Letters From a Stoic (17 page)

‘I’m suffering severe pain,’ you may say.
Well does it stop you suffering it if you endure it in a womanish fashion?
In the same way as the enemy can do far more damage to your army if it is in full retreat, every trouble that may come our way presses harder on the one who has turned tail and is giving ground.
‘But it’s really severe.’ Well, is courage only meant to enable us to bear up under what is not severe?
Would you rather have an illness that’s long drawn out or one that’s short and quick?
If it’s a long one it will have the odd interval, giving one opportunity for rallying, granting one a good deal of time free of it, having of necessity to pause in order to build up again.
An illness that’s swift and short will have one of two results: either oneself or it will be snuffed out.
And what difference does it make whether I or it disappears?
Either way there’s an end to the pain.

Another thing which will help is to turn your mind to other thoughts and that way get away from your suffering.
Call to mind things which you have done that have been upright or courageous; run over in your mind the finest parts that you have played.
And cast your memory over the things you have most admired; this is a time for recollecting all those individuals of exceptional courage who have triumphed over pain: the man who steadily went on reading a book while he was having varicose veins cut out: the man who never stopped smiling under torture albeit that this angered his tormentors into trying on him every instrument of cruelty they had.
If pain has been conquered by a smile will it not be conquered by reason?
And here you may mention anything you care to name, catarrh, a fit of uninterrupted coughing so violent that it brings up parts of the internal organs, having one’s very entrails seared by a fever, thirst, having limbs wrenched in different directions with dislocation of the joints,
or – worse than these – being stretched on the rack or burnt alive, or subjected to the red-hot plates and instruments designed to re-open and deepen swelling wounds.
There have been men who have undergone these experiences and never uttered a groan.
‘He needs more, he hasn’t asked for mercy… he needs more, he still hasn’t answered… he needs more, he has actually smiled, and not a forced smile either.’ Surely pain is something you will want to smile at after this.

‘But my illness has taken me away from my duties and won’t allow me to achieve anything.’ It is your body, not your mind as well, that is in the grip of ill health.
Hence it may slow the feet of a runner and make the hands of a smith or cobbler less efficient, but if your mind is by habit of an active turn you may still give instruction and advice, listen and learn, inquire and remember.
Besides, if you meet sickness in a sensible manner, do you really think you are achieving nothing?
You will be demonstrating that even if one cannot always beat it one can always bear an illness.
There is room for heroism, I assure you, in bed as anywhere else.
War and the battle-front are not the only spheres in which proof is to be had of a spirited and fearless character: a person’s bravery is no less evident under the bed-clothes.
There is something it lies open to you to achieve, and that is making the fight with illness a good one.
If its threats or importunities leave you quite unmoved, you are setting others a signal example.
How much scope there would be for renown if whenever we were sick we had an audience of spectators!
Be your own spectator anyway, your own applauding audience.

Pleasures, moreover, are of two kinds.
The physical pleasures are the ones which illness interferes with, though it does not do away with them altogether – indeed, if you take a true view of the matter, they are actually sharpened by illness, a man deriving greater pleasure from drinking something
when he is thirsty and finding food all the more welcome through being hungry, anything set before one after one has had to fast being greeted with a heightened appetite.
But no doctor can refuse his patient those other, greater and surer pleasures, the pleasures of the mind and spirit.
Anyone who follows these and genuinely knows them pays no attention whatever to all the enticements of the senses.
‘How very unfortunate he is,’ people say, ‘to be sick like that!’ Why?
Because he isn’t melting snow in his wine?
Because he isn’t breaking ice into a bumper goblet to keep the drink he has mixed in it chilled?
Because Lucrine oysters aren’t being opened before him at his table?
Because there isn’t any bustling of cooks about the dining-room, bringing in not just the viands themselves but the actual cooking apparatus along with them?
For this is the latest innovation in luxurious living, having the kitchen accompany the dinner in to the table so as to prevent any of the food losing its heat and avoid anything being at a temperature insufficiently scalding for palates which are nowadays like leather.
‘How very unfortunate he is to be sick,’ they say.
In fact he’ll be eating just as much as he’ll digest.
There won’t be a whole boar lying somewhere where people can see it, conveying the impression that it has been banished from the table as being too cheap and ordinary a piece of meat to be on it, nor will he have his trolley piled high with – now that people think it not quite nice to see the whole bird – carved breast of fowl.
And what’s so bad about your being deprived of that?
You may be eating like a sick man, but you’ll at last be eating in the way a healthy man should.

But given one thing we shall find it easy to put up with the potions and warm drinks and all the rest of it – all the things that seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body; the one requirement
is that we cease to dread death.
And so we shall as soon as we have learnt to distinguish the good things and the bad things in this world.
Then and then only shall we stop being weary of living as well as scared of dying.
For a life spent viewing all the variety, the majesty, the sublimity in things around us can never succumb to
ennui
: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing, is usually the result of an idle and inactive leisure.
Truth will never pall on someone who explores the world of nature, wearied as a person will be by the spurious things.
Moreover, even if death is on the way with a summons for him, though it come all too early, though it cut him off in the prime of life, he has experienced every reward that the very longest life can offer, having gained extensive knowledge of the world we live in, having learnt that time adds nothing to the finer things in life.
Whereas any life must needs seem short to people who measure it in terms of pleasures which through their empty nature are incapable of completeness.

Let these reflections promote your recovery, and meanwhile do find time for our correspondence.
Time will bring us together again one of these days; and when, as it will, the reunion comes, however short it may last, knowing how to make the most of it will turn it into a long one.
As Posidonius said, ‘In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.’ In the meantime cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do.
Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.

Today has been unbroken.
No one has robbed me of any part of it.
It has been wholly divided between my bed and my reading.
A very small part of it has been given over to physical exercise – and on this account I’m grateful for old age, for the exercise costs me little trouble.
I only have to stir and I’m weary, and that after all is the end of exercise even for the strongest.
Interested in having my trainers?
One’s enough for me – Pharius, a likeable young fellow, as you know, but he’s due for a change.
I’m looking now for someone rather more youthful.
He in fact declares that we’re both at the same climacteric since we’re both losing our teeth.
But I’ve reached the stage where I can only keep
up with him with difficulty when we’re out for a run, and before many days are out I won’t be able to keep up with him at all.
See what daily exercise does for one.
When two people are going in opposite directions there’s soon a big distance between them: he’s coming up at the same time as I’m going downwards, and you know how much quicker travel is in the second of these directions.
But I’m wrong: the age I’m at isn’t one that is ‘going downwards’ – it’s one that’s in headlong descent.

However, you’d like to hear how today’s race ended?
Well, we made it a tie, something that doesn’t often happen with runners.
After this, more a spell of exhaustion than of exercise, I had a cold plunge – cold, with me, meaning just short of warm!
Here I am, once celebrated as a devotee of cold baths, regularly paying my respects to the Canal on the first of January and jumping into the Maiden Pool in just the same way as I read, wrote and spoke some sentence or other every New Year in order to ensure good luck in the coming year; and now I’ve shifted my scene of operations, first to the Tiber, then to my own pool here, which, even when I’m feeling my heartiest and don’t cheat, has had the chill taken off it by the sun; it’s a short step to a hot bath!
The next thing is breakfast, which consists of some dry bread; no table laid, and no need to wash the hands after such a meal.
I then have the briefest of naps.
You know this habit of mine, of dropping off for a moment or two, just slipping off the harness, as you might say.
I find it enough to have simply stopped being awake.
Sometimes I know I’ve been asleep, sometimes merely guess I have been….
*

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….