Letters From a Stoic (19 page)

Philosophy has the single task of discovering the truth about the divine and human worlds.
The religious conscience, the sense of duty, justice and all the rest of the close-knit, interdependent ‘company of virtues’, never leave her side.
Philosophy has taught men to worship what is divine, to love what is human, telling us that with the gods belongs authority, and among human beings fellowship.
That fellowship lasted for a long time intact, before men’s greed broke society up – and impoverished even those she had brought most riches; for people cease to possess everything as soon as they want everything for themselves.

The first men on this earth, however, and their immediate descendants, followed nature unspoiled; they took a single person as their leader and their law, freely submitting to the decisions of an individual of superior merit.
It is nature’s way to subordinate the worse to the better.
With dumb animals, indeed, the ones who dominate the group are either the biggest or the fiercest.
The bull who leads the herd is not the weakling, but the one whose bulk and brawn has brought it victory over the other males.
In a herd of elephants the tallest is the leader.
Among human beings the highest merit means the highest position.
So they used to choose their ruler
for his character.
Hence peoples were supremely fortunate when among them a man could never be more powerful than others unless he was a better man than they were.
For there is nothing dangerous in a man’s having as much power as he likes if he takes the view that he has power to do only what it is his duty to do.

In that age, then, which people commonly refer to as the Golden Age, government, so Posidonius maintains, was in the hands of the wise.
They kept the peace, protected the weaker from the stronger, urged and dissuaded, pointed out what was advantageous and what was not.
Their ability to look ahead ensured that their peoples never went short of anything, whilst their bravery averted dangers and their devotedness brought well-being and prosperity to their subjects.
To govern was to serve, not to rule.
No one used to try out the extent of his power over those to whom he owed that power in the first place.
And no one had either reason or inclination to perpetrate injustice, since people governing well were equally well obeyed, and a king could issue no greater threat to disobedient subjects than that of his own abdication.

But with the gradual infiltration of the vices and the resultant transformation of kingships into tyrannies, the need arose for laws, laws which were themselves, to begin with, drafted by the wise.
Solon, who established Athens as a democratic state, was one of the seven men of antiquity celebrated for their wisdom.
If the same age had produced Lycurgus, an eighth name would have been added to that revered number.
The laws of Zaleucus and Charondas are still admired.
And it was not in public life or in the chambers of lawyers that these two men learnt the constitutional principles which they were to establish in Sicily (then in its heyday) and throughout the Greek areas of Italy, but in the secret retreat, now hallowed and famous, of Pythagoras.

Thus far I agree with Posidonius.
But that philosophy discovered the techniques employed in everyday life, that I refuse to admit.
I will not claim for philosophy a fame that belongs to technology.
‘It was philosophy,’ says Posidonius, ‘that taught men how to raise buildings at a time when they were widely dispersed and their shelter consisted of huts or burrowed-out cliffs or hollowed tree trunks.’ I for my part cannot believe that philosophy was responsible for the invention of these modern feats of engineering that rise up storey after storey, or the cities of today crowding one against the next, any more than of our fish-tanks, those enclosures designed to save men’s gluttony from having to run the risk of storms and to ensure extravagance safe harbours of her own, however wildly the high seas may be raging, in which to fatten separately the different kinds of fish.
Are you really going to tell me that philosophy taught the world to use keys and bolts on doors – which was surely nothing but a signal for greed?
Was it philosophy that reared the towering buildings we know today, with all the danger they mean to the people living in them?
It was not enough, presumably, for man to avail himself of whatever cover came to hand, to have found a shelter of some kind or other in nature without trouble and without the use of skills.
Believe me, that age before there ever existed architects or builders was a happy age.
The squaring off of timbers, the accurate cutting of beams with a saw that travels along a marked out line, all these things came in with extravagance.

The wise man then followed a simple way of life – which is hardly surprising when you consider how even in this modern age he seeks to be as little encumbered as he possibly
can.
How, I ask you, can you consistently admire both Daedalus and Diogenes?
Tell me which of these two you would say was a wise man, the one who hit on the saw, or the one who on seeing a boy drinking water from the hollow of his hand, immediately took the cup out of his knapsack and smashed it, telling himself off for his stupidity in having superfluous luggage about him all that time, and curled himself up in a jar
⁵⁶
and went to sleep.
And today just tell me which of the following you consider the wiser man: the one who discovers a means of spraying saffron perfumes to a tremendous height from hidden pipes, who fills or empties channels in one sudden rush of water, who constructs a set of interchangeable ceilings for a dining room in such a way as to produce a constant succession of different patterns, with a change of ceiling at each course?
Or the one who proves to others and to himself that nature makes no demand on us that is difficult or hard to meet and that we can live without the marble-worker and the engineer, that we can clothe ourselves without importing silks, that we can have the things we need for our ordinary purposes if we will only be content with what the earth has made available on its surface.
If they only cared to listen to this man, the human race would realize that cooks are as unnecessary to them as are soldiers.

That race of men to whom taking care of the body was a straightforward enough matter were, if not philosophers, something very like it.
The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort.
Follow nature and you will feel no need of craftsmen.
It was nature’s desire that we should not be kept occupied this.
She equipped us for everything she required us to contend with.
‘But the naked body can’t stand cold.’ So what?
Are the skins of wild beasts and other creatures not capable of giving us more than adequate protection against
the cold?
Is it not a fact that many peoples make a covering for their bodies out of bark, that feathers are sewn together to serve as clothing, that even today the majority of the Scythians wear the pelts of fox and mice, which are soft to the touch and impervious to wind?
Are you going to tell me too that any people you care to mention never used their hands to weave a basketwork of wattles, smear it all over with common mud and then cover the whole roof with long grass-stems and other material growing wild, and went through winter weather, the rains streaming down the slopes of the roof, without any worry?
‘But we need some pretty dense shade to keep off the heat of the sun in summer.’ So what?
Have past ages not left us plenty of hiding places that have been carved out by the ravages of time, or whatever other cause one cares to suppose, and have developed into caves?
And again, is it not a fact that Syrtian tribes take shelter in pits dug in the ground, as do other people who, because of extreme sun temperatures, find nothing less than the baked earth itself sufficiently substantial as a protective covering against the heat?
When nature granted all the other animals a simple passage through life, she was not so unfair to man as to make it impossible for him, for him alone, to live without all these skills.
Nature demanded nothing hard from us, and nothing needs painful contriving to enable life to be kept going.
We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by.
Shelter and apparel and the means of warming body and food, all the things which nowadays entail tremendous trouble, were there for the taking, free to all, obtainable at trifling effort.
With everything the limit corresponded to the need.
It is we, and no one else, who have made those same things costly, spectacular and obtainable only by means of a large number of full-scale techniques.

Nature suffices for all she asks of us.
Luxury has turned her back on nature, daily urging herself on and growing through all the centuries, pressing men’s intelligence into the development of the vices.
First she began to hanker after things that were inessential, and then after things that were injurious, and finally she handed the mind over to the body and commanded it to be the out and out slave of the body’s whim and pleasure.
All those trades that give rise to noise or hectic activity in the city are in business for the body, which was once in the position of the slave, having everything issued to it, and is now the master, having everything procured for it.
This is the starting point for textile and engineering workshops, for the perfumes used by chefs, the sensual movements of our dancing teachers, even sensual and unmanly songs.
And why?
Because the bounds of nature, which set a limit to man’s wants by relieving them only where there is necessity for such relief, have been lost sight of; to want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor.

It is incredible, Lucilius, how easily even great men can be carried away from the truth by the sheer pleasure of holding forth on a subject.
Look at Posidonius, in my opinion one of those who have contributed most to philosophy, when he wants to give a description of how, in the first place, some threads are twisted and others drawn out from the soft, loose hank of wool, then how the warp has its threads stretched perpendicularly by means of hanging weights, and how the weft (worked in to soften the hard texture of the warp threads which compress it on either side) is made compact and close by means of the batten; he declares that philosophers invented the art of the weaver too, forgetting that philosophers had disappeared by the time this comparatively advanced type of weaving in which