Dialogues and Letters (4 page)

3               Of all the wounds which have ever pierced your body this last one is, I admit, the worst. It has not simply broken the skin but cut into your breast and vital parts. But just as recruits, even when superficially wounded, cry aloud and dread being handled by doctors more than the sword, while veterans, even if severely wounded, patiently and without a groan allow their wounds to be cleaned as though their bodies did not belong to them; so you must now offer yourself bravely for treatment. Come, put away wailings and lamentations and all the other usual noisy manifestations of feminine grief. For all your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched. Do I seem to have dealt boldly with you? I have kept away not one of your misfortunes from you, but piled them all up in front of you.

4               I have done this courageously for I decided to conquer your grief, not to cheat it. But I shall do this, I think, first of all if I show that I am suffering nothing for which I could be called wretched, let alone make my relations wretched; then if I turn to you and show that your fortune, which is wholly dependent on mine, is also not painful.

 First I shall deal with the fact, which your love is longing to hear, that I am suffering no affliction. I shall make it clear, if I
can, that those very circumstances which you think are crushing me can be borne; but if you cannot believe that, at least I shall be more pleased with myself for being happy in conditions which normally make men wretched. There is no need to believe others about me: I am telling you firmly that I am not wretched, so that you won't be agitated by uncertainty. To reassure you further, I shall add that I cannot even be made wretched.

5               We are born under circumstances that would be favourable if we did not abandon them. It was nature's intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself. So what? Am I calling myself a sage? Certainly not. For if I could claim that, not only would I be denying that I was wretched but I would be asserting that I was the most fortunate of all men and coming close to god. As it is, doing what is sufficient to alleviate all wretchedness, I have surrendered myself to wise men, and as I am not yet strong enough to help myself I have gone over to another camp – I mean those who can easily protect themselves and their followers. They have ordered me to take a firm stand, like a sentry on guard, and to foresee all the attacks and all the onslaughts of Fortune long before they hit me. She falls heavily on those to whom she is unexpected; the man who is always expecting her easily withstands her. For an enemy's arrival too scatters those whom it catches off guard; but those who have prepared in advance for the coming conflict, being properly drawn up and equipped, easily withstand the first onslaught, which is the most violent. Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place whence she could claim them back without bothering me. I kept a wide gap between them and me, with the result that she has taken
them away, not torn them away. No man has been shattered by the blows of Fortune unless he was first deceived by her favours. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own for ever, who wanted to be admired on account of them, are laid low and grieve when the false and transient pleasures desert their vain and childish minds, ignorant of every stable pleasure. But the man who is not puffed up in good times does not collapse either when they change. His fortitude is already tested and he maintains a mind unconquered in the face of either condition: for in the midst of prosperity he has tried his own strength against adversity. So I have never believed that there was any genuine good in the things which everyone prays for; what is more, I have found them empty and daubed with showy and deceptive colours, with nothing inside to match their appearance. And now in these so-called evils I find nothing so terrible and harsh as the general opinion threatened. Certainly the word ‘exile' itself now enters the ears more harshly through a sort of conviction and popular belief, and strikes the listener as something gloomy and detestable. For that is the people's verdict, but wise men on the whole reject the people's decrees.

6               So, putting aside this judgement of the majority who are carried away by the surface appearance of things, whatever the grounds for believing in it, let us examine the reality of exile. Clearly a change of place. I must not seem to restrict its force and remove its worst feature, so I agree that this change of place brings with it the disadvantages of poverty, disgrace and contempt. I shall deal with these later; meanwhile I wish first to examine what distress the change of place itself involves.

‘It is unbearable to be deprived of your country.' Come now, look at this mass of people whom the buildings of huge Rome can scarcely hold: most of that crowd are deprived of their country. They have flocked together from their towns and colonies, in fact from the whole world, some brought by ambition, some by the obligation of public office, some by the duties of an envoy, some by self-indulgence seeking a place
conveniently rich in vice, some by a love of liberal studies, some by the public shows; some have been attracted by friendship, some by their own energy which has found a wide field for displaying its qualities; some have come to sell their beauty, others their eloquence. Absolutely every type of person has hastened into the city which offers high rewards for both virtues and vices. Take a roll-call of all of them and ask each where he comes from: you will see that most of them have left their own homes and come to a very great and beautiful city, but not their own. Then move away from this city, which in a way can be said to belong to all, and go around all the others: in every one a large proportion of the population is immigrant. Pass on from those whose lovely and convenient position attracts large numbers, and review deserted places and rocky islands,
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Sciathus and Seriphus, Gyara and Cossura: you will find no place of exile where somebody does not linger because he wants to. What could be found so bare and with such a steep drop on every side as this rock? What more barren regarding its resources? What more savage regarding its people? What more rugged regarding its geography? What more intemperate regarding its climate? Yet more foreigners than natives live here. Thus, so far is change of locality itself from being a hardship that even this place has enticed some people from their homeland. I've come across people who say that there is a sort of inborn restlessness in the human spirit and an urge to change one's abode; for man is endowed with a mind which is changeable and unsettled: nowhere at rest, it darts about and directs its thoughts to all places known and unknown, a wanderer which cannot endure repose and delights chiefly in novelty. This will not surprise you if you consider its original source. It was not made from heavy, earthly material, but came down from that heavenly spirit: but heavenly things are by nature always in motion, fleeing and driven on extremely fast. Look at the planets which light up the world: not one is at rest. The sun glides constantly, moving on from place to place, and although it revolves with the universe its motion is nevertheless opposite to
that of the firmament itself: it races through all the signs of the zodiac and never stops; its motion is everlasting as it journeys from one point to another. All the planets forever move round and pass by: as the constraining law of nature has ordained they are borne from point to point. When through fixed periods of years they have completed their courses they will start again upon their former circuits. How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.

7               Well, now, turn your attention from heavenly to human matters and you will see that whole nations and peoples have changed their abode. What are Greek cities doing in the midst of barbarian territories? Why do we hear the Macedonian language among Indians and Persians? Scythia and all that wide region of fierce and untamed tribes reveal Achaean cities established on the shores of the Pontus. People were not put off from migrating there by the endlessly severe winter or the savage character of the natives which matched their climate. There is a crowd of Athenians in Asia; Miletus has sent out all over the place enough people to colonize seventy-five cities; the whole of the Italian coast which is washed by the lower sea was once Greater Greece. Asia claims the Etruscans as her own; Tyrians live in Africa, Phoenicians in Spain; Greeks penetrated into Gaul and Gauls into Greece; the Pyrenees did not block the passage of the Germans – through trackless, through unknown territory has ventured the restlessness of men, and behind them came their wives and children and parents stricken in years. Some of them, driven about in their long wanderings, did not choose their goal deliberately, but through weariness settled at the nearest place; others by force of arms established their right in a foreign country. Some tribes were drowned while they sought unknown regions; others settled where they were stranded by running out of supplies. They did not all have the same reason for abandoning one homeland for
another. Some, escaping the destruction of their cities by enemy attack, were driven to other territory when they lost their own; some were banished by civil strife; others were sent out to relieve the burden of overpopulation; others fled from disease or constant earthquakes or some intolerable deficiencies in their barren soil; others were tempted by the exaggerated report of a fertile shore. Different reasons roused different peoples to leave their homes; but this at least is clear, nothing has stayed where it was born. The human race is always on the move: in so large a world there is every day some change – new cities are founded, and new names of nations are born as former ones disappear or are absorbed into a stronger one. But what else are all these national migrations than banishments of a people? Why should I drag you through the whole cycle? Why bother to mention Antenor
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who founded Patavium, and Evander who settled the Arcadian kingdom on the banks of the Tiber? What about Diomedes and the others, both conquerors and conquered, who were scattered over alien lands by the Trojan War? Why, the Roman empire itself looks back to an exile as its founder, a man who was driven out when his homeland was captured and, taking a few survivors, was forced by fear of the victor to make a long journey which brought him to Italy. What a number of colonies this people in turn has sent out to every province! – wherever the Romans have conquered they dwell. People volunteered for this kind of emigration, and even old men leaving their altars followed the settlers overseas. The point does not need any more illustration, but I will just add one which hits you in the eye: this island itself has often changed its inhabitants. To leave aside earlier events which are obscured by antiquity, the Greeks who now live in Massilia after leaving Phocis first settled in this island. It is not clear what drove them from it, whether the harsh climate, or being in sight of the superior power of Italy, or the lack of harbours. For clearly the reason was not the savagery of the inhabitants, since they settled among what were then the fiercest and most uncivilized peoples in Gaul. Subsequently the Ligurians crossed over to the island,
and the Spaniards too, as is clear from the similarity of their customs: for the Corsicans wear the same kind of head-covering and shoes as the Cantabrians, and some of their words are the same – only some, for their language as a whole, through association with Greeks and Ligurians, has lost its native elements. Next, two colonies of Roman citizens were brought there, one by Marius and one by Sulla: so often has the population of this barren and thorny rock changed! In a word, you will hardly find a single country still inhabited by its original natives: everywhere the people are of mixed and imported stock. One group has followed another: one longed for what another scorned; one was driven out from where he had expelled others. So fate has decreed that nothing maintains the same condition forever.

8               To compensate for the actual change of place and forgetting about the other inconveniences attached to exile, Varro,
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most learned of Romans, considers we have this sufficient remedy, that wherever we come we have the same order of nature to deal with. Marcus Brutus
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thinks this is enough, that exiles can carry with them their own virtues. Even if anyone thinks that these points taken separately are insufficient to console the exile, he will admit that in combination they carry great weight. For how little have we lost, when the two finest things of all will accompany us wherever we go, universal nature and our individual virtue. Believe me, this was the intention of whoever formed the universe, whether all-powerful god, or incorporeal reason creating mighty works, or divine spirit penetrating all things from greatest to smallest with even pressure, or fate and the unchanging sequence of causation – this, I say, was the intention, that only the most worthless of our possessions should come into the power of another. Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, eager and upright, let
us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men. From whatever point on the earth's surface you look up to heaven the same distance lies between the realms of gods and men. Accordingly, provided my eyes are not withdrawn from that spectacle, of which they never tire; provided I may look upon the sun and the moon and gaze at the other planets; provided I may trace their risings and settings, their periods and the causes of their travelling faster or slower; provided I may behold all the stars that shine at night – some fixed, others not travelling far afield but circling within the same area; some suddenly shooting forth, and others dazzling the eye with scattered fire, as if they are falling, or gliding past with a long trail of blazing light; provided I can commune with these and, so far as humans may, associate with the divine, and provided I can keep my mind always directed upwards, striving for a vision of kindred things – what does it matter what ground I stand on?