Letter 40

I thank you for writing to me so often. For in the one way you can, you show yourself to me. Never do I receive a letter of yours but at once we are together. If portraits of absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew the memory and ease our longing with a false and empty comfort, how much more pleasant are letters, which bring the true traces, the true marks of an absent friend? For that which is sweetest in the sight of a friend, the hand impressed upon the letter affords: recognition.

You write that you have heard the philosopher Serapion, when he had put in at your shores. "He is wont to tear his words along at a great rush, which he does not let pour out one by one, but presses and crowds them on. For more of them come than a single voice can give vent to." This I do not approve in a philosopher, whose delivery too, like his life, ought to be composed; and nothing is well-ordered which is hurled headlong and hurries. Therefore that speech in Homer, rapid and falling without intermission after the manner of snow, is given to the younger orator; gentle and sweeter than honey it flows from the old man.

So hold to this, then: that swift and overflowing force of speaking is fitter for a quack than for one handling a great and serious matter and teaching. I no more wish a man to drip than to gallop; let him neither stretch the ear nor overwhelm it. For that scantiness and meagreness too holds the hearer less attentive through weariness at the slowness of interrupted speech; yet what is awaited sinks in more easily than what flies past. In short, men are said to hand down precepts to their disciples; but what flees is not handed down.

Add now this, that the speech which devotes its labour to truth ought to be unadorned and plain. This popular eloquence has nothing of truth; it wishes to move the crowd and to carry away unconsidered ears by its rush; it does not offer itself to be handled, it is whisked away. But how can that govern others which cannot be governed itself? And what of this, that the speech which is applied to the healing of minds ought to sink into us? Remedies do no good unless they stay.

Besides, such speech has much that is hollow and empty; it sounds more than it is worth. The things that terrify me must be soothed, the things that provoke me checked, the things that deceive me dispelled; luxury must be restrained, avarice rebuked; which of these can be done in a rush? What physician cures the sick in passing? Nay, has such a din of words tumbling out without choice even any pleasure in it?

But just as it is enough to have learned once that most things which you would not believe could be done can be done, so it is more than enough to have heard once those men who have practised words. For what would one wish to learn, what to imitate? What is one to judge of the mind of those whose speech is confused and let loose and cannot be reined in?

Just as men running down a slope do not halt their steps where they have a mind to, but the roused weight of the body carries them on and bears them farther than they wished, so that swiftness of speaking is neither in its own power nor at all becoming to philosophy, which ought to set its words down, not fling them out, and to proceed step by step.

"What then? Shall it never even rise up?" Why not? But with the dignity of its bearing preserved, which that violent and excessive force strips away. Let it have great strength, but tempered; let it be a lasting stream, not a torrent. Scarcely would I permit even an orator that headlong speed of speaking, irrecoverable and going forward without law. For how shall the judge be able to follow, a judge sometimes unskilled and untrained? Even then, when either display has carried the orator away or a passion not master of itself, let him hasten and heap on words only so much as the ears can endure.

You will do rightly, then, if you do not look to those who ask how much they say, not how, and if you yourself would rather, if you must, speak as Publius Vinicius did, who stammers. When it was asked how Publius Vinicius spoke, Asellius said, "Drawlingly." For Geminus Varius said, "How you can call that man eloquent I do not know; he cannot join three words together." Why should you not prefer to speak as Vinicius does?

Some witless fellow may intervene like the one who said to Vinicius, as he plucked out his words one by one, as though he were dictating rather than speaking: "Say, will you ever say anything?" For the headlong pace of Quintus Haterius, in his own day a most celebrated orator, I would have to be far removed from a man of sound mind; he never hesitated, never paused; once begun, he was once done.

Yet some things, I think, suit nations more or less. Among the Greeks you might tolerate this licence; we, even when we write, are used to punctuate. Our own Cicero too, from whom Roman eloquence sprang forth, was a stepper. Roman speech looks about and weighs itself more, and offers itself to be weighed.

Fabianus, an excellent man both in life and in learning and—what comes after these—in eloquence too, used to discourse fluently rather than headlong, so that you might call it ease, not speed. This I admit in a wise man, but do not exact; let his speech go forth without impediment, yet I would rather it were brought forth than that it flow.

For this reason I deter you the more from that disease, because that thing cannot fall to you otherwise than if you have ceased to feel shame; you must rub your brow hard and not listen to yourself. For that unobserved rush will carry off many things which you would wish to censure.

It cannot, I say, fall to you with your sense of shame preserved. Besides, there is need of daily exercise, and the study must be transferred from things to words. But these, even if they are at hand and able to run down without any labour of yours, must none the less be tempered. For just as a more modest gait befits a wise man, so does a controlled speech, not a bold one. The sum of sums, then, will be this: I bid you be slow of speech. Farewell.