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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn the Happy Life
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On the Happy Life

1 Everyone wants to live happily, my brother Gallio,1 but when it comes to seeing clearly what it is that makes a life happy, they are in a fog. Reaching the happy life is so far from easy that the more eagerly a man rushes toward it, the farther he gets from it, if he has taken the wrong road; when the road leads the other way, his very speed only widens the distance.

So we must first set out what it is we are seeking; then we must look around for the road by which we can get there fastest. On the journey itself, if only it is the right one, we will learn how much ground is covered each day and how much nearer we are to the thing our natural desire drives us toward. As long as we wander here and there, following no guide but the din and discordant shouting of people calling us in different directions, life will be worn away in wandering, and life is short even if we work day and night for a sound mind. Let us decide, then, both where we are heading and by what road, and not without some expert who has explored the ground we are entering, since the conditions here are not the same as on other journeys. On those, some recognized track and the locals you ask keep you from going astray; here the most beaten and most crowded road is the one that deceives you most. Nothing, then, matters more than not to follow, like cattle, the herd in front of us, going not where we ought to go but where everyone goes. And yet nothing entangles us in greater troubles than shaping ourselves to rumor, thinking that what has been received with great approval is best, and taking our many examples for good ones, so that we live not by reason but by imitation. Hence that enormous pile of people falling over one another. What happens in a great crush of people, when the crowd presses on itself (no one falls without pulling someone else down on top of him, and those in front are the ruin of those behind), you can see happening in all of life. No one goes wrong only for himself; he is the cause and the author of another’s error as well. It does harm to be pressed against those in front; and since each of us would rather believe than judge, we never judge about life, we always believe, and an error handed down from hand to hand whirls us around and throws us headlong. We are dying of other people’s examples: we will be healed if only we separate ourselves from the crowd. As it is, the people stand against reason, defending their own evil. And so the same thing happens as at elections, where, once fickle favor has swung around, the very men who elected the praetors marvel that they were elected: we approve the same things, we condemn the same things. This is the outcome of every decision that goes by the majority.

2 When the question is the happy life, there is no reason for you to answer me as they do when the senate divides: “This side seems to be the larger.” That is exactly why it is the worse. Human affairs are not so well arranged that the better things please the greater number: the crowd is the proof of the worst. Let us ask, then, what is best to do, not what is most usual, and what will set us in possession of an everlasting good fortune, not what has been approved by the common herd, that worst interpreter of the truth. And by the common herd I mean the cloaked as much as the crowned; I do not look at the color of the clothes that drape their bodies. I do not trust my eyes about a man; I have a better and surer light by which to tell the true from the false: let the mind find the good of the mind. If it ever has time to breathe and to withdraw into itself, oh, how it will confess the truth to itself, under torture from itself, and say: “Whatever I have done so far I wish undone; whenever I think back over what I have said, I envy the dumb; whatever I have prayed for I count as a curse from my enemies; whatever I have feared, good gods, how much lighter it was than what I desired! I have been at enmity with many and have come back from hatred into friendship, if there is any friendship among the wicked: with myself I am not yet a friend. I have taken every pains to raise myself out of the crowd and make myself conspicuous for some gift: what have I done but expose myself to weapons and show malice something to bite? Do you see those people who praise eloquence, who chase wealth, who flatter influence, who extol power? All of them are enemies or, what amounts to the same, can be. The crowd of those who envy is as large as the crowd of those who admire. Why do I not look instead for some good that is good in use, one I can feel, not one I can show? These things that people gaze at, that they stop for, that one points out to another in amazement, shine on the outside and are wretched within.”

3 Let us look for some good that is not for show but solid, consistent throughout, and more beautiful in its hidden part; let us dig this out. It is not far off: it will be found; you need only know where to reach out your hand. As it is, we pass by what is near us as though in the dark, stumbling against the very things we long for.

But not to drag you around by detours, I will pass over the opinions of others, since it would take long to list them and long to refute them: hear ours. When I say “ours,” I do not bind myself to any one of the Stoic leaders: I too have the right to an opinion. So I will follow one, I will ask another to divide his motion, and perhaps, called on after all the rest, I will reject nothing that my predecessors have decided and will say, “I move the following in addition.” Meanwhile, as all Stoics agree, I assent to Nature; wisdom is not to stray from her, and to be shaped by her law and her example.

The happy life, then, is a life in harmony with its own nature, and it can come about in no other way than if, first, the mind is sound and in lasting possession of its soundness; next, if it is brave and vigorous, then nobly enduring, ready for every circumstance, attentive to its body and what belongs to the body, but not anxiously, careful of the other things that furnish life without being dazzled by any of them, ready to use the gifts of Fortune, not to be their slave. You understand, even if I do not add it, that there follows a lasting tranquility and freedom, once the things that either provoke us or frighten us have been driven away; for in place of pleasures and ⟨…⟩,2 in place of things that are petty and fragile and harmful in their very wickedness, there comes an immense joy, unshaken and steady, then peace and harmony of mind, and greatness together with gentleness; for all fierceness comes from weakness.

4 Our good can also be defined in other ways; that is, the same idea can be expressed in different words. Just as the same army is sometimes deployed more widely, sometimes packed into a narrow space, and either curves back at the center with its wings thrown forward or spreads out in a straight line, and yet, however it is drawn up, its strength is the same and so is its will to stand for the same side, so the definition of the highest good can sometimes be spread out and extended, sometimes gathered up and compressed into itself. So it will be the same if I say, “The highest good is a mind that looks down on what chance brings and rejoices in virtue,” or “an unconquerable strength of mind, experienced in the world, calm in action, with great humanity and care for those it deals with.” We may also define it so as to call that man happy for whom nothing is good or evil except a good or evil mind; who cultivates the honorable and is content with virtue; whom chance neither lifts up nor breaks; who knows no greater good than the one he can give himself; for whom true pleasure will be the contempt of pleasures. If you want to range further, you can carry the same thing into one form after another, keeping its force safe and whole; for what prevents us from saying that the happy life is a mind free, upright, unafraid, and steady, placed beyond fear and beyond desire, for which the one good is the honorable and the one evil the shameful, and everything else a worthless crowd of things that neither takes anything from the happy life nor adds anything to it, coming and going without increase or loss to the highest good? A man so grounded must, whether he will or not, be attended by a constant cheerfulness and a gladness that is deep and comes from deep within, since he delights in what is his own and wants nothing greater than what he has at home. Why should he not weigh all this well against the petty, trivial, and fleeting movements of his poor body? On the day he is beneath pleasure, he will be beneath pain as well; and you see what an evil and harmful slavery he will serve whom pleasures and pains, the most capricious and most tyrannical of masters, will possess by turns: so we must break out into freedom. Nothing gives this but indifference to Fortune. Then will arise that priceless good, the calm of a mind set in safety, and its elevation, and, once errors have been driven out, a great and unshaken joy from the knowledge of the truth, together with kindliness and expansiveness of mind; and in these he will delight not as goods but as things born of his own good.

5 Since I have begun to be generous with definitions, a man may be called happy who, thanks to reason, neither desires nor fears; for stones too are free of fear and sorrow, and so are cattle, yet no one would call those things fortunate that have no understanding of good fortune. Put in the same place those people whom a dull nature and ignorance of themselves have reduced to the level of cattle and animals. There is no difference between the two, since the animals have no reason, and these people have a reason that is depraved, clever only at their own harm and at perversity. For no one can be called happy who has been thrown outside the truth. The happy life, then, is one established on a right and sure judgment, and unchangeable. For then the mind is pure and free of all evils, having escaped not only wounds but even pinches; it will always stand where it has taken its stand and will defend its ground even against an angry and hostile Fortune. As for pleasure, though it pour around us on every side and flow in by every channel and soothe the mind with its caresses and bring up one charm after another to tempt us, whole and in part, what mortal with any trace of a human being left in him would want to be tickled day and night and, deserting his mind, devote himself to his body?

6 “But the mind too,” he says, “will have its pleasures.” Let it have them, then, and let it sit as judge of luxury and pleasures; let it fill itself with everything that usually delights the senses, then look back on the past and, remembering pleasures long faded, exult in the former ones and already lean toward the ones to come, and arrange its hopes, and, while the body lies stuffed in the present, send its thoughts ahead to the future: this will seem to me all the more wretched, for to choose evils in place of goods is madness. No one is happy without sanity, and no one is sane who seeks what is to come as if it were the best. The happy man, then, is one whose judgment is right; the happy man is content with what he has, whatever it is, and on good terms with his circumstances; the happy man is the one to whom reason commends every condition of his affairs.

7 Even those who have placed the highest good in pleasure see what a shameful place they have put it in. So they deny that pleasure can be separated from virtue, and say that no one can live honorably without living pleasantly, nor pleasantly without also living honorably. I do not see how things so different can be thrown into the same yoke. What is the reason, I beg you, why pleasure cannot be separated from virtue? Is it, I suppose, because all goods have their beginning in virtue, the things you love and seek also spring from its roots? But if those two were inseparable, we would not see some things that are pleasant but dishonorable, and others that are most honorable but harsh, to be achieved through pain. Add now that pleasure comes even to the most shameful life, while virtue does not admit an evil life; and some people are unfortunate not without pleasure, indeed because of pleasure itself. This would not happen if pleasure had mixed itself with virtue, which often lacks pleasure and never needs it. Why do you join things that are unlike, indeed opposed? Virtue is something lofty, exalted and royal, unconquered, untiring; pleasure is low and servile, weak and perishable, and its post and home are the brothels and the taverns. Virtue you will meet in the temple, in the forum, in the senate house, standing on the walls, covered with dust, sunburned, with calloused hands; pleasure, more often skulking and seeking the dark, around the baths and sweating rooms and places that fear the aedile, soft, nerveless, soaked with wine and perfume, pale or painted and embalmed in cosmetics. The highest good is immortal; it does not know how to depart, and it has neither satiety nor regret; for a right mind never turns, is never hateful to itself, and, being the best, changes nothing. But pleasure is extinguished at the very moment it delights most; it has little room, so it quickly fills up, becomes tedious, and wilts after the first onrush. Nor is anything ever certain whose nature lies in motion; so there cannot even be any substance in what comes and passes most quickly and will perish in the very use of itself; for it strains toward the point where it stops, and while it begins it looks toward its end.

8 What of the fact that pleasure belongs to the good and the bad alike, and that the shameful delight in their disgrace no less than the honorable in noble deeds? That is why the ancients told us to follow the best life, not the most pleasant, so that pleasure should be not the guide of a right and good will but its companion. For we must take Nature as our guide; reason watches her and consults her. To live happily, then, and to live according to nature are the same. What this means I will now explain: if we preserve the gifts of the body and the things that suit our nature carefully and without fear, as things given for a day and fleeting; if we do not submit to slavery to them, and things outside us do not possess us; if the things that please the body and come from outside hold the place with us that auxiliaries and light-armed troops hold in camp (let them serve, not command), only then are they useful to the mind. Let a man be uncorrupted by externals and unconquerable, an admirer only of himself,

“confident in spirit, and ready for either fate,”3

a craftsman of his own life. Let his confidence not be without knowledge, nor his knowledge without constancy; let what he has once decided stay decided, and let there be no erasure in his decrees. It is understood, even if I do not add it, that such a man will be composed and orderly, and in all he does both magnificent and courteous. But reason, stirred by the senses and taking its first principles from them (for it has nothing else to start from or from which to launch its drive toward the truth), should return into itself. For the universe too, which embraces all things, and god, its ruler, reach outward, yet from every side return inward into themselves. Let our mind do the same: when, following its senses, it has reached out through them to external things, let it be master both of them and of itself. In this way a single force and power will be formed, in harmony with itself, and that sure reason will be born which is not divided or hesitant in its opinions and apprehensions or in its convictions; and once it has ordered itself, has agreed with its own parts, and, so to speak, sung in tune, it has reached the highest good. For nothing crooked, nothing slippery is left, nothing on which it might stumble or slide; it will do everything on its own authority, and nothing unexpected will happen to it; whatever it does will turn out well, easily, readily, and without shuffling on the part of the doer; for sluggishness and hesitation show conflict and inconstancy. So you may boldly declare that the highest good is harmony of the mind; for the virtues must be where there is agreement and unity: it is the vices that are at odds.

9 “But you too,” he says, “cultivate virtue for no other reason than that you hope to get some pleasure from it.” First of all, even if virtue is going to supply pleasure, it is not sought for that reason; for it does not supply pleasure as its aim; it supplies pleasure as well, and it does not labor for pleasure; its labor, though it aims at something else, will attain this as well. Just as in a field plowed for grain some flowers spring up in between, and yet all that work was not spent on this little plant, however much it delights the eye (the sower had something else in view; this came in addition), so pleasure is not the reward or the cause of virtue but a by-product; and virtue is not welcome because it delights, but if it is welcome, it also delights. The highest good lies in the very judgment and disposition of the best mind; when that mind has filled out its course and enclosed itself within its own limits, the highest good is complete and wants nothing more; for there is nothing outside the whole, any more than beyond the end. So you are wrong when you ask what it is for the sake of which I seek virtue; you are looking for something above the highest. You ask what I seek from virtue? Virtue itself. It has nothing better; it is its own reward. Or is that not great enough? When I tell you, “The highest good is the unbreakable firmness of the mind, and foresight, and loftiness, and soundness, and freedom, and harmony, and grace,” do you still demand something greater to which all this can be referred? Why do you mention pleasure to me? I am looking for the good of a man, not of a belly, and cattle and beasts have roomier bellies.

10 “You are pretending not to understand what I say,” he says. “I say that no one can live pleasantly unless he also lives honorably, and this cannot happen to dumb animals or to those who measure their good by food. I declare loudly and openly that this life which I call pleasant comes only when virtue is added.” And yet who does not know that the greatest fools are the fullest of your pleasures, that wickedness overflows with delights, and that the mind itself suggests many depraved kinds of pleasure? First of all arrogance, and too high an opinion of oneself, and a swollen sense of being above others, and a blind, improvident love of one’s own things, and exultation over the smallest and most childish causes; then a biting tongue and a pride that delights in insults; sloth, and the slackness of a lazy mind that wallows in luxury and falls asleep on itself. All this virtue shakes off; it tweaks the ear, weighs pleasures before admitting them, and sets no great store by those it has approved; it does admit them, but it is glad not in using them but in self-control. Self-control, however, since it lessens pleasures, is a wrong done to the highest good. You embrace pleasure, I restrain it; you enjoy pleasure, I use it; you think it the highest good, I do not even think it good; you do everything for the sake of pleasure, I do nothing.

11 When I say that I do nothing for the sake of pleasure, I am speaking of that wise man to whom alone we grant pleasure. But I do not call a man wise if anything is above him, much less pleasure. And if he is taken over by it, how will he withstand toil and danger, poverty, and all the threats that roar around human life? How will he bear the sight of death, how bear pain, how bear the crashes of the world and so many fierce enemies, if he has been beaten by so soft an adversary? “He will do whatever pleasure advises.” Come now, do you not see how many things it will advise? “It will not be able to advise anything shameful,” he says, “because it is joined to virtue.” Do you not see, again, what kind of highest good it is that needs a guard in order to be good? And how will virtue rule pleasure if it follows it, since following is for one who obeys, ruling for one who commands? Do you put the commander at the rear? A fine duty virtue has among you: to be pleasure’s food taster! But we shall see whether, among those who treat virtue so insultingly, it is still virtue, for it cannot keep its name once it has given up its place. Meanwhile, to stick to the point, I will show you many people besieged by pleasures, on whom Fortune has poured out all her gifts, and whom you must admit to be wicked. Look at Nomentanus and Apicius,4 hunting down the good things, as they call them, of land and sea, and reviewing on their table the animals of every nation; look at these same men gazing down from a heap of roses on their own cookshop, delighting their ears with the sound of voices, their eyes with spectacles, their palates with flavors; their whole bodies are coaxed with soft and soothing applications, and, so that their nostrils are not idle meanwhile, the very room in which they hold funeral rites for luxury is steeped in various scents. You will say these men live in pleasures, and yet it will not go well with them, because what they rejoice in is not a good.

12 “It will go badly with them,” he says, “because many things will come up to disturb the mind, and conflicting opinions will unsettle the intellect.” I grant that this is so; but nonetheless these very fools, inconsistent and exposed to the stroke of regret, will feel great pleasures, so that we must admit that they are then as far from all distress as from a sound mind, and that, as happens to most people, they are mad with a merry madness and rave while they laugh. The pleasures of the wise, on the other hand, are mild and modest, almost languid, held in and barely noticeable, as things that are never sent for and, even when they come of themselves, are not held in honor or received with any joy by those who feel them; for the wise mix them into life and insert them, like play and jest amid serious matters.

Let them stop, then, joining things that do not fit and entangling pleasure with virtue, a fault by which they flatter all the worst people. The man sunk in pleasures, always belching and drunk, believes, because he knows he lives with pleasure, that he lives with virtue too (for he hears that pleasure cannot be separated from virtue); then he labels his vices wisdom and makes a show of what ought to be hidden. So it is not that Epicurus5 drove them to luxury; rather, men given over to vice hide their luxury in the lap of philosophy and flock to where they hear pleasure praised. They do not consider how sober and dry that pleasure of Epicurus is (for that, by Hercules, is what I think), but fly to the name itself, seeking some defense and cover for their lusts. So they lose the one good they had in their evils, shame at doing wrong; for they praise what they used to blush at and glory in vice; and so even the young cannot rise again, once an honorable label has been attached to shameful idleness. This is why that praise of pleasure is ruinous: its honorable precepts lie hidden within; what corrupts is plain to see.

13 For my part I hold this opinion (I will say it, though our own people will not like it): Epicurus’ teachings are holy and right, and even, if you come closer, austere; for that pleasure of his is reduced to something small and thin, and the law we lay down for virtue he lays down for pleasure. He bids it obey nature; but what is enough for nature is too little for luxury. What, then? The man who calls lazy idleness and gluttony and lust by turns good fortune looks for a good sponsor for a bad thing, and when he has come to that school, drawn by its attractive name, he follows not the pleasure he hears of there but the pleasure he brought with him; and once he has begun to think his vices resemble its precepts, he indulges them not timidly or in secret, but from then on flaunts his luxury with his head uncovered. So I will not say, as most of our people do, that the school of Epicurus is a teacher of vice; but this I do say: it has a bad name, it is in ill repute. “But undeservedly.” Who can know that unless he has been admitted inside? Its very front gives occasion for gossip and invites evil hopes. It is like a brave man dressed in a woman’s gown: your chastity is firm, your manhood is safe, your body is not given over to any shameful submission, but there is a tambourine in your hand. So let an honorable title be chosen, and an inscription that in itself rouses the mind: the one that stands there now has drawn the vices.

Whoever has approached virtue has given proof of a noble nature; the man who follows pleasure seems nerveless, broken, falling away from manhood, bound to end in shameful things unless someone sorts out his pleasures for him, so that he knows which of them stay within natural desire and which are swept headlong, are boundless, and grow more insatiable the more they are filled. Come, then, let virtue go first: every step will be safe. And too much pleasure does harm; with virtue there is no fear of too much, because measure is in virtue itself; that is not a good which suffers from its own size. Besides, for beings who have been allotted a rational nature, what better thing can be set before them than reason? And if this partnership pleases you, if you like to go to the happy life in this company, let virtue go in front and pleasure follow, hovering about the body like a shadow. But to hand over virtue, the loftiest of mistresses, to pleasure as a maidservant is the act of a mind that can hold nothing great.

14 Let virtue go first and carry the standard: we shall have pleasure all the same, but we shall be its masters and moderators; it will win something from us by asking, but force nothing. Those, however, who have given the lead to pleasure lack both; for they lose virtue, and besides, they do not have pleasure; pleasure has them, and they are either tortured by its lack or strangled by its abundance, wretched if it deserts them, more wretched if it overwhelms them, like sailors caught in the shoals of the Syrtes, now left on dry ground, now tossed on a rushing flood. This comes from excessive intemperance and a blind love of the thing; for when a man seeks evils in place of goods, it is dangerous for him to get them. As we hunt wild beasts with toil and danger, and even when they are caught their possession is anxious (for they often tear their masters apart), so it is with great pleasures: they have turned into a great evil, and once captured they have captured their captors; and the more and greater they are, the smaller and the more widely enslaved is the man whom the crowd calls fortunate. I would like to stay with this image a little longer. As the man who tracks down the lairs of wild beasts, and to whom

“to take wild beasts in snares”

is worth a great deal, and so is

“to ring the wide glades with hounds,”6

so that he may press close on their tracks, abandons better things and renounces many duties, so the man who pursues pleasure puts everything else second, neglects his first possession, freedom, and pays it out for his belly; he does not buy pleasures for himself, he sells himself to pleasures.

15 “Still,” he says, “what prevents virtue and pleasure from being blended into one, and the highest good from being so formed that the same thing is both honorable and pleasant?” Because a part of the honorable can only be honorable, and the highest good will not keep its purity if it sees anything in itself unlike the better part. Not even the joy that springs from virtue, though it is a good, is a part of the absolute good, any more than gladness and tranquility are, though they are born of the noblest causes; for these are goods, but they follow the highest good, they do not complete it. Whoever makes a partnership between virtue and pleasure, and not even an equal one, dulls whatever vigor there is in the one good by the frailty of the other, and sends under the yoke that freedom which is unconquered only so long as it knows nothing more precious than itself. For he begins to need Fortune, and that is the greatest slavery; there follows a life anxious, suspicious, fearful, dreading chance, hanging on every moment of time. You give virtue no solid, immovable foundation, but bid it stand on shifting ground; and what is so shifting as waiting on chance and the changeableness of the body and of the things that affect the body? How can such a man obey god and take whatever happens in good spirit and not complain of fate, a kindly interpreter of his own misfortunes, if he is shaken by the little pinpricks of pleasures and pains? Nor is he a good guardian or defender of his country, or a champion of his friends, if he leans toward pleasures. So let the highest good climb to a place from which no force can drag it down, where neither pain nor hope nor fear has access, nor anything else that would weaken the rights of the highest good; and only virtue can climb there. By its step that slope must be conquered; it will stand bravely and bear whatever happens, not only enduring but willing, and it will know that every hardship of the times is a law of nature; and like a good soldier it will bear its wounds, count its scars, and, pierced through with spears, will love in dying the general for whom it falls; it will keep in mind that old precept: Follow god. But whoever complains and weeps and groans is forced by violence to do what he is ordered, and is dragged, unwilling, to his orders all the same. What madness it is to be dragged rather than to follow! As much, by Hercules, as it is folly and ignorance of one’s condition to grieve because something is lacking or something harsher has befallen you, or likewise to be surprised or indignant at things that happen to the good as much as to the bad: I mean diseases, deaths, infirmities, and the other things that run crosswise into human life. Whatever we must suffer by the constitution of the universe, let us take it up with a great spirit: this is the oath we were sworn to, to bear the lot of mortals and not to be troubled by what it is not in our power to avoid. We were born in a kingdom: to obey god is freedom.

16 True good fortune, then, lies in virtue. What will this virtue advise you? Not to think anything good or evil that does not come about through virtue or wickedness; then to be immovable both against evil and in good, so that, as far as is permitted, you may model yourself on god. What does it promise you for this campaign? Vast things, equal to the divine: you will be forced to nothing, you will lack nothing; you will be free, safe, unharmed; you will attempt nothing in vain, be prevented from nothing; everything will turn out as you intend, nothing adverse will happen, nothing against your expectation and your will. “What, then? Is virtue enough for living happily?” Perfect and divine as it is, why should it not be enough, and more than enough? What can be lacking to one who is placed beyond the desire of anything? What need of outside things has the man who has gathered all that is his into himself? But the man who is making his way toward virtue, even if he has advanced far, still needs some indulgence from Fortune while he is still struggling among human things, until he loosens that knot and every mortal bond. What, then, is the difference? That others are tightly bound, fettered, even pulled apart; this man, who has advanced to the higher regions and raised himself higher, drags a loose chain: not yet free, but already as good as free.

17 So if one of those who bark at philosophy says what they usually say: “Why, then, do you talk more bravely than you live? Why do you lower your voice before a superior, and think money a necessary tool, and get upset at a loss, and shed tears on hearing of the death of your wife or a friend, and care about your reputation, and feel the sting of malicious talk? Why is your country place more cultivated than natural need requires? Why do you not dine according to your own rules? Why is your furniture so elegant? Why is wine older than you drunk at your house? Why is gold laid out on display? Why are trees planted that will give nothing but shade? Why does your wife wear in her ears the fortune of a rich household? Why are your page boys dressed in costly clothes? Why is waiting at table an art in your house, and why is the silver not set out at random, as you please, but arranged with skill, and why is there a master carver?” Add, if you like: “Why do you have property overseas? Why more than you know? Why are you so shamefully careless that you do not know your few slaves, or so luxurious that you have more than your memory can keep track of?” I will help these insults along later and charge myself with more than you think; for now I give you this answer: I am not a wise man and, to feed your malice, I never shall be. So demand of me not that I be equal to the best, but that I be better than the bad: this is enough for me, to take away something from my vices each day and to rebuke my errors. I have not reached health, and I will not reach it either; I compound soothing remedies rather than cures for my gout, content if it comes less often and torments me less: compared with your feet, cripples that you are, I am a runner. I do not say this for my own sake (for I am deep in every vice), but for the sake of one who has achieved something.

18 “You talk one way,” you say, “and live another.” This, you most malicious creatures and most hostile to all the best men, was charged against Plato, charged against Epicurus, charged against Zeno;7 for all of these spoke not of how they themselves lived, but of how they too ought to live. I speak of virtue, not of myself, and when I rail at vices, I rail first of all at my own: when I am able, I will live as I ought. Nor will that malice of yours, dipped in much poison, deter me from what is best; not even that venom with which you spatter others and with which you kill yourselves will keep me from continuing to praise not the life I lead but the life I know ought to be led, from worshiping virtue, and from following it, crawling, at an immense distance. Am I to expect, I suppose, that anything will be left untouched by malice, to which neither Rutilius nor Cato was sacred?8 Should anyone care whether he seems too rich to people for whom Demetrius the Cynic is not poor enough? That fiercest of men, who fights against all the desires of nature, poorer than the other Cynics in that, having forbidden himself to own, he has also forbidden himself to ask: they say he is not needy enough. For you see, it is not the knowledge of virtue he has professed, but of poverty.

19 Diodorus, the Epicurean philosopher,9 who a few days ago put an end to his life with his own hand, did not, they say, act according to the teaching of Epicurus when he cut his throat: some want this act of his to be seen as madness, others as recklessness. He, meanwhile, happy and full of a good conscience, bore witness to himself as he left life, praised the quiet of a life spent in harbor and at anchor, and said what you have heard unwillingly, as though you too had to do it:

“I have lived, and finished the course that Fortune gave.”10

You argue about one man’s life and another’s death, and at the name of men great for some outstanding merit you bark, as little dogs do when they meet strangers; for it suits you that no one should seem good, as though another’s virtue were a reproach to all your misdeeds. In envy you compare their splendor with your filth, and do not understand how much this daring costs you. For if those who follow virtue are greedy, lustful, and ambitious, what are you, who hate the very name of virtue? You say that no one lives up to what he says or lives by the model of his own words: what wonder, since what they speak of is brave, vast, beyond the reach of all the storms of human life? They are trying to pull themselves down from their crosses (crosses into which each one of you drives his own nails); yet even when they are led to execution, they hang each from a single stake, while these people, who are their own executioners, are torn apart on as many crosses as they have desires. But they are slanderers, and witty at others’ expense. I would believe they had time for it, were it not that some men spit on the spectators from their own gibbet.

20 “Philosophers do not practice what they preach.” Yet they accomplish much by what they preach, by what they conceive with an honorable mind. If only they also acted on a par with their words: who would be happier than they? Meanwhile there is no reason for you to despise good words and hearts full of good thoughts: the pursuit of wholesome studies deserves praise even short of result. What wonder if those who attempt the steep do not reach the summit? But if you are a man, look up to those who attempt great things, even if they fall. It is a noble thing to look not to one’s own strength but to the strength of one’s nature, to attempt lofty things, and to conceive in the mind greater things than can be carried out even by those endowed with an immense spirit. The man who has set himself this goal: “I will look on death with the same face with which I hear of it. I will submit to toil, however great it is, propping up the body with the mind. I will despise riches, present and absent alike, neither sadder if they lie elsewhere nor bolder if they glitter around me. I will not feel Fortune either coming or going. I will look on all lands as mine, and on mine as everyone’s. I will live as though I knew I was born for others, and I will give thanks to Nature on this account: for how could she have managed my affairs better? She has given me, one man, to all, and all to me alone. Whatever I have I will neither guard meanly nor scatter wastefully; I will believe that I possess nothing more truly than what I have given well. I will not count benefits by number or by weight, or value them at all except by the worth of the receiver; never will that seem much to me which a worthy man receives. I will do nothing for the sake of reputation, everything for the sake of conscience. Whatever I do with only myself aware, I will believe is done with the whole people watching. The end of eating and drinking for me will be to quench the desires of nature, not to fill the belly and empty it. I will be pleasant to my friends, mild and easy to my enemies. I will be won over before I am asked, and will meet honorable requests halfway. I will know that the universe is my country and that the gods preside over it, and that they stand above me and around me as censors of what I do and say. Whenever nature asks back my breath, or reason releases it, I will depart bearing witness that I loved a good conscience and good pursuits, that no one’s freedom was lessened through me, and least of all my own.” The man who resolves, wills, and tries to do these things will be making his way to the gods; truly, even if he does not keep his hold, “yet he fell in a great venture.”11

You, for your part, are doing nothing new in hating virtue and its devotee. For sore eyes, too, dread the sun, and night creatures shun the bright day; at its first rising they are dazed and seek their hiding places everywhere, and, afraid of the light, bury themselves in any crack. Groan, and exercise your ill-starred tongues in abusing good men; gape, bite: you will break your teeth much sooner than you leave a mark.

21 “Why does that man study philosophy and live so rich a life? Why does he say that wealth should be despised, and have it; think that life should be despised, and yet live; that health should be despised, and yet guard it most carefully and want it to be excellent? And why does he think exile an empty name and say, ‘What evil is there in changing countries?’ and yet, if he can, grow old in his native land? And why does he judge that there is no difference between a longer time and a shorter one, yet, if nothing prevents him, prolong his life and stay green and peaceful in a ripe old age?” He says these things ought to be despised, not so that he should not have them, but so that he should not have them anxiously; he does not drive them away from himself, but when they leave he sees them off, free of care. Where, after all, will Fortune deposit riches more safely than with one from whom she will take them back without complaint from the man returning them? Marcus Cato, while he was praising Curius and Coruncanius and that age in which a few small plates of silver were an offense for the censor, himself owned four million sesterces, less, no doubt, than Crassus, but more than Cato the Censor.12 He had outstripped his great-grandfather by a wider margin, if they were compared, than he was outstripped by Crassus; and if greater wealth had come his way, he would not have scorned it. For the wise man does not think himself unworthy of any gifts of chance: he does not love riches, but he prefers them; he takes them not into his mind but into his house; he does not spurn what he possesses but keeps it, and wants more material to be supplied to his virtue.

22 And what doubt is there that the wise man has more material for unfolding his mind in riches than in poverty, since in poverty there is only one kind of virtue, not to be bent or crushed, while in riches self-control, generosity, diligence, orderliness, and magnificence all have an open field? The wise man will not despise himself even if he is very short, but he will want to be tall. And if he is frail in body or has lost an eye, he will still be strong, but he will prefer to have bodily strength, and that while knowing there is something else in him that is stronger; he will endure ill health, he will wish for good health. For some things, even if they are small in the sum of the whole and can be taken away without the ruin of the principal good, still add something to the lasting gladness that springs from virtue: riches affect him and cheer him as a fair and following wind does a sailor, as a fine day does, or a sunny spot in the cold of winter. Further, which of the wise (I mean of our school, for whom virtue is the only good) denies that even these things we call indifferent have some value in themselves, and that some are preferable to others? To some of them a little honor is given, to some a great deal; so make no mistake: riches are among the preferable things. “Why, then,” you say, “do you laugh at me, when they have the same place with you as with me?” Do you want to know how far from the same place they have? If my riches slip away, they will take away nothing but themselves; you will be stunned and will seem to yourself left without yourself, if they leave you. With me riches have some place; with you, the highest. In short, my riches belong to me; you belong to your riches.

23 Stop, then, forbidding philosophers money: no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. The philosopher will have ample wealth, but wealth taken from no one, not stained with another’s blood, acquired without wrong to anyone, without sordid gains, whose exit is as honorable as its entrance, over which no one groans except the spiteful. Pile it up as high as you like: it is honorable if, while there is much in it that each man would like to call his own, there is nothing that anyone can say is his own. He will not push away the kindness of Fortune, and he will neither boast of nor blush at an inheritance honorably acquired. Yet he will have something to boast of if he can throw open his house, let the whole city in among his possessions, and say, “Let each take whatever he recognizes as his.” What a great man, what an excellent rich man, if after these words he still has as much! I mean this: if he can safely and calmly let the people search, if no one finds anything in his house to lay hands on, he will be rich boldly and openly. The wise man will not let a single denarius across his threshold that enters wrongly; but he will not reject or shut out great wealth, the gift of Fortune and the fruit of virtue. For why should he begrudge it a good lodging? Let it come, let it be his guest. He will neither flaunt it nor hide it (the one is the mark of a silly mind, the other of a timid and petty one, which keeps it in its pocket like some great good), nor, as I have said, will he throw it out of the house. For what will he say? “You are useless”? Or “I do not know how to use riches”? Just as he could make a journey on foot but would rather climb into a carriage, so, though he could be poor, he will want to be rich. So he will have wealth, but as something light and ready to fly away, and he will not allow it to be a burden to anyone else or to himself. He will give (why have you pricked up your ears? why are you holding open your pockets?), he will give either to the good or to those he can make good; he will give with the greatest deliberation, choosing the most worthy, as one who remembers that an account must be rendered of what is spent as well as of what is received; he will give for right and defensible reasons, for a gift badly placed is among the shameful losses; he will have a pocket that opens easily but has no holes, from which much goes out and nothing falls.

24 He is mistaken who thinks giving an easy thing: it involves the greatest difficulty, if it is done with judgment and not scattered at random and on impulse. This man I put under obligation, to that one I repay; this one I help, this one I pity; that one I equip, as one who deserves not to be dragged down by poverty or kept tied up by it; to some I will not give though they are in need, because even if I give they will still be in need; to some I will offer, on some I will even press it. I cannot be careless in this matter; I am never more a lender than when I give. “What?” you say. “Do you give in order to get it back?” No: in order not to lose it. Let a gift be placed where it need not be asked back but can be returned. Let a benefit be laid up like a treasure buried deep, which you would not dig up unless you had to. Why, the very house of a rich man, what scope it offers for doing good! For who confines generosity to men in togas? Nature bids me do good to human beings. Whether they are slaves or free, freeborn or freedmen, freed in due form or by a declaration among friends, what does it matter? Wherever there is a human being, there is room for a benefit. So money can be spread even within one’s own threshold and give play to generosity (liberalitas), which is so called not because it is owed to the free (liberi) but because it comes from a free (liber) mind. With the wise man it is never thrown at the shameful and unworthy, nor does it ever grow so tired and wander so far that it does not flow, as if from a full source, whenever it finds someone worthy.

There is no reason, then, for you to misunderstand what is said honorably, bravely, and with spirit by students of wisdom. And first note this: a student of wisdom is one thing, a man who has already attained wisdom another. The first will tell you: “I speak very well, but I am still rolling among very many evils. There is no reason for you to hold me to my own formula: at this very moment I am making and shaping myself and raising myself toward a mighty model; if I advance as far as I have resolved, then demand that my deeds match my words.” But the one who has attained the summit of human good will deal with you differently and will say: “First of all, there is no reason for you to permit yourself to pass judgment on your betters; I have already had the good fortune to displease the wicked, which is the proof of what is right. But so that I may give you the account that I grudge no mortal, hear what I promise and what value I set on each thing. I deny that riches are a good; for if they were, they would make men good; as it is, since what is found in the hands of the wicked cannot be called good, I deny them that name. For the rest, I admit that they are to be had, and are useful, and bring great conveniences to life.

25 “Hear, then, why I do not count them among goods, and what I do differently from you in regard to them, since we both agree they are to be had. Put me in the most opulent house, put me where gold and silver are in common use: I will not look up to myself because of these things, which, even if they are in my house, are still outside me. Move me to the Sublician Bridge13 and throw me among the beggars: I will not look down on myself for sitting among those who hold out a hand for alms. For what does it matter whether a man lacks a crust of bread if he does not lack the power to die? What, then? I prefer that splendid house to the bridge. Put me among splendid furnishings and refined luxury: I will believe myself no more fortunate because my cloak is soft, because purple is spread beneath my guests. Change my bedding: I will be no more wretched if my tired neck rests on a handful of hay, if I lie on a circus cushion with the stuffing coming out through the patches of old linen. What, then? I prefer to show what spirit I have wearing the purple-bordered toga and shoes rather than with bare shoulders or cut feet.14 Let all my days go as I wish, let new congratulations be added to the old: I will not be pleased with myself for that. Turn this kindness of the times to its opposite, let my mind be struck from this side and that by loss, mourning, and assaults of every kind, let no hour pass without some complaint: I will not on that account call myself wretched among the most wretched things, I will not on that account curse any day; for I have seen to it that no day is a black day for me. What, then? I prefer to moderate joys than to suppress sorrows.”

The great Socrates will tell you this: “Make me conqueror of all nations, let the luxurious chariot of Bacchus carry me in triumph from the rising of the sun all the way to Thebes, let kings come to me for their laws: I will remember most of all that I am a man when I am hailed as a god on every side. Join to this lofty height, without a pause, a headlong change: let me be set on a foreign litter to adorn the procession of a proud and savage conqueror: I will be driven beneath another’s chariot no humbler than I stood in my own. What, then? I would still rather conquer than be captured. I will despise the whole kingdom of Fortune, but from it, if I am given the choice, I will take the better things. Whatever comes to me will become good, but I prefer that what comes be easier and more pleasant and less troublesome to the one who handles it. For there is no reason for you to think that any virtue is without toil; but some virtues need spurs, others reins. Just as the body must be held back on a downward slope and pushed on against a steep one, so some virtues are on a downward slope, others climb a hill. Can there be any doubt that endurance, courage, perseverance, and every other virtue that is set against hardships and subdues Fortune climbs, strains, and struggles uphill? What, then? Is it not just as plain that generosity, self-control, and gentleness go downhill? In these we hold the mind back so that it does not slip forward; in those we urge it on and spur it hard. So to poverty we shall apply the braver virtues, which know how to fight; to riches, the more careful ones, which tread lightly and keep their own weight in check. With this division made, I prefer to have in use those that can be practiced more calmly, rather than those whose testing is blood and sweat. So I do not live,” says the wise man, “otherwise than I speak; but you hear otherwise; only the sound of the words reaches your ears; what they mean you do not ask.”

26 “What difference is there, then, between me, a fool, and you, a wise man, if we both want to have them?” A very great one: for with the wise man riches are in slavery, with the fool in command; the wise man entrusts nothing to riches; to you riches are everything; you grow used to them and cling to them as if someone had promised you their possession forever; the wise man thinks most about poverty when he stands in the midst of riches. No general ever trusts peace so much as not to prepare himself for a war that, even if it is not being waged, has been declared: a beautiful house makes you insolent, as if it could neither burn nor fall down; wealth stuns you, as if it had risen above every danger and were too great for Fortune to have strength enough to consume it. You play idly with your riches and do not foresee their danger, as barbarians for the most part do when they are shut in and know nothing of siege engines: they idly watch the work of the besiegers and do not understand what the things being built in the distance are for. The same thing happens to you: you go limp among your possessions and do not think how many misfortunes threaten on every side, ready any moment to carry off the precious spoils. Whoever takes away the wise man’s riches will leave him all that is his; for he lives glad in the present, free of care about the future.

“There is nothing,” says Socrates, or some other who has the same attitude toward human affairs and the same power, “that I have more firmly resolved than not to bend the conduct of my life to your opinions. Pour out your usual words from every side: I will think you are not abusing me but wailing, like the most miserable infants.” This is what he will say who has attained wisdom, whose mind, free of vices, bids him rebuke others not because he hates them but as a remedy. He will add this: “Your opinion of me moves me not on my own account but on yours, because to hate virtue, to keep shouting at it and attacking it, is to renounce the hope of good. You do me no wrong; nor do those who overturn altars wrong the gods. But an evil purpose shows itself, and an evil plan, even where it could do no harm. I bear your ravings as Jupiter Best and Greatest bears the absurdities of the poets: one has given him wings, another horns, another has brought him on as an adulterer staying out all night, another as cruel to the gods, another as unjust to men, another as a ravisher of the freeborn, even of his own kin, another as a parricide and the usurper of a kingdom not his own, his father’s. All they have achieved is to take away from men their shame at sinning, if men believed the gods were like that. But although these things do not hurt me at all, I warn you for your own sake: look up to virtue, believe those who have followed it long and proclaim that what they follow is something great, which appears greater every day; worship virtue like the gods and its teachers like priests, and whenever mention of the sacred writings comes up, keep a holy silence (favete linguis). The phrase does not come, as most people suppose, from applause (favor); it commands silence, so that the rite can be duly performed with no ill-omened word breaking in. It is much more necessary that this be commanded of you, so that whenever anything is uttered from that oracle, you listen attentively, with your voices held in. When someone shaking a sistrum lies on command, when someone skilled at slashing his own arms bloodies his arms and shoulders with a careful hand, when some woman crawling on her knees along the road howls, and an old man in linen, carrying a laurel branch and a lamp at midday, cries out that one of the gods is angry, you run together and listen, and, feeding each other’s stupefaction, declare him inspired.”

27 See, Socrates, from that prison which he cleansed by entering it and made more honorable than any senate house, cries out: “What frenzy is this, what nature hostile to gods and men, to defame the virtues and violate holy things with malicious talk? If you can, praise the good; if not, pass them by; and if you enjoy indulging that foul license, attack one another. For when you rage against heaven, I do not say you commit sacrilege, but you waste your effort. I once gave Aristophanes matter for jokes; that whole troop of comic poets poured out their poisoned wit on me; my virtue was made to shine by the very things by which it was attacked; for it profits from being brought out and tested, and no one understands how great it is better than those who have felt its strength by assailing it: the hardness of flint is known to none better than to those who strike it. I offer myself like some rock left alone in a shallow sea, which the waves, from whatever quarter they are driven, never stop beating, and yet they neither move it from its place nor wear it away by their frequent assaults over so many ages. Leap at me, charge me: I will conquer you by enduring. Whatever strikes against what is firm and unconquerable exerts its force to its own harm: so look for some soft and yielding material in which your darts can stick.

“But do you have time to pry into the evils of others and pass judgment on anyone? ‘Why does this philosopher live so spaciously? Why does that one dine so lavishly?’ Do you look at other people’s pimples when you are covered with countless sores? It is as if a man being eaten up by foul mange should laugh at the moles or warts on the most beautiful bodies. Reproach Plato for having sought money, Aristotle for having taken it, Democritus for having neglected it, Epicurus for having spent it; throw Alcibiades and Phaedrus in my face,15 you who will be most fortunate the moment you get the chance to imitate our vices! Why not rather look around at your own evils, which stab you from every side, some attacking from outside, others burning in your very vitals? Human affairs are not in such a state, even if you know little of your own condition, that you have so much leisure left over as to have time to wag your tongues in abuse of your betters.

28 “This you do not understand, and you wear a face that does not fit your fortune, like so many people sitting in the circus or the theater whose house is already in mourning while the bad news has not yet reached them. But I, looking out from on high, see what storms either hang over you, to burst their clouds a little later, or have already come close, near enough to sweep away you and yours. And then? Even now, though you barely feel it, is not some whirlwind spinning your minds and wrapping them round, as they flee and seek the same things, now lifted on high, now dashed to the depths ⟨…⟩16

Notes

  1. 1. Seneca’s elder brother Novatus, who took the name Lucius Junius Gallio when he was adopted by the orator Junius Gallio; On Anger is addressed to him under his earlier name.

  2. 2. Some words are lost here, and the phrase that follows is corrupt; read as “harmful in their very wickedness.”

  3. 3. Virgil, Aeneid 2.61, said of the Greek Sinon.

  4. 4. Nomentanus and Marcus Gavius Apicius were proverbial gluttons; Apicius lived under Augustus and Tiberius.

  5. 5. Epicurus (341–270 BC), the Athenian philosopher whose school held pleasure to be the highest good.

  6. 6. Virgil, Georgics 1.139–140, slightly adapted.

  7. 7. Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC), founder of the Stoic school.

  8. 8. Publius Rutilius Rufus, consul in 105 BC, was unjustly condemned and died in exile; Cato the Younger, the Stoic opponent of Julius Caesar, killed himself at Utica in 46 BC.

  9. 9. An Epicurean otherwise unknown.

  10. 10. Virgil, Aeneid 4.653, the last words of Dido before her suicide.

  11. 11. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.328, from the epitaph of Phaethon, who fell while driving the chariot of the Sun.

  12. 12. Manius Curius Dentatus and Tiberius Coruncanius, heroes of the third century BC, were models of old Roman frugality; Marcus Licinius Crassus was the richest Roman of the younger Cato’s time, and Cato the Censor was his great-grandfather.

  13. 13. The ancient wooden bridge over the Tiber at Rome, a haunt of beggars.

  14. 14. The text is corrupt here; read as “and shod … with bare shoulders or cut feet.”

  15. 15. Democritus of Abdera, the philosopher of atoms, was said to have neglected his inheritance; Alcibiades and Phaedrus were young men of Socrates’ circle, named in slanders about his loves.

  16. 16. The rest is lost.