On the Shortness of Life

1. The greater part of mortals complains of the malice of nature, Paulinus: that we are born for so small a span, that the space of time given us runs past so quickly, so swiftly, that — with the very few excepted — life abandons the rest in the midst of life's own preparations. Nor has the crowd alone, thoughtless as they think, grieved over this common ill; the same feeling has called out laments from famous men too.

2. What moved them to cry that life is short is this: they never have leisure enough to look back on their own years; and no one of them ever learned to hold off death. But that they could not do what they wished even once in a life so busy, some of the greatest of them confessed — men whose fame and glories history keeps; you will recognize them as I name them. That life is not short, but that we make it so, we hear from the greatest of the ancients — the wisest too, and each in his own words.

3. Why do we complain of nature? She has dealt kindly: life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is gripped by greedy cares, another by the dull labor of doing nothing; one is soaked in wine, another dulled by sloth; one is worn out by the sweat of ambition always hanging on another's judgment; one is driven by the greed of trading over lands and seas on every hope of gain; one is tormented by the passion of war — hurrying to wound others only to be wounded; some wear themselves out in unpaid devotion to the great. To these add those who are held by no one slavery, but a self-invited one — restless masters of their own fortunes; add those who have no settled grief, yet — and this I know is no one — nothing gnaws them falsely or with unquiet mind: life knows no bounds for any but these.

4. What they ask, then, is a thing even mortal nature cannot grant: they beg for a long life who do not know how to live any part of it. Add those who cling to time only to insult it, who long for posterity and make ready out of their own life the things they will leave behind. And these are the same who will cry that life is short — who live as if thrown headlong into the one thing they would refuse at any price. Among these also count those who have no settled craving, and time wastes away on them no less than it flows: the hours leave them, they do not hold them. Their life is without bound, and they will not set bounds to their life.

1. Of all these, some are held by the bitterest remorse of their idleness — like men who have drunk the cup of forgetfulness before their journey; and even the happiest of them you will see trembling at the hour they themselves called for. But the man who has spent his time on the public good is the one who always has time enough at his disposal. He holds life in such a way that neither is it carried off before its day, nor snatched away, nor cast aside.

2. Of the life we live, part is given to others; of the life to come, all is in doubt. In a moment, death itself may call you back from any undertaking — the limit nature set, none may pass. And so, of all the wretches, he alone is left whom unforeseen old age has come upon, whom the losses of things dear to him have overturned and made unable to hold what he had: for he had laid up nothing for himself against that hour.

3. The crowd has one more evil still, and that the greatest: they are heavy with the remorse of things done ill; they hear them over in mind, and weigh them; their guilt is before their eyes. These, then, are worse than the first: those could not attain what they wished, and these have fallen back from what they had embraced.

4. So they are wretched before and after. Yet of all men these are the last who could be set free from their troubles, since their vices rise up before their eyes and sting — yes, and come back again to memory. For the memory of what is past brings back both a pleasure and a fear: the good deed done is glad to be seen again; the wicked does not.

5. And there is the most senseless indignation of certain men — those who complain of the disrespect of their forebears, of how little they left to be told of; who say they were born before the age of all these blessings, before the age of crowds crowned its favorites, before the games that draw the whole world. It is a thing to pardon in the young, that they do not yet know what to desire; old men complaining of the calendar, and grieving that they lived with the generations of the Flood — that is senseless madness: whatever your age, there is one fixed limit you can never pass.

1. Therefore, Paulinus, be of good courage: the life you ask for, you shall have. You desire it longer than you have lived: but who could not live it more spaciously? Who could not spend it more gladly? Behold, the years are there — take them, and turn them to good. They are yours: see what lies unused, what lies wasted. Why do you always snatch at the last? What is your reason for this delay? Death waits — will you wait for nothing?

2. Behold, the greatest of poets sings the welcome verse, as if struck with divine terror: "Each best day of life flees first for wretched mortals." Why do you delay? Why do you stand? Unless you seize it, it flees. And even when you have seized it, it will still flee: therefore you must contend with the swiftness of time in the speed of using it, and drink quickly, as from a rushing torrent that will not always flow.

3. And most beautiful of all — for shaming endless deliberation — he does not say each best AGE, but each best DAY. Why do you stretch out to yourself months and years in a long series, at your greed's own pleasure, careless and slow amid so great a flight of time? He speaks to you of the day, and of this very one that is fleeing.

4. In short, there is no doubt but that each best day flees wretched mortals first — that is, the preoccupied. Their minds are still childish when old age comes upon them, for which they arrive unarmed and unprepared: nothing has been provided; they have fallen into it suddenly, unawares — they did not feel it drawing near day by day.

5. "From the fiftieth year," says one, "I shall retire into leisure; the sixtieth shall release me from every duty." And what pledge, unhappy man, do you have for so long a life? Who will grant those things to your plan? Will you use the leftovers of others as if they were your own? Will you postpone everything to the time when you shall be done with everything? How foolish it is to put off the beginning of living, when you can begin from nothing else.

1. From the most powerful of men, raised far aloft, utterances of longing for leisure have fallen — in their prayers first of all. Even in the season of their prosperity, when it was permitted to them, above all things they begged for rest, for a withdrawal into safe retreats — desires they had no hope of attaining by their own judgment.

2. That lord of the world, the man to whom the whole blood of his citizens sometimes gave way, the man before whose nod all things bowed, once said, when he was weary: "When, O Rome, shall I be permitted to lay this burden down?" — as if a man who could command it had not the power to wish it.

3. He had proved how much those goods that shine through all lands draw out of men their sweat, how much hidden anxiety they cover: forced to decide with arms first with citizens, then with colleagues, last with kinsmen, by sea and land he shed blood. Through Macedonia, and driving before him the wrecks of peoples, he wandered to the edge of the world; he was giving laws to the Athenians — and while he moved the boundaries of empire, daggers were being whetted against him in the city itself: against Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others.

4. He had not yet escaped these ambushes when his daughter and so many noble youths, bound by adultery as if by a sacrament, were already shaking his enfeebled age, and Paulus, and a woman twice to be feared with Antony. These sores he had cut away with the limbs themselves: others were growing beneath; and — like a ship heavy-laden which takes in water even in calm — the burden he had laid on himself sank him.

5. The arms, the soldiers, the fleets — with which he hemmed the seas, and carried the Roman people to the ends of the earth — even in dream he looked to; his labors returned to him in hope and thought.

6. And yet this was the prayer of a man who had it in his own power to make any prayer come true.

1. And Cicero — how tossed about he was between the daggers of Catiline on one side and the swords of the young Caesar on the other! What day was there to him that did not bring some peril? How he prays against exile, as if against death itself! How he exults at his consulship! How proudly he bears himself, as if he had bought a life immortal with his eloquence!

2. And yet what shall I say of that man of whom, when his country had appeared to him in a vision, the first thing he begged was that he might live to see it safe — this the vision promised — and he gave thanks, and prayed that he might not live too long?

3. But even so great a man, held fast by the memory of his glory, could not set his face against the dangers crowding him: he had to come to terms with living; he had to pray to be spared. He who said of his own consulship "I have lived," who could have said "I have lived well" — the man to whom his glory gave a great witness — lived on in fear, an old man pleading for his years.

1. Livius Drusus, a man fierce and violent, when he had stirred up the new and wicked laws of Gracchus, hemmed in by an immense gathering from all Italy, and seeing no way out of things he was neither allowed to abandon nor free, once begun, to leave — is said to have cursed the unquiet life from its very beginnings, and to have cried that no holidays had ever come to him alone, no, not even when a boy. For he dared, while still a ward and still wearing the stripe, to commend defendants to judges and to interpose his influence in the courts so effectually that certain verdicts are said to have been wrested from them by him.

2. Into what would not ambition so immature break out? You might know that so precocious a boldness would break forth into great mischief, private and public. Late, therefore, he lamented that no holidays had been his from boyhood — seditious as a child, a burden to the courts. It is debated whether he laid hands on himself; for he collapsed from a sudden wound taken in the groin, some doubting whether his death was self-willed, none whether it was timely.

3. It is superfluous to recall more of those who, while they seemed to others the most blessed, gave true witness against themselves, hating every act of their years; but by such laments they changed neither others nor themselves: for when the words have burst out, the feeling slips back into habit.

4. Your life, by Hercules, though it passed a thousand years, will be drawn into the narrowest compass: those vices will swallow up every age. But this space, which reason stretches while nature runs, must soon slip from you; for you do not grasp it, nor hold it, nor so much as delay the flight of the swiftest of all things — you let it go as a superfluous and recoverable thing.

1. And in the first place count those who are devoted to nothing but wine and lust: none are more shamefully busy. The others, even if held by a vain image of glory, at least err respectably: name me the greedy, the passionate, men waging unjust hatreds or wars — all these sin more manfully. It is a disgraceful wasting away in those who are flung upon belly and lust.

2. Turn over all their hours: see how long they spend in adding up accounts, how long in lying in wait, how long in fearing, how long in courting, how long in being courted, how much they occupy their own bonds and others', how much their dinner-parties — which are now duties in themselves: you will see how their own evil or their own good will not let them breathe.

3. Finally, it is agreed among all that nothing can be well exercised by a busy man — not eloquence, not the liberal studies, since a mind stretched taut takes in nothing deep, and rejects everything as if beaten in. Nothing is further from the busy man than living: of nothing is the knowledge harder. The teachers of other arts are common and many; some of them boys have so grasped that they could even teach: living, the whole of life is to be learned — and, which will perhaps astonish you more, the whole of life is to be learned in dying.

4. So many great men, laying aside every impediment, when they had renounced riches, offices, pleasures, worked at this one thing to their last age — to know how to live; and yet more of them went out of life confessing they did not yet know — much less these.

5. Believe me, it belongs to great men, eminent above human error, to let none of their time be stained; and therefore that life of theirs is longest, because, however much room it opened, they devoted the whole of it to themselves. Nothing in it lay uncultivated and idle; nothing was under another's hand; for they found nothing worthy of exchange with their time — they were its most sparing guardians. And so it was enough for them; but it must have failed those from whose life the crowd took much.

6. Nor think that these men never came to understand their loss: you will hear most of those whom great felicity burdens, amid troops of clients or pleadings or other respectable miseries, cry out at times: "I am not allowed to live."

7. And why not allowed? All those who call you to them take you from yourself. How many days has that defendant taken? How many that candidate? How many that old woman weary with burying her heirs? How many that feigned sick man, playing on the greed of flatterers? How many that mightier friend, who keeps you not for friendship but for display? Mark it, I say, and count up the days of your life: you will see how very few, and how small, have stayed with you.

8. The man who has won the fasces he longed for wants to lay them down, and says at once: "When will this year pass by?" That one gives games, whose lot he judged great to win: "When," he says, "shall I escape them?" That one is torn from end to end of the forum as an advocate, and with great concourse fills everything beyond what can be heard: "When," he says, "will the case be called?" Each one hurries on his life and labors with desire of the future, in weariness of the present.

9. But he who devotes every hour to his own uses, who orders every day as if it were the last, neither longs for tomorrow nor fears it. For what is there that any hour could bring of new delight? All things are known, all things experienced to satiety. For the rest, let fortune order as she will: life is already safe. It can be added to, nothing taken from — and added as food to one already full and satisfied: he takes it because he does not crave it.

10. Therefore do not think anyone has lived long because of grey hairs or wrinkles: he has not lived long — he has BEEN long. For what if you should think that man had sailed much whom a savage tempest, caught as he left harbor, carried hither and thither and drove in a circle over the same spaces by the cross-winds of opposing gales? He did not sail much — he was tossed much.

1. I often marvel when I see some men asking for time and others the most ready to grant it: each looks to the thing for which time is asked, not to the time itself: as if nothing were asked, nothing given. The most precious of all things is played with; and it deceives them because it is incorporeal, because it does not come under the eyes, and therefore is rated cheapest — no, has almost no price at all.

2. Yearly gifts and doles men receive most gladly, and on them they spend labor or service or diligence: no one rates time; they use it more loosely, as if gratis. But see the same men in sickness, if the peril of death is brought near, touching the knees of physicians; if they fear a capital sentence, ready to spend everything, that they may live! So great is the discord of their feelings!

3. But if the number of each man's past years could be set out as the years to come are — how they would tremble who saw few remaining, how they would spare them! Yet it is easy to dispense even a little of what is certain; that must be kept more carefully of which you do not know when it will fail.

4. Nor think they do not know how dear a thing it is: they are used to say to those they love best that they are ready to give part of their years: they give, and do not understand; and they give so as to take from themselves without those years' increase. But whether they are taking from themselves they do not know: therefore the loss of a hidden hurt is bearable to them.

5. No one will give back the years; no one will restore you to yourself again. Life will go as it began, and will neither call back nor check its course; nothing will it do in tumult, nothing will it warn of its swiftness: silently it will glide by. It will not extend itself further at a king's command, nor at the people's favor: as it was sent forth from the first day, it will run — never turning aside, never delaying. What will happen? You are busy; life hurries; meanwhile death will be there, and you must find time for him, whether you will or no.

1. Can anything be more foolish than the opinion of certain men — those, I say, who boast of prudence? They are busy over their busyness. That they may live better, they spend life in equipping life. They order their thoughts far ahead; and the greatest waste of life is postponement: it takes each day from us first; it snatches the present while promising the later. The greatest hindrance to living is expectation, which hangs on tomorrow and loses today. You dispose of what is in fortune's hands; you let slip what is in your own. Where are you aiming? Where is the thing you are making ready for?

2. Behold, the greatest of poets cries out, and as if inspired with divine terror sings the saving song: "Each best day of life flees first for wretched mortals." "Why do you delay?" he says; "Why do you stand? Unless you seize it, it flees." And when you have seized it, it will still flee: therefore with the swiftness of using time you must contend in like speed, and drink quickly, as from a rushing torrent that will not always flow.

3. He speaks most beautifully too, in reproving endless deliberation, when he says not each best age but each best DAY. Careless, in so great a flight of time, why do you stretch out to yourself in a long series, as your greed has seemed to please, months and years? He speaks with you of the day, and of this very fleeing one.

4. Is there any doubt, then, that each best day flees wretched mortals first — that is, the busy? Whose minds, still childish, old age oppresses, for which they arrive unprepared and unarmed; for nothing has been provided: they have fallen into it suddenly, unexpecting — they did not feel it drawing near day by day.

5. As talk, or reading, or some more intent thought deceives a man making a journey, so that they know they have arrived before they knew they were nearing — so this journey of life, unceasing and most rapid, which we make with the same step waking and sleeping, does not appear to the busy except at its end.

1. What I proposed, if I wished to draw out into parts and spread the arguments, many things would meet me by which I might prove the life of the busy to be shortest. Fabianus used to say — not of those lectern philosophers, but of the true and ancient kind — "against the passions we must fight with assault, not with subtlety, and the battle-line must be turned not by small wounds but by a full onset." He did not approve of cavils: "what is needed is to crush, not to pluck." Still, since their own error must be made plain to them, they must be taught, not only bewailed.

2. Life is divided into three times: what WAS, what IS, what WILL BE. Of these, what we do is brief; what we shall do, doubtful; what we have done, certain. For this is that over which fortune has lost her rights, which cannot be brought back into anyone's power.

3. This the busy lose; for they have no leisure to look back on the past; and if they had, the recollection of a thing to be repented is unwelcome. Unwillingly, then, they call the mind back to times spent ill, nor do they dare to try again those things whose vices — even such as were stolen in under some present pleasure's bait — open out on review. No one willingly turns himself to the past unless all his acts are under his own judgment, which is never deceived —

4. he who coveted much ambitiously, despised proudly, conquered immoderately, deceived treacherously, seized greedily, poured out lavishly, must needs fear his own memory. And yet this is the sacred and dedicated part of our time, passed beyond all human chances, taken out of fortune's kingdom, which neither want, nor fear, nor the assault of diseases can harass: this can neither be troubled nor taken away; its possession is everlasting and unafraid. Only single days, and those by moments, are present; but all the time that is past, when you bid it, is at hand, and will let itself be called to view and held.

5. It is the part of a mind secure and at rest to run through all the parts of its life; the minds of the busy, as if under the yoke, cannot turn and look back. Therefore their life goes away into the deep; and as nothing profits, though you pour in never so much, if there is nothing beneath to receive and keep it, so it matters nothing how much time is given, if there is nowhere for it to settle: it is poured through riven and broken minds.

6. The present time is shortest — so short that to some it seems none; for it is always in course, it flows and hurries headlong; it ceases to be before it comes, and suffers no delay any more than the world or the stars, whose ever-restless motion never stays in one track. Therefore the present alone touches the busy — and that so brief it cannot be seized — and even this their stretched minds lose among many things.

1. In short, would you know how SHORT a time they live? See how eagerly they long to live. Decrepit old men beg by their prayers the addition of a few years: they pretend they are younger than they are; they flatter themselves with a lie, and are as glad to deceive themselves as if they deceived the Fates withal. Then, when some weakness has admonished them of mortality, they die trembling — not as if they were going out of life, but as if they were being dragged from it. They cry out that they were fools, that they had not lived, and that, if only they escape that sickness, they will live in leisure: then they see how vainly they provided for all that was not to be theirs.

2. But for him whose life is passed far from all business — why should it not be spacious? Nothing in it is handed on, nothing scattered here and there, nothing given over to fortune, nothing lost by neglect, nothing taken away by lavishness, nothing is superfluous: the whole of it, so to speak, is gain. However small, therefore, it is enough; and therefore, whenever the last day shall come, the wise man will not hesitate to go to death with sure step.

1. You ask, perhaps, whom I call the busy? There is no need to think I mean only those whom the dogs of the basilica drive out at last, whom you see crushed more conspicuously in their own crowd or more contemptibly in another's, whom their duties summon from their own houses to knock at others' doors — or whom the praetor's wand keeps busy over shameful gain and an abscess that will one day break.

2. Some men's leisure is occupied: in their country house or on their couch, in the midst of solitude, though they have withdrawn from all, they are a burden to themselves — a life to be called not idle but busy idleness. Do you call that man at leisure who carves up Corinthian bronzes, precious to a few men's madness, with anxious fastidiousness, and spends the better part of his days over rusty plates? Who sits in the wrestling-school — shame on it, we do not even labor under Roman vices! — a spectator of boys brawling? Who breeds his herds of mares in matched ages and colors? Who feeds the latest athletes?

3. And those you call at leisure, who pass many hours at the barber while whatever grew in the night is plucked away, while each single hair is deliberated, while disordered locks are restored or a thinning one is combed from here and there onto the brow? How they rage if the barber was a little careless, as if a man were being sheared! How they blaze if anything has been cut from their mane, if anything lies out of order, unless everything falls back into its rings! Who of these would not rather see the republic disturbed than his own hair? Who is not more anxious about the polish of his head than of his health? Who would rather be neat than honorable? Do you call these men at leisure — busy over a comb and a mirror?

4. And those who have labored at composing, hearing, learning songs, who twist a voice that nature made straight, and best, and simplest, into the bendings of the laziest modulation — whose fingers, measuring out some song within themselves, are always sounding — whose silent humming is heard even when they are called to serious matters, often to sad ones! These have no leisure, but idle business.

5. Their dinner-parties, by Hercules, I should not rank among free times, when I see how anxiously they set out the silver, how carefully they gird the tunics of their minions, how they hang suspended as a boar comes out of the cook's hands, how fast, at a signal, the smooth-cheeked boys run to their services, with what art birds are carved into moderate portions, how wretched little slaves carefully wipe up the spittle of the drunk. On these they stake their name for elegance and refinement; and their evils follow them into every retreat of life so far that they cannot drink without rivalry nor eat without it.

6. Nor should you count among the at leisure those who carry themselves here and there in a chair and a litter, and keep appointments with their own litters — as if it were not permitted to forsake them — whom another must remind when they should bathe, when swim, when dine. So dissolved are they by the languor of a too-delicate mind that they cannot know by themselves whether they hunger.

7. I hear one of these spoiled creatures — if a life may be called spoiled that has unlearned human habit — when he had been carried from the bath and set in his chair, say to one asking: "Am I sitting now?" Do you think this man, who does not know whether he is sitting, knows whether he is alive, whether he sees, whether he is at leisure? Hard to say which I should pity more — that he did not know, or that he pretended not to know.

8. They feel forgetfulness of many things, but they also feign it; certain vices delight them as proofs of felicity: it seems the part of a low and contemptible man to know what you are doing. Go now, believe the mimes tell many lies to reproach luxury! More things pass over, by Hercules, than they invent; such a stock of incredible vices has grown up in this one ingenious age that we may already reproach the mimes for negligence — that anyone has so rotted into luxury that he believes of another whether he is sitting!

9. This man, then, is not at leisure — give him another name: he is sick, no, dead. That man is at leisure whose sense of his own leisure is awake. This half-alive one, who needs a monitor to understand the posture of his own body — how can he be master of any time?

1. It is long to pursue one by one those who have spent their lives over dice, or ball, or baking themselves in the sun. Not idle are those whose pleasures hold much business: of those no one will doubt that they busily do nothing, who are held by the study of useless letters — of which a great flock exists among the Romans too.

2. That disease of the Greeks was to inquire what number of rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, and whether they were by the same author, and other questions of this kind — which, if you keep to yourself, they do nothing for your secret conscience; if you produce them, you seem not more learned but more tiresome.

3. Behold, a vain study of over-learning has invaded the Romans too. These days I heard a certain man reporting what each of the Roman commanders had done first: Duilius first won a naval battle, Curius Dentatus first led elephants in a triumph. Even now, though such things do not tend to true glory, they still turn about examples of civil offices: such knowledge would bring no profit — still, it is a thing that would hold us in a specious vanity of facts.

4. Now hear what these men are after: they tell of the same with the Greeks. One is collecting which king first armed elephants: first in the sacred books? or where the custom first appears? Another is eager to know what Juno never told: whether it was at her prayer that the Roman commander first led horses and mules in triumph. Another inquires how often the people ordered the little heralds to begin the game.

5. Anything you like is worked over — the linen breastplates of Abraham and the jars of Egypt: one asks who first persuaded the Romans to take a wife; another what was the first dowry; another why the new name was given and the old set aside. Among all these you have in hand matter for keeping the mind employed: and yet, though you keep it, they do not live; for they study history of nothing but names.

6. And so we ought not to waste our whole life in such studies — much less, surely, than those things I censured. But it is long to search out the rest, whose learning is not and never will be.

7. I forbear — and would you not rather think those men the most wretched, who spend their whole lives over the things which, unless you loved them, you must needs despise? They give out nothing useful from themselves; they lay up nothing in themselves — but they polish for others' ears what they have gathered, and they exercise their tongues on every silly word, and they call back to mind things once heard; they weigh — they search — they compare.

8. And what is more wretched than to be someone for whom the worth of another's idle time is the study? They turn the stones of all books — they cut out worthlessly. I should not refrain from praising them if only they used their work elsewhere.

9. But even if you grant that they tell all things in good faith and write to be believed — whose wanderings would all this lessen? Whose greed would it press? Whom would it make braver, more just, more generous? Our own Fabianus used to say he doubted at times whether it were better to touch no studies at all than to be entangled in these.

1. Of all men, those who give themselves to wisdom are alone at leisure. They alone live: for they do not keep only their own age — they add every age to theirs; all the years that have gone before are theirs to use.

2. Most sacred, most august is that temple: we must enter it and set before it all the ages, admire one thing, take another. It is the greatest mark of shame to be ignorant of the very thing for which life is given: those men live through all ages.

3. The busy, whom I began by naming, are cast into their own affairs as into the waves; the whole crowd is carried down more often than it rises; of these some pray and stretch their hands to heaven, and give thanks to the immortal gods as if their heads had been raised from the lowest pit — others groan that they have slipped back again into the same labors: this is a thing they have already prayed to escape.

4. From these, then, the leisure of those is far removed who turn to wisdom; their lot is set apart; they do not climb into peril on account of others; they do not fall with the falling crowd. For the rest — with how much favor fortune treats them, in how great peace they spend their time! They are not lifted up, not cast down: their life flows in the deep stillness of a secure stream.

5. The busiest of all, then, are the idle; those, I say, who labor at composing, hearing, learning songs. This, truly, is the kind of leisure which a philosopher's dignity rejects — but it is the least wicked kind of the others.

1. No one forces you to die with these: a nobler service calls you to itself. Every age is yours for the taking; nothing lies outside your reach that any age of human life has brought forth; nothing of the ancient harvest is shut off to your search. All the generations that strove for the truth before us are made ready for our use; the noblest of us have gathered things in store for us, long life by long life. Ours is the mother-age: by her grace we are born into all manner of truths; and from the whole harvest of every age the best has been set apart for us, if only we knew how to use the depths of our minds.

2. All that is ours when we will: we can mark out no limit. Then run through the whole of it! All things have been given as food for minds. And since a great thing has been permitted you, and it is a great thing to have been born into this age, in which you are allowed to take whatever you wish from so great a richness of minds — do not carry out your life in sleep. For what is the part of a mind fitted for great things, if not to hunt out things as yet hidden from sense?

3. And you will mark it in this too — the life of the past lies open to us, and it is the greatest of goods to have mixed with all ages. He who has devoted himself wholly to wisdom is shut out from no age and admitted to all.

4. But this life, which the busy spend over eating their own time, they themselves labor at in such a way as to keep nothing for themselves. In their company, all the hours of the greatest men are open; from all they snatch what is worth the taking; they add to the number of their years.

5. Believe me, of those who have these temples of the greatest minds open, none can be wretched: their appetite is aroused; whatever they have gathered they make their own; they delight themselves most happily and — what I judge still happier — they leave nothing of their leisure to others.

1. To pass by those whose leisure is known — painters, and all who labor over the warmth of bronze and marble; you have seen the busy troops about marbles and pictures and the flocks about a bellows and a furnace; and those who fashion the limbs of gladiators and work the grooves of silver with their file. Those whom the rest of men call lovers of leisure, they themselves know to be the busiest of all: as when certain men — pretenders to philosophy in the crowd — gather an audience and sweat at their words, nothing of their soul reaches them; for they think over what they are about to say, not what they have said.

2. And so they spend their whole life over a promised life: they do not recite what they have committed, but what they are now composing — nor that, but now composing otherwise. For whatever it is, they are going to speak otherwise. They are weighed down with the things left over, and — they begin another.

3. Do you suppose those men at leisure who spend the whole day in the vetting of their robes, and turn over their papers, and fill themselves with old songs? Such men do not yet have leisure, for there is something else still to catch up: and so, gathering the life of the past, they neglect the present. Do you suppose those at leisure who spend hours with the barber? They do not yet have leisure: they are getting something ready.

4. I have named the men whose occupations are known from their talk. Tell me of those who pass their lives in idleness — who carry their pastime not hidden but displayed: they are the busiest of all. They have no leisure — why so? They are seeking leisure. Do you ask how these are busy? One is making himself up with a comb, busy with leisure itself.

5. And it is a hard matter to judge of these: the idle life for the busy does not seem idle, and yet nothing is the same.

1. Their very pleasures are anxious, and troubled with varied fears, and the thought of the exulting spirit at its height is suddenly solicitous: "How long will this last?" From this feeling kings have wept over their power; nor did the greatness of their fortune delight them, but the end that would come some day terrified them.

2. When through the great spaces of his plains the most insolent king of Persia was stretching out his army, he did not number it but measured it; he shed tears, because within a hundred years no one of so great a youth would survive. Yet the man who wept was himself to bring fate upon them, wasting others now by sea, now by land, now in battle, now in flight, and within a brief time consuming those whose hundredth year he feared.

3. What of the fact that some men's very gains are burdensome: their riches, by which they seem to be counted blest, they do not enjoy but grind out; their crops and their herds and their glittering gold and silver they gaze on with suspicion; they preserve by care what they have heaped together; they fear the hour when they must leave it; the gains they call their own they do not use, they only guard.

4. What of those who sit from the first morning in the middle of a crowd of clients, pass to the hall, and from there to the civic roar; they please themselves with a greatness that is another's; they think the house splendid, the gate lofty, the reception court wide, the rings in greater number — while beneath these displays lies a mind on the rack.

5. Even their softness is mixed with much unrest: the silky tunic, the softest couches, the banquets planned through long night, the games devised beyond the custom of kings — this luxurious daintiness, if you look closely, is not rest but a kind of fevered toil.

1. Draw yourself, then, out of the crowd, dearest Paulinus, and, tossed as you have been, at last withdraw into a quieter harbor. Think how many storms you have gone through, how many gales you have met — some private, some public, turned against yourself. Your virtue has been shown long enough through hard and troubled proofs: try what it can do in leisure. The greater part of your life, certainly the better part, has been given to the republic: take some of your time for yourself too.

2. Nor do I call you to a dull or idle quiet, or to drowning whatever lively nature is in you in sleep and the pleasures dear to the crowd. That is not repose: you will find greater works than any you have actively handled, to carry on withdrawn and unafraid.

3. You indeed administer the affairs of the whole world as carefully as if they were another's, as diligently as if they were your own, as religiously as if they were the public's. In office you win love, though love's opposite is hard to avoid there; but believe me, it is better to know the account of one's own life than of the public corn.

4. Recall that vigor of mind, so capable of the greatest things, from a service honorable indeed, but little fitted for the blessed life; and consider that from your earliest years, with all that culture of liberal studies, you did not strive so that many thousands of measures of corn might be well entrusted to you. You promised something greater and deeper of yourself. There will never be lacking men of proven thrift and laborious service: slow oxen are the better beasts for carrying burdens than noble horses, whose generous speed did any man ever burden with a heavy load?

5. Consider, besides, how much anxiety it is to lay upon yourself so great a mass: when you have to do with a hungry people, the matter brooks no reason, is not softened by fairness, is not bent by any prayer. Only the other day, within those few days in which Gaius perished — if the dead have any feeling — how bitterly he bore it, that the Roman people, surviving him, must have at best seven or eight days of food!

6. While he joined bridge to bridge with ships and played with the strength of empire, the last of evils beset even those he besieged: want of food. He all but fell by famine and ruin — the collapse of all things that follows famine — in imitation of a mad, foreign, and unlucky-proud king.

7. What a spirit, then, must those have had to whom the care of the public corn was entrusted — stone, iron, fire, with a Gaius to be faced! With the deepest dissimulation they covered a great evil lying hidden in their midst, and with reason: certain sicknesses must be cured while the sick are ignorant; for many, the knowledge of their disease was a cause of death.

1. Of all men they alone are at leisure who have time for wisdom: they alone live — for they do not keep only their own age; they add every age. All the years that have gone before are open to them. But the most short and anxious life is theirs who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

2. When they have come to the end — the wretched return to a new fear, for they cannot look back on anything with ease: their regrets are remembered, their negligence is present, their fear is before them. Some of the busy are kept even from the last comfort by the memory of their own pleasure; and there are those who have, in the things they have done, a sort of light to accompany them. But for these, life is all anxiety; and they — the one class must judge its own life is not good, the other does not hold it to be lived.

1. Hold fast, therefore, Paulinus, to this: do not let your time be carried off in the tide of another's business, and keep yourself for better things. Let this one thing be charged against your constant service — it must not be endless.

2. Consider how many things you have taken up in your charge that are foreign to it: none of your offices is necessary, none is worthy of a man at peace; and yet all of them, weighed, consume the man. How many days have been taken by clients who had no claim on you, by mourners at another's funeral, by banquets! See, the year has closed — do you think it closed in anything of yours?

3. Call to mind, then, when you shall be free of such offices: they will grieve you less if you know you are quitting them. For he is most unhappy who — when there is the best cause — does not at once depart.

4. What you call your offices — the tribuneship, the commission, the guard of the letter and the rest — are things to which you have not been called by nature, but by men; and those things that are of chance and not of nature are removed with the same ease by which they were brought on. Keep for yourself the better part of your life for things better than these.

5. Why do you delay to do this? Even if you should take from your whole life every care that others press on you, yet what is left is but a little, and it flees. But your age invites, even urges: it is not strength failing, it is at its very height. Yet delay — the body will be the first to fail, and then the mind, and at last you will say you had no leisure.

6. You will have leisure only when you have ceased to hope, to fear; but for now, though you seem to hold it back, life slips through — so that I seem to hear one of the great, warned by a mighty conscience, saying: "We are not permitted to live." Why are you not permitted? For all the occasions that call you away, one man keeps the greatest of all. Make haste: this last office is owed to yourself.