On the Shortness of Life

The greater part of mankind, Paulinus, complains of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because these allotted spaces of time run out so swiftly, so headlong, that, with very few exceptions, life leaves the rest of us in the very midst of our preparations for living. Nor is it only the common throng and the unthinking crowd that groan at this evil, as they take it to be; the feeling has called forth complaints even from men of distinction. Hence comes that cry of the greatest of physicians: “Life is short, art is long.”

Hence too the grievance of Aristotle, ill befitting a wise man, when he arraigns Nature: that she has indulged the animals so far as to let them live through five or ten generations, while a far shorter limit is set for man, though he was born for so many and such great achievements.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given to us in generous measure for the accomplishment of the greatest things, if the whole of it were well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is spent on no good end, the final constraint at last compels us to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

So it is: we are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied with it but wasteful of it. Just as great and royal wealth, once it has come into the hands of a bad master, is scattered in a moment, while wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good guardian, grows with use, so our lifetime extends amply for the man who orders it well.

Why do we complain of Nature? She has shown herself generous; life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is gripped by an insatiable greed, another by a laborious diligence over superfluous toils; one is sodden with wine, another sluggish with idleness; one is worn out by an ambition that always hangs upon the judgement of others, another, driven by the headlong greed of trade, is led over every land and every sea by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for soldiering, forever bent on imperilling others or anxious about their own danger; there are those whom the thankless servility they pay to their superiors consumes in a self-imposed slavery.

Many have been held fast either by the pursuit of other men’s fortunes or by complaint about their own; many, following no fixed aim, have been tossed by a shifting, inconstant fickleness that is dissatisfied with itself, from one new design to another; some have no settled goal by which to steer their course, but are overtaken by fate as they lie languid and yawning, so that I cannot doubt the truth of what the greatest of poets uttered as if in the manner of an oracle: “Small is the part of life in which we truly live.” All the rest of one’s span is not life but merely time.

Vices press in and surround them on every side, and do not let them rise again or lift their eyes to the clear discernment of truth, but keep them sunk and fixed fast in their lusts. Never are they allowed to return to their true selves; if ever some chance brings them a moment’s rest, they are still tossed about like a deep sea, in which there is heaving even after the wind has dropped, and never does their respite from their lusts stand still.

Do you suppose that I am speaking only of those whose ills are admitted? Look at those to whose felicity men flock; they are choked by their own blessings. To how many is wealth a burden! From how many does eloquence, and the daily straining to show off their talent, draw forth their lifeblood! How many are pale from unbroken pleasures! To how many does the crowd of clients thronging about them leave no freedom! In short, run through them all, from the lowest to the highest: this man summons an advocate, this one attends, that one stands trial, that one defends, that one judges; no one claims himself for himself, each is consumed for the sake of another. Inquire about those whose names are learned by heart, and you will see that they are distinguished by these marks: this one is the courtier of that man, that one of another; no one belongs to himself.

Then there is the utterly senseless indignation of certain men: they complain of the disdain of their superiors, because, when they wished to approach, these had no time for them! Does anyone dare to complain of another’s pride, when he himself never has time for himself? Yet that great man, whoever you are, has at least sometimes looked upon you, however haughty his expression, has lent his ears to your words, has admitted you to his side; you have never deigned to look upon yourself, never to give yourself a hearing. There is no reason, then, to lay these attentions to anyone’s account, since, when you paid them, it was not because you wished to be with another, but because you could not be with yourself.

Though all the bright intellects that ever shone should agree upon this one point, they will never sufficiently marvel at this fog that lies upon the human mind. Men will suffer no one to seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about a boundary, they rush to stones and arms; yet they allow others to encroach upon their life—nay, they themselves even invite in those who will be its future masters. No one is to be found who is willing to share out his money; but to how many does each man parcel out his life! Men are tight-fisted in guarding their patrimony, yet as soon as it comes to the waste of time, they are most lavish with the one thing in which it is honourable to be miserly. And so I should like to seize upon one from the throng of the old:

“We see that you have reached the utmost limit of human life; you are pressing upon your hundredth year, or beyond; come now, recall your years to a reckoning. Count up how much of that time a creditor has carried off, how much a mistress, how much a patron, how much a client, how much a quarrel with your wife, how much the punishing of your slaves, how much running dutifully about the city. Add the diseases we have brought on by our own hands; add the time that has lain idle and unused: you will see that you have fewer years than you reckon.

Search your memory and consider when you were ever firm of purpose, how few of your days went off as you had planned, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face wore its natural look, when your mind was undismayed, what work of any account you accomplished in so long a span, how many have plundered your life while you did not perceive what you were losing, how much was carried off by groundless grief, by foolish joy, by greedy desire, by the charms of company, how little of your own was left to you: you will understand that you are dying before your time.” What, then, is the cause?

You live as though you would live forever; your own frailty never enters your mind; you do not observe how much time has already passed. You squander it as though your store were full and overflowing, when all the while that very day which is given to some person or to some affair may perhaps be your last. You fear everything as mortals, you covet everything as though you were immortal. You will hear most people saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall withdraw into leisure; my sixtieth year shall release me from my duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you of a longer life? Who will allow your plans to proceed just as you arrange them? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnants of life, and to set apart for sound thinking only that time which can be put to no other use? How late it is to begin to live just when life must end! What stupid forgetfulness of our mortality it is to put off sound counsels until the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to resolve to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

You will notice that the most powerful men, those raised to the heights, let fall remarks in which they long for leisure, praise it, and prefer it to all their blessings. They desire at times, if it could be done in safety, to come down from their pinnacle; for though nothing from without assail or shake it, Fortune of herself collapses upon herself.

The deified Augustus, on whom the gods bestowed more than on any other man, never ceased to pray for rest for himself and to seek release from public affairs; all his conversation turned ever back to this—that he hoped for leisure. With this sweet, though false, solace he beguiled his labours, that one day he would live for himself.

In a certain letter sent to the Senate, when he had promised that his repose would not be wanting in dignity nor inconsistent with his former glory, I have found these words: “But these things can be carried out more nobly than promised. Nevertheless, my longing for that most longed-for time has carried me so far that, since the joy of the reality is still delayed, I would seize some foretaste of the pleasure from the sweetness of the words.”

So great a thing did leisure seem to him that, because he could not have it in fact, he anticipated it in thought. He who saw all things hanging upon himself alone, who dispensed fortune to men and nations, thought most joyfully of that day on which he would lay aside his greatness. He had learned by experience how much sweat those blessings, glittering across all lands, wrung from a man, how many hidden anxieties they concealed.

Compelled to settle matters by arms—first with his fellow citizens, then with his colleagues, and last of all with his kinsmen—he shed blood by land and sea. Driven about by war through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and well-nigh every coast, he turned his armies, weary of slaughtering Romans, to foreign wars. While he was pacifying the Alps and subduing enemies entangled in the midst of peace and empire, while he was advancing his frontiers even beyond the Rhine, the Euphrates, and the Danube, in the very city of Rome the daggers of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being whetted against him. And not yet had he escaped their plots when his daughter and so many noble youths, bound to adultery as if by an oath, kept terrifying his now broken old age; and there was Paulus, and a second time a woman to be feared, in league with an Antony. He had cut away these ulcers along with the very limbs; others kept springing up in their place; just as in a body overloaded with too much blood, there was always some part bursting open. And so he longed for leisure; in the hope and the thought of it his labours found their ease; this was the prayer of the man who could grant the prayers of others.

Marcus Cicero, tossed about among the likes of Catiline and Clodius, among the Pompeys and the Crassuses—some open enemies, some doubtful friends—while he is buffeted along with the state and holds it back as it founders, only to be swept away at last, neither at rest in prosperity nor able to endure adversity—how often does he curse that very consulship of his, praised by himself not without cause, but without end!

What mournful words he wrings out in a certain letter to Atticus, when the elder Pompey had now been defeated and the son was still trying to revive his shattered arms in Spain! “You ask,” he says, “what I am doing here? I am lingering in my Tusculan villa, half a free man.” He goes on to add other things, in which he both bewails his earlier life and complains of the present and despairs of the future. Cicero called himself half a free man.

But, by Hercules, the wise man will never sink to so lowly a title, never will he be half free; always he possesses a freedom whole and unbroken, unfettered, his own master, and loftier than all others. For what can be above him who is above Fortune?

Livius Drusus, a fierce and vehement man, after he had set in motion new laws and the mischief inherited from the Gracchi, hemmed in by a vast throng gathered from all Italy, and unable to foresee the outcome of his measures—which he could neither carry through nor was now free to abandon once begun—is said to have cursed his life, unquiet from its very beginning, and to have declared that he alone, not even as a boy, had ever had a holiday. For while still a ward and wearing the boy’s purple-bordered toga, he had dared to commend accused men to the jurors and to throw his influence into the courts so effectively that, by general agreement, he carried off certain verdicts.

To what lengths would such premature ambition not break out? You could be sure that such precocious audacity would issue in some great evil, both private and public. Too late, then, did he complain that he had never had a holiday, a man who from boyhood had been a maker of sedition and a trouble to the courts. It is disputed whether he laid hands on himself; for he collapsed from a wound suddenly received in the groin, and while some doubted whether his death was self-inflicted, none doubted that it was timely.

It is needless to mention more men who, though they seemed to others most fortunate, bore true witness against themselves, loathing every act of their years; yet by these complaints they changed neither others nor themselves. For after the words have burst forth, the passions slide back into their habit.

Your life, by Hercules, though it should stretch beyond a thousand years, will be contracted into the narrowest compass; those vices of yours will swallow up any age whatever. And as for this present span, which reason can prolong though Nature hurries it on, it must needs slip swiftly from you; for you do not grasp it, you do not hold it back, you do not delay the swiftest of all things, but you let it go as if it were something superfluous and replaceable.

Among the foremost I count also those who have time for nothing but wine and lust; for none are more shamefully occupied. The rest, even if they are held by an empty image of glory, go astray at least with some show of dignity; you may count up for me the avaricious, the irascible, those who wage unjust hatreds or wars—all of these sin in more manly fashion; but the disgrace of those who are abandoned to the belly and to lust is foul.

Sift through all the time of such men: see how long they spend in reckoning accounts, how long in laying snares, how long in fearing, how long in courting others, how long in being courted, how much their own and others’ bail-bonds take up, how much their banquets, which have now themselves become duties: you will see how their own evils, or their goods, leave them no room to breathe.

In short, all agree that no one occupation can be well pursued by a man who is preoccupied—neither eloquence nor the liberal studies—since a mind that is pulled in many directions takes in nothing deeply, but rejects everything as if it had been crammed in. There is nothing the preoccupied man does less than live; and of no thing is the knowledge harder. Teachers of the other arts are common and many; some of these even mere boys have been seen to have mastered so well that they could even give instruction. But living must be learned throughout the whole of life, and—what will perhaps astonish you more—throughout the whole of life one must learn how to die.

So many of the greatest men, when they had laid aside all encumbrances, when they had renounced riches and offices and pleasures, made it their one aim, down to the very end of their years, to know how to live; yet most of them departed from life confessing that they did not yet know it—far less, then, do those others know.

It is the mark of a great man, believe me, and one who rises above human errors, to suffer nothing of his own time to be filched away; and his life is therefore the longest, because, however much it lasted, the whole of it was free for himself. None of it lay uncultivated and idle, none of it was under another’s control; for, being the most thrifty guardian of his time, he found nothing worth exchanging for it. And so he had enough; but it is inevitable that those should fall short whose lives the public has taken much from.

And there is no reason for you to think that such men do not sometimes recognize their loss. Certainly you will hear most of those who are weighed down by great prosperity cry out at times, amid their droves of clients, or their pleading of cases, or the rest of their honourable miseries: “I am not allowed to live.”

And why should you not be? All those who summon you to themselves draw you away from yourself. How many days has that defendant carried off? How many that candidate? How many that old woman worn out with burying her heirs? How many that man who feigns illness to whet the greed of legacy-hunters? How many that more powerful friend, who keeps you not for friendship but for show? Reckon up, I say, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few, and those the refuse, have remained with you.

That man, having won the rods of office he had longed for, longs to lay them down and keeps saying: “When will this year be over?” This one gives public games, the chance to hold which he had reckoned a great thing: “When,” he says, “shall I escape them?” That advocate is torn at over the whole forum and fills the place beyond what can be heard with a great crowd: “When,” he says, “will the recess come?” Each man hurries his own life headlong and suffers from a longing for the future, a weariness of the present.

But the man who devotes every hour to his own uses, who orders each day as if it were his last, neither longs for the morrow nor fears it. For what is there that any new hour can bring of fresh pleasure? All is known, all has been enjoyed to the full. For the rest, let Fortune dispose as she will: his life is now in safety. To it something may be added, nothing taken away; and added in such a way as one adds food to a man already sated and full, who has no appetite for it and yet takes it. There is no reason, then, to think that anyone has lived long because of grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long, but existed long. For suppose you thought that a man had sailed far whom a savage storm had caught as he left harbour and carried hither and thither, driving him in circles over the same waters by the turns of winds raging from opposite quarters: he did not sail far, but was tossed about much.

I am often filled with wonder when I see some men asking for time, and those who are asked most ready to give it. Each looks to the object for which the time was asked, but neither to the time itself; it is asked as if it were nothing, given as if it were nothing. Men trifle with the most precious thing of all; but it deceives them, because it is a thing incorporeal, because it does not come before the eyes, and so it is reckoned the cheapest of things—nay, almost of no value at all.

Men accept pensions and gratuities most gladly, and for these they hire out their labour or their service or their diligence. But no one sets a value on time; men use it freely, as if it cost nothing. Yet see those same men, when ill, if the peril of death has drawn near, clasping the knees of physicians; if they fear capital punishment, ready to spend all they have in order to live!

So great is the discord of their feelings. But if each man’s number of years to come could be set before him, as the number of years past can, how those who saw few remaining would tremble, how sparing they would be of them! And yet it is easy to husband what is fixed, however scanty; that which you cannot tell when it will fail must be guarded the more carefully.

And yet there is no reason to think that such men do not know how precious a thing it is; they are wont to say to those whom they love most dearly that they are ready to give them a part of their own years. And they do give—without realizing it; they give, moreover, in such a way that they diminish their own store without adding to that of the others. But this very thing—whether they are diminishing it—they do not know; and so the loss of a wasting they cannot see is one they can bear.

No one will restore your years, no one will give you back to yourself again. Life will go on as it began, and will neither call back nor check its course; it will make no commotion, give no reminder of its swiftness. Silently it will glide on; it will lengthen itself out neither at a king’s command nor at the people’s favour. Just as it was set going on the first day, so will it run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere delay. What will be the result? You are preoccupied, life hastens on; meanwhile death will be at hand, for which, willing or unwilling, you must find time.

Can anything be more foolish than the attitude of certain men—I mean of those who boast of their foresight? They are the more laboriously occupied that they may be able to live better; they furnish out life at the cost of life! They lay their plans for the long term; but the greatest waste of life is putting things off: it robs us of each day as it comes, it snatches away the present while it promises something further on. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which hangs upon the morrow and loses today. You arrange what lies in Fortune’s hand, and let slip what lies in your own. Where are you looking? Where are you stretching out? All that is to come lies in uncertainty: live at once!

Lo, the greatest of bards cries out, and as though inspired by a divine utterance sings a saving strain: “The best days of life are the first to flee from wretched mortals.” “Why do you delay?” he says. “Why do you tarry? Unless you seize it, it flees.” And even when you have seized it, still it will flee; therefore you must contend against the swiftness of time with the speed of using it, and you must drink quickly, as from a rushing torrent that will not always flow.

This too is most beautifully said, to reproach our boundless procrastination: that he speaks not of the best age but of the best day. Why, untroubled and slow amid so great a flight of time, do you stretch out months and years before yourself in a long array, however your greed sees fit? It is of a day that he speaks to you, and of this very day as it flees.

Is there any doubt, then, that the best day flees first from wretched mortals—that is, from the preoccupied? Old age overwhelms their minds, still childish, and they reach it unready and unarmed, for nothing has been provided; suddenly, all unawares, they have fallen into it; they did not perceive that it was drawing on day by day.

Just as conversation, or reading, or some deeper reflection beguiles a traveller, so that he finds he has arrived before he was aware of drawing near, so this unbroken and most rapid journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace, does not become apparent to the preoccupied until the end.

If I should choose to divide my thesis into its parts and proofs, many arguments would occur to me by which to prove that the life of the preoccupied is the shortest. Fabianus used to say—not one of those professorial philosophers, but one of the true and ancient kind—“Against the passions we must fight with main force, not with subtlety; the battle-line must be turned by a charge, not by little wounds; cavilling is no proper weapon, for they must be crushed, not pricked.” Yet, that their error may be brought home to such men, they must be taught, not merely lamented over.

Life is divided into three periods: what has been, what is, and what is to come. Of these, the time we are passing is brief, the time we shall pass is doubtful, the time we have passed is certain. For this last is the one over which Fortune has lost her power, which can be brought back under no man’s control. This it is that the preoccupied lose; for they have no time to look back upon the past, and even if they had, the recollection of a thing to be repented of is unpleasant.

Unwillingly, therefore, do they recall their minds to times ill spent, nor do they dare to retrace those years whose vices—even such as were stolen upon them under the enticement of some present pleasure—stand revealed when handled again. No one, unless all his deeds have been submitted to his own censorship, which is never deceived, gladly turns himself back upon the past.

The man who has coveted much in his ambition, despised much in his pride, conquered without self-control, deceived by treachery, snatched in greed, squandered in extravagance—he must needs dread his own memory. And yet this is the part of our time that is sacred and dedicated, that has risen above all human chances, withdrawn beyond the reign of Fortune, that neither want nor fear nor the onset of disease can disturb; this can be neither troubled nor snatched away: the possession of it is perpetual and undismayed. Single days, and these but moment by moment, are present; but all the days of past time will attend you when you bid them, and will suffer themselves to be examined and detained at your pleasure—a thing the preoccupied have no time to do.

It is the mark of a tranquil and untroubled mind to range over all the parts of its life; but the minds of the preoccupied, as though under a yoke, cannot turn and look back. Their life, therefore, sinks into an abyss; and just as it is no use to pour in any amount, if there is nothing at the bottom to receive and hold it, so it matters not how much time is given, if there is no place for it to settle: it passes through minds cracked and full of holes.

Present time is very short, so short indeed that to some it seems to be none at all; for it is always in motion, it flows and rushes headlong; it ceases to be before it has come, and it allows of delay no more than the firmament or the stars, whose unresting movement never stays in the same place. Present time alone, therefore, concerns the preoccupied—time so brief that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are pulled in many directions.

In short, do you wish to know how little they live for long? See how greatly they desire to live long. Decrepit old men beg with prayers for an addition of a few years; they pretend to be younger than they are; they flatter themselves with a lie and cheat themselves as gladly as if they were cheating Fate along with it. But when at last some infirmity has reminded them of their mortality, how terrified they are when they die—not as though they were passing out of life, but as though they were being dragged out of it. They cry out that they have been fools who have not truly lived, and that, if only they escape this illness, they will live in leisure; then they reflect how vainly they amassed things they never enjoyed, how all their toil has fallen out for nothing. But for those whose life is led far from all business, why should it not be ample? Nothing is delegated from it, nothing scattered here and there, nothing handed over to Fortune, nothing lost through neglect, nothing subtracted by lavishness, nothing superfluous; the whole of it, so to speak, yields a return. However small it may be, therefore, it is abundantly sufficient; and so, whenever the last day comes, the wise man will not hesitate to go to his death with a steady step.

You will perhaps ask whom I call the preoccupied. There is no reason to suppose that I mean only those whom the dogs let loose at last drive out of the courthouse, those whom you see crushed—more splendidly in their own throng, or more contemptibly in another’s—those whom their duties call forth from their houses to dash against other men’s doors, or whom the praetor’s spear keeps busy with a profit that is disreputable and one day will fester. Some men’s very leisure is preoccupied:

in their country house or on their couch, in the midst of solitude, though they have withdrawn from everyone, they are a burden to themselves; their life is to be called not leisured, but a slothful preoccupation. Do you call that man leisured who arranges with anxious nicety his Corinthian bronzes, made precious by the madness of a few, and spends the greater part of his days over rusty bits of metal? Who sits in the wrestling-ring—for, the shame of it! we labour under vices that are not even Roman—as a spectator of brawling boys? Who sorts his herds of pack-animals into matched pairs by age and colour? Who feeds the newest athletes?

What of those who pass many hours at the barber’s, while whatever grew the night before is clipped away, while a council is held over each separate hair, while the disordered locks are restored or the thinning ones combed forward from this side and that over the brow? How angry they grow if the barber has been a little careless, as though he were shearing a real man! How they flare up if anything is cut off from their mane, if anything lies out of order, if all does not fall back into its ringlets! Which of these would not rather have the state thrown into disorder than his hair? Who is not more anxious about the elegance of his head than about its safety? Who would not rather be well-groomed than honourable? Do you call these men leisured who are busy between the comb and the mirror?

What of those who are absorbed in composing, hearing, and learning songs, while they twist into the turns of a most spiritless melody a voice whose straight course Nature made both best and simplest, whose fingers are always tapping out some tune within them, and whose silent humming is overheard even when they have been called to serious, often sad, affairs? These men have not leisure, but idle business.

Their banquets, by Hercules, I would not reckon among their free hours, when I see how anxiously they set out their silver, how carefully they tuck up the tunics of their favourites, how on tenterhooks they are over the way the boar comes from the cook’s hands, with what speed at a given signal the smooth-skinned slaves run to their tasks, with what art the birds are carved into portions of just the right size, how attentively the wretched little slave-boys wipe up the spittle of the drunken. By such means is a reputation for elegance and refinement angled for, and to such a degree do their vices follow them into all the private corners of their life that they neither drink nor eat without ostentation.

Nor would I count even among the leisured those who are carried hither and thither by chair and litter, and who present themselves at the appointed hours for their airings, as though it were not permitted to forgo them; whom another must remind when they ought to bathe, when to swim, when to dine: so utterly are they unstrung by the excessive languor of a pampered mind that of themselves they cannot tell whether they are hungry!

I am told that one of these pampered creatures—if pampering is the word for unlearning the life and habits of a human being—when he had been lifted by hands out of the bath and set down in his chair, asked by way of inquiry: “Am I now sitting?” Do you think that this man, who does not know whether he is sitting, knows whether he is alive, whether he sees, whether he is at leisure? I could not easily say whether I pity him the more if he really did not know this, or if he pretended not to know.

They are conscious, indeed, of forgetting many things, but many things too they affect to forget. Certain vices delight them as proofs of their good fortune; it seems to mark too low and despised a man to know what he is doing. Go now and suppose that the mime-writers invent much to reproach our luxury! By Hercules, they pass over more than they invent, and so great an abundance of incredible vices has come forth in this one age, ingenious in this alone, that we can now convict the mimes of negligence. To think that there should be someone so ruined by self-indulgence that he takes another’s word for whether he is sitting!

This man, then, is not leisured; give him another name; he is a sick man, nay rather a dead man. He is leisured who has also a sense of his own leisure. But this fellow, who is but half alive, who needs another to tell him the posture of his own body—how can he be master of any portion of time?

It would be tedious to pursue them one by one, whose lives have been consumed by draughts or ball-games or the care of baking their bodies in the sun. They are not leisured whose pleasures involve much business. For of these no one will doubt that they laboriously do nothing—those who are kept busy with the study of useless letters, a class which among the Romans too is now a great company.

It was a disease of the Greeks to inquire what number of rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, and besides whether they were by the same author, and other matters of this stamp; which, if you keep them to yourself, in no way profit your private conscience, and if you publish them, make you seem not more learned but more tiresome.

Lo, an empty zeal for learning superfluities has invaded the Romans too. In these days I heard a man relate what each Roman general had been the first to do: Duilius was the first to win a naval battle, Curius Dentatus the first to lead elephants in a triumph. These matters, even though they do not tend toward true glory, at least are concerned with examples of services to the state; such knowledge will do us no good, yet it is the kind of thing that holds us with a specious idleness of detail.

Let us pardon, too, those who inquire who first persuaded the Romans to go aboard ship. It was Claudius, surnamed Caudex for this very reason, because a structure of several planks was called caudex among the ancients, whence the public registers are called codices, and even now, by ancient usage, the boats that carry supplies up the Tiber are called codicariae.

No doubt this too may be to the point: that Valerius Corvinus was the first to conquer Messana, and the first of the family of the Valerii to be called Messana, the name of the captured city being transferred to himself, and that by degrees, as the common people changed the letters, he came to be called Messala.

Will you allow anyone to care, too, about this—that Lucius Sulla was the first to let loose lions in the circus, though otherwise they were exhibited in fetters, with javelin-throwers sent by King Bocchus to dispatch them? And let this too be pardoned: but does it serve any good purpose that Pompey was the first to exhibit in the circus a battle of eighteen elephants, with criminals set against them after the manner of a real fight? A leader of the state, and, as fame has handed down, among the leaders of old of singular goodness, thought it a memorable kind of spectacle to destroy men in a novel fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is too little. Are they torn to pieces? That is too little: let them be crushed beneath the huge bulk of the beasts!

Better it were that these things should pass into oblivion, lest hereafter some man of power should learn of them and envy a deed so utterly inhuman. Oh, how great a fog does great prosperity cast upon our minds! That man believed himself raised above the nature of things when he flung so many troops of wretched men before beasts born under another sky, when he set on a war between creatures so unequal, when he shed much blood before the eyes of the Roman people—soon to compel them to shed more of their own. But that same man was afterwards deceived by Alexandrian treachery and offered himself to be run through by the basest slave, at last understanding the empty boasting of his surname.

But to return to the point from which I digressed, and to show in the same matter the superfluous diligence of certain men: this same man related that Metellus, triumphing over the Carthaginians defeated in Sicily, was the only one of all the Romans to lead a hundred and twenty captured elephants before his car; that Sulla was the last of the Romans to extend the pomerium, which by the custom of the ancients it was usual to extend when Italian, but never when provincial, land had been gained. Is it more profitable to know this than that the Aventine hill lies outside the pomerium—as that man asserted—for one of two reasons: either because the plebs had withdrawn thither, or because, when Remus took the auspices there, the birds had not given their sanction; and other matters beyond number, which are either stuffed with falsehoods or are no better?

For grant that they tell all these things in good faith, grant that they write to vouch for their truth, still whose errors will they lessen? Whose lusts will they restrain? Whom will they make braver, whom juster, whom more generous? Our friend Fabianus used to say that he sometimes doubted whether it were not better to be attached to no studies at all than to be entangled in these.

They alone of all men are at leisure who give their time to wisdom; they alone truly live. For they do not merely keep good watch over their own age: they annex every age to their own. All the years that have passed before them are added to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, those most illustrious founders of sacred doctrines were born for us, for us they made ready a life. By the labour of others we are led to the sight of things most fair that have been wrested out of darkness into light; from no age are we shut out, we are admitted to all; and if it pleases us, by greatness of soul, to pass beyond the narrow bounds of human weakness, there is a vast stretch of time through which to roam.

We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, conquer human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not betake ourselves with our whole soul, away from this scanty and fleeting passage of time, to those things which are boundless, which are eternal, which we share with our betters?

Those men who dash about on duties, who keep themselves and others in a turmoil, when they have raved their fill, when they have made the daily round of every threshold and passed by no open door, when they have carried their mercenary greetings through houses the most diverse—how few will they manage to see out of so vast a city, distracted by such various desires?

How many will there be whom sleep, or luxury, or rudeness keeps from them! How many who, after torturing them with a long wait, rush past with feigned haste! How many will avoid coming out through an entrance hall packed with clients and slip away through hidden passages of the house—as though it were not more inhuman to cheat than to shut out! How many, half asleep and heavy from yesterday’s carousing, while those wretched men break their own sleep to wait upon another’s, will return the name whispered a thousand times, with lips scarcely parted, by a yawn of the haughtiest kind!

We may rightly say that those linger upon true duties who choose to have Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the other high priests of good learning, and Aristotle and Theophrastus, as their closest intimates day by day. None of these will be too busy for you, none will fail to send away the one who comes to him happier and more devoted to himself, none will let any man depart with empty hands; by night, by day, they are open to all mortals.

None of these will compel you to die, all will teach you how; none of these will wear away your years—each will contribute his own to yours; with none of them will conversation be dangerous, the friendship of none will cost you your life, the courting of none will be costly. From them you will take whatever you wish; through them it will be no fault of theirs if you do not draw as deeply as you desire.

What happiness, what a fair old age awaits the man who has given himself into the patronage of these! He will have those with whom he may take counsel about matters the least and the greatest, whom he may consult daily about himself, from whom he may hear the truth without insult, be praised without flattery, and after whose likeness he may fashion himself.

We are wont to say that it was not in our power to choose the parents who fell to our lot, that they were given to men by chance; but we are free to be born to whom we will. There are households of the noblest intellects: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted; you will be adopted not into the name alone, but into the very goods, which are not to be guarded meanly or grudgingly—they will grow the greater, the more men you share them with.

These men will give you a path to eternity, and will raise you up to that place from which no one is cast down. This is the one way of prolonging your mortality—nay, of turning it into immortality. Honours, monuments, whatever ambition has either ordered by its decrees or reared up in its works, are quickly thrown down; there is nothing that long age does not demolish and remove. But to the things that wisdom has consecrated it can do no harm; no age will abolish them, none diminish them; the next age, and ever the one beyond, will add something to their veneration, since envy busies itself with what is near at hand, whereas we more freely admire what is set far off.

The life of the wise man, therefore, has a wide range, and he is not hemmed in by the same boundary as other men. He alone is released from the laws of the human race; all ages serve him as they serve a god. Has some time gone by? He embraces it in recollection. Is time now at hand? He uses it. Is time to come? He anticipates it. The bringing together of all times into one makes his life long.

Theirs is the briefest and most anxious life who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future; when they have come to the end, the wretches understand too late that for so long they have been busy doing nothing.

And there is no reason for you to think it proved that they lead a long life because at times they call upon death. Their want of foresight vexes them with uncertain feelings that rush upon the very things they fear; they often long for death just because they fear it.

Neither is there reason for you to think it a proof of long living that the day often seems long to them, that they complain the hours go slowly until the appointed time of dinner comes; for if ever their occupations have deserted them, they are left in leisure and grow restless, and do not know how to dispose of it or draw it out. And so they make for some occupation, and all the time that lies between is a burden to them; just as, by Hercules, when a day for a gladiatorial show has been announced, or when the appointed time of some other spectacle or pleasure is awaited, they wish to leap over the days that lie between. Every postponement of a thing hoped for is long to them.

But the time that they love is short and headlong, and is made much shorter by their own fault; for they flee from one thing to another and cannot rest in a single desire. Their days are not long, but hateful; whereas, on the other hand, how short the nights seem which they spend in the embraces of harlots or in wine!

Hence too the frenzy of the poets, who nourish human errors with their tales, in which Jupiter, beguiled by the pleasure of an embrace, was thought to have doubled the night. What else is it but to inflame our vices, to inscribe the gods as their authors and to give to disease, by the example of divinity, a licence excused? Can the nights help seeming all too short to such men, when they buy them at so dear a price? They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.

Their very pleasures are uneasy and disquieted by various terrors, and at the very height of their exultation there steals upon them the anxious thought: “How long will this last?” From this feeling kings have wept over their own power, and the greatness of their fortune has not delighted them, but the end one day to come has struck them with dread. When the most insolent king of the Persians spread out his army over vast plains and could grasp not its number but only its extent, he poured forth tears that within a hundred years not one of so great a host of young men would be left alive.

Yet the very man who wept was himself about to bring that fate upon them, and was to destroy some on the sea, some on land, some in battle, some in flight, and within a brief span to consume those for whom he feared the hundredth year.

And what of the fact that even their joys are uneasy? For they do not rest on solid grounds, but are troubled by the same vanity from which they spring. And of what sort do you suppose are those times which, by their own confession, are wretched, when even these moments, in which they exalt themselves and lift themselves above man, are far from genuine?

All the greatest goods are attended by anxiety, and no fortune is less to be trusted than the best; another good fortune is needed to safeguard the first, and on behalf of the very prayers that have been answered fresh prayers must be made. For everything that comes by chance is unstable, and the higher it has risen, the more liable it is to fall. Now no one is delighted by things doomed to fall; the life of those, therefore, who acquire with great toil what they must possess with greater, must needs be most wretched, and not merely most brief. With labour they attain what they wish, with anxiety they hold what they have attained;

and meanwhile no account is taken of time that will never more return. New occupations take the place of the old, hope kindles hope, ambition kindles ambition. No end of miseries is sought, but their matter is changed. Have our own honours tortured us? Those of others take up more of our time. Have we ceased to labour as candidates? We begin to canvass for others. Have we laid down the bother of prosecuting? We take on that of judging. Has a man ceased to be a juror? He becomes president of a court. Has another grown old in the hired management of other men’s goods? He is now hemmed in by his own wealth.

Has the soldier’s boot discharged Marius? The consulship keeps him busy. Does Quintius hasten to get through his dictatorship? He will be called back from the plough. Scipio will go against the Carthaginians before he is ripe for so great a task; the conqueror of Hannibal, the conqueror of Antiochus, the ornament of his own consulship, the surety for his brother’s, who, but for his own delay, would be set beside Jupiter—him civil seditions will harass as the saviour of his country, and after he had as a young man scorned honours that made him the equal of the gods, in old age the ambition of stubborn exile will please him. Never will causes for anxiety, whether of prosperity or of misery, be lacking; through occupations life will be driven on. Leisure will never be enjoyed, only ever longed for.

Withdraw yourself, therefore, dearest Paulinus, from the crowd, and, after being buffeted more than your span of years warranted, retire at last into a more peaceful harbour. Consider how many waves you have encountered, how many storms you have weathered—some private, some public that you turned upon yourself; your virtue has now been displayed enough through toilsome and unquiet proofs: try what it can do in leisure. The greater part of your life, certainly the better part, has been given to the state; take now some of your time for yourself as well.

Nor do I summon you to a sluggish or idle repose, nor to drown in sleep and in the pleasures dear to the crowd whatever vigour of nature is in you. That is not to find rest; you will discover greater works than all those you have hitherto handled with such energy, which you may carry on at your ease, withdrawn and free from care.

You, indeed, administer the accounts of the whole world as scrupulously as if they were another’s, as carefully as if they were your own, as conscientiously as if they were the state’s. You win love in an office in which it is hard to escape hatred; but nevertheless, believe me, it is better to know the account of one’s own life than that of the public corn supply.

Recall this vigour of mind, most capable of the greatest things, from an office honourable indeed but little fitted to the happy life, and reflect that it was not for this that you laboured from your earliest years in every pursuit of the liberal studies—that many thousand measures of corn might be well entrusted to you; you had promised something greater and loftier of yourself. There will be no lack of men both of strict frugality and of laborious industry; sluggish beasts of burden are far more suited to carrying loads than noble horses, whose high-bred swiftness who ever weighed down with a heavy pack?

Consider, besides, how much anxiety it is to expose yourself to so great a burden; your business is with the human belly. A starving people listens to no reason, is softened by no fairness, is bent by no entreaty. Only the other day, within those few days in which Gaius Caesar perished—if any feeling remains to those below, taking it most grievously that the Roman people had survived him—there was left food for seven or at most eight days, while he was joining ships into bridges and playing with the resources of the empire; there was upon us the worst of evils even for the besieged, a dearth of provisions; his imitation of a mad and foreign king, unhappy in his pride, all but cost us ruin and famine, and the destruction of all things that follows famine.

What feelings, then, had those to whom the care of the public corn supply had been entrusted, and who were ready to face stones, steel, and fire—and Gaius? With the utmost dissimulation they kept hidden the great evil lurking within the vitals of the state—and with reason, no doubt. For some maladies must be treated while the sick are kept in ignorance; to many the knowledge of their own disease has been the cause of death.

Betake yourself to these more tranquil, safer, greater things! Do you think it the same thing whether you take care that the corn is poured into the granaries unspoiled, both by the fraud and by the negligence of those who convey it, lest it be tainted by absorbing moisture and grow hot, that it may answer to measure and weight—or whether you approach these holy and sublime matters, to learn what is the substance of God, what his delight, what his condition, what his form; what fate awaits your soul; where Nature lays us to rest when we are released from our bodies; what it is that holds up the heaviest parts of this world in the centre, suspends the light above, carries fire to the summit, and rouses the stars to their courses; and the rest in turn, full of mighty marvels?

Will you not leave the ground and turn your mind to these things! Now, while the blood is warm, we must press on to better things, with vigour. In this kind of life there awaits you much that is good in the liberal arts, the love and practice of the virtues, the forgetfulness of the lusts, the knowledge of how to live and how to die, a deep repose of all things.

Wretched, indeed, is the lot of all the preoccupied, but most wretched of all is the lot of those who labour not even at their own occupations, who sleep to another’s slumber, walk at another’s pace, and are commanded to love and to hate, the freest of all things. If these wish to know how brief their own life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.

When, therefore, you see a man who has often already donned the purple-bordered robe, when you see a name renowned in the forum, do not envy him; these things are bought at the price of life. That a single year may be reckoned from them, they will wear away all their years. Some, before they could struggle to the summit of their ambition, life abandoned while they were yet wrestling among the first steps; some, after they had crept up to the consummation of their dignity through a thousand indignities, the wretched thought stole upon them that they had toiled only for an epitaph; in some the last old age, while it is being arranged for new hopes as though for youth, broke down enfeebled in the midst of great and shameless endeavours.

Shameful is that man whose breath failed him in court, an old man, while he was angling for the applause of an ignorant ring of bystanders on behalf of utterly unknown litigants; disgraceful is he who, worn out by living sooner than by labouring, collapsed in the very midst of his duties; disgraceful he over whom, as he died in the act of receiving the accounts, his long-deferred heir laughed.

I cannot pass over an instance that occurs to me. Sextus Turannius was an old man of tried diligence who, after his ninetieth year, when he had received an unsolicited release from his procuratorship from Gaius Caesar, ordered himself to be laid out on his bed and mourned as though dead by the household standing round. The whole house lamented the leisure of its old master, and did not end its grief until his work was restored to him. Is it so pleasant a thing, then, to die in harness?

Most men have the same spirit; their craving for work outlasts their capacity for it; they struggle against the weakness of the body, and judge old age itself burdensome on no other count than that it sets them aside. The law does not enrol a soldier after his fiftieth year, does not summon a senator after his sixtieth; men obtain leisure from themselves with more difficulty than from the law.

Meanwhile, while they are snatched and snatch, while one breaks another’s rest, while they are wretched to one another’s undoing, life is without fruit, without pleasure, without any advancement of the mind. No one keeps death in sight, no one but stretches his hopes far ahead; some, indeed, even arrange those things that lie beyond life—massive piles of tombs, dedications of public works, gifts for their funeral pyre, and ostentatious obsequies. But, by Hercules, the funerals of such men, as though they had lived the briefest of lives, ought to be conducted by the light of torches and tapers, as those of children are.