travails (two divorces, the untimely death of his daughter Tullia), almost enough to forgive his pomposity. Virginia Woolf once noted that ‘there is a bareness about an age that has neither letter-writers nor biographers’, and it is Cicero who proves the point first. There is no doubt that Cicero knew the value of his correspondence: it was carefully edited before being copied, with an aim to present a man in firm control of grand public events; Tiro, his secretary, played at least some role in this. The worth of his letters to subsequent centuries has changed over time, but as a late-Victorian translator of Cicero’s writing claims in an introduction to his letters, ‘In every one of them he will doubtless rouse different feelings in different minds. But though he will still, as he did in his lifetime, excite vehement disapproval as well as strong admiration, he will never, I think, appear to anyone dull or uninteresting.’
In 2011, the Princeton classics professor Denis Feeney noted that while Cicero has always been popular, the last decade and a half has seen an even greater scholarly interest in his letters, ‘as if our own scurrying e-communications have created a nostalgia for a time when busy people could write pages of well-turned prose as part of their regular intercourse’.*
Two examples provide vivid snapshots of his times and a glimpse of his mischievous style (Cicero claimed he was no more able to keep a witticism in his mouth than a hot coal). The first, to his friend M. Marius at Cumae, a city near Naples, was written in 55 BC from Rome. His friend had missed the opening of the new theatre named after the leader Pompey, and with it a nice display of animal-baiting and other revelry.
If some bodily pain or weakness of health has prevented your coming to the games, I put it down to fortune rather than your own wisdom: but if you have made up your mind that these things which the rest of the world admires are only worthy of contempt, and, though your health would have allowed of it, you yet were unwilling to come, then I rejoice at both facts – that you were free from bodily pain, and that you had the sound sense to disdain what others causelessly admire.
. . . On the whole, if you care to know, the games were most splendid, but not to your taste. I judge from my own . . . For what is the pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the ‘Clytemnestra’, or three thousand bowls in the ‘Trojan Horse’, or gaycoloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some battle? These things roused the admiration of the vulgar; to you they would have brought no delight . . . Why, again, should I suppose you to care about missing the athletes, since you disdained the gladiators? in which even Pompey himself confesses that he lost his trouble and his pains. There remain the two wild-beast hunts, lasting five days, magnificent – nobody denies it – and yet, what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when either a weak man is torn by an extremely powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting spear? . . . The last day was that of the elephants, on which there was a great deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it, and a kind of belief created that that animal has something in common with mankind.
At the same theatre, just over a decade later, in 44 BC, the murder of Julius Caesar would take place by its entrance. But shortly before that, Caesar came to dinner at Cicero’s house in the Bay of Naples, and Cicero wrote of the experience to Atticus in Rome in much the same way we might refer to overpowering visitors today.
Well, I have no reason after all to repent my formidable guest! For he made himself exceedingly pleasant . . . He stayed with Philippus on the third day of the Saturnalia till one o’clock, without admitting anyone. He was engaged on his accounts, I think, with Balbus. Then he took a walk on the beach. After two he went to the bath . . . He was anointed: took his place at the table. He was under a course of emetics, 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
