16 - Luxury and Simplicity

Two letters written from houses — one that belonged to a great man, one that belongs to Seneca and was not ready for him — and both used to measure how much a person actually needs. The first is sent from the country house that once belonged to Scipio Africanus. Seneca has paid his respects to the man's spirit and to an altar he suspects may be the general's actual tomb, and he opens with the claim that Scipio's soul went to heaven, returning to the place it came from. What convinces him of this is not the scale of the armies Scipio commanded — Cambyses commanded armies on that scale and was simply a madman who put his madness to good use — but the man's exceptional self-restraint and sense of duty. And what he admires most is not the campaigning but the departure. The choice Rome faced was stark: either Scipio stayed in the city, or Rome stayed a free republic. Seneca reports what Scipio said. He had no wish to weaken the laws or institutions in the smallest degree; all Roman citizens must be equal before the law; so he asked his country to make the most of what he had done for her, but without him. If she owed her freedom to him, let him also prove that she was free — and if his stature had grown too great for her own good, then out he would go. He went into voluntary exile to relieve the state of an embarrassing burden, because events had reached the point where either Scipio or the republic was going to suffer at the other's hands. Then Seneca walks into the bathroom, and the letter becomes an inventory of what has happened to Rome since. Scipio's bathroom has tiny chinks pierced in the masonry, too small to be called windows, admitting light without weakening the wall's defensive purpose. Nowadays, he says, people call a bathroom a moth-hole unless it is designed to catch the sun through enormous windows all day, unless a man can acquire a tan while bathing, unless there are views over countryside and sea. He lists the rest with contempt: the arrays of statues, the assemblies of columns that hold nothing up and exist purely so that money can be spent on them, the water cascading noisily from one level to the next. We have reached such a pitch of fastidiousness, he concludes, that we object to walking on anything that is not a precious stone. The second letter finds him in the opposite situation. He has reached his house at Alba late at night, worn out by a journey that was uncomfortable rather than long, to find that nothing has been prepared for his arrival except himself. So he is in bed recovering, and turning the cook's and the baker's slowness into the subject of a conversation with himself: how nothing is burdensome if it is taken lightly, and how nothing needs to provoke irritation so long as you do not make it bigger than it is by becoming irritated. The reasoning that follows is domestic and completely serious. The baker may be out of bread, but the farm manager will have some, or the steward, or a tenant. Bad bread, Lucilius will object — so wait, and it will shortly become good bread, because hunger will make even that loaf seem soft and wheaty. One should not eat until hunger asks. Seneca will therefore wait until either the good bread returns or he stops being fussy about the bad. It is essential, he says, to accustom oneself to putting up with a little, since even the rich and well provided for are continually met and frustrated by difficult circumstances. It is in nobody's power to have whatever he wants, but it is in everybody's power not to want what he does not have, and to make cheerful use of whatever does arrive. A stomach firmly under control, one that will tolerate rough handling, is a considerable step towards independence. 📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140442103?... As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.