Keep going, Lucilius. Push harder. The longer you spend with a mind under your own authority, the richer that time becomes. There is satisfaction in the work of getting there, yes, but it is greater still to look on a soul that has been scoured clean. You already know what it felt like to put on the adult toga for the first time and go out into the forum as a man. Expect something greater than that, something that makes that day look like a rehearsal, when philosophy finally enters your name among the grown.
For here is the trouble. We outgrow boyhood, but not boyishness. We carry the fears of children in bodies that now carry authority. Boys fear small things. Infants fear shadows. We fear both. Stay on the path, and you will begin to see this clearly: the things that frighten us most are often the least worth fearing. No evil that comes last can be a great evil. Death is coming. You might fear it if it could stay, but it cannot. It either never arrives or arrives and is gone at once.
You say it is hard to bring the mind to a place where it is not gripping life. Look around you. People abandon life for the most contemptible reasons. One man hangs himself outside his mistress’s door. Another throws himself from a roof rather than endure one more day under a harsh master. A runaway slave drives a blade into himself before the soldiers can take him back. These men did not need courage. They needed only enough fear to overcome a worse fear. If terror can do that, what is virtue’s excuse? The man who spends himself trying to lengthen his life, who treats each passing year as a blessing in itself, will never know peace. Rehearse this every day. Practice letting go. Most people do something worse than die badly. They cling on, swept downstream, clutching at thorns and sharp rocks with bleeding hands. They do not want to die, and they do not know how to live.
Make your life worth inhabiting by dropping the anxiety about losing it. Nothing gives pleasure to its owner if the owner cannot bear the thought of it being taken away. And nothing is easier to lose than what, once lost, you can no longer want back. So harden yourself. Look to the great ones. Pompey’s fate was decided by a boy king and a eunuch. Crassus was killed by a proud Parthian. Caligula ordered Lepidus to bow his neck to the axe, and then Chaerea did the same to Caligula. Fortune has never raised anyone so high that she did not hold over him the same threat he had once held over others. Do not trust her calm. In an instant the sea can turn to its depths. The ships that were playing on the water in the morning are swallowed by evening.
A thief can cut your throat. An enemy can. And even without any of that, every slave who passes you holds your life in his hands, because anyone who scorns his own life becomes the master of yours. The man who does not fear death cannot be threatened. Think how many powerful people have been killed by their own servants, by conspiracy or by open violence. Their rank meant nothing. What difference does it make how powerful the man is whom you fear, when the very thing you fear is within anyone’s reach?
And if an enemy takes you captive and marches you off to your death, where exactly do you think he is taking you? You have been marching in that direction since the hour you were born. Stop deceiving yourself. This is not something that is happening to you for the first time. Keep these thoughts close. Let them live in you. If you want to face that last hour without flinching, you must stop letting it poison all the hours before it.
I want to close with something I took today from another man’s garden. Poverty brought into alignment with what nature actually requires is great wealth. And what does nature require? Only that you are not hungry, not thirsty, not cold. To meet those needs, you do not have to flatter the rich or endure the humiliation of their condescending charity. You do not have to risk the sea or the battlefield. What nature needs is available wherever you are. It is the surplus that costs everything. The surplus wears out your clothes, ages you in camp, drives you onto foreign shores. What is enough is already in your hands.