Sobre a Brevidade da Vida

The greater part of mankind, my Paulinus, complains of the
unkindness of Nature, because we are born only for a short space
of time, and that this allotted period of life runs away so swiftly,
nay so hurriedly, that with but few exceptions men’s life comes to
an end just as they are preparing to enjoy it: nor is it only the
common herd and the ignorant vulgar who mourn over this universal
misfortune, as they consider it to be: this reflection has wrung
complaints even from great men. Hence comes that well-known saying
of physicians, that art is long but life is short: hence arose that
quarrel, so unbefitting a sage, which Aristotle picked with Nature,
because she had indulged animals with such length of days that some
of them lived for ten or fifteen centuries, while man, although
born for many and such great exploits, had the term of his existence
cut so much shorter. We do not have a very short time assigned to
us, but we lose a great deal of it: life is long enough to carry
out the most important projects: we have an ample portion,
if we do but arrange the whole of it aright: but when it all runs
to waste through luxury and carelessness, when it is not devoted
to any good purpose, then at the last we are forced to feel that
it is all over, although we never noticed how it glided away. Thus
it is: we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one,
and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them. When great and
kinglike riches fall into the hands of a bad master, they are
dispersed straightway, but even a moderate fortune, when bestowed
upon a wise guardian, increases by use: and in like manner our life
has great opportunities for one who knows how to dispose of it to
the best advantage.

Why do we complain of Nature? she has dealt kindly with us.
Life is long enough, if you know how to use it. One man is possessed
by an avarice which nothing can satisfy, another by a laborious
diligence in doing what is totally useless: another is sodden by
wine: another is benumbed by sloth: one man is exhausted by an
ambition which makes him court the good will of others[2]: another,
through his eagerness as a merchant, is led to visit every land and
every sea by the hope of gain: some are plagued by the love of
soldiering, and are always either endangering other men’s lives or
in trembling for their own: some wear away their lives in that
voluntary slavery, the unrequited service of great men: many are
occupied either in laying claim to other men’s fortune or in
complaining of their own: a great number have no settled purpose,
and are tossed from one new scheme to another by a rambling,
inconsistent, dissatisfied, fickle habit of mind: some care for no
object sufficiently to try to attain it, but lie lazily yawning
until their fate comes upon them: so that I cannot doubt the
truth of that verse which the greatest of poets has dressed in the
guise of an oracular response—

“We live a small part only of our lives.”

But all duration is time, not life: vices press upon us and surround
us on every side, and do not permit us to regain our feet, or to
raise our eyes and gaze upon truth, but when we are down keep us
prostrate and chained to low desires. Men who are in this condition
are never allowed to come to themselves: if ever by chance they
obtain any rest, they roll to and fro like the deep sea, which
heaves and tosses after a gale, and they never have any respite
from their lusts. Do you suppose that I speak of those whose ills
are notorious? Nay, look at those whose prosperity all men run to
see: they are choked by their own good things. To how many men do
riches prove a heavy burden? how many men’s eloquence and continual
desire to display their own cleverness has cost them their lives?[3]
how many are sallow with constant sensual indulgence? how many have
no freedom left them by the tribe of clients that surges around
them? Look through all these, from the lowest to the highest:—this
man calls his friends to support him, this one is present in court,
this one is the defendant, this one pleads for him, this one is on
the jury: but no one lays claim to his own self, every one wastes
his time over some one else. Investigate those men, whose names are
in every one’s mouth: you will find that they bear just the same
marks: A is devoted to B, and B to C: no one belongs to himself.
Moreover some men are full of most irrational anger: they complain
of the insolence of their chiefs, because they have not granted
them an audience when they wished for it; as if a man had any right
to complain of being so haughtily shut out by another, when he never
has leisure to give his own conscience a hearing. This chief
of yours, whoever he is, though he may look at you in an offensive
manner, still will some day look at you, open his ears to your
words, and give you a seat by his side: but you never design to
look upon yourself, to listen to your own grievances. You ought
not, then, to claim these services from another, especially since
while you yourself were doing so, you did not wish for an interview
with another man, but were not able to obtain one with yourself.[4]

Were all the brightest intellects of all time to employ
themselves on this one subject, they never could sufficiently express
their wonder at this blindness of men’s minds: men will not allow
any one to establish himself upon their estates, and upon the most
trifling dispute about the measuring of boundaries, they betake
themselves to stones and cudgels: yet they allow others to encroach
upon their lives, nay, they themselves actually lead others
in to take possession of them. You cannot find any one who wants
to distribute his money; yet among how many people does every one
distribute his life? men covetously guard their property from waste,
but when it comes to waste of time, they are most prodigal of that
of which it would become them to be sparing. Let us take one of the
elders, and say to him, “We perceive that you have arrived at the
extreme limits of human life: you are in your hundredth year, or
even older. Come now, reckon up your whole life in black and white:
tell us how much of your time has been spent upon your creditors,
how much on your mistress, how much on your king, how much on your
clients, how much in quarrelling with your wife, how much in keeping
your slaves in order, how much in running up and down the city on
business. Add to this the diseases which we bring upon us with our
own hands, and the time which has laid idle without any use having
been made of it; you will see that you have not lived as many years
as you count. Look back in your memory and see how often you have
been consistent in your projects, how many days passed as you
intended them to do when you were at your own disposal, how often
you did not change colour and your spirit did not quail, how much
work you have done in so long a time, how many people have without
your knowledge stolen parts of your life from you, how much you
have lost, how large a part has been taken up by useless grief,
foolish gladness, greedy desire, or polite conversation; how little
of yourself is left to you: you will then perceive that you will
die prematurely.” What, then, is the reason of this? It is that
people live as though they would live for ever: you never remember
your human frailty; you never notice how much of your time has
already gone by: you spend it as though you had an abundant and
overflowing store of it, though all the while that day which you
devote to some man or to some thing is perhaps your last. You
fear everything, like mortals as you are, and yet you desire
everything as if you were immortals. You will hear many men say,
“After my fiftieth year I will give myself up to leisure: my sixtieth
shall be my last year of public office”: and what guarantee have
you that your life will last any longer? who will let all this go
on just as you have arranged it? are you not ashamed to reserve
only the leavings of your life for yourself, and appoint for the
enjoyment of your own right mind only that time which you cannot
devote to any business? How late it is to begin life just when we
have to be leaving it! What a foolish forgetfulness of our mortality,
to put off wholesome counsels until our fiftieth or sixtieth year,
and to choose that our lives shall begin at a point which few of
us ever reach.

You will find that the most powerful and highly-placed men let
fall phrases in which they long for leisure, praise it, and prefer
it to all the blessings which they enjoy. Sometimes they would fain
descend from their lofty pedestal, if it could be safely done: for
Fortune collapses by its own weight, without any shock or interference
from without. The late Emperor Augustus, upon whom the gods bestowed
more blessings than on any one else, never ceased to pray for rest
and exemption from the troubles of empire: he used to enliven his
labours with this sweet, though unreal consolation, that he would
some day live for himself alone. In a letter which he addressed to
the Senate, after promising that his rest shall not be devoid of
dignity nor discreditable to his former glories, I find the following
words:—”These things, however, it is more honourable to do than to
promise: but my eagerness for that time, so earnestly longed for,
has led me to derive a certain pleasure from speaking about it,
though the reality is still far distant.”[5] He thought leisure so
important, that though he could not actually enjoy it, yet
he did so by anticipation and by thinking about it. He, who saw
everything depending upon himself alone, who swayed the fortunes
of men and of nations, thought that his happiest day would be that
on which he laid aside his greatness. He knew by experience how
much labour was involved in that glory that shone through all lands,
and how much secret anxiety was concealed within it: he had been
forced to assert his rights by war, first with his countrymen, next
with his colleagues, and lastly with his own relations, and had
shed blood both by sea and by land: after marching his troops under
arms through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, and almost
all the countries of the world, when they were weary with slaughtering
Romans he had directed them against a foreign foe. While he was
pacifying the Alpine regions, and subduing the enemies whom he found
in the midst of the Roman empire, while he was extending its
boundaries beyond the Rhine, the Euphrates, and the Danube, at Rome
itself the swords of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others
were being sharpened to slay him. Scarcely had he escaped from their
plot, when his already failing age was terrified by his daughter
and all the noble youths who were pledged to her cause by adultery
with her by way of oath of fidelity. Then there was Paulus and
Antonius’s mistress, a second time to be feared by Rome: and
when he had cut out these ulcers from his very limbs, others grew
in their place: the empire, like a body overloaded with blood, was
always breaking out somewhere. For this reason he longed for leisure:
all his labours were based upon hopes and thoughts of leisure: this
was the wish of him who could accomplish the wishes of all other
men.

While tossed hither and thither by Catiline and Clodius, Pompeius
and Crassus, by some open enemies and some doubtful friends, while
he struggled with the struggling republic and kept it from going
to ruin, when at last he was banished, being neither able to keep
silence in prosperity nor to endure adversity with patience, how
often must Marcus Cicero have cursed that consulship of his which
he never ceased to praise, and which nevertheless deserved it? What
piteous expressions he uses in a letter to Atticus when Pompeius
the father had been defeated, and his son was recruiting his shattered
forces in Spain? “Do you ask,” writes he, “what I am doing here? I
am living in my Tusculan villa almost as a prisoner.” He adds more
afterwards, wherein he laments his former life, complains of the
present, and despairs of the future. Cicero called himself “half a
prisoner,” but, by Hercules, the wise man never would have come
under so lowly a title: he never would be half a prisoner, but would
always enjoy complete and entire liberty, being free, in his own
power, and greater than all others: for what can be greater than
the man who is greater than Fortune?

When Livius Drusus, a vigorous and energetic man, brought forward
bills for new laws and radical measures of the Gracchus pattern,
being the centre of a vast mob of all the peoples of Italy, and
seeing no way to solve the question, since he was not allowed to
deal with it as he wished, and yet was not free to throw it up after
having once taken part in it, complained bitterly of his life, which
had been one of unrest from the very cradle, and said, we are
told, that “he was the only person who had never had any holidays
even when he was a boy.” Indeed, while he was still under age and
wearing the praetexta, he had the courage to plead the cause of
accused persons in court, and to make use of his influence so
powerfully that it is well known that in some causes his exertions
gained a verdict. Where would such precocious ambition stop? You
may be sure that one who showed such boldness as a child would end
by becoming a great pest both in public and in private life: it was
too late for him to complain that he had had no holidays, when from
his boyhood he had been a firebrand and a nuisance in the courts.
It is a stock question whether he committed suicide: for he fell
by a sudden wound in the groin, and some doubted whether his death
was caused by his own hand, though none disputed its having happened
most seasonably. It would be superfluous to mention more who, while
others thought them the happiest of men, have themselves borne true
witness to their own feelings, and have loathed all that they have
done for all the years of their lives: yet by these complaints they
have effected no alteration either in others or in themselves: for
after these words have escaped them their feelings revert to their
accustomed frame. By Hercules, that life of you great men, even
though it should last for more than a thousand years, is still a
very short one: those vices of yours would swallow up any extent
of time: no wonder if this our ordinary span, which, though Nature
hurries on, can be enlarged by common sense, soon slips away from
you: for you do not lay hold of it or hold it back, and try to delay
the swiftest of all things, but you let it pass as though it were
a useless thing and you could supply its place.

Among these I reckon in the first place those who devote their
time to nothing but drinking and debauchery: for no men are
busied more shamefully: the others, although the glory which they
pursue is but a counterfeit, still deserve some credit for their
pursuit of it—though you may tell me of misers, of passionate men,
of men who hate and who even wage war without a cause—yet all such
men sin like men: but the sin of those who are given up to gluttony
and lust is a disgraceful one. Examine all the hours of their lives:
consider how much time they spend in calculation, how much in
plotting, how much in fear, how much in giving and deceiving flattery,
how much in entering into recognizances for themselves or for others,
how much in banquets, which indeed become a serious business, you
will see that they are not allowed any breathing time either by
their pleasures or their pains. Finally, all are agreed that nothing,
neither eloquence nor literature, can be done properly by one who
is occupied with something else; for nothing can take deep root in
a mind which is directed to some other subject, and which rejects
whatever you try to stuff into it. No man knows less about living
than a business man: there is nothing about which it is more difficult
to gain knowledge. Other arts have many folk everywhere who profess
to teach them: some of them can be so thoroughly learned by mere
boys, that they are able to teach them to others: but one’s whole
life must be spent in learning how to live, and, which may perhaps
surprise you more, one’s whole life must be spent in learning how
to die. Many excellent men have freed themselves from all hindrances,
have given up riches, business, and pleasure, and have made it their
duty to the very end of their lives to learn how to live: and yet
the larger portion of them leave this life confessing that they do
not yet know how to live, and still less know how to live as wise
men. Believe me, it requires a great man and one who is superior
to human frailties not to allow any of his time to be filched from
him: and therefore it follows that his life is a very long
one, because he devotes every possible part of it to himself: no
portion lies idle or uncultivated, or in another man’s power; for
he finds nothing worthy of being exchanged for his time, which he
husbands most grudgingly. He, therefore, had time enough: whereas
those who gave up a great part of their lives to the people of
necessity had not enough. Yet you need not suppose that the latter
were not sometimes conscious of their loss: indeed, you will hear
most of those who are troubled with great prosperity every now and
then cry out amid their hosts of clients, their pleadings in court,
and their other honourable troubles, “I am not allowed to live my
own life.” Why is he not allowed? because all those who call upon
you to defend them, take you away from yourself. How many of your
days have been spent by that defendant? by that candidate for office?
by that old woman who is weary with burying her heirs? by that man
who pretends to be ill, in order to excite the greed of those who
hope to inherit his property? by that powerful friend of yours, who
uses you to swell his train, not to be his friend? Balance your
account, and run over all the days of your life; you will see that
only a very few days, and only those which were useless for any
other purpose, have been left to you. He who has obtained the
_fasces_[6] for which he longed, is eager to get rid of them, and
is constantly saying, “When will this year be over?” another exhibits
public games, and once would have given a great deal for the chance
of doing so, but now “when,” says he, “shall I escape from this?”
another is an advocate who is fought for in all the courts, and who
draws immense audiences, who crowd all the forum to a far greater
distance than they can hear him; “When,” says he, “will vacation-time
come?” Every man hurries through his life, and suffers from
a yearning for the future, and a weariness of the present: but he
who disposes of all his time for his own purposes, who arranges all
his days as though he were arranging the plan of his life, neither
wishes for nor fears the morrow: for what new pleasure can any hour
now bestow upon him? he knows it all, and has indulged in it all
even to satiety. Fortune may deal with the rest as she will, his
life is already safe from her: such a man may gain something, but
cannot lose anything: and, indeed, he can only gain anything in the
same way as one who is already glutted and filled can get some extra
food which he takes although he does not want it. You have no
grounds, therefore, for supposing that any one has lived long,
because he has wrinkles or grey hairs: such a man has not lived
long, but has only been long alive. Why! would you think that a man
had voyaged much if a fierce gale had caught him as soon as he left
his port, and he had been driven round and round the same place
continually by a succession of winds blowing from opposite quarters?
such a man has not travelled much, he has only been much tossed
about.

I am filled with wonder when I see some men asking others for
their time, and those who are asked for it most willing to give it:
both parties consider the object for which the time is given, but
neither of them thinks of the time itself, as though in asking for
this one asked for nothing, and in giving it one gave nothing: we
play with what is the most precious of all things: yet it escapes
men’s notice, because it is an incorporeal thing, and because it
does not come before our eyes; and therefore it is held very cheap,
nay, hardly any value whatever is put upon it. Men set the greatest
store upon presents or pensions, and hire out their work, their
services, or their care in order to gain them: no one values time:
they give it much more freely, as though it cost nothing. Yet you
will see these same people clasping the knees of their physician
as suppliants when they are sick and in present peril of death, and
if threatened with a capital charge willing to give all that they
possess in order that they may live: so inconsistent are they.
Indeed, if the number of every man’s future years could be laid
before him, as we can lay that of his past years, how anxious those
who found that they had but few years remaining would be to make
the most of them? Yet it is easy to arrange the distribution of a
quantity, however small, if we know how much there is: what you
ought to husband most carefully is that which may run short you
know not when. Yet you have no reason to suppose that they do not
know how dear a thing time is: they are wont to say to those whom
they especially love that they are ready to give them a part of
their own years. They do give them, and know not that they are
giving them; but they give them in such a manner that they themselves
lose them without the others gaining them. They do not, however,
know whence they obtain their supply, and therefore they are able
to endure the waste of what is not seen: yet no one will give you
back your years, no one will restore them to you again: your life
will run its course when once it has begun, and will neither begin
again or efface what it has done. It will make no disturbance, it
will give you no warning of how fast it flies: it will move silently
on: it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the
wish of a nation: as it started on its first day, so it will run:
it will never turn aside, never delay. What follows, then? Why! you
are busy, but life is hurrying on: death will be here some time or
other, and you must attend to him, whether you will or no.

Can anything be mentioned which is more insane than the ideas
of leisure of those people who boast of their worldly wisdom? They
live laboriously, in order that they may live better; they
fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself, and cast
their thoughts a long way forwards: yet postponement is the greatest
waste of life: it wrings day after day from us, and takes away the
present by promising something hereafter: there is no such obstacle
to true living as waiting, which loses to-day while it is depending
on the morrow. You dispose of that which is in the hand of Fortune,
and you let go that which is in your own. Whither are you looking,
whither are you stretching forward? everything future is uncertain:
live now straightway. See how the greatest of bards cries to you
and sings in wholesome verse as though inspired with celestial
fire:—

“The best of wretched mortals’ days is that Which is the first to fly.”

Why do you hesitate, says he, why do you stand back? unless you
seize it it will have fled: and even if you do seize it, it will
still fly. Our swiftness in making use of our time ought therefore
to vie with the swiftness of time itself, and we ought to drink of
it as we should of a fast-running torrent which will not be always
running. The poet, too, admirably satirizes our boundless thoughts,
when he says, not “the first age,” but “the first day.” Why are you
careless and slow while time is flying so fast, and why do you
spread out before yourself a vision of long months and years, as
many as your greediness requires? he talks with you about one day,
and that a fast-fleeting one. There can, then, be no doubt that the
best days are those which fly first for wretched, that is, for busy
mortals, whose minds are still in their childhood when old age comes
upon them, and they reach it unprepared and without arms to combat
it. They have never looked forward: they have all of a sudden
stumbled upon old age: they never noticed that it was stealing upon
them day by day. As conversation, or reading, or deep thought
deceives travellers, and they find themselves at their journey’s
end before they knew that it was drawing near, so in this fast and
never-ceasing journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether
we are asleep or awake, busy people never notice that they are
moving till they are at the end of it.

If I chose to divide this proposition into separate steps,
supported by evidence, many things occur to me by which I could
prove that the lives of busy men are the shortest of all. Fabianus,
who was none of your lecture-room philosophers, but one of the true
antique pattern, used to say, “We ought to fight against the passions
by main force, not by skirmishing, and upset their line of battle
by a home charge, not by inflicting trifling wounds: I do not approve
of dallying with sophisms; they must be crushed, not merely scratched.”
Yet, in order that sinners may be confronted with their errors,
they must be taught, and not merely mourned for. Life is divided
into three parts: that which has been, that which is, and that which
is to come: of these three stages, that which we are passing through
is brief, that which we are about to pass is uncertain, and that
which we have passed is certain: this it is over which Fortune has
lost her rights, and which can fall into no other man’s power: and
this is what busy men lose: for they have no leisure to look back
upon the past, and even if they had, they take no pleasure in
remembering what they regret: they are, therefore, unwilling to
turn their minds to the contemplation of ill-spent time, and they
shrink from reviewing a course of action whose faults become glaringly
apparent when handled a second time, although they were snatched
at when we were under the spell of immediate gratification. No one,
unless all his acts have been submitted to the infallible censorship
of his own conscience, willingly turns his thoughts back upon the
past. He who has ambitiously desired, haughtily scorned, passionately
vanquished, treacherously deceived, greedily snatched, or prodigally
wasted much, must needs fear his own memory; yet this is a
holy and consecrated part of our time, beyond the reach of all human
accidents, removed from the dominion of Fortune, and which cannot
be disquieted by want, fear, or attacks of sickness: this can neither
be troubled nor taken away from one: we possess it for ever
undisturbed. Our present consists only of single days, and those,
too, taken one hour at a time: but all the days of past times appear
before us when bidden, and allow themselves to be examined and
lingered over, albeit busy men cannot find time for so doing. It
is the privilege of a tranquil and peaceful mind to review all the
parts of its life: but the minds of busy men are like animals under
the yoke, and cannot bend aside or look back. Consequently, their
life passes away into vacancy, and as you do no good however much
you may pour into a vessel which cannot keep or hold what you put
there, so also it matters not how much time you give men if it can
find no place to settle in, but leaks away through the chinks and
holes of their minds. Present time is very short, so much so that
to some it seems to be no time at all; for it is always in motion,
and runs swiftly away: it ceases to exist before it comes, and can
no more brook delay than can the universe or the host of heaven,
whose unresting movement never lets them pause on their way. Busy
men, therefore, possess present time, alone, that being so short
that they cannot grasp it, and when they are occupied with many
things they lose even this.

In a word, do you want to know for how short a time they live?
see how they desire to live long: broken-down old men beg in their
prayers for the addition of a few more years: they pretend to be
younger than they are: they delude themselves with their own lies,
and are as willing to cheat themselves as if they could cheat Fate
at the same time: when at last some weakness reminds them that they
are mortal, they die as it were in terror: they may rather
be said to be dragged out of this life than to depart from it. They
loudly exclaim that they have been fools and have not lived their
lives, and declare that if they only survive this sickness they
will spend the rest of their lives at leisure: at such times they
reflect how uselessly they have laboured to provide themselves with
what they have never enjoyed, and how all their toil has gone for
nothing: but those whose life is spent without any engrossing
business may well find it ample: no part of it is made over to
others, or scattered here and there; no part is entrusted to Fortune,
is lost by neglect, is spent in ostentatious giving, or is useless:
all of it is, so to speak, invested at good interest. A very small
amount of it, therefore, is abundantly sufficient, and so, when his
last day arrives, the wise man will not hang back, but will walk
with a steady step to meet death.

Perhaps you will ask me whom I mean by “busy men”? you need
not think that I allude only to those who are hunted out of the
courts of justice with dogs at the close of the proceedings, those
whom you see either honourably jostled by a crowd of their own
clients or contemptuously hustled in visits of ceremony by strangers,
who call them away from home to hang about their patron’s doors,
or who make use of the praetor’s sales by auction to acquire infamous
gains which some day will prove their own ruin. Some men’s leisure
is busy: in their country house or on their couch, in complete
solitude, even though they have retired from all men’s society,
they still continue to worry themselves: we ought not to say that
such men’s life is one of leisure, but their very business is sloth.
Would you call a man idle who expends anxious finicking care in the
arrangement of his Corinthian bronzes, valuable only through the
mania of a few connoisseurs? and who passes the greater part of his
days among plates of rusty metal? who sits in the palaestra (shame,
that our very vices should be foreign) watching boys wrestling?
who distributes his gangs of fettered slaves into pairs according
to their age and colour? who keeps athletes of the latest fashion?
Why, do you call those men idle, who pass many hours at the barber’s
while the growth of the past night is being plucked out by the
roots, holding councils over each several hair, while the scattered
locks are arranged in order and those which fall back are forced
forward on to the forehead? How angry they become if the shaver is
a little careless, as though he were shearing a _man_! what a white
heat they work themselves into if some of their mane is cut away,
if some part of it is ill-arranged, if all their ringlets do not
lie in regular order! who of them would not rather that the state
were overthrown than that his hair should be ruffled? who does not
care more for the appearance of his head than for his health? who
would not prefer ornament to honour? Do you call these men idle,
who make a business of the comb and looking-glass? what of those
who devote their lives to composing, hearing, and learning songs,
who twist their voices, intended by Nature to sound best and simplest
when used straightforwardly, through all the turns of futile melodies:
whose fingers are always beating time to some music on which they
are inwardly meditating; who, when invited to serious and even sad
business may be heard humming an air to themselves?—such people are
not at leisure, but are busy about trifles. As for their banquets,
by Hercules, I cannot reckon them among their unoccupied times when
I see with what anxious care they set out their plate, how laboriously
they arrange the girdles of their waiters’ tunics, how breathlessly
they watch to see how the cook dishes up the wild boar, with what
speed, when the signal is given, the slave-boys run to perform their
duties, how skilfully birds are carved into pieces of the right
size, how painstakingly wretched youths wipe up the spittings of
drunken men. By these means men seek credit for taste and
grandeur, and their vices follow them so far into their privacy
that they can neither eat nor drink without a view to effect. Nor
should I count those men idle who have themselves carried hither
and thither in sedans and litters, and who look forward to their
regular hour for taking this exercise as though they were not allowed
to omit it: men who are reminded by some one else when to bathe,
when to swim, when to dine: they actually reach such a pitch of
languid effeminacy as not to be able to find out for themselves
whether they are hungry. I have heard one of these luxurious folk—if
indeed, we ought to give the name of luxury to unlearning the life
and habits of a man—when he was carried in men’s arms out of the
bath and placed in his chair, say inquiringly, “Am I seated?” Do
you suppose that such a man as this, who did not know when he was
seated, could know whether he was alive, whether he could see,
whether he was at leisure? I can hardly say whether I pity him more
if he really did not know or if he pretended not to know this. Such
people do really become unconscious of much, but they behave as
though they were unconscious of much more: they delight in some
failings because they consider them to be proofs of happiness: it
seems the part of an utterly low and contemptible man to know what
he is doing. After this, do you suppose that playwrights draw largely
upon their imaginations in their burlesques upon luxury: by Hercules,
they omit more than they invent; in this age, inventive in this
alone, such a number of incredible vices have been produced, that
already you are able to reproach the playwrights with omitting to
notice them. To think that there should be any one who had so far
lost his senses through luxury as to take some one else’s opinion
as to whether he was sitting or not? This man certainly is not at
leisure: you must bestow a different title on him: he is sick, or
rather dead: he only is at leisure who feels that he is at leisure:
but this creature is only half alive, if he wants some one
to tell him what position his body is in. How can such a man be
able to dispose of any time?

It would take long to describe the various individuals who
have wasted their lives over playing at draughts, playing at ball,
or toasting their bodies in the sun: men are not at leisure if their
pleasures partake of the character of business, for no one will
doubt that those persons are laborious triflers who devote themselves
to the study of futile literary questions, of whom there is already
a great number in Rome also. It used to be a peculiarly Greek disease
of the mind to investigate how many rowers Ulysses had, whether the
Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, and furthermore, whether
they were written by the same author, with other matters of the
same stamp, which neither please your inner consciousness if you
keep them to yourself, nor make you seem more learned, but only
more troublesome, if you publish them abroad. See, already this
vain longing to learn what is useless has taken hold of the Romans:
the other day I heard somebody telling who was the first Roman
general who did this or that: Duillius was the first who won a
sea-fight, Curius Dentatus was the first who drove elephants in his
triumph: moreover, these stories, though they add nothing to real
glory, do nevertheless deal with the great deeds of our countrymen:
such knowledge is not profitable, yet it claims our attention as a
fascinating kind of folly. I will even pardon those who want to
know who first persuaded the Romans to go on board ship. It was
Claudius, who for this reason was surnamed Caudex, because any piece
of carpentry formed of many planks was called _caudex_ by the ancient
Romans, for which reason public records are called _Codices_, and
by old custom the ships which ply on the Tiber with provisions are
called _codicariae_. Let us also allow that it is to the point to
tell how Valerius Corvinus was the first to conquer Messana,
and first of the family of the Valerii transferred the name of the
captured city to his own, and was called Messana, and how the people
gradually corrupted the pronunciation and called him Messalla: or
would you let any one find interest in Lucius Sulla having been the
first to let lions loose in the circus, they having been previously
exhibited in chains, and hurlers of darts having been sent by King
Bocchus to kill them? This may be permitted to their curiosity: but
can it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompeius was the first
to exhibit eighteen elephants in the circus, who were matched in a
mimic battle with some convicts? The leading man in the state, and
one who, according to tradition, was noted among the ancient leaders
of the state for his transcendent goodness of heart, thought it a
notable kind of show to kill men in a manner hitherto unheard of.
Do they fight to the death? that is not cruel enough: are they torn
to pieces? that is not cruel enough: let them be crushed flat by
animals of enormous bulk. It would be much better that such a thing
should be forgotten, for fear that hereafter some potentate might
hear of it and envy its refined barbarity. O, how doth excessive
prosperity blind our intellects! at the moment at which he was
casting so many troops of wretches to be trampled on by outlandish
beasts, when he was proclaiming war between such different creatures,
when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman
people, whose blood he himself was soon to shed even more freely,
he thought himself the master of the whole world; yet he afterwards,
deceived by the treachery of the Alexandrians, had to offer himself
to the dagger of the vilest of slaves, and then at last discovered
what an empty boast was his surname of “The Great.” But to return
to the point from which I have digressed, I will prove that even
on this very subject some people expend useless pains. The same
author tells us that Metellus, when he triumphed after having
conquered the Carthaginians in Sicily, was the only Roman who ever
had a hundred and twenty captured elephants led before his car: and
that Sulla was the last Roman who extended the pomoerium,[7] which
it was not the custom of the ancients to extend on account of the
conquest of provincial, but only of Italian territory. Is it more
useful to know this, than to know that the Mount Aventine, according
to him, is outside of the pomoerium, for one of two reasons, either
because it was thither that the plebeians seceded, or because when
Remus took his auspices on that place the birds which he saw were
not propitious: and other stories without number of the like sort,
which are either actual falsehoods or much the same as falsehoods?
for even if you allow that these authors speak in all good faith,
if they pledge themselves for the truth of what they write, still,
whose mistakes will be made fewer by such stories? whose passions
will be restrained? whom will they make more brave, more just, or
more gentlemanly? My friend Fabianus used to say that he was not
sure that it was not better not to apply oneself to any studies at
all than to become interested in these.

The only persons who are really at leisure are those who devote
themselves to philosophy: and they alone really live: for they do
not merely enjoy their own lifetime, but they annex every century
to their own: all the years which have passed before them belong
to them. Unless we are the most ungrateful creatures in the world,
we shall regard these noblest of men, the founders of divine schools
of thought, as having been born for us, and having prepared life
for us: we are led by the labour of others to behold most beautiful
things which have been brought out of darkness into light; we are
not shut out from any period, we can make our way into every subject,
and, if only we can summon up sufficient strength of mind to
overstep the narrow limit of human weakness, we have a vast extent
of time wherein to disport ourselves: we may argue with Socrates,
doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, overcome human nature
with the Stoics, out-herod it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows
us to commune with every age, why do we not abstract ourselves from
our own petty fleeting span of time, and give ourselves up with our
whole mind to what is vast, what is eternal, what we share with
better men than ourselves? Those who gad about in a round of calls,
who worry themselves and others, after they have indulged their
madness to the full, and crossed every patron’s threshold daily,
leaving no open door unentered, after they have hawked about their
interested greetings in houses of the most various character,—after
all, how few people are they able to see out of so vast a city,
divided among so many different ruling passions: how many will be
moved by sloth, self-indulgence, or rudeness to deny them admittance:
how many, after they have long plagued them, will run past them
with feigned hurry? how many will avoid coming out through their
entrance-hall with its crowds of clients, and will escape by some
concealed backdoor? as though it were not ruder to deceive their
visitor than to deny him admittance!—how many, half asleep and
stupid with yesterday’s debauch, can hardly be brought to return
the greeting of the wretched man who has broken his own rest in
order to wait on that of another, even after his name has been
whispered to them for the thousandth time, save by a most offensive
yawn of his half-opened lips. We may truly say that those men are
pursuing the true path of duty, who wish every day to consort on
the most familiar terms with Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the
rest of those high priests of virtue, with Aristotle and with
Theophrastus. None of these men will be “engaged,” none of
these will fail to send you away after visiting him in a happier
frame of mind and on better terms with yourself, none of them will
let you leave him empty-handed: yet their society may be enjoyed
by all men, and by night as well as by day.

None of these men will force you to die, but all of them will
teach you how to die: none of these will waste your time, but will
add his own to it. The talk of these men is not dangerous, their
friendship will not lead you to the scaffold, their society will
not ruin you in expenses: you may take from them whatsoever you
will; they will not prevent your taking the deepest draughts of
their wisdom that you please. What blessedness, what a fair old age
awaits the man who takes these for his patrons! he will have friends
with whom he may discuss all matters, great and small, whose advice
he may ask daily about himself, from whom he will hear truth without
insult, praise without flattery, and according to whose likeness
he may model his own character. We are wont to say that we are not
able to choose who our parents should be, but that they were assigned
to us by chance; yet we may be born just as we please: there are
several families of the noblest intellects: choose which you would
like to belong to: by your adoption you will not receive their name
only, but also their property, which is not intended to be guarded
in a mean and miserly spirit: the more persons you divide it among
the larger it becomes. These will open to you the path which leads
to eternity, and will raise you to a height from whence none shall
cast you down. By this means alone can you prolong your mortal life,
nay, even turn it into an immortal one. High office, monuments, all
that ambition records in decrees or piles up in stone, soon passes
away: lapse of time casts down and ruins everything; but those
things on which Philosophy has set its seal are beyond the reach
of injury: no age will discard them or lessen their force,
each succeeding century will add somewhat to the respect in which
they are held: for we look upon what is near us with jealous eyes,
but we admire what is further off with less prejudice. The wise
man’s life, therefore, includes much: he is not hedged in by the
same limits which confine others: he alone is exempt from the laws
by which mankind is governed: all ages serve him like a god. If any
time be past, he recals it by his memory; if it be present, he uses
it; if it be future, he anticipates it: his life is a long one
because he concentrates all times into it.

Those men lead the shortest and unhappiest lives who forget
the past, neglect the present, and dread the future: when they reach
the end of it the poor wretches learn too late that they were busied
all the while that they were doing nothing. You need not think,
because sometimes they call for death, that their lives are long:
their folly torments them with vague passions which lead them into
the very things of which they are afraid: they often, therefore,
wish for death because they live in fear. Neither is it, as you
might think, a proof of the length of their lives that they often
find the days long, that they often complain how slowly the hours
pass until the appointed time arrives for dinner: for whenever they
are left without their usual business, they fret helplessly in their
idleness, and know not how to arrange or to spin it out. They betake
themselves, therefore, to some business, and all the intervening
time is irksome to them; they would wish, by Hercules, to skip over
it, just as they wish to skip over the intervening days before a
gladiatorial contest or some other time appointed for a public
spectacle or private indulgence: all postponement of what they wish
for is grievous to them. Yet the very time which they enjoy is brief
and soon past, and is made much briefer by their own fault: for
they run from one pleasure to another, and are not able to devote
themselves consistently to one passion: their days are not
long, but odious to them: on the other hand, how short they find
the nights which they spend with courtezans or over wine? Hence
arises that folly of the poets who encourage the errors of mankind
by their myths, and declare that Jupiter to gratify his voluptuous
desires doubled the length of the night. Is it not adding fuel to
our vices to name the gods as their authors, and to offer our
distempers free scope by giving them deity for an example? How can
the nights for which men pay so dear fail to appear of the shortest?
they lose the day in looking forward to the night, and lose the
night through fear of the dawn.

Such men’s very pleasures are restless and disturbed by various
alarms, and at the most joyous moment of all there rises the anxious
thought: “How long will this last?” This frame of mind has led kings
to weep over their power, and they have not been so much delighted
at the grandeur of their position, as they have been terrified by
the end to which it must some day come. That most arrogant Persian
king,[8] when his army stretched over vast plains and could not be
counted but only measured, burst into tears at the thought that in
less than a hundred years none of all those warriors would be alive:
yet their death was brought upon them by the very man who wept over
it, who was about to destroy some of them by sea, some on land,
some in battle, and some in flight, and who would in a very short
space of time put an end to those about whose hundredth year he
showed such solicitude. Why need we wonder at their very joys being
mixed with fear? they do not rest upon any solid grounds, but are
disturbed by the same emptiness from which they spring. What must
we suppose to be the misery of such times as even they acknowledge
to be wretched, when even the joys by which they elevate themselves
and raise themselves above their fellows are of a mixed
character. All the greatest blessings are enjoyed with fear, and
no thing is so untrustworthy as extreme prosperity: we require fresh
strokes of good fortune to enable us to keep that which we are
enjoying, and even those of our prayers which are answered require
fresh prayers. Everything for which we are dependent on chance is
uncertain: the higher it rises, the more opportunities it has of
falling. Moreover, no one takes any pleasure in what is about to
fall into ruin: very wretched, therefore, as well as very short
must be the lives of those who work very hard to gain what they
must work even harder to keep: they obtain what they wish with
infinite labour, and they hold what they have obtained with fear
and trembling. Meanwhile they take no account of time, of which
they will never have a fresh and larger supply: they substitute new
occupations for old ones, one hope leads to another, one ambition
to another: they do not seek for an end to their wretchedness, but
they change its subject. Do our own preferments trouble us? nay,
those of other men occupy more of our time. Have we ceased from our
labours in canvassing? then we begin others in voting. Have we got
rid of the trouble of accusation? then we begin that of judging.
Has a man ceased to be a judge? then he becomes an examiner. Has
he grown old in the salaried management of other people’s property?
then he becomes occupied with his own. Marius is discharged from
military service; he becomes consul many times: Quintius is eager
to reach the end of his dictatorship; he will be called a second
time from the plough: Scipio marched against the Carthaginians
before he was of years sufficient for so great an undertaking; after
he has conquered Hannibal, conquered Antiochus, been the glory of
his own consulship and the surety for that of his brother, he might,
had he wished it, have been set on the same pedestal with Jupiter;
but civil factions will vex the saviour of the state, and he who
when a young man disdained to receive divine honours, will
take pride as an old man in obstinately remaining in exile. We shall
never lack causes of anxiety, either pleasurable or painful: our
life will be pushed along from one business to another: leisure
will always be wished for, and never enjoyed.

Whefore, my dearest Paulinus, tear yourself away from the
common herd, and since you have seen more rough weather than one
would think from your age, betake yourself at length to a more
peaceful haven: reflect what waves you have sailed through, what
storms you have endured in private life, and brought upon yourself
in public. Your courage has been sufficiently displayed by many
toilsome and wearisome proofs; try how it will deal with leisure:
the greater, certainly the better part of your life, has been given
to your country; take now some part of your time for yourself as
well. I do not urge you to practise a dull or lazy sloth, or to
drown all your fiery spirit in the pleasures which are dear to the
herd: that is not rest: you can find greater works than all those
which you have hitherto so manfully carried out, upon which you may
employ yourself in retirement and security. You manage the revenues
of the entire world, as unselfishly as though they belonged to
another, as laboriously as if they were your own, as scrupulously
as though they belonged to the public: you win love in an office
in which it is hard to avoid incurring hatred; yet, believe me, it
is better to understand your own mind than to understand the
corn-market. Take away that keen intellect of yours, so well capable
of grappling with the greatest subjects, from a post which may be
dignified, but which is hardly fitted to render life happy, and
reflect that you did not study from childhood all the branches of
a liberal education merely in order that many thousand tons of corn
might safely be entrusted to your charge: you have given us
promise of something greater and nobler than this. There will never
be any want of strict economists or of laborious workers: slow-going
beasts of burden are better suited for carrying loads than well-bred
horses, whose generous swiftness no one would encumber with a heavy
pack. Think, moreover, how full of risk is the great task which you
have undertaken: you have to deal with the human stomach: a hungry
people will not endure reason, will not be appeased by justice, and
will not hearken to any prayers. Only just a few days ago, when G.
Caesar perished, grieving for nothing so much (if those in the other
world can feel grief) as that the Roman people did not die with
him, there was said to be only enough corn for seven or eight days’
consumption: while he was making bridges with ships[9] and playing
with the resources of the empire, want of provisions, the worst
evil that can befall even a besieged city, was at hand: his imitation
of a crazy outlandish and misproud king very nearly ended in ruin,
famine, and the general revolution which follows famine. What must
then have been the feelings of those who had the charge of supplying
the city with corn, who were in danger of stoning, of fire and
sword, of Gaius himself? With consummate art they concealed the
vast internal evil by which the state was menaced, and were quite
right in so doing; for some diseases must be cured without the
patient’s knowledge: many have died through discovering what was
the matter with them.

Betake yourself to these quieter, safer, larger fields of
action: do you think that there can be any comparison between seeing
that corn is deposited in the public granary without being
stolen by the fraud or spoilt by the carelessness of the importer,
that it does not suffer from damp or overheating, and that it
measures and weighs as much as it ought, and beginning the study
of sacred and divine knowledge, which will teach you of what elements
the gods are formed, what are their pleasures, their position, their
form? to what changes your soul has to look forward? where Nature
will place us when we are dismissed from our bodies? what that
principle is which holds all the heaviest particles of our universe
in the middle, suspends the lighter ones above, puts fire highest
of all, and causes the stars to rise in their courses, with many
other matters, full of marvels? Will you not[10] cease to grovel
on earth and turn your mind’s eye on these themes? nay, while your
blood still flows swiftly, before your knees grow feeble, you ought
to take the better path. In this course of life there await you
many good things, such as love and practice of the virtues,
forgetfulness of passions, knowledge of how to live and die, deep
repose. The position of all busy men is unhappy, but most unhappy
of all is that of those who do not even labour at their own affairs,
but have to regulate their rest by another man’s sleep, their walk
by another man’s pace, and whose very love and hate, the freest
things in the world, are at another’s bidding. If such men wish to
know how short their lives are, let them think how small a fraction
of them is their own.

When, therefore, you see a man often wear the purple robes of
office, and hear his name often repeated in the forum, do not envy
him: he gains these things by losing so much of his life. Men throw
away all their years in order to have one year named after them as
consul: some lose their lives during the early part of the struggle,
and never reach the height to which they aspired: some after
having submitted to a thousand indignities in order to reach the
crowning dignity, have the miserable reflexion that the only result
of their labours will be the inscription on their tombstone. Some,
while telling off extreme old age, like youth, for new aspirations,
have found it fail from sheer weakness amid great and presumptuous
enterprises. It is a shameful ending, when a man’s breath deserts
him in a court of justice, while, although well stricken in years,
he is still striving to gain the sympathies of an ignorant audience
for some obscure litigant: it is base to perish in the midst of
one’s business, wearied with living sooner than with working;
shameful, too, to die in the act of receiving payments, amid the
laughter of one’s long-expectant heir. I cannot pass over an an
instance which occurs to me: Turannius was an old man of the most
painstaking exactitude, who after entering upon his ninetieth year,
when he had by G. Caesar’s own act been relieved of his duties as
collector of the revenue, ordered himself to be laid out on his bed
and mourned for as though he were dead. The whole house mourned for
the leisure of its old master, and did not lay aside its mourning
until his work was restored to him. Can men find such pleasure in
dying in harness? Yet many are of the same mind: they retain their
wish for labour longer than their capacity for it, and fight against
their bodily weakness; they think old age an evil for no other
reason than because it lays them on the shelf. The law does not
enrol a soldier after his fiftieth year, or require a senator’s
attendance after his sixtieth: but men have more difficulty in
obtaining their own consent than that of the law to a life of
leisure. Meanwhile, while they are plundering and being plundered,
while one is disturbing another’s repose, and all are being made
wretched alike, life remains without profit, without pleasure,
without any intellectual progress: no one keeps death well before
his eyes, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes. Some even
arrange things which lie beyond their own lives, such as huge
sepulchral buildings, the dedication of public works, and exhibitions
to be given at their funeral-pyre, and ostentatious processions:
but, by Hercules, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted
by the light of torches and wax tapers,[11] as though they had lived
but a few days.

[1] “On croit que ce Paulin étoit frère de Pauline, épouse de Sénéque.” —La Grange.

[2] “L’un se consume en projets d’ambition, dont le succès depend du suffrage de l’autrui.”—La Grange.

[3] “Combien d’orateurs qui s’épuisent de sang et de forces pour faire montrer de leur génie!”—La Grange.

[4] “Pour vous, jamais vous ne daignâtes vous regarder seulement,
ou vous entendre. Ne faites pas non plus valoir votre condescendance
a écouter les autres. Lorsque vous vous y prêtez, ce n’est pas que
vous aimiez a vous communiquer aux autres; c’est que vous craignez
de vous trouver avec vous-même.”—La Grange.

“It is a folly therefore beyond Sence, When great men will not
give us Audience To count them proud; how dare we call it pride
When we the same have to ourselves deny’d.

Yet they how great, how proud so e’re, have bin Sometimes so
courteous as to call thee in. And hear thee speak; but thou
could’st nere afford Thyself the leisure of a look or word.

Thou should’st not then herein another blame, Because when thou
thyself do’st do the same. Thou would’st not be with others,
but we see Plainly thou can’st not with thine own self be.”

“L. ANNAEUS SENECA, the Philosopher, his book of the Shortness of
Life, translated into an English Poem. Imprinted at London, by
William Goldbird, for the Author, mdclxiii.”

[5] “Dans une lettre qu’il envoya au Sénat apres avoir promis que
son repos n’aura rièn indigne de la gloire de ses premières années,
il ajoute: Mais l’execution y mettra un prix, que ne peuvent y
mettre les promesses. J’obeis cependant a la vive passion que j’ai,
de me voir a ce temps si désiré; et puisque l’heureuse situation
d’affaires m’en tient encore éloigné, j’ai voulu du moins me
satisfaire en partie, par la douceur que je trouve à vous en
parler.”—La Grange.

“Such words I find. But these things rather ought Be done, then
said; yet so far hath the thought Of that wish’d time prevail’d,
that though the glad Fruition of the thing be not yet had. Yet
I,” &c.

[6] Fasces, the rods carried by the _lictors_ as symbols of office. See Smith’s “Diet, of Antiquities,” _s.v._

[7] See Smith’s “Dict. of Antiquities.”

[8] Xerxes.

[9] “Sénéque parle ici du pont que Caligula fit construire sur le
golphe de Baies, l’an de Rome 791, 40 de J. C. . . . . rassembla
et fit entrer dans la construction de son pont tous les vaisseaux
qui se trouverent dans les ports d’Italie et des contrées voisines.
Il n’excepta pas même ceux qui etoient destinés a y apporter des
grains étrangers,” &c.—LaGrange.

[10] For _vis tu_ see Juv. v., vis tu consuetis, &c. Mayor’s note.

[11] As those of children were.