Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
You order me to give you an account of my days, one by one and in full. You must think well of me if you assume there is nothing in them I would hide. And in fact that is how we ought to live — as if we lived in plain view; that is how we ought to think — as if someone could look into the depths of our chest. Someone can. What good does it do to keep a thing secret from men? Nothing is closed to god. He stands within our minds; he steps into the middle of our thoughts — though 'steps in' is a poor way to put it, as if he ever stepped out. So I will do what you order: I will gladly write you what I am doing and in what sequence. I will start watching myself at once and — the most useful practice of all — I will review my day. What makes us as bad as we are is that no one looks back over his own life. Our thoughts run ahead to what we intend to do — and even that seldom — while what we have already done we never consider. Yet any plan for the future has to come out of the past.
Today is a solid block; no one has stolen any piece of it from me. The whole of it went to my bed and my reading. Only a scrap was given to bodily exercise, and on that score I thank old age: it costs me very little. The moment I move, I am tired — and being tired is where exercise ends even for the strongest. You ask about my training partners? One is enough for me: Pharius, a boy — a lovable one, as you know — but he will have to be replaced; I am already looking for someone younger. He claims, actually, that he and I are at the same critical stage, since we are both losing our teeth. But already I can barely keep up with him when he runs, and within a very few days I will not be able to at all: see what daily practice accomplishes. The gap between two people moving in opposite directions widens fast: he is climbing at the very moment I am going down, and you know well how much faster the second of those goes. No — I lied: at my age one is no longer going down; one is falling. Still, you want to know how today's race came out? We did what runners rarely do: we finished in a dead heat, and the prize went to the god. After this — fatigue rather than exercise — I went down into the cold plunge, which in my house means water not quite warm. I, the great cold-bather, who used to greet the canal on the first of January, who used to open the new year by leaping into the Aqua Virgo the way other men open it by reading or writing or making a speech — I moved camp first to the Tiber, then to this tub of mine, which the sun takes the chill off when I am at my bravest and everything is done in good faith. I am not far from the warm bath now. Then dry bread, a lunch without a table, the kind after which there is no need to wash one's hands. I sleep very little. You know my habit: I take the briefest of naps, unyoking the team for a moment, so to speak. It is enough for me to have stopped being awake. Sometimes I know I have slept; sometimes I only suspect it. Now the roar of the Games breaks in — some sudden shout from every throat at once strikes my ears, but it does not shake my train of thought loose; it does not even interrupt it. Noise I bear with great patience. Many voices blurred into one are to me like surf, or wind lashing a forest, or any other sound that carries no meaning.
What, then, have I turned my mind to? I will tell you. Left over from yesterday is this puzzle: what did those very shrewd men think they were doing when, for the greatest questions, they built proofs so flimsy and so tangled that even when true they look like lies? Zeno — that very great man, founder of this bravest and purest of schools — wants to scare us away from drunkenness. Hear, then, how he proves that a good man will not get drunk: 'No one entrusts a confidential conversation to a drunk man; but people do entrust one to a good man; therefore a good man will not be drunk.' Now watch how he is mocked by a parallel argument set against it — one out of many will do: 'No one entrusts a confidential conversation to a sleeping man; but people do entrust one to a good man; therefore a good man does not sleep.' Posidonius pleads our Zeno's case in the only way it can be pleaded — and even so, in my judgment, it cannot be won. He says 'drunk' is used in two senses: of a man heavy with wine and not in command of himself, and of a man who habitually gets drunk and is a slave to this vice. Zeno, he says, means the man who habitually gets drunk, not the man who is drunk right now; and to that man no one will entrust secrets that wine might make him blurt out. This is false. The first premise of the argument covers the man who is drunk, not the man who is going to be. You will grant that there is a great deal of difference between a drunk man and a drunkard: the man who is drunk may be drunk for the first time and not have the habit at all, and the drunkard is often free of drunkenness. So I take the word in the sense it usually carries — especially when it is set down by a man who professes precision and weighs his words. Add this: if Zeno understood it one way and wanted us to understand it another, he used an ambiguous word to open the door to a cheat, and that must never be done where truth is the object. But suppose he did mean it that way: the next step is still false — that a confidential conversation is not entrusted to a man who habitually gets drunk. Think how many soldiers, not always sober, have been given orders to keep quiet about by their general, their tribune, their centurion. Take the plot to kill Gaius Caesar — I mean the one who defeated Pompey and got the state into his grip: Tillius Cimber was trusted with it as fully as Gaius Cassius. Cassius drank water his whole life; Tillius Cimber was both heavy in his wine and a brawler. Cimber himself joked about it: 'Am I to carry any man,' he said, 'when I can't carry my wine?'
Let each of us now name for himself the men he knows can be trusted badly with wine and well with a secret. One example, though, occurs to me, and I will set it down before it gets lost — for life should be stocked with striking examples, and we need not always run back to the old ones. Lucius Piso, the warden of the city, was drunk from the moment he first got drunk. He spent the greater part of the night at dinner parties and slept until nearly the sixth hour: that was his morning. Yet the duty on which the safety of the city depended he discharged with the utmost care. The deified Augustus gave him confidential instructions when he set him over Thrace — which he subdued — and so did Tiberius when leaving for Campania, though he was leaving behind in the city much that was suspect and much that was hated. Later — I suppose because Piso's drunkenness had turned out so well for him — Tiberius made Cossus prefect of the city: a serious, steady man, but soaked and dripping with wine, to the point that he was once carried out of the senate, where he had come straight from a dinner party, sunk in a sleep no one could wake him from. Yet Tiberius wrote to this man, in his own hand, many things he judged unfit to entrust even to his own agents; and not one secret, private or public, ever slipped out of Cossus.
So let us clear away those set-piece declamations: 'The mind in the grip of drunkenness is not its own master. Just as fermenting must bursts the very casks, and the force of the heat throws whatever lies at the bottom up to the top, so when wine seethes, whatever lies hidden at the bottom is carried up and comes out into the open. Men loaded with drink cannot hold their food down when the wine overflows — and no more can they hold a secret; they spill their own and other people's alike.' That does commonly happen; but it just as commonly happens that we take counsel on essential business with men we know to be fond of their drink. So the claim offered as a defense — that nothing confidential is given to a man who habitually gets drunk — is false.
How much better to accuse drunkenness openly and lay out its vices — vices even a passable man would avoid, let alone the perfected and wise man, for whom it is enough to quench his thirst, and who, even when good cheer is urged on further than usual for someone else's sake, still halts short of drunkenness. Whether the wise man's mind can be thrown off balance by too much wine and do what drunks typically do — that we will examine later. Meanwhile, if your aim is to prove that drunkenness is beneath a good man, why work with syllogisms? Say how ugly it is to pour into yourself more than you have room for, ignorant of what your own stomach can take; how many acts a drunk commits that would make him blush once sober; that drunkenness is nothing other than madness taken up voluntarily. Stretch that drunken condition over several days: will you have any doubt it is insanity? As it is, it is not a lesser insanity — only a shorter one. Cite the example of Alexander of Macedon, who ran Clitus — the man he loved and trusted most — through at a banquet, and when he grasped what he had done, wanted to die; certainly he ought to have. Drunkenness ignites every vice and uncovers it; it strips away the shame that blocks bad impulses — for more men are held back from what is forbidden by embarrassment at doing wrong than by good will. When an overload of wine has taken possession of the mind, whatever evil lay hidden comes to the surface. Drunkenness does not create vices; it drags them out. Then the lecher does not even wait for a bedroom, but grants his appetites, without delay, everything they ask; then the pervert confesses his disease and advertises it; then the bully controls neither his tongue nor his hand. Arrogance swells in the insolent man, cruelty in the savage, spite in the envious; every vice is let off the leash and steps out. Add the loss of self-command: the slurred, half-formed words, the unfocused eyes, the wandering step, the spinning head, the very ceiling in motion as if some whirlwind were turning the whole house, the torments of the stomach as the wine boils up and bloats the guts themselves. Even then it is somehow bearable while the wine still has its force: what about when sleep sours it, and what was drunkenness has become indigestion? Think of the disasters public drunkenness has produced: it has handed the fiercest, most warlike nations over to their enemies; it has opened walls defended through years of stubborn war; it has driven the most defiant peoples, who refused every yoke, under a stranger's control; it has tamed with wine men unconquered in battle. Alexander, whom I mentioned just now — all those marches, all those battles, all those winters he came through, beating the difficulty of season and terrain, all those rivers falling out of unknown country, all those seas let him pass unhurt: it was intemperance in drinking, and that fatal cup of Hercules, that buried him. What glory is there in holding a lot of liquor? When the palm is yours, when the others, sprawled in sleep or vomiting, have declined your toasts, when you are the last man standing at the whole banquet, when you have beaten everyone by your magnificent prowess and no one has held as much wine as you — you are still beaten by the cask. What else destroyed Mark Antony — a great man, of noble talent — and drove him over into foreign habits and un-Roman vices, if not drunkenness, and a love of Cleopatra no weaker than his love of wine? This is what made him an enemy of the state; this is what left him unequal to his enemies; this is what made him cruel — when the heads of the leading men of Rome were brought to him at dinner, when amid the most elaborate banquets and royal luxury he inspected the faces and hands of the proscribed, when, heavy with wine, he thirsted all the same for blood. It was intolerable that he was getting drunk while he did these things; more intolerable by far that he did them in the drunkenness itself. Cruelty generally follows on hard drinking, for soundness of mind is damaged and rubbed raw. As long illnesses make men peevish and touchy and enraged at the smallest slight, so continual drunkenness brutalizes the mind: when a man is repeatedly out of his own possession, the habit of insanity hardens, and the vices conceived in wine stay strong without it.
Say, then, why the wise man ought not to get drunk. Show the ugliness of the thing, and its offensiveness, by facts, not words. Prove — nothing is easier — that the so-called pleasures, once they pass the limit, are punishments. For if your argument is that the wise man does not become intoxicated by a great deal of wine, and that even when soused he holds his course straight, then you may as well conclude that after drinking poison he will not die, after taking a sleeping draught he will not sleep, and after a dose of hellebore he will not throw off, up or down, whatever is lodged in his bowels. But if his feet stagger and his tongue will not obey, on what grounds would you judge him part sober, part drunk? Farewell.