Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
everything that appeals to others, gain power by time. Both those
which {251} afford us real strength and those which do but trick
us out in a more attractive form, require long years before they
gradually are adapted to us by time. But I fear that custom, which
confirms most things, implants this vice more and more deeply in
me. Long acquaintance with both good and bad people leads one to
esteem them all alike. What this state of weakness really is, when
the mind halts between two opinions without any strong inclination
towards either good or evil, I shall be better able to show you
piecemeal than all at once. I will tell you what befalls me, you
must find out the name of the disease. I have to confess the greatest
possible love of thrift: I do not care for a bed with gorgeous
hangings, nor for clothes brought out of a chest, or pressed under
weights and made glossy by frequent manglings, but for common and
cheap ones, that require no care either to keep them or to put them
on. For food I do not want what needs whole troops of servants to
prepare it and admire it, nor what is ordered many days before and
served up by many hands, but something handy and easily come at,
with nothing far-fetched or costly about it, to be had in every
part of the world, burdensome neither to one’s fortune nor one’s
body, not likely to go out of the body by the same path by which
it came in. I like[1] a rough and unpolished homebred servant, I
like my servant born in my house: I like my country-bred father’s
heavy silver plate stamped with no maker’s name: I do not want a
table that is beauteous with dappled spots, or known to all the
town by the number of fashionable people to whom it has successively
belonged, but one which stands merely for use, and which causes no
guest’s eye to dwell upon it with pleasure or to kindle at it with
envy. While I am well satisfied with this, I am reminded of the
clothes of a certain schoolboy, dressed with no ordinary care and
splendour, of slaves bedecked with gold and a whole regiment {252}
of glittering attendants. I think of houses too, where one treads
on precious stones, and where valuables lie about in every corner,
where the very roof is brilliantly painted, and a whole nation
attends and accompanies an inheritance on the road to ruin. What
shall I say of waters, transparent to the very bottom, which flow
round the guests, and banquets worthy of the theatre in which they
take place? Coming as I do from a long course of dull thrift, I
find myself surrounded by the most brilliant luxury, which echoes
around me on every side: my sight becomes a little dazzled by it:
I can lift up my heart against it more easily than my eyes. When I
return from seeing it I am a sadder, though not a worse man, I
cannot walk amid my own paltry possessions with so lofty a step as
before, and silently there steals over me a feeling of vexation,
and a doubt whether that way of life may not be better than mine.
None of these things alter my principles, yet all of them disturb
me. At one time I would obey the maxims of our school and plunge
into public life, I would obtain office and become consul, not
because the purple robe and lictor’s axes attract me, but in order
that I may be able to be of use to my friends, my relatives, to all
my countrymen, and indeed to all mankind. Ready and determined, I
follow the advice of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, all of whom
bid one take part in public affairs, though none of them ever did
so himself: and then, as soon as something disturbs my mind, which
is not used to receiving shocks, as soon as something occurs which
is either disgraceful, such as often occurs in all men’s lives, or
which does not proceed quite easily, or when subjects of very little
importance require me to devote a great deal of time to them, I go
back to my life of leisure, and, just as even tired cattle go faster
when they are going home, I wish to retire and pass my life within
the walls of my house. “No one,” I say, “that will give me no
compensation worth such a loss shall ever {253} rob me of a day.
Let my mind be contained within itself and improve itself: let it
take no part with other men’s affairs, and do nothing which depends
on the approval of others: let me enjoy a tranquillity undisturbed
by either public or private troubles.” But whenever my spirit is
roused by reading some brave words, or some noble example spurs me
into action, I want to rush into the law courts, to place my voice
at one man’s disposal, my services at another’s, and to try to help
him even though I may not succeed, or to quell the pride of some
lawyer who is puffed up by ill-deserved success: but I think, by
Hercules, that in philosophical speculation it is better to view
things as they are, and to speak of them on their own account, and
as for words, to trust to things for them, and to let one’s speech
simply follow whither they lead. “Why do you want to construct a
fabric that will endure for ages? Do you not wish to do this in
order that posterity may talk of you: yet you were born to die, and
a silent death is the least wretched. Write something therefore in
a simple style, merely to pass the time, for your own use, and not
for publication. Less labour is needed when one does not look beyond
the present.” Then again, when the mind is elevated by the greatness
of its thoughts, it becomes ostentatious in its use of words, the
loftier its aspirations, the more loftily it desires to express
them, and its speech rises to the dignity of its subject. At such
times I forget my mild and moderate determination and soar higher
than is my wont, using a language that is not my own. Not to multiply
examples, I am in all things attended by this weakness of a
well-meaning mind, to whose level I fear that I shall be gradually
brought down, or, what is even more worrying, that I may always
hang as though about to fall, and that there may be more the matter
with me than I myself perceive: for we take a friendly view of our
own private affairs, and partiality always obscures our judgment.
{254} I fancy that many men would have arrived at wisdom had they
not believed themselves to have arrived there already, had they not
purposely deceived themselves as to some parts of their character,
and passed by others with their eyes shut: for you have no grounds
for supposing that other people’s flattery is more ruinous to us
than our own. Who dares to tell himself the truth? Who is there,
by however large a troop of caressing courtiers he may be surrounded,
who in spite of them is not his own greatest flatterer? I beg you,
therefore, if you have any remedy by which you could stop this
vacillation of mine, to deem me worthy to owe my peace of mind to
you. I am well aware that these oscillations of mind are not perilous
and that they threaten me with no serious disorder: to express what
I complain of by an exact simile, I am not suffering from a storm,
but from sea-sickness. Take from me, then, this evil, whatever it
may be, and help one who is in distress within sight of land.
II. [_Seneca._] I have long been silently asking myself, my friend
Serenus, to what I should liken such a condition of mind, and I
find that nothing more closely resembles it than the conduct of
those who, after having recovered from a long and serious illness,
occasionally experience slight touches and twinges, and, although
they have passed through the final stages of the disease, yet have
suspicions that it has not left them, and though in perfect health
yet hold out their pulse to be felt by the physician, and whenever
they feel warm suspect that the fever is returning. Such men,
Serenus, are not unhealthy, but they are not accustomed to being
healthy; just as even a quiet sea or lake nevertheless displays a
certain amount of ripple when its waters are subsiding after a
storm. What you need, therefore, is, not any of those harsher
remedies to which allusion has been made, not that you should in
some cases check yourself, in others be angry with yourself, in
{255} others sternly reproach yourself, but that you should adopt
that which comes last in the list, have confidence in yourself, and
believe that you are proceeding on the right path, without being
led aside by the numerous divergent tracks of wanderers which cross
it in every direction, some of them circling about the right path
itself. What you desire, to be undisturbed, is a great thing, nay,
the greatest thing of all, and one which raises a man almost to the
level of a god. The Greeks call this calm steadiness of mind
_euthymia_, and Democritus’s treatise upon it is excellently written:
I call it peace of mind: for there is no necessity for translating
so exactly as to copy the words of the Greek idiom: the essential
point is to mark the matter under discussion by a name which ought
to have the same meaning as its Greek name, though perhaps not the
same form. What we are seeking, then, is how the mind may always
pursue a steady, unruffled course, may be pleased with itself, and
look with pleasure upon its surroundings, and experience no
interruption of this joy, but abide in a peaceful condition without
being ever either elated or depressed: this will be “peace of mind.”
Let us now consider in a general way how it may be attained: then
you may apply as much as you choose of the universal remedy to your
own case. Meanwhile we must drag to light the entire disease, and
then each one will recognize his own part of it: at the same time
you will understand how much less you suffer by your self-depreciation
than those who are bound by some showy declaration which they have
made, and are oppressed by some grand title of honour, so that shame
rather than their own free will forces them to keep up the pretence.
The same thing applies both to those who suffer from fickleness and
continual changes of purpose, who always are fondest of what they
have given up, and those who merely yawn and dawdle: add to these
those who, like bad sleepers, turn from side to {256} side, and
settle themselves first in one manner and then in another, until
at last they find rest through sheer weariness: in forming the
habits of their lives they often end by adopting some to which they
are not kept by any dislike of change, but in the practice of which
old age, which is slow to alter, has caught them living: add also
those who are by no means fickle, yet who must thank their dulness,
not their consistency for being so, and who go on living not in the
way they wish, but in the way they have begun to live. There are
other special forms of this disease without number, but it has but
one effect, that of making people dissatisfied with themselves.
This arises from a distemperature of mind and from desires which
one is afraid to express or unable to fulfil, when men either dare
not attempt as much as they wish to do, or fail in their efforts
and depend entirely upon hope: such people are always fickle and
changeable, which is a necessary consequence of living in a state
of suspense: they take any way to arrive at their ends, and teach
and force themselves to use both dishonourable and difficult means
to do so, so that when their toil has been in vain they are made
wretched by the disgrace of failure, and do not regret having longed
for what was wrong, but having longed for it in vain. They then
begin to feel sorry for what they have done, and afraid to begin
again, and their mind falls by degrees into a state of endless
vacillation, because they can neither command nor obey their passions,
of hesitation, because their life cannot properly develope itself,
and of decay, as the mind becomes stupefied by disappointments. All
these symptoms become aggravated when their dislike of a laborious