Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
The thing you're asking about belongs to the class of things it's relevant to know only for the sake of knowing. Still, since it is relevant, you're in a hurry and won't wait for the books I'm arranging right now, which cover the whole moral branch of philosophy. I'll deal with it at once; but first let me write about how this passion for learning that I see you burning with should be managed, so that it doesn't get in its own way. Things shouldn't be plucked at random, nor should the whole field be greedily attacked at once: you reach the whole through the parts. The load ought to be fitted to your strength, and you shouldn't take on more than you can handle. Draw off not as much as you want but as much as you can hold. Only keep a good attitude, and your capacity will match your wish: the more a mind receives, the wider it stretches.
I remember Attalus giving us this advice in the days when we laid siege to his lecture room, first to arrive and last to leave, and drew him into discussions even while he was out walking — for he was not merely available to his students but came out to meet them. 'Teacher and student,' he said, 'should have the same goal: the one should want to do good, the other to get better.' Whoever goes to a philosopher should carry off some benefit every day: he should come home either sounder or more curable. And he will: such is the power of philosophy that it helps not only the serious student but even the casual visitor. A man who steps into the sun will get a tan even if that isn't why he came; people who linger a little while in a perfume shop walk out wearing the shop's fragrance; and those who have spent time with a philosopher must inevitably take away something that would do good even to people paying no attention. Note my word: paying no attention — not fighting back.
'What then? Don't we know people who sat with a philosopher for years and never picked up even a tint?' Of course I know them — very persistent, very regular; I call them not the philosophers' students but their lodgers. Some come to listen, not to learn, the way we're drawn to the theater for pleasure, to delight our ears with speech or song or story. You'll see that a large part of the audience treats the philosopher's classroom as a lounge for their idle hours. They're not there to lay down any vices or to receive some rule of life to measure their conduct against, but to enjoy a treat for the ears. Some even come with notebooks — not to take down the substance, but the phrases, which they'll repeat with as little profit to others as they heard them with profit to themselves. Some are stirred up by grand utterances and pass into the emotion of the speakers, faces and hearts eager, worked up exactly like Phrygian half-men going frantic on command at the sound of the flute. What seizes and spurs them is the beauty of the subject matter, not the noise of empty words. If something has been said sharply against death, or defiantly against fortune, they itch to do at once what they hear. They're genuinely affected, and they are what they're told to be — if that impression stayed stamped on the mind, if the crowd, that great discourager of what's honorable, didn't immediately intercept the fine impulse. Few have managed to carry home the frame of mind they conceived there. It's easy to rouse a listener to a desire for what's right, because nature has given everyone the foundations and the seed of the virtues. We are all born for all of them; when someone comes to stir us, those good qualities of the soul wake up, as if from sleep. Don't you see how the theaters ring out whenever lines are spoken that we recognize as a community, and whose truth we all attest with one voice?
Poverty lacks much; greed lacks everything. The greedy man is good to no one — and worst to himself.
At verses like these even the most sordid man in the house applauds and delights to hear his own vices abused. How much more do you think this happens when such things are said by a philosopher, when verses are woven into wholesome teachings, to sink those same lessons more effectively into untrained minds? For as Cleanthes used to say, 'Just as our breath gives a clearer note when a trumpet has drawn it through the narrows of a long tube and poured it out at last through a widening mouth, so the tight discipline of verse makes our thoughts ring clearer.' The same points are heard more carelessly and strike less hard as long as they're delivered in loose prose; when rhythm comes in and fixed meter binds a fine thought tight, the very same idea is hurled as if by a stronger arm. A great deal gets said about despising money, and long speeches drive home the lesson that people should locate wealth in the mind, not in the estate — that the rich man is the one who has fitted himself to his poverty and made himself wealthy on little. But minds are struck harder when lines like these are spoken:
The mortal who wants least is the one who needs least. Whoever can want just what's enough has what he wants.
When we hear things like this, we're driven to confess the truth: even those whom no amount ever satisfies marvel, shout approval, declare war on money. When you see them in that state of feeling, press on — push it, load it on, and drop the ambiguities and syllogisms and quibbles and the rest of the games of pointless cleverness. Speak against greed, speak against luxury; and when you see you've made progress and touched your hearers' souls, bear down harder still. It's beyond belief how much good a speech like that does when it's bent on healing and turned entirely to the benefit of the audience. Young minds are most easily won to the love of what's honorable and right; on those still teachable and only lightly corrupted, truth lays her hand — if she finds a fit advocate. I know that when I heard Attalus arguing at full stretch against vice, against error, against everything wrong in how we live, I often pitied the human race and believed him to stand high above the human summit. He himself used to say he was a king; but to me he seemed something more than a king — a man licensed to sit in judgment on the ones who reign. And when he began to recommend poverty, and to show that whatever exceeds our needs is a useless weight, heavy on the one who carries it, I often wanted to walk out of that classroom a poor man. When he began to expose our pleasures, to praise a chaste body, a sober table, a mind kept clean not only of illicit pleasures but of superfluous ones, I wanted to set limits on my gullet and my belly. Some of it has stayed with me, Lucilius. I had come at it all with a huge rush of enthusiasm; then, drawn back into the life of the city, I kept only a little of the good start. From that time comes my lifelong renunciation of oysters and mushrooms — for they aren't food, they're seasonings for the sated, forcing men to eat past fullness (which is exactly what gluttons love, stuffing themselves beyond capacity): easy down, easy back up. From that time, a lifetime of doing without perfume, since the best smell for the body is none. From that time, a stomach that goes without wine. From that time, a lifelong avoidance of the hot bath: to stew the body and drain it with sweating seemed to me at once useless and self-indulgent. Other renunciations I abandoned have come back — but in such a way that where I stopped abstaining, I keep a limit that borders on abstinence and is perhaps harder, since some things are more easily cut out of the mind than kept in moderation.
Since I've started explaining how much greater my drive toward philosophy was as a young man than my persistence in it is as an old one, I won't be ashamed to confess the love that Pythagoras planted in me. Sotion used to explain why Pythagoras had abstained from animal food, and why Sextius did afterwards. Their reasons were different, but each was magnificent.
Sextius believed that man has food enough without shedding blood, and that a habit of cruelty forms once tearing flesh apart has been made into a pleasure. He added that we should shrink the raw material of luxury, and he reasoned that a varied diet, foreign to our bodies, is the enemy of good health. Pythagoras, by contrast, said there is a kinship of everything with everything, and an interchange of souls passing from one form into another. On his view, no soul perishes — none even stops, except briefly, while it's poured into another body. We may leave aside through what cycles of time, and when, after wandering through many dwellings, it returns into a man; meanwhile he made men afraid of crime and of parricide, since they might unknowingly assault a parent's soul and violate it with knife or with teeth, wherever some kindred spirit was lodged in a body. When Sotion had laid this out and filled it in with his own arguments, he said: 'You don't believe that souls are dealt out into one body after another, and that what we call death is a migration? You don't believe that in these cattle, in wild beasts, in creatures under the water, there lingers a soul that once belonged to a man? You don't believe that nothing perishes in this world, but only changes its neighborhood — and that not only do the heavenly bodies turn in their fixed circuits, but living creatures too pass through their turns, and souls are driven round in a cycle? Great men have believed these things. So suspend your judgment, by all means, but keep the whole question open for yourself. If it's all true, abstaining from animals is innocence; if it's false, it's frugality. What loss does your credulity suffer here? I'm merely taking away the food of lions and vultures.' Spurred by all this, I began to abstain from animal food, and after a year the habit was not merely easy but pleasant. I believed my mind was more lively — and today I wouldn't swear to you whether it really was. You ask how I stopped? My young manhood fell in the early principate of Tiberius Caesar. Foreign rites were then being suppressed, and abstaining from certain animal foods was counted among the proofs of superstition. So at my father's request — he wasn't afraid of an accusation; he just hated philosophy — I went back to my old habits; and he had no trouble persuading me to dine better. Attalus used to praise a mattress that resists the body: I use that kind even in old age, one that doesn't show the print of a sleeper. I've told all this to prove to you what passionate first impulses raw beginners have toward everything best, if someone urges them on, if someone gives them a push. But things go wrong, partly through the fault of the teachers, who train us to argue rather than to live, and partly through the fault of the students, who come to their teachers intending to cultivate not their character but their wits. And so what used to be philosophy has been turned into philology. It matters a great deal what purpose you bring to a thing. The future grammarian poring over Virgil doesn't read that superb passage with this in mind —
'we must stay awake; if we don't hurry, we're left behind; the swift day drives us and is driven; we're swept along without knowing it; we arrange everything for the future and dawdle on the edge of a cliff' — no, he reads it to note that whenever Virgil speaks of how fast time moves, he uses this word, fugit — 'it flees':
For wretched mortals the best days of life are the first to flee; diseases crowd in after, and gloomy old age, and toil, and the harshness of pitiless death snatches us away.
The man whose eye is on philosophy takes these same lines where they ought to go. 'Virgil never says the days go,' he says, 'but that they flee — the most headlong kind of running there is — and that the best are snatched first. Then why do we hesitate to spur ourselves, so that we can match the speed of the fastest thing there is? The better part flies past; the worse takes its place.' Just as it's the clearest wine that flows first from the jar, while the heaviest and murkiest settles to the bottom, so in our lifetime the best comes first. Do we let it be drained off for others, and keep the dregs for ourselves? Let this line stick in the mind, and let it please us like an oracle's pronouncement:
For wretched mortals the best days of life are the first to flee.
Why the best? Because what's left is uncertain. Why the best? Because in youth we can learn; we can turn a pliant mind, still workable, toward better things; because this is the season fit for hard work, fit for driving the intellect through study and exercising the body through action. What remains is slower and feebler and closer to the end. So let's go at it with our whole soul, drop the sideshows we keep turning off to, and labor at one thing only — lest we understand the speed of racing time, which we cannot hold back, only after it has left us behind. Let each day, as it comes, please us as if it were the best, and be made our own. What flees has to be seized. The man who reads that poem with a grammarian's eyes thinks about none of this — not that each day is the best precisely because diseases crowd in, because old age presses close and already hangs over our heads while we're still dreaming of youth. No, he notes that Virgil always puts diseases and old age together — and not without reason, by Hercules: old age is an incurable disease. 'Besides,' he says, 'he gave old age a fixed epithet — he calls it gloomy:
diseases crowd in after, and gloomy old age. And elsewhere he says: and pale Diseases live there, and gloomy Old Age.'
No need to be surprised that each man gathers from the same material what suits his own pursuits: in the same meadow the ox looks for grass, the dog for a hare, the stork for a lizard.
When a philologist, a grammarian, and a devotee of philosophy each pick up Cicero's book On the Republic, each sends his attention off in a different direction. The philosopher marvels that so much could be said against justice. When the philologist comes to the same reading, he jots down this: that there were two Roman kings of whom one has no father and the other no mother — for Servius's mother is a matter of doubt, and Ancus has no father, being called merely the grandson of Numa. He notes further that the officer we call dictator, and read of under that name in the histories, was called by the ancients the 'master of the people.' That survives today in the augural books, and the proof is that the man he appoints is the 'master of horse.' Likewise he notes that Romulus perished during an eclipse of the sun; and that appeal to the people existed even under the kings — so it stands in the pontifical books, and so some authorities hold, Fenestella among them. When the grammarian unrolls the same books, the first thing he enters in his notebook is that Cicero says 'reapse,' that is, 're ipsa,' and likewise 'sepse,' that is, 'se ipse.' Then he passes to what the usage of the age has changed — as when Cicero says, 'since we have been called back from the very calx by his interruption': what we now call the 'creta,' the chalk line in the Circus, the ancients called the 'calx.' Next he collects lines of Ennius, first of all the ones written about Africanus:
a man to whom no one, citizen or enemy, will be able to render a return worthy of his deeds.
From this he says he understands that ops among the ancients meant not only 'help' but 'effort': for Ennius is saying that no one, citizen or enemy, could pay Scipio back the price of his effort. Next he counts himself lucky to have found the source of Virgil's line
over whom the vast gate of heaven thunders.
Ennius, he says, filched this from Homer, and Virgil from Ennius; for in Cicero, in this same On the Republic, there stands this epigram of Ennius:
if it is right for anyone to climb into the regions of the gods, for me alone heaven's great gate stands open.
But before I slide into playing philologist or grammarian myself while my business lies elsewhere, let me give this warning: the hearing and the reading of philosophers must be pulled toward the goal of the happy life. We're not to chase archaic or invented words, extravagant metaphors, figures of speech — but useful teachings and grand, spirited utterances that can soon be carried over into action. Let's learn them so thoroughly that what were words become deeds. In my judgment no one has deserved worse of the whole human race than those who have learned philosophy as a trade with something to sell, and who live otherwise than they teach one must live. They parade themselves around as specimens of a useless training, slaves to every vice they denounce.
A teacher of that kind can do me no more good than a helmsman seasick in a storm. When the wave is wrenching the rudder, you have to hold it; you have to wrestle with the sea itself and tear the sails away from the wind. What help to me is a ship's captain who is stunned and vomiting? And how much greater a storm do you think tosses a life than tosses any boat? What's needed is not talking but steering. Everything these men say, everything they toss out before their crowds of listeners, belongs to other people: Plato said it, Zeno said it, Chrysippus and Posidonius said it, and a huge column of names as many and as great. I'll show them how they can prove it's their own: let them do what they've said.
Since I've now said what I wanted to bring to you, I'll satisfy your desire another time and carry the whole of what you demanded over into a second letter, so that you don't come tired to a thorny subject that needs to be heard with ears pricked and alert. Farewell.