1'Are you,' you say, 'advising me? 1Have you already advised yourself, then, already corrected yourself? 1Is that why you have leisure for the reform of others?' 1I am not so shameless as to undertake cures while I am sick myself; but, as though I were lying in the same infirmary, I talk with you about our common malady and share remedies with you. 1So listen to me as if I were talking to myself. 1I am admitting you into my private chamber and, with you present, I am examining myself. 2I cry out to myself: 'Count your years, and you will be ashamed to want the same things you wanted as a boy, to be procuring the same things.
2At least do yourself this service as your dying day draws near: let your vices die before you. 2Let go of those turbulent pleasures, which must be paid for dearly; 2it is not only those to come that do harm, but also those that are past. 2Just as with crimes, even if they were not detected when they were committed, the anxiety does not depart along with them; 2so with shameful pleasures, there is regret even after they are gone. 2They are not solid, they are not faithful; 2even if they do no harm, they fly away.' 3'Look around rather for some good that will last. 3But there is none, except what the mind finds for itself out of itself.
3Virtue alone affords a joy that is everlasting and secure; 3even if something gets in the way, it comes between like clouds, which drift along below and never overpower the daylight.' 4When will it be granted to reach this joy? 4There has been no idleness so far, it is true, but let us make haste. 4Much work remains, on which you yourself must spend your own wakeful nights, your own toil, if you want it accomplished. 4This business does not admit of delegation. 5Another kind of literary study does allow assistance. 5Within our memory there was a rich man, Calvisius Sabinus. 5He had both the fortune of a freedman and the mind of one; 5I never saw a man whose prosperity was more unbecoming.
5His memory was so bad that the name now of Ulysses would slip from him, now of Achilles, now of Priam, men whom we know as well as we knew our own tutors. 5No aged name-caller, who does not give out names but invents them, ever greeted the tribes so wrongly as he greeted the Trojans and the Achaeans. 5Nonetheless he wanted to seem learned. 6So he thought up this short cut: he bought slaves for a great sum, one to know Homer by heart, another Hesiod; 6besides this, he assigned one to each of the nine lyric poets. 6There is no reason for you to wonder that he paid a great deal for them; 6he had not found them ready, so he contracted for them to be made.
6Once this household had been got together for him, he began to pester his dinner guests. 6He kept these men at his feet, and though he kept asking them for verses to repeat, he would often break down in the middle of a word. 7Satellius Quadratus, a nibbler at rich fools, and, what follows from that, a smiler at them, and, what goes with both of these, a mocker of them, advised him to keep scholars as gatherers of scraps. 7When Sabinus had said that each slave had cost him a hundred thousand sesterces; 7'You could have bought as many bookcases for less,' said he. 7Yet Sabinus held to the belief that he knew whatever anyone in his house knew.
8This same Satellius began urging him to take up wrestling, a sickly, pale, skinny man. 8When Sabinus replied: 'And how can I? 8I am barely alive.' 8'Please,' said he, 'do not say that; 8don't you see how many very strong slaves you have?' 8A sound mind can be neither borrowed nor bought. 8And I think that if it were for sale, it would find no buyer. 8But an unsound one is bought every day. 9But now take what I owe you, and farewell. 9'Riches are poverty adjusted to the law of nature.' 9Epicurus often says this, in one way and another; 9but what is never learned enough is never said too often.
9To some people remedies must be pointed out, into others they must be drummed. 9Farewell.