1'Do you,' you say, 'bid me avoid the crowd, withdraw, and be content with my conscience? 1Where are those precepts of yours which command us to die in action?' 1As for the course I seem to you meanwhile to be urging, I have hidden myself away and shut my doors for this purpose, that I might be of use to more people. 1No day of mine passes in idleness. 1I claim part of the nights for study. 1I do not make time for sleep but give in to it, and I keep my eyes, wearied with waking and drooping, at their work. 2I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, and above all from my own affairs; 2I am doing the business of posterity; 2for them I am writing down some things which may be of use.
2Healthful counsels, like the recipes of useful medicines, I commit to writing, having found them effective on my own sores, which, even if they are not fully healed, have ceased to spread. 3The right road, which I recognised late and when weary with wandering, I point out to others. 3I cry out: 'Avoid whatever pleases the crowd, whatever chance bestows. 3At every good that comes by chance, stop short, suspicious and fearful; 3both the wild beast and the fish are deceived by some alluring hope. 3Do you think these are gifts of fortune? 3They are snares. 3Whoever of you wishes to lead a safe life, let him shun as much as ever he can these limed favours, in which we most wretched men are deceived in this too; 3we think that we possess, but we are caught fast.' 4'That course leads down to the precipice.
4The end of this lofty life is to fall. 4Then it is not even possible to stand firm, once prosperity has begun to drive men off course, or at least to fall upright and once for all; 4fortune does not overturn, but tips headlong and dashes down.' 5'Hold fast, then, to this sound and healthful pattern of life: indulge the body only so far as is enough for good health. 5It must be treated rather harshly, so that it may not disobey the mind. 5Let food appease hunger, let drink quench thirst, let clothing keep off cold, let a house be a defence against what threatens the body. 5Whether turf has raised it or variegated marble from a foreign land makes no difference; 5know that a man is sheltered as well by thatch as by gold.
5Despise all the things which needless toil sets up as ornament and adornment. 5Reflect that nothing is admirable except the mind, to which, being great, nothing is great.' 6If I say these things to myself, if I say them to posterity, do I not seem to you to be doing more good than when I went down as an advocate to a court appearance, or pressed my ring on the tablets of a will, or lent my voice and hand in the senate to a candidate? 6Believe me, those who seem to be doing nothing are doing greater things; 6they deal with things human and divine at once. 7But now I must make an end and, as I have arranged, pay something in return for this letter.
7It will not come from my own store; 7I am still unrolling Epicurus, whose saying I read today: 'You must be a slave to philosophy, that true freedom may fall to your lot.' 7The man who has submitted and handed himself over to her is not put off from day to day; 7he is set free at once. 7For this very thing, being a slave to philosophy, is freedom. 8It may be that you ask me why I quote so many good sayings from Epicurus rather than from our own school. 8Yet what reason is there why you should think these sayings belong to Epicurus and are not common property?
8How many poets say things which have been said by philosophers or ought to be said! 8I will not touch on the tragedians or our comedies in Roman dress. 8For these too have something of seriousness and stand midway between comedies and tragedies. 8What a quantity of most eloquent verses lies among the mimes! 8How many lines of Publilius ought to be spoken not by actors in slippers, but by actors in tragic boots! 9I will quote one verse of his which bears on philosophy and on that part of it which was in hand just now, in which he says that things that come by chance are not to be counted as our own: 'Whatever comes by wishing is all another's.' 10I remember that this thought was expressed by you not a little better and more concisely: 'What fortune has made yours is not yours.' 10I will not pass over that one, even better still, spoken by you: 'The good that could be given can be taken away.' 10This I do not charge to your account as payment; 10I have given you something of your own.
10Farewell.