Letters From a Stoic (11 page)

If you have ever come on a dense wood of ancient trees that have risen to an exceptional height, shutting out all sight of the sky with one thick screen of branches upon another, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, your sense of wonderment at finding so deep and unbroken a gloom out of doors, will persuade you of the presence of a deity.
Any cave in which the rocks have been eroded deep into the mountain resting on it, its hollowing out into a cavern of impressive extent not produced by the labours of men but the result of processes of nature, will strike into your soul some kind of inkling of the divine.
We venerate the sources of important streams; places where a mighty river bursts suddenly from hiding are provided with altars; hot springs are objects of worship; the darkness or unfathomable depth of pools has made their waters sacred.
And if you come across a man who is never alarmed by dangers, never affected by cravings, happy in adversity, calm in the midst of storm, viewing mankind from a higher level and the gods from their own, is it not likely that a feeling will find its way into you of veneration for him?
Is it not likely that you will say to yourself, ‘Here is a thing which is too great, too sublime for anyone to regard it as being in the same sort of category as that puny body it inhabits.’ Into that body there has descended a divine power.
The soul that is elevated and well regulated, that passes through any experience as if it counted for comparatively little, that smiles at all the things we fear or pray for, is impelled by a force that comes from heaven.
A thing of that soul’s height cannot stand without the prop of a deity.
Hence the greater part of it is situated where it descends from; in the same way as the sun’s rays touch the earth but are really situated at the point from which they emanate, a soul possessed of greatness and holiness, which has been sent down into this world in order that we may gain a nearer knowledge of the divine, associates with us, certainly, but
never loses contact with its source.
On that source it depends; that is the direction in which its eyes turn, and the direction it strives to climb in; the manner in which it takes part in our affairs is that of a superior being.

What, then, is this soul?
Something which has a lustre that is due to no quality other than its own.
Could anything be more stupid than to praise a person for something that is not his?
Or more crazy than admiring things which in a single moment can be transferred to another?
It is not a golden bit that makes one horse superior to others.
Sending a lion into the arena with his mane gilded, tired by the handling he has been given in the process of being forced to submit to this embellishment, is a very different thing from sending in a wild one with his spirit unbroken.
Bold in attack, as nature meant him to be, in all his unkempt beauty, a beast whose glory it is that none can look on him without fear, he stands higher in people’s eyes than the other, docile, gold-leaf coated creature.

No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.
We praise a vine if it loads its branches with fruit and bends its very props to the ground with the weight it carries: would any one prefer the famous vine that had gold grapes and leaves hanging on it?
Fruitfulness is the vine’s peculiar virtue.
So, too, in a man praise is due only to what is his very own.
Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him – they are just things around him.
Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man’s.

You ask what that is?
It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit.
For man is a rational animal.
Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born.
And what is it that reason demands of
him?
Something very easy – that he live in accordance with his own nature.
Yet this is turned into something difficult by the madness that is universal among men; we push one another into vices.
And how can people be called back to spiritual well-being when no one is trying to hold them back and the crowd is urging them on?

It was a joy, not just a pleasure, to read it.
There was so much talent and spirit about it – I’d have said ‘forcefulness’, too, if it had been written on a quieter plane now and then and periodically raised on to a higher one; as it was there was no such forcefulness, but instead there was a sustained evenness of style.
The writing was pure and virile – and yet not lacking in that occasional entertaining touch, that bit of light relief at the appropriate moment.
The quality of nobility, of sublimity,
you have; I want you to keep it, and to carry on just the way you’re doing.

Your subject, also, contributed to the result – which is a reason why you should always select a fertile one, one that will engage the mind’s attention and stimulate it.
But I’ll write and say more about the book when I’ve gone over it again.
At the moment my judgement isn’t really a sufficiently settled one – it’s as if I’d heard it all rather than read it.
You must let me go into it thoroughly, too.
You needn’t be apprehensive, you’ll hear nothing but the truth.
How fortunate you are in possessing nothing capable of inducing anyone to tell you a lie over a distance as great as the one that separates us – except that even in these circumstances, when all reason for it is removed, we still find habit a reason for telling lies!

This is why I laugh at those people who think it degrading for a man to eat with his slave.
Why do they think it degrading?
Only because the most arrogant of conventions has decreed that the master of the house be surrounded at his dinner by a crowd of slaves, who have to stand around while he eats more than he can hold, loading an already distended
belly in his monstrous greed until it proves incapable any longer of performing the function of a belly, at which point he expends more effort in vomiting everything up than he did in forcing it down.
And all this time the poor slaves are forbidden to move their lips to speak, let alone to eat.
The slightest murmur is checked with a stick; not even accidental sounds like a cough, or a sneeze, or a hiccup are let off a beating.
All night long they go on standing about, dumb and hungry, paying grievously for any interruption.

The result is that slaves who cannot talk before his face talk about him behind his back.
The slaves of former days, however, whose mouths were not sealed up like this, who were able to make conversation not only in the presence of their master but actually with him, were ready to bare their necks to the executioner for him, to divert on to themselves any danger that threatened him; they talked at dinner but under torture they kept their mouths shut.
It is just this highhanded treatment which is responsible for the frequently heard saying, ‘You’ve as many enemies as you’ve slaves.’ They are not our enemies when we acquire them; we make them so.

For the moment I pass over other instances of our harsh and inhuman behaviour, the way we abuse them as if they were beasts of burden instead of human beings, the way for example, from the time we take our places on the dinner couches, one of them mops up the spittle and another stationed at the foot of the couch collects up the ‘leavings’ of the drunken diners.
Another carves the costly game birds, slicing off choice pieces from the breast and rump with the unerring strokes of a trained hand – unhappy man, to exist for the one and only purpose of carving a fat bird in the proper style – although the person who learns the technique from sheer necessity is not quite so much to be pitied as the person who gives demonstrations of it for pleasure’s sake.
Another, the
one who serves the wine, is got up like a girl and engaged in a struggle with his years; he cannot get away from his boyhood, but is dragged back to it all the time; although he already has the figure of a soldier, he is kept free of hair by having it rubbed away or pulled out by the roots.
His sleepless night is divided between his master’s drunkenness and sexual pleasures, boy at the table, man in the bedroom.
Another, who has the privilege of rating each guest’s character, has to go on standing where he is, poor fellow, and watch to see whose powers of flattery and absence of restraint in appetite or speech are to secure them an invitation for the following day.
Add to these the caterers with their highly developed knowledge of their master’s palate, the men who know the flavours that will sharpen his appetite, know what will appeal to his eyes, what novelties can tempt his stomach when it is becoming queasy, what dishes he will push aside with the eventual coming of sheer satiety, what he will have a craving for on that particular day.

These are the people with whom a master cannot tolerate the thought of taking his dinner, assuming that to sit down at the same table with one of his slaves would seriously impair his dignity.
‘The very idea!’ he says.
Yet have a look at the number of masters he has from the ranks of these very slaves.
*
Take Callistus’ one-time master.
I saw him once actually standing waiting at Callistus’ door and refused admission while others were going inside, the very master who had attached a price-ticket to the man and put him up for sale along with other rejects from his household staff.
There’s a slave who has paid his master back – one who was pushed into the first lot, too, the batch on which the auctioneer is merely trying out his voice!
Now it was the slave’s turn to strike his master off his list, to decide that
he
’s not the sort of
person he wants in
his
house.
Callistus’ master sold him, yes, and look how much it cost him!

How about reflecting that the person you call your slave traces his origin back to the same stock as yourself, has the same good sky above him, breathes as you do, lives as you do, dies as you do?
It is as easy for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see a slave in you.
Remember the Varus disaster: many a man of the most distinguished ancestry, who was doing his military service as the first step on the road to a seat in the Senate, was brought low by fortune, condemned by her to look after a steading, for example, or a flock of sheep.
Now think contemptuously of these people’s lot in life, in whose very place, for all your contempt, you could suddenly find yourself.

I don’t want to involve myself in an endless topic of debate by discussing the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are exceptionally arrogant, harsh and insulting.
But the essence of the advice I’d like to give is this: treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your own superiors.
And whenever it strikes you how much power you have over your slave, let it also strike you that your own master has just as much power over you.
‘I haven’t got a master,’ you say.
You’re young yet; there’s always the chance that you’ll have one.
Have you forgotten the age at which Hecuba became a slave, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?
Be kind and courteous in your dealings with a slave; bring him into your discussions and conversations and your company generally.
And if at this point all those people who have been spoilt by luxury raise an outcry protesting, as they will, ‘There couldn’t be anything more degrading, anything more disgraceful’, let me just say that these are the very persons I will catch on occasion kissing the hand of someone else’s slave.

Don’t you notice, too, how our ancestors took away all
odium from the master’s position and all that seemed insulting or degrading in the lot of the slave by calling the master ‘father of the household’ and speaking of the slaves as ‘members of the household’ (something which survives to this day in the mime)?
They instituted, too, a holiday on which master and slave were to eat together, not as the only day this could happen, of course, but as one on which it was always to happen.
And in the household they allowed the slaves to hold official positions and to exercise some jurisdiction in it; in fact they regarded the household as a miniature republic.

‘Do you mean to say,’ comes the retort, ‘that I’m to have each and every one of my slaves sitting at the table with me?’ Not at all, any more than you’re to invite to it everybody who isn’t a slave.
You’re quite mistaken, though, if you imagine that I’d bar from the table certain slaves on the grounds of the relatively menial or dirty nature of their work – that muleteer, for example, or that cowhand.
I propose to value them according to their character, not their jobs.
Each man has a character of his own choosing; it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job.
Have some of them dine with you because they deserve it, others in order to make them so deserving.
For if there’s anything typical of the slave about them as a result of the low company they’re used to living in, it will be rubbed off through association with men of better breeding.

You needn’t, my dear Lucilius, look for friends only in the City or the Senate; if you keep your eyes open, you’ll find them in your own home.
Good material often lies idle for want of someone to make use of it; just give it a trial.
A man who examines the saddle and bridle and not the animal itself when he is out to buy a horse is a fool; similarly, only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.

‘He’s a slave.’ But he may have the spirit of a free man.
‘He’s a slave.’ But is that really to count against him?
Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear.
I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman’, a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service.
I could show you some highly aristocratic young men who are utter slaves to stage artistes.
And there’s no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
So you needn’t allow yourself to be deterred by the snobbish people I’ve been talking about from showing good humour towards your slaves instead of adopting an attitude of arrogant superiority towards them.
Have them respect you rather than fear you.

Here, just because I’ve said they ‘should respect a master rather than fear him’, someone will tell us that I’m now inviting slaves to proclaim their freedom and bringing about their employers’ overthrow.
‘Are slaves to pay their “respects” like dependent followers or early morning callers?
That’s what he means, I suppose.’ Anyone saying this forgets that what is enough for a god, in the shape of worship, cannot be too little for a master.
To be really respected is to be loved; and love and fear will not mix.
That’s why I think you’re absolutely right in not wishing to be feared by your slaves, and in confining your lashings to verbal ones; as instruments of correction, beatings are for animals only.
Besides, what annoys us does not necessarily do us any harm; but we masters are apt to be robbed of our senses by mere passing fancies, to the point where our anger is called out by anything which fails to answer to our will.
We assume the mental attitudes of tyrants.
For they too forget their own strength and the helplessness of others and grow white-hot with fury as if they had received an injury, when all the time they are quite immune from any such danger through the sheer exaltedness
of their position.
Nor indeed are they unaware of this; but it does not stop them seizing an opportunity of finding fault with an inferior and maltreating him for it; they receive an injury by way of excuse to do one themselves.

But I won’t keep you any longer; you don’t need exhortation.
It is a mark of a good way of life that, among other things, it satisfies and abides; bad behaviour, constantly changing, not for the better, simply into different forms, has none of this stability.