05 - The Crowd and the Silence Within

The four letters here work out a single problem from opposite ends: how much of other people a man can take, and where the quiet he needs actually comes from. The first is the most famous attack on public entertainment in Latin literature. Seneca tells Lucilius to avoid the crowd because association with it is contagious — nothing is so damaging to good character as attendance at a spectacle, since vices creep in under the guise of pleasure. He then describes the lunch-hour interlude of the games, where he had expected something light and found killing done for its own sake. There is no helmet, no shield, no skill; only bodies exposed to the sword, and an audience calling for throats to be cut. In the morning men are thrown to the lions and the bears; in the lunch hour it is their spectators they are thrown to. Seneca does not claim immunity. He goes home from such a show more selfish, more self-seeking and more self-indulgent — and, he adds, crueller and less humane for having been in contact with human beings. Nor would the great have fared better: Socrates, Cato, Laelius — men whose characters the mob might have shaken. How much less can we resist. The alternative is not solitude but selection: retire with a few good people, and be enough for yourself if there are none. He seals it with Democritus, who said that a single man is a crowd to him, and a crowd a single man. The second letter answers the obvious charge against that advice. If the philosopher withdraws, what use is he? Seneca's answer is that his retreat is the most productive work he has ever done, and that it is not addressed to his contemporaries alone. Shut away, he is drawing up instructions for later generations, writing down what will help them, marking out the right road and the false gifts of fortune. The body's needs are to be met and subordinated; the spirit's are the work. So occupied, he claims, a man serves more people than he ever would in public office. He then quotes Epicurus on philosophy as the road to freedom and refuses to apologise for the source: truth is common property, and he will take a good line wherever it is found — from Epicurus, from Publilius the writer of mimes, from anyone. A third letter immediately qualifies that defence of withdrawal, and it is the sharpest thing in the chapter. Seneca has been along the beach between Cumae and the house of Servilius Vatia, a wealthy ex-praetor famous for nothing except having retired, and thought fortunate on that ground alone. In the years when a man could be destroyed for having been a friend of Asinius Gallus, or an enemy of Sejanus — or a follower of Sejanus, which became as dangerous as crossing him — people would say: Vatia, you are the only man who knows how to live. What he actually knew, Seneca says, was how to hide. There is a great deal of difference between a life that is retiring and a life that is spineless, and he admits that while Vatia was still alive he never passed the house without remarking, here lies Vatia. Philosophy is so venerable that anything resembling it borrows a specious appeal: let a man retire and the crowd assumes he is free of cares and living for himself, when none of that can be had by anyone but a philosopher, who alone knows the fundamental thing, how to live. Whoever has run from the world because his desires failed, who cannot bear the sight of people doing better, who has gone to ground like a timid animal, is not living for himself but for his belly and his sleep and his appetites. Living for nobody is not the same as living for oneself. The fourth letter closes the circle by removing the last excuse. Seneca is living above a public bathhouse, and he sets down the inventory of noise: the grunting of weightlifters, the slap of hands on shoulders, the shouting of the man who likes his own voice in the pool, the ball-player counting his throws, the brawler, the thief caught, the pastry-seller and the sausage-man each with his own cry. None of it, he insists, disturbs his reading. He has trained his mind to hold together, and he draws the conclusion that makes the letter more than a boast: external silence is worth nothing if the passions are in uproar within. Nor is night quiet for a man whose conscience is bad — he lies still and the trouble goes on. The noise a man should fear is the one he brings with him, and the work is to wake up and cut the vices out at the root, after which no shouting from outside will reach him. 📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140442103?... As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.