Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
to endure the waste of what is not seen: yet no one will give you
back your years, no one will restore them to you again: your life
will run its course when once it has begun, and will neither begin
again or efface what it has done. It will make no disturbance, it
will give you no warning of how fast it flies: it will move silently
on: it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the
wish of a nation: as it started on its first day, so it will run:
it will never turn aside, never delay. What follows, then? Why! you
are busy, but life is hurrying on: death will be here some time or
other, and you must attend to him, whether you will or no.
IX. Can anything be mentioned which is more insane than the ideas
of leisure of those people who boast of their worldly wisdom? They
live laboriously, in order that {301} they may live better; they
fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself, and cast
their thoughts a long way forwards: yet postponement is the greatest
waste of life: it wrings day after day from us, and takes away the
present by promising something hereafter: there is no such obstacle
to true living as waiting, which loses to-day while it is depending
on the morrow. You dispose of that which is in the hand of Fortune,
and you let go that which is in your own. Whither are you looking,
whither are you stretching forward? everything future is uncertain:
live now straightway. See how the greatest of bards cries to you
and sings in wholesome verse as though inspired with celestial
fire:—
“The best of wretched mortals’ days is that Which is the first
to fly.”
Why do you hesitate, says he, why do you stand back? unless you
seize it it will have fled: and even if you do seize it, it will
still fly. Our swiftness in making use of our time ought therefore
to vie with the swiftness of time itself, and we ought to drink of
it as we should of a fast-running torrent which will not be always
running. The poet, too, admirably satirizes our boundless thoughts,
when he says, not “the first age,” but “the first day.” Why are you
careless and slow while time is flying so fast, and why do you
spread out before yourself a vision of long months and years, as
many as your greediness requires? he talks with you about one day,
and that a fast-fleeting one. There can, then, be no doubt that the
best days are those which fly first for wretched, that is, for busy
mortals, whose minds are still in their childhood when old age comes
upon them, and they reach it unprepared and without arms to combat
it. They have never looked forward: they have all of a sudden
stumbled upon old age: they never noticed that it was stealing upon
them day by day. As conversation, or reading, or deep thought
deceives travellers, and they find {302} themselves at their journey’s
end before they knew that it was drawing near, so in this fast and
never-ceasing journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether
we are asleep or awake, busy people never notice that they are
moving till they are at the end of it.
X. If I chose to divide this proposition into separate steps,
supported by evidence, many things occur to me by which I could
prove that the lives of busy men are the shortest of all. Fabianus,
who was none of your lecture-room philosophers, but one of the true
antique pattern, used to say, “We ought to fight against the passions
by main force, not by skirmishing, and upset their line of battle
by a home charge, not by inflicting trifling wounds: I do not approve
of dallying with sophisms; they must be crushed, not merely scratched.”
Yet, in order that sinners may be confronted with their errors,
they must be taught, and not merely mourned for. Life is divided
into three parts: that which has been, that which is, and that which
is to come: of these three stages, that which we are passing through
is brief, that which we are about to pass is uncertain, and that
which we have passed is certain: this it is over which Fortune has
lost her rights, and which can fall into no other man’s power: and
this is what busy men lose: for they have no leisure to look back
upon the past, and even if they had, they take no pleasure in
remembering what they regret: they are, therefore, unwilling to
turn their minds to the contemplation of ill-spent time, and they
shrink from reviewing a course of action whose faults become glaringly
apparent when handled a second time, although they were snatched
at when we were under the spell of immediate gratification. No one,
unless all his acts have been submitted to the infallible censorship
of his own conscience, willingly turns his thoughts back upon the
past. He who has ambitiously desired, haughtily scorned, passionately
vanquished, treacherously deceived, greedily snatched, or prodigally
{303} wasted much, must needs fear his own memory; yet this is a
holy and consecrated part of our time, beyond the reach of all human
accidents, removed from the dominion of Fortune, and which cannot
be disquieted by want, fear, or attacks of sickness: this can neither
be troubled nor taken away from one: we possess it for ever
undisturbed. Our present consists only of single days, and those,
too, taken one hour at a time: but all the days of past times appear
before us when bidden, and allow themselves to be examined and
lingered over, albeit busy men cannot find time for so doing. It
is the privilege of a tranquil and peaceful mind to review all the
parts of its life: but the minds of busy men are like animals under
the yoke, and cannot bend aside or look back. Consequently, their
life passes away into vacancy, and as you do no good however much
you may pour into a vessel which cannot keep or hold what you put
there, so also it matters not how much time you give men if it can
find no place to settle in, but leaks away through the chinks and
holes of their minds. Present time is very short, so much so that
to some it seems to be no time at all; for it is always in motion,
and runs swiftly away: it ceases to exist before it comes, and can
no more brook delay than can the universe or the host of heaven,
whose unresting movement never lets them pause on their way. Busy
men, therefore, possess present time, alone, that being so short
that they cannot grasp it, and when they are occupied with many
things they lose even this.
XI. In a word, do you want to know for how short a time they live?
see how they desire to live long: broken-down old men beg in their
prayers for the addition of a few more years: they pretend to be
younger than they are: they delude themselves with their own lies,
and are as willing to cheat themselves as if they could cheat Fate
at the same time: when at last some weakness reminds them that they
{304} are mortal, they die as it were in terror: they may rather
be said to be dragged out of this life than to depart from it. They
loudly exclaim that they have been fools and have not lived their
lives, and declare that if they only survive this sickness they
will spend the rest of their lives at leisure: at such times they
reflect how uselessly they have laboured to provide themselves with
what they have never enjoyed, and how all their toil has gone for
nothing: but those whose life is spent without any engrossing
business may well find it ample: no part of it is made over to
others, or scattered here and there; no part is entrusted to Fortune,
is lost by neglect, is spent in ostentatious giving, or is useless:
all of it is, so to speak, invested at good interest. A very small
amount of it, therefore, is abundantly sufficient, and so, when his
last day arrives, the wise man will not hang back, but will walk
with a steady step to meet death.
XII. Perhaps you will ask me whom I mean by “busy men”? you need
not think that I allude only to those who are hunted out of the
courts of justice with dogs at the close of the proceedings, those
whom you see either honourably jostled by a crowd of their own
clients or contemptuously hustled in visits of ceremony by strangers,
who call them away from home to hang about their patron’s doors,
or who make use of the praetor’s sales by auction to acquire infamous
gains which some day will prove their own ruin. Some men’s leisure
is busy: in their country house or on their couch, in complete
solitude, even though they have retired from all men’s society,
they still continue to worry themselves: we ought not to say that
such men’s life is one of leisure, but their very business is sloth.
Would you call a man idle who expends anxious finicking care in the
arrangement of his Corinthian bronzes, valuable only through the
mania of a few connoisseurs? and who passes the greater part of his
days among plates of rusty metal? who sits in the palaestra (shame,
that our very vices {305} should be foreign) watching boys wrestling?
who distributes his gangs of fettered slaves into pairs according
to their age and colour? who keeps athletes of the latest fashion?
Why, do you call those men idle, who pass many hours at the barber’s
while the growth of the past night is being plucked out by the
roots, holding councils over each several hair, while the scattered
locks are arranged in order and those which fall back are forced
forward on to the forehead? How angry they become if the shaver is
a little careless, as though he were shearing a _man_! what a white
heat they work themselves into if some of their mane is cut away,
if some part of it is ill-arranged, if all their ringlets do not
lie in regular order! who of them would not rather that the state
were overthrown than that his hair should be ruffled? who does not
care more for the appearance of his head than for his health? who
would not prefer ornament to honour? Do you call these men idle,
who make a business of the comb and looking-glass? what of those
who devote their lives to composing, hearing, and learning songs,
who twist their voices, intended by Nature to sound best and simplest
when used straightforwardly, through all the turns of futile melodies:
whose fingers are always beating time to some music on which they
are inwardly meditating; who, when invited to serious and even sad
business may be heard humming an air to themselves?—such people are
not at leisure, but are busy about trifles. As for their banquets,
by Hercules, I cannot reckon them among their unoccupied times when
I see with what anxious care they set out their plate, how laboriously
they arrange the girdles of their waiters’ tunics, how breathlessly
they watch to see how the cook dishes up the wild boar, with what
speed, when the signal is given, the slave-boys run to perform their
duties, how skilfully birds are carved into pieces of the right
size, how painstakingly wretched youths wipe up the spittings of
drunken men. By these means men seek credit for taste {306} and
grandeur, and their vices follow them so far into their privacy
that they can neither eat nor drink without a view to effect. Nor
should I count those men idle who have themselves carried hither
and thither in sedans and litters, and who look forward to their
regular hour for taking this exercise as though they were not allowed
to omit it: men who are reminded by some one else when to bathe,
when to swim, when to dine: they actually reach such a pitch of
languid effeminacy as not to be able to find out for themselves
whether they are hungry. I have heard one of these luxurious folk—if
indeed, we ought to give the name of luxury to unlearning the life
and habits of a man—when he was carried in men’s arms out of the
bath and placed in his chair, say inquiringly, “Am I seated?” Do
you suppose that such a man as this, who did not know when he was
seated, could know whether he was alive, whether he could see,