Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
I write this to you lying in the very villa of Scipio Africanus, after paying my respects to his shade and to the altar which I suspect is that great man's tomb. His soul, I am convinced, returned to the heaven it came from — not because he led great armies (Cambyses had those too, a madman who used his madness with success) but because of his rare restraint and sense of duty, which I find more admirable in him when he left his country than when he defended it. Either Scipio had to be at Rome, or Rome had to be free. 'I want to take nothing away from the laws,' he said, 'nothing from our institutions; let the rights of all citizens be equal. My country, enjoy the good I did you — without me. I was the cause of your liberty; I will also be its proof: I am leaving, if I have grown larger than is good for you.' How could I not admire the greatness of spirit with which he withdrew into voluntary exile and took the weight off the state? Things had come to the point where either liberty must wrong Scipio or Scipio wrong liberty. Neither was permissible; so he gave the laws right of way and retired to Liternum, meaning to put his own exile on the state's account as surely as Hannibal's.
I have seen the villa: built of squared stone; a wall enclosing a wood; towers, too, run up on both sides as strongpoints for the house; a cistern set beneath the buildings and the greenery, big enough to supply an army; and a little bathroom, cramped and dark in the old fashion — our ancestors did not think water was hot unless it was in the dark. A great pleasure came over me as I compared Scipio's ways with ours. In this cranny that 'terror of Carthage,' the man Rome must thank that she was captured only once, used to wash a body worn out by farm work. For he kept himself in trim with labor, and — as the custom was in the old days — worked his own land himself. Under this roof, this shabby roof, he stood; this floor, this cheap floor, bore his weight. And now — who is there who could bear to bathe like that? A man thinks himself poor and squalid unless his walls gleam with great costly disks, unless Alexandrian marbles are set off with Numidian inlay, unless a laborious border, tinted as variously as a painting, runs around them on every side, unless the vault is hidden under glass, unless Thasian stone — once a rare sight in the odd temple — rims our pools, into which we lower bodies drained thin by heavy sweating, unless silver spigots deliver the water. And so far I am only talking about the common man's plumbing. What when I come to the baths of the freedmen? What a mass of statues, what a mass of columns supporting nothing, set up as ornament purely for the sake of the expense! What volumes of water crashing down over steps! We have arrived at such delicacy that we refuse to walk on anything but gems.
In this bath of Scipio's there are tiny slits rather than windows cut through the stone wall, to let in light without weakening the defenses. Nowadays people call a bath a moth-hole if it has not been angled to catch the sun all day through enormous windows, if men cannot bathe and tan at the same time, if they cannot look out from the tub over fields and sea. And so baths that drew crowds and gasps at their dedication are shrugged off as antiques as soon as luxury has thought up some novelty to bury itself under. In the old days baths were few, and not decorated at all — why decorate a thing that cost a quarter-as and was invented for use, not amusement? The water was not kept topped up; it did not run fresh continuously as if from a hot spring; and men did not think the transparency of the water they left their dirt in was worth a thought. But, good gods, what a pleasure to step into those dark baths with their ordinary plaster, knowing that the aedile Cato — or a Fabius Maximus, or some Cornelius — had tested the temperature for you with his own hand! For even the noblest aediles performed this duty too: entering the places where the people were received, and demanding cleanliness and a temperature useful and healthy — not this recent invention that resembles a house fire, so much so that a slave convicted of some crime ought by rights to be sentenced to be bathed alive. As far as I can see there is no longer any difference between a bath that is burning and one that is hot. What rustic crudity some people now convict Scipio of — that he did not let daylight into his hot-room through broad panes, that he did not stew himself in full sunshine and wait to digest his dinner in the tub! The unlucky fellow — living was a skill he never acquired! He bathed in unfiltered water, often cloudy water, nearly mud when the rain came down hard. Nor did it much matter to him that he bathed that way; he came to wash off sweat, not scented oil. What do you suppose some people will say to that? 'I don't envy Scipio: a man who bathed like that truly lived in exile.' Worse yet, if you must know — he did not bathe every day. Those who have handed down the old customs of the city tell us that men washed their arms and legs daily — the parts that work had dirtied — and washed all over only on market days. Someone will say here: 'Clearly they were filthy men.' And what do you think they smelled of? Of soldiering, of labor, of a man. Since spotless baths were invented, men are dirtier. When Horatius Flaccus wanted to describe a notorious character, a man conspicuous for overdone refinements, what does he say? 'Buccillus smells of lozenges.'
Show me a Buccillus today: it would be just the same as if he reeked of goat — he would stand where Gargonius did, the man that same Horace set opposite Buccillus. It is not enough now to put on perfume unless it is freshened two or three times a day so it will not fade on the skin. And what of the fact that men boast of this scent as if it were their own?
If all this strikes you as too gloomy, charge it to the villa — where I learned from Aegialus, that most careful head of a household (he now owns this land), that a tree can be transplanted however old it is. We old men need this lesson, since every one of us is planting an olive orchard for somebody else — I have seen that orchard, in its third and fourth year, drop its fruit as if disdaining it. You too will one day be sheltered by the tree that
comes slowly, to make shade for grandsons far ahead,
as our Vergil says — a poet who looked not for the truest thing to say but the most graceful, and who aimed to delight readers, not to instruct farmers. To pass over everything else, let me copy out the point I had to catch him on today:
in spring the beans are sown; then you too, Median clover, the crumbling
furrows receive, and the millet's yearly care comes round.
Whether these crops go in at one and the same time, and whether both are spring sowings, you may judge from this: it is June as I write to you, tipping already into July, and on one and the same day I have seen men harvesting beans and men sowing millet.
Back to the olive orchard, which I saw planted in two ways. In the first, Aegialus took the trunks of large trees, cut back the branches to a single foot each, and moved them root-ball and all, after pruning off the roots and leaving only the knob from which they had hung. He dipped this in dung, sank it in the pit, and then not only heaped earth over it but trod and packed it down. Nothing, he says, is more effective than this 'tamping,' as he calls it. Evidently it shuts out cold and wind; besides, the trunk shifts less, and so allows the emerging roots to come out and take hold of the soil — roots which are still waxy, holding on by sufferance, so that even a slight shaking tears them loose. He scrapes the ball of the tree, moreover, before he buries it, since new roots come out, he says, from all the wood that has been bared. The trunk should project from the soil no higher than three or four feet; that way it clothes itself in growth from the very base, and no great part of it will be dry and scorched, as in old olive orchards. The second way of planting was this: he set out, by the same method, strong branches whose bark was not yet hard, the kind young trees carry. These rise a little more slowly, but since they grow up as if from a seedling, there is nothing gnarled or dismal about them. I saw this too: a vine of many years' standing transplanted away from its tree. With a vine, even the hair-fine rootlets should be gathered up if possible, and then the vine bedded out generously, so it can strike root from the body itself. And I have seen vines planted not in February alone but even when March was already spent: they have taken hold, and are embracing elms not their own. All these trees of the thicker-stemmed kind, so to speak, should be helped along, he says, with cistern water — and if that works, we have the rain in our own power.
I do not plan to teach you any more, or I would be training you up as my rival, the way Aegialus trained me up as his. Farewell.