Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
their folly torments them with vague passions which lead them into
the very things of which they are afraid: they often, therefore,
wish for death because they live in fear. Neither is it, as you
might think, a proof of the length of their lives that they often
find the days long, that they often complain how slowly the hours
pass until the appointed time arrives for dinner: for whenever they
are left without their usual business, they fret helplessly in their
idleness, and know not how to arrange or to spin it out. They betake
themselves, therefore, to some business, and all the intervening
time is irksome to them; they would wish, by Hercules, to skip over
it, just as they wish to skip over the intervening days before a
gladiatorial contest or some other time appointed for a public
spectacle or private indulgence: all postponement of what they wish
for is grievous to them. Yet the very time which they enjoy is brief
and soon past, and is made much briefer by their own fault: for
they run from one pleasure to another, and are not able to devote
{313} themselves consistently to one passion: their days are not
long, but odious to them: on the other hand, how short they find
the nights which they spend with courtezans or over wine? Hence
arises that folly of the poets who encourage the errors of mankind
by their myths, and declare that Jupiter to gratify his voluptuous
desires doubled the length of the night. Is it not adding fuel to
our vices to name the gods as their authors, and to offer our
distempers free scope by giving them deity for an example? How can
the nights for which men pay so dear fail to appear of the shortest?
they lose the day in looking forward to the night, and lose the
night through fear of the dawn.
XVII. Such men’s very pleasures are restless and disturbed by various
alarms, and at the most joyous moment of all there rises the anxious
thought: “How long will this last?” This frame of mind has led kings
to weep over their power, and they have not been so much delighted
at the grandeur of their position, as they have been terrified by
the end to which it must some day come. That most arrogant Persian
king,[8] when his army stretched over vast plains and could not be
counted but only measured, burst into tears at the thought that in
less than a hundred years none of all those warriors would be alive:
yet their death was brought upon them by the very man who wept over
it, who was about to destroy some of them by sea, some on land,
some in battle, and some in flight, and who would in a very short
space of time put an end to those about whose hundredth year he
showed such solicitude. Why need we wonder at their very joys being
mixed with fear? they do not rest upon any solid grounds, but are
disturbed by the same emptiness from which they spring. What must
we suppose to be the misery of such times as even they acknowledge
to be wretched, when even the joys by which they elevate themselves
and raise themselves above their fellows are of {314} a mixed
character. All the greatest blessings are enjoyed with fear, and
no thing is so untrustworthy as extreme prosperity: we require fresh
strokes of good fortune to enable us to keep that which we are
enjoying, and even those of our prayers which are answered require
fresh prayers. Everything for which we are dependent on chance is
uncertain: the higher it rises, the more opportunities it has of
falling. Moreover, no one takes any pleasure in what is about to
fall into ruin: very wretched, therefore, as well as very short
must be the lives of those who work very hard to gain what they
must work even harder to keep: they obtain what they wish with
infinite labour, and they hold what they have obtained with fear
and trembling. Meanwhile they take no account of time, of which
they will never have a fresh and larger supply: they substitute new
occupations for old ones, one hope leads to another, one ambition
to another: they do not seek for an end to their wretchedness, but
they change its subject. Do our own preferments trouble us? nay,
those of other men occupy more of our time. Have we ceased from our
labours in canvassing? then we begin others in voting. Have we got
rid of the trouble of accusation? then we begin that of judging.
Has a man ceased to be a judge? then he becomes an examiner. Has
he grown old in the salaried management of other people’s property?
then he becomes occupied with his own. Marius is discharged from
military service; he becomes consul many times: Quintius is eager
to reach the end of his dictatorship; he will be called a second
time from the plough: Scipio marched against the Carthaginians
before he was of years sufficient for so great an undertaking; after
he has conquered Hannibal, conquered Antiochus, been the glory of
his own consulship and the surety for that of his brother, he might,
had he wished it, have been set on the same pedestal with Jupiter;
but civil factions will vex the saviour of the state, and he who
when {315} a young man disdained to receive divine honours, will
take pride as an old man in obstinately remaining in exile. We shall
never lack causes of anxiety, either pleasurable or painful: our
life will be pushed along from one business to another: leisure
will always be wished for, and never enjoyed.
XVIII. Whefore, my dearest Paulinus, tear yourself away from the
common herd, and since you have seen more rough weather than one
would think from your age, betake yourself at length to a more
peaceful haven: reflect what waves you have sailed through, what
storms you have endured in private life, and brought upon yourself
in public. Your courage has been sufficiently displayed by many
toilsome and wearisome proofs; try how it will deal with leisure:
the greater, certainly the better part of your life, has been given
to your country; take now some part of your time for yourself as
well. I do not urge you to practise a dull or lazy sloth, or to
drown all your fiery spirit in the pleasures which are dear to the
herd: that is not rest: you can find greater works than all those
which you have hitherto so manfully carried out, upon which you may
employ yourself in retirement and security. You manage the revenues
of the entire world, as unselfishly as though they belonged to
another, as laboriously as if they were your own, as scrupulously
as though they belonged to the public: you win love in an office
in which it is hard to avoid incurring hatred; yet, believe me, it
is better to understand your own mind than to understand the
corn-market. Take away that keen intellect of yours, so well capable
of grappling with the greatest subjects, from a post which may be
dignified, but which is hardly fitted to render life happy, and
reflect that you did not study from childhood all the branches of
a liberal education merely in order that many thousand tons of corn
might safely be entrusted to your charge: you have {316} given us
promise of something greater and nobler than this. There will never
be any want of strict economists or of laborious workers: slow-going
beasts of burden are better suited for carrying loads than well-bred
horses, whose generous swiftness no one would encumber with a heavy
pack. Think, moreover, how full of risk is the great task which you
have undertaken: you have to deal with the human stomach: a hungry
people will not endure reason, will not be appeased by justice, and
will not hearken to any prayers. Only just a few days ago, when G.
Caesar perished, grieving for nothing so much (if those in the other
world can feel grief) as that the Roman people did not die with
him, there was said to be only enough corn for seven or eight days’
consumption: while he was making bridges with ships[9] and playing
with the resources of the empire, want of provisions, the worst
evil that can befall even a besieged city, was at hand: his imitation
of a crazy outlandish and misproud king very nearly ended in ruin,
famine, and the general revolution which follows famine. What must
then have been the feelings of those who had the charge of supplying
the city with corn, who were in danger of stoning, of fire and
sword, of Gaius himself? With consummate art they concealed the
vast internal evil by which the state was menaced, and were quite
right in so doing; for some diseases must be cured without the
patient’s knowledge: many have died through discovering what was
the matter with them.
XIX. Betake yourself to these quieter, safer, larger fields of
action: do you think that there can be any comparison between seeing
that corn is deposited in the public {317} granary without being
stolen by the fraud or spoilt by the carelessness of the importer,
that it does not suffer from damp or overheating, and that it
measures and weighs as much as it ought, and beginning the study
of sacred and divine knowledge, which will teach you of what elements
the gods are formed, what are their pleasures, their position, their
form? to what changes your soul has to look forward? where Nature
will place us when we are dismissed from our bodies? what that
principle is which holds all the heaviest particles of our universe
in the middle, suspends the lighter ones above, puts fire highest
of all, and causes the stars to rise in their courses, with many
other matters, full of marvels? Will you not[10] cease to grovel
on earth and turn your mind’s eye on these themes? nay, while your
blood still flows swiftly, before your knees grow feeble, you ought
to take the better path. In this course of life there await you
many good things, such as love and practice of the virtues,
forgetfulness of passions, knowledge of how to live and die, deep
repose. The position of all busy men is unhappy, but most unhappy
of all is that of those who do not even labour at their own affairs,
but have to regulate their rest by another man’s sleep, their walk
by another man’s pace, and whose very love and hate, the freest
things in the world, are at another’s bidding. If such men wish to
know how short their lives are, let them think how small a fraction
of them is their own.
XX. When, therefore, you see a man often wear the purple robes of
office, and hear his name often repeated in the forum, do not envy
him: he gains these things by losing so much of his life. Men throw
away all their years in order to have one year named after them as
consul: some lose their lives during the early part of the struggle,
and never reach the height to which they aspired: {318} some after
having submitted to a thousand indignities in order to reach the
crowning dignity, have the miserable reflexion that the only result
of their labours will be the inscription on their tombstone. Some,
while telling off extreme old age, like youth, for new aspirations,
have found it fail from sheer weakness amid great and presumptuous
enterprises. It is a shameful ending, when a man’s breath deserts
him in a court of justice, while, although well stricken in years,
he is still striving to gain the sympathies of an ignorant audience
for some obscure litigant: it is base to perish in the midst of
one’s business, wearied with living sooner than with working;
shameful, too, to die in the act of receiving payments, amid the
laughter of one’s long-expectant heir. I cannot pass over an an
instance which occurs to me: Turannius was an old man of the most
painstaking exactitude, who after entering upon his ninetieth year,
when he had by G. Caesar’s own act been relieved of his duties as
collector of the revenue, ordered himself to be laid out on his bed
and mourned for as though he were dead. The whole house mourned for
the leisure of its old master, and did not lay aside its mourning
until his work was restored to him. Can men find such pleasure in