1I leap for joy whenever I receive your letters. 1For they fill me with good hope, and now they do not merely promise on your behalf, they guarantee. 1Do just that, I beg and beseech you. 1For what better thing do I have to ask of a friend than what I am going to ask on his own behalf? 1If you can, withdraw yourself from those occupations of yours; 1if not, tear yourself away. 1We have scattered quite enough time; 1let us begin to pack our baggage in old age. 2Surely there is nothing to resent in that? 2We have lived in the open strait; let us die in harbour.
2Nor would I advise you to seek a name from your retirement, which you ought neither to parade nor to hide. 2For I shall never drive you so far, by condemning the madness of the human race, as to want some hiding place and oblivion to be prepared for you; 2see to it that your retirement does not stand out, but is visible. 3Next, those whose plans are still fresh and untouched will see about this question, whether they wish to pass their life in obscurity; 3for you it is not open. 3The vigour of your talent, the elegance of your writings, your famous and noble friendships have brought you forward into public view.
3Fame has already taken hold of you. 3Though you plunge into the remotest place and hide yourself deep away, still your past will reveal you. 4You cannot have darkness; 4wherever you flee, much of your former light will follow. 4Quiet you can claim without anyone's ill will, without regret or pangs of conscience. 4For what will you leave behind that you could think of as left by you unwillingly? 4Your clients? 4Not one of them follows you yourself, but something from you. 4Friendship was once sought, now plunder; 4deserted old men will change their wills, the caller at the morning levée will move on to another doorstep. 4A great thing cannot be had at a small cost; 4weigh up whether it is better to give up yourself or something of what is yours.
5Would that it had been your lot to grow old within the limits of your birth, and that fortune had not sent you out into the deep! 5Swift prosperity has carried you far from the sight of a healthy life: a province, an agency, and whatever is promised by these; 5then greater duties will take you up, and one after another. 6What end will there be? 6Why wait until you stop having anything to desire? 6That time will never come. 6Just as we say there is a chain of causes from which fate is woven, so there is one of desires; 6one is born from the end of another. 6You have been plunged into a life which will never of itself put an end to your miseries and your slavery.
6Withdraw your neck from the yoke that has chafed it; 6it is better to have it cut once and for all than to be always pressed. 7If you withdraw into private life, everything will be smaller, but it will fill you abundantly; 7but now the very great amounts heaped upon you from every side do not satisfy you. 7Which do you prefer, a full stomach from scarcity, or hunger amid plenty? 7Prosperity is both greedy and exposed to the greed of others. 7As long as nothing is enough for you, you yourself will not be enough for others. 8'How,' you say, 'shall I get out?' 8Any way you can. 8Think how many things you have attempted rashly for money, how many with toil for office; 8something must be dared for leisure too, or else you must grow old in that anxiety of agencies and then of civic duties, amid turmoil and ever-new waves, which no one has ever managed to escape by any modesty, by any quietness of life.
8For what does it matter whether you wish to be at rest? 8Your fortune does not wish it. 8What if you allow it to grow even now? 8Whatever is added to your successes will be added to your fears. 9I want to quote to you at this point a saying of Maecenas, who spoke the truth on the very summit: 'For height itself strikes the summits with thunder.' 9If you ask in what book he said it; 9in the one entitled 'Prometheus'. 9He meant to say this, that height holds the summits thunderstruck. 9Is any power, then, worth so much that your speech should be so drunken? 9He was a man of talent, who would have given a great model of Roman eloquence, had not prosperity unmanned him, or rather castrated him.
9This end awaits you, unless you now shorten sail, unless you make for land, as he wished to do too late. 10I could have squared accounts with you with this saying of Maecenas. 10But you will pick a quarrel with me, if I know you, and you will not want to accept what I owe in rough and bad coin. 10As things stand, I must take out a loan from Epicurus. 10'You must look round,' he says, 'to see with whom you eat and drink, before you look at what you eat and drink. 10For feeding on flesh without a friend is the life of a lion and a wolf.' 11This will not fall to your lot unless you withdraw; 11otherwise you will have guests whom your name-caller has sorted out from the crowd of callers.
11But he is wrong who seeks a friend in the hall, and tests him at the banquet. 11A busy man, besieged by his own goods, has no greater evil than this, that he thinks men his friends to whom he himself is not a friend, that he judges his favours effective for winning friends, when some men hate the more, the more they owe. 11A light debt makes a man your debtor, a heavy one your enemy. 12'What then? 12Do favours not win friendships?' 12They do, if one has been allowed to choose those who will receive them, if they have been placed, not scattered. 12So, while you are beginning to be your own master, meanwhile use this counsel of the wise, and consider that it matters more who has received a favour than what he has received.
12Farewell.