Letter 77

Today, all of a sudden, the Alexandrian ships came into view, the ones usually sent ahead to announce the coming of the fleet behind them; they are called the mail-boats. Campania is glad to see them; the whole crowd stands out on the piers of Puteoli and picks out the Alexandrian vessels from the very style of their sails, even among a great throng of ships. For they alone are allowed to spread the topsail, which in the open sea all ships carry.

Nothing aids a ship's course so much as the upper part of the sail; from there the vessel is driven hardest. And so, whenever the wind freshens and is stronger than is convenient, the yard is lowered; the blast has less force when it comes from low down. But once they have entered the waters off Capreae and the headland from which "on the storm-swept summit lofty Pallas keeps her watch," the rest are ordered to be content with the mainsail; the topsail is the badge of the Alexandrians.

Amid this general rush to the shore I felt great pleasure in my own laziness, for although I was about to receive letters from my people, I was in no hurry to learn what state my affairs were in there, or what news they brought; for a long while now nothing of mine is either lost or gained. Even if I were not old, this is something I ought to have felt; but now I feel it far more. However little I had, there would still be more provision left to me than journey, especially since the road we have entered upon need not be travelled to the end.

A journey is incomplete if you stop halfway, or short of the place you set out for; a life is not incomplete if it is honourable. Wherever you leave off, if you leave off well, it is whole. Often, too, we must leave off bravely, and not for the gravest reasons; for the reasons that keep us here are not grave either.

Tullius Marcellinus, whom you knew very well, a quiet young man and prematurely old, fell ill with a disease that was not incurable but long, troublesome, and exacting, and began to think about death. He called together a number of his friends. Each one, according to his timidity, gave him the advice he himself would have followed, or, according to his flattery and inclination, the advice he thought most pleasing.

But our friend the Stoic, an excellent man and, to praise him in the words by which he deserves to be praised, a brave and vigorous man, gave him, in my opinion, the best encouragement. For he began thus: "Do not torment yourself, my Marcellinus, as though you were deliberating over some great matter. To live is no great thing; all your slaves live, all the beasts live; the great thing is to die honourably, wisely, bravely. Think how long you have now been doing the same things: food, sleep, lust, round and round this circle we run. The wish to die may come not only to the wise man, or the brave man, or the wretched man, but even to the man who is merely fastidious."

Marcellinus did not need someone to persuade him, but someone to help; his slaves were unwilling to obey. First the Stoic took away their fear, and made it plain that the household was in danger only when it was uncertain whether the master's death had been voluntary; otherwise it was as bad an example to kill one's master as to prevent his dying.

Then he reminded Marcellinus himself that it was no more than humane that, just as the leavings of a finished dinner are shared out among the bystanders, so when life was finished something should be handed to those who had been servants of one's whole life. Marcellinus was an easy-going and generous man, even when it was his own that was being given. So he distributed small sums to his weeping slaves and consoled them besides.

He had no need of steel, no need of blood; for three days he abstained from food and ordered a tent to be set up in his very bedroom. Then a tub was brought in, in which he lay for a long while, and as warm water was poured over him from time to time he gradually grew faint, not, as he said, without a certain pleasure, the kind that a gentle dissolving is wont to bring, a thing not unknown to those of us who have sometimes fainted away.

I have digressed into a little tale not unwelcome to you. For you will learn that the end of your friend was neither hard nor wretched. Though he took his own life, yet he passed out of it most gently and slipped away from life. But the tale will not even be useless. For often necessity demands examples of this kind. Often we ought to die and are unwilling, we die and are unwilling.

No one is so untaught as not to know that one must die some day; yet when the moment draws near, he shrinks back, trembles, weeps. Will not a man seem to you the most foolish of all who wept because he had not been alive a thousand years before? Equally foolish is the man who weeps because he will not be alive a thousand years hence. These are the same: you will not be, and you were not. Both spans of time belong to others, not to you.

You have been flung into this point of time; however far you stretch it, how far will you stretch it? Why do you weep? What do you long for? You waste your labour. "Cease to hope that the decrees of the gods can be bent by prayer." They are fixed and settled, and are drawn along by a great and eternal necessity. You will go where all things go. What is new in this for you? You were born to this law. This befell your father, this your mother, this your forefathers, this all before you, this all after you. An unconquered chain, alterable by no aid, has bound and drags all things along.

How great a throng of those who must die will follow you? How great a company will go with you? You would be braver, I think, if many thousands were dying along with you; and yet many thousands of men and animals, at this very moment in which you hesitate to die, are giving up their breath in various ways. But did you not think that you would one day come to that toward which you were always going? No road is without its end.

Do you suppose I shall now bring forward examples of great men? I shall bring forward examples of boys. There is the well-known Spartan, still a child, who, when taken captive, kept crying in his Doric tongue, "I will not be a slave," and made good his word; for as soon as he was ordered to perform a servile and degrading task, being bidden to fetch a foul vessel, he dashed his head against the wall and broke it.

So near is freedom; and does anyone go on being a slave? Would you not rather your son perished thus than grew old through sloth? Why, then, should you be troubled, if even a boy can die bravely? Suppose you are unwilling to follow; you will be led. Make your own what now belongs to another. Will you not take on a boy's spirit, so as to say, "I am not a slave"? Unhappy man, you are a slave to men, a slave to circumstances, a slave to life. For life, if the courage to die is wanting, is slavery.

Have you any reason to wait? The very pleasures that hold you back and detain you, you have used up. None of them is new to you, none that is not already loathsome through satiety itself. You know the taste of wine, the taste of mead. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand jars pass through your bladder; you are a strainer.

What else is there that you should grieve to have torn from you? Friends? But who can be a friend to you? Your country? Do you value it so highly as to be slow to dine? The sun? You would put it out, if you could; for what have you ever done worthy of its light? Confess it: it is not because you miss the senate-house, or the forum, or even nature herself, that you are slow to die; you are reluctant to leave the market in which you have left nothing behind.

You fear death; yet how you scorn it in the midst of a feast of mushrooms! You wish to live; but do you know how? You fear to die; and what then? Is this life of yours not death? Gaius Caesar, as a man was passing along the Latin road, when one of the prisoners with a beard hanging down to his breast begged to be put to death, said, "Why, are you alive now?" That is the answer to be made to those for whom death will be a relief: "You fear to die; why, are you alive now?"

"But," he says, "I wish to live, since I do many things honourably. I am unwilling to leave the duties of life, which I perform faithfully and industriously." Why? Do you not know that to die is also one of the duties of life? You are leaving no duty undone. For there is no fixed number that you are bound to complete.

No life is not short. For if you regard the nature of things, even the life of Nestor is short, and that of Sattia, who ordered it to be inscribed on her tomb that she had lived ninety-nine years. You see someone boasting of a long old age. Who could have borne her, had it fallen to her lot to round out a hundred? As with a play, so with life: what matters is not how long it lasts, but how well it is acted. It makes no difference at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will; only put a good ending to it. Farewell.