1Urge your friend to despise with a great spirit those who reproach him for having sought shade and leisure, for having abandoned his rank, and, though he could have attained more, for having preferred quiet to everything; 1let him show them daily how profitably he has managed his own business. 1Those who are envied will not cease to pass by; 1some will be crushed, others will fall. 1Prosperity is a restless thing; 1it harries itself. 1It stirs the brain in more ways than one; 1it goads different men towards different things, these towards power, those towards luxury. 1Some it puffs up, others it softens and wholly unstrings. 2'But someone carries it well.' 2Yes, as he carries wine.
2So there is no reason for those people to persuade you that a man is happy who is besieged by many; 2they run to him as people run to a pool, which they drain and muddy. 2'They call him trifling and idle.' 2You know that some people speak perversely and mean the opposite. 3They used to call him happy; 3well then? 3Was he? 3Nor do I even care about this, that to some he seems to have a mind too rough and stern. 3Ariston used to say that he preferred a gloomy young man to one who was cheerful and agreeable to the crowd. 3For wine becomes good which seemed harsh and rough when new; 3wine which pleased in the cask does not bear age.
3Let them call him gloomy and hostile to his own advancement; 3that very gloominess will turn out well in old age, if only he perseveres in cultivating virtue and drinking deep of liberal studies, not those with which it is enough to be sprinkled, but these with which the mind must be dyed. 4This is the time for learning. 4'What then? 4Is there any time at which one should not learn?' 4None at all. 4But just as it is honourable to study at every age, so it is not honourable to be schooled at every age. 4An old man learning his letters is a shameful and ridiculous thing; 4the young man must acquire, the old man must use.
4You will therefore do a most useful thing for yourself if you make him as good as possible; 4these, they say, are the benefits to be sought and bestowed, undoubtedly of the first rank, which it profits as much to give as to receive. 5Besides, he is no longer free in anything; 5he has given his pledge. 5And it is less shameful to go bankrupt to a creditor than to fair hopes. 5To pay off that kind of debt, the trader needs a prosperous voyage, the farmer the fertility of the land he farms and the favour of the sky; 5what he owes can be paid in full by will alone.
6Fortune has no jurisdiction over character. 6Let him so order his character that his mind may come to perfection in the greatest possible tranquillity, a mind which feels neither that anything is taken from it nor that anything is added, but stays in the same condition however things turn out. 6If ordinary goods are heaped upon such a mind, it rises above its circumstances; if chance has struck away some or all of them, it does not become less. 7If he had been born in Parthia, he would be bending a bow straight away as an infant; 7if in Germany, he would be brandishing a slender spear at once as a boy; 7if he had lived in the times of our grandfathers, he would have learned to ride and to strike the enemy at close quarters.
7These things the training of his own nation urges upon each man and commands. 8What, then, must this man practise? 8What serves well against all weapons, against every kind of enemy: to despise death, which no one doubts has something terrible in it, such as to offend even our minds, which nature has formed to love themselves; 8for there would be no need to be prepared and sharpened for something towards which we would go by a kind of willing instinct, as all creatures are borne towards their own preservation. 9No one learns so that, if need be, he may lie with a calm mind upon roses, but he is hardened for this: that he may not surrender his loyalty to torture, that, if need be, he may keep watch all night before the rampart, standing and sometimes even wounded, and not even lean upon his javelin, because sleep tends to creep up meanwhile on those who recline on any support.
9Death has no inconvenience; 9for there must be something for which it is an inconvenience. 10But if so great a desire for a longer life holds you, reflect that none of the things which depart from our eyes and are laid back in the nature of things, from which they came forth and will soon come forth again, is destroyed; 10they cease, but they do not perish. 10And death, which we dread and refuse, interrupts life, it does not snatch it away; 10the day will come again which will restore us to the light, a day which many would refuse if it did not bring them back forgetful. 11But later I shall show more carefully that all things which seem to perish are changed.
11He who is to return ought to depart with a calm mind. 11Observe the cycle of things returning upon themselves; 11you will see that nothing in this world is extinguished, but that things go down and rise in turn. 11Summer has gone, but another year will bring it back; 11winter has fallen, its own months will bring it back again; 11night has overwhelmed the sun, but day will at once drive night itself away. 11That wandering course of the stars repeats whatever it has passed through; 11one part of the sky is continually rising, another sinking. 12Finally, I shall make an end once I have added this one point, that neither infants nor children nor those who have lost their minds fear death, and that it is most shameful if reason does not afford us that freedom from care to which folly leads.
12Farewell.