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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn the Shortness of Life
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On the Shortness of Life

1 The greater part of mortals, Paulinus,1 complain of the meanness of Nature: that we are born for a brief span of life, that the time given us runs out so swiftly, so rapidly, that apart from a very few, life abandons the rest just as they are getting ready to live. Nor is it only the crowd and the unthinking masses who groan over this evil, which they suppose is common to all; the same feeling has drawn complaints from famous men as well. Hence that exclamation of the greatest of physicians: “Life is short, art is long.”2 Hence Aristotle’s quarrel with Nature, little befitting a wise man: “She has been so indulgent to animals that they live out five hundred or a thousand years, while for man, born for so many and such great things, the limit stands so much nearer.”3 It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given generously for the accomplishment of the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested; but when it drains away through luxury and carelessness, when it is spent on nothing good, then at last, under the pressure of the final necessity, we feel that it has passed, though we never noticed it going. So it is: we are not given a short life, we make it short; we are not poor in it, but wasteful. Just as great and princely wealth, when it comes to a bad master, is squandered in a moment, while wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good guardian, grows by use, so our lifetime offers ample room to the man who manages it well.

2 Why do we complain about Nature? She has behaved generously: life is long, if you know how to use it. One man is gripped by insatiable greed, another by laborious diligence in useless tasks; one is soaked in wine, another numb with idleness; one is worn out by an ambition that always hangs on the judgments of others, another is driven by a headlong desire for trade over every land and every sea in the hope of profit; some are tormented by a passion for soldiering, always either intent on others’ dangers or anxious about their own; there are those whom thankless attendance on their superiors wears away in voluntary servitude; many have been held fast by aspiring to another’s condition or complaining of their own; most, pursuing nothing fixed, have been tossed from one new plan to another by a fickleness that is aimless, inconstant, and displeased with itself; some like nothing toward which to steer their course, but the fates catch them yawning and languid, so that I do not doubt the truth of what was said, like an oracle, by the greatest of poets: “Small is the part of life we really live.”4 All the rest of the span is not life but merely time. Vices press on them and surround them from every side and do not let them rise again or lift their eyes to discern the truth. They hold them down, submerged and impaled on desire; they are never allowed to come back to themselves. If ever some calm comes to them by chance, they toss about as on a deep sea where the swell goes on even after the wind has dropped, and they never have leisure from their desires. Do you think I am speaking of those whose evils are admitted? Look at those whose good fortune people flock to see: they are choked by their own goods. How many find their riches a burden! How many have their blood drained by their eloquence and the daily strain of displaying their talent! How many are pale from continual pleasures! How many are left no freedom by the crowd of clients swarming around them! In short, run through them all, from the lowest to the highest: this man calls for support in court, that one gives it; this one is on trial, that one defends him, that one judges; no one claims himself for himself; each is used up for another. Ask about those whose names are learned by heart, and you will see they are distinguished by these marks: this one cultivates that one, that one another; no one belongs to himself. Then there is the utterly insane indignation of some: they complain of the arrogance of their superiors, because they had no time for them when they wished to call! Does anyone dare complain of another’s pride, when he himself never has time for himself? Yet that great man has at some point looked at you, whoever you are, even if with an insolent face; he has bent his ears to your words; he has admitted you to his side: you have never deigned to look into yourself, to listen to yourself. There is no reason, then, to claim credit with anyone for those attentions, since when you paid them, it was not that you wanted to be with another; you could not bear to be with yourself.

3 Though all the brilliant minds that ever shone agree on this one point, they will never sufficiently wonder at this fog in human minds. Men will not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about the boundary line, they run for stones and weapons; yet they let others trespass on their life, indeed they themselves bring in those who will become its owners. No one is found who wants to share out his money, but among how many people each of us distributes his life! They are tightfisted in keeping their property; as soon as it comes to wasting time, they are most prodigal with the one thing in which it is honorable to be greedy. So I would like to seize upon someone from the crowd of old men: “We see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life; your hundredth year or more is pressing on you. Come now, call your life to an accounting. Reckon how much of that time a creditor has taken, how much a mistress, how much a patron, how much a client, how much quarreling with your wife, how much punishing your slaves, how much running about the city on social calls; add the illnesses we have brought on ourselves, add the time that has lain unused: you will see that you have fewer years than you count. Call back to mind when you were ever firm in a plan, how few days went as you had intended, when you had the use of yourself, when your face kept its natural expression, when your mind was unafraid, what work you have done in so long a life, how many have plundered your life without your noticing what you were losing, how much has been taken by empty pain, foolish gladness, greedy desire, the charms of society, how little of your own has been left you: you will understand that you are dying before your time.” What, then, is the cause? You live as if you were going to live forever; your frailty never occurs to you; you do not notice how much time has already gone by; you waste it as though from a full and overflowing supply, while all the while that very day which you are giving to some person or thing may be your last. You fear everything like mortals, you desire everything like immortals. You will hear many people say: “At fifty I will retire into leisure; at sixty I will be free of my duties.” And what surety, may I ask, do you have for a longer life? Who will allow these things to go as you arrange them? Are you not ashamed to keep for yourself only the leftovers of life, and to set aside for a sound mind only the time that cannot be put to any other use? Is it not far too late to begin living just when you must stop? What forgetfulness of our mortality could be so foolish as to put off sound plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to want to begin life at a point few have reached?

4 You will see the most powerful men, raised to the heights, let fall words in which they long for leisure, praise it, and prefer it to all their goods. They desire, at times, to step down from that pinnacle, if they could do it safely; for even if nothing outside attacks or shakes it, great fortune collapses on itself. The deified Augustus, to whom the gods granted more than to anyone, never stopped praying for rest and seeking release from the affairs of state; all his talk always came back to this, the hope of leisure. He used to beguile his labors with this consolation, false perhaps but sweet: that one day he would live for himself. In a letter he sent to the senate, in which he had promised that his rest would not be without dignity or out of keeping with his former glory, I found these words: “But these things are finer to do than to promise. Still, my longing for that time so much desired has carried me so far that, since the joy of the reality is still delayed, I may taste some pleasure in advance 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 enjoyed it in advance in thought. The man who saw everything depend on himself alone, who gave fortune to men and nations, thought with the greatest gladness of the day on which he would lay aside his greatness. He had learned by experience how much sweat those goods shining across every land squeezed out, how many hidden anxieties they covered. Forced to fight it out in arms first with his fellow citizens, then with his colleagues, finally with his relatives, he shed blood on land and sea. Driven through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, Asia, and almost every coast, he turned his armies, weary of Roman slaughter, to foreign wars. While he was pacifying the Alps and subduing enemies planted in the middle of a peaceful empire, while he was moving the frontiers beyond the Rhine, the Euphrates, and the Danube, in the city itself the swords of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being sharpened against him.5 He had not yet escaped their plots when his daughter and so many young nobles, bound by adultery as by an oath, kept frightening his already broken old age, and Paullus, and a woman to be feared once again with an Antony.6 He had cut out these ulcers along with the limbs themselves; others grew up beneath; like a body overburdened with blood, it was always breaking out somewhere. So he longed for leisure; in the hope and thought of it his labors found rest; this was the prayer of the man who could grant others’ prayers.

5 Marcus Cicero, tossed among Catilines and Clodiuses, Pompeys and Crassuses,7 some open enemies, some doubtful friends, while he rode the waves with the state and held it up as it went down, was at last swept away; never at peace in prosperity nor patient in adversity, how often he curses that very consulship of his, which he praised not without cause, but without end! What tearful words he utters in a letter to Atticus, when Pompey the father had already been defeated and the son was still reviving his broken arms in Spain! “You ask,” he says, “what I am doing here? I am lingering in my Tusculan villa, half free.” He then adds other things, in which he bewails his past life, complains of the present, and despairs of the future. Cicero called himself half free: but by Hercules, the wise man will never stoop to so lowly a name; he will never be half free; his freedom will always be whole and solid; he will be unbound, his own master, and higher than all others. For what can be above the man who is above Fortune?

6 Livius Drusus,8 a keen and vehement man, after he had stirred up new laws and the evils of the Gracchi, with a huge throng from all Italy around him, not foreseeing the outcome of measures he could neither carry through nor, once begun, was free to abandon, is said to have cursed a life restless from its beginnings and to have said that he alone had never had a holiday, not even as a boy. For while still a ward and wearing the purple-bordered toga, he dared to commend defendants to the jurors and to bring his influence to bear in the forum, and so effectively that it is agreed some verdicts were extorted by him. Where would such premature ambition not break out? You could have known that such precocious boldness would end in great evil, both private and public. So it was too late that he complained of never having had a holiday, he who had been a troublemaker from boyhood and a burden to the forum. It is debated whether he laid hands on himself; for he collapsed after receiving a sudden wound in the groin, some doubting whether his death was voluntary, no one whether it was timely. It would be superfluous to mention more who, though others thought them most fortunate, bore true witness against themselves, loathing every act of their years; but with these complaints they changed neither others nor themselves; for when the words have burst out, the passions slip back into habit. Your life, by Hercules, though it should exceed a thousand years, will be squeezed into the narrowest space: those vices will swallow any number of centuries; but this span, which reason extends though nature hurries it on, must quickly escape you; for you do not grasp it or hold it back or delay the swiftest of all things, but let it go as something superfluous and replaceable.

7 First of all, I count among them those who have time for nothing but wine and lust; for none are more shamefully preoccupied. The others, even if they are held by an empty image of glory, at least go wrong with some show; you may list for me the greedy, the irascible, those who pursue unjust hatreds or unjust wars: all these sin in a more manly way; the decay of those sunk in belly and lust is dishonorable. Examine all the time of these people; see how long they spend calculating, how long plotting, how long fearing, how long courting, how long being courted, how much time their own court dates and other people’s take up, how much their banquets, which are now themselves duties: you will see how their evils, or their goods, do not let them breathe. Finally, everyone agrees that no activity can be pursued well by a preoccupied man, not eloquence, not the liberal arts, since a distracted mind takes in nothing deeply but spits everything out as if it had been crammed in. Nothing is less the business of a preoccupied man than living; there is nothing harder to learn. Teachers of the other arts are everywhere and many, and some of these arts mere boys have seemed to master so well that they could even teach them. But living must be learned all your life, and, what will perhaps surprise you more, all your life you must learn to die. So many great men, having set aside every hindrance and renounced riches, duties, and pleasures, made it their single aim, up to the end of their lives, to know how to live; yet most of them left life confessing that they did not yet know it, much less do these people know it. It is the mark of a great man, believe me, one who rises above human errors, to let nothing be skimmed off his time; and his life is the longest for this reason, that however much of it there was, the whole was free for himself. None of it lay fallow and idle, none of it was under another’s control; for he found nothing worth exchanging for his time, of which he was the most sparing guardian. And so he had enough of it; but those from whose life the public has taken a great deal were bound to run short. Nor need you think that these people never understand their loss: you will certainly hear many of those whom great prosperity weighs down cry out now and then, amid their herds of clients or their pleadings in court or their other respectable miseries: “I am not allowed to live.” How could you be allowed? All who call you to their side take you away from yourself. How many days has that defendant taken? How many that candidate? How many that old woman worn out with burying her heirs? How many that man pretending to be sick to whet the greed of legacy hunters? How many that more powerful friend, who keeps you not as a friend but as part of his retinue? Check off, I say, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few, and those the castoffs, have remained with you. The man who has reached the fasces he longed for wants to lay them down, and keeps saying: “When will this year be over?” Another is giving games, and he set great store on the lot falling to him: “When,” he says, “shall I escape them?” An advocate is fought over throughout the forum and fills every corner with a great crowd, farther than his voice can reach: “When,” he says, “will the courts recess?” Each man hurries his life on and suffers from longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who devotes all his time to his own use, who orders every day as if it were his last, neither longs for tomorrow nor fears it. For what new pleasure can any hour now bring him? Everything is known, everything has been enjoyed to the full. As for the rest, let chance and Fortune dispose of it as they please: his life is already safe. Something can be added to it, nothing taken away, and added only as some food is to a man already full and satisfied: he takes it without wanting it. So you have no reason to think that anyone has lived long because of his gray hair or wrinkles: he has not lived long, he has existed long. For what if you thought a man had sailed far whom a savage storm caught as he left harbor and drove here and there, and with the shifts of winds raging from opposite quarters drove round and round in a circle over the same waters? He has not sailed much; he has been tossed about much.

8 I am always amazed when I see some people asking for time and those who are asked so very obliging. Both look at the purpose for which the time is asked, neither at the time itself: as if what is asked were nothing, as if what is given were nothing. People play with the most precious thing of all; but it deceives them because it is an incorporeal thing, because it does not come before the eyes, and so it is valued very cheaply, indeed it has almost no value at all. People accept annual pensions and handouts most gratefully and hire out for them their labor or their service or their diligence: no one values time; they use it lavishly, as if it cost nothing. But see these same people when they are sick, if the danger of death comes closer, clasping the knees of their doctors; if they fear capital punishment, ready to spend all they have in order to live! So great is the conflict of their passions. But if the number of each man’s future years could be set before him, as the number of his past years can, how those who saw only a few remaining would tremble, how sparingly they would use them! And yet it is easy to manage what is certain, however small; you should guard more carefully what you do not know when it will run out. Still, you have no reason to think that they do not know how precious a thing it is: they often say to those they love most that they are ready to give them part of their own years. They give and do not understand: they give in such a way that they take from themselves without adding to the others. But they do not even know whether they are taking from themselves; and so the loss is bearable to them because the damage is hidden. No one will bring back the years, no one will restore you to yourself. Your lifetime will go the way it began and will neither turn back nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will give no warning of its speed: it will glide on in silence. It will not lengthen itself at the command of a king or the favor of the people: as it was sent off from the first day, so it will run, nowhere turning aside, nowhere delaying. What will happen? You are preoccupied, life is hurrying on; meanwhile death will be at hand, and for death, whether you will or not, you must make time.

9 Can anything be more foolish than the outlook of certain people, I mean those who boast of their prudence? They are preoccupied more laboriously. In order to live better, they prepare for life at the expense of life. They lay out their plans far ahead; but postponement is the greatest waste of life: it takes away each day as it comes, it snatches away the present by promising what lies further on. The greatest obstacle to living is expectation, which hangs on tomorrow and loses today. You arrange what lies in the hand of Fortune, you let go what lies in your own. Where are you looking? How far are you stretching yourself? All that is to come lies in uncertainty: live now. Listen: the greatest of bards cries out and, as if inspired by a divine dread, sings this healing song:

“The best day of life, for wretched mortals,
is always the first to flee.”9

“Why do you hesitate?” he says. “Why are you idle? Unless you seize it, it flees.” And even when you have seized it, it will flee all the same; so you must match the swiftness of time with the speed of your use of it, and drink quickly, as from a rushing torrent that will not always flow. This too is a very fine rebuke to endless planning, that he says not “the best age” but “the best day.” Why, free of care and sluggish in so great a flight of time, do you stretch out months and years for yourself in a long series, however your greed sees fit? He is speaking to you about a day, and about this very day as it flees. Is there any doubt, then, that the best day is always the first to flee from wretched mortals, that is, from the preoccupied? Old age overwhelms their minds while they are still childish, and they come to it unprepared and unarmed; for nothing has been provided: they have fallen into it suddenly and unexpectedly; they did not feel it drawing nearer day by day. Just as conversation or reading or some deep thought deceives travelers, and they find they have arrived before they knew they were near, so this unceasing and very swift journey of life, which we make at the same pace waking and sleeping, is not apparent to the preoccupied until the end.

10 If I wanted to divide my thesis into heads and arguments, many things would occur to me by which to prove that the life of the preoccupied is very short. Fabianus,10 who was not one of these armchair philosophers but one of the true and old-fashioned kind, used to say: “Against the passions we must fight by force, not by subtlety; we must turn back their battle line not with small wounds but with a charge.” He did not approve of quibbles: “They must be crushed,” he said, “not pricked.” Still, so that their error may be brought home to them, the preoccupied must be taught, not merely mourned. Life is divided into three periods: what has been, what is, and what will be. Of these, the time we are living is short, the time we shall live is doubtful, the time we have lived is certain. For this is the one over which Fortune has lost her rights, which cannot be brought back under anyone’s control. This the preoccupied lose; for they have no time to look back on the past, and even if they had, the memory of something to be regretted is unpleasant. So they are unwilling to call their minds back to times ill spent and do not dare to go over again those whose vices, even those that slipped by under the seductive charm of momentary pleasure, become plain when reviewed. No one turns back willingly to the past except the man who has done everything under his own censorship, which is never deceived: the man who has ambitiously desired many things, arrogantly despised, recklessly conquered, treacherously deceived, greedily seized, wastefully squandered, must fear his own memory. Yet this is the part of our time that is sacred and dedicated, beyond all human misfortunes, removed from the kingdom of Fortune, which no want, no fear, no onset of disease can disturb; it can be neither troubled nor snatched away; its possession is everlasting and untroubled. Only one day at a time is present, and that moment by moment; but all the days of past time will appear when you bid them, will let you inspect them and hold them at your pleasure, a thing the preoccupied have no time to do. It belongs to a mind free of care and at rest to roam through all the parts of its life; the minds of the preoccupied, as if under a yoke, cannot turn and look back. So their life vanishes into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring in as much as you like if there is nothing underneath to receive and keep it, so it does not matter how much time is given if there is nowhere for it to settle: it passes through minds that are cracked and full of holes. The present is very brief, so brief indeed that to some it seems to be no time at all; for it is always in motion, it flows and rushes headlong; it ceases to be before it has come, and it no more admits delay than the universe or the stars, whose ever restless motion never stays in the same track. Only the present, then, belongs to the preoccupied, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even that is stolen from them while they are distracted among many things.

11 In short, do you want to know how little they live? See how much they long to live long. Decrepit old men beg in their prayers for the addition of a few years; they pretend to be younger than they are; they flatter themselves with a lie and deceive themselves as gladly as if they were cheating the fates at the same time. And when some infirmity has reminded them of their mortality, how terrified they die, not as if they were leaving life but as if they were being dragged out of it! They keep crying out that they were fools not to have lived, and that if only they escape from this illness, they will live in leisure; then they think how uselessly they acquired what they would never enjoy, how all their labor has come to nothing. But for those whose life is spent far from all business, why should it not be ample? None of it is assigned away, none scattered here and there, none of it handed over to Fortune, none lost through carelessness, none subtracted by lavish giving, none of it is superfluous: the whole of it, so to speak, is income. However small it is, then, it is abundantly sufficient, and so, whenever his last day comes, the wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with a sure step.

12 Do you perhaps ask whom I call the preoccupied? You need not think I mean only those whom the dogs, let in at last, drive out of the basilica, those whom you see crushed more grandly in their own crowd or more contemptibly in someone else’s, those whom their duties call out of their own houses to dash them against other people’s doors, or whom the praetor’s auction spear keeps busy with disreputable gain that will one day fester. Some people’s 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 should be called not leisure but idle preoccupation. Do you call that man at leisure who arranges Corinthian bronzes, made precious by the mania of a few, with anxious care, and spends the greater part of his days on rusty bits of metal? Who sits in the wrestling ground (for, what a shame! we suffer from vices that are not even Roman) watching boys fight? Who sorts his herds of pack animals into pairs by age and color? Who feeds the latest athletes? What? Do you call those men at leisure who spend many hours at the barber’s, while whatever grew the night before is plucked out, while a consultation is held over each separate hair, while either the disordered locks are rearranged or thinning hair is brought forward from either side onto the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a little careless, as if he were trimming a real man! How they flare up if anything is cut from their mane, if any hair lies out of place, if everything does not fall into its proper curls! Which of them would not rather have the state in disorder than his hair? Who is not more anxious about the beauty of his head than its safety? Who would not rather be well groomed than honorable? Do you call these men at leisure, who are preoccupied between comb and mirror? What of those who are busy composing, hearing, and learning songs, while they twist the voice, whose straight course Nature made the best and simplest, into the turns of the most idle melodies; whose fingers are always drumming as they beat time to some song inside them; whose silent humming can be heard even when they have been called to serious, often even sad, business? These people do not have leisure; they have idle busyness. Their banquets, by Hercules, I would not count among their free hours, when I see how anxiously they arrange the silver, how carefully they tuck up the tunics of their boy favorites, how breathless they are about how the boar will come out of the cook’s hands, with what speed, at a given signal, the smooth-skinned slaves rush to their tasks, with what skill the birds are carved into pieces of proper size, how carefully the wretched little slave boys wipe up the spit of drunkards: from such things they seek a reputation for elegance and refinement, and their evils follow them so far into every retreat of life that they neither drink nor eat without ambition. Nor would you count among the leisured those who have themselves carried here and there in a sedan chair or a litter, and turn up at the hours for their rides as if they were not allowed to miss them, who are reminded by someone else when they ought to bathe, when to swim, when to dine: they are so enfeebled by the excessive languor of a pampered mind that they cannot tell by themselves whether they are hungry. I hear that one of these pampered men (if indeed unlearning human life and habit is to be called pampering), when he had been carried out of the bath in someone’s arms and set in his chair, asked: “Am I sitting down now?” Do you think 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 more if he really did not know this or if he pretended not to know. They do feel forgetfulness of many things, but they also imitate it for many; some vices delight them as proofs of good fortune; it seems the mark of a very low and contemptible man to know what you are doing. Go now and think that the mime actors invent a great deal to mock luxury! By Hercules, they pass over more than they make up, and such an abundance of incredible vices has come forth in this age, so clever in this one thing, that we can now accuse the mimes of neglect. To think that there is someone so far lost in luxury that he takes another’s word on whether he is sitting! This man, then, is not at leisure; you must give him another name: he is sick, no, he is dead; the man at leisure is the one who is also aware of his leisure. But this half-alive man, who needs someone to tell him the posture of his own body, how can he be master of any time?

13 It would take long to go through them one by one, those whose lives have been eaten up by board games or ball games or the care of baking their bodies in the sun. They are not at leisure whose pleasures involve much business. As for those who are kept busy with the study of useless literature, no one will doubt that they toil at doing nothing; and there is now a large band of them among the Romans too. It used to be the disease of the Greeks to ask how many oarsmen Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, and whether, besides, they were by the same author, and other things of this sort, which, if you keep them to yourself, do your silent mind no good, and if you bring them out, make you seem not more learned but more tiresome. Look, the Romans too have been invaded by an empty passion for learning useless things. The other day I heard someone reporting what each Roman general had been the first to do: Duilius was the first to win a naval battle, Curius Dentatus was the first to lead elephants in a triumph. Still, such things, even if they do not lead to true glory, are at least concerned with examples of civic deeds; such knowledge will do no good, but it is the kind that holds us with the specious appeal of trifles. Let us also pardon those who ask who first persuaded the Romans to board a ship (it was Claudius, called Caudex for this very reason, because the ancients called a structure of many planks joined together a “caudex,” whence the public records are called “codices,” and the boats that carry provisions up the Tiber are still called “codicariae” by ancient custom); granted that this too is to the point, that Valerius Corvinus was the first to conquer Messana, and the first of the Valerian family to be called Messana, the name of the captured city transferred to himself, and that, as common speech gradually changed the letters, he came to be called Messala: will you also allow anyone to care that Lucius Sulla was the first to show lions loose in the circus, when otherwise they had been shown tied up, and that javelin men were sent by King Bocchus to kill them? Let this too be pardoned: but does it serve any good purpose to know that Pompey was the first to show in the circus a fight of eighteen elephants, with condemned criminals pitted against them as in a battle? The first man of the state and, as tradition has it, a man of outstanding goodness among the leaders of old, he thought it a memorable kind of spectacle to destroy men in a new way. Are they fighting to the death? Not enough. Are they being torn to pieces? Not enough: let them be crushed by animals of enormous bulk! It would have been better for these things to go into oblivion, lest some powerful man later learn of them and envy so inhuman a deed. Oh, what darkness great prosperity casts over our minds! He believed himself above Nature at the moment when he threw so many troops of wretched men to beasts born under another sky, when he set up a war between such unequal creatures, when he shed much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, soon to force it to shed more; yet later, betrayed by Alexandrian treachery, he himself offered his body to be stabbed by the lowest slave, and only then understood the empty boast of his surname.11 But to return to the point from which I strayed and to show the superfluous diligence of some people in the same subject: the same man was telling how Metellus, celebrating his triumph after defeating the Carthaginians in Sicily, was the only Roman ever to lead a hundred and twenty captured elephants before his chariot; that Sulla was the last of the Romans to extend the pomerium,12 which it was the custom of the ancients to extend only on acquiring Italian, never provincial, territory. Is it more useful to know this than that the Aventine Hill is outside the pomerium, as he asserted, for one of two reasons, either because the plebs had seceded there or because, when Remus took the auspices at that place, the birds were not favorable, and countless other things in turn that are either stuffed with lies or like them? For even if you grant that they say everything in good faith, that they write as though vouching for it, still whose errors will these things lessen? Whose desires will they restrain? Whom will they make braver, whom more just, whom more generous? Our Fabianus used to say that he sometimes doubted whether it was better not to take up any studies than to be entangled in these.

14 Of all people, only those are at leisure who have time for wisdom; they alone are alive. For they do not only keep good watch over their own lifetime: they add every age to their own; all the years that went before them are added to their store. Unless we are utterly ungrateful, those most famous founders of sacred doctrines were born for us; they prepared a life for us. We are led by the labor of others to the most beautiful things, brought out of darkness into light; no age is closed to us, we are admitted to all, and if we choose, by greatness of mind, to go beyond the narrow bounds of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, go beyond it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into partnership with every age, why should we not turn from this brief and fleeting passage of time and give ourselves with all our mind to the things that are immeasurable, eternal, and shared with the better? Those who rush about on their social duties, who disturb themselves and others, when they have gone thoroughly mad, when they have crossed everyone’s threshold every day and passed by no open door, when they have carried their mercenary morning greetings around the most varied houses, how few will they be able to see in a city so immense and distracted by such various desires? How many there will be whose sleep or self-indulgence or rudeness will shut them out! How many who, after torturing them with a long wait, will rush past them with a pretense of haste! How many will avoid going out through a hall crowded with clients and will escape through some hidden passage of the house, as if it were not ruder to deceive than to shut out! How many, half asleep and heavy from yesterday’s drinking, will barely part their lips and, with a most arrogant yawn, give back to those poor wretches, who break their own sleep to wait for another’s, the name whispered to them a thousand times! Those, let us say, are engaged in true duties who will want to have Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the other high priests of the liberal arts, Aristotle and Theophrastus, as their most intimate friends every day. None of these will lack time for you, none will fail to send away the one who comes to him happier and more devoted to him, none will let anyone leave him empty-handed; they can be visited by any mortal, by night or by day.

15 None of these will force you to die, all will teach you how; none of them wears away your years, each adds his own to yours; with none of them will conversation be dangerous, friendship deadly, or attendance costly. You will take from them whatever you wish; it will not be their fault if you do not draw from them as much as you desire. What good fortune, what a fine old age awaits the man who has made himself their client! He will have those with whom to deliberate about the smallest and the greatest matters, whom he can consult about himself every day, from whom he can hear the truth without insult and praise without flattery, on whose likeness he can model himself. We often say that it was not in our power to choose the parents we were allotted, that they were given to us by chance: but the good may be born as they choose. There are families of the noblest minds: choose the one into which you wish to be adopted; you will be adopted not only into the name but into the property itself, which need not be guarded meanly or grudgingly: it will grow greater the more people you share it with. These will give you a path to eternity and will raise you to that place from which no one is thrown down. This is the only way to extend mortality, or rather to turn it into immortality. Honors, monuments, whatever ambition has ordered by decrees or built up in works, are quickly torn down; there is nothing that long age does not demolish and remove; but it cannot harm what wisdom has consecrated; no age will abolish it, no age diminish it; the next and every later one will only add something to its veneration, since envy works at close range, and we admire more frankly what is far away. So the wise man’s life extends far; he is not confined by the same boundary as others; he alone is freed from the laws of the human race; all ages serve him as they serve a god. Has some time passed? He holds it in memory. Is it present? He uses it. Is it to come? He anticipates it. The gathering of all times into one makes his life long.

16 The life of those is very short and very anxious who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future: when they come to the end, the poor wretches understand too late that they have been preoccupied for so long in doing nothing. Nor need you think it proves that they lead a long life because they sometimes call on death: their imprudence torments them with unsettled passions that rush into the very things they fear; they often long for death because they fear it. Nor need you think this a proof that they live long, that the day often seems long to them, that they complain the hours go slowly until the appointed time for dinner comes; for if ever their preoccupations leave them, they are restless when left in leisure and do not know how to arrange it or how to get through it. So they reach for some preoccupation, and all the time in between is heavy, exactly, by Hercules, as when the day of a gladiatorial show has been announced, or when the appointed date of some other spectacle or pleasure is awaited, they want to skip over the days between. Every postponement of what they hope for is long to them; but the time that they love is short and fleeting, and much shorter through their own fault; for they flee from one thing to another and cannot settle on one desire. Their days are not long to them, but hateful; on the other hand, how short seem the nights they spend in the arms of harlots or over wine! Hence too the madness of the poets, who feed human errors with their fables, and in whose eyes Jupiter, charmed by the pleasure of lovemaking, doubled the length of a night; what else is it to inflame our vices than to inscribe the gods as their authors and to give the disease, by the example of divinity, an excused license? Can the nights not seem very short to these men, when they buy them so dearly? They lose the day in waiting for the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.

17 Their very pleasures are anxious and disturbed by various fears, and at the moment of their greatest exultation an anxious thought creeps in: “How long will this last?” This feeling has made kings weep over their power; the greatness of their fortune did not delight them, but the end that must someday come terrified them. When that most arrogant king of the Persians was spreading out his army over vast stretches of plain, and could grasp not its number but its extent, he shed tears because within a hundred years not one of so many young men would be alive;13 but the very man who wept was about to bring their fate upon them, and to destroy some on sea and some on land, some in battle and some in flight, and within a short time to wipe out those for whose hundredth year he was afraid. What of the fact that even their joys are anxious? For they do not rest on solid causes but are disturbed by the same emptiness from which they spring. What do you think those times are like that are wretched even by their own admission, when even these joys by which they raise themselves up and lift themselves above humanity are not quite pure? All the greatest goods are anxious, and no fortune is less to be trusted than the best; more good fortune is needed to protect good fortune, and for the very prayers that have been granted more prayers must be offered. For everything that comes by chance is unstable: the higher it has risen, the readier it is to fall. And no one takes pleasure in what is going to fall; so the life of those who gain with great labor what they must hold with greater labor must be not only very short but very wretched. They achieve what they want with toil, they hold what they have achieved with anxiety; meanwhile they take no account of time, which will never return: new preoccupations take the place of old, hope stirs up hope, ambition ambition. They do not seek an end to their miseries; they only change the material. Have our own honors tormented us? Other people’s take more of our time. Have we stopped laboring as candidates? We begin canvassing for others. Have we laid down the burden of prosecuting? We take up that of judging. Has he stopped being a juror? He becomes a presiding judge. Has he grown old in the hired management of other people’s property? He is kept busy by his own wealth. Has the soldier’s boot released Marius? The consulship keeps him busy. Does Quinctius hurry to get through his dictatorship? He will be called back from the plow. Scipio will go against the Carthaginians before he is ripe for so great a task; victor over Hannibal, victor over Antiochus, the glory of his own consulship, the guarantor of his brother’s, he would have been set up beside Jupiter had he not himself prevented it: civil strife will harass the savior, and after he has scorned as a young man honors equal to the gods’, in his old age he will take pleasure in the ambition of a defiant exile.14 There will never be lacking causes of anxiety, either fortunate or wretched; life will be pushed on through one preoccupation after another; leisure will never be had, always longed for.

18 So tear yourself away from the crowd, my dearest Paulinus, and, tossed about more than your years deserved, withdraw at last into a calmer harbor. Think how many waves you have faced, how many storms you have endured, some private, some public ones you drew upon yourself; your virtue has long since been displayed in toilsome and restless 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 some of your time for yourself as well. I am not calling you to a sluggish or idle rest, nor to drown whatever lively talent is in you in sleep and the pleasures dear to the crowd; that is not resting: you will find greater works than all those you have so energetically managed so far, to occupy you in retirement and free of care. You, for your part, manage the accounts of the whole world as scrupulously as you would another’s, as carefully as your own, as conscientiously as the public’s. You win affection in an office in which it is hard to avoid hatred; but still, believe me, it is better to know the accounts of one’s own life than those of the public grain. Call back that vigor of mind, most capable of the greatest things, from a post that is honorable indeed, but little suited to the happy life, and consider that it was not for this that from your earliest years you devoted yourself to every liberal study, that many thousands of measures of grain might be safely entrusted to you; you had promised something greater and loftier of yourself. There will be no lack of men of exact frugality and diligent labor; slow pack animals are much better suited to carrying loads than thoroughbred horses, and who ever weighed down their noble speed with a heavy pack? Think, besides, how much anxiety it is to expose yourself to so great a burden: your dealings are with the human belly; a hungry people neither listens to reason, nor is calmed by fairness, nor bent by any prayer. Just recently, within those few days in which Gaius Caesar died15 (if the dead have any feeling, he is taking it very hard that he was dying while the Roman people survived), there was food left for seven or eight days at most! While he was joining bridges of boats and playing with the resources of the empire, the last of evils even for the besieged was at hand, a shortage of food; his imitation of a mad, foreign, and ill-starred proud king nearly cost the city destruction and famine, and what follows famine, the collapse of everything. What spirit did those have then who had been entrusted with the care of the public grain, facing stones, the sword, fire, Gaius? With the greatest concealment they covered up so great an evil hidden in the vitals of the state, and with good reason: for some ailments must be treated without the patient’s knowledge; for many, knowing their disease has been the cause of death.

19 Withdraw to these calmer, safer, greater things! Do you think it is the same thing whether you see to it that grain is poured into the granaries untouched by the fraud or the carelessness of the shippers, that it does not take in moisture and spoil and heat up, that it tallies with the measure and the weight, or whether you approach these sacred and lofty studies, to learn what the substance of god is, what his pleasure, his condition, his form; what lot awaits your soul; where Nature lays us to rest when we are released from our bodies; what it is that holds all the heaviest things of this universe in the center, suspends the light things above, carries fire to the highest region, rouses the stars to their courses; and other things in turn, full of immense wonders? Come, leave the ground behind and turn your mind to these! Now, while the blood is warm, we must go in our vigor to better things. In this kind of life there await you many good arts, the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of desires, the knowledge of living and dying, a deep calm.

20 The condition of all the preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who do not even toil at their own preoccupations, who sleep by another’s sleep, walk at another’s pace, are ordered to love and to hate, the freest things of all. If these people want to know how short their life is, let them consider how small a part of it is their own. So when you see a man who has often put on the purple-bordered toga, when you see a name famous in the forum, do not envy him: these things are bought with the loss of life. To have a single year named after them, they will wear out all their years. Some, before they could struggle up to the summit of ambition, life left behind among their first struggles; some, when they had crawled through a thousand indignities to the crowning dignity, were seized by the wretched thought that they had labored for an inscription on a tomb; for some, extreme old age, still being planned out for new hopes as though it were youth, has given out in weakness amid great and shameless efforts. Disgraceful is the man whose breath left him while he was pleading in court for the most obscure litigants, at a great age, angling for the applause of an ignorant ring of bystanders; shameful the man who, worn out by living sooner than by working, collapsed in the very midst of his duties; shameful the man who died over his accounts, and whose heir, long kept waiting, laughed at him. I cannot pass over an example that comes to mind. Turranius was an old man of scrupulous diligence who, after his ninetieth year, when Gaius Caesar had released him of his own accord from his post as procurator, ordered himself to be laid out on his bed and mourned by the household standing around him as if he were dead.16 The house lamented its old master’s leisure, and did not end its sorrow until his work was restored to him. Is it so pleasant, then, to die preoccupied? Most people have the same attitude; their desire for work outlasts their ability; they fight against the weakness of the body, and they judge old age itself a hardship on no other ground than that it sets them aside. The law does not enlist a soldier after fifty, nor summon a senator after sixty: men find it harder to obtain leisure from themselves than from the law. Meanwhile, while they snatch and are snatched, while one breaks another’s rest, while they make each other wretched, life is without profit, without pleasure, without any progress of the mind; no one keeps death in view, no one fails to stretch his hopes far ahead; some even arrange things that lie beyond life: huge masses of tombs, dedications of public works, gifts for their funeral pyre, and ostentatious funerals. But, by Hercules, the funerals of these men should be conducted by torches and tapers, as though they had lived the shortest of lives.

Notes

  1. 1. Pompeius Paulinus, prefect of the grain supply, the official responsible for feeding the city of Rome; he was probably the father of Seneca’s wife Paulina.

  2. 2. Hippocrates, Aphorisms 1.1.

  3. 3. Cicero (Tusculan Disputations 3.69) attributes this complaint to Theophrastus, not Aristotle.

  4. 4. The line has not been found in Homer or Virgil; its source is unknown.

  5. 5. Conspirators against Augustus: Marcus Lepidus (30 BC), Varro Murena and Fannius Caepio (23 or 22 BC), and Egnatius Rufus (19 BC).

  6. 6. Augustus’s daughter Julia was banished for adultery in 2 BC; among her lovers was Iullus Antonius, son of Mark Antony, which recalled Cleopatra and Antony. Lucius Aemilius Paullus, husband of Julia’s daughter, was later executed for conspiracy.

  7. 7. Catiline’s conspiracy was suppressed by Cicero as consul in 63 BC; Publius Clodius drove Cicero into exile in 58 BC. The letter quoted below does not survive.

  8. 8. Marcus Livius Drusus, tribune of the people in 91 BC, proposed reforms in the manner of the Gracchi and was murdered that year.

  9. 9. Virgil, Georgics 3.66–67.

  10. 10. Papirius Fabianus, rhetorician and philosopher, one of Seneca’s teachers.

  11. 11. Pompey, defeated by Julius Caesar, was stabbed to death on landing in Egypt in 48 BC; his surname Magnus means “the Great.”

  12. 12. The pomerium was the sacred boundary of the city of Rome; the emperor Claudius extended it again in AD 49.

  13. 13. Xerxes, reviewing his army before the invasion of Greece in 480 BC (Herodotus 7.45–46).

  14. 14. Gaius Marius rose from the ranks to seven consulships; Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was called from his plow to be dictator; Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal in 202 BC, served as his brother Lucius’s guarantor in the war against Antiochus (190 BC), and ended his life in voluntary exile at Liternum.

  15. 15. Gaius Caesar is the emperor known as Caligula (AD 37–41); his bridge of boats across the Bay of Baiae imitated Xerxes’s bridge over the Hellespont.

  16. 16. Gaius Turranius, prefect of the grain supply under Augustus and Tiberius.