Letters From a Stoic

by Seneca

  These expressions of his, strung together in such an outrageous fashion, tossed out in such a careless manner, constructed with such a total disregard of universal usage, reveal a character equally revolutionary, equally perverted and peculiar. Maecenas’ greatest claim to glory is regarded as having been his clemency: he spared the sword, refrained from bloodshed and showed his power only in his defiance of convention. But he has spoilt this very claim of his by these monstrous stylistic frolics; for it becomes apparent that he was not a mild man but a soft one. That perplexing word order, those transpositions of words and those startling ideas which have indeed the quality of greatness in them but which lose all their effect in the expression, will make it obvious to anyone that his head was turned by overmuch prosperity.

  It is a fault which is sometimes that of the man and sometimes that of the age. Where prosperity has spread luxury over a wide area of society, people start by paying closer attention to their personal turnout. The next thing that engages people’s energies is furniture. Then pains are devoted to the houses themselves, so as to have them running out over broad expanses of territory, to have the walls glowing with marble shipped from overseas and the ceilings picked out in gold, to have the floors shining with a lustre matching the panels overhead. Splendour then moves on to the table, where praise is courted through the medium of novelty and variations in the accustomed order of dishes, making what normally rounds off a meal the first course and giving people as they go what they used before to be given on arrival. Once a person’s spirit has acquired the habit of disdaining what is customary and regards the usual as banal, it starts looking for novelty in its methods of expression as well. At one moment it will disinter and revive archaic or obsolete expressions; at another it will coin new, unheard of expressions and give a word a new form; at another – this is something that has become very common recently – the bold and frequent use of metaphor passes for good style. There are some who cut their thoughts short and hope to win acclaim by making their meaning elusive, giving their audience a mere hint of it; there are others who stretch them out, reluctant to let them go; there are others still who do not merely fall into a defect of style (which is something that is inevitable if one is striving for any lofty effect), but have a passion for the defect for its own sake.

  So wherever you notice that a corrupt style is in general favour, you may be certain that in that society people’s characters as well have deviated from the true path. In the same way as extravagance in dress and entertaining are indications of a diseased community, so an aberrant literary style, provided it is widespread, shows that the spirit (from which people’s words derive) has also come to grief. And in fact you need feel no surprise at the way corrupt work finds popularity not merely with the common bystander but with your relatively cultivated audience: the distinction between these two classes of critic is more one of dress than of discernment. What you might find more surprising is the fact that they do not confine themselves to admiring passages that contain defects, but admire the actual defects themselves as well. The former thing has been the case all through history – no genius that ever won acclaim did so without a measure of indulgence. Name me any man you like who had a celebrated reputation, and I’ll tell you what the age he lived in forgave him, what it turned a blind eye to in his work. I’ll show you plenty of stylists whose faults never did them any harm and some who were actually helped by them. I’ll even say this: I could show you some men of the highest renown, men held up as objects of wonder and admiration, in whose case to amend their faults would be to destroy them, their faults being so inextricably bound up with their virtues.

  Besides, there are no fixed rules of style. They are governed by the usage of society and usage never stands still for any length of time. Many speakers hark back to earlier centuries for their vocabulary, talking in the language of the Twelve Tables.* Gracchus, Crassus and Curio are too polished and modern for them. They go right back to Appius and Coruncanius. Others, by contrast, in seeking to confine themselves to familiar, everyday expressions, slip into an undistinguished manner. Both these practices, in their different ways, are debased style (quite as much so as the rejection of any expression that is not high-sounding, florid and poetical, avoiding the indispensable expressions in normal use). The one is as much a fault as the other, in my view, the first paying undue attention to itself and the second unduly neglecting itself. The former removes the hair from its legs as well, the latter not even from its armpits.

  Let us turn our attention to composition. How many species of fault can I show you where this is concerned? Some like it broken and uneven, and go out of their way to disarrange any passage with a relatively smooth and even flow. They want every transition to come with a jolt, and see virility and forcefulness in a style the irregularities of which jar the ear. With some other literary figures it is not a case of composition but of setting words to melodies, so sweetly, softly do they glide along. What shall I say about the kind in which words are held back and keep us waiting for a long time before they make their reluctant appearance right at the end of the period? What of that, like Cicero’s, which moves to its conclusion in a leisurely fashion, in a gentle and delayed incline, and unvaryingly true to its customary rhythm?

  In the field of the epigram, too, faults comprise a tameness and childishness, or a boldness and daring that oversteps the bounds of decency, or a richness that has a cloying quality, or a barrenness in the outcome, an ineffectiveness, a ringing quality and nothing more.

  These faults are introduced by some individual dominating letters at the time, are copied by the rest and handed on from one person to another. Thus in Sallust’s heyday abruptly terminated sentences, unexpectedly sudden endings and a brevity carried to the point of obscurity passed for a polished style. Lucius Arruntius, the historian of the Punic War and a man of unusual simplicity of character, was a follower of Sallust and strove after that kind of style. ‘By means of money he procured an army’, hired one, in other words, is an expression found in Sallust. Arruntius took a fancy to this expression ‘procured’ and found a place for it on every page, saying in one passage: ‘They procured our rout’, in another: ‘King Hiero of Syracuse procured a war’, and in another: ‘This news procured the surrender of the people of Panormus to the Romans.’ These are merely by way of giving you samples of the practice – the whole book is rife with them. What was occasional in Sallust is of frequent, almost incessant occurrence in Arruntius, which is easily enough explained, for whereas Sallust hit on such expressions Arruntius cultivated them. You can see what the result is when some writer’s fault is taken as a model. Sallust spoke of ‘wintry rains’. Arruntius, in the first book of The Punic War, says: ‘Suddenly the weather was wintry.’ In another place, when he wants to describe a particular year as having been a cold one, he says: ‘The whole year was wintry.’ In another passage he writes: ‘From there he despatched sixty transport vessels, lightly laden apart from troops and essential crew, in spite of a wintry northerly gale.’ He drags the word in constantly, in every conceivable place. Sallust at one point writes: ‘Seeking, amid civil war, the plaudits of rectitude and integrity’. Arruntius was unable to restrain himself from inserting right at the beginning of his first book mention of Regulus’ tremendous ‘plaudits’.

  Now these faults, and others like them, stamped on a writer’s style by imitation, are not themselves evidence of extravagant ways or corrupt attitudes. For the things upon which you base any judgement on a person’s psychology must be things peculiar to himself, things that spring from his own nature, a hot-tempered man having a hot-tempered style, an emotional man an over-excited one, a self-indulgent man a soft and flabby one and so on. And the last is the manner one observes adopted by the sort of person who has his beard plucked out, or has it plucked out in parts, who keeps himself close-shaven and smooth around his lips but leaves the rest of it to grow, who wears cloaks in flamboyant colours, who wears a diaphanous robe, who is reluctant to do anyt
hing that might escape people’s attention, who provokes and courts such attention and so long as he is looked at does not mind whether it is with disapproval. Such is the manner of Maecenas and every other writer whose stylistic errors are not accidental but deliberate and calculated. It is something that stems from a serious affliction of the spirit. When a person is drinking his tongue only starts stumbling after his mental faculties have succumbed and given way or broken down. The same applies with this drunkenness – what else can one regard it as? – of style. No one suffers from it unless his spirit is unstable.

  See, then, that the spirit is well looked after. Our thoughts and our words proceed from it. We derive our demeanour and expression and the very way we walk from it. If the spirit is sound and healthy our style will be firm and forceful and virile, but if the spirit tumbles all the rest of our personality comes down in ruins with it.

  The queen unharmed, the bees all live at one;

  Once she is lost, the hive’s in anarchy.*

  The spirit is our queen. So long as she is unharmed, the rest remains at its post, obedient and submissive. If she wavers for a moment, in the same moment the rest all falters.†

  LETTER CXXII

  THE daylight has begun to diminish. It has contracted considerably, but not so much that there is not a generous amount remaining still for anyone who will, so to speak, rise with the daylight itself. More active and commendable still is the person who is waiting for the daylight and intercepts the first rays of the sun; shame on him who lies in bed dozing when the sun is high in the sky, whose waking hours commence in the middle of the day – and even this time, for a lot of people, is the equivalent of the small hours. There are some who invert the functions of day and night and do not separate eyelids leaden with the previous day’s carousal before night sets in. Their way of life, if not their geographical situation, resembles the state of those peoples whom nature, as Virgil says, has planted beneath our feet on the opposite side of the world

  And when Dawn’s panting steeds first breathe on us,

  For them the reddening Evening starts at length

  To light their lamps.‡

  There are some antipodes living in the same city as ourselves who, as Marcus Cato said, have never seen the sun rise or set. Can you imagine that these people know how one ought to live when they do not know when one ought to live? Can they really be afraid of death like other people when this is what they have retreated into in their own lifetimes? They are as weird as birds that fly by night. They may while away their hours of darkness to a background of wine and perfume, they may occupy the whole of the time they spend, contrarily, awake eating sumptuous dishes – individually cooked, too, in a long succession of different courses; but what in fact they are doing is not banqueting but celebrating their own last rites. At least the dead have their memorial ceremonies during the daytime. Heavens, though, no day is a long one for a man who is up and about! Let us expand our life: action is its theme and duty. The night should be kept within bounds, and a proportion of it transferred to the day. Poultry that are being reared for the table are cooped up in the dark so as to prevent them moving about and make them fatten easily; there they languish, getting no exercise, with the swelling taking possession of their sluggish bodies and the inert fat creeping over them in their magnificent seclusion. And the bodies of these people who have dedicated themselves to the dark have an unsightly look about them, too, inasmuch as their complexions are unhealthier looking than those of persons who are pale through sickness. Frail and feeble with their blanched appearance, in their case the flesh on the living person is deathlike. And yet I should describe this as the least of their ills. How much deeper is the darkness in their souls! Their souls are dazed and befogged, envious of the blind! What man was ever given eyes for the sake of the dark?

  Do you ask how the soul comes to have this perverse aversion to daylight and transference of its whole life to the night-time? All vices are at odds with nature, all abandon the proper order of things. The whole object of luxurious living is the delight it takes in irregular ways and in not merely departing from the correct course but going to the farthest point away from it, and in eventually even taking a stand diametrically opposed to it. Don’t you think it’s living unnaturally to drink without having eaten, taking liquor into an empty system and going on to dinner in a drunken state? Yet this is a failing which is common among young people, who cultivate their capacities to the point of drinking – swilling would be a better description of it – in naked groups the moment they’re inside the doors of the public bath-house, every now and then having a rub all over to get rid of the perspiration brought on by continually putting down the piping hot liquor. To them drinking after lunch or dinner is a common habit, something only done by rural worthies and people who don’t know where the true pleasure lies: the wine that gives a person undiluted enjoyment, they say, is the wine that makes its way into his system unobstructed instead of swimming about in his food; intoxication on an empty stomach is the kind that gratifies a man.

  Don’t you think it’s living unnaturally to exchange one’s clothes for women’s?* Is it not living unnaturally to aim at imparting the bloom of youth to a different period of life can there be a sorrier or crueller practice than that whereby a boy is never, apparently, allowed to grow up into a man, in order that he may endure a man’s attentions for as long as may be? Won’t even his years rescue him from the indignity his sex ought to have precluded?

  Is it not living unnaturally to hanker after roses during the winter, and to force lilies in midwinter by taking the requisite steps to change their environment and keeping up the temperature with hot water heating? Is it not living unnaturally to plant orchards on the top of towers, or to have a forest of trees waving in the wind on the roofs and ridges of one’s mansions, their roots springing at a height which it would have been presumptuous for their crests to reach? Is it not living unnaturally to sink the foundations of hot baths in the sea and consider that one is not swimming in a refined fashion unless one’s heated waters are exposed to the waves and storms? Having started to make a practice of desiring everything contrary to nature’s habit, they finally end up by breaking off relations with her altogether. ‘It’s daylight: time for bed! All’s quiet: now for our exercises, now for a drive, now for a meal! The daylight’s getting nearer: time we had our dinner! No need to do as the crowd does: to follow the common, well-worn path in life is a sordid way to behave. Let’s leave the daytime to the generality of people. Let’s have early hours that are exclusively our own’.

  This sort of person is to me as good as dead. After all, how far can a person be from the grave, and an untimely one at that, if he lives by the light of tapers and torches?* I can recall a great many people who led this kind of life at one time, with a former praetor among them, too, Acilius Buta, the man who had squandered an enormous fortune which he had inherited, and when he confessed his impoverished state to the emperor Tiberius was met with the remark, ‘You have woken up rather late.’ Montanus Julius, a tolerably good poet, noted for his closeness to Tiberius and subsequent fall from favour, who used to give public readings of his verse, took great delight in working sunrises and sunsets into his compositions. Hence the remark of Natta Pinarius when someone was expressing disgust at the way Montanus’ reading had continued for a whole day and declaring that his readings weren’t worth attending: ‘I’m quite prepared to listen to him – can I say fairer than this – from sunrise to sunset.’ When Montanus had just read the lines

  The sun god starts his fiery flames to extend,

  The rosy dawn to diffuse her light, and now

  That plaintive bird, the swallow, starts to thrust

  Her morsels down the throats of nestlings shrill,

  With gentle bill supplying each its share,

  With journeys yet to come,

  one Varus called out, ‘And Buta starts to sleep.’ Varus was a Roman knight, a friend of Marcus Vinicius, who was always in attenda
nce at good dinners, for which he used to qualify by the sauciness of his tongue. It was he, too, who said a little later on when Montanus had read

  The herdsmen now in byres have stalled their beasts,