Letter 82

I have now ceased to be anxious about you. "Which of the gods," you ask, "have you taken as your surety?" That one, of course, who deceives no one, a mind that loves the right and the good. The better part of you is in safety. Fortune can do you an injury; what concerns the matter more, I do not fear that you will do one to yourself. Go where you have begun to go, and settle yourself into that mode of life calmly, not softly.

I would rather be ill at ease than at ease in softness; and "ill at ease" understand in the sense in which the common folk take it: hardly, harshly, laboriously. We are wont to hear the life of certain men whom we do not approve called soft living; this is what they mean: "He is soft." For little by little the mind grows effeminate, and dissolves into the likeness of its own idleness and of the sloth in which it lies. What then? Is it not better for a man even to grow stiff and hard? Then these same dainty folk dread that which is no worse than death, and they live between idleness and the grave.

"What then?" you say, "is it not better to lie at ease even thus, than to be whirled about in those eddies of duties?" Both things are to be detested, both the cramping and the torpor. I think that the man who lies among perfumes is as truly dead as the one who is dragged off with the hook. Leisure without letters is death and the burial of a living man.

What good, then, is there in having withdrawn? As though the causes of our anxieties did not pursue us across the seas! What hiding-place is there into which the fear of death does not enter? What rest of life is so well fortified and drawn up to a height that pain does not terrify it? Wherever you hide yourself, human ills will din around you. There are many things outside us that surround us, to deceive or to press upon us; there are many within. Even in the midst of solitude the things that have settled deep within us seethe.

Philosophy must be set about us, an impregnable wall, which fortune, though it assail it with many engines, does not pass. The mind that has abandoned externals stands in an unassailable place, and from its own citadel asserts itself; below it every weapon falls. Fortune has not, as we suppose, long hands; she lays hold of no one but the man who clings to her.

Therefore, as far as we can, let us leap back from her; which only the knowledge of oneself and of nature will furnish. Let a man know whither he is to go, whence he came; what is good, what is evil; what to seek, what to flee; what that Reason is which distinguishes the things to be sought from those to be shunned, by which the madness of the desires is tamed and the savagery of the fears is checked.

Some think that these passions can be checked even without philosophy; but when some chance disturbance has roused them, they yield slowly, with delay. "What good," you say, "do these precepts do, if fortune has all the power?" They do this good: that even when fortune rules, the mind may be its own master. Empty letters do not strengthen the mind, but a teaching well grounded does. "Now there is need of courage, Aeneas, now of a firm heart."

But constant meditation will make that heart firm, if you have exercised not your words but your mind, if you have prepared yourself against death, against which he will neither exhort nor lift you up who tries to persuade you by quibbles that death is no evil. For I am glad, Lucilius, best of men, to laugh at the Greek absurdities, which, much as I marvel at them, I have not yet shaken off.

Our Zeno uses this syllogism: "No evil is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not an evil." You have done good work; I am freed from fear; after this I shall not hesitate to stretch out my neck. Will you not speak more seriously, and not move to laughter a man about to die? Truly, I could not easily tell you which was the more absurd, the man who thought he had by this question quenched the fear of death, or the man who tried, as though it were to the point, to refute it.

For he himself set against it a contrary question, born of the fact that we place death among the things indifferent, which the Greeks call adiaphora. "Nothing indifferent," he says, "is glorious; but death is glorious; therefore death is not indifferent." You see where this question slips in a fallacy: death is not glorious, but to die bravely is glorious. And when you say, "Nothing indifferent is glorious," I grant it to you, but with this reservation, that I say nothing is glorious except as it has to do with things indifferent. I call "indifferent," that is, neither good nor bad, disease, pain, poverty, exile, death.

None of these is in itself glorious, yet nothing is glorious without them. For it is not poverty that is praised, but the man whom poverty has not bent nor bowed down; it is not exile that is praised, but the man who has gone into exile with a bolder face than if he had been sending another into exile; it is not pain that is praised, but the man whom pain has forced into nothing. No one praises death, but the man whose mind death has carried off before it could throw it into confusion.

All these things are in themselves neither honourable nor glorious, but whatever of them virtue has approached and handled, it makes honourable and glorious; they lie in the middle; it makes a difference whether wickedness or virtue has laid its hand upon them. For that death which in Cato is glorious is at once base and shameful in Brutus. For this is that Brutus who, when about to die, sought delays for his death, withdrew to relieve his bowels, and, summoned to death and bidden offer his neck, said, "I will offer it, so may I live." What madness it is to flee when you cannot go backward! "I will offer it, so may I live." He all but added, "even under Antony." O man worthy to be handed over to life!

But, as I had begun to say, you see that death itself is neither evil nor good; Cato used it most honourably, Brutus most basely. Every thing takes on the comeliness it did not have when virtue is added. We call a bedroom bright; this same room is most dark at night.

Day pours light into it, night snatches it away; so to those things which by us are called indifferent and middle, riches, strength, beauty, honours, kingship, and on the other hand death, exile, ill health, pains, and whatever else we have dreaded more or less, it is either wickedness or virtue that gives the name of good or evil. A lump of metal in itself is neither hot nor cold; thrown into the furnace it has grown hot, plunged into water it has grown cold. Death is honourable through that which is honourable, namely virtue and a mind despising externals.

There is also, Lucilius, a great distinction even among these things which we call middle. For death is not indifferent in the same way as the question whether your hairs are an even or an odd number. Death is among the harsh things; for there is an inborn will to remain and to preserve oneself, and a loathing of dissolution, because it seems to snatch away many goods from us and to lead us out of this abundance of things to which we have grown used. This too estranges us from death, that these things we already know, while those to which we are about to pass over we do not know what they are like, and we shudder at the unknown. Besides, there is a natural fear of the darkness into which death is believed to lead us.

And so, even if death is indifferent, yet it is not such as can easily be made light of. The mind must be hardened by much exercise to endure the sight and the approach of it. Death ought to be despised more than it usually is. For we have believed many things about it. The talents of many have vied to swell its ill repute. The prison of the underworld has been described, and the region overwhelmed in perpetual night, in which "the huge doorkeeper of Orcus, lying upon half-gnawed bones in his gory cave, with everlasting barking terrifies the bloodless shades." Even when you have persuaded yourself that these are fables and that nothing remains for the dead to fear, another fear creeps in. For men fear as much to be among the dead as to be nowhere.

Since these notions, which long persuasion pours over us, oppose us, why should it not be glorious to bear death bravely, and among the greatest works of the human mind? Which mind will never rise to virtue if it has believed death to be an evil; it will rise, if it thinks it indifferent. The nature of things does not allow that anyone should approach with a great heart that which he judges to be an evil; he will come sluggishly and hesitantly. But nothing is glorious that is done by an unwilling and reluctant man; virtue does nothing because it must.

Add now that nothing is done honourably except by one upon whom the whole mind has leaned and been present, who has not been at war with himself in any part. But when one approaches an evil either through fear of worse things or through hope of goods, to attain which the patient endurance of one evil swallowed down is worth so much, the judgments of the doer are at variance among themselves. On the one side is what bids him carry out his purpose, on the other what draws him back and makes him flee from a suspected and dangerous thing. Therefore he is torn in opposite directions; and if this is so, glory perishes. For virtue carries out its decrees with a mind at concord. It does not fear what it does. "Yield not to ills, but go against them more boldly, where your fortune permits you."

You will not go more boldly, if you have believed those things to be evils. This must be plucked from the breast; otherwise a suspicion will linger that delays the impulse. A man will be thrust into that which he must attack. Our own school, indeed, wish Zeno's question to seem true, but the other, which is set against it, deceptive and false. I do not reduce these matters to the law of dialectic and to those knots of a most antiquated artifice. I judge that the whole class of such things must be thrown out, by which the man questioned thinks himself circumvented, and, brought to a confession, answers one thing and thinks another. On behalf of truth one must proceed more simply; against fear, more bravely.

These very things which they spin out I would rather unravel and weigh, so as to persuade, not to impose. How do men exhort one leading an army into battle to meet death for wives and children? I give you the Fabii, transferring to a single house the whole war of the commonwealth. I show you the Spartans posted in the very narrows of Thermopylae. They hope neither for victory nor for return. That place will be their tomb.

How do you exhort them to receive the ruin of a whole nation upon their own interposed bodies, and to yield their lives rather than their post? Will you say, "What is evil is not glorious; death is glorious; therefore death is not evil"? O effective harangue! Who after this would hesitate to fling himself upon the hostile blades and to die standing? But how bravely did that Leonidas address them! "So," he said, "breakfast, comrades, as men about to dine in the underworld." The food did not grow in their mouths, did not stick in their throats, did not slip from their hands; eagerly they pledged themselves both to breakfast and to dinner.

What of that Roman general who, when his soldiers had been sent to seize a position, since they were about to go through a vast host of the enemy, addressed them thus: "You must go thither, comrades, whence it is not necessary to return"? You see how simple and commanding virtue is; whom of mortals can your quibbles make braver, whom more erect? They break the mind, which never ought to be cramped less and forced into petty and thorny things than when some great thing is being framed.

Not from three hundred men, but from all mortals, the fear of death ought to be taken away. How do you teach them that it is no evil? How do you overcome the opinions of every age, with which infancy is at once steeped? What help do you find for human weakness? What do you say to set the mind on fire to leap among dangers? By what speech do you drive away the whole human race's longing for life? With what eloquence do you turn aside from death a stubborn persuasion?

That serpent in Africa, savage and more terrible to the Roman legions than the war itself, men assailed in vain with arrows and slings; not even to the Pythian javelin was it vulnerable, since its huge bulk, solid in proportion to the vastness of its body, threw back the iron and whatever human hands had hurled. At last it was broken with millstones. And against death do you hurl such petty syllables? With an awl do you fell that beast? You delay its onset by trifles; what you say is too slight for one who fears death. Farewell.