Letters From a Stoic (25 page)
Read Letters From a Stoic Online
Authors: Seneca
Irrestorable, Time flies
*
‘We need to bestir ourselves; life will leave us behind unless we make haste; the days are fleeting by, carried away at a gallop, carrying us with them; we fail to realize the pace at which we are being swept along; here we are making comprehensive plans for the future and generally behaving as if we had all the leisure in the world when there are precipices all around us.’ No, his purpose is to note that Virgil invariably uses this word ‘flies’ whenever he speaks of the swift passage of time.
Life’s finest days, for us poor human beings,
Fly first; the sicknesses and sufferings,
A bleak old age, the snatching hand
Implacable of merciless death, creep near.
†
It is the person with philosophy in his mind who takes these words in the way they are meant to be taken.
‘Virgil,’ he says, ‘never speaks of the hours as “passing” but as “flying”, this being the swiftest form of travel.
He is also telling us that the finest ones are the first to be borne away.
Then why are we so slow to get ourselves moving so as to be able to keep up with the pace of this swiftest of all things?’ The best parts of life are flitting by, the worse are to come.
The wine which is poured out first is the purest wine in the bottle, the heaviest particles and any cloudiness settling to the bottom.
It is just the same with human life.
The best comes first Are we going to let others drain it so as to keep the dregs for ourselves?
Let that sentence stick in your mind, accepted as unquestioningly as if it had been uttered by an oracle:
Life’s finest days, for us poor human beings,
Fly first.
Why finest?
Because what is to come is uncertain.
Why finest?
Because while we are young we are able to learn; when the mind is quick to learn and still susceptible to training we can turn it to better ends.
Because this is a good time for hard work, for studies as a means of keeping our brains alert and busy and for strenuous activities as a means of exercising our bodies; the time remaining to us afterwards is marked by relative apathy and indolence, and is all the closer to the end.
Let us act on this, then, wholeheartedly.
Let us cut out all distractions and work away at this alone for fear that otherwise we may be left behind and only eventually realize one day the swiftness of the passage of this fleeting phenomenon, time, which we are powerless to hold back.
Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable.
What flies past has to be seized at.
These thoughts never occur to someone who looks at the lines I have quoted through the eyes of our literary scholar.
He does not reflect that our first days are our best days for the very reason that ‘the sicknesses creep near’, with old age bearing down on us, hovering over our heads whilst our minds are still full of our youth.
No, his comment is that Virgil constantly couples ‘sicknesses’ and ‘old age’ (and not without good reason, I can tell you: I should describe old age itself as a kind of incurable sickness).
The scholar further remarks on the epithet attached to old age, pointing out that the poet speaks in the passage quoted of ‘bleak old age’ and in another passage writes
Where dwell wan Sicknesses and bleak Old Age.
*
There is nothing particularly surprising about this way which everyone has of deriving material for his own individual interests from identical subject-matter.
In one and the same meadow the cow looks for grass, the dog for a hare and the stork for a lizard.
When a commentator, a literary man and a devotee of philosophy pick up Cicero’s book
The State
, each directs his attention in different directions.
The philosopher finds it astonishing that so much could have been said in it by way of criticism of justice.
The commentator, coming to the very same reading matter, inserts this sort of footnote: ‘There are two Roman kings one of whom has no father and another no mother, the mother of Servius being a matter on which there is uncertainty, and Ancus, the grandson of Numa, having no father on record.’ He observes further that ‘the man to whom we give the title Dictator and read about in the history books under the same name was called the Master of the Commons by the early Romans; this title survives to the present day in the augural records, and the fact that the person appointed by him as his deputy was known as the Master of the Knights is evidence that this is correct.’ He similarly observes that ‘Romulus died during an eclipse of the sun’; that ‘the right of appeal to the Commons was recognized as early as the period of the monarchy; there is authority for this in the pontifical records, in the opinion of a number of scholars, in particular Fenestella.’ When the literary scholar goes through the same book, the first thing he records in his notebook is Cicero’s use of
reapse
for
re ipse
, and
sepse
likewise for
se ipse
.
He then goes on to examine changes in usage over the years.
Where, for example, Cicero uses the expression: ‘Since we have been called back right from the
calx
by this interruption of his’, he notes that the
calx
was the name which the old Romans gave to the finishing line in the stadium that we nowadays call the
creta.
The next thing he does is assemble lines
from Ennius, and in particular those referring to Scipio of Africa:
None, foe nor Roman, can assess the value
Of his succour and do justice to his feats.
*
From this passage the scholar claims to deduce that the word ‘succour’ to the early Romans signified the rendering not merely of assistance but of actual services, Ennius saying that no one, foe or Roman, was capable of assessing the value of the services Scipio rendered Rome.
Next he congratulates himself on discovering the source from which Virgil chose to take the following:
Above whose head the mighty gates of heaven
Thunder.
†
He tells us that Ennius filched the idea from Homer and that Virgil filched it from Ennius, there being a couplet of Ennius (preserved in this very work of Cicero’s I was mentioning,
The State
) which reads
If any man may rise to heaven’s levels,
To me, alone, lie open heaven’s huge gates.
But enough, or before I know where I am I shall be slipping into the scholar’s or commentator’s shoes myself.
My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life.
We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application – not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech – and learn them so well that words become works.
No one to my mind lets humanity down quite
so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live.
People prone to every fault they denounce are walking advertisements of the uselessness of their training.
That kind of man can be of no more help to me as an instructor than a steersman who is seasick in a storm – a man who should be hanging on to the tiller when the waves are snatching it from his grasp, wrestling with the sea itself, rescuing his sails from the winds.
What good to me is a vomiting and stupefied helmsman?
And you may well think the storm of life is a great deal more serious than any which ever tosses a boat.
What is needed is a steering hand, not talking.
And apart from this, everything which this kind of man says, everything he tosses out to a thronging audience, belongs to someone else.
The words were said by Plato, said by Zeno, said by Chrysippus and Posidonius and a whole host more of Stoics like them.
Let me indicate here how men can prove that their words are their own: let them put their preaching into practice.
Now that I’ve given you the message I wanted to convey to you, I’ll go on from here to satisfy that wish of yours.
But I’ll transfer what you wanted from me to another, fresh letter, to avoid your coming mentally weary to a subject which is a thorny one and needs to be followed with a conscientious and attentive ear.
Y
OU
ask why it is that at certain periods a corrupt literary style has come into being; and how it is that a gifted mind develops a leaning towards some fault or other (resulting in the prevalence at one period of a bombastic form of exposition,
at another of an effeminate form, fashioned after the manner of songs); and why it is that at one time approval is won by extravagant conceits and at another by sentences of an abrupt, allusive character that convey more to the intelligence than to the ear; and why there have been eras in which metaphors have been shamelessly exploited.
The answer lies in something that you hear commonly enough, something which among the Greeks has passed into a proverb: people’s speech matches their lives.
And just as the way in which each individual expresses himself resembles the way he acts, so in the case of a nation of declining morals and given over to luxury forms of expression at any given time mirror the general behaviour of that society.
A luxuriant literary style, assuming that it is the favoured and accepted style and not just appearing in the odd writer here and there, is a sign of an extravagant society.
The spirit and the intellect cannot be of different hues.
If the spirit is sound, if it is properly adjusted and has dignity and self-control, the intellect will be sober and sensible too, and if the former is tainted the latter will be infected as well.
You’ve observed surely, how a person’s limbs drag and his feet dawdle along if his spirit is a feeble one?
And how the lack of moral fibre shows in his very gait if his spirit is addicted to soft living?
And how if his spirit is a lively and dashing one his step is brisk?
And how if it is a prey to madness or the similar state of anger, his body moves along in an uncontrolled sort of way, in a rush rather than a walk?
Isn’t this all the more likely to be the case where a person’s intellect is concerned, his intellect being wholly bound up with his spirit – moulded by and responsive to it and looking to it for guidance?
The manner in which Maecenas lived is too well known for there to be any need to describe the way he walked, his self-indulgent nature, his passion for self-display, his reluctance that his faults should escape people’s notice.
Well, then, wasn’t
his style just as undisciplined as his dress was sloppy?
Wasn’t his vocabulary just as extraordinary as his turnout, his retinue, his house, his wife?
He would have been a genius if he had pursued a more direct path instead of going out of his way to avoid being intelligible, had he not been as loose in matters of style as he was in everything else.
Which is why you’ll notice that his eloquence resembles a drunken man’s, tortuous and rambling and thoroughly eccentric.
Could there be a worse expression than ‘the bank with mane of stream and woods’?
And look at ‘men tilling with wherries the channel, driving the gardens back with the shallows’ churning over’.
What about a person ‘curvetting at a woman’s beck, with lips on billing bent, a sigh the opening of his addresses, neck lolling like a forest giant in his ecstasy’?
‘The unregenerate company rummage homes for victuals, raiding them with provision jars and trading death for hope.’ ‘But hardly should I call as witness on his holy day my guardian spirit.’ ‘Else the wick of a slender waxlight and sputtering meal.’ ‘Mothers or wives accoutre the hearth’ When you read this sort of thing, doesn’t it immediately cross your mind that this is the same man who invariably went around with casual clothes on in the capital (even when Maecenas was discharging the emperor’s duties during the absence of Augustus, the officer coming to him for the daily codeword would find him in informal attire), who appeared on the bench, on the platform and at any public gathering wearing a mantle draped over his head leaving both ears exposed, looking just like the rich man’s runaway slave as depicted on the comic stage?
The same man whose public escort, at a time when the nation was embroiled in a civil war and the capital was under arms and in a state of alarm, consisted of a pair of eunuchs, and who went through a thousand ceremonies of marriage with his one wife?
These expressions of his, strung together in such an outrageous fashion, tossed out in such a careless manner, constructed
with such a total disregard of universal usage, reveal a character equally revolutionary, equally perverted and peculiar.
Maecenas’ greatest claim to glory is regarded as having been his clemency: he spared the sword, refrained from bloodshed and showed his power only in his defiance of convention.
But he has spoilt this very claim of his by these monstrous stylistic frolics; for it becomes apparent that he was not a mild man but a soft one.
That perplexing word order, those transpositions of words and those startling ideas which have indeed the quality of greatness in them but which lose all their effect in the expression, will make it obvious to anyone that his head was turned by overmuch prosperity.
It is a fault which is sometimes that of the man and sometimes that of the age.
Where prosperity has spread luxury over a wide area of society, people start by paying closer attention to their personal turnout.
The next thing that engages people’s energies is furniture.
Then pains are devoted to the houses themselves, so as to have them running out over broad expanses of territory, to have the walls glowing with marble shipped from overseas and the ceilings picked out in gold, to have the floors shining with a lustre matching the panels overhead.
Splendour then moves on to the table, where praise is courted through the medium of novelty and variations in the accustomed order of dishes, making what normally rounds off a meal the first course and giving people as they go what they used before to be given on arrival.
Once a person’s spirit has acquired the habit of disdaining what is customary and regards the usual as banal, it starts looking for novelty in its methods of expression as well.
At one moment it will disinter and revive archaic or obsolete expressions; at another it will coin new, unheard of expressions and give a word a new form; at another – this is something that has become very common recently – the bold and frequent use of
metaphor passes for good style.
There are some who cut their thoughts short and hope to win acclaim by making their meaning elusive, giving their audience a mere hint of it; there are others who stretch them out, reluctant to let them go; there are others still who do not merely fall into a defect of style (which is something that is inevitable if one is striving for any lofty effect), but have a passion for the defect for its own sake.
So wherever you notice that a corrupt style is in general favour, you may be certain that in that society people’s characters as well have deviated from the true path.
In the same way as extravagance in dress and entertaining are indications of a diseased community, so an aberrant literary style, provided it is widespread, shows that the spirit (from which people’s words derive) has also come to grief.
And in fact you need feel no surprise at the way corrupt work finds popularity not merely with the common bystander but with your relatively cultivated audience: the distinction between these two classes of critic is more one of dress than of discernment.
What you might find more surprising is the fact that they do not confine themselves to admiring passages that contain defects, but admire the actual defects themselves as well.
The former thing has been the case all through history – no genius that ever won acclaim did so without a measure of indulgence.
Name me any man you like who had a celebrated reputation, and I’ll tell you what the age he lived in forgave him, what it turned a blind eye to in his work.
I’ll show you plenty of stylists whose faults never did them any harm and some who were actually helped by them.
I’ll even say this: I could show you some men of the highest renown, men held up as objects of wonder and admiration, in whose case to amend their faults would be to destroy them, their faults being so inextricably bound up with their virtues.
Besides, there are no fixed rules of style.
They are governed
by the usage of society and usage never stands still for any length of time.
Many speakers hark back to earlier centuries for their vocabulary, talking in the language of the Twelve Tables.
*
Gracchus, Crassus and Curio are too polished and modern for them.
They go right back to Appius and Coruncanius.
Others, by contrast, in seeking to confine themselves to familiar, everyday expressions, slip into an undistinguished manner.
Both these practices, in their different ways, are debased style (quite as much so as the rejection of any expression that is not high-sounding, florid and poetical, avoiding the indispensable expressions in normal use).
The one is as much a fault as the other, in my view, the first paying undue attention to itself and the second unduly neglecting itself.
The former removes the hair from its legs as well, the latter not even from its armpits.
Let us turn our attention to composition.
How many species of fault can I show you where this is concerned?
Some like it broken and uneven, and go out of their way to disarrange any passage with a relatively smooth and even flow.
They want every transition to come with a jolt, and see virility and forcefulness in a style the irregularities of which jar the ear.
With some other literary figures it is not a case of composition but of setting words to melodies, so sweetly, softly do they glide along.
What shall I say about the kind in which words are held back and keep us waiting for a long time before they make their reluctant appearance right at the end of the period?
What of that, like Cicero’s, which moves to its conclusion in a leisurely fashion, in a gentle and
delayed incline, and unvaryingly true to its customary rhythm?
In the field of the epigram, too, faults comprise a tameness and childishness, or a boldness and daring that oversteps the bounds of decency, or a richness that has a cloying quality, or a barrenness in the outcome, an ineffectiveness, a ringing quality and nothing more.
These faults are introduced by some individual dominating letters at the time, are copied by the rest and handed on from one person to another.
Thus in Sallust’s heyday abruptly terminated sentences, unexpectedly sudden endings and a brevity carried to the point of obscurity passed for a polished style.
Lucius Arruntius, the historian of the Punic War and a man of unusual simplicity of character, was a follower of Sallust and strove after that kind of style.
‘By means of money he procured an army’, hired one, in other words, is an expression found in Sallust.
Arruntius took a fancy to this expression ‘procured’ and found a place for it on every page, saying in one passage: ‘They procured our rout’, in another: ‘King Hiero of Syracuse procured a war’, and in another: ‘This news procured the surrender of the people of Panormus to the Romans.’ These are merely by way of giving you samples of the practice – the whole book is rife with them.
What was occasional in Sallust is of frequent, almost incessant occurrence in Arruntius, which is easily enough explained, for whereas Sallust hit on such expressions Arruntius cultivated them.
You can see what the result is when some writer’s fault is taken as a model.
Sallust spoke of ‘wintry rains’.
Arruntius, in the first book of
The Punic War
, says: ‘Suddenly the weather was wintry.’ In another place, when he wants to describe a particular year as having been a cold one, he says: ‘The whole year was wintry.’ In another passage he writes: ‘From there he despatched sixty transport vessels, lightly laden apart from troops and essential
crew, in spite of a wintry northerly gale.’ He drags the word in constantly, in every conceivable place.
Sallust at one point writes: ‘Seeking, amid civil war, the plaudits of rectitude and integrity’.
Arruntius was unable to restrain himself from inserting right at the beginning of his first book mention of Regulus’ tremendous ‘plaudits’.
Now these faults, and others like them, stamped on a writer’s style by imitation, are not themselves evidence of extravagant ways or corrupt attitudes.
For the things upon which you base any judgement on a person’s psychology must be things peculiar to himself, things that spring from his own nature, a hot-tempered man having a hot-tempered style, an emotional man an over-excited one, a self-indulgent man a soft and flabby one and so on.
And the last is the manner one observes adopted by the sort of person who has his beard plucked out, or has it plucked out in parts, who keeps himself close-shaven and smooth around his lips but leaves the rest of it to grow, who wears cloaks in flamboyant colours, who wears a diaphanous robe, who is reluctant to do anything that might escape people’s attention, who provokes and courts such attention and so long as he is looked at does not mind whether it is with disapproval.
Such is the manner of Maecenas and every other writer whose stylistic errors are not accidental but deliberate and calculated.
It is something that stems from a serious affliction of the spirit.
When a person is drinking his tongue only starts stumbling after his mental faculties have succumbed and given way or broken down.
The same applies with this drunkenness – what else can one regard it as?
– of style.
No one suffers from it unless his spirit is unstable.
See, then, that the spirit is well looked after.
Our thoughts and our words proceed from it.
We derive our demeanour and expression and the very way we walk from it.
If the spirit is sound and healthy our style will be firm and forceful
and virile, but if the spirit tumbles all the rest of our personality comes down in ruins with it.