Epistles 1.2 (Fairclough)

While you, Lollius Maximus, declaim at Rome, I have been reading afresh at Praeneste the writer of the Trojan War; who tells us what is fair, what is foul, what is helpful, what not, more plainly and better than Chrysippus or Crantor. Why I have come to think so, let me tell you, unless there is something else to take your attention.

The story in which it is told how, because of Paris’s love Greece clashed in tedious war with a foreign land, embraces the passions of foolish kings and peoples. Antenor moves to cut away the cause of the war. What of Paris? To reign in safety and to live in happiness—nothing, he says, can force him. Nestor is eager to settle the strife between the sons of Peleus and of Atreus. Love fires one, but anger both in common. Whatever folly the kings commit, the Achaeans pay the penalty. With faction, craft, crime, lust and wrath, within and without the walls of Troy all goes wrong.

Again, of the power of worth and wisdom he has set before us an instructive pattern in Ulysses, that tamer of Troy, who looked with discerning eyes upon the cities and manners of many men, and while for self and comrades he strove for a return across the broad seas, many hardships he endured, but could never be o’erwhelmed in the waves of adversity. You know the Sirens’ songs and Circe’s cups; if, along with his comrades, he had drunk of these in folly and greed, he would have become the shapeless and witless vassal of a harlot mistress—would have lived as an unclean dog or a sow that loves the mire. We are but ciphers, born to consume earth’s fruits, Penelope’s good for naught suitors, young courtiers of Alcinous, unduly busy in keeping their skins sleek, whose pride it was to sleep till midday and to lull care to rest to the sound of the cithern.

To cut men’s throats, robbers rise up by night; to save your own life, won’t you wake up? Nay, just as, if you won’t take up running in health, you’ll have to do it when dropsical; so, if you don’t call for a book and a light before daybreak, if you don’t devote your mind to honourable studies and pursuits, envy or passion will keep you awake in torment. Why indeed are you in a hurry to remove things which hurt the eye, while if aught is eating into your soul, you put off the time for cure till next year? Well begun is half done; dare to be wise; begin! He who puts off the hour of right living is like the bumpkin waiting for the river to run out: yet on it glides, and on it will glide, rolling its flood forever.

We seek money and a rich wife to bear us children; the wild woods, too, are tamed by our plough: but he, to whose lot sufficient falls, should covet nothing more. No house or land, no pile of bronze or gold, has ever freed the owner’s sick body of fevers, or his sick mind of cares. The possessor must be sound in health, if he thinks of enjoying the stores he has gathered. To one with fears or cravings, house and fortune give as much pleasure as painted panels to sore eyes, warm wraps to the gout, or citherns to ears that suffer from secreted matter. Unless the vessel is clean, whatever you pour in turns sour.

Scorn pleasures; pleasure bought with pain is harmful. The covetous is ever in want: aim at a fixed limit for your desires. The envious man grows lean when his neighbour waxes fat; than envy Sicilian tyrants invented no worse torture. He who curbs not his anger will wish that undone which vexation and wrath prompted, as he made haste with violence to gratify his unsated hatred. Anger is short-lived madness. Rule your passion, for unless it obeys, it gives commands. Check it with bridle—check it, I pray you, with chains.

While the colt has a tender neck and is able to learn, the groom trains him to go the way his rider directs. The hound that is to hunt does service in the woods from the time that it first barked at a deer-skin in the yard. Now, while still a boy, drink in my words with clean heart, now trust yourself to your betters. The jar will long keep the fragrance of what it was once steeped in when new. But if you lag behind, or with vigour push on ahead, I neither wait for the slow nor press after those who hurry on before.