defeating its light.’
How soon will you be fortunate enough to attain to this happiness? Well, you haven’t been dragging your steps up till now, but your pace could be increased. There’s a lot of work remaining to be done, and if you want to be successful you must devote all your waking hours and all your efforts to the task personally. This is not something that admits of delegation. It is a different branch of learning which has room for devilling. There was a rich man called Calvisius Sabinus, in my own lifetime, who had a freedman’s brains along with a freedman’s fortune. I have never seen greater vulgarity in a successful man. His memory was so bad that at one momentor another the names of Ulysses, or Achilles, or Priam, characters he knew as well as we knew our early teachers, would slip his memory. No doddering butler ever went through the introductions of a mass of callers committing quite such solecisms – not announcing people’s names so much as foisting names on them – as Sabinus did with the Greek and Trojan heroes. But this didn’t stop him wanting to appear a well-read man. And to this end he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves, one of them to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod, while he assigned one apiece to each of the nine lyric poets. * That the cost was enormous is hardly surprising: not having found what he wanted in the market he had them made to order. After this collection of slaves had been procured for him, he began to give his dinner guests nightmares. He would have these fellows at his elbow so that he could continually be turning to them for quotations from these poets which he might repeat to the company, and then – it happened frequently – he would break down halfway through a word. Satellius Quadratus, who regarded stupid millionaires as fair game to be sponged off, and consequently also fair game for flattery, as well as – and this goes with the other two things – fair game for facetiousness at their expense, suggested to him that he should keep a team of scholars ‘to pick up the bits’. On Sabinus’ letting it be known that the slaves had set him back a hundred thousand sesterces apiece, he said: ‘Yes, for less than that you could have bought the same number of bookcases.’ Sabinus was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally. It was Satellius, again, who started urging Sabinus, a pale and skinny individual whose health was poor, to take up wrestling.
When Sabinus retorted: ‘How can I possibly do that? It’s as much as I can do to stay alive’, Satellius answered: ‘Now please, don’t say that! Look how many slaves you’ve got in perfect physical condition!’ A sound mind can neither be bought nor borrowed. And if it were for sale, I doubt whether it would find a buyer. And yet unsound ones are being purchased every day.
But let me pay you what I owe you and say goodbye. ‘Poverty brought into accord with the law of nature is wealth.’ Epicurus is constantly saying this in one way or another. But something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often. With some people you only need to point to a remedy; others need to have it rammed into them.
LETTER XXVIII
D O you think you are the only person to have had this experience? Are you really surprised, as if it were something unprecedented, that so long a tour and such diversity of scene have not enabled you to throw off this melancholy and this feeling of depression? A change of character, not a change of air, is what you need. Though you cross the boundless ocean, though, to use the words of our poet Virgil,
Lands and towns are left astern, *
whatever your destination you will be followed by your failings. Here is what Socrates said to someone who was making the same complaint: ‘How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are
How soon will you be fortunate enough to attain to this happiness? Well, you haven’t been dragging your steps up till now, but your pace could be increased. There’s a lot of work remaining to be done, and if you want to be successful you must devote all your waking hours and all your efforts to the task personally. This is not something that admits of delegation. It is a different branch of learning which has room for devilling. There was a rich man called Calvisius Sabinus, in my own lifetime, who had a freedman’s brains along with a freedman’s fortune. I have never seen greater vulgarity in a successful man. His memory was so bad that at one momentor another the names of Ulysses, or Achilles, or Priam, characters he knew as well as we knew our early teachers, would slip his memory. No doddering butler ever went through the introductions of a mass of callers committing quite such solecisms – not announcing people’s names so much as foisting names on them – as Sabinus did with the Greek and Trojan heroes. But this didn’t stop him wanting to appear a well-read man. And to this end he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves, one of them to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod, while he assigned one apiece to each of the nine lyric poets. * That the cost was enormous is hardly surprising: not having found what he wanted in the market he had them made to order. After this collection of slaves had been procured for him, he began to give his dinner guests nightmares. He would have these fellows at his elbow so that he could continually be turning to them for quotations from these poets which he might repeat to the company, and then – it happened frequently – he would break down halfway through a word. Satellius Quadratus, who regarded stupid millionaires as fair game to be sponged off, and consequently also fair game for flattery, as well as – and this goes with the other two things – fair game for facetiousness at their expense, suggested to him that he should keep a team of scholars ‘to pick up the bits’. On Sabinus’ letting it be known that the slaves had set him back a hundred thousand sesterces apiece, he said: ‘Yes, for less than that you could have bought the same number of bookcases.’ Sabinus was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally. It was Satellius, again, who started urging Sabinus, a pale and skinny individual whose health was poor, to take up wrestling.
When Sabinus retorted: ‘How can I possibly do that? It’s as much as I can do to stay alive’, Satellius answered: ‘Now please, don’t say that! Look how many slaves you’ve got in perfect physical condition!’ A sound mind can neither be bought nor borrowed. And if it were for sale, I doubt whether it would find a buyer. And yet unsound ones are being purchased every day.
But let me pay you what I owe you and say goodbye. ‘Poverty brought into accord with the law of nature is wealth.’ Epicurus is constantly saying this in one way or another. But something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often. With some people you only need to point to a remedy; others need to have it rammed into them.
LETTER XXVIII
D O you think you are the only person to have had this experience? Are you really surprised, as if it were something unprecedented, that so long a tour and such diversity of scene have not enabled you to throw off this melancholy and this feeling of depression? A change of character, not a change of air, is what you need. Though you cross the boundless ocean, though, to use the words of our poet Virgil,
Lands and towns are left astern, *
whatever your destination you will be followed by your failings. Here is what Socrates said to someone who was making the same complaint: ‘How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are
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