Letter 108

What you ask about is one of those things which it concerns one to know only for the sake of knowing. But none the less, because it does concern you, you are in haste and unwilling to wait for the books which at this very moment I am arranging, containing the whole moral part of philosophy. I will dispatch it at once; yet I will first write how this craving for learning, with which I see you burning, should be ordered, lest it impede its own self.

We must neither pluck at things here and there, nor greedily fall upon them all at once; the whole is reached by parts. The load must be fitted to one's strength, nor must we take up more than we can be equal to. Not as much as you wish, but as much as you can hold, must be drawn off. Only keep a good heart; you will hold as much as you wish. The more the mind takes in, the more it expands itself.

I remember that Attalus used to give us this precept, when we besieged his school and came first and went out last, and even drew him into some discussions as he walked, for he was not only ready for learners but went to meet them. "The same purpose," he said, "ought to belong both to the teacher and to the learner: that the one wish to do good, the other to make progress."

He who comes to a philosopher should carry away with him something good each day: let him return home either sounder, or more curable. And he will return so; such is the power of philosophy that it helps not only those who study it, but even those who associate with it. He who has come into the sun, though he came not for this, will be tanned; those who have sat in a perfumer's shop and lingered a little longer carry away with them the scent of the place. And those who have been with a philosopher must needs have drawn off something to profit even the careless. Mark what I say: the careless, not the resisting.

What then? Do we not know some who have sat for many years with a philosopher and have not even taken a tinge of colour? Why should I not know them? Most persistent indeed and assiduous men, whom I call not the disciples of philosophers, but their lodgers.

Some come to hear, not to learn, just as we are drawn to the theatre for pleasure, to charm the ears with a speech or a voice or a play. You will see a great part of the audience to whom the philosopher's school is a lounging-place of leisure. They do not aim to lay aside any of their vices there, to receive any rule of life by which to test their conduct, but to enjoy a delight of the ears. Some, however, come even with note-tablets, not to catch the matter, but the words, which they utter with as little profit to others as they hear them without profit to themselves.

Some are roused by magnificent utterances and pass over into the feeling of the speakers, alert in face and mind, and are stirred no otherwise than eunuchs are wont to be by the sound of the Phrygian flute, raving at command. The beauty of things sweeps them along and goads them, not the sound of empty words. If anything is said keenly against death, anything defiantly against fortune, it delights us at once to put into practice what we hear. They are affected by these things and are such as they are bidden to be, if that shape remains in the mind, if the people, that dissuader from the honourable, does not at once intercept the notable impulse; few have been able to carry home the resolve they had conceived.

It is easy to rouse a hearer to a longing for what is right; for Nature has given to all the foundations and the seed of the virtues. We are all born for all these things; when an instigator approaches, then that good spirit, as if set free, is awakened. Do you not see how the theatres ring whenever something is said which we publicly acknowledge and by consent attest to be true?

"To poverty many things are lacking, to avarice all things." "The miser is good to no one, but worst of all to himself." At these verses even the most sordid man applauds and rejoices that reproach is cast upon his own faults; how much more, do you judge, does this come about when such things are said by a philosopher, when verses are inserted among wholesome precepts, to sink those same lessons more effectively into the minds of the untaught?

For, as Cleanthes used to say, just as our breath gives back a clearer sound when the trumpet, drawing it through the narrows of a long pipe, has at last poured it out at a wider opening, so the tight necessity of verse makes our meanings clearer. The same things are heard more carelessly and strike less, so long as they are said in loose prose; but when measures have been added and fixed feet have bound up an excellent meaning, that same sentiment is hurled, as it were, from a more vigorous arm.

Much is said about the contempt of money, and it is taught in the longest discourses that men should think their riches to lie in the mind, not in their estate, that he is wealthy who is fitted to his own poverty and has made himself rich with little; yet our minds are struck more when verses of this sort are spoken: "That mortal needs least who desires least." "He has what he wishes, who can wish for what is enough."

When we hear these and the like, we are led to a confession of the truth. For those to whom nothing is enough marvel, cry aloud, and proclaim hatred of money. When you have seen this feeling in them, press on, urge this, lay this load on, leaving aside ambiguities and syllogisms and quibbles and the rest of the toys of useless cleverness. Speak against avarice, speak against luxury; when you have seen that you have made progress and have stirred the minds of the hearers, press in more vehemently; it is past belief how much such a discourse profits when it is aimed at a cure and wholly turned to the good of the hearers. For tender natures are most easily won over to the love of the honourable and the right, and truth lays its hand upon those still teachable and lightly corrupted, if it has found a fitting advocate.

I at least, when I used to hear Attalus declaiming against vices, against errors, against the evils of life, often pitied the human race, and believed him to be sublime and higher than the summit of mankind. He himself said that he was a king, but he seemed to me to be more than a king, since he was permitted to exercise censorship over those who reign.

But when he had begun to commend poverty and to show that whatever exceeds use is a superfluous burden, heavy to the bearer, I often longed to go forth from the school a poor man. When he had begun to expose our pleasures, to praise a chaste body, a sober table, a mind pure not only from forbidden pleasures but even from superfluous ones, it pleased me to set bounds to my throat and belly.

Hence certain things have remained with me, Lucilius. For I had come to all of them with a great onset. Then, brought back to the life of the city, I kept few of what I had begun well. Hence oysters and mushrooms were renounced for my whole life; for they are not foods, but allurements, forcing the already sated to eat, which is most welcome to gluttons and to those who stuff themselves beyond what they can hold; easy to go down, easy to come back up.

Hence for my whole life I abstain from perfume, since the best scent on the body is none. Hence the stomach free of wine. Hence for my whole life I flee the bath; to boil the body down and exhaust it with sweats I believed both useless and effeminate. The rest of the things I had cast off have returned, yet in such a way that, of things whose abstinence I broke off, I keep a measure—and one indeed very near to abstinence, perhaps even more difficult, since some things are cut off more easily by the mind than tempered.

Since I have begun to set forth to you with how much greater an onset I came to philosophy as a youth than I go on with it as an old man, I shall not be ashamed to confess what love Pythagoras instilled in me. Sotion used to tell why Pythagoras abstained from animals, and why later Sextius did. The reason was different for each, but for each magnificent.

Sextius believed that man had enough of nourishment short of blood, and that a habit of cruelty arose where the tearing of flesh had been brought into a pleasure. He added that the materials of luxury must be cut down; he concluded that varied foods, foreign to our bodies, were contrary to good health.

But Pythagoras said that there was a kinship of all things with all, and a commerce of souls passing into one shape and another. No soul, if you believe him, perishes, nor even ceases save for a brief time, while it is poured over into another body. We shall see through what turns of time and when, after wandering through several dwellings, it returns into a man; in the meantime he made men fear crime and parricide, since they might, unaware, run upon the soul of a parent and violate it with the knife or the tooth, if in some creature there lodged a kindred spirit.

When Sotion had set forth these things and filled them out with his arguments, "Do you not believe," he said, "that souls are assigned to one body after another, and that what we call death is a migration? Do you not believe that in these herds or wild beasts, or in creatures plunged in water, there lingers the soul that was once a man's? Do you not believe that nothing perishes in this world, but only changes its region? And that not only the heavenly bodies are turned through fixed circuits, but that living things too pass in turn, and souls are driven round the cycle? Great men have believed these things."

And so suspend your judgement, but keep everything for yourself an open question. If these things are true, to have abstained from animals is innocence; if false, it is frugality. What loss to your credulity is there in this? I am snatching from you the food of lions and vultures.

Stirred by these things, I began to abstain from animals, and at the end of a year the habit was not only easy for me, but sweet. I believed my mind to be more active, and I would not affirm to you today whether it was. You ask how I left off? The time of my youth had fallen in the early principate of Tiberius Caesar. Foreign rites were then being expelled, but among the proofs of superstition was set down abstinence from certain animals. And so, at my father's request—who did not fear slander, but hated philosophy—I returned to my former habit. Nor did he persuade me with difficulty to begin dining better.

Attalus used to praise a mattress that resisted the body; such I use even as an old man, one in which no imprint can appear. I have related these things to prove to you how vehement an impulse young recruits have toward all that is best, if someone exhorts them, if someone sets them on fire. But some fault is committed through the fault of the teachers, who teach us to dispute, not to live; and some through the fault of the learners, who bring to their teachers a purpose not of cultivating the mind, but the wit. And so what was philosophy has been made philology.

But it matters much with what purpose you approach any subject. He who is going to be a grammarian and examines Virgil reads that excellent line, "irrecoverable time flees on," not with this mind: we must watch; unless we make haste, we shall be left behind; the swift day drives us and is driven; we are snatched along unawares; we arrange everything for the future and amid headlong things are slow; but he reads it to observe how often Virgil, when he speaks of the swiftness of the seasons, uses this word "flees." "The best days for wretched mortals flee first; on come diseases and gloomy old age and toil, and the cruelty of harsh death snatches them away."

But he who looks to philosophy brings these same lines to the use he ought: "Virgil," he says, "never says the days go, but flee, which is the most rapid kind of running, and that all the best things are first snatched away; why then do we delay to rouse ourselves, that we may be able to match the speed of a most rapid thing? The better things fly past, the worse come on."

Just as from a jar what is first to flow out is the purest, and all that is heaviest and most turbid settles to the bottom, so in our span of life what is best is in the first part. Do we allow that to be drained off by others, while we keep the dregs for ourselves? Let this cling to the mind and please us as though sent from an oracle: "The best days for wretched mortals flee first."

Why best? Because what remains is uncertain. Why best? Because as young men we can learn, can turn a mind still pliant and tractable to better things; because this time is fit for labours, fit for plying our wits with studies and exercising our bodies with works; what remains is more sluggish and more languid and nearer the end. Therefore let us do this with our whole mind, and, laying aside the things to which we turn off, let us labour at the one thing, lest, being left behind, we at last understand this speed of most fleeting time, which we cannot hold back. Let each first day, as if it were the best, please us and be reduced into our possession.

What flees must be seized. The man who reads that verse with the eyes of a grammarian does not reflect on this—that each best day is first because diseases come on, because old age presses, and hangs over the head even of those still thinking of adolescence; but he says that Virgil always sets diseases and old age together, and not, by Hercules, without reason. For old age is an incurable disease.

"Besides," he says, "Virgil has given old age this surname, he calls it 'gloomy': 'on come diseases and gloomy old age.' In another place he says: 'pale Diseases dwell, and gloomy Old Age.'" There is no reason for you to wonder that each gathers from the same material things suited to his own pursuits; in the same meadow the ox seeks grass, the dog the hare, the stork the lizard.

When some philologist takes up Cicero's book On the Commonwealth, here, and a grammarian there, and there one devoted to philosophy, each directs his attention elsewhere. The philosopher marvels that so much could be said against justice. When the philologist comes to this same reading, he notes this down: that there were two Roman kings, of whom the one had no father, the other no mother. For there is doubt about the mother of Servius; Ancus is said to have had no father, being the grandson of Numa.

Besides he notes that the man whom we call dictator, and whom we read so named in the histories, was among the ancients called master of the people. To this day it stands so in the books of the augurs, and the proof is that the man named by him is master of the horse. Equally he notes that Romulus perished during an eclipse of the sun; that there was an appeal to the people even from the kings; that this is so in the books of the pontiffs, and others think so, and Fenestella too.

When a grammarian unfolds the same books, first he puts down in his commentary that the word reapse is used by Cicero, that is, re ipsa, "in fact itself," and no less sepse, that is, se ipse, "himself." Then he passes to those things which the custom of the age has changed, as when Cicero says: "since by his interruption we have been called back from the very calx." This, which we now call in the circus creta (the chalk-line), the ancients called calx (the lime-line).

Then he gathers the verses of Ennius, and first of all those written about Africanus: "to whom no citizen nor enemy will be able to render a reward worthy of his deeds." From this he says he understands that ops among the ancients did not mean only "aid," but "service." For Ennius says that no one, neither citizen nor enemy, could render Scipio a reward worthy of his service.

Then he thinks himself fortunate that he has found whence it seemed good to Virgil to say: "over whom the huge gate of heaven thunders." Ennius, he says, filched this from Homer, and Virgil from Ennius. For there is in Cicero, in these very books On the Commonwealth, this epigram of Ennius: "If it is right for anyone to ascend to the regions of the heavenly ones, for me alone the great gate of heaven lies open."

But, that I myself, while I do something else, may not slip into being a philologist or a grammarian, I give this warning: that the hearing and reading of philosophers should be turned to the purpose of the happy life, not that we may hunt for ancient or coined words, or improper metaphors and figures of speech, but for precepts that will profit and for magnificent and spirited utterances, which may soon be transferred into action. Let us so learn these things that what have been words may become works.

But I judge that no men deserve worse of all mortals than those who have learned philosophy as though it were some saleable craft, who live otherwise than they teach men ought to live. For they carry themselves about as examples of a useless discipline, liable to every vice which they pursue with words.

No such teacher can profit me any more than a helmsman who is seasick in a storm. The helm must be held while the wave snatches it, one must struggle with the very sea, the sails must be wrenched from the wind; what help to me can be a steersman of the ship who is dumbstruck and vomiting? How much greater a storm do you think life is tossed by than any vessel? One must not talk, but steer.

Everything they say, everything they fling about with the crowd listening, is borrowed: Plato said those things, Zeno said them, Chrysippus and Posidonius and a vast army of our school, so many and such men. How they can prove these things to be their own, I will show: let them do what they have said.

Since I have now said what I wished to convey to you, I will now satisfy your desire, and will transfer entire into another letter the matter you had demanded, lest you come weary to a thorny subject, one to be heard with ears erect and curious. Farewell.