1You write that you are anxious about the outcome of a lawsuit with which the fury of an enemy threatens you, and you think I shall urge you to picture better things for yourself and to rest in pleasant hope. 1For why must one summon up evils, which will have to be endured soon enough when they come, anticipate them, and waste the present time through fear of the future? 1It is without doubt foolish to be wretched already because at some time you are going to be wretched. 1But I shall lead you to peace of mind by another road: if you want to throw off all anxiety, picture whatever you fear may happen as certain to happen, and whatever that evil is, measure it out within yourself and assess your fear; 2you will surely see that what you dread is either not great or not long.
3Nor need examples to strengthen you be gathered for long; 3every age has produced them. 3To whatever area of history, whether of our own state or of foreign ones, you send your memory, you will meet characters of great progress or of great impulse. 3Can anything harsher happen to you, if you are condemned, than to be sent into exile, or to be led off to prison? 3Is there anything more for anyone to fear than to be burned, than to perish? 3Set out each of these one by one, and call up those who have despised them, who need not be searched for, but only chosen. 4Rutilius bore his condemnation as if nothing in it troubled him except that he was being judged unjustly.
4Metellus bore exile bravely, Rutilius even gladly; 4the one granted his return as a favour to the state, the other refused his return to Sulla, to whom nothing was refused at that time. 4Socrates held discussions in prison, and refused to leave, though there were men who promised him escape; he stayed, so as to free mankind from the fear of two most grievous things, death and prison. 5Mucius placed his hand in the fire. 5It is bitter to be burned; 5how much more bitter, if you suffer it by your own doing! 5You see a man not learned, not equipped with any precepts against death or pain, furnished only with a soldier's strength, exacting a penalty from himself for a failed attempt; 5he stood watching his right hand dripping away on the enemy's brazier, and did not withdraw the melting hand from the bare bones until the fire was taken away from him by the enemy.
5He could have done something more successful in that camp, nothing braver. 5See how much keener virtue is to seize on danger than cruelty is to inflict it: Porsenna more easily forgave Mucius for having wanted to kill him than Mucius forgave himself for not having killed him. 6'Those stories,' you say, 'have been sung over and over in all the schools; 6next, when we come to despising death, you will tell me about Cato.' 6Why should I not tell of him, reading a book of Plato on that last night, with a sword laid at his head? 6He had provided these two instruments for his final extremity, the one so that he might be willing to die, the other so that he might be able to.
6So, having set his affairs in order, as far as affairs broken and at their end could be set in order, he thought he must make sure that no one should be allowed to kill Cato or have the chance to save him. 7And drawing the sword, which until that day he had kept pure of all bloodshed, he said: 'You have achieved nothing, Fortune, by blocking all my efforts. 7Until now I have fought not for my own freedom but for my country's, and I was not acting with such persistence in order to live free, but to live among the free. 7Now, since the affairs of the human race are beyond hope, let Cato be led away to safety.' 8Then he drove a deadly wound into his body.
8When the doctors had bound it up and he had less blood, less strength, but the same spirit, angry now not only with Caesar but with himself, he thrust his bare hands into the wound, and that noble spirit, which scorned all power, he did not let go but hurled out. 9I am not heaping up examples now in order to exercise my wit, but in order to encourage you against what seems most terrible. 9And I shall encourage you more easily if I show that not only brave men have despised this moment of breathing out the soul, but that some, cowardly in other respects, have in this matter equalled the courage of the bravest, like that Scipio, father-in-law of Gnaeus Pompey, who, driven back to Africa by a contrary wind, when he saw that his ship was held by the enemy, ran himself through with a sword, and when men asked where the commander was, said, 'The commander is well.' 10This saying made him equal to his ancestors and did not allow the glory destined for the Scipios in Africa to be broken off.
10It was a great thing to conquer Carthage, but a greater to conquer death. 10'The commander,' he said, 'is well.' 10Should a commander have died otherwise, and indeed Cato's commander? 11I am not calling you back to the histories, nor am I collecting from every century those who despised death, who are very many. 11Look back at these times of ours, whose sluggishness and luxury we complain of; 11they will supply men of every rank, of every fortune, of every age, who have cut short their misfortunes by death. 11Believe me, Lucilius, death is so far from being something to fear that, thanks to it, nothing is to be feared.
11So listen to your enemy's threats without anxiety. 12And although your conscience gives you confidence, yet because many things count for much besides the merits of the case, both hope for what is most just and prepare yourself for what is most unjust. 12But remember this before everything: to strip things of their commotion and to see what there is in each thing; 12you will know that there is nothing terrible in them except fear itself. 13What you see happen to children happens to us too, who are slightly bigger children: those whom they love, to whom they are accustomed, with whom they play, if they see them wearing masks, they are terrified.
13Not only from men but from things the mask must be removed and their own face restored. 14Why do you show me swords and fires and a crowd of executioners roaring around you? 14Take away that pomp beneath which you hide and frighten fools! 14You are death, whom my slave lately despised, whom my maidservant despised. 14Why do you once more unfold whips and racks before me with great display? 14Why the separate devices fitted to each separate joint, to wrench them apart, and a thousand other instruments for butchering a man piece by piece? 14Put away those things which stun us. 14Order the groans and cries to fall silent, and the bitterness of the voices forced out amid the torture!
14Surely you are pain, which that man with gout despises, which that dyspeptic endures in the midst of his luxuries, which a girl bears to the end in childbirth. 14You are light if I can bear you, you are short if I cannot bear you. 15Turn these things over in your mind, which you have often heard and often said. 15But whether you have truly heard them, whether you have truly said them, prove by the result. 15For this is the most shameful charge that is usually thrown at us, that we deal in the words of philosophy, not its works. 15What, have you only now learned that death hangs over you, only now exile, only now pain?
15You were born to these things. 15Whatever can happen, let us think of as going to happen. 16What I advise you to do, I know for certain you have done; 16now I urge you not to drown your mind in that anxiety of yours. 16For it will be dulled and have less vigour when it has to rise up. 16Lead it away from your private case to the case of all. 16Tell yourself that you have a mortal and fragile body, which will be threatened with pain not only from injury or from the force of the more powerful. 16Pleasures themselves turn into torments: feasts bring indigestion, drunken bouts numbness and trembling of the sinews, lusts deformities of the feet, the hands, and all the joints.
17I shall become poor; 17I shall be among the majority. 17I shall become an exile; 17I shall think I was born in the place to which I am sent. 17I shall be put in chains; 17what of it? 17Am I free of bonds now? 17Nature has bound me to this heavy weight of my body. 17I shall die; 17what you are saying is: I shall cease to be able to fall sick, cease to be able to be bound, cease to be able to die. 18I am not so foolish as to run through the Epicurean refrain at this point and say that the terrors of the underworld are empty, that Ixion is not whirled on a wheel, nor a rock pushed uphill on the shoulders of Sisyphus, nor anyone's entrails able to grow again every day and be torn away; 18no one is so much a child as to fear Cerberus and the darkness and the ghostly shape of those held together by bare bones.
18Death either consumes us or sets us free. 18For those released, better things remain once the burden is removed; for those consumed, nothing remains: goods and evils alike have been taken away. 19Allow me at this point to quote a line of yours, once I have first reminded you to consider that you wrote those words not for others only, but also for yourself. 19It is shameful to say one thing and feel another; 19how much more shameful to write one thing and feel another! 19I remember that you once handled that theme, that we do not fall into death suddenly, but advance towards it little by little; 19we die every day.
20For every day some part of life is taken away, and even when we are growing, life is shrinking. 20We have lost infancy, then boyhood, then youth. 20Right up to yesterday, whatever time has passed is lost; 20this very day which we are spending we share with death. 20Just as it is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but whatever has flowed out before, so the final hour in which we cease to exist does not by itself cause death, but by itself completes it; 20at that moment we arrive at death, but we have been coming for a long time. 21When you had described this in your usual style, always lofty, but never keener than when you fit your words to the truth, you said: 'Death comes not once; the death that takes us off is the last death.' 21I would rather you read yourself than my letter.
21For it will become clear to you that this death which we fear is the last, not the only one. 22I see what you are looking for; 22you are asking what I have packed into this letter, what spirited saying of some writer, what useful precept. 22Something will be sent from this very subject which has been in hand. 22Epicurus rebukes those who long for death no less than those who fear it, and says: 'It is absurd to run to death out of weariness of life, when it is by your way of life that you have made it necessary to run to death.' 23Likewise he says in another place: 'What is so absurd as to seek death, when you have made your life restless through fear of death?' 23You may add to these this further saying of the same stamp, that men's folly, or rather madness, is so great that some are driven to death by the fear of death.
24Whichever of these you dwell on, you will strengthen your mind for enduring either death or life. 24For we must be warned and strengthened in both directions, so that we neither love life too much nor hate it too much. 24Even when reason advises us to make an end of ourselves, the impulse is not to be seized rashly or with a headlong rush. 25The brave and wise man ought not to flee from life, but to leave it. 25And above all let that emotion too be avoided which has taken hold of many, the lust for dying. 25For there is, my Lucilius, as towards other things, so also towards dying, an ill-considered leaning of the mind, which often seizes noble men of the keenest temperament, and often the cowardly and the downcast; 25the former despise life, the latter are weighed down by it.
26Some are overcome by a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things, and not a hatred of life but a distaste for it, into which we slip with philosophy itself urging us on, while we say: 'How long the same things? 26I shall wake, of course, and sleep, be hungry and be sated, be cold and be hot. 26Nothing has an end, but all things are linked in a circle; they flee and they follow. 26Night presses on day, day on night, summer ends in autumn, upon autumn winter presses hard, and is checked by spring; 26all things pass on only to return. 26I do nothing new, I see nothing new; 26at some point one grows sick even of this.' 26There are many who judge living to be not bitter, but superfluous.
26Farewell.