Letter 83

You bid me set out for you my single days, and indeed in their entirety; you judge well of me, if you think there is nothing in them which I would hide. So at any rate we ought to live, as though we lived in the sight of others; so we ought to think, as though someone could look into our inmost breast, and indeed someone can. For what does it profit that something is kept secret from a man? Nothing is closed to God. He is present at our minds and enters into the midst of our thoughts, into the midst, I say, as one who at some time departs.

I will do, then, as you bid, and will gladly write to you what I do and in what order. I will keep watch on myself at once and, what is most useful, review my day. This is what makes us the worst of men, that no one looks back upon his own life. We think of what we are going to do. And yet the plan of the future comes from the past.

Today has been whole; no one has snatched anything of it from me. The whole of it has been divided between rest and reading. A very little has been given to exercise of the body, and on this score I give thanks to old age: it costs me little; the moment I bestir myself I am tired. And this is the end of exercise even for the strongest.

Do you ask after my trainers? One is enough for me, Pharius, a pleasant boy, as you know; but I shall change him. I am now in want of one less seasoned. He says that we have the same crisis, since the teeth are falling for both of us. But now I can scarcely keep up with him as he runs, and within a very few days I cannot keep up at all. See what daily exercise does. Soon the distance between two who go in opposite directions grows great; he climbs at the same moment that I come down, and you know how much more swiftly the latter is done than the former.

Yet you ask how today's contest fell out to us? What rarely befalls runners, we made a sacred match, a draw. From this fatigue, rather than exercise, I went down into the cold water; this with me means "not hot enough." That great cold-bather, who used to greet the channel on the first of January, who at the new year, just as I would begin to read, to write, to say something, would take the omen by leaping into the Maiden's water, first shifted his camp to the Tiber, then to this tub, which, when I am at my strongest and everything is done in good faith, the sun warms. I have not much energy left for the bath.

Then dry bread and a luncheon without a table, after which the hands need not be washed. I sleep very little. You know my habit: I use the briefest sleep, and as it were unyoke for a while. It is enough for me to have ceased to be awake. Sometimes I know that I have slept, sometimes I only suspect it.

Look, the shout of the circus din breaks in. Some sudden and universal cry strikes my ears. Yet it does not shake out my thought, nor even interrupt it. I bear the uproar most patiently. Many voices confused into one are to me like the surf, or the wind lashing a wood, and the other things that sound without meaning.

What is it, then, to which I have just now turned my mind? I will tell you. There remains with me from yesterday a thought: what those most prudent men meant who made the proofs of the greatest matters trifling and tangled, proofs which, granting they are true, are yet like falsehoods.

Zeno, a most great man, the founder of this most brave and most holy school, wishes to deter us from drunkenness. Hear, then, how he concludes that the good man will not become drunk: "No one entrusts a secret conversation to a drunken man; but to a good man one does entrust it; therefore the good man will not be drunk." Observe how he is mocked by an opposed question of a like kind. It is enough to set down one out of many: "No one entrusts a secret conversation to a sleeping man; but to a good man one does entrust it; the good man, therefore, does not sleep."

In the one way in which he can, Posidonius pleads our Zeno's case, but not even thus, in my opinion, can it be pleaded. For he says that "drunken" is used in two senses: in the one, when a man is heavy with wine and not master of himself; in the other, if he is accustomed to become drunk and is liable to this vice. He says that the man whom Zeno means is the one accustomed to become drunk, not the one who is drunk. To this latter no one will entrust secrets which he might disclose under the influence of wine.

Which is false. For that first question embraces the man who is drunk, not the one who is going to be drunk. For you will grant that there is a great difference between a drunken man and a drunkard. A man who is drunk may be so then for the first time and not have this vice, and a drunkard may often be free of drunkenness. And so I understand by the word what it is usually taken to mean, especially when it is set down by a man professing exactness and weighing his words. Add now that, if Zeno meant this and wished us to understand it, by the ambiguity of the word he sought an opening for trickery, which must not be done where truth is sought.

But grant that he did mean this; what follows is false, that a secret conversation is not entrusted to one accustomed to become drunk. For consider how many soldiers, not always sober, a general and a tribune and a centurion have charged with things to be kept secret. With regard to the murder of Gaius Caesar, I mean the one who, after overcoming Pompey, held the commonwealth, so much was entrusted to Tillius Cimber as to Gaius Cassius. Cassius drank water all his life; Tillius Cimber was both prone to wine and given to brawling. He himself joked about the matter: "Should I bear anyone," he said, "I who cannot bear my wine?"

Let each man now name to himself those to whom he knows that wine is ill entrusted but a conversation well; yet I will report one example which occurs to me, lest it slip away from memory by lying idle. For life must be furnished with illustrious examples. Let us not always take refuge in the ancients.

Lucius Piso, the guardian of the city, was drunk from the moment he was once made so. He spent the greater part of the night in feasting; he slept until almost the sixth hour; this was his morning. Yet he administered his office, which embraced the protection of the city, most diligently. To him the deified Augustus gave secret commissions when he set him over Thrace, which he subdued, and Tiberius, departing into Campania, when he was leaving in the city many things both suspected and hated.

I suppose that, because Piso's drunkenness had turned out well, he afterwards made Cossus prefect of the city, a man grave and moderate, but steeped and dripping with wine, so much so that once he was carried out of the senate, into which he had come from a feast, overcome by a sleep that could not be roused. To him nevertheless Tiberius wrote many things in his own hand, which he judged should not be entrusted even to his own servants. No secret, private or public, slipped from Cossus.

And so let us remove from our midst those declamations: "The mind, fettered by drunkenness, is not in its own power. As the very casks burst from the new wine, and all that lies at the bottom the force of the heat throws to the top, so when the wine boils up, whatever lies hidden at the bottom is brought forth and comes out into the midst. As men loaded with wine do not keep down their food when the wine overflows, so neither do they keep a secret. What is their own and what is another's, they pour out alike."

But although this is wont to happen, so also is the other wont, that with those whom we know to drink rather freely we deliberate about necessary matters. It is false, then, that which is set down as a defence, that nothing kept silent is entrusted to one accustomed to become drunk. How much better it is openly to accuse drunkenness and to lay bare its vices, which even a tolerable man would avoid, much more the perfect and the wise man, for whom it is enough to quench his thirst, who, even if at some time mirth, prolonged further for another's sake, has urged him on, yet stops short of drunkenness.

For as to that other question, we shall see whether the wise man's mind is thrown into confusion by too much wine and does the things usual to the drunken; meanwhile, if you wish to conclude that the good man ought not to become drunk, why do you proceed by syllogisms? Say how base it is to pour into oneself more than one can hold and not to know the measure of one's own stomach; how many things the drunken do at which the sober blush; that drunkenness is nothing else than voluntary madness. Prolong that condition of the drunken man over several days; will you doubt that it is madness?

Even now it is no less madness, only shorter. Bring forward the example of Alexander of Macedon, who ran Clitus, dearest and most faithful to him, through amid the feasting, and, when he understood the crime, wished to die, certainly ought to have. Drunkenness both kindles and lays bare every vice; it removes the shame that stands in the way of evil attempts. For more men abstain from forbidden things through shame at sinning than through good will.

When too great a force of wine has taken possession of the mind, whatever evil was lurking comes to the surface. Drunkenness does not make vices, but draws them out; then the lustful man does not even wait for a bedroom, but grants his desires whatever they ask without delay; then the unchaste man professes and publishes his disease; then the insolent man holds neither his tongue nor his hand. In the overbearing man pride grows, in the savage man cruelty, in the spiteful man malice. Every vice is given loose rein and comes into the open.

Add that ignorance of oneself, words doubtful and ill articulated, wavering eyes, a stumbling gait, dizziness of the head, the very roof seeming to move as though some whirlwind were turning the whole house round, the torments of the stomach when the wine ferments and distends the very entrails. Then, however, it is somehow bearable, while a man has his own force; but what of it when sleep has spoiled him and what was drunkenness has become a surfeit?

Think what disasters public drunkenness has wrought; it has betrayed to the enemy the fiercest and most warlike nations; it has laid open walls defended by the stubborn warfare of many years; it has overthrown into the power of others those most unyielding and disdaining the yoke; it has conquered by wine those unconquerable in battle.

Alexander, of whom I have just made mention, so many marches, so many battles, so many winters, through which he passed by overcoming the difficulty of times and places, so many rivers falling from an unknown source, so many seas sent him safely away; it was intemperance in drinking and that fatal cup of Hercules that laid him low.

What glory is it to hold much wine? When the prize has been yours, and those laid low in sleep and vomiting have refused your toasts, when you have survived the whole banquet, when you have conquered all by your magnificent prowess and no one has been so capacious of wine, you are conquered by the cask.

Mark Antony, a great man and of noble talent, what else ruined him and carried him over into foreign manners and un-Roman vices than drunkenness and his love of Cleopatra, no less than wine? This it was that made him an enemy of the commonwealth, this that rendered him no match for his enemies; this made him cruel, when the heads of the leading men of the state were brought to him at dinner, when amid the most elaborate feasts and royal extravagance he scrutinized the faces and hands of the proscribed, when, heavy with wine, he thirsted nonetheless for blood. It was unbearable that he should become drunk while doing these things; how much more unbearable that he did these things in drunkenness itself!

Cruelty for the most part follows wine-bibbing; for the soundness of the mind is corrupted and embittered. As long sickness makes men peevish and difficult, so a continuous succession of drunken bouts brutalizes the mind. For when for many days men have been out of their senses, the madness, having taken root, endures and follows up the vices conceived in wine.

Say, then, why the wise man ought not to become drunk. Show the foulness and the offensiveness of the thing by facts, not by words. What is easiest, prove that these things which are called pleasures, when they have overstepped the measure, are punishments. For if you will argue that the wise man is made drunk by much wine and keeps his right course even though tipsy, you may conclude that he will not die though he drink poison, nor sleep though he take a sleeping-draught, nor, having taken hellebore, will eject and cast down whatever sticks in his entrails. But if the feet are unsteady, the tongue stumbles, what reason is there why you should think him sober in part and in part drunk? Farewell.