On Tranquillity of Mind

SERENUS: When I examined myself, Seneca, certain faults showed themselves laid bare and out in the open, such that I could lay my hand upon them; others were more obscure and tucked away in some corner; others were not constant but returned at intervals, and these I would call the most troublesome of all, like a roving enemy that springs upon you when the chance arises, by reason of which one can neither be on guard as in war nor at ease as in peace.

Yet the state I detect in myself above all is this (for why should I not confess the truth to you as to a physician?): that I am neither honestly freed from the things I feared and hated, nor again in bondage to them. I am set in a condition that, if not the worst, is at any rate the most fretful and peevish: I am neither sick nor well.

There is no need to tell me that the beginnings of all the virtues are tender, and that hardness and strength come to them with time. I am well aware that even those things which strive merely for outward show—I mean rank and the fame of eloquence and whatever depends upon another's vote—gather strength with delay; both those that supply real powers and those that trick themselves out with a kind of paint to please must wait for the years, until length of time gradually lends them their colour. But my fear is that habit, which lends things their constancy, may fix this fault in me the more deeply. Long familiarity breeds love of bad things as readily as of good.

What this weakness is, of a mind wavering between the two, leaning neither firmly toward the right nor toward the wrong, I can show you not so much all at once as piece by piece. I will describe what happens to me: you will find the name for the disease. I am gripped, I confess, by the deepest love of thrift.

What pleases me is a bed not arranged for display, clothing not brought out from a chest, not pressed to a shine by weights and a thousand contrivances that force it to gleam, but homespun and cheap, neither stored away nor to be put on with any fuss;

what pleases me is food that troops of slaves do not prepare and gaze upon, not ordered many days in advance nor served by many hands, but easy to come by and ready, with nothing far-fetched or costly about it, to be had anywhere, a burden neither to one's estate nor to one's body, not bound to come back up the way it went down;

what pleases me is an unpolished attendant, a home-bred slave still raw, the heavy plate of a rustic father stamped with no craftsman's name, and a table not conspicuous for the variety of its markings nor known to the whole city through a long succession of fashionable owners, but set there for use, one that holds no guest's eyes either by the pleasure it gives or by the envy it kindles.

Then, when all this has pleased me well, the splendour of some pages' establishment dazzles my mind, slaves dressed more carefully than for a public procession and decked with gold, and a whole column of glittering servants; by now even a house where the very floor one treads on is precious, where wealth is scattered into every corner, the ceilings themselves ablaze, and a crowd of hangers-on escorting estates on their way to ruin. Need I speak of pools transparent to the bottom that flow around the very banquets, or of feasts worthy of their own stage-setting?

Coming as I do from a long stretch of plain living, luxury has poured all its brilliance around me and rung in my ears from every side. My vision wavers a little; I can lift my mind against it more easily than my eyes. And so I withdraw, not worse, but sadder, and I no longer walk so tall among those modest belongings of mine; a silent gnawing creeps over me, and the doubt whether those other things may not be better. None of this changes me, yet none of it leaves me unshaken.

It pleases me to follow the commands of my teachers and to plunge into the thick of public life; it pleases me to lay hold of offices and the magistrate's fasces—not, of course, drawn on by the purple or the rods, but so that I may be readier and more useful to my friends and kinsmen, to all my fellow citizens, and then to all mankind. Eager and prepared, I follow Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus—and yet not one of them entered public life, and not one of them failed to urge it on others.

But the moment some unaccustomed shock buffets my mind, the moment I meet with something either degrading—as in the whole of human life there are many such things—or that flows less smoothly than it should, or matters of no great worth have demanded much of my time, I turn back to leisure; and just as even with tired cattle the pace homeward is quicker, so it is with me. It pleases me to confine my life within its own walls: 'Let no man rob me of a single day who will give back nothing worth so great a cost; let the mind cling to itself, cultivate itself, busy itself with nothing that is another's, nothing that looks to a judge; let a tranquillity be loved that is free of all care, public and private.'

But the moment some bolder reading has roused my spirit and noble examples have set their goads to me, I long to spring into the forum, to lend one man my voice, another my service—a service that, even if it should help him nothing, would at least try to help—to check in the forum the arrogance of some man whom prosperity has lifted up to his own harm.

In my studies, by Hercules, I think it better to look to the things themselves and to speak for their sake, leaving the words to follow the matter, so that where the matter leads, an unlabored style may go along with it: 'What need is there to compose works that will outlast the ages? Why not aim instead at not being passed over in silence by posterity? You were born to die: a funeral attended in silence has fewer vexations! And so, just to fill your time, for your own use and not for any fanfare, write something in a plain style; less toil is needed by those who study only for the day.'

Then again, when the mind has lifted itself by the grandeur of its thoughts, it grows ambitious for words, and yearns to speak as loftily as it breathes, and the style rises to match the dignity of its themes; forgetting then my rule and my more restrained judgment, I am carried higher, and the voice is no longer my own.

Not to pursue the details at greater length: in every matter this weakness of a well-meaning mind dogs me. Indeed I am afraid of gradually slipping away, or, what is more disquieting, of forever hanging like a man about to fall, and that there may be more amiss than I myself can see; for we look at our own affairs with a too-familiar eye, and partiality always stands in the way of judgment.

I think that many men could have reached wisdom, had they not supposed they had already reached it, had they not glossed over certain things in themselves and leaped past others with eyes shut. For you have no reason to judge that we are ruined more by other men's flattery than by our own. Who has ever dared to tell himself the truth? Who, set amid throngs of those who praise and fawn upon him, has not nonetheless been his own greatest flatterer?

And so I beg you, if you have any remedy by which to stay this tossing of mine, count me worthy to owe my tranquillity to you. These motions of the mind are not dangerous, I know, nor do they bring any real turmoil; to express what I complain of by a true comparison, it is not a storm that troubles me but seasickness. Take away, then, whatever this trouble is, and come to the aid of one who is suffering within sight of land.

SENECA: For some time now, Serenus, I have been asking myself in silence what I might liken such a condition of mind to, and I can bring it close to no example so nearly as to the case of those who, having recovered from a long and grave illness, are still touched now and then by little twinges and slight upsets, and who, though they have escaped the last remnants of the disease, are nonetheless made uneasy by their own suspicions, and, well as they now are, hold out their wrist to the doctor and read a fever into every warmth of their body. Their body, Serenus, is not unsound; it is merely not yet used to being sound—just as there is a certain trembling even in a calm sea, above all when it has just settled after a storm.

What you need, then, is not those harsher measures which we have now run past—standing in your own way here, growing angry with yourself there, bearing down hard upon yourself somewhere else—but that last remedy: to have confidence in yourself and to believe that you are going by the right road, drawn aside not at all by the crossing tracks of the many who run this way and that, some of them straying about the very road itself.

But what you long for is great, the highest of all, and near to godhood: not to be shaken. This steadfast seat of the mind the Greeks call euthymia—on which there is an excellent treatise by Democritus; I call it tranquillity. For there is no need to imitate and carry words over in the very shape they have in Greek; the thing itself under discussion must be marked by some name, and that name should have the force of the Greek term, not its features.

We are asking, then, how the mind may always hold an even and favorable course, be gracious to itself, look upon its own state with gladness, and not break off that joy, but abide in a calm condition, never lifting itself up nor casting itself down. That will be tranquillity. Let us inquire in a general way how it can be reached; from this common remedy you will take as much as you wish.

Meanwhile the whole malady must be dragged out into the open, where each man will recognize his own share of it; and at the same time you will understand how much less trouble you have with your self-disgust than do those whom shame, rather than any real will, holds bound to a showy profession and toiling under some grand title, kept fast in their own pretense.

All are in the same case: both those who are plagued by fickleness and boredom and by an endless changing of their purpose—men to whom what they have abandoned is always the more pleasing—and those who droop and yawn. Add to them those who, just like men who find sleep hard, toss about and arrange themselves now this way, now that, until weariness brings them rest. By forever reshaping the pattern of their lives, they end up settling at last in that state in which they are caught, not by any hatred of change, but by an old age too sluggish to make new starts. Add too those who are insufficiently changeable not through any fault of steadfastness but through sheer indolence, and who live not as they wish but as they have begun.

From there the particular forms are past counting, but the effect of the malady is one: to be displeased with oneself. This arises from a distemper of the mind and from desires that are timid or insufficiently rewarded, when men either do not dare as much as they crave, or do not attain it and lean wholly out toward their hope; they are forever unstable and shifting, as must happen to those left hanging. They press toward their wishes by every road, and they school and force themselves to dishonorable and difficult things; and where the effort goes unrewarded, the fruitless disgrace torments them, and they grieve not that they wanted what was base, but that they wanted it in vain.

Then they are seized both by regret for what they have begun and by a fear of beginning again, and over them creeps that tossing of a mind that can find no way out, because it can neither command its desires nor obey them; and there comes the hesitation of a life that fails to unfold itself, and the stagnation of a mind grown numb amid its abandoned wishes.

All this grows heavier still when, out of loathing for their laborious ill-success, men have fled to leisure and to studies pursued in private—studies that a mind set toward public affairs, greedy for action and by nature restless, cannot endure, having too few consolations within itself. And so, with the distractions stripped away that busy occupations afford to men forever on the move, it cannot bear home, solitude, the bare walls, and looks with reluctance upon itself left to its own company.

Hence comes that weariness and self-disgust, the writhing of a mind that can settle nowhere, and the gloomy, sick endurance of its own idleness—above all when shame forbids confessing the causes and embarrassment drives the torments inward, so that desires, shut up in a narrow space with no outlet, throttle themselves. Hence grief and dejection and the thousand surges of a wavering mind, which hopes just begun keep in suspense and hopes given up for lost leave despondent; hence that mood of men who curse their own leisure and complain that they have nothing to do, and whose envy is most hostile to other men's advancement. For unhappy idleness feeds spite, and they long for everyone to be brought low, because they themselves could not get ahead;

then, out of this aversion to other men's successes and despair of their own, the mind grows angry with fortune and complains of the age, and draws itself off into corners, brooding over its own punishment, while it is sick and ashamed of itself. For the human mind is by nature nimble and prone to motion. Every chance to rouse and distract itself is welcome to it—more welcome to all the worst dispositions, which gladly wear themselves down with busyness. As certain sores reach out for the hands that will hurt them and take pleasure in the touch, and as whatever irritates a foul itch of the body delights it, so I would say of these minds, in which desires have broken out like malignant sores, that toil and harassment are a pleasure to them.

For there are some things that delight even our body together with a kind of pain, as to turn over and shift a side not yet tired, and to cool oneself by lying first in one posture, then in another. Such is that Achilles of Homer's, now on his face, now on his back, settling himself into one position after another—which is the mark of a sick man, to endure nothing for long and to use changes as though they were cures.

Hence men take up aimless travels and rove along trackless shores, and their fickleness, forever hostile to whatever is at hand, tries itself out now by sea, now by land. 'Now let us make for Campania.' Soon the soft places have grown tiresome: 'Let us seek out wild country—let us push on to Bruttium and the woodlands of Lucania.' Yet amid the wastes something pleasant is wanted, where eyes accustomed to luxury may find relief from the long bleakness of forbidding scenes: 'Let us make for Tarentum and its famous harbor, the milder winters of its sky, a region rich enough even for its ancient throng.' For too long the ears have been kept from applause and uproar; now it is a pleasure to revel even in human blood: 'Now let us turn our course back to the city.' One journey is undertaken after another, and one spectacle is exchanged for another. As Lucretius says:

'Thus does each man forever flee himself.' But what good does it do, if he does not escape? He follows himself, and bears down upon himself, his own most oppressive companion.

And so we ought to know that the fault we suffer from is not in the places but in ourselves; we are weak at enduring anything—unable to bear toil for long, or pleasure, or our own selves, or anything at all. This has driven some men to death: that by forever changing their plans they kept rolling back to the same things and had left no room for novelty. Life and the very world began to disgust them, and there steals over them that cry of rotting self-indulgence: 'How long the same old things?'

You ask what help I think should be used against this weariness. The best course, as Athenodorus says, would be to keep oneself occupied with the conduct of affairs, with the management of the state, and with civic duties. For just as some men spend the day in sun and exercise and care of the body, and as it is by far the most useful thing for athletes to spend the greater part of their time nourishing the strength and brawn to which alone they have dedicated themselves, so for you who are training your mind for the contest of public life it is by far the finest thing to be engaged in that single work. For when a man has set himself the aim of making himself useful to his fellow citizens and to mankind, he both exercises and advances himself at once, who has placed himself in the thick of his duties, administering public and private business according to his ability.

'But because,' he says, 'amid this insane ambition of men, with so many slanderers twisting honest things to the worse, plain dealing is hardly safe, and there will always be more to thwart us than to favor us, one must indeed withdraw from the forum and from public life—yet a great mind has room to unfold itself freely even in private; and the impulse of men is not penned in cages as is that of lions and other beasts—men whose greatest deeds are done in retirement.

Yet let him so retire that, wherever he has hidden his leisure, he is willing to be of use to individuals and to all alike, by his talent, his voice, his counsel. For it is not only the man who brings forward candidates and defends the accused and gives his vote on peace and war who serves the state, but also the man who exhorts the young, who instills virtue into their minds in so great a dearth of good teachers, who seizes and holds back those rushing headlong toward money and luxury and, if nothing else, at least delays them: such a man, even in private, is conducting public business.

Or does the man render more service who, as praetor for foreigners or for citizens, pronounces to those who come before him the words his assessor prompts, than the man who teaches what justice is, what piety, what endurance, what courage, what contempt of death, what understanding of the gods, and how safe and free a good thing a good conscience is?

Therefore, if you devote to study the time you have withdrawn from your duties, you will not have deserted your post nor shirked your service. For it is not only the man who stands in the battle line and defends the right wing and the left who serves as a soldier, but also the man who guards the gates and holds a post that, though less dangerous, is not idle either, who keeps the night watches and has charge of the armory; and such offices, bloodless though they are, are counted among the terms of service.

If you recall yourself to study, you will escape every weariness of life, nor will you long for night to come out of disgust with the daylight, nor will you be a burden to yourself or superfluous to others; you will draw many into friendship, and the best of men will flock to you. For virtue, however obscure, never lies wholly hidden, but sends out signs of itself; whoever is worthy will trace it out by its footprints.

For if we do away with all society and renounce the human race and live wholly turned in upon ourselves, this solitude, stripped of all serious occupation, will be followed by a want of things to do. We shall begin to put up some buildings and tear down others, to push back the sea and to lead waters out against the difficulty of the terrain, and so to squander the time that Nature gave us to spend.

Some of us use it sparingly, others lavishly; some of us spend it so that we can render an account of it, others so that we are left with nothing—and there is nothing more shameful than that. Often a man far advanced in years has no other proof to show that he has lived long, except his age.'

To my mind, dearest Serenus, Athenodorus seems to have given in to the times too much, to have retreated too soon. I would not deny that one must sometimes yield, but step by step, with the standards saved and one's soldierly honor unimpaired; those who come over to the enemy under truce while still under arms are safer and more respected. This, I think, is what virtue, and the man devoted to virtue, must do.

If fortune prevails and cuts off his power to act, let him not at once turn his back and flee unarmed in search of hiding, as if there were any place where fortune could not pursue him, but let him take on his duties more sparingly and, with discrimination, find some way in which he may be useful to the state. Is he not allowed to bear arms?

Then let him seek public office. Must he live as a private citizen? Let him be a pleader. Is he condemned to silence? Let him help his fellow citizens by his silent advocacy. Is it dangerous even to set foot in the forum? Then in homes, at the games, at banquets, let him play the good comrade, the faithful friend, the temperate guest. Has he lost the duties of a citizen? Let him practice those of a man.

It is for this reason that, in greatness of soul, we have not shut ourselves within the walls of a single city, but have sent ourselves out into intercourse with the whole world and have declared the universe to be our native land—that virtue might be given a wider field. Is the tribunal closed to you, are you barred from the rostra or the assemblies? Look behind you at how vast a stretch of the widest regions lies open, how many peoples; never will so great a part be blocked off from you that a greater part is not left.

But take care that this whole thing is not your own fault; for you are unwilling to take any part in the state except as consul or prytanis or herald or suffete. What if you would refuse to soldier unless as general or tribune? Even if others hold the front rank and your lot has placed you among the reserves, from there serve with your voice, your encouragement, your example, your spirit; even with his hands cut off, a man finds in the battle something to contribute to his side, who nonetheless stands his ground and helps with his shout.

Do something of the same kind. If fortune has removed you from the front rank of public life, stand your ground nonetheless and help with your shout; and if someone has gripped you by the throat, stand your ground nonetheless and help by your silence. The service of a good citizen is never useless; heard and seen, by his look, his nod, his silent resolve, and by his very bearing he does good.

Just as certain wholesome things do good by their scent, without being tasted or touched, so virtue pours out its usefulness even from afar and in hiding. Whether it ranges abroad and exercises its own right, or holds its outings on sufferance and is forced to take in sail, whether it is idle and mute and hedged into a narrow space, or stands open—in whatever condition it is, it does good. Do you suppose the example of one who rests well to be of little use?

By far the best course, then, is to blend leisure with action, whenever an active life is hindered by chance obstacles or by the condition of the state; for never is everything so completely barred that there is no room left for some honorable deed.

Can you find any city more wretched than that of the Athenians was, when the Thirty Tyrants were tearing it apart? They had killed thirteen hundred citizens, the best of them all, and were not stopping for that reason; rather, their savagery whetted itself. In a city that held the Areopagus, the most august of tribunals, that had a senate and a people that resembled a senate, a grim college of executioners gathered daily, and the ill-starred senate house was too cramped for so many tyrants! Could that city find any rest, in which there were as many tyrants as there might be henchmen? Not even any hope of recovering liberty could be held out to men's minds, nor did there appear room for any remedy against so great a force of evils. For where was the wretched city to find so many men like Harmodius?

Yet Socrates was there in their midst, consoling the grieving fathers, urging on those who despaired of the state, reproaching the rich who now feared their own wealth with the too-late repentance of their dangerous greed, and carrying about, for those willing to imitate him, a great model—as he walked free among thirty masters.

Yet this same man Athens herself killed in prison, and the freedom that liberty had restored could not endure the freedom of the man who had safely mocked a whole band of tyrants. From this you may know both that even in a stricken state there is an opportunity for the wise man to show himself, and that in a flourishing and prosperous one wantonness, envy, and a thousand other cowardly vices hold sway.

However the state, then, presents itself, however fortune allows, so shall we either spread ourselves out or draw ourselves in; but in any case we shall keep in motion, and shall not grow numb, fettered by fear. Indeed, the true man will be the one who, with dangers looming on every side, with arms all around and chains rattling, has neither dashed his virtue to pieces nor hidden it away; for to bury oneself is not to save oneself.

Curius Dentatus used to say, and rightly, as I think, that he would rather be dead than merely alive; for it is the worst of evils to depart from the number of the living before you die. But if you fall upon a less manageable season of public affairs, you will have to claim more for leisure and for letters, and—just as in a perilous voyage—to make for harbor again and again, and not to wait until affairs dismiss you, but to detach yourself from them of your own accord.

We shall have to examine, first, our own selves; next, the undertakings we mean to attempt; and then those for whose sake, or in whose company, we mean to attempt them.

Before all else it is necessary to appraise oneself, because as a rule we seem to ourselves capable of more than we are. One man comes to grief through confidence in his eloquence; another has demanded more of his estate than it could bear; another has crushed a frail body with a laborious office. Some men's modesty is ill-suited to civic affairs, which call for a bold front; some men's stubbornness does not fit them for the court; some have no command over their anger, and the least indignation carries them off into rash words; some cannot keep their wit in check and do not abstain from dangerous jests. For all such men, repose is better than business; a fierce and impatient nature should avoid the provocations of a frankness that will do it harm.

Next we must appraise the very things we are undertaking, and weigh our own strength against the tasks we mean to attempt; for there ought always to be more strength in the doer than in the work; burdens that are greater than the one who bears them must necessarily crush him.

Moreover, some undertakings are not so much great as prolific, and bring with them a host of further undertakings. These too must be shunned—the kind from which fresh and manifold occupation will be born; nor must we approach anything from which there is no free retreat. We should set our hand to those tasks whose end we can either reach or at least hope for, and leave aside those that grow wider in the doing and do not stop where you intended.

In any case, a careful choice must be made of our associates: whether they are worth spending a part of our life upon, whether the loss of our time reaches them as a gain; for some men actually charge us with the very services we render them, as though we were in their debt.

Athenodorus says that he would not even go to dinner with a man who would owe him nothing in return for it. You understand, I suppose, that he would go far less readily to those who square the accounts of friendship by their table, who reckon up the courses as so many largesses, as though they were intemperate to do another man honor. Take away their witnesses and spectators, and a private gluttony will give them no pleasure. One must consider whether your nature is fitter for action or for leisured study and contemplation, and incline in the direction toward which the bent of your talent carries you. Isocrates laid his hand on Ephorus and drew him away from the forum, judging him more useful for composing records of history; for natures that are forced respond badly, and where nature struggles against it, the labor is in vain.

Yet nothing will delight the mind so much as a faithful and sweet friendship. What a blessing it is when hearts stand ready into which every secret may descend in safety, whose knowledge of you you fear less than your own, whose conversation soothes your anxiety, whose judgment unties your perplexity, whose cheerfulness scatters your gloom, whose very sight delights you! Such friends, of course, we shall choose as free as possible from desires; for vices creep on and leap across to each man's nearest neighbor and do harm by their touch. And so, just as

in a plague one must take care not to sit beside bodies already seized and burning with disease, because we shall draw the danger to ourselves and suffer from the very breath of it, so in choosing the characters of our friends we shall take pains to admit those least tainted; the beginning of disease is to mingle the sound with the sick. Yet I would not lay this down for you, that you should follow or attach to yourself no one but a wise man. For where will you find that man, whom we have been seeking for so many ages? In place of the best, let the least bad serve!

You would scarcely have the chance of a happier choice even if you were to seek out good men among the Platos and Xenophons and that whole crop of Socratic offspring, or if the age of Cato were put within your power—an age that bore many men worthy to be born in Cato's day, as well as many worse than at any other time, contrivers of the greatest crimes; for both throngs were needed, that Cato might be understood: he had to have both the good, to win their approval, and the bad, on whom to test his strength.

But as things now stand, amid so great a dearth of good men, let the choice be made less fastidiously. Above all, however, avoid the gloomy and those who bewail everything, to whom no occasion fails to offer matter for complaint. Granted that such a man's loyalty and goodwill hold firm, a companion who is forever agitated and groaning over everything is nonetheless an enemy to tranquillity.

Let us pass on to our estates, the greatest source of human distress; for if you set all the other things by which we are tormented—deaths, illnesses, fears, longings, the endurance of pains and labors—against the evils our money brings upon us, this side of the scale will far outweigh the rest.

And so we must reflect how much lighter a pain it is not to have than to lose; and we shall understand that poverty has the less matter for torment because it has the less matter for loss. For you are mistaken if you think the rich bear their losses with more spirit; in the largest and the smallest bodies alike, the pain of a wound is the same.

Bion neatly remarked that it is no less painful for the bald to have their hair plucked than for the long-haired. The same, you may be sure, holds of the poor and the rich: the torment is equal for them; for in each case the money has grown fast to the man and cannot be torn away without his feeling it. But it is, as I said, more bearable and easier not to acquire than to lose, and for that reason you will see those happier whom fortune has never looked upon than those whom she has deserted.

This Diogenes saw, a man of vast spirit, and he so arranged matters that nothing could be snatched from him. Call that condition poverty, want, destitution; pin on his security whatever shameful name you please. I will grant that this man is not happy, if you can find me any other to whom nothing can be lost. Either I am deceived, or it is a kind of kingship, amid the greedy, the swindlers, the robbers, the kidnappers, to be the one man who cannot be harmed.

If anyone doubts the happiness of Diogenes, he can equally doubt the state of the immortal gods—whether they live in too little blessedness, because they have no estates nor gardens nor costly lands worked by a tenant farmer nor great usury in the forum. Are you not ashamed, whoever you are that stand gaping at riches? Come, look upon the universe; you will see the gods naked, giving all, possessing nothing. Do you think the man poor, or like to the immortal gods, who has stripped himself of all that fortune gives?

Do you call happier that Demetrius, Pompey's freedman, who was not ashamed to be richer than Pompey himself? The number of his slaves was reported to him daily, as the strength of an army to a general—a man for whom long since two understudies and a roomier cell ought to have counted as wealth enough.

But Diogenes's one and only slave ran away, and when the man was pointed out to him, he did not think it worth the trouble to bring him back. 'It would be a disgrace,' he said, 'that Manes can live without Diogenes, but Diogenes cannot live without Manes.' He seems to me to have said: 'Mind your own business, fortune; there is now nothing of yours in Diogenes's keeping. My slave has run away—nay rather, it is I who have walked off a free man!' A household demands clothing and food;

so many bellies of most ravenous creatures must be provided for, clothing must be bought, those most thieving hands must be watched, and one must make use of the services of people who weep and curse you. How much happier is the man who owes nothing to anyone, except to the one person he can most easily refuse—himself!

But since we have not so much strength, our estates must at least be narrowed down, so that we may be less exposed to the assaults of fortune. In war, those bodies are handier that can be drawn together within their own armor than those that spill over the edges and on every side expose their bulk to wounds. The best measure of money is that which neither sinks into poverty nor strays far from poverty.

But this measure will please us only if thrift has first pleased us—thrift without which no wealth is sufficient, and with which no wealth fails to stretch far enough—especially since the remedy lies close at hand, and poverty itself can turn into riches once frugality is called in to its aid.

Let us accustom ourselves to put away ostentation, and to measure things by their use, not by their adornment. Let food subdue hunger, drink quench thirst; let appetite flow only as far as it must. Let us learn to lean upon our own limbs, to order our dress and our diet not by the latest fashions but as the ways of our forefathers urge; let us learn to increase self-control, to curb luxury, to temper our craving for glory, to soften anger, to look upon poverty with level eyes, to cultivate frugality—and all the more, even if many will be ashamed of it, to apply cheap remedies, ready to hand, to our natural wants; to keep our unbridled hopes and our minds straining toward the future as if under chains; and to set ourselves to seek our riches from ourselves rather than from fortune.

Never can so great a variety and injustice of mischances be warded off but that many a squall will rush upon those who spread great sail. Our affairs must be forced into a small compass, so that the missiles may fall harmless; and for this reason exile and calamity have sometimes served as a remedy, and graver troubles have been healed by lighter ones. When the mind gives too little heed to precepts and cannot be cured by gentler means, why should it not be served by applying poverty, disgrace, the overthrow of one's fortunes—an evil set against an evil? Let us then accustom ourselves to be able to dine without a crowd, to be served by fewer slaves, to procure clothes for the purpose they were invented for, and to live in a more cramped house. Not only in running and in the contests of the circus, but in these stretches of life too, we must keep to the inner track when we round the turn.

Even the most liberal of all expenditures, that on studies, has its reason only so long as it keeps within measure. What is the point of countless books and libraries, whose owner in his whole life has scarcely read through the catalogues? The mass of them burdens the learner, it does not instruct him, and it is far better to give yourself over to a few authors than to wander among many. Forty thousand books burned at Alexandria;

let someone else praise that loss as the noblest monument of royal opulence—as Livy does, who says it was an outstanding work of the elegance and care of kings. That was no elegance or care, but a studious extravagance—nay, not even studious, since they had gathered the books not for study but for show, just as for many men, ignorant even of the rudiments of letters, books are not the instruments of study but the decorations of a dining room. Let one acquire, then, as many books as are enough, and none for mere display.

'It is more respectable,' you say, 'to have lavished oneself on this expense than on Corinthian bronzes and painted panels.' Whatever is excessive is faulty everywhere. What reason have you to pardon a man who hunts after bookcases of citron wood and ivory, who collects the complete works of authors either unknown or condemned, and who sits yawning amid so many thousands of volumes, the man whom the title pages and the labels of his rolls please most of all?

And so it is in the houses of the laziest men that you will see whatever there is of oratory and of history, with their pigeonholes built up to the ceiling; for by now, among the bathrooms and hot baths, a library too is finished off as a necessary ornament of the house. I could readily pardon all this if it were a case of going astray through an excessive passion for study. As it is, these collections of the sacred works of genius, sorted out with their portrait busts, are bought up for show and to dress the walls.

But suppose you have fallen upon some hard way of life, and that, without your knowing it, fortune, whether public or private, has fastened upon you a noose that you can neither loosen nor break. Reflect that men in fetters at first bear ill the burdens and the shackles on their legs; then, when they have resolved not to chafe at them but to endure them, necessity teaches them to bear them bravely, and habit to bear them easily. In any way of life whatever you will find amusements and relaxations and pleasures, if only you are willing to think your ills light rather than to make them hateful.

On no better count has Nature deserved well of us than this: that, knowing into what hardships we are born, she devised habit as the softener of calamities, quickly bringing the gravest of them into familiarity. No one could hold out, if adversity kept by its persistence the same force it had in the first blow.

We are all chained to fortune. For some the chain is of gold and loose, for others tight and of base metal; but what does it matter? The same custody has hemmed us all in, and even those who have bound others are themselves bound—unless perhaps you think a chain lighter when it is on the left arm. Honors bind one man, wealth another; high birth weighs upon some, low birth upon others; over the heads of some hangs the command of others, over the heads of others their own; some are kept in one place by exile, others by priesthoods.

All life is servitude. One must therefore grow accustomed to one's lot, complain of it as little as possible, and lay hold of whatever advantage it has about it; nothing is so bitter that a balanced mind cannot find some comfort in it. Often a small plot has been opened to many uses by the skill of one who lays it out, and arrangement has made even the narrowest foothold habitable. Bring reason to bear upon your difficulties; hard things can be softened, narrow ones widened, and heavy ones press less upon those who carry them skillfully.

Moreover, our desires must not be sent off into the distance; let us rather allow them to range only as far as the near at hand, since they will not endure being shut in altogether. Leaving aside those things that either cannot be had or can be had only with difficulty, let us pursue what lies close by and beckons to our hope; but let us know that all these things are equally trifling—wearing different faces on the outside, equally hollow within. And let us not envy those who stand higher; what seemed lofty is sheer precipice.

Those again whom an unkind lot has set in a perilous height will be safer if they strip away the arrogance from things that are arrogant in themselves, and bring their own fortune down to the level ground as far as they can. There are indeed many who must of necessity cling fast to their pinnacle, from which they cannot come down except by falling; but let them bear witness that this very thing is their heaviest burden—that they are compelled to be a weight upon others, and are not raised aloft but nailed up. By justice, gentleness, kindness, by a generous and open hand, let them lay up many safeguards against an adverse turn, in the hope of which they may hang more securely. Yet nothing will deliver us so well from these surgings of the mind as always to set some limit to our advancement, and not to leave the decision of stopping to fortune, but to urge ourselves to halt well short of the limit. In this way certain desires will whet the mind, yet, being bounded, will not draw it out into the boundless and the uncertain.

This discourse of mine concerns the imperfect, the middling, the unsound—not the wise man. For him there is no need to walk timidly or step by cautious step; for he has such confidence in himself that he does not hesitate to go to meet fortune, and will never yield his ground to her. Nor has he any reason to fear her, since he counts among things merely lent not only his slaves and possessions and rank, but his very body too, and his eyes, and his hand, and whatever makes life dearer to a man, and even his own self; and he lives as one on loan to himself, ready to give all back without sadness to those who reclaim it.

Nor is he therefore cheap in his own eyes because he knows that he does not belong to himself; rather he will do everything as carefully, as circumspectly, as a scrupulous and upright man is accustomed to guard what has been entrusted to his keeping. And whenever he is bidden to give it back, he will not quarrel with fortune, but will say: 'I give thanks for what I have possessed and held.

It has cost me much to tend your property, but since you so command, I give it up, I yield it gratefully and gladly. If you would have me keep anything of yours even now, I will keep it; if you prefer otherwise, then my wrought and coined silver, my house, my household—I give them back, I restore them.' Should Nature, who first entrusted us to ourselves, call us to account, to her too we shall say: 'Take back a spirit better than you gave. I do not turn aside nor shrink; you have, ready from one who is willing, what you gave to one who did not feel it: take it away.'

What hardship is there in returning whence you came? He will live badly who does not know how to die well. And so the value of this thing first of all must be stripped away, and the breath of life reckoned among cheap things. Gladiators, as Cicero says, we hold in contempt if they are eager to win their lives by any means at all; we favor them if they make a show of despising life. Know that the same holds for us; for often the cause of death is to fear to die.

That fortune, who makes games for her own amusement, says: 'Why should I spare you, you wretched and trembling creature? You will be cut and run through all the more, because you do not know how to offer your throat. But you who take the steel with no neck drawn back, no hands thrust out to ward it off, but with courage—you will both live longer and die more easily.'

He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man. But he who knows that this was stipulated for him the very moment he was conceived will live by the bond, and at the same time, with that same strength of mind, will secure this further thing: that nothing which happens shall come to him as sudden. For by looking ahead to whatever can happen as though it were going to happen, he will soften the onset of all evils, which bring nothing new to those who are prepared and waiting; they fall heavily only upon the carefree, who look for nothing but happiness. Disease, captivity, ruin, fire—none of these is sudden:

I knew into how turbulent a fellowship Nature had shut me up. So many times in my neighborhood has the death-wail gone up; so many times has the torch and the taper passed before my threshold, leading premature funerals; often has the crash of a collapsing building sounded at my side; many of those whom the forum, the senate house, conversation had drawn into my company, a single night has carried off, and the coffin has cut apart the clasped hands of comrades. Should I marvel that dangers have sometimes come near me, when they have always been roaming about me? A great part of mankind is the kind that, about to set sail, gives no thought to the storm.

I shall never be ashamed of a good saying because its author is bad. Publilius, more forceful than the writers of tragedy and comedy whenever he left aside the trivialities of mime and words aimed at the topmost rows of the gallery, said among many other things that are stronger than the buskin, let alone the curtain of farce, this also: 'Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to you.' If a man lets this sink into his very marrow, and looks upon all the evils that befall others—of which each day brings an enormous supply—as though the road were open for them to reach him too, he will arm himself long before he is attacked;

Too late is the mind equipped to endure dangers, when the dangers are already past. 'I did not think this would happen,' and 'Would you ever have believed this would come to pass?' But why not? What riches are there that want and hunger and beggary do not follow at the heels? What dignity is there whose purple-bordered robe and augur's staff and patrician shoe-thongs are not attended by squalor and the brand of disgrace and a thousand stains and utter contempt? What kingdom is there for which ruin is not in readiness, and a trampling underfoot, and a master and an executioner? Nor are these separated by long intervals; the space of an hour lies between the throne and another man's knees.

Know, then, that every condition is liable to be overturned, and that whatever has befallen anyone at all can befall you too. Are you rich? Surely no richer than Pompey? When Gaius—his old kinsman, his new host—threw open Caesar's house to him only to mock his own, Pompey lacked bread and water! Though he owned so many rivers that rose on his lands and fell on his lands, he begged for the dripping of a gutter. He perished of hunger and thirst in his kinsman's palace, while that kinsman, his heir, was arranging a public funeral for a man who was starving! Have you held the highest offices?

But surely not such great ones, or so unlooked for, or so all-embracing as Sejanus held? On the very day the senate had escorted him, the people tore him into scraps; of the man on whom gods and men had heaped whatever could be heaped, there was nothing left for the executioner to drag away! Are you a king?

I will not send you to Croesus, who saw his own pyre both lit while he lived and quenched again, made to outlive not only his kingdom but his very death; nor to Jugurtha, whom the Roman people, within a year of having feared him, made a public show. We have seen Ptolemy, king of Africa, and Mithridates of Armenia among the guards of Gaius; the one was sent into exile, the other prayed that he might be sent there in better faith! Amid so great a turning of affairs that go up and down, if you do not hold whatever can happen as a thing that is to be, you give adversity its power over you—the power that whoever has foreseen it first has already broken.

The next point after these will be that we should not toil over what is needless, or for what is needless—that is, that we should not crave things we cannot attain, nor, having attained them, come to understand the emptiness of our desires too late and after much shame. In other words: that the toil should not be in vain, without result, nor the result unworthy of the toil; for as a rule sorrow follows from these, when either we have not succeeded or we are ashamed of the success.

We must cut back the rushing about that is the habit of a great part of mankind, forever roving through houses and theaters and forums; they thrust themselves into other men's affairs, always looking like men with something to do. If you ask one of them as he leaves his house, 'Where are you off to? What is on your mind?' he will answer you: 'By Hercules, I do not know; but I shall see some people, I shall do something.'

They wander without a purpose, looking for things to do, and they do not what they have planned but whatever they have stumbled into. Their course is aimless and idle, like that of ants creeping over a thicket, that are driven empty-handed up to the topmost tip and from there down to the bottom; most men lead a life like theirs, which one might not unjustly call a restless idleness.

You will pity some of them, running as if to a fire; so hard do they shove against those they meet, and hurl both themselves and others headlong, when all the while they have been hurrying either to pay their respects to a man who will not return the greeting, or to follow the funeral of someone they never knew, or to the trial of a habitual litigant, or to the betrothal of a habitual bride; and after dancing attendance on her litter, in some places they have even helped to carry it. Then, returning home with a needless weariness, they swear they do not themselves know why they went out, or where they have been—only to wander the next day along those same tracks.

Let all our effort, then, be directed to some end, let it have some end in view! It is not industry that drives the restless, but madness, the false images of things. For not even they are set in motion without some hope; the appearance of some object lures them on, whose emptiness their captive mind does not expose.

In the same way, each one of those who go out to swell the crowd is led about the city by empty and trifling reasons; though he has nothing to busy himself with, the rising daylight drives him out, and after he has been dashed in vain against many men's doors and has saluted the name-callers in passing, shut out by many, of all men he finds none harder to meet at home than himself.

From this evil hangs that most loathsome vice, eavesdropping and the prying into matters public and private, and the knowledge of many things that can neither be told in safety nor heard in safety.

It was with this in view, I think, that Democritus began thus: 'Whoever would live tranquilly should not be too busy either in private or in public affairs'—meaning, of course, with reference to needless ones. For if matters are necessary, then both in private and in public we must do not merely many things but countless ones; but where no solemn duty summons us, our activities must be held in check.

For the man who does many things often puts himself in fortune's power, whereas it is safest to put her to the test rarely, but always to keep her in mind and to promise oneself nothing on the strength of her good faith. 'I will sail, unless something happens'; and 'I will become praetor, unless something stands in the way'; and 'My business will turn out for me, unless something intervenes.'

This is why we say that nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation: we exempt him not from the chances that befall men, but from their mistakes; nor does everything turn out for him as he wished, but as he reckoned—and above all he reckoned that something might stand in the way of his plans. And the pain of a frustrated desire must necessarily reach the mind more lightly when you have not flatly promised yourself success.

We must also make ourselves adaptable, so that we do not give ourselves up too much to our fixed designs, but pass over into whatever chance has led us, and do not dread a change either of plan or of condition—provided only that fickleness, the deadliest enemy of repose, does not take hold of us. For obstinacy must needs be anxious and wretched, since fortune is forever wringing something from it, while fickleness, which can hold to nothing, is far heavier still. Both are hostile to tranquillity: to be able to change nothing, and to be able to endure nothing.

In any case the mind must be called back to itself from all outward things. Let it have confidence in itself, rejoice in itself, look up to its own goods, withdraw as far as it can from what belongs to others and attach itself to itself, not feel its losses, and interpret even adversity kindly.

When the wreck of his ship was announced, our own Zeno, hearing that all his goods had gone to the bottom, said: 'Fortune bids me play the philosopher more lightly burdened.' A tyrant was threatening the philosopher Theodorus with death, and indeed with death unburied: 'You have,' said Theodorus, 'reason to be pleased with yourself—a half-pint of blood is in your power; for as to burial, what a fool you are if you think it matters to me whether I rot above the ground or below it.'

Julius Canus, a man great above all others—whose claim to our admiration is not lessened even by the fact that he was born in our own age—after a long altercation with Gaius, was told by that Phalaris, as he was leaving: 'So that you may not flatter yourself with some foolish hope, I have ordered you to be led off to execution.' 'I thank you,' he replied, 'most excellent prince.'

What he meant I am not sure, for many possibilities come to my mind. Did he mean to be insulting and to show how great that cruelty was under which death was a kindness? Or was he reproaching Gaius with his daily madness? (for thanks were being rendered even by those whose children had been killed and whose goods had been seized.) Or did he accept it gladly, as a kind of release? Whatever it was, he answered with a great soul.

Someone will say: 'Gaius could after this have ordered him to live on.' Canus had no fear of that; Gaius's good faith in such orders was well known! Will you believe that he spent the ten intervening days, right up to his execution, without any anxiety? It passes belief—the things that man said, the things he did, how perfectly at peace he was.

He was playing at draughts when the centurion, dragging along a column of men doomed to die, ordered him too to be roused. Summoned, he counted his pieces and said to his partner: 'See that after my death you do not falsely claim to have won'; then, with a nod to the centurion: 'You shall be witness,' he said, 'that I am one piece ahead.' Do you suppose that Canus was merely playing at that board? He was making a mock of it! His friends were saddened at the loss of such a man:

'Why are you downcast?' he said. 'You are inquiring whether souls are immortal; I shall know the answer presently.' Nor did he cease to search out the truth at the very end, and to make a question of inquiry out of his own death.

His own philosopher was attending him, and the mound was now not far off on which the daily sacrifice was being offered to our god Caesar; and he said: 'What, Canus, are you thinking of now? What is in your mind?' 'I have resolved,' said Canus, 'to watch closely whether in that swiftest of moments the soul will be aware of its going forth'; and he promised that, if he discovered anything, he would go round to his friends and report what the condition of souls might be.

Behold tranquillity in the midst of the storm; behold a soul worthy of eternity, which summons its own fate as a proof of the truth, which, set on that last step, questions the departing soul and learns something not only right up to death but even from death itself. No one ever played the philosopher longer. This great man shall not be let go in haste, and he deserves to be spoken of with care. We will give you over to all remembrance, most illustrious of men, you who were a great part of the carnage wrought by Gaius!

But it is of no use to have cast off the causes of private sorrow; for sometimes a hatred of the human race takes possession of us. When you have reflected how rare simplicity is, how unknown innocence, how scarcely ever there is good faith except when it pays, and when there comes before you the whole throng of crimes that prosper, and the gains and losses of lust, equally hateful, and ambition that by now so far refuses to keep within its own bounds that it shines through sheer baseness: then the mind is driven into night, and, as if the virtues had been overthrown—virtues which one is no longer allowed to hope for and which it does no good to possess—darkness rises over it.

We must therefore be turned in this direction: that all the vices of the crowd seem to us not hateful but laughable, and that we imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For the latter, whenever he went out in public, wept, while the former laughed; to the one, everything we do seemed misery, to the other, folly. We must therefore make light of everything and bear it with an easy mind; it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it.

Add to this, that he who laughs at the human race deserves better of it than he who mourns over it; for the one leaves it some room for good hope, while the other foolishly bewails things he despairs of ever setting right. And, taking all things into view, it is the mark of a greater soul not to restrain one's laughter than not to restrain one's tears, since laughter stirs the gentlest of the mind's passions and reckons nothing in all this great array to be great, nothing solemn, nor even wretched.

Let each man set before himself the several things on account of which we are glad or sad, and he will know the truth of what Bion said: that all human concerns are very like their beginnings, and that men's life is no more sacred or solemn than their conception—that, born from nothing, they fall back into nothing.

But it is better to take the common manners and the vices of mankind calmly, breaking out into neither laughter nor tears; for to be tormented by other men's ills is an everlasting misery, to take delight in other men's ills an inhuman pleasure, just as it is a useless show of feeling to weep because someone is burying a son, and to compose one's countenance to grief.

In one's own troubles, too, one ought so to bear oneself as to grant to grief only as much as Nature demands, not as much as custom does; for most men pour out tears in order to make a display, and have dry eyes as often as a spectator is wanting, judging it disgraceful not to weep when everyone is weeping. So deeply has this evil fixed itself in us—to hang upon other men's opinion—that even the simplest thing of all, grief, descends into pretense.

There follows a topic that, not without reason, tends to sadden us and to bring us into anxiety. When good men come to a bad end—when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, when that Cato, the living image of the virtues, falling upon his sword, declares openly that all is over both with himself and with the republic—it is inevitable that one should be tormented that fortune pays out such unjust rewards. And what is each man then to hope for himself, when he sees the best men suffering the worst? What, then, is the answer?

Look at how each of them bore his end, and if they were brave, long for them with a spirit like their own; if they perished in a womanish and cowardly way, nothing is lost. Either they are worthy, and their virtue should please you, or unworthy, and their cowardice is no loss to miss. For what is more shameful than that the greatest men, by dying bravely, should make others timid? Let us praise the man worthy of praise as often as he deserves it, and say: 'The braver, the happier!

You have escaped all mischances, spite, disease; you have come out from custody; not that you seemed to the gods worthy of an ill fortune, but unworthy that fortune should any longer have any power over you.' But upon those who shrink back and, even in the act of death, look longingly toward life, we must lay hold with a firm hand!

I will weep for no man who is glad, for no man who weeps; the one has himself wiped away my tears, the other by his own tears has made himself worthy of none. Shall I weep for Hercules because he is burned alive, or for Regulus because he is pierced by so many nails, or for Cato because he reopens his own wounds? All these men, at the small cost of a little time, found out how to become eternal, and reached immortality by dying.

There is also that not insignificant source of anxieties: if you compose yourself anxiously and show yourself to no one frankly, as is the life of many men—a feigned life, got up for display; for the unremitting watching of oneself is a torment, and one fears being caught looking other than one's wont. Nor are we ever freed from care, so long as we think ourselves judged as often as we are looked at; for many things happen that strip us bare against our will, and, however well so great a self-scrutiny may succeed, the life of those who always live behind a mask is neither pleasant nor secure.

But how much pleasure there is in a candor that is genuine and unadorned in itself, drawing no veil over its own character! Yet this life too runs the risk of contempt, if everything lies open to everyone; for there are those who disdain whatever they have come closer to. But there is no danger that virtue will grow cheap when brought before the eyes, and it is better to be despised for one's simplicity than to be tormented by perpetual pretense. Let us, however, apply moderation to the matter; there is a great difference between living simply and living carelessly.

We must also withdraw much into ourselves; for association with men unlike us unsettles a well-ordered state, reawakens the passions, and chafes raw whatever in the mind is weak and not fully healed. Yet these two must be mingled and made to alternate—solitude and company. The one will make us long for men, the other for ourselves, and each will be the remedy for the other; solitude will cure the loathing of the crowd, the crowd the weariness of solitude.

Nor should the mind be held evenly at the same pitch of effort, but should be drawn off to amusements. Socrates did not blush to play with little children, and Cato used to relax with wine a mind wearied by public cares, and Scipio would move to rhythm that triumphal, soldierly body of his—not breaking himself up in effeminate fashion, as is now the way with men who, in their very gait, flow with a softness beyond a woman's, but as those men of old were wont, in their play and at festival times, to dance in manly style, men who would have taken no harm of it even if they had been watched by their own enemies.

Relaxation must be granted to our minds; rested, they will rise up better and keener. As one must not make demands of fertile fields—for an unbroken fruitfulness will quickly exhaust them—so unremitting toil will break the energy of our minds, which will recover their powers when loosened and relaxed a little; from the constant pursuit of labors there arises a certain dullness and languor of mind.

Nor would so strong a craving of men reach out toward this, if play and jesting did not hold a certain natural pleasure—though the frequent use of them will rob the mind of all its weight and all its force; for sleep too is necessary for our restoration, yet if you keep it up through day and night together, it will be death. There is a great difference between slackening something and loosing it altogether!

The framers of the laws established festival days, so that men might be brought together publicly to merriment, as though inserting a necessary tempering into their labors; and certain great men, as I have said, gave themselves monthly holidays on fixed days, while others divided no day at all but split it between leisure and cares. Such a man we remember Asinius Pollio to have been, the great orator, whom no business detained beyond the tenth hour; he would not even read letters after that hour, lest some fresh care should arise, but in those two hours he laid aside the weariness of the whole day. Some have taken a break in the middle of the day and put off some lighter work to the afternoon hours. Our ancestors too forbade any new motion to be brought before the senate after the tenth hour. The soldier divides up his watches, and the night is exempt from duty for those returning from a campaign.

The mind must be indulged, and leisure must be granted it from time to time, to serve as nourishment and strength. We should walk abroad in the open air, so that under the free sky and with deep breaths the mind may grow and lift itself up; sometimes a ride, a journey, a change of region will give back its vigor, and so will good company and a more generous draught. Now and then one should even go as far as drunkenness—not so that it may drown us, but so that it may sink our cares; for it washes away our troubles and stirs the mind from its depths, and as it heals certain diseases, so it heals sadness; and Liber was called the discoverer of wine not because of any license of the tongue, but because he frees the mind from the slavery of cares, sets it at liberty, quickens it, and makes it bolder for every undertaking.

But as of liberty, so of wine, the wholesome thing is moderation. Solon and Arcesilaus are believed to have been fond of wine; drunkenness has been thrown in Cato's teeth—but whoever brought that charge against him will more easily make the charge respectable than make Cato disgraceful. Yet it must not be done often, lest the mind contract a bad habit; and yet now and then it must be drawn out into exultation and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be put away for a little while.

For whether we believe the Greek poet that 'sometimes it is pleasant even to be mad,' or Plato that 'the man in possession of his senses has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry,' or Aristotle that 'no great genius has ever existed without a mixture of madness': a mind can utter nothing grand and above the common run unless it has been stirred.

When it has scorned the common and the customary and risen higher by a sacred impulse, only then does it sing something grander than a mortal mouth could. It cannot lay hold of anything sublime and set on a height so long as it is in possession of itself; it must break away from the wonted course, and be carried off, and champ the bit, and snatch away its own driver, and bear him where on his own he would have feared to climb.

You have now, dearest Serenus, the things that can preserve tranquillity, that can restore it, that can resist the vices as they steal upon us. Yet know this: that none of these is strong enough for those who would keep safe a thing so frail, unless an intent and unremitting care stands guard about the wavering mind.