independent of me and he is not included in my testament; so that he has no reason to love me save his pleasure in the gift of a few acres I did not need and the sympathy of our minds. His friendship seems to me the more serious and tenacious because he is a convinced though not fanatical Epicurean—if a quality so opposed to Epicureanism can ever afflict any member of that enlightened sect.
No doubt you will exclaim against me, both for admitting to my familiarity a man who is a kind of cultivated vagabond, perhaps an escaped slave, and for allowing him to bring the morals of Epicurus into my house. Believe me, dear Rufinus, not even Cicero has been just to Epicurus; and the Stoics have maligned him bitterly. When I had read the works of Epicurus, Philodemus, and other exponents of the doctrine, comparing them with the poem of our own nobly inspired Lucretius, I was delighted with the purity and wisdom of their philosophy. It secures my assent the more readily because practice of its teaching actually creates the spiritual effect promised; because it does not seek to persuade by rewards or to terrify by punishments; because it appears to be in harmony with reason and nature. You know my fancy that philosophical sects are mere classifications of temperaments. In my opinion the various philosophies are not to be looked upon as mutually destructive enemies, but as convenient methods of living for many sorts of men; thus the sensual man becomes a Cyrenaic, the proud man a Stoic, the morose man a Cynic, the sceptic a disciple of Pyrrho. My nature is most suited by the philosophy of Epicurus, though I add to its gentleness and tolerance and temperance, to its "indolence of body and tranquillity of mind," something more robust in physical health, more ardently Platonic in the love of beauty, less supercilious in my relations with other men. Of course it is the morals of Epicurus I chiefly study; the physics, even of Aristotle, I read rather because I am curious than because I perceive any final truth in them, while I have a natural aversion from metaphysics which I find hard to overcome. The purpose of my inexpert philosophy is simply to pass through this too brief life as agreeably, honourably, and harmlessly as possible. I am not anxious that Rome should eke out its scanty intellectual fare with chatter about me; and I am not ambitious that a fraction of an indifferent posterity should know that such a man once existed. You will exclaim against this contempt for glory; it is sincere though perhaps ignoble and certainly un-Roman. Had I
