Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (c. 55 ce)
Trivial ideas sound better in Latin. It’s one thing that keeps the language alive so many centuries after the last gladiator bit the dust. Latin is not great for discussing computer problems, rocket science or dry-cleaning. But when it comes to lofty sentiments such as ‘do your best’ or ‘seek the truth’, there is nothing better. It is one thing to say ‘overcome adversity’ and another to pronounce per ardua ad astra. Latin clichés never sound like clichés. They sound like part of a coat of arms. My favourite Latin dictum, vouchsafed to me by an elderly nun, is omni quique proprius stercus bene olet. It means ‘to each person, their own shit smells best.’ I have always tried to live up to that. Latin is not all sunshine and light, however. It is responsible for both the ego and the CV, the status quo and the post-mortem. It also gave us alphabet soup: p.s., i.e., n.b., a.m., p.m., RIP, QED, etc.
The real thing that keeps Latin alive is its extraordinary literature. Its poetry and prose have been one of the places in my life where I have found shelter.
By the age of sixteen, most of my friends were creating the relationships that, in turn, would create their world. Some of the most important were with places. These included sporting grounds, music venues, record shops, burger joints and pubs which, in those days, were more inclined to turn a blind eye to the question of age. The memory of these locations can still allow my contemporaries to let slip the preoccupations of middle age, a bit like stepping out of a heavy coat. Love needs a someone. But it also needs a somewhere.
One of my somewheres was Tyrell’s Bookshop on the Pacific Highway at Crows Nest in Sydney, just up the road from the Chinese Lantern, where you could get all you could eat for five dollars with a choice of rice or chips to go with the sweet-and-sour. If I stayed on the bus that took me home from school for an extra ten minutes, I could sneak a visit to Tyrell’s and vanish from the world for a short time, becoming invisible among the tight shelves and piles of books, magazines and general clutter. It was a safe place for me in an otherwise confusing world.
I still have books I bought in those years. Looking at them now, I realise that I must have been an insufferable nerd because many of them are Latin texts. I loved them and the immunity they gave me from reality.
These little books are still full of notes and annotations which, along with that obsessive sticky tape, allow me to meet my sixteen-year-old self all over again, an anxious kid looking both for ways to matter and places to hide. I loved Latin because I thought it was such a compact language, perfect for superior beings such as myself who liked to pass judgement with a terse phrase that still allowed them to keep arm’s length from whatever it was they were judging. Latin can create the illusion you can control the world, nail it down with a few words, and I needed that illusion.
One of the books I took home from Tyrell’s for the princely sum of a dollar was Latin Elegy, Lyric and Epigram (1970) edited by three teachers, Dale, Thompson and Craddock, each of whom seemed to me to have been alive when Ovid was sent into exile on the Black Sea. But in such a musty tome I found this line:
Omnia mors poscit. Lex est, non poena, perire.
Death owns everything. It’s the law, not a punishment, to perish.
The author was Seneca the younger (4 bce to 65 ce), so called to distinguish him from his father, Seneca the elder. Seneca’s only known child, a boy, didn’t live long. This was sad, but it did solve the problem of finding a name for him other than Seneca the Yet Younger. There was something in those words of Seneca that braced my soul’s palate, a bit like a first taste of mouldy cheese. I loved the affectation of bleakness. It was certainly easier than dealing with people. I was a cheerless youth and Seneca was a handy accessory:
Omnia tempus edax despascitur.
Time is the omnivore that eats everything.
I was wrong both about myself and about Seneca.
Seneca, a philosopher and dramatist, is one of those people remembered as much for his death as for his life. His former pupil, the emperor Nero, ordered him to commit suicide when he was associated with a plot to kill him. Seneca may not have been the first teacher who wanted to kill a student but in this case he was probably innocent. The strange thing is that, after a lifetime of fragile health, Seneca proved almost impossible to kill. He survived several attempts, including wrist-slashing, leg-slashing and poison, before he was suffocated in steam. He would have given the monk Rasputin a run for his money and Seneca had no shortage of that, having lined his pockets with the proceeds of living at close quarters to power. Despite his philosophical protestations about the transient nature of worldly existence, he was happy to make a buck out of it while it lasted.
It would be better to remember Seneca for a work of witty prose called On the Shortness of Life. Appropriately for its title, it is brief. It was written in the same decade and the same place as another succinct work, the Gospel According to St Mark. The two pieces bear comparison, not least because both were written partly to deal with the impact of a destructive political leader, namely Nero. Nero only became emperor through the connivance of his mother, Agrippina, the sister of Caligula. He was one of those whose personal insecurity led to violence. Both Seneca and the Markan community deal with the inevitability of suffering and the place of fear in coping with it. Mark asks people to hold on and endure. Seneca asks them to let go because it will all soon be over. You’d expect it to be the other way around. Seneca and Mark confront the depravity of a ravenous ego with works of extraordinary self-possession.
On the Shortness of Life was written over a century before Marcus Aurelius’s famous meditations. It is a bijou from a misunderstood philosophical movement known as Stoicism, a brand for which Marcus Aurelius is the usual poster boy. These days, a person is described as ‘stoic’ when they play a game of football with a broken arm. A better word for this would be ‘stupid’. Stoicism is not about the denial of real pain, real anxiety, real grief or, indeed, anything real. It is about using the mind not to change reality but to deal with it by placing it in a broader context. Naturally, this has the effect of changing reality, because we are part of that reality and if we change ourselves, we change the world, at least in a small way.
Seneca could well have written a book called On the Shortness of Breath. He spent a lifetime battling against his uncooperative lungs: he had severe asthma and bronchitis. Coughing and wheezing became his calling cards. He spent a good part of his adult life a few heartbeats from power and one short breath from oblivion. He existed on a knife edge. His philosophy and drama both reflect this.
He grew up in what is now called Spain, developing a passion for rhetoric and the well-honed phrase under the influence of his father. He spent years in Egypt, trying to find a better climate for his lungs. He was later exiled by the emperor Claudius to the island of Corsica on the trumped-up charge of adultery. It is hard to believe the lean and ascetical Seneca having the wind to get up to any such mischief. But Claudius’s wife needed him out of the way.
Nero’s mother brought him back when she wanted her son educated. Seneca may have been an excellent teacher but this doesn’t mean that Nero learnt anything from him, certainly as far as morality is concerned. Seneca was trying to extricate himself from the emperor’s circles when he wrote On the Shortness of Life.
The book argues that we are not given a short life but that we ‘make it short’ through all the unnecessary things we do to fritter away our time. He notes that people who are careful with their money and property are happy just to give their time away. He sees this as an obvious contradiction. ‘You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you.’ Then he challenges us:
Learning how to live takes a whole life and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die…You must not think a person has lived long because they have grey hair and wrinkles: they have not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a person had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as they left the harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of the opposing winds? They did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.
Seneca says ‘the preoccupied find life very short’ and is impatient with people who put things off and ‘spend their lives in organising their lives’. The reason for this is ‘the whole future lies in uncertainty: get living now.’ He distinguishes between a life of leisure, which is great, and idle preoccupation, which is awful. If a person goes to their country house and thinks about the arrangement of their furniture or something like that, then they are prisoners of their own pettiness. ‘Do you call people leisured who divide their time between the comb and the mirror?…It would be tedious to mention those who have spent all their lives playing draughts or balls or cooking themselves in the sun.’ The answer is simple:
Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs…We are excluded from no age; we have access to them all…None of these will force you to die, but all will teach you how to die. None of them will exhaust your years, but each will contribute their years to yours.
In other words, if you read On the Shortness of Life, your span of years is suddenly around two thousand.