Epistles 1.1 (Fairclough)

You, of whom my earliest Muse has told, of whom my last shall tell—you Maecenas, seek to shut me up again in my old school, though well tested in the fray, and already presented with the foil. My years, my mind, are not the same. Veianius hangs up his arms at Hercules’ door, then lies hidden in the country, that he may not have to plead with the crowd again and again from the arena’s edge. Some one there is who is always dinning in my well-rinsed ear: “Be wise in time, and turn loose the ageing horse, lest at the last he stumble amid jeers and burst his wind.”

So now I lay aside my verses and all other toys. What is right and seemly is my study and pursuit, and to that am I wholly given. I am putting by and setting in order the stores on which I may some day draw. Do you ask, perchance, who is my chief, in what home I take shelter? I am not bound over to swear as any master dictates; wherever the storm drives me, I turn in for comfort. Now I become all action, and plunge into the tide of civil life, stern champion and follower of true Virtue; now I slip back stealthily into the rules of Aristippus, and would bend the world to myself, not myself to the world.

As the night seems long for one whose mistress proves false, and the day long for those who work for hire; as the year lags for wards held in check by their mother’s strict guardianship: so slow and thankless flow for me the hours which defer my hope and purpose of setting myself vigorously to that task which profits alike the poor, alike the rich, but, if neglected, will be harmful alike to young and to old. What remains is for me to guide and solace myself with these poor rudiments. You may not be able, with your eyes, to see as far as Lynceus, yet you would not on that account scorn to anoint them, if sore. Nor, because you may not hope for unconquered Glycon’s strength of limb, would you decline to keep your body free from the gnarls of gout. It is worth while to take some steps forward, though we may not go still further.

Is your bosom fevered with avarice and sordid covetousness? There are spells and sayings whereby you may soothe the pain and cast much of the malady aside. Are you swelling with ambition? There are fixed charms which can fashion you anew, if with cleansing rites you read the booklet thrice. The slave to envy, anger, sloth, wine, lewdness—no one is so savage that he cannot be tamed, if only he lend to treatment a patient ear.

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom. You see with what anxious thought and peril of life you strive to avoid those ills you deem the greatest, a slender fortune and the shame of failure at the polls. Ardent-trader that you are, you rush to the furthest Indies, fleeing poverty through sea, through rocks, through flame: but that you may cease to care for the things which you foolishly admire and crave, will you not learn and listen and trust one wiser than yourself? What wrestler in the village games and at the cross-ways would scorn being crowned at the great Olympic games, who had the hope, who had the surety of victory’s palm without the dust?

Of less worth than gold is silver, than virtue gold. “O citizens, citizens, money you first must seek; virtue after pelf.” This rule the Janus arcade proclaims from top to bottom; this is the lesson the old as well as the young are singing, “with slate and satchel slung over the left arm.” “You have sense, you have morals, eloquence and honour, but there are six or seven thousands short of the four hundred; you will be in the crowd. Yet boys at play cry: “You’ll be king, if you do right.” Be this our wall of bronze, to have no guilt at heart, no wrongdoing to turn us pale.

Tell me, pray, which is better, the Roscian law or the children’s jingle which offers a kingdom to those who “do right”—a jingle once trolled by the manly Curii and Camilli? Does he advise you better, who bids you “make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means money,” and all that you may have a nearer view of the doleful plays of Pupius; or he who, an ever present help, urges and fits you to stand free and erect, and defy scornful Fortune?

But if the people of Rome should ask me, perchance, why I do not use the same judgements even as I walk in the same colonnades as they, why I do not follow or eschew what they love or hate, I should reply as once upon a time the prudent fox made answer to the sick lion: Because those footprints frighten me; they all lead toward your den, and none lead back. You are a many-headed monster-thing. For what am I to follow or whom? Some men rejoice to farm state-revenues; some with titbits and fruits hunt miserly widows, and net old men to stock their preserves; with many their money grows with interest unobserved.

But let it be that men are swayed by different aims and hobbies; can the same persons persist for one hour in liking the same things? “No bay in the world outshines lovely Baiae.” If so the rich man has said, lake and sea suffer from the eager owner’s fancy; but if a morbid whim has given him the omen, “My lads,” he cries, “to-morrow you’ll carry your tools to Teanum.” Is the bed of his Genius in his hall? “Nothing,” he says, “is finer or better than a single life.” If it is not, he swears that only the married are well off. With what knot can I hold this face-changing Proteus? What of the poor man? Have your laugh! He changes his garret, his bed, his baths, his barber. He hires a boat and gets just as sick as the rich man who sails in his private yacht.

If, when some uneven barber has cropped my hair, I come your way, you laugh; if haply I have a tattered shirt beneath a new tunic, or if my gown sits badly and askew, you laugh. What, when my judgement is at strife with itself, scorns what it craved, asks again for what it lately cast aside; when it shifts like a tide, and in the whole system of life is out of joint, pulling down, building up, and changing square to round? You think my madness is the usual thing, and neither laugh at me nor deem that I need a physician or a guardian assigned by the court, though you are keeper of my fortunes, and flare up at an ill-pared nail of the friend who hangs upon you and looks to you in all.

To sum up: the wise man is less than Jove alone. He is rich, free, honoured, beautiful, nay a king of kings; above all, sound—save when troubled by the “flu”!