On the Shortness of Life

erhaps you will ask me whom I mean by “busy men”? you need
not think that I allude only to those who are hunted out of the
courts of justice with dogs at the close of the proceedings, those
whom you see either honourably jostled by a crowd of their own
clients or contemptuously hustled in visits of ceremony by strangers,
who call them away from home to hang about their patron’s doors,
or who make use of the praetor’s sales by auction to acquire infamous
gains which some day will prove their own ruin. Some men’s leisure
is busy: in their country house or on their couch, in complete
solitude, even though they have retired from all men’s society,
they still continue to worry themselves: we ought not to say that
such men’s life is one of leisure, but their very business is sloth.
Would you call a man idle who expends anxious finicking care in the
arrangement of his Corinthian bronzes, valuable only through the
mania of a few connoisseurs? and who passes the greater part of his
days among plates of rusty metal? who sits in the palaestra (shame,
that our very vices should be foreign) watching boys wrestling?
who distributes his gangs of fettered slaves into pairs according
to their age and colour? who keeps athletes of the latest fashion?
Why, do you call those men idle, who pass many hours at the barber’s
while the growth of the past night is being plucked out by the
roots, holding councils over each several hair, while the scattered
locks are arranged in order and those which fall back are forced
forward on to the forehead? How angry they become if the shaver is
a little careless, as though he were shearing a man! what a white
heat they work themselves into if some of their mane is cut away,
if some part of it is ill-arranged, if all their ringlets do not
lie in regular order! who of them would not rather that the state
were overthrown than that his hair should be ruffled? who does not
care more for the appearance of his head than for his health? who
would not prefer ornament to honour? Do you call these men idle,
who make a business of the comb and looking-glass? what of those
who devote their lives to composing, hearing, and learning songs,
who twist their voices, intended by Nature to sound best and simplest
when used straightforwardly, through all the turns of futile melodies:
whose fingers are always beating time to some music on which they
are inwardly meditating; who, when invited to serious and even sad
business may be heard humming an air to themselves?—such people are
not at leisure, but are busy about trifles. As for their banquets,
by Hercules, I cannot reckon them among their unoccupied times when
I see with what anxious care they set out their plate, how laboriously
they arrange the girdles of their waiters’ tunics, how breathlessly
they watch to see how the cook dishes up the wild boar, with what
speed, when the signal is given, the slave-boys run to perform their
duties, how skilfully birds are carved into pieces of the right
size, how painstakingly wretched youths wipe up the spittings of
drunken men. By these means men seek credit for taste and
grandeur, and their vices follow them so far into their privacy
that they can neither eat nor drink without a view to effect. Nor
should I count those men idle who have themselves carried hither
and thither in sedans and litters, and who look forward to their
regular hour for taking this exercise as though they were not allowed
to omit it: men who are reminded by some one else when to bathe,
when to swim, when to dine: they actually reach such a pitch of
languid effeminacy as not to be able to find out for themselves
whether they are hungry. I have heard one of these luxurious folk—if
indeed, we ought to give the name of luxury to unlearning the life
and habits of a man—when he was carried in men’s arms out of the
bath and placed in his chair, say inquiringly, “Am I seated?” Do
you suppose that such a man as this, who did not know when he was
seated, could know whether he was alive, whether he could see,
whether he was at leisure? I can hardly say whether I pity him more
if he really did not know or if he pretended not to know this. Such
people do really become unconscious of much, but they behave as
though they were unconscious of much more: they delight in some
failings because they consider them to be proofs of happiness: it
seems the part of an utterly low and contemptible man to know what
he is doing. After this, do you suppose that playwrights draw largely
upon their imaginations in their burlesques upon luxury: by Hercules,
they omit more than they invent; in this age, inventive in this
alone, such a number of incredible vices have been produced, that
already you are able to reproach the playwrights with omitting to
notice them. To think that there should be any one who had so far
lost his senses through luxury as to take some one else’s opinion
as to whether he was sitting or not? This man certainly is not at
leisure: you must bestow a different title on him: he is sick, or
rather dead: he only is at leisure who feels that he is at leisure:
but this creature is only half alive, if he wants some one
to tell him what position his body is in. How can such a man be
able to dispose of any time?