Letter 95

You ask me to bring forward at once, and write to you, what I had said should be put off to its own day, whether this part of philosophy which the Greeks call paraenetic, and we the preceptive, is enough to bring wisdom to its completion. I know that you will take it in good part if I refuse. But I shall the more readily promise it, and shall not let the proverb perish: 'Do not ask afterward for what you would not wish to obtain.'

For sometimes we beg earnestly for what we should refuse if anyone offered it. This, whether it is fickleness or flattery, must be punished by a too-ready granting. Many things we wish to seem to wish, yet do not wish. A reciter has brought a vast history written in the smallest hand, and, when a great part has been read through, says, 'I will stop, if you wish.' 'Read on, read on!' is shouted by those who long for him to fall silent then and there. Often we wish one thing and pray for another, and tell the truth not even to the gods, but the gods either do not hear, or take pity.

I, laying aside pity, will take my revenge and will fling a huge letter upon you, which, if you read it against your will, you may say: 'I brought this on myself,' and count yourself among those whom a wife wooed with great striving torments, among those whom riches acquired by the utmost sweat ill use, among those whom honours sought by every art and effort rack, and the rest who possess their own evils.

But, to leave the preface and approach the matter itself, they say: 'The happy life consists of right actions; to right actions precepts lead; therefore precepts suffice for the happy life.' Precepts do not always lead to right actions, but only when the disposition is compliant; sometimes they are applied in vain, if depraved opinions besiege the mind.

Then, even if men act rightly, they do not know that they act rightly. For no one, unless he has been shaped from the beginning and composed throughout by reason, can carry out all the measures, so as to know when he ought to act, and how far, and with whom, and in what manner, and why. He cannot strive with his whole mind toward honourable things, nor even steadily nor gladly, but will look back, will hesitate.

'If,' he says, 'an honourable action comes from precepts, precepts are abundantly enough for the happy life; but the former is true, therefore the latter too.' To these we shall answer that honourable actions are done both by precepts and not by precepts alone.

'If,' he says, 'other arts are content with precepts, wisdom too will be content, for this also is an art of life.' And yet the man who prescribes makes a helmsman: 'Move the helm thus, lower the sails thus, use a favourable wind thus, resist a contrary one thus, claim a doubtful and shared one for yourself thus.' Precepts shape other craftsmen too; therefore they can do the same in the craftsman of life.

All those arts are occupied with the instruments of life, not with the whole of life. And so many things hinder and impede them from without, hope, desire, fear. But this art, which has professed itself the art of life, can be forbidden by nothing from exercising itself; for it scatters the impediments and casts the obstacles aside. Do you wish to know how unlike the condition of this art is to the others? In those it is more pardonable to err willingly than by chance; in this the greatest fault is to sin of one's own will.

What I say is this. A grammarian will not blush at a solecism, if he made it knowingly, he will blush if unknowingly; the physician, if he does not understand that the sick man is failing, sins more, so far as the art goes, than if he pretends not to understand it. But in this art of living the fault of those who err willingly is the baser. Add now that very many of the arts too, indeed the most liberal of all, have their own decrees, not only precepts, such as medicine. And so one school is that of Hippocrates, another of Asclepiades, another of Themison.

Besides, no contemplative art is without its decrees, which the Greeks call dogmata, and which we may call either decrees or doctrines or tenets, which you will find both in geometry and in astronomy. But philosophy is both contemplative and active; it both beholds and acts. For you are mistaken if you think it promises you only earthly services; it aims higher. 'The whole heaven,' it says, 'I scrutinize, nor am I content to be confined within these bounds in which men are penned.'

'For I shall begin to discourse to you of the high reckoning of heaven and of the gods, and to lay open the first beginnings of things, whence nature creates all things, increases and nourishes them, and whither again she dissolves the same when they are spent,' as Lucretius says. It follows, then, that since it is contemplative, it has its own decrees.

And what of this, that no one will rightly discharge even the things to be done unless to him has been handed the reasoning by which in each case he can carry out all the measures of duty, which he will not observe who has received precepts for the present case rather than for the whole? Precepts given by themselves are weak and, so to say, rootless. It is the decrees that strengthen us, that guard our security and tranquillity, that embrace at once the whole of life and the nature of all things. There is this difference between the decrees of philosophy and its precepts, that there is between the elements and the members; these depend on those, and those are the causes both of these and of all things.

'Ancient wisdom,' he says, 'prescribed nothing else than what was to be done and avoided, and then men were far better. After the learned came forth, the good are lacking. For that simple and open virtue has been turned into an obscure and crafty knowledge, and we are taught to dispute, not to live.'

There was indeed, as you say, that old wisdom, especially while it was being born, rude no less than the other arts, in whose progress refinement has grown. But there was not yet even need of careful remedies. Wickedness had not yet risen so high nor spread itself so far. Simple remedies could stand against simple vices; now it is necessary that the defences be as much more elaborate as the things by which we are assailed are more violent.

Medicine was once the knowledge of a few herbs, by which flowing blood was stanched, wounds were closed; then little by little it came to this so manifold variety. Nor is it wonderful that it then had less business, with bodies still firm and solid, and with food easy and not corrupted by art and pleasure, which, after it began to be sought not to remove but to provoke hunger, and a thousand seasonings were invented by which greed might be roused, became, to those who craved them, nourishment, but are burdens to the full.

Hence pallor, and the trembling of sinews soaked in wine, and a leanness more pitiable from surfeits than from hunger. Hence the unsteady and tottering steps and a reeling always like that of drunkenness. Hence dropsy spreading under the whole skin, and a belly distended, while the man grows accustomed to take in more than he could. Hence the overflow of livid bile, and a discoloured face, and the wasting away of things rotting within themselves, and shrivelled fingers with stiffening joints, and the numbness of sinews lying without sensation, or their palpitation never at rest.

Why should I mention dizziness of the head? Why the torments of the eyes and ears, and the gnawing throbs of the boiling brain, and all the inner parts, through which we are unburdened, affected with inward ulcers? Besides, the countless kinds of fevers, some raging with their onset, some creeping on with a slight infection, some coming with shivering and much shaking of the limbs?

Why should I recount the other countless diseases, the punishments of luxury? Free from these evils were they who had not yet relaxed themselves in delicacies, who commanded themselves, who served themselves. They hardened their bodies by work and true toil, wearied either by running or by the hunt or by the tilling of the earth; food awaited them which could not please any but the hungry. And so there was no need of so great a furniture of physicians, nor of so many surgical irons and boxes. Good health was simple, from a simple cause; many dishes have made many diseases.

See how many things luxury, the ravager of land and sea, mingles together to pass through a single gullet. It must needs be, then, that things so diverse are at war among themselves, and being swallowed are ill digested, one part striving one way, another another. Nor is it wonderful that disease from discordant food is inconstant and various, and that those things, forced together from contrary parts of nature, flow back. Hence so many new kinds of sickness as there are of foods.

That greatest of physicians and founder of this science said that women do not lose their hair nor suffer in their feet; and yet they are both robbed of their hair and sick in their feet. The nature of women has not been changed, but conquered; for since they have equalled the licence of men, they have equalled also the bodily ills of men.

They keep awake no less, they drink no less, and they challenge men with oil and wine; equally they bring up again, vomited through the mouth, what they have forced into unwilling bellies, and measure out again all their wine in vomit; equally they gnaw snow, a solace for the burning stomach. In lust they do not yield even to males, born to be passive, may the gods and goddesses confound them! They have devised so perverse a kind of unchastity that they play the man with men. What wonder, then, is it that the greatest of physicians and most skilled in nature is caught in a falsehood, when so many women are gouty and bald? They have lost the privilege of their sex by their vices, and, because they had put off the woman, are condemned to the diseases of men.

The ancient physicians did not know how to give food more often and to prop up the failing veins with wine, they did not know how to let blood and to relieve a long sickness with the bath and with sweats, they did not know how to recall the hidden and inward force to the extremities by a binding of the legs and arms. There was no need to look about for many kinds of helps, when the perils were very few.

But now how far the evils of ill health have advanced! These are the interest we pay on the pleasures coveted beyond measure and beyond what is lawful. You will not wonder that the diseases are countless: count the cooks. All study has ceased, and the professors of liberal arts preside over deserted corners without any audience. In the schools of the rhetoricians and philosophers there is solitude; but how thronged are the kitchens, how great a youth crowds round the hearths of the spendthrifts!

I pass over the troops of unhappy boys, whom, after the banquets are over, other outrages of the bedroom await. I pass over the bands of catamites, sorted by nations and colours, that all may have the same smoothness, the same measure of the first down, the same fashion of hair, lest anyone whose hair is straighter be mixed with the curly-haired. I pass over the crowd of bakers, I pass over the throng of servers, by whom, at a given signal, men run about to bring in the dinner. Good gods, how many men does one belly keep busy! What? Do you think those mushrooms, a voluntary poison, do no hidden work, even if they were not deadly on the spot?

What? Do you not think that summer snow forms a callus on the liver? What? Those oysters, the most sluggish flesh, fattened on mud, do you think they bring on no slimy heaviness? What? That fish-sauce of the allies, the costly gore of bad fish, do you not believe it burns the vitals with its salt decay? What? Those purulent dishes, which are carried into the mouth all but from the very fire, do you judge they are extinguished without harm in the very entrails? How foul and pestilent, then, are the belchings, how great the loathing they have of themselves who breathe out the stale fumes of yesterday's debauch! You may know that what has been taken in is rotting, not being digested.

I remember that there was once much talk of a famous dish, into which the eating-house, hastening to its own ruin, had heaped together whatever among the daintily-fed is wont to spin out the day; mussels and scallops, and oysters trimmed back as far as they are edible, were set off by sea-urchins placed between them. Now they crowd in mullets too, dissected and boned.

It is now too much trouble to eat single things; the flavours are forced into one. In a dinner is done what ought to be done in the stomach; soon I shall expect that things chewed will be set before us. And how little less is it than this, to strip off the shells and bones and to have the cook do the work of the teeth? 'It is troublesome to be luxurious piece by piece; let all things be set down at once and turned into the same flavour. Why should I reach out my hand for one thing? Let many come at once, let the ornaments of many dishes meet and cohere.'

Let those know at once, who used to say that distinction and glory was sought from these things, that these are not displayed, but given to conscience. Let the things that are wont to be set out separately be on a level, drenched in one sauce. Let there be no difference: let oysters, sea-urchins, scallops, mullets be set down jumbled and cooked together. The food of vomiters would be no more confused.

As these things are tangled together, so from them are born not single diseases, but inextricable, diverse, manifold ones, against which medicine too has begun to arm itself with many kinds, with many observances. The same I say to you of philosophy. It was once simpler, among men sinning in lesser things and curable even by slight care; against so great an overthrow of morals all things must be attempted. And would that at last this plague might thus be vanquished!

We are mad not in private only, but in public. We restrain murders and single killings; but what of wars and the glorious crime of slaughtered nations? Neither avarice nor cruelty knows a measure. And these things, so long as they are done in secret and by individuals, are less harmful and less monstrous; but by decrees of the senate and resolutions of the people savage deeds are practised, and what is forbidden in private is publicly commanded.

Things which, committed in secret, men would pay for with their lives, we praise because they did them in military cloaks. Men are not ashamed both to wage wars and to hand them down to be waged by their children, when even among dumb and wild creatures there is peace among their own kind.

Against a madness so powerful and so widely unfolded philosophy has become more laborious, and has taken to itself as much strength as had accrued to the things against which it was being prepared. It was easy to chide those who indulged in wine and sought more delicate food; the mind did not have to be brought back with great force to frugality, from which it had departed but a little.

Now there is need of swift hands, now of masterly art. Pleasure is sought from everything. No vice stays within itself; luxury rushes headlong into avarice. Forgetfulness of the honourable has come upon us. Nothing is base whose price pleases. Man, a thing sacred to man, is now slain for sport and jest, and one whom it was a crime to train for the giving and receiving of wounds is now brought forth naked and unarmed, and the death of a man is spectacle enough.

In this perversity of morals, then, something more vehement than usual is needed, which may scatter the inveterate evils; we must work with decrees, that the received persuasion of false things may be torn out by the roots. If to these we join precepts, consolations, exhortations, they will be able to avail; by themselves they are ineffective.

If we wish to hold men bound and to tear them from the evils by which they are now held, let them learn what is evil, what is good. Let them know that all things except virtue change their name, and become now evils, now goods. As the first bond of military service is religion and love of the standards and the wickedness of desertion, and then afterward the rest are easily exacted and commanded of those who have been bound by the oath, so in those whom you would lead to the happy life, the first foundations must be laid and virtue instilled. Let them be held by a kind of superstition for it; let them love it; let them wish to live with it, refuse to live without it.

'What then? Have not some, without subtle instruction, turned out upright and attained great progress, while they obeyed bare precepts only?' I confess it; but they had a happy disposition, and snatched at saving things in passing. For as the immortal gods learned no virtue, being born with all of it, and it is a part of their nature to be good, so certain men, having been allotted an excellent disposition, come to the things which are usually handed over without long teaching, and have embraced honourable things as soon as they heard them; whence those temperaments so greedy of virtue, or fruitful of themselves. But those dull and sluggish minds, or beset by bad custom, must have their mental rust rubbed off again and again.

But, just as instruction more quickly raises to the summit those who are inclined to good, so it will help these weaker ones too and draw them out of bad opinions, whoever has handed over to them the tenets of philosophy; and how necessary these are you may understand from this, that there are things which sit within us, yet do not make us ready for action. 'You ought to do this for a father, this for children, this for friends, this for guests'; while a man tries, avarice will hold him back. He knows that he must fight for his country, but fear will dissuade him; he knows that he must sweat for his friends to the very last sweat, but pleasure will forbid.

It will do no good, therefore, to give precepts, unless you have first removed the things that will stand against the precepts, no more than it will do good to have set arms in view and brought them near, unless the hands are made ready to use them. That the mind may be able to go to the precepts which we give, it must be set free.

Let us suppose that someone does what he ought; he will not do it steadily, he will not do it evenly: for he will not know why he does it. Some things will come out right either by chance or by practice, but there will not be in his hand the rule by which they may be tested, by which he may believe that the things he has done are right. He will not promise himself that he will be such forever, who is good by chance.

Then perhaps precepts will furnish you the doing of what one ought, but will not furnish the doing of it as one ought; and if they do not furnish this, they do not lead to virtue. He will do what he ought, when admonished, I grant; but that is too little, since indeed the praise is not in the deed, but in the manner in which it is done.

What is more shameful than a costly dinner that consumes a knight's income? What so worthy of the censor's mark, if anyone, as those gluttons say, indulges himself and his appetite in this? And men reclining at a sumptuous feast have often paid out a million sesterces for it. The very man whom dinner has cost most is the man for whom it cost not pleasure but boasting.

A mullet of huge size, why should I not add the weight too and tempt the gullet of some, they said it was four pounds and a half, Tiberius Caesar, when it was sent to him and he had ordered it to be carried into the market and sold, said: 'Friends, everything deceives me unless either Apicius or Publius Octavius buys that mullet.' Beyond his hope his guess turned out: they bid, Octavius won and gained a vast glory among his fellows, when he had bought for five thousand sesterces a fish which Caesar had sold and not even Apicius had bought. To pay out so much was base for Octavius, not for the man who bought it that he might send it to Tiberius, though I should blame him too.

Someone sits by a sick friend: we approve. But he does this for the sake of an inheritance: he is a vulture, he awaits the corpse. The same things are either base or honourable; it matters why or how they are done. But all things will become honourable, if we have given ourselves over to the honourable and have judged this alone among human things to be good, and the things that are from it; the rest are goods only for the day.

Therefore a persuasion concerning the whole of life ought to be fixed in us: this is what I call a decree. Of whatever sort this persuasion shall have been, of that sort will be the things that are done, the things that are thought. And of whatever sort these shall have been, of that sort will the life be. To one ordering the whole, it is too little to have given counsel on the parts.

Marcus Brutus, in that book which he entitled 'On Duty,' gives many precepts both to parents and to children and to brothers; no one will do these as he ought, unless he has something to which to refer them. Let him set before himself the highest good, toward which he may strive, to which every deed and word of his may be directed; as helmsmen must order their course according to some star.

A life without a purpose is wandering; and if a purpose must indeed be set, then decrees begin to be necessary. This, I think, you will grant, that nothing is baser than a man doubtful and uncertain, and timidly drawing back. This will befall us in all matters, unless those things are removed which check and hold back the impulse, and check the whole effort by which we ought to strive.

How the gods are to be worshipped is usually prescribed. Let us forbid anyone to light lamps on the Sabbath, since the gods need no light, and not even men are pleased by soot; let us forbid the performance of morning salutations and sitting by the doors of temples; human ambition is caught by such offices; he worships God who knows him; let us forbid carrying linen cloths and scrapers to Jupiter and holding a mirror for Juno; God does not seek servants. Why? He himself serves the human race, is everywhere and at hand to all.

Though a man hear what measure he ought to keep in sacrifices, how far to leap back from troublesome superstitions, he will never have made progress enough, unless he has conceived of God in his mind such as he ought, as having all things, granting all things, beneficent without reward. What is the reason that the gods do good? Their nature.

He is mistaken who thinks they are unwilling to harm; they cannot. Nor can they receive an injury nor do one; for to harm and to be harmed are joined together. That highest and most beautiful nature of all has not made dangerous those whom it has exempted from danger.

The first worship of the gods is to believe in the gods; then to render to them their majesty, to render their goodness, without which there is no majesty. To know that they are who preside over the world, who temper all things by their power, who bear the guardianship of the human race, though sometimes careless of individuals. They neither give an evil nor have one; yet they chastise certain men and restrain them and impose penalties and sometimes punish under the appearance of a good. Do you wish to win the gods' favour? Be good. Whoever has imitated them has worshipped them enough.

Behold another question, how men are to be used. What do we do? What precepts do we give? That we should spare human blood? How little it is not to harm one whom you ought to help! Great praise indeed it is, if man is gentle to man. Shall we prescribe that he stretch out his hand to the shipwrecked, show the way to the wanderer, share his bread with the hungry? When shall I say all the things that are to be done and avoided, when I can hand to him this brief formula of human duty:

all this which you see, in which things divine and human are enclosed, is one; we are members of a great body. Nature begot us kin, since she generated us from the same things and to the same things. She has put into us mutual love and made us sociable. She has framed what is fair and just; by her ordinance it is more wretched to harm than to be harmed. By her command let our hands be ready to help.

Let that verse be both in our breast and in our mouth: 'I am a man, and I count nothing human foreign to me.' Let us hold things in common; we are born for this. Our fellowship is most like an arch of stones, which would fall were they not to lean against each other, and by this very thing is held up.

After the gods and men, let us consider how things are to be used. We have flung out our precepts in vain, unless that has gone before, what opinion we ought to hold about each thing, about poverty and riches, about glory and disgrace, about country and exile. Let us value each thing apart, rumour removed, and ask what they are, not what they are called.

Let us pass to the virtues. Someone will prescribe that we value prudence highly, that we embrace bravery, that we apply justice, if it can be done, even more closely to ourselves than the rest. But it will do nothing, if we are ignorant what virtue is, whether it is one or many, whether they are separate or interwoven, whether he who has one has the rest also, in what they differ among themselves.

It is not necessary for the carpenter to inquire about carpentry, what its origin is, what its use, any more than for the pantomime to inquire about the art of dancing; all these arts, if they know themselves, lack nothing; for they do not pertain to the whole of life. But virtue is the knowledge both of other things and of itself; one must learn about it in order to learn it.

Action will not be right, unless the will has been right, for from this is the action. Again, the will will not be right, unless the habit of the mind has been right, for from this is the will. The habit of the mind, further, will not be at its best, unless it has grasped the laws of the whole of life, and has determined what is to be judged of each thing, unless it has reduced things to the truth. Tranquillity does not fall to any but those who have attained an unchangeable and certain judgment; the rest fall down again and again and are set up again, and fluctuate by turns between things dismissed and things sought.

The cause of this tossing what is it? That nothing is certain to those who hang upon the most uncertain thing, rumour. If you wish always to will the same things, you must will true things. But to the truth one comes not without decrees; they embrace the whole of life. Goods and evils, the honourable and the base, the just and the unjust, the dutiful and the undutiful, the virtues and their use, the possession of advantages, dignity, good repute, and on the other side health, strength, beauty, keenness of senses: all these demand one who can appraise them. Let it be allowed to know at how much each thing is to be entered on the account; for you are deceived.

For you are deceived, and you think certain things greater than they are, and you are so far deceived that the things held greatest among us, riches, influence, power, are to be valued at a single sesterce. This you will not know, unless you have looked into the very ordinance by which these things are valued among themselves. As leaves cannot grow green by themselves, but need a branch to which to cling, from which to draw sap, so those precepts, if they are alone, wither; they wish to be fixed into a school.

Besides, those who do away with decrees do not understand that they are confirmed by the very act of being done away with. For what do they say? That life is sufficiently set out by precepts, that the decrees of wisdom are superfluous, that is, the dogmas. And yet this very thing which they say is a decree, just as much, by Hercules, as if I should now say that we must withdraw from precepts as superfluous, that we must use decrees, that to these alone our study must be directed; by this very statement I should be signifying that there are precepts.

Some things in philosophy need admonition, some need proof, and indeed much proof, because they are involved and scarcely laid open by the greatest exactness and diligence. If proofs are necessary, decrees too are necessary, which gather the truth by reasoning. But reason is not filled by manifest things; the greater and fairer part of it is in things hidden. Hidden things demand proof, proof is not without decrees; therefore decrees are necessary.

The thing that makes the common sense, the same makes the perfect, namely a fixed persuasion concerning things; without which, if all things float in the mind, decrees are necessary, which give the mind an unmoved judgment. Finally, when we admonish someone to hold a friend in the same place as himself, to think that an enemy can become a friend, to kindle love in the one, to moderate hatred in the other, we add: 'it is just and honourable.'

But the just and the honourable our reasoning about decrees contains; therefore this is necessary, without which neither are those. But let us join both. For both branches without a root are useless, and the roots themselves are helped by the things they have produced. How great is the use of the hands, no one may be ignorant; they help openly; but that heart, by which the hands live, from which they take their impulse, by which they are moved, lies hidden.

The same I can say of precepts: they are open, but the decrees of wisdom are in the hidden place. As only the initiated know the more holy of the rites, so in philosophy those secret things are shown to those admitted and received into the sacred mysteries; but precepts and other things of the kind are known even to the profane.

Posidonius judges necessary not only prescription, for nothing forbids us to use this word, but also persuasion, consolation, and exhortation. To these he adds the inquiry into causes, aetiologia, which I do not see why we should not dare to call so, since the grammarians, the guardians of the Latin tongue, call it so by their own right. He says that the description of each virtue will also be useful; this Posidonius calls ethologia, some call it characterismos, rendering the signs and marks of each virtue and vice, by which things alike are distinguished among themselves.

This thing has the same force as prescribing. For he who prescribes says: 'If you wish to be temperate, do thus.' He who describes says: 'He is temperate who does those things, who abstains from those.' Do you ask what the difference is? The one gives the precepts of virtue, the other its model. These descriptions and, to use the publicans' word, these likenesses, I confess, have their use; set the praiseworthy thing before us, and there will be one to imitate it.

Do you think it useful that arguments be given you by which you may recognize a noble horse, lest you be deceived in buying, lest you waste your effort on a sluggish one? How much more useful is this, to know the marks of an excellent mind, which one is permitted to transfer from another into oneself!

'Straightway the foal of a noble stock steps higher in the fields and sets down his supple legs; first he dares both to go the road and to try the threatening rivers and to commit himself to an unknown bridge, nor does he shudder at empty noises. High is his neck and clean-cut his head, short his belly and full his back, and his spirited breast riots with muscles. Then, if from afar arms have given any sound, he knows not how to stand still, he pricks his ears and trembles in his limbs, and rolls under his nostrils the gathered fire.'

While doing something else, our Virgil has described a brave man; I, at least, would give no other image to a great man. If Marcus Cato were to be portrayed for me, set in the midst of the crashes of civil war, the first to defend the passes of the Alps, to throw himself in the way of war drawn down from Germany, I would give no other countenance.

Certainly no one could step higher than he who at once raised himself against both Caesar and Pompey, and, while some favoured Caesar's cause, others Pompey's, challenged both alike, and gave his vote to the commonwealth. For of Cato it is no less true: 'nor does he shudder at empty noises.' Why should he? When he was not shaken even by true ones.

How great is the vigour and spirit in him, how great the confidence in the public trembling! He knows that he is the one man whose standing is not at stake; for the question is not whether Cato is free, but whether he is among the free; thence his contempt of perils and swords. It is a joy to apply to that man's indomitable steadfastness those words: 'his spirited breast riots with muscles.'

It will profit not only to say of what sort good men are wont to be, and to draw out their form and lineaments, but to relate and set forth of what sort they have been: Cato's last and bravest wound, through which he let out his freedom; the wisdom of Laelius and his concord with his friend Scipio; the noble deeds of the elder Cato at home and abroad; the wooden couches of Tubero, spread for a public banquet, and the goat-skins instead of coverlets, and, before the very shrine of Jupiter, earthen vessels set out for the feast. What else was this than to consecrate poverty on the Capitol? Though I have no other deed of his by which to enrol him among the Catos, do we think this too little? It was a censorship, not a dinner.

Oh, how ignorant are men greedy of glory, what it is or how it must be sought! On that day the Roman people beheld the furniture of many, admired that of one. The gold and silver of all those others has been broken up and melted down a thousand times over; but to all ages the goat-skins of Tubero will be famous. Farewell.