Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] You are wrong, my dear Lucilius, if you think that extravagance and the neglect of good conduct — and the other things each generation charges against its own times — are the fault of our age: these are the faults of men, not of times. No age has been free of blame; and if you set out to weigh the license of any given age, it's embarrassing to say, but wrongdoing was never more open than in the presence of Cato. [2] Could anyone believe that money changed hands in that trial in which Publius Clodius was the defendant, charged with the adultery he had committed with Caesar's wife in a secluded place, violating the sacred rites of that sacrifice which is called the one performed 'for the people' — a rite from which every man is excluded from the enclosed area, so strictly that even paintings of male creatures are covered over? And yet the jurors were given money, and — more shameful still than that bargain — the seductions of married women and of well-born young men were exacted on top of it, in place of a fee. [3] The wrongdoing in the acquittal was worse than the crime charged: the man accused of adultery went and divided up adulteries of his own, and had no confidence in his safety until he had made the jurors just like himself. This is what happened in that trial in which, if nothing else, Cato had given testimony. I will set down Cicero's own words, since the facts exceed belief. [From Book One of Cicero's Letters to Atticus] [4] 'He summoned them to him, made promises, went surety, handed over money. And now — good gods, what a ruined business! — the nights of certain women, and introductions to well-born young men, served some of the jurors as a bonus on top of their fee.' [5] There's no point complaining about the price — the extras were the greater part of it. 'Do you want that stern man's wife? I'll give her to you. Do you want that rich man's? I'll deliver you his bed. If you don't vote for acquittal, you lose out. That beautiful woman you want will come to you. I promise you her night, and I won't put it off; before the case is adjourned for reconsideration, my promise will be made good.' It's a worse thing to hand out adulteries than to commit them — this, in fact, is announcing them publicly to respectable wives. [6] These jurors of Clodius's had asked the senate for a guard, something needed only by men who meant to convict; and they got it. So Catulus made a nice remark to them once the defendant was acquitted: 'Why were you asking us for a guard? Was it so your money wouldn't be snatched from you?' Yet amid this mockery the adulterer got off scot-free — an adulterer before the trial, a pimp during it, who escaped conviction in a worse way than he deserved it. [7] Do you think anything could have been more corrupt than the morals of that age, in which lust could be checked neither by religious rites nor by a judge, in which, in that very inquiry which the senate's decree had set up as an extraordinary proceeding, more was committed than was being investigated? The question under investigation was whether anyone, after committing adultery, could be safe: it turned out that no one could be safe without committing it.
[8] This affair was set in motion between Pompey and Caesar, between Cicero and Cato — that very Cato in whose presence, it's said, the people did not dare to demand the traditional stripping of the prostitutes at the Floralia — if you can believe that people watched more strictly than they judged in those days. Such things will happen again, and have happened before, and the license of cities is sometimes reined in by discipline and fear, but it never settles down on its own. [9] So there's no reason for you to believe that we have given the most license to lust and the least respect to law; this younger generation is by far more restrained than that one, when the defendant would deny adultery before the jurors while the jurors were confessing it in front of the defendant, when the crime itself was committed for the sake of deciding the case, when Clodius, popular through the very vices that made him guilty, ran his procuring business in the middle of delivering his defense. Can anyone believe it? A man who was being condemned for one act of adultery was acquitted by committing many.
[10] Every age will produce its Clodiuses; not every age will produce its Catos. We slide easily toward the worse, because there is never a shortage of a leader or a companion for it, and the thing proceeds even without a leader or a companion, on its own momentum. The slope toward vice is not merely gentle but headlong, and — what makes most people incorrigible — the failures of every other art embarrass their practitioners and sting them when they go wrong, but the failures of living give pleasure. [11] A helmsman takes no joy in a shipwreck, a doctor takes no joy in a patient carried out dead, an orator takes no joy if his client is convicted through his own fault as advocate; but on the contrary, everyone takes delight in his own wrongdoing: one man is glad of the adultery he was drawn into by the very difficulty of it; another is glad of the swindle and the theft, and neither feels guilt until his luck in the guilt turns bad. This comes from a corrupt habit. [12] Otherwise — and I say this so you'll know that even in minds dragged down to the worst there still lurks some sense of the good, that wrong is not unrecognized but merely disregarded — everyone conceals his own misdeeds, and even when they've turned out well, people enjoy the profit from them while hiding the acts themselves. But a good conscience wants to come forward and be seen: it is wickedness alone that is afraid of the dark. [13] So I think Epicurus put it elegantly: 'a guilty man may manage to escape notice, but he can have no assurance of escaping notice' — or if you think the thought can be better put this way: 'concealment does no good for wrongdoers, because even if their concealment succeeds, they have no confidence in it.' That's how it is: crimes can be safe, but they cannot be free of anxiety. [14] I don't think this conflicts with our school, if you take it this way. Why? Because the first and greatest punishment of wrongdoers is the very fact of having done wrong, and no crime — even if fortune decks it out with her gifts, even if she protects and defends it — goes unpunished, since the punishment for the crime lies within the crime itself. But nonetheless these secondary punishments also press upon it and follow it: perpetual fear and dread, and no confidence in one's own safety. So why should I free wickedness from this punishment? Why should I not leave it forever hanging in suspense? [15] Let us part ways with Epicurus where he says that nothing is just by nature and that crimes are to be avoided because fear cannot be avoided; but let us agree with him here: that evil deeds are scourged by conscience, and that the greatest part of their torment is this, that unrelenting anxiety besets and lashes them, that they cannot trust the guarantors of their own safety. For this, Epicurus, is proof in itself that we recoil from crime by nature — the fact that fear dogs everyone, even amid safety. [16] Fortune frees many from punishment, but no one from fear. Why is that, if not because the aversion to that thing which nature has condemned is fixed deep within us? That's why concealment never gives confidence even to those who are concealed — because conscience convicts them and reveals them to themselves. It is the special mark of the guilty to tremble. It would have gone badly for us, given that many crimes escape the law and its avenger and the punishments written down, if nature's own grave penalties did not settle accounts on the spot, and fear did not take the place of suffering. Farewell.