Letter 86

I write this to you as I lie in the very villa of Scipio Africanus, having paid my respects to his shade and to the altar which I suspect is the tomb of so great a man. As for his soul, I persuade myself that it has returned to heaven, from which it came, not because he led great armies, for these the frenzied Cambyses too had, who used his frenzy with success, but on account of his remarkable moderation and devotion, which I judge more admirable in him when he left his country than when he defended it; for either Scipio had to be at Rome, or Rome in freedom.

"I wish," he said, "to take nothing from the laws, nothing from the institutions. Let the law be equal among all citizens. Enjoy my benefit without me, my country. I was the cause of your freedom; I shall be its proof as well; I withdraw, if I have grown greater than is to your advantage."

Why should I not admire this greatness of soul, by which he retired into voluntary exile and unburdened the state? Matters had been brought to such a pass that either freedom must do wrong to Scipio, or Scipio to freedom. Neither was right. And so he gave place to the laws and withdrew to Liternum, intending to charge his own exile to the commonwealth's account as much as he had charged it with Hannibal's.

I have seen the villa, built of squared stone, the wall ringing round its woodland, the towers too raised on either side for the defence of the villa, the cistern set beneath the buildings and the plantations, which could suffice for the use even of an army, the little bathroom, narrow and dark after the old fashion; for our ancestors did not think a bath warm unless it was dark. It was therefore a great pleasure that stole over me as I contemplated the manners of Scipio and our own.

In this corner that terror of Carthage, to whom Rome owes that she was captured only once, used to wash his body wearied with the labours of the farm. For he exercised himself with work and, as was the custom with the men of old, he himself broke up the soil. Under this so mean a roof he stood, this so cheap a pavement bore him.

But now who is there who would endure to bathe so? A man thinks himself poor and mean unless the walls have shone with great and costly disks, unless Alexandrian marbles are set off with Numidian veneers, unless an elaborate stucco, varied in the manner of a painting, borders them on every side, unless the vault is hidden with glass, unless Thasian stone, once a rare spectacle in some temple, rings round our pools, into which we lower bodies emptied by much sweating, unless the water flows from silver taps.

And so far I speak of the pipes of the common folk; what, when I shall come to the baths of the freedmen? How many statues, how many columns supporting nothing, but set there for ornament's sake, at great expense! How great a volume of water falling with a roar down the steps! We have come to such a pitch of luxury that we are unwilling to tread on anything but gems.

In this bath of Scipio there are tiny chinks, rather than windows, cut out of the stone wall, so as to admit light without injury to the fortification; but now those baths are called fit only for moths if they have not been so arranged as to receive the sun of the whole day through the most ample windows, unless men both bathe and get a tan at the same time, unless from the basin they look out over fields and seas. And so the baths that drew a crowd and admiration when they were dedicated are now shunned and reckoned among the antiquated, as soon as luxury has devised something new, by which it may outdo itself.

But in the old days baths were both few and not adorned with any elegance. For why should a thing be adorned that cost a farthing and was devised for use, not for delight? The water was not poured in from above, nor did it always run fresh as from a hot spring, nor did they think it mattered into how transparent a water they laid down their dirt.

But, good gods, how it delights one to enter those dim baths, roofed with a common plaster, which you knew that Cato as aedile, or Fabius Maximus, or one of the Cornelii had regulated with his own hand! For the most noble aediles too performed this office of going into the places that received the people, and exacting cleanliness and a useful and wholesome temperature, not this which has lately been devised, like a conflagration, so much so indeed that a slave convicted of some crime ought to be bathed alive. Nothing now seems to me to make any difference whether the bath is on fire or merely hot.

With how great rusticity do some now condemn Scipio because he had not let the daylight into his hot-room through broad window-panes, because he did not stew in much light and wait to be cooked through in the full blaze! "O wretched man," they say, "he did not know how to live! He did not bathe in filtered water; it was often turbid, and, when it rained harder, almost muddy." But it did not greatly matter to him to bathe so; for he came to wash off sweat, not unguent.

What voices of certain men do you think there will be? "I do not envy Scipio; he truly lived in exile, who bathed so." Nay, if you would know it, he did not bathe daily. For, as those say who have handed down the ancient manners of the city, they washed their arms and legs daily, which of course had gathered dirt from their work, but bathed all over on market-days. Here someone will say: "Plainly they were very dirty men. What do you think they smelled of?" Of soldiering, of toil, of manhood. After clean baths were invented, men are filthier.

Intending to describe an infamous man notorious for excessive refinement in his luxury, Horace says: "Buccillus smells of pastilles." Show me a Buccillus now; it would be just as if he smelled of a he-goat, he would stand in the place of Gargonius, whom the same Horace set against Buccillus. It is too little to apply unguent, unless it is renewed twice and three times a day, lest it vanish from the body. And what of this, that they boast of this smell as though it were their own?

If these things seem to you too gloomy, you will charge them to the villa, in which I learned from Aegialus, a most diligent householder, for he is now the owner of this estate, that even an old tree can be transplanted. This it is necessary for us old men to learn, of whom there is none who does not plant an olive-grove for another. I have seen one drop fruit at three and four years old, fruit one would have disdained, or rather lay it down anew.

You too shall be sheltered by that tree which "comes late, to make shade for late descendants," as our Virgil says, who looked not at what could be said most truly, but at what could be said most fittingly, and wished not to instruct farmers, but to delight his readers.

For, to pass over all else, I will add this, which I had to detect today: "In spring is the sowing of beans; then the crumbling furrows receive you too, lucerne, and the millet's yearly care comes round." Whether these should be planted at one time, and whether both should be sown in spring, you may judge from this, that I write to you now in June, all but gone into July; and I have seen men gathering beans and sowing millet on the same day.

I shall return to the olive-grove, which I saw planted in two ways. Aegialus took the boughs of large trees, lopped close, and set them, an arm's length apart, so that, as he said, a new tree might be raised, as it were, from the trunk. He covers their roots with earth, then packs the earth and rams it down well.

He says that nothing is more effective than this, as he calls it, ramming; it shuts out, no doubt, the cold and the wind. Besides, it is less moved about, and on this account allows the roots, as they spring, to come forth and lay hold of the soil, which, while still tender and clinging weakly, the slightest stir tears up. But before he covers the tree he scrapes the root; for, he says, new roots come from the whole of the wood thus laid bare. Moreover, the trunk should not stand more than three or four feet out of the ground; for from the very first it will be clothed from below, nor will a great part of it be, as in old olives, dry and withered.

The other manner of planting was this: he set, in the same way, strong boughs of no hard bark, such as those of young trees are wont to be. These rise a little more slowly, but, since they have come up as it were from a slip, they have in them nothing rough or gloomy.

This too I have seen, an aged vine transplanted from its own plantation; its very fibres, if it can be done, must be gathered up, then the vine laid down more freely, so that it may strike root even from its stem. And I have seen them set not only in the month of February, but even at the end of March; they take hold and clasp elms not their own.

But all those trees which, so to say, are of large trunk, he says must be helped with cistern water; and if this is of use, we have the rain in our own power. I do not intend to teach you more, lest, just as Aegialus has made me his adversary, so I make you mine. Farewell.