To Paulinus. (360)
Your letter was a feast, as your letters always are. Among the many pleasures of our friendship, not the least is that when you write, you write as though time and distance did not exist -- as though we were still walking together in the portico, exchanging ideas with the freedom that only old friends enjoy.
You raise the question of whether philosophy and public life can truly be reconciled. I have thought about this more than you might suppose, given that I chose the lecture hall over the courtroom. But the choice was not as simple as it appears. The lecture hall is itself a kind of public life, if one teaches the men who will govern. And governing, if done well, requires the very qualities that philosophy cultivates: steadiness, justice, the ability to see past the immediate to the permanent.
The problem, as always, is that the men who possess these qualities are rarely the ones who obtain power, and those who obtain power rarely seek to acquire them. But we must go on teaching as though it mattered, because it does -- even if the evidence is sometimes hard to see.
Your letter was a feast, as your letters always are. Among the many pleasures of our friendship, not the least is that when you write, you write as though time and distance did not exist -- as though we were still walking together in the portico, exchanging ideas with the freedom that only old friends enjoy.
You raise the question of whether philosophy and public life can truly be reconciled. I have thought about this more than you might suppose, given that I chose the lecture hall over the courtroom. But the choice was not as simple as it appears. The lecture hall is itself a kind of public life, if one teaches the men who will govern. And governing, if done well, requires the very qualities that philosophy cultivates: steadiness, justice, the ability to see past the immediate to the permanent.
The problem, as always, is that the men who possess these qualities are rarely the ones who obtain power, and those who obtain power rarely seek to acquire them. But we must go on teaching as though it mattered, because it does -- even if the evidence is sometimes hard to see.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.