The letter turns moral exhortation into a chain of athletic and Homeric images.
Because I always carry you in memory, I almost seem to have you present, and I contrive to make the absent present. When I remember you, everything comes in with pleasure: the steadiness of your character, your zeal for letters, the moderation of your mind, and, greatest of all, the self-control that checks the unreasonable impulses of youth.
Sometimes I reckon with myself: if he appeared such a person while all of us were watching, what will he become when he is on his own? I think you will outdo what came before by competing with yourself, so that you may show us, though absent, that you honored virtue for its own sake and not merely from shame before observers.
If you now have a luxurious city around you, full of examples of wantonness, that will make you more ambitious in resisting pleasure. What athlete, proud of victory, comes to Olympia and treats the greatness of the contest as a chance for ease? Does he not immediately intensify his training and confirm earlier victories by a greater one?
So close your senses. Stand unmoved before every sound and sight. Show that abundance of evils does not know how to defeat self-control. Where longing for higher things exists, even if you name the Sirens and Circe who changes everything, Odysseus will conquer again: now displaying moly, which I take to be the reason Hermes gave; now binding himself with virtue and, I think, shouting many things as he sails past pleasures.
Because I always carry you in memory, I almost seem to have you present, and I contrive to make the absent present. When I remember you, everything comes in with pleasure: the steadiness of your character, your zeal for letters, the moderation of your mind, and, greatest of all, the self-control that checks the unreasonable impulses of youth.
Sometimes I reckon with myself: if he appeared such a person while all of us were watching, what will he become when he is on his own? I think you will outdo what came before by competing with yourself, so that you may show us, though absent, that you honored virtue for its own sake and not merely from shame before observers.
If you now have a luxurious city around you, full of examples of wantonness, that will make you more ambitious in resisting pleasure. What athlete, proud of victory, comes to Olympia and treats the greatness of the contest as a chance for ease? Does he not immediately intensify his training and confirm earlier victories by a greater one?
So close your senses. Stand unmoved before every sound and sight. Show that abundance of evils does not know how to defeat self-control. Where longing for higher things exists, even if you name the Sirens and Circe who changes everything, Odysseus will conquer again: now displaying moly, which I take to be the reason Hermes gave; now binding himself with virtue and, I think, shouting many things as he sails past pleasures.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.