Moral Letters to Lucilius

”Yet it is necessary to repel the heat of the summer sun by a thicker shade.” What then? Did not antiquity give many places which, hollowed out either by the injury of time or by any other chance, receded into a cave? What then? Did not any people weave a wicker frame with their hand and plaster it with cheap mud, then cover the top with straw and other wild plants, and while the rains glided down the slopes, pass the winter secure? What then? Do not the Syrtic nations lie hidden in dug-out pits, and those for whom, on account of the excessive heat of the sun, no covering is solid enough to repel the heat except the dry earth itself?

​Nature was not so hostile that, while she gave an easy course of life to all other animals, man alone could not live without so many arts. None of these things was commanded to us by her, none is to be sought with trouble so that life can be prolonged. We were born to things prepared; we have made everything difficult for ourselves through disgust with easy things. Roofs and coverings and the warming of bodies and food, and what have now become a huge business, were ready at hand, and free of cost, and procurable with light labor. For the measure of all things was according to necessity; we have made those things costly, we have made them objects of wonder, and things to be sought with great and many arts.

​Nature is sufficient for that which she demands. From nature luxury has departed, which daily incites itself and has grown through so many ages and assists vices with ingenuity. First it began to desire superfluous things, then things contrary to nature, and most recently it has enslaved the mind to the body and ordered it to serve the body’s lust. All those arts by which the city is either busied or makes a din carry on the business of the body, to which once all things were furnished as to a servant, but are now prepared as for a master. Therefore, hence are the workshops of weavers, hence of craftsmen, hence the odors of those who cook, hence the soft manners of those who teach effeminate movements of the body and soft and broken songs. For that natural measure has receded, which bounded desires by necessary aid; now it is a sign of rusticity and misery to wish only for as much as is enough.

​It is incredible, my Lucilius, how easily the sweetness of speech leads even great men away from the truth. Behold Posidonius, in my opinion one of those who have contributed most to philosophy, while he wishes to describe first how some threads are twisted, others drawn from a soft and solid mass, then how the loom stretches the straight warp with suspended weights, how the inserted woof, which softens the hardness of the warp compressing it on both sides, is forced to come together and be joined by the batten. He said that the art of weaving also was invented by wise men, forgetting that later this more subtle kind was found, in which “The web is bound to the beam, the reed separates the warp, the woof is inserted in the middle by sharp shuttles, which the teeth of the notched reed beat with a broad comb.” What if it had happened to him to approach these looms of our time, by which clothing that will conceal nothing is made, in which I do not say there is no help for the body, but none for decency?

​He passes then to the farmers, and no less eloquently describes the soil ploughed by the plough and ploughed again, so that the loosened earth may open more easily to the roots, then the scattered seeds and the weeds gathered by hand, lest anything fortuitous and wild should grow up to kill the crop. This work too he says is of wise men, as if even now husbandmen do not find very many new things by which fertility is increased.

​Then he is not content with these arts, but sends the wise man down into the mill. For he tells how, having imitated the nature of things, he began to make bread. “The grains,” he says, “received into the mouth, the hardness of the teeth meeting together breaks, and whatever falls out is brought back to the same teeth by the tongue; then indeed it is mixed, so that it may pass more easily through the slippery throat. When it has arrived in the stomach, it is digested by its equal heat, and only then is it added to the body.”