Sosius Senecio: your wish is, I believe, to become a man of notable action, not for yourself and your country alone, but before all who know how to value civic virtue. You therefore think that tranquillity of soul, of which the schools make so much, would rather be an obstacle to you, and you see no use for it in public and active life. That is why I shall begin not with precepts and arguments, but with examples whose authority you will recognize.

Remember Ulysses, whom Homer depicts as a man forever careful for his safety and his fortune; he is the only one, or the first, whom the poet calls 'of many turns.' He suffered in his heart countless sorrows, as he says himself; and yet the love of return, the desire to see again the smoke rising from his city, the support of his wife, the loneliness of his father, the peril of his threatened household kept him from yielding to discouragement. This is why he bore with great courage the dangers of monsters, shipwrecks, the loss of his companions, the cruelty of the elements, trusting henceforth to time and to himself to keep himself whole. Such is the first cause of tranquillity: hope. Such too is the first disease of the soul, what troubles it before all else: when a man despairs of himself, when he calls himself lost, when he cries, like those who flee the battlefield, that all is lost. The man who counts on himself always has resources; and he who sighs after prosperity and blames the times adds a second affliction to the first, like those who, at sea, not content with the storm, overturn the ship.

Consider also Anaxagoras. Having learned of the death of his son, he said: 'I knew that I had begotten a mortal.' And Cleanthes, carrying the stone that seemed best fitted for his work, seemed to carry the heaviest; but the others laughed: the firmness of his face showed that he was bearing the work of reason, not a burden. For the man whose life is lit by reason sees evils with serenity and without trouble; while the man who makes his prosperity depend on outward goods, when those goods vanish, vanishes with them.

But here, Sosius, is what seems to me essential. Often fortune does not seem so dreadful as our mind portrays it; it is we who swell and inflate our evils by the way we view them. Just as the shapes children think they see in the woods vanish when a lamp is brought near, so the terrors and griefs of the soul, when we approach them closely, with the light of reason, are dispersed. It is like those painters who depict enormous demons and monsters on half-formed faces: a closer look reveals ordinary figures. Now it is our own judgments that are the painters of our sorrows: if we consent to look at things in themselves, without the vain opinions mingled with them, we shall find that they deserve neither all the good nor all the evil we lend them.

Moreover, we must guard against those outbursts in which we blame fortune as if she had forgotten her duty toward us. Foolish men act like those who, in one house, wish to receive the furniture of another, or who, on one sea, would demand another: they wish not to be happy, but to be happy otherwise. Yet in whatever situation a man finds himself, the same reason can always make it bearable. The pilot makes something of a storm, not of fair winds; the physician makes something of sickness, not of health; and the statesman, of ill fortune, not of good. Think of those who handle a bad affair well, like champions who, if they cannot withstand a blow in combat, decline it without fear. The master of a ship, when the storm assails him, throws his cargo into the sea; the tranquil man does the same with what is superfluous, then with what is necessary, then with what is useful; for the more possessions vanish in our misfortunes, the more our life remains sound and solid.

Finally, Sosius, remember this maxim: it is not the abundance of goods that makes a man happy, but the sovereign good of the soul, which is reason. The tranquil man makes use of every season as sailors do of a shifting wind: when the wind carries them where they wish, they hoist their sails; when it drives them back, they lower them and wait. Thus the man who governs his life with reason needs neither another fortune nor another world; and therefore, if you wish to lead a public life without being carried away by sorrows and vain opinions, begin by ordering your private life: lower the sails of your desires, cast anchor on reason, and you will see that tranquillity is no obstacle to action, but its firmest assurance.