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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Tranquility of Mind
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On Tranquility of Mind

1 When I examined myself, Seneca, some of my vices showed themselves in plain sight, where I could take hold of them with my hand; some were more hidden, back in a corner; and some were not there all the time but came back at intervals. These last I would call the most troublesome of all. They are like roving enemies who spring on you whenever they see a chance, and with them you can do neither one thing nor the other: you can neither stand ready as in war nor be free of care as in peace.

Still, the condition I catch myself in most of all (for why should I not confess the truth to you, as to a doctor?) is this: I am neither honestly free of the things I used to fear and hate, nor, on the other hand, in their power. The state I am in is not the worst, but it is the most complaining and peevish: I am neither sick nor well. There is no need to tell me that all virtues are tender at first, and that time gives them firmness and strength. I know, too, that the things that work for show, I mean rank and a name for eloquence and whatever depends on other people’s votes, grow strong with time: both the things that build real strength and the things that are dressed up with some kind of paint to please must wait for years, until length of time gradually gives them their color. But I am afraid that habit, which gives things stability, may fix this vice deeper in me. Long acquaintance breeds love for bad things as much as for good.

What it is like, this weakness of a mind hesitating between the two, leaning bravely neither toward the right nor toward the wrong, I can show you better piece by piece than all at once. I will tell you what happens to me; you will find a name for the disease. I have, I admit, a great love of thrift. I like a bed that is not made up for show; clothes not brought out of a chest, not pressed under weights and a thousand screws that force them to shine, but plain, everyday clothes that need no care to keep or to put on. I like food that no household of slaves has to prepare or watch being eaten, not ordered many days ahead or served by many hands, but easy to get and easy to make, with nothing exotic or costly about it, to be had anywhere, a burden neither to the estate nor to the body, and not likely to come back up the way it went down. I like a plain servant, a rough little houseborn slave; my rustic father’s heavy silver with no maker’s name on it; and a table not conspicuous for the variety of its markings, or known to the whole city from passing through the hands of a long line of fashionable owners, but set up for use, one that holds no guest’s eyes with pleasure and inflames none with envy. Then, after all this has pleased me well, my mind is dazzled by the display of some training school for page boys: slaves dressed more carefully than for a procession and decked in gold, a whole troop of gleaming servants; and then a house where even the floor you walk on is precious, where wealth is scattered in every corner and the very ceilings glitter; and the crowd that tags along after fortunes on their way to ruin. Why should I speak of waters clear to the bottom that flow round the very guests at dinner, of banquets worthy of such a stage? Coming as I do from long, dull years of frugality, I find luxury pouring around me in all its splendor and echoing on every side. My eyes waver a little; I can lift my mind against it more easily than my eyes. So I come away, not worse, but sadder; I do not walk so tall among my own paltry things; and a silent pang comes over me, and a doubt whether that life may not be better. None of this changes me, yet none of it fails to shake me.

I like to follow my teachers’ orders and go into the thick of public life. I like to take up office and the fasces, not, of course, because the purple or the rods have lured me, but so that I may be more ready and more useful to my friends and relatives and all my fellow citizens, and then to all mankind. Eager and untried, I follow Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus,1 none of whom went into public life, and every one of whom sent others into it. But when something has struck a mind not used to being battered, when something happens that is either unworthy (as so much is in every human life) or not going smoothly, or when things not worth much have demanded a great deal of time, I turn back to leisure; and, as cattle walk faster toward home even when they are tired, so do I. I like to confine my life within my own walls again. Let no one rob me of a single day, since he will give back nothing worth so great a cost; let the mind cling to itself, cultivate itself, do nothing that is another’s business, nothing that has to wait on anyone’s verdict; let me love a tranquility free of public and private cares. But when some stirring reading has roused my mind, and noble examples have spurred me on, I want to leap into the forum, lend my voice to one man and my help to another, help that, even if it does no good, will at least try to, and check in the forum the arrogance of someone puffed up by undeserved success.

In my studies, by heaven, I think it better to keep my eyes on the matter itself and to speak for its sake, and for the rest to leave the words to the matter, so that my style follows, unlabored, wherever the matter leads. What need is there to compose things that will last for centuries? Won’t you stop working to keep posterity from being silent about you? You were born to die; a silent funeral has fewer annoyances. So write something in a simple style to fill your time, for your own use, not for advertisement: study for the day’s needs takes less labor. Then again, when my mind has been lifted up by the greatness of its thoughts, it grows ambitious for words; as it aspires higher, so it longs to speak higher, and the style rises to the dignity of the matter. Forgetting then my rule and my stricter judgment, I am carried higher, with a voice no longer my own.

Not to go on with details any longer: in everything this weak hold on a sound mind follows me. I am afraid I may gradually slip away, or, what is more worrying, that I may hang forever like someone about to fall, and that there may be more wrong with me than I myself can see. For we look on our own affairs with a friend’s eyes, and favor always gets in the way of judgment. I think many men could have reached wisdom if they had not thought they had reached it already, if they had not hidden some things in themselves and closed their eyes and jumped over others. For there is no reason to think that we are ruined more by other people’s flattery than by our own. Who has dared to tell himself the truth? Who, surrounded though he was by crowds of people praising and fawning on him, has not still been his own greatest flatterer? So I ask you, if you have any remedy to stop this wavering of mine, to think me worthy of owing my tranquility to you. I know these movements of the mind are not dangerous and bring no real turmoil. To express what I complain of with an exact comparison: it is not a storm that troubles me but seasickness. So take away this ill, whatever it is, and help someone struggling within sight of land.

2 I have been asking myself in silence for a long time now, Serenus, by heaven, what I should liken such a state of mind to, and I can bring it closest to the case of people who have recovered from a long and serious illness but are still touched by slight twinges and little discomforts now and then. Though they have escaped the last traces of the disease, they are still troubled by suspicions; already well, they hold out their wrist to doctors and suspect every warmth of their body of being fever. Their body, Serenus, is not unsound; it is only unused to soundness, just as even a calm sea still has a certain trembling and motion when it has come to rest after a storm. What you need, then, is not the harsher treatments we have already gone through, resisting yourself here, being angry with yourself there, pressing hard on yourself elsewhere, but the one that comes last: to trust yourself and believe you are on the right road, not drawn aside by the crisscrossing tracks of the many who run this way and that, some of them wandering close around the road itself. But what you long for is something great and supreme and close to god: not to be shaken.

The Greeks call this steady footing of the mind euthymia,2 and Democritus has an excellent book on it; I call it tranquility (tranquillitas). For there is no need to imitate words and copy them in the Greek form; the thing we are talking about must be marked by some name that has the force of the Greek word, not its look. What we are asking, then, is how the mind may always go on an even and favorable course, be well disposed to itself, look on its own affairs with gladness, and never interrupt this joy but stay in a calm state, never lifting itself up and never casting itself down. That will be tranquility. Let us ask in general how it can be reached; you will take from the common remedy as much as you like. Meanwhile the whole vice must be dragged into the open, and in it each man will recognize his own share. At the same time you will understand how much less trouble you have with your dislike of yourself than those who, tied to some showy profession and laboring under a grand title, are held in their pretense by shame more than by choice.

They are all in the same case: both those who are plagued by fickleness and boredom and constant change of purpose, who always like better what they have left behind, and those who droop and yawn. Add those who toss and turn like people who cannot sleep, settling themselves now this way, now that, until they find rest through sheer weariness: by reshaping their way of life again and again, they end up staying in the one where they are caught, not by dislike of change, but by old age, too sluggish for anything new. Add, too, those who fail to be fickle, a fault that comes not from constancy but from inertia, and who live not as they want but as they began. There are countless varieties after this, but the vice has one effect: to be displeased with oneself. This springs from a mind out of balance and from desires that are timid or unsuccessful, when men either do not dare as much as they desire or do not attain it, and lean out wholly toward hope. They are always unsteady and changeable, as must happen to people who live in suspense. They strain toward their wishes by every road, teach and force themselves to do shameful and difficult things, and when their labor goes unrewarded, they are tortured by disgrace that bought them nothing: they are sorry not for having wished for wrong things but for having wished in vain. Then they are seized both by regret for what they began and by fear of beginning again, and there creeps over them that tossing of a mind that finds no way out, because they can neither command their desires nor obey them, and the hesitation of a life that never gets under way, and the stagnation of a mind growing numb among abandoned wishes. All this is worse when, out of hatred for their laborious failure, they have taken refuge in leisure and in private studies, which a mind bent on public affairs, eager for action, and restless by nature cannot bear, since, of course, it has too few consolations within itself. So, once it is deprived of the amusements that busy affairs themselves supply to people rushing about, it cannot stand home, solitude, the four walls; it looks unwillingly at itself left to itself.

From this come that boredom, that displeasure with oneself, that tossing of a mind that settles nowhere, that gloomy and sick endurance of one’s own leisure. It is worst when people are ashamed to confess the causes and their sense of shame has driven their torments inward: then their desires, shut up in a narrow space with no way out, strangle themselves. From this come grief and listlessness and the thousand surges of an unsettled mind, which hopes begun keep in suspense and hopes given up leave gloomy. From this comes the state of those who loathe their leisure and complain that they themselves have nothing to do, and the bitterest envy of other people’s advancement (for unhappy idleness feeds spite, and they want everyone destroyed because they could not get ahead themselves); then, from this aversion to others’ progress and despair of their own, comes a mind that rages at Fortune, complains about the times, withdraws into corners, and broods over its own punishment, while it is sick and weary of itself. For the human mind is by nature active and prone to movement. Anything that rouses and distracts it is welcome to it, and more welcome still to all the worst natures, which are glad to be worn down by preoccupations. Just as certain sores crave the hands that will hurt them and delight in being touched, and the foul itch of the body enjoys whatever scratches it, so, I would say, these minds, in which desires have broken out like evil sores, take pleasure in toil and torment. For there are some things that delight even our body while giving it a certain pain, such as turning over and changing to a side that is not yet tired, and cooling ourselves now in one position, now in another. Homer’s Achilles is like that, lying now on his face, now on his back, arranging himself in one position after another: this is the mark of a sick man, to put up with nothing for long and to use changes as remedies.

Hence people take up aimless journeys and wander along shores, and their fickleness, always hostile to whatever is at hand, tries itself now on sea, now on land. “Now let’s head for Campania.” Soon soft living bores them: “Let’s see some wild country; let’s go through the forests of Bruttium and Lucania.” Yet in the wilderness they look for something pleasant, where their pampered eyes can find relief from the long squalor of rough places: “Let’s make for Tarentum, its famous harbor, its mild winters, a district rich enough even for its crowds of old … Now let’s turn our course back to Rome: our ears have gone too long without applause and noise; now I’d like to enjoy a little human blood too.” One journey is undertaken after another, and one spectacle is exchanged for another. As Lucretius says:

“Thus each man is forever running from himself.”3

But what good does it do, if he does not escape? He follows himself and presses on himself, the most tiresome of companions. So we must understand that the fault we suffer from is not in the places but in ourselves: we are too weak to endure anything, unable to bear toil or pleasure, ourselves or anything else, for long. This has driven some people to death: by changing their purposes again and again they kept coming round to the same things and had left no room for anything new, and life and the universe itself began to disgust them; and there came over them that cry of people rotting in luxury: “How much longer the same things?”

3 You ask what help I think we should use against this boredom. The best course, as Athenodorus4 says, would be to keep oneself occupied with practical affairs, the management of the state, and the duties of a citizen. Some men spend the day in the sun, in exercise, and in care of the body, and for athletes by far the most useful thing is to spend the greater part of their time feeding their arms and the strength to which alone they have devoted themselves; just so, for us, who are preparing our minds for the contest of civic life, by far the finest thing is to be at our work. For when a man has set himself the aim of making himself useful to his fellow citizens and to mankind, he both trains and makes progress at once by putting himself in the middle of public duties and managing common and private affairs to the best of his ability. “But because,” he says, “in this insane ambition of men, with so many slanderers twisting what is right into something worse, honesty is not very safe, and there will always be more to block us than to help us succeed, we must indeed withdraw from the forum and public life. But a great mind has room to unfold itself freely even in private life; and the energies of men are not, like the onrush of lions and other animals, held in by cages, for men’s greatest actions are done in retirement. Yet a man should hide himself in such a way that, wherever he has hidden his leisure, he still wants to be of use to individuals and to everyone by his intellect, his voice, his advice. For it is not only the man who brings forward candidates, defends the accused, and votes on peace and war who serves the state. The man who encourages the young, who in so great a dearth of good teachers instills virtue into minds, who grabs and pulls back those rushing headlong after money and luxury and, if nothing else, at least slows them down, is doing public business in private life. Or does the man who, as praetor for foreigners or praetor of the city, pronounces his assessor’s words to those who come before him, do more than the man who teaches what justice is, what devotion, what endurance, what courage, what contempt for death, what understanding of the gods, and what a free good a good conscience is? So if you give to study the time you have taken away from your duties, you will not have deserted or refused your post. For the soldier is not only the one who stands in the battle line and defends the right wing and the left, but also the one who guards the gates and holds a post less dangerous, though not an idle one, who keeps the night watch and is in charge of the armory: these duties, though bloodless, count as military service. If you call yourself back to study, you will escape all disgust with life; you will not long for night out of weariness of daylight, you will not be a burden to yourself or useless to others; you will draw many people into friendship, and all the best men will flock to you. For virtue, however obscure, is never hidden; it sends out signs of itself, and whoever is worthy will follow its tracks. For if we do away with all social life, renounce the human race, and live turned in on ourselves alone, this solitude without any pursuit will be followed by a lack of things to do: we will begin to put up some buildings and pull down others, push back the sea, bring water in against the lie of the land, and squander the time that nature gave us to use. Some of us use it sparingly, others wastefully; some of us spend it so that we can give an account of it, others so that we have nothing left, and nothing is more shameful than that. Often a man old in years has no other proof that he has lived long except his age.”

4 To me, my dearest Serenus, Athenodorus seems to have given in to the times too much and to have run away too soon. I would not deny that at times one must give way, but by stepping back gradually, with the standards safe and military honor safe: those who come over to the enemy on terms, still armed, are more respected by him and safer. This, I think, is what virtue and the student of virtue should do: if Fortune gets the upper hand and cuts off the chance to act, he should not at once turn his back and flee unarmed, looking for hiding places, as if there were any place where Fortune could not follow him; he should throw himself into duties more sparingly and choose with care some way to be useful to the state. He may not serve in the army: let him seek office. He must live as a private citizen: let him be an orator. Silence has been imposed on him: let him help his fellow citizens by silent advocacy. Even entering the forum is dangerous: in homes, at shows, at dinners, let him play the good companion, the faithful friend, the temperate guest. He has lost the duties of a citizen: let him practice those of a man. That is why, with a great spirit, we have not shut ourselves within the walls of one city but have gone out into dealings with the whole world and declared the universe our country: so that we might give virtue a wider field. The tribunal is closed to you, and you are kept from the rostra or the assemblies: look behind you at how many broad lands lie open, how many peoples. Never will so large a part be blocked to you that a larger one is not left. But see that this whole trouble is not your own fault. You do not want to serve the state unless as consul, or as prytanis at Athens, or herald, or sufete at Carthage. What if you refused to be a soldier unless as general or tribune? Even if others hold the front line and the lot has put you in the rear ranks, fight from there with your voice, encouragement, example, and spirit: even with his hands cut off, a man finds something to contribute to his side in battle if he still stands his ground and helps with his shout. Do something like that: if Fortune has removed you from the first place in the state, stand your ground anyway and help with your shout; and if someone chokes your throat, stand your ground anyway and help with your silence. The work of a good citizen is never useless: he is heard and seen. By his look, his nod, his silent stubbornness, his very walk, he does good. As some healthful things do their work by their smell, without being tasted or touched, so virtue spreads its benefit even from a distance and in hiding. Whether it walks abroad and uses its own rights, or goes out only on sufferance and is forced to shorten sail, or is idle and mute and narrowly hemmed in, or out in the open, in whatever state it is, it does good. Do you think the example of a man who rests well is of little use? So by far the best thing is to mix leisure with affairs whenever an active life is blocked by chance obstacles or by the condition of the state; for everything is never so shut off that there is no room for honorable action.

5 Can you find a city more wretched than Athens was when the Thirty Tyrants were tearing it apart?5 They had killed thirteen hundred citizens, all the best men, and that did not make them stop; their savagery egged itself on. In the city that had the Areopagus, the most sacred of courts, that had a senate and a people like its senate, there met every day a grim board of executioners, and the wretched senate house was too small for its tyrants. Could that city ever find rest, which had as many tyrants as it had henchmen? Not even a hope of recovering freedom could present itself to their minds, and there seemed to be no room for any remedy against such a mass of evils: for where would a wretched city find so many Harmodiuses? Yet Socrates was in their midst. He consoled the grieving fathers, encouraged those who despaired of the state, reproached the rich who feared for their wealth with repenting too late of their dangerous greed, and carried about a great model for those willing to imitate it, as he walked a free man among thirty masters. Yet Athens herself killed him in prison, and freedom could not bear the freedom of a man who had safely mocked a whole troop of tyrants: so that you may know that even in a stricken state the wise man has occasion to put himself forward, and that in a flourishing and happy one wantonness, envy, and a thousand other idle vices reign. However the state presents itself, then, however Fortune allows, we will either spread ourselves out or draw ourselves in; but in any case we will move, and not lie numb, bound by fear. No, he will be a man indeed who, with dangers threatening on every side, with arms and chains clanking around him, neither dashes his virtue against them nor hides it: for to bury yourself is not to save yourself. Curius Dentatus, I believe, used to say that he would rather be dead than live as a dead man: the last of evils is to leave the number of the living before you die. But if you happen on a time when the state is less manageable, you will have to claim more for leisure and letters, and, just as on a dangerous voyage, make for harbor now and then, and not wait until affairs let you go, but cut yourself loose from them.

6 But we will have to examine, first, ourselves; then the business we will undertake; then the people for whose sake or with whom we undertake it. Above all, a man must assess himself, because we usually think we can do more than we can. One man comes to grief through confidence in his eloquence; another has demanded more of his estate than it could bear; another has weighed down a weak body with a laborious office. Some men’s modesty is ill suited to public affairs, which require a bold face; some men’s stubbornness is no good at court; some do not have their anger under control, and any indignation carries them away into rash words; some do not know how to hold back their wit and cannot keep away from dangerous jokes: for all these, quiet is more useful than business. A fierce and impatient nature should avoid whatever provokes a freedom of speech that will do it harm. You must consider whether your nature is better suited to doing things or to quiet study and contemplation, and lean the way the force of your talent carries you. Isocrates laid hands on Ephorus and led him away from the forum, thinking him more useful for writing history. Talents that are forced respond badly; when nature fights back, labor is in vain.

Next we must assess the tasks themselves that we undertake, and compare our strength with the things we are going to attempt. For there should always be more strength in the doer than in the work: loads larger than the one who carries them are bound to crush him. Besides, some tasks are not so much great as fertile, and breed a lot of further business: these too should be avoided, since new preoccupations, and many of them, will spring from them. Nor should you go anywhere you cannot freely come back from. Put your hand to things whose end you can bring about, or at least hope for; leave alone those that spread wider as you go and do not stop where you meant them to. Above all we must choose our people: whether they are worth spending part of our life on, whether the loss of our time reaches them at all; for some people actually count our services to them as favors they have done us. Athenodorus says he would not even go to dinner with a man who would feel no obligation to him for coming. You understand, I think, how much less he would go to those who settle their accounts with their friends’ services by means of their table, who count their courses as gifts of money, as if they were gluttons in other people’s honor. Take away their witnesses and spectators, and gluttony in private will give them no pleasure …

7 Yet nothing will delight the mind so much as a faithful and sweet friendship. How great a good it is to have hearts ready into which any secret may safely sink, whose knowledge of you you fear less than your own, whose conversation soothes your worry, whose judgment settles your plans, whose cheerfulness scatters your sadness, whose very sight delights you! We will choose them, of course, as free from desires as possible: for vices creep, leap to whoever is nearest, and harm by contact. So, just as in a plague we must take care not to sit by bodies already seized and burning with the disease, because we will draw in danger and suffer from their very breath, so in choosing our friends’ characters we will take pains to take on the least tainted: mixing the sound with the sick is the beginning of disease. Not that I would instruct you to follow or draw to yourself no one but a wise man: for where will you find him, whom we have been seeking for so many ages? The least bad counts as the best. You would hardly have the chance of a more fortunate choice if you were seeking good men among the Platos and Xenophons and that whole crop of Socratic offspring, or if you had at your disposal the age of Cato, which produced many men worthy of being born in Cato’s time (just as it produced many worse than ever before, contrivers of the greatest crimes; for both crowds were needed for Cato to be understood: he had to have good men to win approval from and bad men to test his strength on). But now, in so great a shortage of good men, let the choice be less fastidious. Above all, though, avoid the gloomy who lament everything and are glad of any excuse to complain. However loyal and kindly he may be, a companion who is agitated and moans about everything is an enemy to tranquility.

8 Let us pass on to property, the greatest source of human troubles. For if you compare all the other things that distress us, deaths, illnesses, fears, longings, the endurance of pains and toils, with the ills our money causes us, this side will far outweigh them. So we must reflect how much lighter a pain it is not to have than to lose, and we will understand that poverty has less to torment it because it has less to lose. For you are wrong if you think the rich bear their losses with more spirit: the pain of a wound is the same for the biggest bodies and the smallest. Bion6 puts it neatly: it hurts the bald no less than the hairy to have their hair pulled out. You may be sure the same goes for poor and rich, that their torment is equal, for in both cases their money has grown onto them and cannot be torn away without their feeling it. But it is more bearable, as I said, and easier not to acquire than to lose, and so you will see that those whom Fortune has never favored are more cheerful than those she has deserted. Diogenes, a man of enormous spirit, saw this and made sure that nothing could be taken from him. Call it poverty, want, need; give that freedom from care any shameful name you like: I will grant he is not fortunate when you find me anyone else who has nothing to lose. Either I am mistaken, or it is a kingship to be the one man among misers, swindlers, robbers, and kidnappers who cannot be harmed. If anyone doubts Diogenes’ good fortune, he can doubt the condition of the immortal gods too, whether they live less than happily because they have no estates or gardens, no costly farms worked by another man’s tenant, no large loans out in the forum. Are you not ashamed, whoever you are who gape at riches? Come, look at the universe: you will see the gods naked, giving everything, having nothing. Do you think this man poor, or like the immortal gods, who has stripped himself of everything that chance can give? Do you call Demetrius, Pompey’s freedman, more fortunate,7 who was not ashamed to be richer than Pompey? Every day the number of his slaves was reported to him as an army’s is to its general, though his riches should long since have been two under-slaves and a roomier cell. But Diogenes’ only slave ran away, and when he was pointed out to him, Diogenes did not think it worth the trouble to bring him back. “It would be a disgrace,” he said, “if Manes could live without Diogenes and Diogenes could not live without Manes.” He seems to me to have said: “Fortune, mind your own business; there is nothing of yours left with Diogenes. My slave has run away; no, it is I who have gone free.” A household of slaves needs clothes and food; so many bellies of the greediest creatures must be looked after, clothing bought, the most thieving hands watched, and the services of people who weep and curse put to use. How much more fortunate is the man who owes nothing to anyone except the one he can most easily refuse, himself! But since we do not have that much strength, we should at least cut down our property, so as to be less exposed to the wrongs of Fortune. In war, bodies that can be drawn in behind their armor are handier than those that spill out beyond it and by their very size expose themselves to wounds on every side. The best measure of money is one that neither falls into poverty nor goes far from it.

9 This limit will please us if thrift has pleased us first; without it no wealth is enough, and with it any wealth is ample, especially since the remedy is close by, and poverty itself, by calling in frugality, can turn itself into riches. Let us get used to putting display away from us and to measuring things by their use, not their ornament. Let food tame hunger, drink thirst; let lust flow only where it must. Let us learn to rely on our own limbs, to arrange our dress and diet not by the latest fashions but as the customs of our ancestors advise. Let us learn to increase our self-restraint, check luxury, temper the love of glory, soften irascibility, look on poverty with level eyes, cultivate frugality, even if many are ashamed of it, apply to our natural needs remedies cheaply got, hold our unbridled hopes and our mind that leans out toward the future as if in chains, and see to it that we seek our riches from ourselves rather than from Fortune. So great a variety and injustice of misfortunes can never be driven off so completely that many storms will not burst on those who spread a great deal of sail. Our affairs must be drawn into a narrow compass, so that the weapons fall wide; that is why exile and disasters have sometimes turned out to be a cure, and heavier troubles have been healed by lighter ones. When the mind pays too little heed to precepts and cannot be cured by gentler means, why should it not be looked after by applying poverty, disgrace, and the overturning of its fortunes? One ill is set against another. Let us get used, then, to being able to dine without a crowd, to being slaves to fewer slaves, to getting clothes for the purpose they were invented for, and to living in smaller quarters. Not only in the races and contests of the circus, but on these laps of life too, we must keep to the inside of the turn. Even the money spent on studies, the most liberal of expenses, is sensible only as long as it is moderate. What is the point of countless books and libraries, whose owner can hardly read through the catalogues in his whole life? The mass of them burdens the learner; it does not instruct him; and it is far better to give yourself to a few authors than to wander among many. Forty thousand books burned at Alexandria.8 Someone else may praise that library as the finest monument of royal wealth, as Livy did, who says it was an outstanding work of the taste and care of kings. It was not taste or care, but learned luxury; no, not even learned, since they had collected it not for study but for show, just as for many people ignorant even of a schoolboy’s letters, books are not tools of study but decorations for dining rooms. So let us get as many books as are enough, none for display. “It is more respectable,” you say, “to pour money out on these than on Corinthian bronzes and paintings.” Excess is a fault everywhere. What reason have you to forgive a man who hunts for bookcases of citron wood and ivory, who collects the works of authors unknown or discredited, and who yawns among so many thousands of books, a man who likes the ends and labels of his volumes best? So it is among the laziest of men that you will see all the speeches and histories there are, cases piled up to the ceiling: for now, along with the baths and hot rooms, a library too is polished up as a necessary ornament of a house. I would readily forgive it if men went wrong from too much desire for learning; as it is, these collected works of sacred genius, arranged with portraits of their authors, are bought for show and to decorate walls.

10 But suppose you have fallen into some hard kind of life, and public or private fortune has thrown a noose around you before you knew it, which you can neither untie nor break. Remember that men in fetters find the weights and shackles on their legs hard to bear at first; then, once they have resolved not to rage against them but to endure them, necessity teaches them to bear them bravely, and habit to bear them easily. In any kind of life you will find amusements and relaxations and pleasures, if you are willing to think your ills light rather than make them hateful. Nature has done us no greater kindness than this: knowing to what troubles we were born, she invented habit to soften disasters, quickly making the heaviest things familiar. No one would last if the continuance of adversity had the same force as its first blow. We are all chained to Fortune: some by a chain of gold and loose, others by one tight and shabby; but what difference does it make? The same custody surrounds us all, and those who have chained others are chained too, unless perhaps you think the chain lighter on the left arm. Some are bound by office, others by wealth; some are weighed down by noble birth, others by low birth; some live under another’s command, others under their own; some are kept in one place by exile, others by priesthoods. All life is slavery. So we must get used to our condition, complain about it as little as possible, and seize whatever advantages it has: nothing is so bitter that a calm mind cannot find comfort in it. Small plots of ground have often, by the skill of the planner, been made to serve many uses, and arrangement has made even a cramped foothold livable. Apply reason to difficulties: hard things can be softened, narrow things widened, and heavy things weigh less on those who bear them skillfully.

Besides, we should not send our desires far afield; let us allow them to go out only into the neighborhood, since they will not stand being shut up entirely. Leaving aside things that are either impossible or hard to achieve, let us follow what lies close by and smiles on our hopes, but let us know that all things are equally trivial, with different faces on the outside, alike empty within. And let us not envy those who stand higher: what seemed lofty heights are sheer cliffs.

Those, on the other hand, whom an unkind lot has set in a precarious place will be safer if they take the pride out of things proud in themselves and bring their fortune down to level ground as far as they can. There are many, of course, who must cling to their height, from which they cannot come down except by falling; but let them bear witness that this itself is their heaviest burden, that they are forced to be a burden to others, and that they have not been lifted up but nailed up there. By justice, gentleness, humanity, and a generous and kindly hand, let them lay up many safeguards against the falls that may follow, in the hope of which they may hang there more free of care. Yet nothing will free us from these surges of the mind so well as always setting some limit to our advancement, and not leaving it to Fortune to decide when we stop, but halting ourselves well short of that point. In this way some desires will still sharpen the mind, and, being limited, will not lead it out into the boundless and uncertain.

11 This talk of mine is meant for those who are imperfect, ordinary, and not quite sound, not for the wise man. He need not walk timidly or step by step: for he has such confidence in himself that he does not hesitate to go out to meet Fortune and will never give ground to her. Nor has he any reason to fear her, since he counts not only his slaves, his possessions, and his rank, but even his body, his eyes, his hand, and whatever makes life dearer, and himself too, among things held on sufferance; and he lives as one lent to himself, ready to give everything back without sorrow when it is asked for. Nor is he of little worth to himself because he knows he is not his own; but he will do everything as carefully, as attentively, as a devout and scrupulous man guards what has been entrusted to him. And whenever he is ordered to give it back, he will not quarrel with Fortune but will say: “I thank you for what I have possessed and held. I have cared for your property at great cost to myself, but since you so command, I give it up, I hand it over, gratefully and gladly. If you want me to keep anything of yours even now, I will keep it safe; if you wish otherwise, I give back and restore my silver, wrought and coined, my house, and my household.” If Nature calls in the debt, she who first lent to us, we will say to her too: “Take back a soul better than you gave it. I do not dodge or run away. What you gave to one who did not know it, you have ready from one who is willing: take it.” What is so hard about going back where you came from? He will live badly who does not know how to die well. So the first thing we must do is take away the value we set on life and count our breath among cheap things. As Cicero says, we hate gladiators if they are eager to win their lives by any means; we favor them if they display contempt for life. You may be sure the same happens to us: for often the cause of dying is to die timidly. Fortune, who stages games for her own amusement, says: “What should I save you for, you worthless, trembling creature? You will be wounded and stabbed all the more because you do not know how to offer your throat. But you, who take the sword boldly, without pulling back your neck or putting up your hands, will both live longer and die more easily.” The man who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man; but the man who knows that this was settled for him the moment he was conceived will live by the terms, and at the same time, with the same strength of mind, he will see to it that nothing that happens comes to him suddenly. For by looking ahead to whatever can happen as if it were going to happen, he will soften the onrush of all ills, which bring nothing new to those prepared and waiting for them, and fall heavily on those who feel free of care and look only for happy things. Illness, captivity, collapse, fire: none of these is sudden. I knew what a riotous lodging nature had shut me up in. So often the cry for the dead has gone up in my neighborhood; so often torch and taper have gone past my door ahead of funerals of the young; often the crash of a falling building has sounded beside me; many of those whom the forum, the senate house, and conversation had brought close to me night has carried off, cutting apart hands joined in friendship. Should I be surprised that dangers have at last reached me which have always been roaming around me? A great many people set out to sail without a thought of storms. I will never be ashamed of a bad author when what he says is good. Publilius, more forceful than the tragic and comic poets whenever he left aside the silliness of the mime and the words aimed at the top gallery, said, among many other things too strong not only for the mime’s curtain but for the tragic buskin, this too:

“What can happen to anyone can happen to you.”9

If a man lets this sink into his marrow and looks at all other people’s ills, of which there is a huge supply every day, as if they had a clear road to him too, he will arm himself long before he is attacked. It is too late to train the mind to endure dangers after the dangers have come. “I didn’t think this would happen,” and, “Would you ever have believed this would happen?” But why not? What riches are there that poverty, hunger, and beggary do not follow close behind? What office is there whose purple-bordered toga, augur’s staff, and patrician shoe straps are not attended by squalor, the brand of disgrace, a thousand stains, and the utmost contempt? What kingdom is there for which ruin and trampling, a master and an executioner, are not in store? Nor are these things separated by long intervals: the turn of an hour lies between the throne and clasping another man’s knees. Know, then, that every condition can turn, and that whatever falls on anyone can fall on you too. You are rich: are you richer than Pompeius? When Gaius,10 an old kinsman and a new host, opened Caesar’s house to him so that he could close his own, he went without bread and water. Though he owned so many rivers that rose and ended on his own land, he begged for drips from the eaves; he died of hunger and thirst in his kinsman’s palace, while his heir was contracting for a state funeral for a starving man. You have held the highest offices: were they as great, as unexpected, or as all-embracing as those of Sejanus?11 On the day the senate had escorted him, the people tore him to pieces. Of the man on whom gods and men had heaped everything that could be heaped, nothing was left for the executioner to drag away. You are a king: I will not send you to Croesus, who mounted his pyre at command and saw it put out, outliving not only his kingdom but his own death; nor to Jugurtha, whom the Roman people gazed at within a year of fearing him. We have seen Ptolemy, king of Africa, and Mithridates, king of Armenia, under Gaius’s guards:12 one was sent into exile; the other prayed to be sent there in better faith. In such a turning of things up and down, if you do not take whatever can happen as going to happen, you give adversity a power over you that anyone who saw it coming first has broken.

12 Next after these comes the rule that we should not labor either for useless things or uselessly: that is, not desire what we cannot get, nor, having got it, realize too late, after much sweat, the emptiness of our desires; that is, our labor should not be fruitless and without result, nor the result unworthy of the labor. For sadness usually follows from these, if we have either not succeeded or are ashamed of our success. We must cut back the restless running about that is typical of a great many people who wander through houses and theaters and forums: they offer themselves for other people’s business, always looking like people with something to do. If you ask one of them as he comes out of his house, “Where are you off to? What are you planning?” he will answer you: “By heaven, I don’t know; but I’ll see some people, I’ll do something.” They wander without a purpose, looking for business, and they do not do what they meant to do but what they ran into. Their course is unplanned and empty, like that of ants crawling over trees, which are driven, empty-handed, up to the very top and from there down to the bottom. Most people live a life like theirs, which one might fairly call restless idleness. Some you will pity, as if they were running to a fire: they knock into people they meet and send themselves and others headlong, when all the while they have been running to call on someone who will not return the call, or to follow the funeral of a man they did not know, or to the trial of someone who is always going to law, or to the betrothal of a woman who is always getting married; and, tagging after a litter, in some places they have even carried it. Then, coming home with a useless weariness, they swear they do not know themselves why they went out or where they have been; and the next day they will wander over the very same tracks. So let all labor be directed toward something, have something in view. It is not hard work that makes them restless; false images of things drive them as they drive madmen. For not even madmen move without some hope; they are stirred by the impression of something whose emptiness the captive mind does not detect. In the same way, each of those who go out to swell the crowd is led around the city by empty and trivial reasons; daybreak drives him out though he has nothing to work at, and when, after knocking against many doorways in vain, he has greeted the slaves who announce the callers and been shut out by many, he finds no one harder to meet at home than himself. From this evil hangs that most loathsome vice, eavesdropping and prying into public and secret matters, and the knowledge of many things that are neither safe to tell nor safe to hear.

13 I think it was with this in mind that Democritus began like this: “Whoever wants to live tranquilly should not do many things, either in private or in public,” meaning, of course, useless things. For if they are necessary, we must do not only many things in private and in public but countless things; but where no customary duty summons us, we should hold back from action. For a man who does many things often puts himself in Fortune’s power. The safest course is to try her rarely, but always to keep her in mind and promise ourselves nothing on her good faith: “I will sail, unless something happens,” and, “I will become praetor, unless something stands in the way,” and, “My business will pay off, unless something interferes.” That is why we say that nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation: we do not exempt him from the accidents of men but from their mistakes, and not everything turns out for him as he wished, but as he thought it would. And first of all he thought that something could stand in the way of his plans. Besides, the pain of a disappointed desire must reach the mind more lightly if you have not promised it certain success.

14 We must also make ourselves adaptable, so that we do not cling too much to the plans we have made, and we should move on to whatever chance has brought us to, and not dread a change of plan or of position, provided fickleness, the vice most hostile to quiet, does not get hold of us. For obstinacy, from which Fortune often wrests something, is bound to be anxious and wretched, and fickleness, which never keeps itself in check anywhere, is much worse. Both are hostile to tranquility: to be unable to change anything and to be unable to put up with anything. In any case the mind must be called back from all external things into itself: let it trust itself, rejoice in itself, admire its own things, withdraw as far as it can from what belongs to others, and devote itself to itself; let it not feel losses, and let it put a kind interpretation even on adversity. When news came of a shipwreck and our own Zeno heard that everything he had was sunk, he said: “Fortune orders me to do philosophy with less baggage.” A tyrant was threatening the philosopher Theodorus with death, and death without burial at that. “You have something to be pleased with,” he said: “half a pint of my blood is in your power. As for burial, what a fool you are if you think it matters to me whether I rot above the ground or below it.” Canus Julius, an exceptionally great man, whom we admire all the same even though he was born in our own age, had a long dispute with Gaius. As he was leaving, that Phalaris said to him: “In case you are flattering yourself with some foolish hope, I have ordered you to be led away to execution.” “I thank you,” he said, “most excellent emperor.”13 What he meant I am not sure, for many explanations occur to me. Did he mean to insult him and show how great his cruelty was, if under it death was a kindness? Or was he reproaching him with his daily madness? For people used to thank him whose children had been killed and whose goods had been taken. Or was he welcoming death gladly as freedom? Whatever it was, it was the answer of a great spirit. “After this,” someone will say, “Gaius could have ordered him to live.” Canus was not afraid of that: Gaius’s good faith in orders of this kind was well known. Would you believe that he spent the ten days until his execution without any anxiety? It passes belief what that man said, what he did, how tranquil he was. He was playing draughts. When the centurion who was dragging a whole column of condemned men to their death ordered him too to be called, he counted his pieces when summoned and said to his partner: “Mind you don’t claim after my death that you won.” Then, nodding to the centurion, he said: “You will be my witness that I am one piece ahead.” Do you think Canus was playing at that board? He was playing with the tyrant. His friends were sad at losing such a man. “Why so gloomy?” he said. “You are asking whether souls are immortal; I shall soon know.” And he did not stop searching for the truth at the very end, and made his own death a subject of inquiry. His philosopher was escorting him, and they were not far now from the mound where daily sacrifice was offered to Caesar, our god. “What are you thinking about now, Canus?” he said. “What is in your mind?” “I have decided,” said Canus, “to watch, in that swiftest of moments, whether the soul will feel itself leaving.” And he promised that if he found anything out, he would go round to his friends and tell them what the state of souls is. Here is tranquility in the midst of the storm; here is a mind worthy of eternity, which calls its own fate to testify to the truth, which, standing on that last step, questions the departing soul, and learns not only up to death but something from death itself: no one has done philosophy longer. So great a man will not be dropped in haste; he must be spoken of with care. We will commit you to all memory, most illustrious of men, you who were so great a part of Gaius’s slaughter!

15 But it does no good to have thrown off the causes of private sadness: for sometimes hatred of the human race takes hold of us, and the throng of so many successful crimes comes to mind. When you think how rare honesty is, how unknown innocence, how good faith is hardly ever found except when it pays; when you think of the gains and losses of lust, both equally hateful, and of ambition that no longer even keeps within its own bounds but seeks to shine through vileness, the mind is driven into night, and, as if the virtues had been overthrown, which we may neither hope for nor profit by having, darkness rises over it. So we must turn ourselves to this: to see all the vices of the crowd as not hateful but ridiculous, and to imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For Heraclitus, whenever he went out in public, used to weep, and Democritus to laugh; to the one all our doings seemed miseries, to the other follies. So we should make light of everything and bear it with an easy mind: it is more humane to laugh at life than to lament it. Add that the man who laughs at the human race does it more of a kindness than the man who mourns it: the one leaves it some good hope, while the other foolishly weeps over what he despairs of putting right. And when you look at the whole, it shows a greater mind to be unable to hold back laughter than to be unable to hold back tears, since such a man stirs the lightest of the mind’s passions and thinks nothing great, nothing serious, not even anything wretched, in all this apparatus. Let each man set before himself the particular things that make us glad or sad, and he will know that what Bion said is true: all the doings of men are very like their beginnings, and their life is no more holy or serious than their conception. But it is better to accept public morals and human vices calmly, falling into neither laughter nor tears; for to be tormented by other people’s ills is endless misery, and to delight in other people’s ills is an inhuman pleasure. Just as it is a useless sort of humanity to weep because someone is burying his son, and to put on a face to match, so in your own ills too you should behave so as to give grief only as much as nature demands, not as much as custom. Most people shed tears in order to show them, and have dry eyes whenever there is no spectator, thinking it shameful not to weep when everyone does. So deeply has this evil fixed itself, dependence on other people’s opinion, that even the simplest of things, grief, turns into pretense.

16 Next comes a part of the subject that, not without reason, usually saddens us and makes us anxious. When good men come to bad ends, when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, and the great Cato, that living image of the virtues, to fall on his sword and declare at once the end of himself and of the commonwealth,14 we cannot help being tormented that Fortune pays out such unjust rewards. And what can each of us hope for himself when he sees the best men suffer the worst? What, then? See how each of them bore it, and if they were brave, long for them with a spirit like their own; if they died like women and cowards, nothing has been lost. Either they are worthy of having their virtue please you, or they are unworthy of having their cowardice missed. For what is more shameful than if the greatest men, by dying bravely, make others timid? Let us praise again and again one who deserves praise, and say: “So much the braver, so much the more fortunate! You have escaped all misfortunes, envy, disease; you have come out of custody; the gods did not judge you worthy of bad fortune, but unworthy of having Fortune hold any power over you any longer.” But those who draw back and look back toward life in the very face of death must be taken in hand. I will weep for no one who is glad, and for no one who weeps: the first has wiped away my tears himself; the second, by his own tears, has made himself unworthy of any. Should 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 opens his wounds a second time? All of them found, at a slight cost of time, the way to become eternal, and by dying they came to immortality.

17 There is also no small source of anxieties if you pose anxiously and show yourself plainly to no one, as many people live, a false life got up for display: for constant watching of oneself is a torment, and one is afraid of being caught looking different from usual. Nor are we ever free of worry when we think we are being judged every time we are looked at. For many things happen that strip us bare against our will, and even if so much care for oneself succeeds, the life of those who live always behind a mask is neither pleasant nor free of care. But how much pleasure there is in a simplicity that is sincere and unadorned in itself, that hides nothing of its character! Yet even this life runs the risk of contempt, if everything lies open to everyone: for there are people who scorn whatever they have come close to. But virtue runs no risk of losing its value by being brought near the eyes, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than tormented by endless pretense. Still, let us use moderation in this: there is a great difference between living simply and living carelessly.

We must also withdraw into ourselves a great deal: for the company of people unlike us upsets what has been well settled, renews passions, and inflames whatever is weak in the mind and not thoroughly healed. Yet the two must be mixed and alternated, solitude and company. The one will make us long for people, the other for ourselves, and each will be a remedy for the other: solitude will cure our hatred of the crowd, and the crowd our boredom with solitude.

Nor should the mind be held equally at the same strain, but called away to jokes. Socrates did not blush to play with little boys; Cato relaxed with wine a mind tired by public cares; and Scipio moved that body of his, the body of a soldier and a triumphing general, to rhythm, not breaking himself down effeminately, as is the fashion now for men who even in their walk flow with more than a woman’s softness, but as those men of old used to dance in a manly way in times of games and festival, men who would have lost nothing even if their enemies had watched them. Minds must be given relaxation: they will rise better and keener after rest. Just as you must not overwork fertile fields (for productivity that is never interrupted will quickly exhaust them), so constant labor will break the drive of minds; they will recover their strength if they are loosened and relaxed a little. Constant labor gives rise to a kind of dullness and listlessness of mind.

Nor would men’s desire tend so strongly toward this if play and jest did not hold some natural pleasure. But using them too often will rob minds of all weight and all force: for sleep too is necessary for refreshment, yet if you keep it up day and night, it will be death. There is a great difference between loosening something and undoing it altogether. Lawgivers established holidays so that people would be made cheerful by public authority, putting between their labors a balance, as it were, that they needed; and some men of great judgment gave themselves a holiday on fixed days each month, and some divided every single day between leisure and cares. Such, as I remember, was Asinius Pollio, the great orator: nothing kept him at work past the tenth hour. After that hour he would not even read letters, so that no new care should arise, but in those two hours he laid aside the weariness of the whole day. Some have made 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. A soldier divides the watches, and those returning from a campaign are exempt from night duty. We must indulge the mind and give it leisure from time to time, to serve it as food and strength.

And we should stroll on open walks, so that the mind may grow and lift itself up under a free sky and with plenty of air; sometimes a drive, a journey, and a change of scene will give it vigor, and company and freer drinking. Sometimes we should even go as far as drunkenness, not so that it drowns us, but so that it sinks us a little: for it washes away cares, stirs the mind from its depths, and heals sadness as it heals certain diseases; and the inventor of wine was called Liber not because of the license of the tongue, but because he frees (liberat) the mind from the slavery of cares, sets it free, invigorates it, and makes it bolder for every attempt.15 But in wine, as in freedom, moderation is healthy. People believe that Solon and Arcesilaus indulged in wine; Cato has been charged with drunkenness: whoever charges him will more easily make the charge honorable than Cato shameful. But we should not do it often, so that the mind does not get into a bad habit; and yet sometimes it must be drawn out into exuberance and freedom, and gloomy sobriety put aside for a while. For whether we believe the Greek poet, “Sometimes it is sweet even to be mad”; or Plato, “A man in his right mind knocks at the doors of poetry in vain”; or Aristotle, “There has never been a great genius without some mixture of madness”:16 the mind cannot utter anything grand and above the rest unless it is stirred. When it has scorned the common and the customary and risen higher by a sacred inspiration, then at last it sings something too grand for a mortal mouth. As long as it is in its senses, it cannot reach anything lofty and set on a height: it must leave the usual track and be carried away and take the bit in its teeth and run off with its rider and carry him where it would have been afraid to climb by itself.

There you have, my dearest Serenus, the things that can protect tranquility, that can restore it, that can resist the vices creeping up on us. But know this: none of them is strong enough for those who are guarding so frail a thing, unless constant, attentive care surrounds the slipping mind.

Notes

  1. 1. Zeno of Citium founded the Stoic school at Athens about 300 BC; Cleanthes and Chrysippus led it after him.

  2. 2. Greek for “good spirits” or “cheerfulness.” Democritus of Abdera (fifth century BC) wrote a work On Euthymia, now lost except for fragments.

  3. 3. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 3.1068.

  4. 4. Athenodorus of Tarsus, a Stoic philosopher of the first century BC and a teacher of Augustus.

  5. 5. An oligarchy that ruled Athens with Spartan backing in 404–403 BC. Harmodius, with Aristogeiton, killed Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias, in 514 BC and was honored as a tyrant-slayer.

  6. 6. Bion of Borysthenes, a popular philosopher of the third century BC with Cynic leanings, known for his witty sayings.

  7. 7. A freedman of Pompey the Great who grew enormously rich.

  8. 8. The books burned during Julius Caesar’s war in Alexandria, 48 BC. Livy’s account is lost.

  9. 9. Publilius Syrus, a writer of mimes of the first century BC whose single-line maxims were collected.

  10. 10. Gaius Caesar, the emperor known as Caligula (reigned AD 37–41). The Pompeius starved in his palace is not Pompey the Great but a later kinsman of the imperial house; his identity is uncertain.

  11. 11. Tiberius’s praetorian prefect, condemned by the senate and executed in AD 31; his body was torn apart by the crowd.

  12. 12. Ptolemy, king of Mauretania and a cousin of Gaius, was summoned to Rome and put to death in AD 40. Mithridates, king of Armenia, was summoned by Gaius, held prisoner, and deprived of his kingdom.

  13. 13. Julius Canus, a Stoic put to death by Gaius. Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas in Sicily in the sixth century BC, was a byword for cruelty. Theodorus, called the Atheist, was a philosopher of Cyrene of about 300 BC.

  14. 14. Publius Rutilius Rufus, unjustly condemned for extortion in 92 BC, lived out his life in exile. Pompey was killed in Egypt in 48 BC by men of a king whose father had been his client; Cicero, in 43 BC, by a man he had once defended. Cato killed himself at Utica in 46 BC after Caesar’s victory; Regulus, captured by the Carthaginians, was said to have been tortured to death.

  15. 15. Liber is the Italian god of wine, identified with Bacchus; Seneca plays on his name and liberat, “frees.”

  16. 16. The Greek poet is unidentified. The Plato is a paraphrase of Phaedrus 245a; the Aristotle saying is not found in this form in his surviving works (compare Problems 30.1).