Letter 114

You ask why, at certain periods, a style of corrupt character has come forth, and how minds have come to incline toward certain faults, so that at one time an inflated manner of exposition flourished, at another a broken one drawn out into the fashion of a song? Why at one time bold sentiments that overstepped belief gave pleasure, at another abrupt and pregnant epigrams, in which more had to be understood than was heard? Why there was an age which used the right of metaphor without shame? The reason is what you commonly hear, what among the Greeks passed into a proverb: as a man's life, so was his speech.

But just as each man's actions resemble his speech, so the manner of speaking sometimes imitates the public morals, if the discipline of the state has grown sick and given itself over to soft delights. The wantonness of public speech is a proof of public luxury, provided only it has been not in one man or another, but approved and received.

The colour of the talent cannot be one thing, of the mind another. If the mind is sound, if it is composed, grave, temperate, the talent too is dry and sober; when the mind is corrupted, the talent too is infected. Do you not see that, if the mind has grown languid, the limbs are dragged and the feet move sluggishly? If it is effeminate, that softness appears in the very gait? If it is keen and fierce, that the step is quickened? If it rages, or, what is like raging, is angry, that the body's motion is disordered, and that the man does not walk but is carried along? How much more do you think this happens to the talent, which is wholly mingled with the mind; by it the talent is shaped, it obeys it, from it it seeks its law.

How Maecenas lived is too well known to need telling now, how he walked, how dainty he was, how he longed to be seen, how he was unwilling that his vices should lie hidden. What then? Is not his speech as loose as he himself was ungirt? Are not his words as marked as his dress, as his retinue, as his house, as his wife? He would have been a man of great talent, if he had directed it by a straighter road, if he had not shunned to be understood, if he had not run to waste even in his speech. You will see, then, the eloquence of a drunken man, involved and wandering and full of licence.

What is more shameful than "a river and woods waving on the bank"? See how "they plough the channel with skiffs and, turning up the shallows, send back the gardens." What of this? "If a man curls at a woman's frown and coos with his lips and begins, sighing, like the lords of the grove who rave with weary neck." "An incurable faction, they probe at banquets and assail homes with the flagon and exact death by hope." "A Genius scarce a witness to his own festival." "Threads of a slender taper and a crackling meal-cake the mother or the wife wraps about the hearth." When you have read these, will it not at once occur to you that this is the man who always walked through the city in loosened tunics?

For even when he was discharging the duties of the absent Caesar, the watchword was sought from an ungirt man. This is the man who, on the tribunal, on the rostra, in every public gathering, appeared with his head veiled in a cloak and his ears left sticking out on either side, just as the runaway slaves of a rich man are wont to look in a mime. This is the man who, at the very time when the civil wars were resounding and the city was anxious and in arms, had as his escort in public two eunuchs, who were nevertheless more men than himself. This is the man who married a wife a thousand times, though he had but one. These words, so wickedly put together, so carelessly thrown out, so set against the usage of all men, show that his morals too were no less novel and perverse and singular.

The greatest praise is granted him for his clemency: he spared the sword, he abstained from blood, and showed what he could do by nothing else than his licence; but this very praise of his he corrupted by those monstrous dainties of his style.

For it is plain that he was soft, not gentle. This those rambling constructions, these words set crosswise, these strange sentiments—often great indeed, but unstrung as they come out—will make manifest to anyone. His head was turned by too much good fortune. This is sometimes the fault of the man, sometimes of the times.

When prosperity has spread luxury far and wide, men first begin to be more careful in the adornment of their persons. Then trouble is taken over furniture. Then care is lavished upon the houses themselves, that they may run out into the spaciousness of a country estate, that the walls may gleam with marbles imported across the seas, that the ceilings may be varied with gold, that the brilliance of the pavements may answer to the panelled ceilings. Then sumptuousness is transferred to the dinners, and there approval is sought from novelty and from a reversal of the accustomed order, so that what is wont to close a dinner is set first, and what was given to guests on their arrival is given to them on their departure.

When the mind has grown accustomed to disdain what is according to custom, and the usual things are to it like sordid ones, then even in speech it seeks what is new, and now recalls and brings forth ancient and obsolete words, now coins and bends unfamiliar ones, now—what has lately become frequent—a bold and frequent metaphor is held to be elegance.

There are those who cut their sentences short and hope for grace from this, if the sentence has hung in suspense and made the hearer suspect a hidden meaning. There are those who draw them out and prolong them. There are those who do not merely approach a fault—for a man attempting something grand must needs do this—but who love the fault itself. And so, wherever you see that a corrupt style gives pleasure, there it will be beyond doubt that the morals too have fallen away from the right. As luxury in banquets and in dress are signs of a sick state, so licence of speech, if only it is frequent, shows that the minds too, from which the words come, have collapsed.

You should not indeed wonder that corrupt things are received not only by the more sordid crowd, but by this more cultivated throng as well; for these men differ from one another in their togas, not in their judgements. You may rather wonder at this, that not only faulty things, but faults themselves, are praised. For that has always been done: no talent has pleased without indulgence. Give me whatever man of great name you wish; I will tell you what his age forgave him, what it knowingly overlooked in him. I will give you many to whom their faults did no harm, some to whom they were of profit. I will give you, I say, men of the greatest fame and set among things to be admired, whom whoever corrects, destroys; for the faults are so woven in with the virtues that they will bring those down along with themselves.

Add now that speech has no fixed rule; the custom of the state, which never stood long in the same place, turns it about. Many seek words from another age, they talk like the Twelve Tables. Gracchus and Crassus and Curio are to them too polished and too modern; they go back as far as Appius and Coruncanius. Some, on the contrary, while they want nothing but what is worn and customary, fall into meanness.

Each is corrupt in a different kind, just as much, by Hercules, as it is corrupt to be unwilling to use anything but splendid and sonorous and poetic words, and to shun the necessary and the things set in common use. I should say that the one sins as much as the other: the one adorns himself more than is right, the other neglects himself more than is right; the one shaves even his legs, the other not even his armpits.

Let us pass to composition. How many kinds shall I give you here in which men err? Some approve a broken and rough composition; they deliberately disturb it, if anything has flowed out too smoothly. They are unwilling that a juncture should be without a jolt; they think that virile and strong which strikes the ear by its unevenness. Of some it is not composition, but a melody; so does it coax and softly glide along.

What shall I say of that in which words are postponed and, long awaited, scarcely come back at the close? What of that lingering composition at the ending, such as Cicero's is, sloping and softly detaining, and answering to its own fashion and rhythm no otherwise than is its wont? The fault is not only in the kind of the sentiments, if they are either petty and childish, or wicked and more daring than is permitted with modesty safe, if they are florid and too sweet, if they end in emptiness and, without effect, do nothing more than make a sound.

These faults some one man introduces, under whom at the time eloquence stands, the rest imitate and hand them on one to another. So, when Sallust flourished, lopped sentences and words falling before they were expected and an obscure brevity were held as elegance. Lucius Arruntius, a man of rare frugality, who wrote a history of the Punic War, was a Sallustian and strove toward that kind. There is in Sallust: "he made an army with money," that is, procured it with money. This Arruntius began to love; he set it on every page. He says in one place: "they made a flight for our men." In another place: "Hiero, king of the Syracusans, made war." And in another place: "these things, when heard, made the people of Panhormus surrender to the Romans."

I wished to give you a taste; the whole book is woven of such things. What in Sallust were rare, in this man are frequent and almost continuous, and not without cause; for Sallust lighted upon these things by chance, but this man sought them out. You see, then, what follows, when someone's fault serves as a model.

Sallust said "with the waters wintering." Arruntius in the first book of the Punic War says: "suddenly the storm wintered." And in another place, when he wished to say that the year had been cold, he says: "the whole year wintered." And in another place: "thence he sent sixty light transports, besides the soldiers and the necessary crews, with the north wind wintering." He does not cease in every place to stuff in this word. In a certain place Sallust says: "amid civil arms he seeks reputations for fairness and goodness." Arruntius could not restrain himself from setting down at once in the first book that "there were great reputations about Regulus."

These faults, then, and faults of this kind, which imitation has stamped upon someone, are not signs of luxury nor of a corrupt mind; for they ought to be a man's own and born of himself, for you to estimate from them his disposition. An angry man's speech is angry, an over-excited man's too impetuous, a dainty man's tender and flowing.

Which you see those men pursue who either pluck out their beards or thin them, who clip and shave their lips close while keeping and letting grow the rest, who put on cloaks of an objectionable colour, who wear a transparent toga, who are unwilling to do anything which men's eyes might be allowed to pass over; they provoke those eyes and turn them upon themselves; they are willing even to be reproached, provided they are stared at. Such is the speech of Maecenas and of all the others who err not by chance but knowingly and willingly.

This springs from a great evil of the mind. As in wine the tongue does not stagger before the mind has yielded to the load and has bowed down or been betrayed, so that intoxication of style, what else is it, troublesome to no one, unless the mind totters? Therefore let the mind be cared for; from it come our sentiments, from it our words, from it our bearing, our look, our gait. When it is sound and strong, the speech too is robust, brave, manly; if it has collapsed, the rest also follow its ruin.

"While the king is safe, all have one mind; when he is lost, they break their faith." Our king is the mind. While it is safe, the rest remain at their duty, obey, comply; when it has wavered a little, they at once hesitate. But when it has yielded to pleasure, its arts too and its acts grow slack, and every effort proceeds from a languid and flabby source.

Since I have used this comparison, I will persist in it: our mind is at one time a king, at another a tyrant. It is a king when it looks to honourable things, when it cares for the well-being of the body committed to it, and commands it nothing base, nothing sordid. But when it is uncontrolled, greedy, dainty, it passes into a detestable and dread name and becomes a tyrant; then uncontrolled passions seize upon it and press hard, which at the beginning indeed rejoice, as a populace is wont to be vainly glutted with a largesse that will do it harm, and handle what it cannot swallow.

But when the disease eats away its strength more and more, and the dainties descend into the marrow and the sinews, it takes delight in the sight of those things by which, through too great greed, it has rendered itself unfit, and, in place of its own pleasures, has the spectacle of others', the procurer of lusts and the witness of those whose enjoyment it has taken from itself by overloading itself. Nor is it so pleasant to it to abound in delights as it is bitter that it does not pass all that apparatus through its gullet and belly, that it does not wallow with the whole crowd of catamites and women, and it grieves that a great part of its happiness, shut out by the narrowness of the body, lies idle.

For is not this, my dear Lucilius, the madness, that no one of us reflects that he is mortal, that no one reflects that he is weak? Nay, that no one of us reflects that he is but one! Look at our kitchens and the cooks running about among so many fires; do you think it is one belly for which food is got ready with so great a tumult? Look at our wine-cellars and our store-rooms full of the vintages of many ages; do you think it is one belly for which the wines of so many consuls and regions are shut up? Look in how many places the earth is turned over, how many thousands of farmers plough and dig; do you think it is one belly for which sowing is done both in Sicily and in Africa?

We shall be sound and shall desire moderately, if each man counts himself and at the same time measures his body, and knows how it can neither hold much nor for long. Yet nothing will profit you so much toward temperance in all things as the frequent reflection upon the brevity of life, and that this is uncertain; whatever you do, look toward death. Farewell.