Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
The daylight has already felt its loss; it has shrunk back noticeably, though there is still a generous stretch of it for anyone who rises, so to speak, with the day itself. More dutiful still, and better, is the man who waits for it and catches the first light; disgraceful is the one who lies half-asleep when the sun is high, whose waking begins at midday — and for many, even that counts as before dawn. There are people who have flipped the functions of daylight and darkness, and do not open eyes heavy with yesterday's hangover until night begins to come on. Their condition is like that of the people whom nature, as Vergil says, has placed under our feet, on earth's far side,
and when the rising Sun first breathes on us with panting horses,
for them glowing Vesper is kindling his late lamps —
except that with these men it is not their region but their life that runs contrary to everyone. There are antipodeans in this very city who, as Marcus Cato says, have never once laid eyes on the sun coming up or going down. Do you imagine such men know how to live, when they don't know when to?
And do these people fear death — the very thing they have buried themselves alive in? They are as ill-omened as the birds of the night. Though they spend their darkness amid wine and perfume, though they use up the whole span of their backwards waking on banquets cooked up into course after course, they are not dining; they are performing their own funeral rites. The dead, at least, get their offerings by day. But truly, no day is long to a man in action. Let us stretch our life: its duty and its proof lie in activity. Cut the night short, and carry some of it over into the day. Birds being fattened for the table are kept in the dark so that they plump easily without moving; just so, in bodies that lie about without any exercise, swelling invades the idle flesh and a sluggish fat creeps up in their pampered shade. And the bodies of these men who have consecrated themselves to darkness are foul to look at — their color is more alarming than that of the sick and pale, since illness at least explains those. Limp and washed out, they are white, and on living men the flesh is corpse-flesh. Yet I would call that the least of their evils: how much more darkness there is in the soul! Inside, such a man is stupefied at himself, he gropes in fog, he envies the blind. Whoever had eyes for the sake of the dark?
You ask how the soul comes by this perversity of shunning the day and shifting one's whole life into the night? All vices fight against nature; all desert the proper order. This is the whole program of decadence: to delight in the backwards, and not merely to depart from the right way but to get as far from it as possible — finally, to stand at the opposite pole. Don't you think men live against nature who drink on an empty stomach, who take wine into empty veins and come to their food already drunk? Yet this is a common vice of the young, who work up their strength so as to drink — no, to swill — practically on the threshold of the bath, among the naked bathers, and then scrape off, again and again, the sweat they have raised with hot drink after hot drink. Drinking after lunch or dinner is common stuff; that is what country householders do, men ignorant of true pleasure. The wine that delights them is the wine that doesn't float on food, that goes straight to the nerves unimpeded; the intoxication they enjoy is the kind that arrives on an empty stomach. Don't you think men live against nature who trade clothes with women? Don't men live against nature who arrange for boyhood to keep its shine past its season? What could be done more cruel, or more wretched? Is he never to be a man, so that he can go on submitting to a man? And when his sex ought to have rescued him from that outrage, will not even his age rescue him? Don't men live against nature who crave a rose in winter, and by hot-water forcing and careful shifting of position squeeze out a lily — a spring flower — at midwinter? Don't men live against nature who plant orchards on the tops of towers, whose woods sway on the roofs and gables of their houses, the roots springing from a level to which the treetops would have had no right to climb? Don't men live against nature who lay the footings of their warm baths out in the sea, and don't consider themselves swimming in style unless their heated pools are lashed by wave and storm? Once they have set themselves to want everything contrary to nature's usage, in the end they defect from her altogether. 'It's light out: time for sleep. All is quiet: now let's take our exercise, our drive, our lunch. Now the daylight approaches: time for dinner. One mustn't do what the crowd does; it's a shabby business to live in the worn, common way. Let ordinary daytime be abandoned: let us have a morning of our very own, private and reserved.' To my mind such people are as good as dead; how far are they, really, from a funeral — and an untimely one — living by torches and wax lights? I remember that many men led this life at one time, among them the ex-praetor Acilius Buta, to whom Tiberius, when Buta had run through an enormous inheritance and was confessing his poverty, said: 'You woke up too late.' Julius Montanus was once giving a reading of a poem — a tolerable poet, known for his friendship with Tiberius, and for its cooling. He loved to sprinkle his verse with sunrises and sunsets; so when someone was fuming that he had recited all day long and swearing that his readings should be boycotted, Natta Pinarius said: 'Could I make him a fairer offer? I am ready to listen to him from sunrise to sunset.'
When Montanus had recited these lines —
Phoebus begins to lead out his blazing fires,
the reddening day to scatter itself; now the sad swallow
begins to bring food back to the chirping nests
and deals it out, sharing with her soft beak —
Varus, a Roman knight, a companion of Marcus Vinicius and a hanger-on at good dinners, which he earned by the wickedness of his tongue, called out: 'Buta begins to sleep.' Then, when Montanus went on to recite —
now the herdsmen have stalled their cattle in the byres,
now sluggish night begins to give its silence to the drowsing lands —
the same Varus said: 'What's that? Night already? I'll go pay my morning call on Buta.' Nothing was more notorious than this life of his spun round to its opposite — a life which, as I said, many led at the same period. The reason some people live this way is not that they think night itself holds anything more delightful, but that nothing ordinary pleases them; also, daylight lies heavy on a bad conscience, and to a man whose desiring or despising of everything depends on whether it cost much or little, light that is free of charge is beneath contempt. Besides, the extravagant want their life talked about while they are still living it; if there's silence, they think their effort wasted. So every now and then they do something to set tongues wagging. Plenty of men eat through their fortunes; plenty keep mistresses. To make a name among that crowd, you need to stage something not merely extravagant but conspicuous; in a city this busy, run-of-the-mill wickedness doesn't get itself talked about. We once heard Albinovanus Pedo telling a story — he was the most elegant of raconteurs — of how he had lived above the house of Sextus Papinius. Papinius was one of this tribe of light-shunners. 'Around the third hour of the night,' Pedo said, 'I hear the crack of whips. I ask what he's doing: I'm told he's auditing his accounts. Around the sixth hour of the night I hear an excited shouting. I ask what that is: I'm told he's exercising his voice.
'Around the eighth hour of the night I ask what that rumble of wheels means: I'm told he's out for his drive. Around dawn there's running to and fro, slaves being summoned, butlers and cooks in an uproar. I ask what's happening: I'm told he has called for honeyed wine and spelt porridge — he's just out of his bath.' 'His dinner, then,' someone said, 'ran past the day?' Not at all — he lived very frugally; he consumed nothing but the night. And so, when some people called Papinius a stingy miser, Pedo said: 'You might as well call him a lamp-liver.' You shouldn't be surprised to find so many individual varieties of vice: vices are various, their faces are beyond counting, their kinds cannot be catalogued. Care for the right is simple, care for the wrong is manifold and takes as many new swerves as you like. The same holds for character: in those who follow nature, characters are easy, unconstrained, with only slight differences between them; the twisted are utterly at odds with everyone and with each other. But the chief cause of this disease, it seems to me, is disdain for ordinary life. As such men mark themselves off from everyone else by their dress, by the refinement of their dinners, by the elegance of their carriages, so they want to stand apart in their scheduling of the hours too. Men whose reward for sinning is notoriety have no wish to sin in the usual manner. Notoriety is what every one of them is chasing — these men whose lives run, as it were, backwards. That, Lucilius, is why we must hold to the road nature has laid down, and not swerve from it: for those who follow it, everything is easy and lies ready to hand; for those who strain against it, life is nothing but rowing against the current. Farewell.