1Once again you make yourself small in my eyes and say that nature first, and then fortune, dealt rather meanly with you, when you could lift yourself above the common crowd and rise to the highest happiness men can have. 1If there is anything else good in philosophy, it is this: that it does not inspect a pedigree. 1All men, if they are traced back to their first origin, are descended from the gods. 2You are a Roman knight, and it was your own diligence that brought you to this order; 2yet, by Hercules, the fourteen rows are closed to many; 2the senate house does not admit everyone; 2the camp too chooses fastidiously those whom it takes in for toil and danger.
2A good mind is open to all; for this we are all noble. 2Philosophy neither rejects anyone nor picks anyone out; 2it shines for all. 3Socrates was no patrician. 3Cleanthes drew water and hired out his hands for watering a garden. 3Philosophy did not receive Plato as a nobleman, but made him one. 3What reason is there why you should despair of being able to become equal to these men? 3All these are your ancestors, if you conduct yourself worthily of them; 3and you will do so if you at once persuade yourself that no one surpasses you in nobility. 4We all have the same number of forebears before us; 4there is no one whose origin does not lie beyond memory.
4Plato says that there is no king who is not sprung from slaves, and no slave who is not sprung from kings. 4All these things a long succession of changes has mingled, and fortune has turned them upside down. 5Who is well born? 5The man well fitted by nature for virtue. 5This alone must be considered; 5otherwise, if you go back to antiquity, everyone comes from that point before which there is nothing. 5From the first beginning of the world down to this time a series alternating between the splendid and the base has brought us down. 5A hall full of smoke-stained portraits does not make a man noble. 5No one has lived for our glory, nor is what existed before us ours; 5it is the mind that makes a man noble, and it may rise above fortune from any condition whatever.
6Suppose, then, that you are not a Roman knight but a freedman; 6you can achieve this, to be the only free man among the freeborn. 6'How?' 6you say. 6If you distinguish bad and good things without taking the people as your authority. 6You must consider not where they come from but where they are going. 6If there is anything which can make life happy, it is good in its own right. 6For it cannot be twisted into evil. 7What is it, then, in which men go astray, since all desire a happy life? 7That they take the means to it for the thing itself, and flee it while they seek it.
7For although the sum of the happy life is a firm freedom from care and an unshaken confidence in it, they gather causes of anxiety, and on life's treacherous road they do not merely carry their baggage but drag it; 7thus they always move further away from attaining what they seek, and the more effort they spend, the more they hinder themselves and are carried backwards. 7This is what happens to people hurrying in a labyrinth; 7their very speed entangles them. 7Farewell.