Back
Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Leisure
Contents
Log in

On Leisure

1 ⟨…⟩1 commend vices to us with one great voice. Even if we attempt nothing else that is wholesome, withdrawal in itself will do us good: we shall be better, each of us, on our own. And what of the fact that we can withdraw into the company of the best of men and choose some example by which to direct our lives? That cannot happen except in leisure. Only then can we hold to what we have once resolved, when no one intervenes to bend our still-weak judgment with the crowd’s help; only then can life go forward on one even course, the life we now tear apart with the most contradictory aims. For among our other ills the worst is that we keep changing our very vices. So we are not even granted this much: to stay in an evil we have grown used to. One thing pleases us, then another, and we are troubled also by this, that our judgments are not only wrong but fickle. We waver and grasp at one thing after another; we abandon what we sought and seek again what we abandoned; our desire and our regret take turns. For we hang wholly on the judgments of others, and that seems best to us which has many seekers and many praisers, not what deserves to be praised and sought; and we judge a road good or bad not by itself but by the number of footprints, and none of them are the footprints of people coming back.

You will say to me: “What are you saying, Seneca? Are you deserting your side? Surely your Stoics say: ‘We shall be in action to the very end of life; we shall never stop working for the common good, helping individuals, bringing aid even to our enemies with an old man’s hand. We are the ones who grant no discharge at any age and who, as that most eloquent man says,

“press our gray hair beneath the helmet;”2

we are the ones for whom nothing before death is a time of leisure, so much so that, if circumstances allow, death itself is not leisure either.’ Why do you preach the precepts of Epicurus to us in the very headquarters of Zeno?3 If you’re tired of your party, why don’t you go over to the other side outright, like a man, instead of betraying it?” For the present I will give you this answer: Do you want anything more than that I show myself like my leaders? What then? I will go not where they send me, but where they lead.

2 Now I will prove to you that I am not deserting the precepts of the Stoics; for they themselves did not desert their own. And yet I would have the best of excuses even if I followed not their precepts but their examples. I will divide what I have to say into two parts. First, that a man may, even from his earliest years, give himself wholly to the contemplation of truth, seek a principle of living, and practice it in private. Second, that a man may do this with the fullest right once his service is done and his years are far spent, and turn his mind to other pursuits,4 after the manner of the Vestal Virgins, whose years are divided among their duties: they learn to perform the rites, and when they have learned, they teach.

3 I will show that the Stoics too approve of this, not because I have made it a law for myself to do nothing against the word of Zeno or Chrysippus, but because the matter itself allows me to go over to their opinion; for a man who always follows one person belongs not to the senate but to a faction. Would that everything were already grasped, that truth lay in the open and acknowledged, and that we changed nothing in our doctrines! As it is, we are searching for the truth together with the very people who teach it.

The two sects that differ most, here too, are the Epicureans and the Stoics, but each of them sends us to leisure by a different road. Epicurus says: “The wise man will not enter public life unless something intervenes.” Zeno says: “He will enter public life unless something prevents him.” The one seeks leisure on principle, the other for a cause; but that cause has a wide reach. If the state is too corrupt to be helped, if it is in the grip of evils, the wise man will not strain to no purpose or spend himself where he can do no good. If he has too little authority or strength, and the state will not admit him, if his health hinders him, then, just as he would not launch a battered ship, just as he would not enlist for the army if he were disabled, so he will not set out on a road he knows he cannot travel. So even a man whose prospects are all still untouched may, before he meets any storms, stay in safety, devote himself at once to the liberal arts, and enjoy an unbroken leisure as a cultivator of the virtues, which can be practiced even by the most retiring. What is required of a man, surely, is this: that he benefit men, many if he can; if not, a few; if not, those nearest him; if not, himself. For when he makes himself useful to others, he is doing the common business. Just as a man who makes himself worse harms not only himself but all those he could have benefited had he become better, so whoever deserves well of himself benefits others by this very fact, that he is preparing what will benefit them.

4 Let us embrace in our minds two commonwealths. One is great and truly common, and holds gods and men; in it we look not to this corner or that, but measure the bounds of our state by the sun. The other is the one to which the accident of birth has assigned us: this will be the commonwealth of the Athenians or of the Carthaginians or of some other city that belongs not to all men but to particular ones. Some serve both commonwealths at the same time, the greater and the lesser; some only the lesser; some only the greater. This greater commonwealth we can serve even in leisure; in fact I am not sure we cannot serve it better in leisure, by inquiring what virtue is, whether it is one or many; whether it is nature or art that makes men good; whether this thing that embraces seas and lands, and all that is set in sea and land, is one, or whether god has scattered many such bodies about; whether all the matter from which everything is born is continuous and full, or divided, with void mixed among the solids; where god’s seat is; whether he looks on his work or handles it; whether he is poured around it from outside or set within the whole; whether the universe is immortal or must be counted among things perishable and born for a time. What does the man who contemplates these things do for god? He keeps such great works of his from going without a witness.

5 We often say that the highest good is to live according to nature: Nature brought us forth for both, for the contemplation of things and for action. Now let us prove what we stated first. What then? Will it not be proved if each person asks himself how great a desire he has to know the unknown, how he is roused by every tale? Some people sail and endure the toils of the longest journeys for no other reward than learning something hidden and remote. This is what draws whole peoples to spectacles, what drives them to pry into what is closed, to search out the more secret, to unroll antiquities, to hear of the customs of barbarous nations. Nature gave us a curious mind, and, aware of her own art and beauty, she brought us forth to be spectators of so great a spectacle, since she would lose the fruit of herself if she displayed things so great, so bright, so finely drawn, so shining and beautiful in more ways than one, to an empty solitude. So that you may know she wanted to be gazed at, not merely seen, look at the place she has given us. She set us in her own center and gave us a view all around; and she did not merely make man upright, but, meaning to fit him for contemplation, so that he could follow the stars as they glide from their rising to their setting and turn his face along with the whole sky, she made his head high and set it on a flexible neck. Then, bringing out six signs by day and six by night, she unfolded every part of herself, so that through what she had offered to his eyes she might make him desire the rest as well. For we do not see all things, nor see them as great as they are; but our sight opens a path of inquiry for itself and lays the foundations for the truth, so that inquiry may pass from what is plain to what is obscure, and find something older than the universe itself: where those stars came from; what the state of the whole was before its separate parts went their ways; what principle drew apart the sunken and confused mass; who assigned places to things; whether heavy things sank and light ones flew up by their own nature, or whether, beyond the thrust and weight of bodies, some higher power laid down a law for each; whether that is true which is the chief argument that men are of divine breath: that a part of the stars, sparks of them as it were, leaped down to earth and stuck in a place not its own. Our thought breaks through the ramparts of heaven and is not content to know what is shown it. “I search into,” it says, “what lies beyond the universe: whether it is a boundless vastness, or whether this too is closed in by its own limits; what the condition of things outside is, whether they are shapeless and confused, filling the same amount of space in every direction, or whether they too are arranged in some order; whether they cling to this universe, or have withdrawn far from it and this one rolls in a void; whether the things from which everything born and to be born is built are indivisible, or their matter is continuous and changeable throughout; whether the elements are at war with one another, or do not fight but work together through their differences.” Born to inquire into these things, consider how little time man has received, even if he claims all of it for himself. Though he lets nothing be snatched away through easygoingness and nothing slip through carelessness, though he guards his hours with the greatest avarice and goes on to the farthest limit of human life, and fortune shakes nothing loose from what nature has allotted him, still man is too mortal for the knowledge of immortal things. Therefore I live according to nature if I have given myself wholly to her, if I am her admirer and her worshiper. But Nature wanted me to do both, to act and to be free for contemplation. I do both, since not even contemplation is without action.

6 “But it matters,” you say, “whether you have come to it for pleasure, seeking nothing from it but endless contemplation that leads nowhere; for it is sweet and has its own allurements.” To this I answer: it matters just as much in what spirit you lead the life of a citizen, whether you are always restless and never take any time for yourself in which to turn your eyes from human things to divine. Just as it is far from commendable to strive after things without any love of the virtues and without cultivating the mind, and to turn out mere labor (for these must be mixed and bound together), so virtue thrown away into leisure without action is an imperfect and languid good, never showing what it has learned. Who denies that it ought to test its progress in practice, and not only think about what should be done but sometimes also put its hand to work and bring what it has meditated into reality? But if the delay is not the wise man’s own fault, if it is not the doer who is lacking but things to do, will you not allow him to keep his own company? With what intention does the wise man withdraw into leisure? Knowing that even then he will be doing things by which he benefits posterity. We, certainly, are the ones who say that Zeno and Chrysippus did greater things than if they had led armies, held offices, and passed laws; and they did pass laws, not for one state but for the whole human race. Why, then, should such leisure not befit a good man, a leisure through which he may give order to the ages to come and speak, not before a few, but before all men of all nations, those who are and those who will be? In short, I ask whether Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Zeno lived by their own precepts. You will answer, no doubt, that they lived as they had said one should live: yet none of them governed a state. “They did not have,” you say, “the fortune or the rank that usually gets a man admitted to the handling of public affairs.” But all the same they did not lead an idle life: they found a way for their own repose to benefit men more than the bustle and sweat of others. So these men were nonetheless seen to have done a great deal, though they did nothing in public life.

7 Besides, there are three kinds of life, and people commonly ask which of them is best: one is given to pleasure, another to contemplation, the third to action. First, setting aside our quarrel and setting aside the implacable hatred we have declared on those who follow other paths, let us see how all these arrive at the same point under one label or another. The man who approves of pleasure is not without contemplation; the man who devotes himself to contemplation is not without pleasure; and the man whose life is given over to action is not without contemplation. “There is all the difference in the world,” you say, “between a thing’s being your goal and its being an appendage of some other goal.” Granted, the difference is great; still, the one does not exist without the other. That man does not contemplate without action, nor does this one act without contemplation; nor does that third man, of whom we have agreed to think badly, approve of an inert pleasure, but of one he makes firm for himself by reason. So even this pleasure-loving sect is in action. Why should it not be in action, when Epicurus himself says that he will sometimes draw back from pleasure, and even seek out pain, if regret hangs over the pleasure, or if a lesser pain is taken in place of a heavier one? What is the point of saying this? To make it plain that contemplation pleases everyone. Others make for it as their goal; for us it is a roadstead, not a harbor.

8 Add now that by the law of Chrysippus a man may live in leisure; I do not mean put up with leisure, but choose it. Our school says the wise man will not enter just any state; but what does it matter how the wise man comes to leisure, whether because the state is lacking to him or he is lacking to the state, if a state is going to be lacking to everyone? And it will always be lacking to those who look for one fastidiously. I ask you what state the wise man should enter. That of the Athenians, where Socrates is condemned, and Aristotle flees so as not to be condemned? Where envy crushes the virtues? You will tell me the wise man will not enter this state. Will the wise man enter the state of the Carthaginians, then, where there is constant sedition, and a freedom hostile to every good man, where justice and goodness are held cheapest of all, where there is inhuman cruelty toward enemies, and hostility even toward their own? He will flee this one too. If I choose to go through them one by one, I shall find none that could put up with the wise man, or that the wise man could put up with. But if that state we imagine for ourselves is not to be found, leisure begins to be necessary for everyone, since the one thing that could have been preferred to leisure exists nowhere. If someone says that the best thing is to sail, and then says that one should not sail on a sea where shipwrecks commonly happen and there are often sudden storms that sweep the pilot off his course, I think this man forbids me to put out from shore, even though he praises sailing. ⟨…⟩5

Notes

  1. 1. The beginning is lost.

  2. 2. Virgil, Aeneid 9.612.

  3. 3. Epicurus (341–270 BC) founded the Epicurean school; Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC) founded the Stoic school, which Cleanthes and then Chrysippus led after him.

  4. 4. The text is corrupt here; read as “turn his mind to other pursuits.”

  5. 5. The rest is lost.