To the Letter. Simon Garfield
and so ate and drank without scruple and as suited his taste. It was a very good dinner, and well served, and not only so, but ‘Well-cooked, well-seasoned food, with rare discourse: A banquet in a word to cheer the heart.’
Besides this, the staff were entertained in three rooms in a very liberal style. The freedmen of lower rank and the slaves had everything they could want. But the upper sort had a really recherché dinner. In fact, I showed that I was somebody. However, he is not a guest to whom one would say, ‘Pray look me up again on your way back.’ Once is enough.
A century later the Stoic philosopher, poet and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger) offered a different take on the Latin letter. Where Cicero was personal and scheming, Seneca was instructional and disarming, composing 124 letters telling us how to conduct our lives.* All written towards the end of his life to his writer friend Lucilius, they are a combination of philosophical treatise and spiritual guide, with the letter judged a suitable vehicle for the provision of robust and serious advice delivered in a digestible way.
The letters may be seen as the world’s first correspondence course in self-improvement, or indeed – considered as a collection – the first self-help book. As would be expected, the complexity of his arguments increases as the course progresses. But the letters are also conversational, and it is largely assumed that the dialogue went both ways, though the contribution from Lucilius does not survive. They contain much modern thinking, and their range is vast: from musings on the respective merits of brawn and brains to old age and senility; from the value of travel to the despairs of drunkenness; from the futility of half-done deeds to the virtues of self-control; from specific ethical issues to broad matters of physics. They are never less than absorbing. Scholars have argued that Seneca is often playing the role of the philosopher, as concerned with the structure of his argument as he is with the treatise itself. But there is no doubt that he adores the challenges of the letter form, and his accessible, bite-sized approach has contributed to the continued popularity and influence of his work.
On travel, for example, Seneca advises against the hope of returning from a journey in a better frame of mind than the one we had on departure. He is evidently replying directly to a complaint of Lucilius:
Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate . . .
What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.
It was one of the cornerstones of the Stoic tradition that an individual’s well-being could be improved by clarity of being as well as clarity of thought, a distant forerunner of the unclutter movement. In ‘Some Arguments in Favour of the Simple Life’, Seneca considers ‘how much we possess that is superfluous; and how easily we can make up our minds to do away with things whose loss, whenever it is necessary to part with them, we do not feel.’
There are a great many musings on aging and death, and several on suicide. In ‘On the Proper Time to Slip the Cable’ there can be no doubting Seneca’s view of aging as a natural process to be welcomed, nor his careful advocacy of euthanasia when the process is no longer bearable.
We have sailed past life, Lucilius, as if we were on a voyage . . . On this journey where time flies with the greatest speed, we put below the horizon first our boyhood and then our youth, and then the space which lies between young manhood and middle age and borders on both, and next, the best years of old age itself. Last of all, we begin to sight the general bourne of the race of man. Fools that we are, we believe this bourne to be a dangerous reef; but it is the harbour, where we must some day put in . . .
Every man ought to make his life acceptable to others besides himself, but his death to himself alone.
Seneca, radical self-improver.
Dramatically, Seneca took his own advice. Implicated in the assassination plot against Nero, he was ordered to kill himself (which he did, although his bloodletting took slightly longer than expected, and his friends were encouraged to carry him into a warm bath to complete the ordeal).
His passing cleared the way for one more great letter-writer of the age. Pliny the Younger, born four years after Seneca’s death, did more than anyone to establish the letter in its modern form, and to rescue it from the byways of inconsequence, pomposity, rhetoric and philosophical instruction. His letters from the turn of the first century, arguably the most buoyant period in the life of the Roman Empire, continue to entertain and inform the reader more than 2,000 years later.
Before the form is put back in the box by an early Christian world more interested in religious stricture and instruction, Pliny’s letters serve as a beacon for what secular letters will become as they emerge in the twelfth century and beyond into the early Renaissance: commonplace, personal and indispensible.
We have 247 personal and professional letters from Pliny collected in nine books that were published in his lifetime, and 121 further official letters to and from the Emperor Trajan published posthumously. The letters were written when Pliny held some of the highest offices in the Treasury and legal profession, and many of his correspondents are also influential lawyers, philosophers and literary men, the majority of them in Rome, some also in his home town of Como (known then as Comum; Pliny owned several houses overlooking the lake). He writes generously and maintains consistent friendships, and his letters reflect wide cultural interests. His main value for us is historical, as a documenter of the times; that this is conveyed not through rhetoric, but through a natural, easy and expressive style renders it not only more accessible but also more authentic. The fact that he is often a vividly descriptive and aesthetic writer is a rare attribute for any Roman man of letters, and may explain why his correspondence has weathered so well.
Here are four letters. Written several decades apart, all are descriptive; the first (to a friend at Lake Como) is nostalgic and instructive, the second (about a failed dinner party) is woeful and comic, and the last two (about the eruption of Vesuvius) are famous and vital. All of them – in these translations from 1909 and the 1960s – could have been written yesterday, were it not for the fact that Lake Como is now a European fixture for the Hollywood A-list, and Pompeii a magnet for the international flip-flop brigade.
To Caninius Rufus (a former school friend and neighbour):
I wonder how our darling Comum is looking, and your lovely house outside the town, with its colonnade where it is always springtime, and the shady plane trees, the stream with its sparkling greenish water flowing into the lake below, and the drive over the smooth firm turf. Your baths which are full of sunshine all day, the dining rooms large and small, the bedrooms for night or the day’s siesta – are you there and enjoying them all in turn, or are you as usual for ever being called away to look after your affairs? If you are there, you are a lucky man to be so happy; if not, you do no better than the rest of us.
But isn’t it really time you handed over those tiresome petty duties to someone else and shut yourself up with your books in the peace and comfort of your retreat? This is what should be both business and pleasure, work and recreation, and should occupy your thoughts awake and asleep! Create something, perfect it to be yours for all time; for everything else you possess will fall to one or another master after you are dead, but this will never cease to be yours once it has come into being. I know the spirit and ability I am addressing, but you must try now to have the high opinion of yourself which the world will come to share if you do.
The following,