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Filling Days and Finding Relaxation

PLINY THE YOUNGER

Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (AD 61–ca. 112), better known as Pliny the Younger, was a magistrate of ancient Rome. Pliny is known today because many of his letters survived and provide invaluable insights into the ancient world of Rome. Written more than two thousand years ago, Pliny’s reflections still illustrate how easy it is for man to waste away his leisure time. In this selection Pliny comments on what he considers profitable exercises of free time and how much he looks forward to them once he has finished his work.

It is astonishing how good an account can be given, or seem to be given, of each separate day spent in Rome, yet that this is not the case with regard to a number of days in a row. If you were to ask any one, “What have you been doing today?” he would reply, “I have attended at the ceremony of a youth’s coming of age. I have helped to celebrate a betrothal or a wedding. One has invited me to the signing of his will, another to attend a trial on his behalf, another to a consultation.” These things seem indispensable at the time when they are done, but when you come to reflect that you have been doing them day after day, they strike you as mere frivolities; and much more is this the case when one has retired into the country.

For, then, the recollection steals over you, “How many days have I wasted, and in what dreary pursuits!” This is what happens to me as soon as I am in my house at Laurentum, and am reading or writing, or even merely looking after my bodily health, that stay on which the mind reposes. I hear nothing, I say nothing, which one need be ashamed of hearing or saying. No one about me gossips ill-naturedly of any one else, and I for my part censure no one, except myself, however, when my writings are not up to the mark. I am troubled by no hopes and no fears, disquieted by no rumours: I converse with myself only and with my books. What a true and genuine life, what a sweet and honest repose, one might almost say, more attractive than occupation of any kind!

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Are you studying? Or fishing? Or hunting? Or uniting all these pursuits? They can all be united at my place. The lake abounds in fish, the woods which surround the lake in game, and that most profound retreat in incentives to study. However, whether you are combining them all, or engaged in any one of them, I am distressed that these pursuits are not permitted me, which I yearn for as sick people yearn for wine, baths, and spring water. Shall I never be able to break through, if unable to loosen them, these bonds which so closely confine me? Never, I imagine. For fresh business is always growing on to the old, and yet the old is not completed. So numerous are the coils, so numerous the links, so to speak, by which the chain of my occupations is daily extended.