Letters From a Stoic Read online

  Zeno was a very great man as well as the founder of our Stoic school, a school with an unequalled record for courageous and saintly living; well, listen to the way in which, desiring to deter us from drunkenness, he deduces the principle that the good man won’t get drunk. ‘No person who is drunk,’ he says, ‘is entrusted with a secret: the good man is entrusted with a secret: therefore, the good man will not get drunk.’ Watch how ridiculous he’s made to look when we counter with a single syllogism on the same pattern (of the many we could advance it’s sufficient to instance one). ‘No person who is asleep is entrusted with a secret: the good man is entrusted with a secret: therefore, the good man does not go to sleep….’

  Now just let each of us name for himself the people he knows can be trusted with a secret though they can’t be trusted with a bottle. I’ll give, all the same, one solitary example myself, just to prevent its being lost to human memory! Life needs a stock of noteworthy examples; nor need we always go running to antiquity for them. Lucius Piso was drunk from the very moment of his appointment as Warden of the City of Rome. He regularly spent most of the night wining and dining in company, and slept from then until around midday, noon to him being early morning; he nevertheless discharged his duties, which embraced the general welfare of the whole city, with the utmost efficiency. The late emperor Augustus as well as Tiberius entrusted him with secret orders, the former on appointing him governor of Thrace (the conquest of which he completed), the latter when he left Rome for Campania, leaving behind him in the capital many objects of distrust and hostility. I imagine it was because Piso’s drunken habits had been such a success so far as he was concerned that Tiberius later appointed Cossus to be Prefect of the City. This man, otherwise dignified and self-controlled, steeped himself in liquor, soaking it up to such an extent that on one occasion in the Senate, having come there straight from a party, he succumbed to a slumber from which nothing could rouse him and had to be carried out. Yet this did not stop Tiberius writing (in his own hand) a number of letters to Cossus the contents of which he did not consider suitable for communication even to his ministers; and Cossus never let slip a single secret, whether private or official….

  If you want to arrive at the conclusion that the good man ought not to get drunk, why set about it with syllogisms? Tell people how disgusting it is for a man to pump more into himself than he can hold and not to know the capacity of his own stomach. Tell them of all the things men do that they would blush at sober, and that drunkenness is nothing but a state of self-induced insanity. For imagine the drunken man’s behaviour extended over several days: would you hesitate to think him out of his mind? As it is, the difference is simply one of duration, not of degree. Point to the example of Alexander of Macedon, stabbing his dearest and truest friend, Clitus, at a banquet, and wanting to die, as indeed he should have done, when he realized the enormity of what he had done. Drunkenness inflames and lays bare every vice, removing the reserve that acts as a check on impulses to wrong behaviour. For people abstain from forbidden things far more often through feelings of inhibition when it comes to doing what is wrong than through any will to good…. Add to this the drunkard’s ignorance of his situation, his indistinct, uncertain speech, his inability to walk straight, his unsteady eye and swimming head, with his very home in a state of motion – as if the whole house had been set spinning by some cyclone – and the tortures in his stomach as the wine ferments….

  Where is the glory in mere capacity? When the victory rests with you, when all the company lie prostrate around you, slumbering or vomiting, declining all your calls for another toast, when you find yourself the only person at the party still on your feet, when your mighty prowess has enabled you to beat all comers and no one has proved able to match your intake, a barrel is none the less enough to beat you.

  What else was it but drinking to excess, together with a passion for Cleopatra itself as potent as drink, that ruined that great and gifted man, Mark Antony, dragging him down into foreign ways of living and un-Roman vices? This it was that made him an enemy of the state; this is what made him no match for his enemies; it was this that made him cruel, having the heads of his country’s leading men brought in to him at the dinner-table, identifying the hands and features of liquidated opponents in the course of banquets marked by sumptuous magnificence and regal pomp, still thirsting for blood when filled to the full with wine….

  Explain, then, why the good man should avoid getting drunk, using facts, not words, to show its ugliness and offensiveness. Prove – and an easy task it is – that so-called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments….

  LETTER LXXXVI

  HERE I am, staying at the country house which once belonged to Scipio of Africa himself. I am writing after paying my respects to his departed spirit as well as to an altar which I rather think may be the actual tomb of that great soldier. His soul will have gone to heaven, returned in fact to the place from which it came. What convinces me of this is not the size of the armies he commanded – for Cambyses equally had such armies and Cambyses was merely a madman who turned his madness to good account – but his quite exceptional self-restraint and sense of duty. This is something in him which I find even more deserving of admiration at the time when he finally left his country than during the time when he was fighting for her. Was Scipio to stay in Rome? Or was Rome to stay a free democracy? That was then the choice. What did Scipio say? ‘I have no wish’ he said, ‘to have the effect of weakening in the least degree our laws or institutions. All Roman citizens must be equal before the law. I ask my country, then, to make the most of what I have done for her, but without me. If she owes it to me that she is today a free country, let me also prove that she is free. If my stature has grown too great for her best interests, then out I go.’ Am I not justified in admiring that nobility of character which led him to retire, to go into voluntary exile to relieve the state of an embarrassing burden? Events had come to the point where either Scipio or democracy was going to suffer at the other’s hands. Neither of these two things could justly be permitted to happen. So he gave way to her constitution and, proposing that the nation should be no less indebted to him for his absence from the scene than for Hannibal’s, he went off into retirement at Liternum.

  I have seen the house, which is built of squared stone blocks; the wall surrounding the park; and the towers built out on both sides of the house for purposes of defence; the well, concealed among the greenery and out-buildings, with sufficient water to provide for the needs of a whole army; and the tiny little bath, situated after the old-fashioned custom in an ill-lit corner, our ancestors believing that the only place where one could properly have a hot bath was in the dark. It was this which started in my mind reflections that occasioned me a good deal of enjoyment as I compared Scipio’s way of life and our own. In this corner the famous Terror of Carthage, to whom Rome owes it that she has only once* in her history been captured, used to wash a body weary from work on the farm! For he kept himself fit through toil, cultivating his fields by his own labour, as was the regular way in the old days. And this was the ceiling, dingy in the extreme, under which he stood; and this the equally undistinguished paving that carried his weight.

  Who is there who could bear to have a bath in such surroundings nowadays? We think ourselves poorly off, living like paupers, if the walls are not ablaze with large and costly circular mirrors, if our Alexandrian marbles are not decorated with panels of Numidian marble, if the whole of their surface has not been given a decorative overlay of elaborate patterns having all the variety of fresco murals, unless the ceiling cannot be seen for glass, unless the pools into which we lower bodies with all the strength drained out of them by lengthy periods in the sweating room are edged with Thasian marble (which was once the rarest of sights even in a temple), unless the water pours from silver taps. And so far we have only been talking about the ordinary fellow’s plumbing. What about the bath-houses of certain former slaves? Look at their arra
ys of statues, their assemblies of columns that do not support a thing but are put up purely for ornament, just for the sake of spending money. Look at the cascades of water splashing noisily down from one level to the next. We have actually come to such a pitch of choosiness that we object to walking on anything other than precious stones.

  In this bathroom of Scipio’s there are tiny chinks – you could hardly call them windows – pierced in the masonry of the wall in such a way as to let in light without in any way weakening its defensive character. Nowadays ‘moth-hole’ is the way some people speak of a bathroom unless it has been designed to catch the sun through enormous windows all day long, unless a person can acquire a tan at the same time as he is having a bath, unless he has views from the bath over countryside and sea.

  The result is that bath-houses which drew admiring crowds when they were first opened are actually dismissed as antiquated as soon as extravagance has hit on any novelty calculated to put its own best previous efforts in the shade. There was a time when bath-houses were few and far between, and never in the least luxuriously appointed – and why should they have been, considering that they were designed for use, not for diversion, and that admission only cost you a copper? There were no showers in those days, and the water did not come in a continuous gush as if from a hot spring. People did not think it mattered then how clear the water was in which they were going to get rid of the dirt. Heavens, what a pleasure it is to go into one of those half-lit bath-houses with their ordinary plastered ceilings, where you knew that Cato himself as aedile – or Fabius Maximus, or one of the Cornelii – regulated the warmth of your water with his own hand! For, however high their rank, it was one of the duties of the aediles to enter all such premises as were open to the public and enforce standards of cleanliness and a healthy sort of temperature, sufficient for practical purposes, not the kind of heat which has recently come into fashion, more like that of a furnace – so much so indeed that a slave convicted on a criminal charge might well be sentenced to be bathed alive! There doesn’t seem to me to be any difference now between ‘your bath’s warm’ and ‘your bath’s boiling’.

  ‘How primitive!’ Such is some people’s verdict these days on Scipio because he did not have extensive areas of glass to let the daylight into the perspiring room, because it was not a habit with him to stew in strong sunlight, letting the time go by until he was perfectly cooked in his own bathroom. ‘What a sorry wretch of a man! He didn’t know how to live! He’d take his bath in water that was never filtered and often cloudy, practically muddy in fact after any heavy rain.’ Well, it did not make much difference to Scipio if this was the kind of bath he had; he went there to wash off sweat, not scent. And what do you think some people will say to this? ‘Well, I don’t envy Scipio; if that was the kind of bath he had all the time, it was a real exile’s life that he was leading.’

  Yes, and what’s more, if you must know, he didn’t even have a bath every day. Writers who have left us a record of life in ancient Rome tell us that it was just their arms and legs, which of course they dirtied working, that people washed every day, bathing all over only once a week on market day. ‘Obviously,’ someone will comment, ‘there must have been times when they were positively disgusting.’ And what do you think they stank of? I’ll tell you – of hard soldiering, of hard work, of all that goes to make up a man. Men are dirtier creatures now than they ever were in the days before the coming of spotlessly clean bathrooms. What is it Horace says when he wants to describe a man noted and indeed notorious for the inordinate lengths to which he carried personal fastidiousness?

  Bucillus stinks of scented lozenges.*

  Produce Bucillus today and he might just as well ‘stink like a goat’. He would be in the same position as the Gargonius with whom Horace contrasted him. For nowadays it is not even enough to use some scented ointment – it must be reapplied two or three times a day as a precaution against its evaporation on the person. I say nothing about the way people preen themselves on the perfume it carries, as if it were their own.

  If all this strikes you as being excessively disapproving you must put it down to the house’s atmosphere! During my stay in it I’ve learnt from Aegialus (who’s the present owner of the estate, and gives a great deal of attention to its management) that trees can be transplanted even when quite old – a lesson that we old men need to learn when we reckon that every one of us who puts down a new olive plantation is doing so for someone else’s benefit – now that I’ve seen him carefully transplanting one of a number of trees that had given fruit unstintingly over three and even four seasons. So you too can enjoy the shade of the tree which

  Is slow in coming up, is there to give

  Your grandsons shade in later years, long hence,*

  according to our Virgil, who was not concerned with the facts but with poetic effect, his object being the pleasure of the reader, not the instruction of the farmer. To pick out only one example, let me quote the following passage which I felt compelled to find fault with today.

  In Spring’s the time for sowing beans; then, too,

  The crumbling furrows, Clover, welcome you,

  And millet, too, receives her yearly care.†

  I leave you to conclude from this whether the crops mentioned are to be planted at the same time as each other, and whether in each case they’re to be sown in spring. As I write, it’s June, getting on for July now, too, and I’ve seen people harvesting beans and sowing millet on the same day.

  To get back to our olive plantation, I saw two different methods of planting used here. In the first, taking sizeable trees and lopping off the branches, cutting them back to a foot from the stem, Aegialus transplanted them complete with crown, pruning away the roots and leaving only the actual base, the part to which the roots are attached. This he placed in the hole with an application of manure, and not only earthed it in but trod and stamped the soil down hard. He says that nothing gives such good results as this ‘packing them down’, as he calls it; what it does, of course, is to keep out cold and wind; and apart from that, the tree is less liable to be shifted, thus allowing the young roots to sprout and get a grip on the soil when they are inevitably tender and torn from their precarious holds by the slightest disturbance. He also scrapes the crown of the tree before covering it up, because (he says) new roots emerge wherever the wood underneath has been laid bare. The tree, again, should not stand higher than three or four feet above the ground. This will ensure, right from the start, green growth from the bottom upwards instead of a large area of dry and withered stem of the sort one sees in old olive-groves.

  The second method was as follows: taking branches of the type one normally finds on very young trees, strong but at the same time having soft bark, he planted them out in the same sort of way. These grow rather more slowly but since they spring from what is virtually a cutting, there is nothing scraggy or unsightly about them.

  Another thing I’ve seen is the transplanting of an old vine from its supporting tree; in this case, one has to gather up with it, if possible, even the minute root-hairs, and in addition give it a more generous covering of soil so that it throws out roots from the stem as well. I have seen such plantings not only in the month of February but even at the end of March, the vines going on to embrace and take good hold of their new elm trees. Aegialus also says that all trees which are stout in the stem, if one may so term them, should have the benefit of a supply of water stored in tanks; if this is a success, we have brought the rain under our control.

  But I don’t propose to tell you any more, in case I turn you into a rival grower in the same way as Aegialus has turned me into a competitor of his!

  LETTER LXXXVIII

  YOU want to know my attitude towards liberal studies. Well, I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. T
ime should be spent on them only so long as one’s mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things. They are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Why ‘liberal studies’ are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man.* But there is really only one liberal study that deserves the name – because it makes a person free – and that is the pursuit of wisdom. Its high ideals, its steadfastness and spirit make all other studies puerile and puny in comparison. Do you really think there is anything to be said for the others when you find among the people who profess to teach them quite the most reprehensible and worthless characters you could have as teachers? All right to have studied that sort of thing once, but not to be studying them now.

  The question has sometimes been posed whether these liberal studies make a man a better person. But in fact they do not aspire to any knowledge of how to do this, let alone claim to do it. Literary scholarship concerns itself with research into language, or history if a rather broader field is preferred, or, extending its range to the very limit, poetry. Which of these paves the way to virtue? Attentiveness to words, analysis of syllables, accounts of myths, laying down the principles of prosody? What is there in all this that dispels fear, roots out desire or reins in passion? Or let us take a look at music, at geometry; you will not find anything in them which tells us not to be afraid of this or desire that – and if anyone lacks this kind of knowledge all his other knowledge is valueless to him. The question is whether or not that sort of scholar is teaching virtue. For if he is not, he will not even be imparting it incidentally. If he is teaching it he is a philosopher. If you really want to know how far these persons are from the position of being moral teachers, observe the absence of connexion between all the things they study; if they were teaching one and the same thing a connexion would be evident. Unless perhaps they manage to persuade you that Homer was actually a philosopher – though they refute their case by means of the very passages which lead them to infer it. For at one moment they make him a Stoic, giving nothing but virtue his approval, steering clear of pleasure, not even an offer of immortality inducing him to stoop to the dishonourable; at another they make him an Epicurean, praising the way of life of a society passing its days at peace and ease, in an atmosphere of dinner-parties and music-making; at another he becomes a Peripatetic, with a threefold classification of things good; at another an Academic, stating that nothing is certain. It is obvious that none of these philosophies is to be found in Homer for the very reason that they all are, the doctrines being mutually incompatible. Even suppose we grant these people that Homer was a philosopher, he became a wise man, surely, before he could recite any epics, so that what we should be learning are the things which made him wise. And there is no more point in my investigating which was the earlier, Homer or Hesiod, than there would be in my knowing the reason why Hecuba, though younger than Helen, carried her years so unsuccessfully. And what, I would ask this kind of scholar, do you suppose is the point of trying to establish the ages of Patroclus and Achilles? And are you more concerned to find out where Ulysses’ wanderings took him than to find a way of putting an end to our own perpetual wanderings? We haven’t the time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the area of the world we know – wanderings as extensive as his could never in fact have taken place inside so limited an area – when every day we’re running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew. We’re not spared those eye-distracting beauties, or attackers. We too have to contend in various places with savage monsters revelling in human blood, insidious voices that beguile our ears, shipwrecks and all manner of misfortune. What you should be teaching me is how I may attain such a love for my country, my father and my wife, and keep on course for those ideals even after shipwreck. Why go into the question whether or not Penelope completely took in her contemporaries and was far from being a model of wifely purity, any more than the question whether or not she had a feeling that the man she was looking at was Ulysses before she actually knew it? Teach me instead what purity is, how much value there is in it, whether it lies in the body or in the mind.