enjoys his own peril.

But even the man from whom this joy is snatched, who is robbed by the very swiftness of his deed of the chance to dwell on it, leaps to his death without hesitation, content to do what is right and honourable. Set against him all you can to deter him; say: "Your deed will soon be followed by oblivion and by the scant gratitude of your fellow citizens." He will answer: "All those things are outside my work. I look to the deed itself. I know that this is honourable. And so wherever it leads and calls, I come."

This, then, is the one good, which not only the perfected mind feels, but also the generous mind of good native quality; the rest are trifling and changeable. And so they are possessed with anxiety. Even when, by fortune's favour, they are heaped into one place, they lie heavy upon their owners and always press them down, and sometimes crush them too.

None of those whom you see in purple is happy, no more than those to whom on the stage the play assigns a sceptre and a robe; before the watching crowd they stride forth tall and high on their buskins, but the moment they go off they are unshod and shrink back to their own stature. None of those whom riches and offices set on a higher pinnacle is great. Why, then, does he seem great? Because you measure him together with his pedestal. A dwarf is not great even though he stand on a mountain; a colossus will keep its greatness even though it stand in a well.

This is the error that plagues us, this is how we are deceived: we value no one for what he is, but add to him the trappings with which he is adorned. Yet when you would form a true estimate of a man and know what sort he is, look at him naked; let him lay aside his patrimony, lay aside his offices and fortune's other lies, let him strip off the very body. Look at his mind, what sort and how great it is, whether great with what is another's or with what is its own.

If he looks with steady eyes upon flashing swords, and knows that it makes no difference to him whether his breath goes out through his mouth or through his slit throat, call him happy; if, when the tortures of the body are threatened against him, both those that come by chance and those that come by the wrong of a stronger man, when chains and exile and the empty terrors of human minds are spoken of, he hears them unmoved and says: "No shape of toils, O maiden, rises before me new or unforeseen; I have foretasted all and gone through them with myself in my mind. You threaten me with these things today; I have always threatened myself with them, and have prepared myself, a man, for what is human."

The blow of an evil foreseen falls softly. But to fools, and to those who trust in fortune, every shape of things seems new and unlooked for; and among the inexperienced a large part of an evil lies in its novelty. That you may know this, men endure more bravely, once they have grown used to them, the things they had thought harsh.

Therefore the wise man grows accustomed to coming evils, and what others make light by long endurance, he makes light by long forethought. Sometimes we hear the voices of the inexperienced saying, "I knew it was in store for me"; the wise man knows that all things are in store for him. Whatever has happened, he says: "I knew it." Farewell.