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28For if you will take my advice, you will be quite satisfied to pick out a little estate in some retired spot on the coast and there carry on at the same time farming and some historical writing, like Xenophon and like Thucydides. 2This form of learning is most enduring and best adapted to every man and to every state; and exile brings with it a kind of leisure that is more fruitful. If, then, you wish to become really immortal, like those historians, emulate them. 3You have the necessary means in sufficiency and you lack no distinction. For if there is any virtue in such honours, you have been consul; nothing more belongs to those who have held office a second, a third, or a fourth time, except an array of idle letters which benefit no man, living or dead. 4Hence you would not choose to be Corvinus, or Marius, the man seven times consul, rather than Cicero. Nor, again, are you anxious for any position of command, seeing that you withdrew from the one bestowed upon you, because you scorned the gains to be had from it, scorned a brief authority that was subject to the scrutiny of all who chose to practise blackmail. 5These matters I have mentioned, not because any one of them is requisite for happiness, but because, since it was necessary, you have occupied yourself sufficiently with public affairs to learn therefrom the difference in lives and to choose the one course and reject the other, to pursue the one and avoid the other. Our life is but short, and you ought not to live all yours for others, but by this time to grant a little to yourself. 6Consider how much better quiet is than turmoil, and tranquillity than tumults, freedom than slavery, and safety than dangers, that you may feel a desire to live as I am urging you to do. In this way you will be happy, and your name shall be great because of it—and that for evermore, whether you are living or dead.
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