1I recognise my Lucilius; 1he is beginning to show himself the man he promised to be. 1Follow that impulse of spirit with which you were heading towards all that is best, trampling underfoot the goods of the crowd. 1I do not wish you to become greater or better than you were striving to be. 1Your foundations have taken up a great deal of ground; 1only complete as much as you have attempted, and carry out the plans which you have borne in your mind. 2In short, you will be wise if you stop your ears, and for this it is not enough to plug them with wax; 2you need a stronger stopping than the one they say Ulysses used for his comrades.
2That voice which was feared was alluring, but not universal; this one, which must be feared, resounds not from a single rock but from every part of the earth. 2Sail past, then, not one place suspected for its treacherous pleasure, but all cities. 2Make yourself deaf to those who love you most; 2with good intentions they pray for bad things. 2And if you want to be happy, pray to the gods that none of the things wished for you may come to pass. 3Those things which these people want heaped upon you are not goods; 3there is one good, which is the cause and foundation of a happy life: to trust oneself.
3But this cannot happen unless toil is despised and counted among the things that are neither good nor bad. 3For it is impossible for any one thing to be now bad, now good, now light and bearable, now terrifying. 4Toil is not a good. 4What then is good? 4Contempt of toil. 4So I would blame those who busy themselves to no purpose. 4Those, on the other hand, who strive towards honourable things, the more they apply themselves and the less they allow themselves to be beaten and to falter, the more I shall approve, and I shall shout: 'So much the better! Rise, draw breath, and get over that hill in one breath, if you can.' 5Toil nourishes noble spirits.
5There is no reason, then, for you to choose from that old prayer of your parents what you would wish to befall you, what you would pray for; 5and in general, for a man who has already passed through the greatest things, it is shameful to be still wearying the gods. 5What need is there of prayers? 5Make yourself happy. 5And you will do so if you understand that those things are good with which virtue is mixed, and those shameful with which vice is joined. 5Just as without a mixture of light nothing is bright, and nothing is black unless it holds darkness or has drawn into itself something dark, and just as without the aid of fire nothing is hot, and nothing cold without air; 5so it is partnership with virtue or with vice that makes things honourable or shameful.
6What then is good? 6Knowledge of things. 6What is bad? 6Ignorance of things. 6The man of wisdom and skill will reject or choose each thing as the occasion requires. 6But he neither fears what he rejects nor admires what he has chosen, provided his spirit is great and unconquerable. 6I forbid you to give in and be cast down. 6If you do not refuse toil, it is not enough; 6demand it. 7'What then?' 7you say, 'is toil that is trivial and superfluous, and called forth by petty causes, not bad?' 7No more than toil spent on noble things, since endurance itself belongs to the mind, which urges itself on to hard and rough things and says: 'Why do you hang back?
7It is not for a man to fear sweat.' 8Let this too be added, so that virtue may be perfect: an evenness and tenor of life consistent with itself throughout, which cannot exist unless one attains knowledge of things and the art through which things human and divine are known. 8This is the highest good. 8If you seize it, you begin to be the gods' companion, not their suppliant. 9'How,' you ask, 'does one get there?' 9Not over the Pennine or Graian Alps, nor through the wastes of Candavia, nor do you have to face the Syrtes or Scylla or Charybdis, though you have passed through all of them for the price of a petty procuratorship; 9the road is safe, it is pleasant, the road for which nature has equipped you.
9She has given you things such that, if you do not desert them, you will rise up equal to a god. 10But money will not make you equal to a god; 10a god has nothing. 10A bordered toga will not do it; 10a god is naked. 10Fame will not do it, nor display of yourself and knowledge of your name spread abroad among the nations; 10no one knows a god, many think ill of him, and with impunity. 10Nor will a crowd of slaves carrying your litter along the roads of the city and of foreign parts; 10that god, the greatest and most powerful, himself carries all things. 10Not even beauty and strength can make you happy; 10none of these endures age.
11We must seek something which does not grow worse day by day, and which cannot be hindered. 11What is this? 11The mind, but a mind that is upright, good and great. 11What else would you call it but a god lodging as a guest in a human body? 11Such a mind may fall to a Roman knight as readily as to a freedman, or to a slave. 11For what is a Roman knight, or a freedman, or a slave? 11Names born of ambition or of injustice. 11One may leap up to heaven from a corner. 11Only rise up 'and fashion yourself, too, worthy of a god.' 11But you will not fashion yourself out of gold or silver; 11an image like a god cannot be shaped from this material: remember that the gods, when they were kindly, were made of clay.
11Farewell.