…1 with great accord commend to us the vices. Although we attempt nothing else that would be beneficial, nevertheless retirement in itself will do us good; we shall be better by ourselves. And what of the opportunity to retire to the society of the best men,2 and to select some model by which we may direct our own lives? But we can do this only in leisure. Only then is it possible for us to maintain what we have once resolved upon, when there is no one who can interfere and with the help of the crowd turn aside our decision while it is still weak; only then is it possible for life, in which we are now distracted by the most diverse aims, to progress along an even and single course. For among all the rest of our ills this is the worst — the habit of changing our very vices. So we do not have even the good fortune to persist in an evil that we already know. We find pleasure first in one and then in another, and the trouble is that our choices are not only wrong, but also fickle. We are tossed about and clutch at one thing after another; what we have sought we abandon, and what we have abandoned we seek again, and oscillate ever between desire and repentance. For we depend wholly on the judgments of others, and that which the many seek and praise seems to us the best — not that which deserves to be sought and praised — and we do not consider whether the way in itself is good or bad, but the number of footprints it has; and none of these are of men who are coming back!3
You will say to me: “What are you doing, Seneca? Are you deserting your party? Surely you Stoics say: ‘We shall engage in affairs to the very end of life, we shall never cease to work for the common good, to help each and all, to give aid even to our enemies when our hand is feeble with age. We are those who grant no exemption from service by reason of years, and, as that most gifted poet puts it,
Upon our hoary heads we thrust the helm.4
We are those who hold so strongly that there should be no leisure before death that, if circumstance permits, we take no leisure for death itself.’ Why in the very headquarters of Zeno do you preach the doctrines of Epicurus? Why, if you are tired of your party, do you not with all speed desert it rather than betray it?” For the present I shall have only this reply to make to you: “What more do you expect of me than that I should imitate my leaders? And what then? I shall not go whither they dispatch me, but whither they lead me.”5