Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
You ask why, at certain periods, a degenerate style of speaking has appeared, and how it happens that talented men drift toward particular faults, so that at one time a puffed-up, sprawling manner was in fashion, at another a broken, sing-song delivery; why at one moment people admired bold conceits that outran belief, and at another clipped, insinuating epigrams in which more had to be guessed than heard; why there was an age that abused the license of metaphor without a blush. The answer is the common saying, long since a proverb among the Greeks: as men live, so they speak. Just as each individual's conduct resembles his manner of speaking, so a whole period's style sometimes copies the public morals, whenever the discipline of the state has broken down and given itself over to soft living. Wantonness in speech is proof of public excess, provided it is not confined to one or two men but has won general acceptance and approval. Talent cannot wear one complexion and the soul another. If the soul is healthy, well ordered, serious, self-controlled, the talent too is dry and sober; when the soul is tainted, the talent catches the infection. Haven't you noticed that when the spirit goes slack, the limbs drag and the feet move sluggishly? That when it turns effeminate, the softness shows in the very walk? That when it is keen and fierce, the step quickens? That when it raves — or is angry, which is close kin to raving — the body's movement is agitated, carried along rather than walking? How much more must this happen to a man's talent, which is wholly blended with his soul, is shaped by it, obeys it, takes its law from it?
How Maecenas lived is too well known to need retelling now — how he strolled about, how pampered he was, how eager to be noticed, how unwilling to let his vices go unseen. Well then: isn't his prose as ungirdled as the man himself? Aren't his words as conspicuous as his dress, his retinue, his house, his wife? He had the makings of a great talent, if he had driven it down a straighter road, if he had not dodged being understood, if he had not run to seed even in his prose. What you will find there is the eloquence of a drunk — tangled, wandering, taking every liberty. [Maecenas, On His Own Way of Life.] What could be uglier than 'a stream and woods with shaggy-haired banks'? See how 'they plough the channel with skiffs and, churning the shallows, leave the gardens behind.' And what of a man who 'crimps at a woman's pout and bills at her with his lips and starts in sighing, like the tyrants of the grove going faint with drooping neck'? 'A gang past cure, they ferret at banquets and put houses to the test with the flagon and by hope exact death.' 'A genius scarcely witness to his own feast-day.' 'Threads of slender wax-taper and the crackling meal.' 'Mother or wife dress the hearth.' Reading this, won't it strike you at once that this is the man who went about the city always with his tunic loose (even when he was standing in for the absent Caesar, the password was asked of an ungirdled commander)? That this is the man who appeared on the tribunal, on the rostra, in every public assembly with his head wrapped in a cloak, his ears poking out on both sides, exactly like the rich man's runaway slaves in a mime? The man who, at the very height of the civil wars, with the city anxious and under arms, had for escort in public two eunuchs — both more man than he was? The man who married a wife a thousand times over, though he had only the one? Those words, so shamelessly strung, so carelessly flung down, so set against everyone's usage, show that his character too was just as strange, warped, and singular. He is given great credit for mildness: he spared the sword, he kept clear of blood, and showed his power in nothing except his loose living. But he spoiled that very claim with these freakish daintinesses of style; it becomes plain he was soft, not gentle. Those winding constructions, those words set crosswise, those startling ideas — often grand, admittedly, but gone limp by the time they emerge — will make it obvious to anyone: too much good fortune had turned his head. The fault is sometimes a man's, sometimes an age's. When prosperity has spilled self-indulgence far and wide, dress and grooming get more elaborate first; then attention shifts to furniture; then money pours into the houses themselves — that they sprawl over the breadth of a countryside, that the walls gleam with marbles shipped across the seas, that the ceilings are patterned in gold, that the sheen of the floors answers the paneling overhead; then luxury moves to the dinner table, where novelty and the reshuffling of the usual order become the recipe for applause — the dishes that normally close a dinner are served first, and what used to be given to guests arriving is given to guests leaving. Once the mind has learned to sneer at whatever is customary, and the usual counts as shabby, it hunts for novelty in speech too: now it drags back and parades ancient, obsolete words; now it coins new ones or bends words out of shape; now — the habit that has lately spread — bold and constant metaphor passes for elegance. There are those who cut their thoughts short and hope the charm lies just there — in leaving the sentence hanging so that the hearer suspects more behind it; there are those who hold their sentences back and stretch them out; and there are those who do not merely drift into the fault (anyone attempting something grand must risk that) but who love the fault itself.
So wherever you see a corrupt style finding favor, you may be certain that morals too have strayed from the straight path. As extravagance in banquets and in dress is a symptom of a sick community, so license in style, if only it is widespread, shows that the minds from which the words come have also collapsed. Nor should you be surprised that corrupt work is welcomed not just by the seedier ring of listeners but by this better-dressed crowd as well; the two differ in their togas, not in their judgment. What may surprise you more is that praise goes not merely to flawed work but to the flaws themselves. The first has always happened: no talent has ever pleased without some indulgence. Name me any man of great reputation you like: I will tell you what his own age forgave him, what it knowingly overlooked in him. I will give you many whose faults did them no harm, and some whose faults did them good. I will give you men of the highest fame, set up as objects of admiration, whom to correct is to destroy; their faults are so interwoven with their virtues that removing the one would drag out the other.
Add to this that style has no fixed rule: the community's usage, which never stands in one place for long, keeps turning it over. Many fetch their words from another century and talk Twelve Tables; for them Gracchus and Crassus and Curio are too polished and too recent — they retreat as far as Appius and Coruncanius. Some men take the opposite path: wanting nothing that isn't worn and everyday, they sink into shabbiness. Both are corruption, each in its own way — just as much, I swear, as refusing to use anything but glittering, sonorous, poetic words and avoiding the necessary ones in common use. I will say the one sins as much as the other: one grooms himself more than is right, the other neglects himself more than is right; the first plucks even his legs, the second not even his armpits.
Let us pass to sentence-structure. How many kinds of error shall I show you here? Some favor a jolting, rough arrangement; they deliberately break up anything that has flowed out too smoothly; they want no join without a jolt; they consider it manly and strong when the unevenness bangs the ear. With others it is not composition at all but crooning, so caressingly does it glide along, so softly. And what shall I say of the arrangement in which words are postponed and, long awaited, barely arrive at the close? Or of the manner slow at the finish, like Cicero's, sloping gently down, holding you softly back, always true to its own habit and its own rhythm?
The fault in epigrams as a class is <also this>: if they are puny and childish, or shameless and daring more than decency allows; if they are flowery and over-sweet; if they end in nothing and, producing no effect, do no more than make a sound.
These faults are introduced by some one man under whose sway eloquence stands at the time; the rest copy him and pass them from one to another. So in Sallust's heyday clipped statements, words dropping before you expected them, and obscure brevity counted as elegance. Lucius Arruntius, a man of rare frugality, who wrote a history of the Punic war, was a Sallustian, straining after that manner. There is a phrase in Sallust, 'he made an army with silver,' meaning he raised one with money. Arruntius fell in love with this; he planted it on every page. In one place he says 'they made a rout for our men,' in another 'Hiero, king of the Syracusans, made war,' and in another 'the news made the people of Panhormus surrender to the Romans.' I only wanted to give you a taste: the whole book is woven of such stuff. What was rare in Sallust is in Arruntius constant and almost unbroken — and no wonder: Sallust stumbled on these things; Arruntius went hunting for them. You see what follows when a man's fault becomes another man's model. Sallust wrote 'while the waters wintered.' Arruntius, in the first book of his Punic war, says 'the storm suddenly wintered'; elsewhere, wanting to say the year had been cold, he says 'the whole year wintered'; and elsewhere, 'from there he sent sixty light transports, carrying nothing beyond soldiers and essential crew, while the north wind wintered.' He never stops wedging that word in everywhere. Somewhere Sallust says 'while amid civil arms he sought the fames of the just and good.' Arruntius could not restrain himself from putting, right in his first book, that the 'fames' about Regulus were immense. Faults like these, then, stamped on a man by imitation, are not symptoms of decadence or of a corrupted mind; to let you gauge a man's character, they must be his own, born of him: an angry man's speech is angry, an excitable man's is over-driven, a pampered man's is tender and slack. What you see is the method of those men who pluck their beards, or pluck them in patches, who shave the lip close and trim tight while keeping the rest long and untended, who put on cloaks of outrageous color and a see-through toga, who refuse to do anything that lets people's eyes pass over it: they provoke attention and turn it on themselves; they are willing even to be censured, so long as they are stared at. Such is the style of Maecenas and of all the others who go wrong not by accident but knowingly and willingly. This grows out of a great sickness of the soul. Just as in drinking the tongue does not stumble until the mind has given way under the load and buckled or betrayed itself, so this drunkenness of style — for what else is it? — troubles no one unless the soul is tottering. So it is the soul that must be treated: from it come our thoughts, from it our words, from it our bearing, our expression, our walk. When the soul is sound and strong, the style too is sturdy, forceful, manly; if the soul goes down, the rest follows it into the wreckage.
While the king is safe, one mind is in them all:
Our king is the soul. While it is safe, the rest stay at their posts, obey, comply; when it wavers a little, they all hesitate together. And once it has surrendered to pleasure, its skills and its actions wither too, and every effort comes from something limp and sagging.
Since I have used this comparison, I will keep it going. Our soul is now a king, now a tyrant: a king when it keeps its eyes on what is honorable, cares for the health of the body entrusted to it, and gives it no base or squalid orders; but when it is uncontrolled, greedy, pampered, it crosses over into that hateful and dreadful name and becomes a tyrant. Then unbridled passions seize it and press hard; at first it enjoys this, the way a mob does, stuffed to no purpose with a handout that will hurt it, pawing what it cannot swallow. But as the disease eats deeper and deeper into its strength, and the indulgences sink into marrow and sinew, it takes pleasure in the sight of those for whom its own excessive greed has left it useless; in place of its own pleasures it has the spectacle of other people's, purveyor and witness of appetites whose use it destroyed by overfeeding them. It finds it less sweet to have delights in abundance than bitter that it cannot push the whole spread through its own gullet and belly, that it cannot roll about with the whole crowd of catamites and women; it grieves that a great part of its happiness sits idle, shut out by the narrowness of a body. For is this not madness, my Lucilius — that not one of us reflects that he is mortal, not one that he is weak? Or rather, that not one of us reflects that he is a single man? Look at our kitchens, the cooks scurrying among so many fires: do you suppose it is for a single belly that food is prepared with all that uproar? Look at our wine-cellars, our storehouses filled with the vintages of many generations: do you suppose it is for a single belly that the wines of so many consulships and regions are locked away? Look at how many places the earth is turned, how many thousands of tenant farmers plough and dig: do you suppose it is for a single belly that crops are sown in Sicily and in Africa alike? We shall be sane, and our desires modest, if each man counts himself as one, and takes the measure of his body at the same time, and learns how little it can hold, and for how short a time. Yet nothing will do you so much good toward moderation in everything as frequent reflection on the shortness of life, and on its uncertainty: whatever you do, keep death in view. Farewell.