Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
Letter 12: On old age
Letter 12 finds old age in a crumbling country house and in the old trees Seneca planted himself, and refuses to complain of it.
Each day is to be arranged as if it closed the series, and the letter ends with Epicurus on the many short roads out of a life lived under constraint.
From the letter
Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.
Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.
Hence, every day ought to be regulated as if it closed the series, as if it rounded out and completed our existence.
That man is happiest, and is secure in his own possession of himself, who can await the morrow without apprehension.
And I shall continue to heap quotations from Epicurus upon you, so that all persons who swear by the words of another, and put a value upon the speaker and not upon the thing spoken, may understand that the best ideas are common property.
Coverage
Our editions hold 30 letters of 124 in Richard Mott Gummere’s translation (1917–1925); 29 of them have a page here, those that Joseph Baillard’s French translation (1861) also contains.
Seneca and Epictetus are in Stoic+ — 1 passage of this letter, with its reference; Marcus Aurelius is free in the app.