On the Happy Life

To live happily, brother Gallio, is the wish of all men, but when it comes to seeing clearly what it is that makes life happy, they are in the dark; and so far is it from being easy to attain the happy life that the more eagerly a man strives toward it, the further he recedes from it, if he has gone astray on the road; for when it leads in the opposite direction, his very speed becomes the cause of greater distance. We must therefore first settle what it is that we are aiming at; then we must look about for the way by which we can travel toward it most swiftly, intending on the journey itself, provided only it be the right one, to discover how much ground is covered each day and how much nearer we are to the goal toward which our natural longing drives us.

So long as we wander aimlessly, following no guide but the babble and discordant outcry of those who summon us in different directions, our brief life will be worn away amid our wanderings, even though we labour day and night for a sound mind. Let us therefore decide both whither we are tending and by what road, and not without some experienced guide who has explored the regions into which we are advancing, since the conditions of this journey are not the same as in our other travels. On those, some well-marked track and the questioning of the inhabitants forbid us to go astray, but here it is precisely the most beaten and the most frequented path that leads us most astray.

Nothing, then, is more to be guarded against than that we should not, after the manner of cattle, follow the herd of those who go before us, making our way not where we ought to go but where the crowd goes. And yet nothing entangles us in greater evils than the fact that we order our lives by report, counting those things best that have been received with loud approval, and that, having so many models before us, we live not by reason but by imitation. Hence comes that great heaping up of men, one falling upon another.

What happens in a great crush of people, when the crowd presses upon itself—no one falls without drawing another down with him, and those in front are the ruin of those who follow—this you may see happening throughout the whole of life. No one goes wrong for himself alone, but is both the cause and the author of another's error; for it is harmful to attach oneself to those in front, and since each man would rather believe than judge, no judgement is ever passed upon life, but belief always takes its place, and the error handed on from hand to hand keeps us spinning and hurls us headlong. We perish by the example of others; we shall be cured, if only we withdraw from the throng.

But as it is, the people stand opposed to reason, the champions of their own undoing. And so the same thing happens as at the elections, where the very men who made the praetors are astonished that those men were made praetors, once their fickle favour has veered round. The same things we approve, the same we condemn; this is the issue of every verdict in which the decision goes by the majority.

When the happy life is in question, there is no reason for you to answer me in the manner of a division of the senate: "This side seems to be the larger." For that is precisely why it is the worse. Human affairs are not so well ordered that the better things please the greater number; the crowd is a proof of the worst.

Let us inquire, then, what is best to do, not what is most customary, and what will establish us in possession of everlasting happiness, not what has been approved by the mob, that worst interpreter of the truth. And by the mob I mean the wearers of fine cloaks no less than the wearers of crowns; for I do not regard the colour of the garments by which the bodies are robed. In judging a man I put no trust in the eyes; I have a better and surer light by which to distinguish the true from the false. Let the soul find out the good of the soul. The soul, if ever it has leisure to draw breath and to withdraw into itself, ah, how it will confess the truth to itself under its own torture, and will say:

"Whatever I have done up to now I would rather had been left undone; when I reflect on whatever I have said, I envy the dumb; whatever I have prayed for I count the cursing of my enemies; whatever I have feared—good gods, how much lighter it was than what I coveted! With many men I have engaged in enmities and returned again from hatred into goodwill—if indeed there is any goodwill among the wicked; with myself I am not yet a friend. I have made every effort to lift myself out of the multitude and to make myself remarkable by some gift. What have I done but expose myself to the darts of malice and show it where it could bite me?

Do you see those men who praise eloquence, who court riches, who fawn upon favour, who extol power? They are all either enemies or—what comes to the same thing—they can become so. As great as the throng of admirers is the throng of the envious. Why do I not rather seek some good that I may feel in the using of it, not one that I may display? Those things that are gazed at, before which men halt, that one points out to another in wonder, are bright on the outside but wretched within."

Let us seek some good that is not good in appearance only, but solid and even and more beautiful on the side that is more hidden; this let us dig out. And it lies not far off; it will be found—we need only to know in what direction to stretch out our hand. As it is, we pass by the things close to us as though in the dark, stumbling against the very objects of our desire.

But, not to drag you through a roundabout course, I shall pass over the opinions of others—for both to enumerate them and to refute them would take long. Hear our own. But when I say "our own," I do not bind myself to any one of the chiefs of the Stoics; I too have the right to form a judgement. And so I shall follow one man, I shall bid another divide his opinion into parts, and perhaps, when called upon after all the rest, I shall reject nothing of what my predecessors have decreed, and I shall say: "This further I propose."

Meanwhile, in accordance with what all the Stoics agree upon, I give my assent to the nature of things; not to stray from it, and to be moulded according to its law and pattern, is wisdom. The happy life, therefore, is the one that is in harmony with its own nature, and it can be attained in no other way than if first the mind is sound and in perpetual possession of its soundness; then if it is brave and vigorous, and further most nobly enduring, adaptable to circumstances, careful—though without anxiety—of the body and of the things that pertain to it, and attentive to all the other things that furnish life, yet without admiration for any of them, so as to use the gifts of fortune without becoming their slave.

You understand, even though I do not add it, that there follows an unbroken tranquillity and freedom, once we have driven off the things that either provoke us or terrify us; for in place of pleasures and of those fears which are petty and frail and harmful by the very vices they bring, there comes over us a vast joy, unshaken and uniform, and then peace and harmony of mind and greatness joined with gentleness; for all savagery comes from weakness.

Our good can also be defined in another way, that is, the same thought may be embraced in different words. Just as the same army is at one moment deployed more widely and at another packed into a narrow space, and is either curved into wings with the centre bent back or drawn out in a straight front, while its strength, however it is arranged, remains the same, as does its will to stand for the same cause: so the definition of the highest good can at one time be spread out and extended, at another gathered together and drawn into itself. It will therefore be the same thing if I say:

"The highest good is a mind that despises the gifts of chance and rejoices in virtue," or "It is the unconquerable strength of a mind that is experienced in affairs, calm in action, joined with much humanity and care for those with whom it deals." One may also define it thus, that we call that man happy for whom there is no good or evil except a good or an evil soul, a worshipper of the honourable, content with virtue, one whom the gifts of chance neither exalt nor crush, who knows no good greater than that which he can give himself, for whom the true pleasure will be the contempt of pleasures.

One may, if one wishes to range further, transfer the same idea into one form after another, its meaning being kept safe and whole; for what is to prevent us from calling the happy life a soul that is free and upright and undaunted and steadfast, set beyond fear and beyond desire, for which the one good is honour and the one evil baseness, while all else is a worthless crowd of things that neither takes away anything from the happy life nor adds anything to it, coming and going without increase or diminution of the highest good?

When a man is thus founded, there must needs follow, whether he will or no, a continual cheerfulness and a deep gladness that comes from on high, since he rejoices in what is his own and desires nothing greater than his own possessions. Why should he not weigh these well against the petty and trivial and fleeting stirrings of this poor body? On the day he ceases to be a slave to pleasure, he will be free of pain as well; but you see what a wretched and pernicious bondage that man is destined to serve whom pleasures and pains, those most uncertain and most tyrannical of masters, will possess by turns. Therefore we must make our way out into freedom.

And nothing bestows this freedom except indifference to fortune. Then there will rise up that good beyond all price, the repose of a mind set in safety and its loftiness; and, with errors driven out, there will come from the knowledge of truth a great and unmoved joy, and graciousness and an expansion of the soul, in which it will take delight not because these are goods but because they are sprung from a good that is its own.

Since I have begun to deal generously, the happy man may be called he who, by the benefit of reason, neither desires nor fears—since even rocks are without fear and sorrow, and the beasts no less; yet no one for that reason would call those things happy which have no understanding of happiness.

In the same class set those men whom a dull nature and ignorance of themselves have reduced to the rank of cattle and lifeless things. There is no difference between these men and those creatures, since the creatures have no reason at all, while these men have a reason that is crooked and clever to their own hurt and twisted to perversity; for no one can be called happy who has been cast out beyond the truth.

The happy life, therefore, is one established upon right and sure judgement and unchangeable. For then the mind is pure and released from all ills, having escaped not only deep wounds but even mere scratches, ready always to stand its ground where it has taken its stand, and to defend its position even against an angry and assailing fortune.

For as regards pleasure, though it pour itself about us on every side and flow in by every avenue and soften the mind with its enticements and bring up one allurement after another by which to assail us whole and in part, what mortal, in whom any trace of a man survives, would wish to be tickled day and night and, abandoning the soul, to devote himself to the body?

"But the mind too," he says, "will have its own pleasures." Let it have them, by all means, and let it sit as the judge of luxury and of the pleasures; let it fill itself with all those things that are wont to gratify the senses, then let it look back upon the past and, mindful of pleasures now grown stale, exult in those that have gone and reach out greedily toward those to come, marshalling its hopes, and, while the body lies in its present surfeit, send its thoughts ahead to future gorging: such a man will seem to me only the more wretched, since to choose evils in place of goods is madness. And no one is happy without soundness of mind, nor sound of mind who craves what will harm him as though it were the best.

Happy, therefore, is the man whose judgement is right; happy is he who is content with his present lot, whatever it be, and is a friend to his own circumstances; happy is the man to whom reason commends the whole condition of his affairs.

Even those who have called pleasure the highest good see in what a base place they have set it. And so they deny that pleasure can be sundered from virtue, and they declare that no one lives honourably without also living pleasantly, nor pleasantly without also living honourably. I do not see how these things, so different, can be cast together into the same yoke. What reason is there, I ask you, why pleasure cannot be separated from virtue? Is it, forsooth, because the whole source of goods is from virtue, and from its roots there spring even those things that you love and seek after? But if these things were inseparable, we should not see that some are pleasant but not honourable, and others most honourable indeed but harsh, to be achieved only through pains.

Add now this, that pleasure comes even to the basest life, but virtue does not admit an evil life, and that some men are unhappy not without pleasure—nay, on account of pleasure itself; and this would not happen if pleasure had mingled itself with virtue, which virtue often lacks but never needs.

Why do you couple things that are unlike—nay, opposite? Virtue is something lofty, exalted and kingly, unconquered and untiring; pleasure is something low, slavish, feeble and perishable, whose station and dwelling are the brothels and the cook-shops. Virtue you will meet in the temple, in the forum, in the senate-house, standing before the walls, dusty and weather-stained, with calloused hands; pleasure you will more often find lurking and courting the shadows, around the baths and sweating-rooms and the places that dread the aedile, soft, enervated, soaked with wine and perfume, pale, or else painted and decked out with cosmetics like a corpse.

The highest good is immortal; it knows no passing away and has neither satiety nor regret; for a right mind never veers, nor becomes hateful to itself, nor has it altered anything in its best life. But pleasure is extinguished at the very moment when it most delights; it has not much room, and so it soon fills it and turns to weariness and droops after the first onset. Nor is anything ever sure whose nature lies in motion. Thus there cannot even be any substance to a thing that comes and passes most swiftly, doomed to perish in the very using of it; for it presses on to the point where it shall end, and even as it begins it looks toward its close.

What of the fact that pleasure belongs to the bad no less than to the good, and that the base delight in their disgrace just as much as the honourable in their noble deeds? It was for this reason that the ancients enjoined us to follow the best life, not the most pleasant, so that pleasure should be not the guide but the companion of a right and good will. For we must take Nature as our guide; her reason heeds, her it consults.

To live happily, then, is the same thing as to live according to Nature. What this means I shall now make clear. If we guard the gifts of the body and the things suited to Nature carefully but without dread, as things granted for a day and fleeting; if we do not fall into bondage to them, and the things that are not our own do not take possession of us; if the gratifications of the body and things adventitious hold for us the place that auxiliaries and light-armed troops hold in a camp—let them serve, not command—only then are they of use to the mind.

Let a man be uncorrupted by externals and unconquerable, an admirer of himself alone, confident in spirit and prepared for either fortune, a craftsman of his own life; let his confidence be not without knowledge, his knowledge not without steadfastness; let his resolutions, once made, abide, and let there be no erasure in his decrees. It is understood, even though I do not add it, that such a man will be composed and orderly, and in all that he does magnificent withal in his courtesy.

Let reason seek out external things, roused by the senses and taking from them its first beginnings—for it has nothing else from which to make its attempt or from which to gather its impetus toward the truth—but let it return into itself. For the universe too, which embraces all things, and god the ruler of the whole, reaches out indeed toward what is without, yet from every quarter withdraws again into himself. Let our mind do the same; when, following its senses, it has through them stretched out toward external things, let it be master both of them and of itself.

In this way there will be wrought a single strength and power at harmony with itself, and that sure reason will be born which is not at variance nor wavering in its opinions and apprehensions nor in its convictions—a reason which, when it has set itself in order and brought its parts into agreement and, so to speak, into concord, has attained the highest good. For nothing crooked is left, nothing slippery, nothing on which it may stumble or slip.

It will do all things by its own command, and nothing unexpected will befall it, but whatever is done will turn out for the good, easily and readily and without any shifting on the part of the doer; for sloth and hesitation betray conflict and inconstancy. You may therefore boldly declare that the highest good is harmony of the soul; for the virtues must dwell where there is concord and unity. It is the vices that are at variance.

"But you too," he says, "cultivate virtue for no other reason than because you hope for some pleasure from it." In the first place, even if virtue is going to bestow pleasure, it is not therefore sought for the sake of pleasure; for it does not bestow this, but this as well, nor does it labour for this end, but its labour, though it aims at something else, will gain this also.

Just as in a field that has been broken up for grain some flowers spring up among the crop, and yet it was not for these little blooms, however they please the eye, that so much toil was spent—the sower had a different aim, and this came over and above—so pleasure is not the wage nor the cause of virtue, but an addition; nor does virtue please because it delights, but, if it pleases, it also delights.

The highest good lies in the very judgement and disposition of a mind that is at its best, which, when it has fulfilled its proper course and bounded itself within its own limits, has perfected the highest good and desires nothing further; for there is nothing beyond the whole, any more than there is anything beyond the end. And so you go astray when you ask what it is for the sake of which I seek virtue;

for you are seeking something above the highest. You ask what I seek from virtue? Virtue itself. For it has nothing better; it is its own reward. Or is this too little a thing? When I say to you, "The highest good is the unbreakable firmness of the soul, and foresight and loftiness and soundness and freedom and harmony and beauty," do you still demand something greater to which these may be referred? Why do you name pleasure to me? I am seeking the good of a man, not of the belly—which is more capacious in cattle and wild beasts!

"You misrepresent," he says, "what is said by me; for I deny that anyone can live pleasantly unless he also lives honourably at the same time—which cannot fall to the lot of dumb animals nor of those who measure their good by food. Clearly, I say, and openly I bear witness that this life, which I call pleasant, falls to no man's lot unless virtue be added."

And yet who does not know that the most foolish men are precisely those most filled with your pleasures, that wickedness abounds in things delightful, and that the mind itself supplies many corrupt kinds of pleasure?—first of all, insolence and an excessive valuation of oneself and a swollen pride lifted above all others, and a blind and improvident love of one's own possessions, and dissolute delights, and exultation arising from the slightest and most childish causes, and besides, a scurrility and an arrogance that takes joy in insults, and the sloth and dissolution of a sluggish mind that drowses over itself.

All these things virtue shatters; it twitches the ear and appraises the pleasures before it admits them; and those it has approved it does not value highly, nor indeed even admit them, and it takes joy not in their use but in temperance. But since temperance lessens the pleasures, it does a wrong to your highest good. You embrace pleasure, I restrain it; you enjoy pleasure, I use it; you think it the highest good, I think it not even a good; you do everything for the sake of pleasure, I nothing.

When I say that I do nothing for the sake of pleasure, I am speaking of that wise man to whom alone you grant pleasure. But I do not call a man wise above whom anything stands, still less pleasure. And yet, if he is taken up with pleasure, how will he withstand toil and danger, want and the many threats that roar about human life? How will he bear the sight of death, how pains, how the crash of the universe and so many bitter enemies, when he has been overcome by an adversary so soft? "Whatever pleasure shall counsel, he will do." Come now, do you not see how many things it will counsel?

"It will be able," he says, "to counsel nothing base, because it is joined to virtue." Do you not see once more what manner of highest good that is which needs a guardian in order to be good? But how shall virtue govern pleasure, which it follows, since to follow belongs to the subject and to govern to the master? Do you set behind it the thing that commands? A noble office indeed virtue has in your eyes—to be the foretaster of pleasures!

But we shall see whether among those by whom virtue has been so insultingly handled it is still virtue, which cannot keep its own name if it has yielded its place. Meanwhile—and this is the point at issue—I shall point out many men beset by pleasures, men upon whom fortune has poured out all her gifts, whom you must needs confess to be bad.

Look at Nomentanus and Apicius, digesting, as those men call it, the good things of land and sea, and reviewing upon their table the creatures of every nation; behold these same men on a mound of roses looking down upon their cookery, delighting their ears with the sound of voices, their eyes with spectacles, their palate with savours; their whole body is plied with soft and soothing applications, and, that their nostrils too may not be idle meanwhile, the very place in which sacrifice is offered to luxury is steeped with diverse perfumes. These men, you will say, are amid pleasures; and yet it will not be well with them, because it is not in a good that they take joy.

"It will be ill with them," he says, "because many things break in to trouble the soul, and opinions at variance with one another will disquiet the mind." That this is so I grant; but none the less those very men, foolish and unstable and exposed to the stroke of remorse, will gather great pleasures, so that one must confess that they are then as far from all distress as they are from a sound mind, and, as happens to most men, are afflicted with a merry madness and rave amid laughter.

But the pleasures of the wise, on the other hand, are gentle and modest and almost languid, kept in check and scarcely to be noticed, since they neither come at call nor, though they have come of their own accord, are held in any honour nor received with any gladness by those who feel them; for the wise mix them with life and interpose them as they would play and jest among serious things.

Let them cease, then, to join things that do not agree and to entangle pleasure with virtue, a fault through which they flatter the very worst of men. The man given over to pleasures, forever belching and drunken, because he knows that he lives with pleasure, believes that he lives with virtue too; for he hears that pleasure cannot be separated from virtue, and then he inscribes upon his vices the name of wisdom and parades what ought to be concealed.

And so it is not at Epicurus's urging that they run riot, but, given over to their vices, they hide their debauchery in the bosom of philosophy and flock to the place where they hear pleasure praised. Nor do they reckon how sober and dry that pleasure of Epicurus is—for so, by Hercules, I judge it—but they fly to the very name, seeking for their lusts some patronage and covering.

And so they lose the one good they had amid their evils—shame at sinning. For they praise the things at which they used to blush, and they glory in their vice; and thus their youth cannot even rise again, once an honourable title has been attached to base sloth. This is why that praise of pleasure is so pernicious, because the honourable precepts lie hidden within, while what corrupts is on view.

For my own part I am of this opinion—and I shall say it to the displeasure of my own school—that Epicurus's teachings are holy and right and, if you draw nearer, austere; for that pleasure of his is reduced to something small and slender, and the very law that we lay down for virtue he lays down for pleasure: he bids it obey Nature. But what is enough for Nature is too little for luxury. What follows, then?

Whoever calls slothful idleness and the alternations of gluttony and lust by the name of happiness is seeking a good authority for a bad thing, and, when he has come to him led on by the alluring name, he follows not the pleasure that he hears of but the one that he has brought with him, and when he has begun to think his own vices like the precepts, he gives himself up to them not timidly, nor does he run riot in secret, but henceforth with head uncovered. And so I shall not say, as most of my school do, that the sect of Epicurus is a teacher of vice, but I say this: it is ill spoken of, it is of evil repute, and undeservedly. How can anyone know this unless he has been admitted within?

Its very front gives occasion for the gossip and provokes evil hopes. It is as if a brave man had put on a woman's gown; your chastity is secure, your manhood is unimpaired, your body is given over to no shameful submission—but there is a tambourine in your hand! Let an honourable label, therefore, be chosen, and an inscription that itself rouses the spirit; for, as it stands, the vices have come crowding to it.

Whoever has approached virtue has given proof of a noble nature; he who follows pleasure appears nerveless, broken, degenerate from a man, destined to sink into baseness, unless someone marks out for him the difference among pleasures, so that he may know which of them stop short within natural desire, and which are borne headlong and are boundless, and the more they are filled, the more insatiable they become.

Come now, let virtue go before, and every step will be safe. Pleasure also harms when it is excessive; but in virtue there is no fear of any excess, because in virtue itself lies the measure. That is no good which suffers from its own greatness. To those, moreover, who have been allotted a rational nature, what better thing can be set before them than reason? And if that partnership is to your liking, if it pleases you to go to the happy life in such company, let virtue go before, let pleasure attend and play about the body like a shadow. To hand over virtue, that most exalted mistress, as a handmaid to pleasure, is the act of one whose soul can grasp nothing great.

Let virtue march in front, let her bear the standards. We shall have pleasure none the less, but we shall be its masters and controllers; it will win something from us by entreaty, it will compel nothing. But those who have surrendered the leadership to pleasure have lost both; for they let go virtue, and besides, they themselves do not possess pleasure, but pleasure possesses them, and they are either tormented by the lack of it or strangled by its abundance—wretched if they are deserted by it, more wretched if they are overwhelmed by it; just like men caught in the Syrtic sea, who are now left stranded on dry ground, now tossed upon a rushing wave.

And this comes about through excessive intemperance and a blind love of the thing; for to him who seeks evils in place of goods it is dangerous to obtain them. Just as we hunt wild beasts with toil and danger, and even the keeping of those we have caught is full of anxiety—for they often tear their masters—so it is with great pleasures; they have turned into a great evil, and, once caught, they have caught their captor. And the more numerous and greater they are, the smaller is the man and the slave of the more masters, whom the crowd calls happy. It pleases me to dwell still further upon this image of the matter.

Just as the man who tracks out the lairs of wild beasts, and who counts it a great thing "to snare wild beasts with the noose" and "to ring the broad glades with hounds," so that he may press upon their tracks, abandons better things and renounces many of his duties, so he who pursues pleasure puts everything else second and neglects the first of goods, his freedom, and pays it out for his belly; nor does he buy pleasures for himself, but sells himself to pleasures.

"Yet what," he says, "prevents virtue and pleasure from being blended into one, and the highest good from being so constituted that the same thing is at once honourable and pleasant?" Because no part of the honourable can be anything but honourable, nor will the highest good keep its own purity if it sees within itself anything unlike its better part.

Not even the joy that springs from virtue, good though it be, is a part of the absolute good, any more than gladness and tranquillity are, although these are born of the fairest causes; for these are goods, but they follow upon the highest good, they do not complete it.

But he who makes a partnership between virtue and pleasure—and not even an equal one—by the frailty of the one good blunts whatever vigour is in the other, and sends beneath the yoke that freedom which is unconquered only so long as it knows nothing more precious than itself. For—and this is the greatest slavery—he begins to have need of fortune; and there follows a life of anxiety, suspicion and trembling, fearful of mischance, hanging upon the turns of time.

You do not give virtue a foundation that is weighty and unmovable, but you bid her stand upon a shifting place; and what is so shifting as the expectation of things that depend on chance, and the changefulness of the body and of the things that affect the body? How can such a man obey god and receive whatever happens with a good will, and not complain of his fate, a kindly interpreter of his own mischances, if he is shaken by the little pricks of pleasures and pains? Nay, he is not even a good protector or champion of his country, nor a defender of his friends, if he inclines toward pleasures.

Let the highest good, then, climb to that height from which no force drags it down, where neither pain nor hope nor fear has access, nor any other thing that would impair the right of the highest good; and to that height virtue alone can climb. By her step that slope must be surmounted; she will stand firmly and bear whatever comes, not merely with patience but even with goodwill, and she will know that every hardship of the times is a law of Nature, and like a good soldier she will endure her wounds, count her scars, and, pierced through by darts and dying, will love the commander for whom she falls; she will keep in her heart that old precept: follow god!

But whoever complains and weeps and groans is compelled by force to do what is commanded, and against his will is hurried off to the orders none the less. And what madness it is to be dragged rather than to follow! Just as much, by Hercules, is it folly and ignorance of one's own condition to grieve because something is lacking to you or because something rather hard has befallen, and likewise to be astonished or to bear with indignation those things that happen to the good no less than to the bad—I mean diseases, deaths, infirmities and the other ills that rush crosswise into human life. Whatever must be suffered by the constitution of the universe, let it be received with a great soul.

To this oath of allegiance we have been sworn—to endure the lot of mortals and not to be disquieted by those things which it is not in our power to avoid. We have been born under a kingdom; to obey god is freedom.

True happiness, therefore, is set in virtue. What will this virtue counsel you? That you should think nothing either good or evil that will come to you neither through virtue nor through wickedness; and next, that you should be unmoved both against evil and from good, so that, so far as is permitted, you may represent god.

What does she promise you in return for this campaign? Things vast and equal to the divine. You will be compelled to nothing, you will lack nothing, you will be free, safe, unharmed; nothing will you attempt in vain, from nothing will you be barred; all things will fall out for you as you wish, nothing adverse will befall, nothing contrary to your expectation and your will. "What then?

Is virtue sufficient for living happily?" Perfect and divine as she is, why should she not be sufficient—nay, more than sufficient? For what can be lacking to one who is set beyond all desire? What need has he of anything from without who has gathered all that is his own into himself? But the man who is striving toward virtue, even though he has advanced far, has still need of some indulgence from fortune while he yet struggles amid human affairs, until he has loosed that knot and every mortal bond. What, then, is the difference? It is that some are tightly bound, others fastened, others fettered hand and foot besides. He who has advanced toward the higher regions and lifted himself higher drags a loosened chain, not yet free, but already as good as free.

If, therefore, one of those men who bark at philosophy should say, as they are wont: "Why, then, do you talk more bravely than you live? Why do you lower your words before a superior and reckon money a necessary instrument for yourself, and are moved by loss, and let fall tears when you hear of the death of a wife or a friend, and have regard to your reputation and are touched by malicious talk?

Why is your country estate more elaborately kept than natural use requires? Why do you not dine according to your own rule? Why is your furniture more splendid? Why is wine older than yourself drunk at your table? Why is an aviary laid out? Why are trees planted that will give nothing but shade? Why does your wife wear in her ears the revenue of a wealthy house? Why is your troop of pages clad in costly raiment? Why is the waiting at your table an art, and the silver not set out carelessly and as one pleases but arranged with skill, and why is there a master to carve the meats?" Add, if you will: "Why do you own property across the sea? Why more than you know of? It is to your shame that you are either so careless that you do not know your handful of slaves, or so given to luxury that you have more than your memory can keep account of!"

I shall presently second your reproaches and bring more charges against myself than you think; for the present I make you this answer: "I am not a wise man, and—to feed your ill will—I never shall be. Demand of me, therefore, not that I should be equal to the best, but that I should be better than the bad. It is enough for me to take away each day something from my vices and to rebuke my errors.

I have not attained to soundness, nor indeed shall I attain it; I compound palliatives rather than remedies for my gout, content if it comes upon me more rarely and twinges me less; but compared with your feet, crippled as I am, I am still a runner." These things I say not on my own behalf—for I am sunk deep in vices of every kind—but on behalf of the man who has accomplished something.

"You talk one way," you say, "and live another." This charge, you most malignant of creatures, you bitter enemies of every best man, was brought against Plato, brought against Epicurus, brought against Zeno; for all these men spoke not of how they themselves lived but of how they ought to live. It is of virtue, not of myself, that I speak, and when I rail at vices, I rail first of all at my own.

When I can, I shall live as I ought. And that malice of yours, steeped in much venom, will not frighten me away from what is best; not even that poison with which you spatter others, with which you destroy yourselves, will hinder me from continuing to praise the life, not that I lead, but that I know ought to be led, nor from worshipping virtue and following her, though crawling, across a vast interval.

Shall I wait, forsooth, for anything to be left unscathed by malice, to which neither Rutilius nor Cato was sacred? Is anyone to care whether he seems too rich to those to whom Demetrius the Cynic is not poor enough? They say that a man most fierce and fighting against all the desires of nature, poorer than the other Cynics in this, that, while they forbade themselves to possess, he forbade himself even to ask—they say that he is not destitute enough! You see what they want: he professed the knowledge not of virtue but of beggary.

Of Diodorus, the Epicurean philosopher, who within a few days put an end to his own life with his own hand, they deny that he acted in accordance with the teaching of Epicurus, because he cut his own throat. Some would have this deed of his seem madness, others rashness; he, meanwhile, happy and full of a good conscience, bore witness for himself as he departed from life, and praised the peace of a life spent in harbour and riding at anchor, and said—what you have heard unwillingly, as though it were a thing that you too must do: "I have lived, and the course that fortune gave me I have run."

You dispute about the life of one man and the death of another, and at the name of great men, men renowned for some surpassing merit, you bark, like little dogs at the approach of strangers; for it is to your advantage that no one should seem good, as though another's virtue were a reproach for all your own offences. In your envy you compare their splendour with your own squalor, and you do not understand at how great a cost to yourselves you make the venture. For if those who pursue virtue are greedy and lustful and ambitious, what are you, to whom the very name of virtue is hateful?

You say that no one makes good what he says, nor lives up to the model of his own discourse. What wonder, when they speak of brave things, vast things, things that escape all human storms? Though they strive to wrench themselves free from the crosses into which each one of you drives his own nails, yet, when they have been led off to punishment, they hang each upon a single stake; but these men, who pass sentence upon themselves, are stretched out upon as many crosses as they have lusts. Yet they are slanderous and witty at another's expense. I could believe that they had leisure for this, were it not that some of them spit upon the spectators from their own gibbet!

"Philosophers do not make good what they say." Yet they make good much by saying it, by conceiving honourable things in their minds; for if they also did deeds equal to their words, what would be happier than they? Meanwhile, there is no reason for you to despise good words and a heart full of good thoughts. The pursuit of wholesome studies is praiseworthy even short of its effect.

What wonder if those who have attempted the heights do not climb to the top? But if you are a man, look up with admiration at those who attempt great things, even though they fall. It is a noble thing to make the attempt with an eye not to one's own strength but to the strength of one's nature, to aim at lofty things and to conceive in the mind designs greater than can be accomplished even by those endowed with a mighty soul. The man who has set himself this aim:

"I will look upon death and upon a comedy with the same countenance. I will submit to toils, however great they be, propping up my body with my mind. I will despise riches alike when I have them and when I have them not, neither sadder if they lie elsewhere nor prouder if they glitter about me. I will be aware of fortune neither when she comes nor when she goes. I will look upon all lands as mine, and my own as belonging to all. I will so live as though I knew that I was born for others, and on this account I will give thanks to the nature of things; for in what better way could she have managed my affairs?

She has given me alone to all men, and all men to me alone. Whatever I shall have, I will neither hoard meanly nor scatter wastefully. I will believe that I possess nothing more truly than what I have given well. I will weigh benefits neither by number nor by weight, nor by any estimate save that of the receiver; never will that be much in my eyes which a worthy man shall receive. Nothing will I do for the sake of opinion, everything for the sake of conscience. Whatever I do with myself alone as witness, I will believe to be done in the sight of all the people.

The end of eating and drinking shall be for me to quench the desires of nature, not to fill and empty my belly. I will be agreeable to my friends, gentle and easy to my enemies. I will be won over before I am asked, and will meet honourable requests halfway. I will know that the whole world is my country and that the gods are its guardians, and that they stand above me and around me, the censors of my deeds and words. And whenever Nature reclaims my breath, or reason dismisses it, I will go forth having borne witness that I loved a good conscience and good pursuits, that no man's freedom was lessened through me, least of all my own"—he who shall set himself to do, to will, to attempt these things makes his way toward the gods; nay, even if he does not reach them, yet "he failed in a great endeavour."

As for you, in hating virtue and her worshipper, you do nothing new. For ailing eyes dread the sun, and creatures of the night turn away from the bright day, which at its first rising stupefies them, and they seek their hiding-places far and wide and bury themselves in some cranny, afraid of the light. Groan and ply your ill-omened tongue in reviling good men; gape, bite; far sooner will you break your teeth than leave a mark.

"Why is this man a student of philosophy and yet lives so rich a life? Why does he say that riches are to be despised and yet possesses them? Why does he think life is to be despised and yet lives? Health to be despised, and yet guards it most carefully and prefers it to be of the best? And does he think exile an empty word and say, 'For what evil is there in changing regions?' and yet, if he may, grow old in his native land? And does he judge that there is no difference between a longer span of time and a shorter, and yet, if nothing prevents, prolong his years and flourish, untroubled, in a ripe old age?"

He says that these things ought to be despised—not so that he may not have them, but so that he may not have them in anxiety; he does not drive them away from himself, but, as they depart, he sees them off without concern. And where indeed will fortune more safely lodge riches than where she can take them back again without complaint from the one who returns them?

Marcus Cato, while he praised Curius and Coruncanius and that age in which it was a charge for the censor's reproof to own a few small plates of silver, himself possessed four million sesterces—less, no doubt, than Crassus, but more than Cato the Censor. By a greater margin, if they be compared, had he outstripped his great-grandfather than he was outstripped by Crassus, and, had greater wealth fallen to him, he would not have scorned it.

For the wise man does not think himself unworthy of any gifts of chance. He does not love riches, but he prefers them; he receives them not into his soul but into his house, nor does he spurn them when he possesses them, but keeps them and wishes that a greater matter may be supplied for his virtue to work upon.

And what doubt is there that for the wise man there is here a greater matter for the unfolding of his soul in riches than in poverty, since in poverty there is but one kind of virtue—not to be bowed down or crushed—whereas in riches temperance and liberality and diligence and orderly management and magnificence have an open field?

The wise man will not despise himself even if he be of the smallest stature, yet he will wish to be tall. He will be strong though slight of body or though he have lost an eye, yet he will prefer to have bodily vigour—and this in such a way that he knows there is in himself something stronger than the body. He will endure ill health, but he will pray for good.

For certain things, even though they be small in the sum of the matter and can be withdrawn without the ruin of the chief good, yet add something to the perpetual gladness that springs from virtue. Riches affect him and cheer him just as a favouring and following wind cheers the sailor, as a fine day and a sunny spot amid the winter's cold.

Moreover, which of the wise—of our own school, I mean, for whom the one good is virtue—denies that even these things which we call indifferent have some value in themselves and that some are preferable to others? To some of them a certain honour is assigned, to others much. Do not be mistaken, then: riches are among the preferable things.

"Why then," you say, "do you mock me, since they hold the same place with you as with me?" Do you wish to know how far they do not hold the same place? If my riches flow away, they will take nothing but themselves; but you will be stunned and will seem to yourself left without yourself if they depart from you. With me riches hold a certain place, with you the highest; in short, my riches belong to me, you belong to your riches.

Cease, then, to forbid money to philosophers; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. The philosopher shall have ample wealth, but wrested from no man nor stained with another's blood, gained without wrong to anyone, without sordid dealings, whose going out shall be as honourable as its coming in, at which no one may groan save the malicious. Pile it up as high as you will; it is honourable, for though there be in it much that each man would call his own, there is nothing that anyone could call his own at another's cost.

He, indeed, will not thrust the bounty of fortune from him, and over a patrimony gained by honourable means he will neither boast nor blush. Yet he will have something even to boast of, if, with his house thrown open and the city admitted to inspect his affairs, he can say: "Let each man take away whatever he recognizes as his own." O great man! O happily rich, if after this declaration he has just as much left! I mean this: if in safety and unconcerned he has offered himself to the people's search, if no one has found anything in his keeping on which to lay a hand, then boldly and openly will he be rich.

The wise man will not admit within his threshold a single coin that enters wrongfully; yet great wealth, the gift of fortune and the fruit of virtue, he will neither refuse nor shut out. For what reason has he to grudge it a good lodging? Let it come, let it be his guest. He will neither flaunt it nor hide it—the one is the mark of a vulgar mind, the other of a timid and petty one that clutches a great good to its bosom—nor, as I have said, will he cast it out of his house. For what will he say?

Will he say either "You are useless" or "I do not know how to use riches"? Just as he will be able to complete a journey even on his own feet, yet will prefer to mount a carriage, so, though he could be poor, he will wish to be rich. He will therefore have wealth, but as a thing light and ready to fly away, and he will not suffer it to be a burden either to anyone else or to himself.

He will give—why have you pricked up your ears? why do you open your laps to catch it?—he will give either to the good or to those whom he can make good; he will give choosing the most worthy with the utmost deliberation, as one who remembers that an account must be rendered of his outlays no less than of his receipts; he will give from a right and defensible cause, for a gift wrongly made is among shameful losses; he will have a pocket easy to open, not full of holes, from which much may go out and nothing fall out by mischance.

He is mistaken who thinks that giving is an easy matter; it holds the greatest difficulty, if only it is bestowed with judgement and not scattered at random and on impulse. This man I lay under obligation, to that one I repay a debt; this one I succour, that one I pity; that other I furnish forth as a worthy man whom poverty should not drag down nor hold fast in its grip; to some I will not give, though they be in need, because, even if I gave, they would still be in need; to some I will offer it, on some I will even press it. I cannot be careless in this matter; never do I enter names in my ledger more carefully than when I give.

"What?" you say, "do you give in order to get back?" Nay rather, in order not to lose; let the gift be placed where it need not be demanded back, but can be repaid. Let a benefit be laid out like a treasure buried deep, which you would not dig up unless it became necessary. What of the fact that the very house of a rich man holds how vast a matter for doing good!

For who restricts liberality to the wearers of the toga alone? Nature bids me be of use to men. Whether these be slaves or free, freeborn or freedmen, whether their freedom be lawfully granted or bestowed among friends, what does it matter? Wherever there is a man, there is room for a kindness. And so money can be poured out even within one's own threshold and liberality exercised—which is so named not because it is owed to the freeborn but because it proceeds from a free spirit. In the wise man this is never thrust upon the base and unworthy, nor does it ever wander about so spent that it does not, whenever it finds a worthy object, flow as though from a full source.

There is no reason, then, why you should misconstrue the things that are spoken honourably, bravely, and high-mindedly by the students of wisdom. And mark this first: it is one thing to be a student of wisdom, another to have already attained wisdom. The student will say to you: "I speak excellently, but I am still tossed about amid many evils. There is no reason for you to hold me to my own rule. At this very moment I am making and moulding myself and lifting myself up to a mighty model; if I shall have advanced as far as I have purposed, then demand that my deeds answer to my words." But he who has attained the sum of human good will deal with you otherwise and say: "First, there is no reason for you to allow yourself to pass judgement upon your betters; it has already fallen to me, as a proof of rectitude, to be displeasing to the bad.

But, that I may render you the account which I grudge to no mortal, hear what I promise and at what worth I rate each thing. I deny that riches are a good; for if they were, they would make men good. But since what is found among the wicked cannot be called a good, I refuse them that name. Nevertheless, that they are to be had and are useful and bring great conveniences to life, this I confess.

Hear, then, why I do not count them among goods, and what I do with them differently from you, since we both agree that they are to be had. Set me in the most opulent of houses, set gold and silver where they are in common use; I shall not look up to myself on account of these things, which, even though they be in my keeping, are nevertheless outside me. Carry me off to the Sublician bridge and cast me down among the beggars; I shall not for that reason despise myself because I sit in the number of those who stretch out the hand for alms. For what does it matter, whether a crust of bread is wanting to one who is not wanting the power to die? What follows, then? I prefer that splendid house to the bridge.

Set me amid gleaming furniture and a dainty service; I shall believe myself no happier because my cloak is soft, because purple is spread beneath my guests. Change my bedding; I shall be no more wretched if my weary neck rests upon a little wisp of hay, if I lie upon a circus mattress with its stuffing oozing out through the seams of the worn cloth. What follows, then? I prefer to show what is in my soul clad in the bordered toga and well shod rather than with bare shoulders or with feet that are cut and torn.

Let every day fall out for me as I would wish, let fresh congratulations be woven on to the former ones; not for this will I be pleased with myself. Change this indulgence of the times into its opposite, let my soul be smitten on this side and on that by loss, by grief, by sundry assaults, let no hour be free from some cause of complaint; not for that reason will I call myself wretched amid the most wretched things, not for that reason will I curse any day; for I have made provision that no day should be a black one for me. What follows, then? I prefer to temper my joys than to stifle my griefs."

This will that famous Socrates say to you: "Make me the conqueror of all the nations, let that luxurious car of Bacchus bear me in triumph from the sun's rising even to Thebes, let the kings of the nations seek their laws from me; I shall think most of all that I am a man, even while I am hailed as a god on every side. Join straightway to this so lofty pinnacle a headlong reversal; let me be set upon another's litter to grace the procession of a proud and savage victor; I shall be no more humbled when driven beneath another's chariot than I had stood upon my own." What follows, then? Still I would rather conquer than be taken captive.

I shall despise the whole kingdom of fortune, but out of it, if a choice be given, I shall take the better things. Whatever shall come to me will be turned to good, but I prefer that the easier and pleasanter things should come, and those that will vex less the one who handles them. For there is no reason for you to suppose that any virtue exists without toil; but some virtues need the spur, others the rein.

Just as the body must be held back when on a downward slope and urged forward against a steep one, so some virtues are on the downward slope and some climb the hill. Can there be any doubt that patience, fortitude, perseverance, and every other virtue that is set against hardships and subdues fortune must climb, and strain, and struggle? What then?

Is it not equally plain that liberality, temperance and gentleness go down the slope? In these we hold the soul in check, lest it slip forward; in those we urge it on and spur it most keenly. To poverty, then, we shall apply the stronger virtues, those that know how to fight; to riches the more careful ones, those that plant a wary step and bear their own weight.

Since the matter is thus divided, I prefer to have in use those virtues that are more tranquil in their exercise than those whose trial is blood and sweat. "And so it is not I," says the wise man, "who live otherwise than I speak, but you who hear otherwise; the mere sound of the words reaches your ears: what they mean you do not ask."

"What difference, then, is there between me, the fool, and you, the wise man, if we both wish to have riches?" The greatest; for in the wise man's keeping riches are in servitude, in the fool's they are in command; the wise man grants nothing to riches, to you riches grant everything; you, as though someone had promised you eternal possession of them, grow used to them and cling to them, the wise man most of all meditates upon poverty at the very moment when he stands in the midst of riches.

Never does a general so trust to peace that he does not prepare himself for a war which, even if it is not being waged, has been declared. You a fine house renders insolent, as though it could neither burn nor fall; you riches stupefy, as though they had passed beyond all danger and were too great for fortune to have strength enough to consume them.

At your ease you make sport with your riches and do not foresee their peril, just as barbarians, when commonly shut up in a siege, knowing nothing of engines of war, watch idly the toil of the besiegers and do not understand to what end those works are being raised at a distance. The same thing happens to you; you grow soft amid your possessions and do not consider how many mischances threaten on every side, ready at any moment now to carry off your precious spoils.

Whoever takes away the wise man's riches will leave him still all that is his own; for he lives glad in the present, free from care for the future. "Of nothing," says that famous Socrates, or someone else who has the same right and the same power against human affairs, "have I more firmly convinced myself than that I should not bend the conduct of my life to your opinions. Heap together your accustomed words from every side; I shall not think that you are reviling me, but wailing like most wretched infants."

These things he will say to whom wisdom has fallen, whom a soul free from vices bids rebuke others, not because it hates them, but for their healing. He will add to these: "Your judgement of me moves me not on my own account but on yours, because to cry out in hatred and to assail virtue is to abjure all good hope. You do me no wrong, but neither do those who overthrow the altars do wrong to the gods. Yet an evil purpose and an evil design show themselves even where they have had no power to harm.

Thus I bear your wild fancies as Jupiter Best and Greatest bears the silly inventions of the poets, of whom one has put wings upon him, another horns, another has brought him in as an adulterer staying out all night, another as cruel toward the gods, another as unjust toward men, another as the ravisher of freeborn youths and of his own kin, another as a parricide and the usurper of another's kingdom and his father's. By all which nothing else was achieved than that men should be relieved of all shame at sinning, if they believed the gods to be such.

But though these things do me no harm, yet for your own sakes I warn you. Look up to virtue, believe those who, having long followed her, cry out that they are following something great and that appears greater day by day, and worship her as you would the gods, and her professors as her priests, and, whenever mention of the sacred writings comes up, keep silence in reverence." This phrase, favete linguis, is derived not, as most suppose, from favour, but enjoins silence, so that the rite may be duly performed with no ill word breaking in. And this it is far more necessary to command of you, that, whenever anything is brought forth from that oracle, you should listen intently and with hushed voice.

When someone, shaking a rattle, lies at command, when someone skilled in gashing his own arms bloodies his arms and shoulders with a slack hand, when some woman, crawling on her knees along the street, howls, and a linen-clad old man, carrying a laurel branch and a lamp at midday, cries aloud that one of the gods is angry, you come running and listen, and, each feeding the other's dumb amazement, you affirm that he is divine.

Behold, Socrates from that prison which he purified by entering it and rendered more honourable than any senate-house cries aloud: "What madness is this, what disposition is this, hostile to gods and men alike, to defame the virtues and to profane holy things with malicious words? If you can, praise good men; if not, pass them by; but if it pleases you to exercise that foul licence of yours, fall upon one another. For when you rave against heaven, I do not say that you commit sacrilege, but that you waste your labour.

I myself once furnished Aristophanes with matter for his jests; the whole band of comic poets poured out upon me their poisoned wit. My virtue was made illustrious by the very means through which it was assailed; for it profits virtue to be brought forth and tried, nor do any understand how great she is more than those who have felt her strength by provoking it. The hardness of the flint is known to none better than to those who strike it.

I offer myself just as some rock standing forth into the sea, which the waves never cease, from whatever quarter they are driven, to lash, yet neither do they move it from its place nor wear it away through so many ages by their constant onset. Leap upon me, make your assault; by enduring I shall conquer you. Against things that are firm and unconquerable, whatever dashes itself spends its own force to its own hurt. Therefore seek out some soft and yielding stuff in which your darts may stick fast."

But have you leisure to pry into the faults of others and to pass sentence upon anyone? "Why does this philosopher dwell more spaciously? Why does this one dine more sumptuously?" You observe the pimples of others, you who are covered with countless sores. This is just as if a man whom a foul scab is devouring should mock at the moles or warts on the loveliest of bodies.

Cast it in Plato's teeth that he sought money, in Aristotle's that he took it, in Democritus's that he neglected it, in Epicurus's that he spent it; throw in my own face Alcibiades and Phaedrus—you who will turn out supremely happy the moment it falls to your lot to imitate our vices!

Why do you not rather look about you at your own ills, which stab you on every side, some raging without, others burning in the very vitals? Human affairs are not in such a state—even if you know too little of your own condition—that so much leisure remains over for you that you have time to wag your tongue at the reproach of better men.

This you do not understand, and you wear a countenance ill-suited to your fortune, like the many who, while they sit idly in the circus or the theatre, already have a house in mourning, though the evil tidings have not yet been announced. But I, looking out from on high, see what storms either threaten you, a little later to burst their cloud, or, already nearer, have drawn close to carry off you and yours. What more? Even now, though you feel it but little, does not a certain whirlwind spin your souls round and round and wrap them up, as you flee from and pursue the very same things, now lifted aloft, now dashed down into the depths?