Letters From a Stoic (18 page)

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
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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 arrays 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?

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!

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.

Turning to the musical scholar I say this.
You teach me how bass and treble harmonize, or how strings producing different notes can give rise to concord.
I would rather you brought about some harmony in my mind and got my thoughts into tune.
You show me which are the plaintive keys.
I would rather you showed me how to avoid uttering plaintive notes when things go against me in life.

The geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates – rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough.
He teaches me to calculate, putting my fingers into the service of avarice, instead of teaching me that there is no point whatsoever in that sort of computation and that a person is none the happier for having properties which tire accountants out, or to put it another
way, how superfluous a man’s possessions are when he would be a picture of misery if you forced him to start counting up single-handed how much he possessed.
What use is it to me to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I’m unable to divide it with a brother?
What use is the ability to measure out a portion of an acre with an accuracy extending even to the bits which elude the measuring rod if I’m upset when some high-handed neighbour encroaches slightly on my property?
The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling.
‘But I’m being turned off the land my father and grandfather owned before me!
‘Well, so what?
Who owned the land before your grandfather?
Are you in a position to identify the community, let alone the individual, to whom it originally belonged?
You entered on it as a tenant, not an absolute owner.
Whose tenant, you may ask?
Your heir’s, and that only if you’re lucky.
The legal experts say that acquisition by prescription never applies where the property concerned is actually public property.
Well, what you possess and call your own is really public property, or mankind’s property for that matter.
Oh, the marvels of geometry!
You geometers can calculate the areas of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating stars.
Nothing’s outside your scope when it comes to measurement.
Well, if you’re such an expert, measure a man’s soul; tell me how large or how small that is.
You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you’ve no idea what straightness means in life?

I come now to the person who prides himself on his familiarity with the heavenly bodies:

You’ll have to bear with me if I digress here.
Nothing will induce me to accept painters into the list of liberal arts, any more than sculptors, marble-masons and all the other attendants on extravagance.
I must equally reject those oil and dust practitioners, the wrestlers, or else I shall have to include in the list the perfumers and cooks and all the others who place their talents at the service of our pleasures.
What is there, I ask you, that’s liberal about those characters who vomit up their food to empty their stomachs for more, with their bodies stuffed full and their minds all starved and inactive?
Can we possibly look on this as a liberal accomplishment for the youth of Rome, whom our ancestors trained to stand up straight and throw a javelin, to toss the caber, and manage a horse, and handle weapons?
They never used to teach their children anything which could be learned in a reclining posture.
That kind of training, nevertheless, doesn’t teach or foster moral values any more than the other.
What’s the use, after all, of mastering a horse and controlling him with the reins at full gallop if you’re carried away yourself by totally unbridled emotions?
What’s the use of overcoming opponent after opponent in the wrestling or boxing rings if you can be overcome by your temper?

‘So we don’t,’ you may ask, ‘in fact gain anything from the liberal studies?’ As far as character is concerned, no, but we gain a good deal from them in other directions – just as even these admittedly inferior arts which we’ve been talking about, the ones that are based on use of the hands, make important contributions to the amenities of life although they have nothing to do with character.
Why then do we give our sons a liberal education?
Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values.
Just as that grounding in grammar, as they called it in the old days, in which boys are given their elementary schooling, does not teach them the liberal arts but
prepares the ground for knowledge of them in due course, so when it comes to character the liberal arts open the way to it rather than carry the personality all the way there….
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In this connexion I feel prompted to take a look at individual qualities of character.
Bravery is the one which treats with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear, despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom.
Is she in any way fortified by liberal studies?
Take loyalty, the most sacred quality that can be found in a human breast, never corrupted by a bribe, never driven to betray by any form of compulsion, crying: ‘Beat me, burn me, put me to death, I shall not talk – the more the torture probes my secrets the deeper I’ll hide them!
‘Can liberal studies create that kind of spirit?
Take self-control, the quality which takes command of the pleasures; some she dismisses out of hand, unable to tolerate them; others she merely regulates, ensuring that they are brought within healthy limits; never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like to but the amount you ought to take.
Humanity is the quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s fellows, or being acrimonious.
In words, in actions, in emotions she reveals herself as kind and good-natured towards all.
To her the troubles of anyone else are her own, and anything that benefits herself she welcomes primarily because it will be of benefit to someone else.
Do the liberal studies inculcate these attitudes?
No, no more than they do simplicity, or modesty and restraint, or frugality and thrift, or mercy, the mercy that is as sparing with another’s blood as though it were its own, knowing that it is not for man to make wasteful use of man.

Someone will ask me how I can say that liberal studies
are of no help towards morality when I’ve just been saying that there’s no attaining morality without them.
My answer would be this: there’s no attaining morality without food either, but there’s no connexion between morality and food.
The fact that a ship can’t begin to exist without the timbers of which it’s built doesn’t mean that the timbers are of ‘help’ to it.
There’s no reason for you to assume that, X being something without which Y could never have come about, Y came about as a result of the assistance of X.
And indeed it can actually be argued that the attainment of wisdom is perfectly possible without the liberal studies; although moral values are things which have to be learnt, they are not learnt through these studies.
Besides, what grounds could I possibly have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man?
For wisdom does not lie in books.
Wisdom publishes not words but truths – and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.

There is nothing small or cramped about wisdom.
It is something calling for a lot of room to move.
There are questions to be answered concerning physical as well as human matters, questions about the past and about the future, questions about things eternal and things ephemeral, questions about time itself.
On this one subject of time just look how many questions there are.
To start with, does it have an existence of its own?
Next, does anything exist prior to time, independently of it?
Did it begin with the universe, or did it exist even before then on the grounds that there was something in existence before the universe?
There are countless questions about the soul alone – where it comes from, what its nature is, when it begins to exist, and how long it is in existence; whether it passes from one place to another, moving house, so to speak, on transfer to successive living creatures, taking on a different form with each, or is no more than
once in service and is then released to roam the universe; whether it is a corporeal substance or not; what it will do when it ceases to act through us, how it will employ its freedom once it has escaped its cage here; whether it will forget its past and become conscious of its real nature from the actual moment of its parting from the body and departure for its new home on high.
Whatever the field of physical or moral sciences you deal with, you will be given no rest by the mass of things to be learnt or investigated.
And to enable matters of this range and scale to find unrestricted hospitality in our minds, everything superfluous must be turned out.
Virtue will not bring herself to enter the limited space we offer her; something of great size requires plenty of room.
Let everything else be evicted, and your heart completely opened to her.

‘But it’s a nice thing, surely, to be familiar with a lot of subjects.’ Well, in that case let us retain just as much of them as we need.
Would you consider a person open to criticism for putting superfluous objects on the same level as really useful ones by arranging on display in his house a whole array of costly articles, but not for cluttering himself up with a lot of superfluous furniture in the way of learning?
To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance.
Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need.
The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works.
In these works he discusses such questions as Homer’s origin, who was Aeneas’ real mother, whether Anacreon’s manner of life was more that of a lecher or that of a drunkard, whether Sappho slept with anyone who asked her, and other things that would be better unlearned if one actually knew them!
Don’t you go and tell me now that life is long enough for this sort of thing!
When you come to writers in our own school, for that matter, I’ll show you plenty of works which could do with some ruthless pruning.
It costs a person an enormous amount of time (and other people’s ears an enormous amount of boredom) before he earns such compliments as ‘What a learned person!’ Let’s be content with the much less fashionable label, ‘What a good man!’…
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What about thinking how much time you lose through constantly being taken up with official matters, private matters or ordinary everyday matters, through sleep, through ill health?
Measure your life: it just does not have room for so much.

I have been speaking about liberal studies.
Yet look at the amount of useless and superfluous matter to be found in the philosophers.
Even they have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions.
They have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies – with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.
Listen and let me show you the sorry consequences to which subtlety carried too far can lead, and what an enemy it is to truth.
Protagoras declares that it is possible to argue either side of any question with equal force, even the question whether or not one can equally argue either side of any question!
Nausiphanes declares that of the things which appear to us to exist, none exists any more than it does not exist.
Parmenides declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole.
Zeno of Elea has dismissed all such difficulties
by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists.
The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian and Academic schools pursue more or less similar lines; the last named have introduced a new branch of knowledge, non-knowledge.

Well, all these theories you should just toss on top of that heap of superfluous liberal studies.
The people I first mentioned provide me with knowledge which is not going to be of any use to me, while the others snatch away from me any hopes of ever acquiring any knowledge at all.
Superfluous knowledge would be preferable to no knowledge.
One side offers me no guiding light to direct my vision towards the truth, while the other just gouges my eyes out.
If I believe Protagoras there is nothing certain in the universe; if I believe Nausiphanes there is just the one certainty, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, only one thing exists; if Zeno, not even one.
Then what are we?
The things that surround us, the things on which we live, what are they?
Our whole universe is no more than a semblance of reality, perhaps a deceptive semblance, perhaps one without substance altogether.
I should find it difficult to say which of these people annoy me most, those who would have us know nothing or the ones who refuse even to leave us the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing.