Letters From a Stoic Read Online Free PDF Page B

adjust and shape his own personality in the light of recollections, even, of that other. A person able to revere another thus will soon deserve to be revered himself. So choose yourself a Cato – or, if Cato seems too severe for you, a Laelius, a man whose character is not quite so strict. Choose someone whose way of life as well as words, and whose very face as mirroring the character that lies behind it, have won your approval. Be always pointing him out to yourself either as your guardian or as your model. There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against you won’t make the crooked straight.
LETTER XII
    W HEREVER I turn I see fresh evidence of my old age. I visited my place just out of Rome recently and was grumbling about the expense of maintaining the building, which was in a dilapidated state. My manager told me the trouble wasn’t due to any neglect on his part: he was doing his utmost but the house was old. That house had taken shape under my own hands; what’s to become of me if stones of my own age are crumbling like that? Losing my temper I seized at the first excuse that presented itself for venting my irritation on him. ‘It’s quite clear,’ I said, ‘that these plane trees are being neglected. There’s no foliage on them. Look at those knotty, dried-up branches and those wretched, flaking trunks. That wouldn’t happen if someone dug round them and watered them.’ He swore by my guardian angel he was doing his utmost: in everything his care was unremitting but the poor things were just old. Between you and me, now, I had planted them myself and seen the first leaf appearing on them myself. Then, turning towards the front door, I said: ‘Who’s that? Who’s that decrepit old person? The door’s the proper place for him all right – he looks as if he’s on the way out. Where did you get him from? What was the attraction in taking over someone else’s dead for burial?’ Whereupon the man said, ‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m Felicio. You used to bring me toy figures. * I’m the son of the manager Philositus, your pet playmate.’ ‘The man’s absolutely crazy,’ I said. ‘Become a little child again, has he, actually calls himself my playmate? Well, the way he’s losing his teeth at this very moment, it’s perfectly possible.’
    So I owe it to this place of mine near town that my oldage was made clear to me at every turn. Well, we should cherish old age and enjoy it. It is full of pleasure if you know how to use it. Fruit tastes most delicious just when its season is ending. The charms of youth are at their greatest at the time of its passing. It is the final glass which pleases the inveterate drinker, the one that sets the crowning touch on his intoxication and sends him off into oblivion. Every pleasure defers till its last its greatest delights. The time of life which offers the greatest delight is the age that sees the downward movement – not the steep decline – already begun; and in my opinion even the age that stands on the brink has pleasures of its own – or else the very fact of not experiencing the want of any pleasures takes their place. How nice it is to have outworn one’s desires and left them behind!
    ‘It’s not very pleasant, though,’ you may say, ‘to have death right before one’s eyes.’ To this I would say, firstly, that death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one – the order in which we each receive our summons is not determined by our precedence in the register – and, secondly, that no one is so very old that it would be quite unnatural for him to hope for one more day.… *
    Every day, therefore, should be regulated as if it were the one that brings up the rear, the one that rounds out and completes our lives. Pacuvius, the man who acquired a right to Syria by prescription, 53 was in the habit of conducting a