Letter 122

The day has now felt its loss. It has rebounded somewhat, yet so that there is still a liberal space, if a man rises with the day itself, so to speak. He is more dutiful and better who awaits the day and catches the first light; base is he who lies half-asleep when the sun is high, whose waking begins at midday; and to many even this is before dawn.

There are those who have reversed the offices of day and night, and do not open their eyes, heavy with yesterday's debauch, before night begins to come on. Such as the condition is said to be of those whom Nature, as Virgil says, has placed beneath our seats on the opposite side—"and when the first Dawn breathes upon us with her panting horses, for them the reddening Evening-star kindles his late lamps"—such is the life, not the region, of these men, contrary to all. There are certain antipodes in the very same city, who, as Marcus Cato says, have never seen either the rising or the setting sun.

Do you think that these men know how one should live, who do not know when? And do these men fear death, in which they have buried themselves while still alive? They are as ill-omened as night-birds. Though they pass their darkness in wine and perfume, though they draw out the whole time of their perverse waking in feasts, and those cooked down into many courses, they do not banquet, but make their own funeral rites. The dead, at least, have their offerings paid by day. But, by Hercules, no day is long to a man who is doing something. Let us extend life; its duty and its proof is action. Let the night be cut short, and let something of it be transferred to the day.

Fowls that are got ready for banquets, that, kept motionless, they may fatten easily, are kept in the dark; so, to those who lie without any exercise, a swelling invades the sluggish body, and an idle plumpness grows upon them in their proud shade. But the bodies of these men, who have dedicated themselves to darkness, are foul to look upon. Indeed, their colour is more suspect than that of those suffering from a disease; pale they are, languid and faded, and in the living the flesh is that of a corpse. Yet I should call this the least of the evils in them. How much more darkness is there in the mind! That is stunned within itself, that is darkened, it envies the blind. Who ever had eyes for the sake of darkness?

You ask how this perversity comes upon the mind, of turning away from the day and transferring the whole of life into the night? All vices fight against Nature, all forsake the due order. This is the aim of luxury, to rejoice in things perverse, and not only to depart from the right, but to go as far as possible away, and then even to stand in its very contrary.

Do they not seem to you to live against Nature who drink fasting, who take wine into empty veins and pass over to food drunk? And yet this is a frequent vice of young men, who cultivate their strength, so that almost on the very threshold of the bath they drink among the naked, nay, carouse, and then again and again scrape off the sweat which they have raised by their frequent and heated draughts. To drink after luncheon or dinner is vulgar; this rustic heads of families do, and men ignorant of true pleasure. That unmixed wine delights them which does not float upon food, which penetrates freely to the sinews; that intoxication pleases which comes into an empty place.

Do they not seem to you to live against Nature who exchange their dress with women? Do they not live against Nature who strive that boyhood may shine at an age not its own? What can be done more cruel or more wretched? Will he never be a man, that he may long endure a man? And when his sex ought to have rescued him from outrage, will not even his age rescue him?

Do they not live against Nature who long for the rose in winter, and by a fomentation of warm waters and an apt change of heat force forth in midwinter the lily, a flower of spring? Do they not live against Nature who plant orchards on the tops of towers? Whose woods wave on the roofs and gables of houses, their roots springing from a place to which they would have wickedly thrust their tops? Do they not live against Nature who lay the foundations of baths in the sea, and do not think they swim daintily enough unless their heated pools are beaten by wave and tempest?

When they have made it their rule to wish all things contrary to the custom of Nature, at last they grow wholly unaccustomed to her. It is light: it is the time for sleep. It is quiet: now let us be exercised, now let us be driven about, now let us lunch. Now the daylight draws nearer: it is the time for dinner. One must not do what the people does. It is a sordid thing to live by the worn and common road. Let the public day be abandoned: let a morning of our own and peculiar to us be made for us.

These men are to me in the place of the dead. For how little are they removed from a funeral, and a bitter one at that, who live by torches and tapers? We remember that many lived this life at the same time, among them Acilius Buta, a man of praetorian rank, to whom, after a huge patrimony had been consumed, when he confessed his poverty, Tiberius said: "You have awakened too late."

Julius Montanus was reciting a poem, a tolerable poet and known both for the friendship of Tiberius and for his coldness. Risings and settings of the sun he most gladly inserted. And so, when a certain man was indignant that he had recited the whole day and declared that one should not go to his recitations, Pinarius Natta said: "I can never act more liberally: I am ready to hear him from rising to setting."

When he had recited these verses—"Phoebus begins to bring forth his burning flames, the ruddy day to spread itself; now the sad swallow, returning, begins to bring food to her shrill nestlings, and shares it out, serving it from her soft beak"—Varus, a Roman knight, a companion of Marcus Vinicius, an attender of good dinners, which he earned by the wickedness of his tongue, exclaimed: "Buta is beginning to sleep." Then, when he had presently recited:

"Now the shepherds have placed their herds in the stalls, now sluggish night begins to give silence to the drowsing lands," the same Varus said: "What do you say? Is it night already? I will go and pay my respects to Buta." Nothing was more notorious than this life of his, turned about into the contrary; which, as I said, many lived at the same time.

But the reason for living so is, for some, not that they think the night itself has anything more pleasant, but that nothing accustomed pleases them, and the light is grievous to a bad conscience, and to one craving or despising all things, according as they have been bought at a great price or a small, the daylight, which costs nothing, is wearisome. Besides, the luxurious wish that their life should be talked of while they live; for if there is silence, they think they are wasting their labour. And so they are ill at ease whenever they do anything that may escape report. Many devour their estates, many keep mistresses. To get a name among these men, you must do a thing not only luxurious, but notable; in a city so busy, ordinary wickedness finds no gossip.

We had heard Pedo Albinovanus relating—and he was a most elegant teller of tales—that he had lived above the house of Sextus Papinius. He was one of this crowd of light-shunners. "I hear," he said, "about the third hour of the night the sound of whips. I ask what he is doing; he is said to be going over his accounts. I hear about the sixth hour of the night an excited shouting; I ask what it is; he is said to be exercising his voice. I ask about the eighth hour of the night what that noise of wheels means; he is said to be taking a drive."

"About daybreak there is a running to and fro, the slaves are called, the butlers, the cooks are in an uproar. I ask what it is; he is said to have called for mead and barley-water, to have come out of the bath." "His dinner," he said, "by no means exceeded the day, for he lived very frugally; he consumed nothing but the night." And so, when certain men said that he was greedy and sordid, "You," he said, "will call him a lamp-liver too."

You should not wonder if you find such great peculiarities of the vices; they are various, they have innumerable faces, their kinds cannot be comprehended. Simple is the care of the right, manifold that of the wrong, and it admits of ever so many new deviations. The same befalls morals; those of men who follow Nature are easy, are free, have slight differences; the morals of these distorted men are most at variance both with all others and among themselves.

Yet the chief cause of this disease seems to me to be a disdain of the common life. As they distinguish themselves from the rest by their dress, by the elegance of their dinners, by the neatness of their carriages, so they wish to separate themselves also by the arrangement of their hours. They are unwilling to sin in the usual way, who have for the reward of their sinning infamy. This all these men seek who, so to speak, live backwards.

Therefore, Lucilius, we must keep to the road that Nature has prescribed, and not turn aside from it; for those who follow it all things are easy and ready, but for those who strive against it there is no other life than that of men rowing against the stream. Farewell.