From the National Maritime Museum

12 July 1690. Samuel Jeake looked over the ocean. A frightening sight sent his heart racing. The outlines of an English ship was forming over the horizon. Samuel knew that just days before the English Navy, faced with impossible odds, had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the French Admiral Tourville in the Battle of Beachy Head. The English had lost 11 ships, the French none. The fleet’s only hope had been retreat.

Jeake stared tentatively at the English ship, and the speed with which it was approaching indicated it was on the run. This could mean only one thing: the French were coming to sack Rye. Others who had seen the same frightful sight, rang the church bells and alerted the occupants of Rye to pack their belongings and flee the town. Chaos ensued. The town only had one exit, and soon people trampled each other clamoring for their escape.

The English ship limped to the beach. The captain, not wanting his ship to fall in French hands, set the ship alight. Onto this day, if the sea is right, the skeleton of the burned ship surfaces on the beaches of Rye, as a ghost resurfacing to tell of a terrible time, when England was at the mercy of its worst foe.

[CONTINUES BELOW]

Battle of Beachy Head 10 July 1690

Other English ships had made it to the river Thames. The streets of London were filled with panic upon the sight of the battered fleet. It seemed clear that the Navy had been beaten, and nothing could stop a French invasion.

John Evelyn

The whole nation now exceedingly alarmed by the French fleet braving our coast even to the very Thames mouth;

wrote diarist John Evelyn. But the French did not fully pursue, a tactical error that would deprive the French of a major long term victory.

This meant that the English were able to mobilize 90 ships by the end of August and break the French control over the channel. But it also meant that the weakened English fleet  could no longer adequately protect its merchant ships on their trade missions while defending its shores.

In the years to come, this would cost the English dearly. English sailors filled their ships with the nations hard earned trade, said goodbye to their families and unprotected by the navy, set sail for exotic destinations, hoping to make their fortune. But they never returned… They were probably captured or destroyed by the French or commercial raiders.

Fear paralyzed the hearts of the seamen the merchants and by 1692 trade missions ground to a halt, sucking the life blood out of the English economy.

The recession deepens

Goods destined for trade now accumulated in the English harbors without ever being sent out, in fear of capture and destruction.

The English people were never one’s to be beaten by the odds, as history proved again and again. Churchill’s words during WWII would have rung as true in 1693 as they did when he gave his speech:

Churchill

[...] we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle [...] .

But of course, there was no mighty British fleet. Instead, despair and hunger turned into an active move of defiance: 0n the 30th of May 1693, the merchants organized themselves to break the impasse in a bold and risky move. 200 merchant ships would band together and undertake a trade mission to Smyrna, Turkey. On board was a years worth of trade that had just been sitting in the harbors: wool, tin, spices and silver, the richest trade mission the world had ever seen. But it also presented a most alluring price to the enemies of the Kingdom.

King William III

King William the 3rd fully understood this was a make or break moment and matched the bold move of the merchants and the sailors with one of his own. He would send almost his entire war fleet comprised of Dutch and English ships to escort the mission, leaving England unprotected. His 102 war ships escorted the trade mission until the port of Brest, where the French historically positioned their fleet. Then it would double back to English shores to provide protection against a potential French invasion.

French spies had uncovered the particulars of the mission, and having decided against an invasion of England in favor of a war against English commerce, they  positioned 93 of their war ships further up at Lagos Bay, at the Southern tip of Portugal.

On June the 27th of 1693 the unsuspecting merchant flotilla, under command of George Rook, sailed into the French trap. Waiting for them, was the French fleet, commanded by their old enemy Admiral Tourville, which once had a chance to destroy the might of the English navy but passed up on it. Tourville smiled. He had been shamed for his blunder 3 years ago, and here was a chance to remake his name.

George Rooke

Hardened by the previous years of misery, George Rook kept a cool head. He ordered the fleet to disperse, making it harder for the organized French army to capture the ships. He was going to take his losses, but not without giving his men a chance to get as many ships through as possible.

He ordered two Dutch ships under his command to bide the fleet time by engaging the French war ships directly. The crew of the Zeeland and the Wapen van Medemblik set course for the French and prayed to their God to be merciful on their souls.

It must have been an odd sight, these two lonely ships approaching the might of a 93 strong French war engine.  Tourville cursed. He had hoped for the greatest of victories: that the merchant fleet would band together and could slowly be ground down by his war machine. Instead, the ships in front of him dispersed in all directions. He ordered pursuit.

Admiral Tourville

The Zeeland and the Wapen van Medemblik collided with his fleet, entering the heart of the warships. They fought valiantly taking overwhelming fire power from every side, but selling their skin dearly. The hulls of the ships were pierced with hundreds of cannon balls. In the inner depths of the ship, men were hacked to pieces by a combination of cannon balls and ricocheting pieces of wood. The floor was lined with sand to soak up all the blood, but became a muddy mess instead. Still, it provided enough disarray amongst the French fleet to slow it down. Tourville had no choice to order part of his fleet to concentrate on the two ships running havoc. The Dutch fought so brave, that he never managed to conquer them, but finally, exhausted and having taken huge losses, the two captains surrendered. Tourville had the captains (Philip Schrijver and Jan van der Poel) brought to his quarters. He congratulated them on their bravery and asked them if they “were men or devils”

Despite this display of death defying bravery and the good judgment of Rooke, the French still captured or destroyed almost 100 merchant vessels.

The news hit England and sent the merchant classes in despair. A wave of bankruptcies ensued. The economy, already on its knees, fell on its face.

A national effort to raise money

King William the 3rd needed a Navy to protect English trade missions and he needed it fast. In its current state, it could not protect the English shores and the trade missions at the same time. The challenge he faced was that the coffers were empty and the economy was so depressed that raising taxes might lead to revolt and further economic malaise. Something else had to be done to raise money.

King William the 3rd was the son of a Dutch father and an English mother. At birth he was destined to be the King of Holland. As the king of Holland, he had learned two things: the power of the Navy, which had been instrumental in the invasion of England which had overthrown his father in law, the English King James II during the Glorious Revolution. But it also gave him a unique insight in the financial revolution that the Dutch had brought the world: the world’s first stock market, created almost a century before  in 1602, where citizens could invest their hard earned money into corporation in exchange for a return on their investment.

Perhaps this Dutch innovation could be a way to mobilize the battered riches of the country?

Working together with Scotsman William Patterson, the creation of  The Bank of England was proposed in 1694. Anyone willing and able to put in 25 Pounds, would get a guaranteed 8% return on his investment. The return was so appealing that both the wealthy and the poor invested their savings in the bank. A look at the book of Investors in the Bank of England reveals the names of the King and Queen, who invested 10,000 pounds, but also the names of historical actors who’s names we recognize from this blog post:  John Evelyn and Samuel Jeake, who upon hearing the news had gathered all his riches, and traveled on horse back for 15 straight hours from Rye to London. Saddle soar, tired and hungry he arrived in London and without resting went straight to his financial agent to discuss the investment. Browsing through the book, we see something even more fascinating: the name of 9 people who were in domestic service who invested every hard earned dime in the bank. This was truly a country wide effort, where everyone who had money poured it into the bank of England.

In just 12 days it raised 1.2 million pounds, and on August the 4th, it made its first loan to the government.

Bank of England Charter sealing 1694

Ship of the line

The national debt provided a virtuous circle of funding: the government borrowed money from the people, which built a navy, which allowed for trade, which  increased the tax revenues that allowed the government to pay its people back with interest.

More than half of the first loan went to building up the navy and this in turn transformed the economy. Each navy ship required over 5 tons of iron nails, 2000 trees, 7000 square yards of canvas and 10 miles of ropes. The navy soon employed 44,000 men, and feeding them reshaped English agriculture. Building the ships made South England into the navy’s building yard, North East Britain into the world’s first industrial iron works (providing the nails) and soon the navy was the engine of English commerce, transforming the countries economy and laying new foundations of the modern world as we know it. In 10 years, the navy was 176 ships strong and soon became the sole rulers of the sea.

But that is a story for another day.

In a world that seems so threatening, full of hatred and war, we might wonder what the most peaceful times were in human existence, and what we can learn from them to stem the violence.

You’d be surprised to learn that the most peaceful period ever recorded in human history is… right now.

Harvard’s Steve Pinker argues that if people had behaved in the 20th Century as they did in the Bible, several billion people would have died in war, not several hundred million. There are more people alive today, meaning that the raw numbers of deaths are higher, but people are fundamentally far less violent and in percentage terms violence has continually decreased significantly since the enlightenment.

The below graphics shows death caused by rival humans amongst the hunter gatherer tribes in pre-history (as per fossil evidence) and the lowest bar shows deaths as a percentage of human population in the 20th century including WWI and WWII:

Source: Steve Pinker, A brief history of violence lecture

Ted Robert Gurr and a team of scholars at the University of Maryland‘s Center for International Development and Conflict Management analyzed all data available on historical conflicts and game to the conclusion that:

the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over 60% [since the mid 1980s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950s

The decline of violence from the 1950s to 2005:

Source: The Human Security Brief

After World War II, a war weary world experienced a growing peace that reached its peak in the late 1950s. Then the Cold War spurred on violence accross the globe. Although only two mighty forces were at odds with each other, the US and the Soviet Union, they ignited wars in various countries. These were called proxy wars. From the Greek civil war to Korea, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, wars were fought by extension, because the two forces could not face each other directly. A nuclear war would have been too devastating.

But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period of peace settled over the world that is unprecedented.

The decline of violence from 2002 – 2006:

Source: The Human Security Brief

As you can see, the trend keeps continuing.

Why do we believe there is so much violence now?

Better access to media

24 hour news has clouded the reality of ever rising peace, instead creating a constant hyperbole. The constant media hype also masks the fact that crime is at is lowest level in history.

Cognitive illusion

In psychology, it is said that the easier it is to remember incidents, the more probable we think its re-occurrence will be. This is why when I traveled the London tubes after the 7 /7 train bombings, I saw virtually no-one on the underground. As the memory faded, and memories of safe transport became more common place, the carriages gradually filled. I saw a documentary here in the US that claimed the British people were indomitable and started to use the Tube right away, but from personal experience I can tell you that this was simply not the case.

For the same reason, when there was a dodged attempt to bring an airplane down this Christmas, President Obama had to step in and promise to raise security. This was as much to counteract the effects of cognitive psychology than to assure people of long lasting improvements in safety standards (in my humble opinion).

Opinion and advocacy markets and political fear mongering

Political actors and fund raisers abuse the news cycle to inspire fear in the hearts of their constituents and recruit them to march under their banner.

It is pretty hard for advocacy group to continue to raise money under the banner: ‘things are getting better all the time’. Instead, marketers know that in order to arouse people from a laissez-faire mentality, a sense of urgency needs to be created: ‘we need to turn this awful tide’.

But none of it resembles a morsel of truth.

Guilt

We live with the heavy historical burden of guilt about parts of our history: war mongering, slavery and abuse or genocide of native people. As integration expands, we feel this tricky past more acutely, as it is used  in part to rightly explain current socio-economic disparities and thus has become a political tool.

The incongruence between the rise of moral standards and human behavior

As our moral standards rise, we judge occurrences of injustice more harshly, as we should. As a result, our current justice system seems to be failing our moral standards daily, as it does, but we forget that in previous times, people expected nothing more of the ‘Kings justice’ than a 10 minute trial followed by a burning on the stake.

With rising moral standards we also emotionally mature. When Jesus Christs commands us to be more ‘like these children’ we find his statement confusing. Children can be cruel, tie firecrackers to cats’ tales or bully others, destroy reputations with gossip and can be petty. Early man however was more like an ‘innocent’ child in his moral awareness, and committed rather similar acts, from throwing cats of bell towers, lowering them in fire for public amusement or indulging in terrible gossip about people that were different from them. Christ more likely referred to the innocence of children in relation to their ability to keep a sense of wonder than that he meant to imply we should admire their moral values.

A sense of anti-Westernism amongst Westerners

The aformentioned incongruence between the rise of moral standards and human behavior in Western societies can cause us to become blasé about our culture. We forget that there is no more affluent or peaceful alternative society on Earth. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continuously strive for improvement.

The human need to excel

Humans are as lazy as they are ambitious. There are two great passions in the human soul: idleness (derived from our instinctual need to preserve energy for the next big hunting and gathering session) and the need to always want more, an eternal ‘the grass is greener on the other side’ attitude that has driven so much of human progress. We are continuously striving for an utopia. Some psychologists associate this with a deep embedded wish for a return to the womb: a place of absolute security and nurture.

As a result, we have a constant attitude that what we have is not enough. This attitude is exacerbated by modern marketing, that gives a constant sense that we don’t have everything we need. This attitude spurs growth and innovation, but can at times lead us to unfairly judge our current circumstances.

Why has peace gone viral?

Preemptive wars and the logic of anarchy

Thomas Schelling gives us a simple example: a burglar enters a house. The occupier catches him in the act. Being good Americans, both have guns. The average human being doesn’t want to kill, but both reason that they have to kill the other before the other kills them, the simple logic of self preservation.

Nations think much along the same lines, because their rulers and citizens are driven by the same instinctual reasoning. The best defense is offense, they argue, and preemptive wars result.

When Theodore Roosevelt argued that the path to peace is to ‘carry a big stick and talk softly’, he might have seemed to be self serving according to some observers, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The policy of deterrence is an evolution of the idea of preemptive war, where a nation keeps an army large enough to avenge all infringements on its territory or citizens. The next evolution was measured response, which means avenging wrong-doings in a measured way (an eye for an eye as opposed to a life for an eye). This reduced the possibility of an endless cycle of retaliatory violence. This evolution was necessary because of the statistical likelihood of smaller armies winning over larger armies, a counter-intuitive concept, but one that is very real and therefore required calculating in. Perfect examples are the Vietnam war, the Guezen in Flanders and the American revolution.

Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this reality in his question: why do underdogs win so often:

Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

The reason behind this is, he argues, because the Goliaths of this world often play by a set of rules unknown to them. If an underdog can understand their rule book and find the loopholes, the underdog can use their logic against them. They often avoid direct confrontation, refuse to offer themselves as a target, instead act as a virus, attacking where least expected, draining the resources of the opponent while remaining illusive themselves. Weighing on the weakness of your opponent, can lead to spectacular results. Strength in numbers is vastly overrated, instead the trick appears to be to not overstretch, not to blindly use scarce resources and not to present an obvious target, causing the enemy to have to thin out their armies not knowing where the next attack will come from. This eventually leads to exhaustion and collapse of the enemy army.

During his Nobel prize acceptance speech, President Obama tried to make a case that the absence of war doesn’t always lead to peace and tried to articulate and justify a difficult balance between the capacity for war in its relationship with the potential for peace:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3uU_mCNcKM[/youtube]

Seeing his speech in terms of what we’ve learned about Goliaths historic impotence at times, we can appreciate the difficult decisions he had to make: wage a war of soldiers vs a war of secret  intelligence (the latter so far being the only thing that has kept us safe from the most devastating terrorist acts while the former only relocated terrorist bases to 6 other countries)? You can read a further opinion in the blog post ‘How the enemy needs war to stay alive’.

Wealth and moral awareness

In wealthy societies, peace is vital for economic growth. On an instinctual level all of us understand this: we are well fed and live relative comfortable lives, and the perceived way to insure this continues is by going on with our business, not fighting another war. This makes peace and justice a valuable commodity and through the psychological powers of projection, we start negatively evaluating every instance of violence and injustice. As a result, we become more sensitive about the use of any type of tribal warfare or racism, which could upset the balance of society and our comfortable lives. Equally, institutions such as the death penalty come under attack, as we empathise with innocent victims in the legal system, the unfair socio-demographic and racial imbalance in the prison system and its corresponding threat to social balance.

This was argued by the political scientist James Payne.

On the other hand, racism can be spurred by the desire to keep economic balance as well, as some seem to identify socio-economic imbalances with historical factors such as slavery, inequality and wars, and instead suspect there is a character flaw in certain races. Equally, fear can lead to intolerance, as the behavior of certain actors can be seen to undermine society and social cohesion.

Non zero sum gain

Robert Wright postulated in the framework of game theory and economic theory a situation in which a participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

As a result, war makes no sense, because it decreases the gains to be had by trade, therefore trade is valued as a bigger win than war. This explains the current peaceful period as aided by economic and technological development.

As Wright put it:

Among the many reasons that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van.

Take it from the horse’s mouth:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcZFIy2mfyE[/youtube]

A sense of community

Humans are endowed with a sense of community. That sense in early human stages did not exceed beyond one’s own immediate family, but grew over time to include the tribe, the village, the nation, one’s own sexes, other species (see the movement for animal rights) and so on. The embrace of empathy amongst humans is ever increasing, much as it does during the stages of individual human development, and empathy reduces the level to which we can dehumanize ‘he who is different from us’, instead we sympathize with their fortunes and pains to an extend that is unprecedented in human history.

This is likely to have happened due to increasing interaction with other humans and the realization of commonly shared conditions and values. Trade, cosmopolitanism, fiction, journalism and a whole heap of other forces have made us more acutely aware of our shared common humanity.

Benjamin Franklin never thought of the slaves as equal until he went to a school for minorities and realized that they could be absorb information as well as white kids. This caused a profound change in his opinion of black people. A similar experience caused a shift in the attitudes of John Quincy Adams and slowly rippled through society.

The decline of authority

In Biblical times authority was far more embedded in society. Speaking out against the King had the legal punishment of death attached to it. Speaking out against your parents did too. With such powers invested in authorities, people were more apt to follow. This was a natural state, as lack of science gave enormous powers to state and religion, the only tools to exercise some control over the random events of life. These two forces, religion and state, competed for power. With the rise of corporations, interest groups, institutions, individual economic independence and the rise of control over our environment through the advancement of science and the resulting technological revolutions, power is much more diluted, and authorities worldwide and in particular in the developed world  find it harder to mobilize public opinion.

We aren’t there yet

None of this means that we should rest on our laurels, but it does indicate that we are moving in a gainful direction. Numbers and statistics are a poor quantifier of evil, as evil is in the deed, not the quantity. But numbers do reflect the effectiveness of the remedies we experiment with.

Nor does this article dare to claim that we are on a path to eradicating war. There have been periods in history of relative calm before, only to melt down in a spectacular explosion of violence.

Instead, as the pendulum inevitably swings, we should be critical of our society, but not throw away the child with the bath water and instead also learn to appreciate the lessons of what went right in our society.

Steve Pinker in his own words

I’ve added some theories to Steve Pinker’s expose, so in the spirit of fairness, here is Steve in his own words:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk[/youtube]

I have a habit of looking up highly rated films on MetaCritic, and then just watching them from highest to lowest rating. It is a great system, because you do get to watch great films from all over the world on an eclectic set of topics. This habit does unnerve Anna (my wife) who likes to know what she will be watching, so she tends to ask me for 5 film titles, does her research and then picks one out. Anna likes to be in the right mood to watch the film that compliments that mood.

Yesterday, the film du jours was Katyn. Having an unruly mind that pre-judges everything it comes in contact with, the title conjured up images of the life of a woman detailing her passage of rites.

I could not have been more wrong…

Katyn – the WWII massacre

In 1939 Poland succumbed to the twin invasions of Germany and Soviet Union, carving up the country between the two behemoths. The film Katyn starts with a scene on a bridge. One side tries to cross it attempting to get away from the German military machine, while the other side crosses it in a hope to escape the Soviet invasion. Panic and confusion arises when both groups realize they are trapped in a steadily closing vise.

Cut to Polish military officers who surrender to the Soviet Union. One of the officers remarks they surrendered to the wrong side, as the Russians never signed the Geneva convention. They are taken to a POW camp.

The film then follows the lives of their relatives, who learn that these 12,000 men were killed in a terrible massacre near the forest of Katyn. In the German occupied lands, this massacre unnerves the occupiers, fearing that this might lead to a violent uprising of the Polish people. They issue documentaries rightly accusing the Russians of callous murder and argue that the Polish people are safer under German occupation. They also express their condolences to the family members, then pressure them viciously  in recording and signing anti-soviet statements, manufacturing hatred for the Russian occupiers on the other side and strengthening their grip on their part of the country.

1945 – Germany surrenders, and the Soviet forces flood over Poland. Recognizing the dangerous situation that has been created by the German public briefing on the massacre of Katyn, they issue propaganda attempting to blame the Germans for a mass murder although it happened in a Russian zone. The propaganda films, of which we see clips in the movie Katyn, are utterly unconvincing. They act only to stir up further hatred for the regime, which the Russians counter by suppressing the population mercilessly and extracting all hope for a successful revolution among the Polish, who still bitterly remember how no-one came to their rescue in ’39. The Polish people feel more and more fatalistic and inclined to cooperate with the occupiers.

The film then explores the lives of the relatives and friends of the murdered soldiers. Those most vocal are rounded up and disappear. Those who remain behind, try to protect themselves against Soviet prosecution, try to blend in, but are slowly hollowed out. The Russians re-ignite their propaganda, create new films and radio documentaries calling the Katyn massacre a German evil, and it inflames those families left behind again. We see their lives unraveling before our lives in self-destructive acts: a sister of one of the murdered soldiers attempts to erect a tombstone for her brother detailing the true events and is rounded up and asked to sign a statement that she saw proof it was a German massacre. Her passions betray her, she cannot submit to this governmental lie, and defies her captors. This act proves to be ultimately self-destructive, and she is locked up in a cell, deep underground, never to be heard of again.

A pragmatic Polish soldier enlists in the Soviet army, recognizing that if you can’t beat them, you must join them. In his capacity as a Soviet major, he attempts to help where he can, in his own way protecting the Polish people by shielding them from Russian aggression and taking on the role of mediator. It is a difficult yet heroic role that leaves him despised by both sides. He desperately attempts to spare others of the fate that the women we mentioned in the last paragraph had to suffer, trying to give relatives a middle road, in which they can move on instead of unleasing the Soviet wrath. But instead he ends up alienated from the Polish people, who see him as a traitor, and in his despair, and the growing conflict in his soul created by serving the perpetrator of this crime, he ends up committing suicide.

The film details many more of these stories, including a General’s wife who seems to be able to accept the futility of rebellion while privately hanging on to her hatred and contempt.

It ends with the protagonist, a wife of a Polish lieutenant, receiving the diary of her husband, detailing his last moments.

Here, the film that had a previously confusing storyline, really becomes great. It shows us the sheer ruthlessness and viciousness of war in its uncensored horror.

We follow the lieutenant on his trip to Katyn, where the 12,000 soldiers disembark, wagon by wagon. For 10 long minutes, we are witness to all the soldiers that we have come to love and respect in the film being slaughtered, one by one. The scene is all the more harrowing because of the mechanical nature of the executions. The soldiers are lulled into a belief that they are going to a cell, stripped of all their valuables, bound, taken into a room where a one sentence trial is read out and then shot through the head. Then their bodies are shipped via a slide to a truck that takes them to a mass grave. The scene shows the Russians getting more and more ‘efficient’ in their slaughter, slowly changing the process in order to deal with the mammoth numbers required in the execution. The trial is skipped, eventually the doomed are simply driven to the grave and shot inside of it.

As you watch this protracted scene, you cannot help but crawl up in your chair in sheer horror. I wondered how these soldiers could execute so many as if they were animals?

It dawned on me that the very armies that we create to protect ourselves are the very danger that we put upon ourselves. These men were selected, trained, desensitized and educated to become sheer killing machines. An environment and reasoning was created for them to no longer see the enemy as human, but even less then animals.

But how can humans be so cruel and inhumane towards each other? That topic we explore in our next blog topic: Are humans good or evil?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUhBB3FgslI[/youtube]

Kings did not remain in their castles long

When watching historical movies about medieval courts, one could easily be forgiven for believing that kings lived lavish lives in their castles, only to be taken on the road to fight the mandatory wars. But this proves to be a popular misconception.

Kings traveled around the country from royal estate to royal estate all year long. This wandering existence has nothing to do with the restlessness of kings, but was in fact the way they managed their kingdom. Kings traveled the country to discuss the affairs of each region with their magnates and to ensure law and order.

So where we have a picture of kings living in opulence, true as that may be, they also lived a grueling existence, constantly experiencing an uncomfortable slog, traveling the old Roman roads or prehistoric tracks of their kingdom.

Always on the road

The further back in time we go, the more uncomfortable the journey’s were. For much of history there were no royal carriages, meaning that the journeys would have to be undertaken on the back of small, stocky horses (horses were more akin to ponies centuries ago than they are to our modern horses), or they would travel in wooden carts (without our suspension technology), or even on foot. Kings lived in a world that was permanently packed up or unpacked.

The truth is that coming home from work, putting your feet up, opening a brew and watching some television while enjoying a snack is more opulence than a medieval king was accustomed to. True, we might not have the same power of the king, but most Western people live lives far more comfortable than that of kings. And on top of that, we don’t have to be worry about losing our heads due to popular demand.

We live a pretty sweet live after all…

Theodore Roosevelt

Why do we look up to great men, why do we read the great books? Ultimately, as the Greek Philosopher Epictetus said, we do this to answer the question: ‘how to live our lives’?

How to live our lives?

Rome 65 AD – 4 miles outside of Rome, in an elaborate, lush estate, Lucius Seneca, 69 years old, notes that he is about as old as his hero, Socrates, when he was forced to drink a cup of poison to ‘atone’ for his ideals. And here, today, Seneca also faces the prospects of his own death because he refuses to abandon his ideals.

Lucius Seneca

Seneca is probably the most famous man at this point, after Nero, the Emperor. Seneca has lived a life of power, glory and immense achievement and had worked himself up to become the second most powerful man in the Roman Empire.

Yet today, he waits, stoically, at his home, for his death to arrive in the form of Nero’s soldiers.

A quick history to put things into context

In these days, Rome stretches from the shores of Britain to today’s Iraq, from the North Sea to the Saharan deserts. Rome has brought prosperity and peace across most of the know world, united under one language, one currency and one law.

Seneca was born in 4AD, in Cordoba, Spain, in a wealthy, influential family. Seneca was sent off to study in history and became a student of Stoicism. He was thought in the market places of Greece, by professors who gave their lessons from a porch, as was the habit of the day.

Seneca came back to Rome, and became a famous writer. He wrote a series of tragedies and was part of the revolutionizing of the Roman literary tradition. Tragedies were rewritten and updated for Roman sensibilities. Shakespeare borrowed a lot from their innovations, although he did not know it. You can see the influence of the Roman writers of Seneca’s time in Shakespeare’s melodramatic endings, murders on stage and even the inclusion of ghosts as main characters. Because of his importance to the revitalization of Roman literature, Seneca won great fame.

This at a time when the political landscape of Rome had experienced great changes: Julius Caesar had recreated the Rome as a dictatorship, and his heir to the throne, Augustus Caesar had decided that the only way to insure Rome’s prosperity and strength was to create a dynasty. Augustus saw to it that all his imperial powers were passed to his son, Tiberius.

It pretty soon became clear that once you give power to a dictator, it is hard to lose it again. The Roman people, at least those in power, were smitten with all the rights and power they had gained without having to be responsible for any of them.

However, Tiberius turned out to be a cruel despot, suspicious and greedy. His heirs to the throne, Caligula and Claudius were truly wicked despots.

Claudius ruled Rome as an evil bureaucrat: jealous, suspicious, lending his ear to informants with their own agenda, the Roman people suffered under the emotional up and downs of their emperor.

It was in this court that Seneca became part of public life, at 45 years of age. He found himself quickly outwitted by the intrigues at court and was forced into exile on Corsica.

Seneca was returned to Rome by Agrippina, wife of Claudius and master intrigant. She had been born with a lust for power and tried to gain her power through influence over Claudius. She managed to have Claudius divorce his wife and marry her. They had a son, Nero, which she wanted to be the new emperor, although that place was reserved for Claudius’ first son, Britannicus.

Seneca felt that Britannicus would be a bad emperor for Rome and aligned himself with Agrippina, in an effort to get Nero placed as the next emperor of Rome.

Here a truly downwards slope starts: It was decided that Britannicus was to be poisoned. But Britannicus, aware of the intrigue at the court was a suspicious man (it isn’t paranoia if they are really out to get you) and had all his food tasted by others. Agrippina devised a clever gambit. She brought Britannicus an apple and cut it in half. She proceeded with eating one half, and Britannicus, satisfied, ate the other. He didn’t kno that Agrippina had laced the half of the knife facing Britannicus with poison. Britannicus died, officially of stomach indigestion.

Claudius was also in Agrippina’s sights, and was served poisoned mushrooms. Claudius struggled for his life, but didn’t appear to be dying. Agrippina quickly gathered her wits, dipped a feather in poison and stuck it in his throat, telling bystanders she was trying to open his airways to help Claudius breath better.

Seneca was aware of all these plots. But after a life of intrigue at the court, he had decided that the goal justified the means: one has to accept the lesser evils to achieve the greater good. Why Seneca believed that aligning himself with power-hungry murderers might somehow benefit the Roman Empire is unclear, but we do know that Seneca had a hunger for power himself, having once tasted its glory and then felt the bitterness of losing it in exile.

Still, Seneca told himself that he had aligned himself with the powers of good, and that somehow this intrigue was necessary to put himself and his allies in a position where they could rule Rome and steer it in the right direction.

Nero was young and inexperienced. He lacked statesmanship, and recognizing this, Seneca wrote the speech to be delivered in the Senate that was to confirm him as the next emperor. Today, this seems to us as no big deal, all great leaders have their speeches written for them, but in that day, all emperors wrote their own speeches. And even today, great leaders still direct the spirit and content of their speeches.

All the betrayal at court, all the murders seemed to pay off . Under the rule of Nero, with Agrippina and Seneca tucking at the cords behind the scenes, a golden age settled over Rome: the informers who had lead a series of anonymous accusations were put behind bars, lowering the emotional temperature and division within Roman public life, courts were again held in public, the economy was put in order, a strong foreign policy improved Rome’s standing in the world and an the empire was administered in a more effective, more transparent manner. For 5 years, Rome thrived and all the dirty deeds had somehow whitewashed the political life of Rome.

But young Nero began to rebel more and more against the influence of his mother. Nero had his own ideas, and felt he had a greater destiny than being an emperor, he felt he was also an artist. He felt constrained by the duties of office. He was frustrated by the power sharing with his mother, that went as far as having to share his portrait with that of his mother on the Roman coins. He decided that he had to break free. And the only template for such a move he knew from his youth, and perhaps the only real option left to him, was to kill his mother. Freud would have a field day with this one.

Nero, after another bitter quarrel with his mother, invited her over to a makeup dinner and at the end of it, offered her a yacht as a present. The yacht was especially designed to collapse when it exited the bay. And so it did, but Agrippina managed to swim away, even escaping the murderous attempts of the sailors who tried to beat her on the head before she could escape. Nero, gripped in fear about this turn of events, sent loyal soldiers to her home to finish the job. When the soldiers arrived, Agrippina put her hands on her stomach and said: “Here, strike my womb, for it is my son that is killing me.” The soldiers ‘obliged’.

With his mother out of the way, Seneca was summoned to write a speech for Nero, to explain the death of Agrippina to the Roman people.

And so Seneca was the speech writer, advisor and spin master to the court of Nero. Seneca took on this task with dread. After all, by doing his job, he became more and more a liability to Nero, being the keeper of all Nero’s guilty secrets.

Seneca, at the age of 66, asked for permission to retire and was granted this but asked to always stay near…

What is good, what is evil?

Sometimes we find with men who have achieved great power and fame, that their mind closes off to the alternative lives they could have lead, instead, coming to justify the course they have taken as the righteous one, one of difficult decisions, agonizing trade-offs that somehow created the virtuous world we live in today. That path was more or less closed off to Seneca, who had placed himself in great peril due to the choices he had made in his life.

We also often see that rich, influential people become to question their legacy in the zenith of their lives, and become champions for social change, immersing themselves in moral lecturing, charitable causes and what more. They abandon the naked strive for power and instead start to use their influence to create a ‘better’ world for all, to somehow come at peace with their legacy.

Perhaps these forces drove Seneca on his dangerous path.

Seneca, a disillusioned old man, having achieved wealth, power and fame, became to pounder his life and wrote his thoughts down in a series of dialogues. He invoked the memories of the young man he once was, full of ideals.

Seneca judged his life as an error in believing in situational justice: that the world is only a place of trade-offs and that sometimes wrong deeds should be carried out for the greater good. Instead, Seneca started to believe in ‘absolute justice’. That some things are wrong in all circumstances.

How Seneca developed his philosophy

He started with God. Does God exist, he asks himself? Yes, is his resounding answer, and he offers the world, the immaculate beauty of the order of nature, the consistency of the universe as proof. To Seneca, how else could this vast world follow its orderly existence, if not guided by the invisible hand of God?

His next question was: is God ‘good’. Again, the answer is a resounding yes.  How could he not be, having created all this beauty and wonder?

And if God is good, than why does evil exist in sickness, loss and injustice? Confronted with this age old question, compounded when one believes that the Gods aren’t fickle, but fundamentally good, Seneca expresses his belief that God has created the universe as a test to mankind. Adversity is God’s lessons, to teach us like a good father about right or wrong. We cannot fully be human nor achieve our potential if we aren’t truly tested to the core.

Borrowed from Socrates’ apology

This idea was borrowed from Socrates’ apology. When Socrates spoke to his accusers who demanded his death sentence. he stated in his address that he did not hate his accusers, that he accepted their actions as being part of a universe that puts him to the test, as a necessary stage in his life.

Socrates went on to explain that all he had ever control over was his own mind. Hate would destroy this power. Socrates argued that if he were to make the mistake of trying to invoke ‘a greater truth’ where his accusers were absolutely wrong and he was absolutely right, he would fall in a mental ‘trap’, because it would ultimately divorce himself from the reality of his own being. All he could be was himself, and the only way to stay in touch with himself was not to judge, but to carry on being who he was, in the face of adversity, in the face of his own death. The true test was not about the nature of the world, about seeing right or wrong, but about remaining firmly who he was, even in the face of the absolute price. This was the test of (the) God(s), Seneca argued.

The philosophical implications

Seneca moved to a philosophy where he is ultimately responsible for his thoughts and actions. He does not blame Nero for his situation, because Seneca states that everything he does, everything he is, everything he thinks belongs only to him, and the situation he finds himself in is presented by God. His reactions are not and never could be governed by the actions of another, no matter how wicked, because he is the only master of his soul, the only person that can give it direction. It would be wrong to blame circumstances for how Seneca has lived his life, because nobody can force him what to think.

Seneca believes that as long as he does not return evil with evil, then he will not be conquered.

He also believed that no person truly suffers evil: evil, adversity, is simply a test, to help us become ourselves, our highest ideal. Without it we would be impotent to achieve our potential. The only evil that we can inflict on ourselves is that of abandoning ourselves. All the rest are milestones on our road.

On to the end

Nero, worried about Seneca’s state of mind and the potential consequences of his writings, sent his soldiers to order Seneca’s suicide. It was a rather protracted affair  that I will not describe here, suffice to say that Seneca eventually, after numerous suicide attempts, drank hemlock, and finally died.

Seneca's last moments

A life of absolute responsibility

A mantra you hear often today is ‘If I don’t do it, somebody else will’ or ‘I am just doing my job.’ According to Seneca, saying this does not only surrender all control over the little difference you can make in this world, it also means surrendering control and responsibility for your own actions. Seneca would argue that losing your job because you acted according to your own convictions is not hardship: it is simply answering with the potential of your full being to ‘God’s test’ (in the terms of Seneca). Not taking full responsibility of your actions, and instead rationalizing ambiguous actions by arguing that it wouldn’t make a difference, because ‘if I don’t do it, somebody else is sure to do it’ is relinquishing the only control you really have: that over your own actions. This, argues Seneca, is the only evil that can truly befall a man.

Why we surrender responsibility as a society

Of course, we live in more practical, more secular times. Idealism has often been replaced by collective goal setting and metrics within corporations and societies. It is ironic that in a time people believe more than ever in the power and existence of the individual, more individuals believe their own small existence has little capacity for making difference. Our highest value is not to change the world, but to be happy, to take care of the small nucleus that is our family – we have, as individuals, somehow given up control over our societies and the forces that drive it, whether it is corporate, religious, political or any other earthly force. Sure we vote, sure we try to do the best job we can, but somehow we are no longer responsible for the overall result, all those little compromises we made, all the judgments we make without adequately informing ourselves first, all the votes we cast without having educating about the issues, none of these contribute to the overall result. Somehow, individuals today live in a world where they believe they can have their cake and eat it too, somehow aligned with the forces of good while others are mysteriously to blame for the current state of the world.

Of course, I express things rather black and white, but upping the contrast on the issues can sometimes reveal the inconsistencies that somehow slip between the cracks.

The only way to be fully human

But Seneca’s prescription for a good life is simply this: to never absolve ourselves of responsibility. It is not wrong to compromise because compromise is an essential tool in creating consensus and direction. Seneca offers two addendums to compromise: once you compromise, you cannot say the situation made you do so. No, you saw the situation, and made a conscious decision to act or not to act, and you own that decision. And you cannot divorce yourself from the result, even if you are only partially responsible for it or had no power over it at this point. You nevertheless remain in relation with your environment, and always responsible for how it is. He beckons us not to see our limited power as a reason to absolve ourselves of responsibility for the overall result, but to see our limited power as a clear call to action, a call to work harder to make a difference.

And Seneca also offers the ideas that there are some absolute wrongs and absolute rights. That if you conspire with murderers to help them to the throne, can you expect less then murder from the throne? To not tell ourselves fairy tales that if a creature is one day today it might be different tomorrow. Instead we should take the long view, and help the right powers to take hold in society over a longer period of time, instead of going for the quick fix and helping the wrong powers achieve position with the wrong actions – as if somehow, once in position, they would magically change…

Seneca in our own time

Of course, when one centers his debate on the nature of God and why God created the universe the way it is you are bound to get in a sticky argument, exactly because anyone can pretty well make up his answer whether God exists or not and what exactly God’s intentions might have been.

But stripped from the more numinous arguments, Seneca’s observations hold one important truth for our time:

If we don’t take responsibility for the world, we cannot blame the world for what it is today. No matter how small, we are all cogs inside a giant machine, and we perpetuate it, no matter how small, through our own actions. We can play the game, but then we should own the problem. Or we can instead choose to stand up for our ideals, and then we have to work tirelessly to become an answer to the problem. But the idea that we are somehow not connected, somehow have no bearing on the end result, that is simply not a true idea.

Theodore Roosevelt and the practical application of Seneca in our time

Roosevelt on campaign

Theo Roosevelt inspired America with a powerful call to action, telling each individual that action, not inaction is what will make America strong. Not to shirk responsibility, but to take more of it, and to lead ‘clean, vigorous, healthy lives’, both spiritually and physically.

In the age of consumerism, we often see our role as simply being a cog in a giant machine, but Roosevelt says we are more than that:

No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone.

[…]

A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. – Theodore Roosevelt

In our next entry we’ll speak about Theodore’s practical solutions for our time, and how he envisioned individuals could take ownership of today’s problems, through living the strenuous life:

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. – Theodore Roosevelt

Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton isn’t remembered all too well in American history, but he was a politician who had a remarkable gift that is oh, so lacking among many politicians, both then and today.

1. The Historical backdrop

In 1787 Hamilton vigorously advocated for what many considered a very monarchical government for the United States. Though regarded as one of his most eloquent speeches, it had little effect upon the deliberations of the convention. He proposed to have an elected President and elected Senators who would serve for life contingent upon “good behavior”, and subject to removal for corruption or abuse; this idea contributed later to the view of Hamilton as a monarchist sympathizer, held by James Madison (secretary of the Convention) and his friends.

James Madison

It was Madison who opposed Hamilton’s view most sagely. He argued that if you give too much power to the provinces, they’d swamp the central government (as had happened before). On the flip side, give to the national government the power to use force on a state, and you could be inviting civil war. So Madison proposed that the most stable balance of power was one where the national government had no mandates to coerce the states or in any way rival them. Both would exist for the protection of the American people.

Madison’s view was triumphant, little states were given equal representation in the upper house, the Senate, and the men of Philadelphia acknowledged in full the local interests of all the regions by giving them the widest representations in the lower house, the House of Representatives. And whatever powers were not stipulated in the Constitution were left to the States.

This sounds like a shattering defeat for Hamilton. When the Convention was over, he lamented that “no man’s ideas are more remote from the plan than my  are known to be.”

2. Hamilton, the noble politician

But here we see a glimpse of what made Alexander Hamilton a great politician. He added, without a grudge: “Is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side and the chance of good to be expected on the other?”

Hamilton did not complain because he had lost, instead went to work writing more than forty brilliantly essays urging the states to ratify the Constitution.

Hamilton, despite the negative light historians have at times represented him in, embodies the best qualities a politician can have in his absence of malice, or in the words of Mencken: “A steady willingness to believe that his opponent is as honorable a man as himself and may be right.”

The signing of the Constitution of the United States

Health Care Reform

The American health care system is entering reform as most systems in the world are facing intense pressure. As a result, it cannot turn to any model as a shining beacon, but will have to get its hands dirty trying to find a solution fit for a 21st Century world, where life spans are longer, birth rate in developing worlds decline and expenditure must be curbed. And that’s just naming the most obvious problems.

So what are the lessons America must learn?

The idea for health care insurance (see latest news on Health Care Reform)  at its conception was a simple one: illness in a population is not the norm, most people are healthy most of the time. But sometimes disaster strikes, we don’t know when and don’t know who it will strike. Economies of scale can deal with this: if everybody pays a fee to an account, that pays out when disaster happens, everyone is covered.

Economies of scale also suggest that the bigger the group you include, the better you can predict risk and therefore the lower a fee you charge everyone. Simply put, take a group of 10 people and it is hard to predict how many of them will face some serious illness in their lifetime. 100 people, predictions work a tiny little better. The more you increase that number, the more predictable the model becomes.

That further brings a challenge to a Free Market model: economic models predict that where perfect competition exists, the consumer will pay bottom prices for the best and most innovative services. But health care doesn’t work in a perfect competition model: it would be too fragmented and wouldn’t be able to benefit from the economies of scale that allow it to actually be effective. As a result, health care insurance must be provided by oligopolies or monopolies (in some European countries there exists a free market solution where many insurers must compete to sell their services to a single buyer: the government. This can easily be called an inverted monopoly: the government has monopoly on demand. A perfect example of this is the Swiss health insurance model. Do read this, it’s a very interesting compromise.)

Most developed countries opted for the welfare state. This model isn’t popular because of socialistic reasons, but because of economies of scale. It is simply cheaper for one insurer to provide health care insurance than 10 insurers, due to the economies of scale.

There is however one massive problem with this model in the developed world. It works great when the majority of your population is young and vital.

Take Japan as an example. Its ‘welfare state’ was so successful that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. So the population was rapidly aging, and to exacerbate the problem, birth rate was falling. In effect, the ratio between old and young got to be the steepest in the world: 21% of its population was over 65, and it is projected that if the current trends prevail, 50% of the population will be pensioners by 2044. These trends have brought the Japanese welfare state to its knees. The problem is so formidable, the population so old on average, that even private insurers cannot present any solutions to Japan’s challenge. Life insurance companies have been fighting for their lives after the stock market crash of 1990, and 3 of its largest insurers failed.

So Japan acts as an omen: in the West, our population is following a similar trend, one where the population noticeably ages. Where the welfare system could be saved by the arrival of a large number of newborns, birth rate in the developed world is less than impressive and immigration isn’t bucking the trend.

As a result, countries in the developed world are looking for a privatized solution to be added to the national insurance model. When there is less money to go around, the money has to work harder. Perhaps private investment companies can help.

Take Chile as an example: brokers invest the pension contributions of Chilean workers in their own stock market. This has wielded impressive results: the annual rate of return on the Personal Retirement Accounts is more than 10%, thanks to an extremely healthy stock market that has risen by a factor of 18 since 1987.

Of course, this model, as all other models has its problems: not everyone in the system has a full-time job and the self-employed don’t have to contribute which leaves a substantial part of the population without coverage. The administrative and fiscal cost of the system are also deemed too high.

It remains however ironic that this type of radical reform did not originate in the heartland of free market economics: America, but instead was executed in Chile.

Reform in America is unavoidable. America’s hospitals vary in great degrees from state-of-the-art to challenged at best, but none can be called cheap (see the World Health Organization Report). For those who need treatment before retirement, the need a private insurance policy. It is estimated that 47 million Americans don’t have one, partly due to the structure of the system: such policies tend to be available only to those in regular, formal employment – any other scheme has a prohibitive price ticket attached to it.

[Cartoon courtesy of Seppo Leinonen. Be sure to check out his other great cartoons!]

The ultimate result is a welfare system that is not comprehensive, marginally redistributive (compared to European systems) but costs a whole heap more. Public health expenditures hover around 7% GDP while private health care is equivalent to 8.5% (in addition!)

In America, over the next 40 years, life expectancy is to rise even more, and the number of the population over the age of 65 will rise from 12% to 21%. However, according to the the 2006 Retirement Confidence Survey , only 60% of American workers say they save for retirement and just 40% has actually calculated how much they should be saving. The average worker plans to retire at the age of 65, but actually retires at 62. All these miscalculations require the tax payer to cough up one way or the other. Currently 36 million retirees receives a total of $21,000 each in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. According to one projection, left alone the cost of Medicare alone will account for 24% of all federal income tax by 2019.

Reform is necessary, and the government hopes to cooperate closely with private insurers. But leaving health care to private insurers is not entirely without risk either, considering the fragmented mosaic of responsibilities that often offers an opt-out for insurers.

Hurricane Katrina forced the myth of the well-oiled American welfare state to collapse for even the most ardent of believers. Those who choose to remain ignorant had no choice but to recognize that the current insurance models no longer cover the risks.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 1.75 million property and casualty claims were made to the sum of an estimated $41 billion. In America, private insurance companies offer protection against wind damage, and the federal government offers protection against flooding. As a result, the assessors sent out by the insurance companies were not sent to fairly assess the damage, but instead to visit properties and find reasons why damage could be due to flooding and not wind. The objective was to limit the amount of claims that would have to be paid out. At the time, insurance companies were portrayed as evil, but this is merely human nature, men are not angels driven by altruism, but driven to thrive and survive. The insurance companies acted in a predictable fashion, and ultimately it was the system that failed, because it allowed for ambiguity, vagueness and shied away from a comprehensive solution, instead leaving in place a fragmented, ‘puzzled’ system.

The same dangers lurk in the modern health care system, as a recent, perhaps slightly alarmist documentary of PBS suggests on health care in America. A fragmented system of insurers, whose company goals are to increase the bottom line year by year (and have done so more than 400% between 2000 and 2007), a system complex enough that it can often avert responsibility at crucial moments but works just well enough on the surface for people to still want to rely on it, while in the background gobbling up so much of America’s GDP and costing employers so much that it actually threatens America’s future in the world…

The challenge for the Obama administration is formidable…

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca, or Seneca the Younger) (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero.

Seneca generally employed a pointed rhetorical style. His writings contain the traditional themes of Stoic philosophy: the universe is governed for the best by a rational providence; contentedness is achieved by a simple, unperturbed life in accordance with nature and the duty to the state; human suffering should be accepted and has a positive effect on the soul; study and learning is important; et cetera. He emphasized practical steps by which the reader might confront life’s problems. In particular, he considered it important to confront the fact of one’s own mortality. The discussion of how to approach death dominates many of his letters.

2. A reprint of the letter of Seneca to Paulinus:

With thanks to Tim Ferris, who brought this letter to my attention once again. If you are short for time, please follow the passages Tim bolded, and you can read the article in 4 minutes or less.

The majority of mortals, Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.

Nor is it merely the common herd and the unthinking crowd that bemoan what is, as men deem it, an universal ill; the same feeling has called forth complaint also from men who were famous…

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.

Why do we complain of Nature? She has shown herself kindly; life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is possessed by greed that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men’s fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn—so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: “The part of life we really live is small.” For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.

Vices beset us and surround us on every side, and they do not permit us to rise anew and lift up our eyes for the discernment of truth, but they keep us down when once they have overwhelmed us and we are chained to lust. Their victims are never allowed to return to their true selves; if ever they chance to find some release, like the waters of the deep sea which continue to heave even after the storm is past, they are tossed about, and no rest from their lusts abides. Think you that I am speaking of the wretches whose evils are admitted? Look at those whose prosperity men flock to behold; they are smothered by their blessings. To how many are riches a burden! From how many do eloquence and the daily straining to display their powers draw forth blood! How many are pale from constant pleasures! To how many does the throng of clients that crowd about them leave no freedom! In short, run through the list of all these men from the lowest to the highest—this man desires an advocate, this one answers the call, that one is on trial, that one defends him, that one gives sentence; no one asserts his claim to himself, everyone is wasted for the sake of another. Ask about the men whose names are known by heart, and you will see that these are the marks that distinguish them: A cultivates B and B cultivates C; no one is his own master. And then certain men show the most senseless indignation—they complain of the insolence of their superiors, because they were too busy to see them when they wished an audience! But can anyone have the hardihood to complain of the pride of another when he himself has no time to attend to himself? After all, no matter who you are, the great man does sometimes look toward you even if his face is insolent, he does sometimes condescend to listen to your words, he permits you to appear at his side; but you never deign to look upon yourself, to give ear to yourself. There is no reason, therefore, to count anyone in debt for such services, seeing that, when you performed them, you had no wish for another’s company, but could not endure your own.

Though all the brilliant intellects of the ages were to concentrate upon this one theme, never could they adequately express their wonder at this dense darkness of the human mind. Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: “I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count. Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!” What, then, is the reason of this? You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!

You will see that the most powerful and highly placed men let drop remarks in which they long for leisure, acclaim it, and prefer it to all their blessings. They desire at times, if it could be with safety, to descend from their high pinnacle; for, though nothing from without should assail or shatter, Fortune of its very self comes crashing down.

The deified Augustus, to whom the gods vouchsafed more than to any other man, did not cease to pray for rest and to seek release from public affairs; all his conversation ever reverted to this subject—his hope of leisure. This was the sweet, even if vain, consolation with which he would gladden his labours—that he would one day live for himself. In a letter addressed to the senate, in which he had promised that his rest would not be devoid of dignity nor inconsistent with his former glory, I find these words: “But these matters can be shown better by deeds than by promises. Nevertheless, since the joyful reality is still far distant, my desire for that time most earnestly prayed for has led me to forestall some of its delight by the pleasure of words.” So desirable a thing did leisure seem that he anticipated it in thought because he could not attain it in reality. He who saw everything depending upon himself alone, who determined the fortune of individuals and of nations, thought most happily of that future day on which he should lay aside his greatness. He had discovered how much sweat those blessings that shone throughout all lands drew forth, how many secret worries they concealed. Forced to pit arms first against his countrymen, then against his colleagues, and lastly against his relatives, he shed blood on land and sea.

Through Macedonia, Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and almost all countries he followed the path of battle, and when his troops were weary of shedding Roman blood, he turned them to foreign wars. While he was pacifying the Alpine regions, and subduing the enemies planted in the midst of a peaceful empire, while he was extending its bounds even beyond the Rhine and the Euphrates and the Danube, in Rome itself the swords of Murena, Caepio, Lepidus, Egnatius, and others were being whetted to slay him. Not yet had he escaped their plots, when his daughter and all the noble youths who were bound to her by adultery as by a sacred oath, oft alarmed his failing years—and there was Paulus, and a second time the need to fear a woman in league with an Antony. When be had cut away these ulcers together with the limbs themselves, others would grow in their place; just as in a body that was overburdened with blood, there was always a rupture somewhere. And so he longed for leisure, in the hope and thought of which he found relief for his labours. This was the prayer of one who was able to answer the prayers of mankind.

Marcus Cicero, long flung among men like Catiline and Clodius and Pompey and Crassus, some open enemies, others doubtful friends, as he is tossed to and fro along with the state and seeks to keep it from destruction, to be at last swept away, unable as he was to be restful in prosperity or patient in adversity—how many times does he curse that very consulship of his, which he had lauded without end, though not without reason! How tearful the words he uses in a letter written to Atticus, when Pompey the elder had been conquered, and the son was still trying to restore his shattered arms in Spain! “Do you ask,” he said, “what I am doing here? I am lingering in my Tusculan villa half a prisoner.” He then proceeds to other statements, in which he bewails his former life and complains of the present and despairs of the future. Cicero said that he was “half a prisoner.” But, in very truth, never will the wise man resort to so lowly a term, never will he be half a prisoner—he who always possesses an undiminished and stable liberty, being free and his own master and towering over all others. For what can possibly be above him who is above Fortune?

When Livius Drusus, a bold and energetic man, had with the support of a huge crowd drawn from all Italy proposed new laws and the evil measures of the Gracchi, seeing no way out for his policy, which he could neither carry through nor abandon when once started on, he is said to have complained bitterly against the life of unrest he had had from the cradle, and to have exclaimed that he was the only person who had never had a holiday even as a boy. For, while he was still a ward and wearing the dress of a boy, he had had the courage to commend to the favour of a jury those who were accused, and to make his influence felt in the law-courts, so powerfully, indeed, that it is very well known that in certain trials he forced a favourable verdict. To what lengths was not such premature ambition destined to go? One might have known that such precocious hardihood would result in great personal and public misfortune. And so it was too late for him to complain that he had never had a holiday when from boyhood he had been a trouble-maker and a nuisance in the forum. It is a question whether he died by his own hand; for he fell from a sudden wound received in his groin, some doubting whether his death was voluntary, no one, whether it was timely.

It would be superfluous to mention more who, though others deemed them the happiest of men, have expressed their loathing for every act of their years, and with their own lips have given true testimony against themselves; but by these complaints they changed neither themselves nor others. For when they have vented their feelings in words, they fall back into their usual round. Heaven knows! such lives as yours, though they should pass the limit of a thousand years, will shrink into the merest span; your vices will swallow up any amount of time. The space you have, which reason can prolong, although it naturally hurries away, of necessity escapes from you quickly; for you do not seize it, you neither hold it back, nor impose delay upon the swiftest thing in the world, but you allow it to slip away as if it were something superfluous and that could be replaced.

But among the worst I count also those who have time for nothing but wine and lust; for none have more shameful engrossments. The others, even if they are possessed by the empty dream of glory, nevertheless go astray in a seemly manner; though you should cite to me the men who are avaricious, the men who are wrathful, whether busied with unjust hatreds or with unjust wars, these all sin in more manly fashion. But those who are plunged into the pleasures of the belly and into lust bear a stain that is dishonourable. Search into the hours of all these people, see how much time they give to accounts, how much to laying snares, how much to fearing them, how much to paying court, how much to being courted, how much is taken up in giving or receiving bail, how much by banquets—for even these have now become a matter of business—, and you will see how their interests, whether you call them evil or good, do not allow them time to breathe.

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. Of the other arts there are many teachers everywhere; some of them we have seen that mere boys have mastered so thoroughly that they could even play the master. It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and—what will perhaps make you wonder more—it takes the whole of life to learn how to die. Many very great men, having laid aside all their encumbrances, having renounced riches, business, and pleasures, have made it their one aim up to the very end of life to know how to live; yet the greater number of them have departed from life confessing that they did not yet know—still less do those others know. Believe me, it takes a great man and one who has risen far above human weaknesses not to allow any of his time to be filched from him, and it follows that the life of such a man is very long because he has devoted wholly to himself whatever time he has had. None of it lay neglected and idle; none of it was under the control of another, for, guarding it most grudgingly, he found nothing that was worthy to be taken in exchange for his time. And so that man had time enough, but those who have been robbed of much of their life by the public, have necessarily had too little of it.

And there is no reason for you to suppose that these people are not sometimes aware of their loss. Indeed, you will hear many of those who are burdened by great prosperity cry out at times in the midst of their throngs of clients, or their pleadings in court, or their other glorious miseries: “I have no chance to live.” Of course you have no chance! All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self. Of how many days has that defendant robbed you? Of how many that candidate? Of how many that old woman wearied with burying her heirs? Of how many that man who is shamming sickness for the purpose of exciting the greed of the legacy-hunters? Of how many that very powerful friend who has you and your like on the list, not of his friends, but of his retinue? Check off, I say, and review the days of your life; you will see that very few, and those the refuse. have been left for you. That man who had prayed for the fasces, when he attains them, desires to lay them aside and says over and over: “When will this year be over!” That man gives games, and, after setting great value on gaining the chance to give them, now says: “When shall I be rid of them?” That advocate is lionized throughout the whole forum, and fills all the place with a great crowd that stretches farther than he can be heard, yet he says: “When will vacation time come?” Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow. For what new pleasure is there that any hour can now bring? They are all known, all have been enjoyed to the full. Mistress Fortune may deal out the rest as she likes; his life has already found safety. Something may be added to it, but nothing taken from it, and he will take any addition as the man who is satisfied and filled takes the food which he does not desire and yet can hold. And so there is no reason for you to think that any man has lived long because he has grey hairs or wrinkles; he has not lived long—he has existed long. For what if you should think that that man had had a long voyage who had been caught by a fierce storm as soon as he left harbour, and, swept hither and thither by a succession of winds that raged from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same course? Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about.

I am often filled with wonder when I see some men demanding the time of others and those from whom they ask it most indulgent. Both of them fix their eyes on the object of the request for time, neither of them on the time itself; just as if what is asked were nothing, what is given, nothing. Men trifle with the most precious thing in the world; but they are blind to it because it is an incorporeal thing, because it does not come beneath the sight of the eyes, and for this reason it is counted a very cheap thing—nay, of almost no value at all. Men set very great store by pensions and doles, and for these they hire out their labour or service or effort. But no one sets a value on time; all use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But see how these same people clasp the knees of physicians if they fall ill and the danger of death draws nearer, see how ready they are, if threatened with capital punishment, to spend all their possessions in order to live! So great is the inconsistency of their feelings. But if each one could have the number of his future years set before him as is possible in the case of the years that have passed, how alarmed those would be who saw only a few remaining, how sparing of them would they be! And yet it is easy to dispense an amount that is assured, no matter how small it may be; but that must be guarded more carefully which will fail you know not when.

Yet there is no reason for you to suppose that these people do not know how precious a thing time is; for to those whom they love most devotedly they have a habit of saying that they are ready to give them a part of their own years. And they do give it, without realizing it; but the result of their giving is that they themselves suffer loss without adding to the years of their dear ones. But the very thing they do not know is whether they are suffering loss; therefore, the removal of something that is lost without being noticed they find is bearable. Yet no one will bring back the years, no one will bestow you once more on yourself. Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay. And what will be the result? You have been engrossed, life hastens by; meanwhile death will be at hand, for which, willy nilly, you must find leisure.

Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people—I mean those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day. You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune, you let go that which lies in your own. Whither do you look? At what goal do you aim? All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty; live straightway! See how the greatest of bards cries out, and, as if inspired with divine utterance, sings the saving strain:

The fairest day in hapless mortals’ life

Is ever first to flee.

“Why do you delay,” says he, “Why are you idle? Unless you seize the day, it flees.” Even though you seize it, it still will flee; therefore you must vie with time’s swiftness in the speed of using it, and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow, you must drink quickly. And, too, the utterance of the bard is most admirably worded to cast censure upon infinite delay, in that he says, not “the fairest age,” but “the fairest day.” Why, to whatever length your greed inclines, do you stretch before yourself months and years in long array, unconcerned and slow though time flies so fast? The poet speaks to you about the day, and about this very day that is flying. Is there, then, any doubt that for hapless mortals, that is, for men who are engrossed, the fairest day is ever the first to flee? Old age surprises them while their minds are still childish, and they come to it unprepared and unarmed, for they have made no provision for it; they have stumbled upon it suddenly and unexpectedly, they did not notice that it was drawing nearer day by day. Even as conversation or reading or deep meditation on some subject beguiles the traveller, and he finds that he has reached the end of his journey before he was aware that he was approaching it, just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether waking or sleeping; those who are engrossed become aware of it only at the end.

Should I choose to divide my subject into heads with their separate proofs, many arguments will occur to me by which I could prove that busy men find life very short. But Fabianus, who was none of your lecture-room philosophers of to-day, but one of the genuine and old-fashioned kind, used to say that we must fight against the passions with main force, not with artifice, and that the battle-line must be turned by a bold attack, not by inflicting pinpricks; that sophistry is not serviceable, for the passions must be, not nipped, but crushed. Yet, in order that the victims of them nay be censured, each for his own particular fault, I say that they must be instructed, not merely wept over.

Life is divided into three periods—that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present time is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. For the last is the one over which Fortune has lost control, is the one which cannot be brought back under any man’s power. But men who are engrossed lose this; for they have no time to look back upon the past, and even if they should have, it is not pleasant to recall something they must view with regret. They are, therefore, unwilling to direct their thoughts backward to ill-spent hours, and those whose vices become obvious if they review the past, even the vices which were disguised under some allurement of momentary pleasure, do not have the courage to revert to those hours. No one willingly turns his thought back to the past, unless all his acts have been submitted to the censorship of his conscience, which is never deceived; he who has ambitiously coveted, proudly scorned, recklessly conquered, treacherously betrayed, greedily seized, or lavishly squandered, must needs fear his own memory. And yet this is the part of our time that is sacred and set apart, put beyond the reach of all human mishaps, and removed from the dominion of Fortune, the part which is disquieted by no want, by no fear, by no attacks of disease; this can neither be troubled nor be snatched away—it is an everlasting and unanxious possession. The present offers only one day at a time, and each by minutes; but all the days of past time will appear when you bid them, they will suffer you to behold them and keep them at your will—a thing which those who are engrossed have no time to do. The mind that is untroubled and tranquil has the power to roam into all the parts of its life; but the minds of the engrossed, just as if weighted by a yoke, cannot turn and look behind. And so their life vanishes into an abyss; and as it does no good, no matter how much water you pour into a vessel, if there is no bottom to receive and hold it, so with time—it makes no difference how much is given; if there is nothing for it to settle upon, it passes out through the chinks and holes of the mind. Present time is very brief, so brief, indeed, that to some there seems to be none; for it is always in motion, it ever flows and hurries on; it ceases to be before it has come, and can no more brook delay than the firmament or the stars, whose ever unresting movement never lets them abide in the same track. The engrossed, therefore, are concerned with present time alone, and it is so brief that it cannot be grasped, and even this is filched away from them, distracted as they are among many things.

In a word, do you want to know how they do not “live long”? See how eager they are to live long! Decrepit old men beg in their prayers for the addition of a few more years; they pretend that they are younger than they are; they comfort themselves with a falsehood, and are as pleased to deceive themselves as if they deceived Fate at the same time. But when at last some infirmity has reminded them of their mortality, in what terror do they die, feeling that they are being dragged out of life, and not merely leaving it. They cry out that they have been fools, because they have not really lived, and that they will live henceforth in leisure if only they escape from this illness; then at last they reflect how uselessly they have striven for things which they did not enjoy, and how all their toil has gone for nothing. But for those whose life is passed remote from all business, why should it not be ample? None of it is assigned to another, none of it is scattered in this direction and that, none of it is committed to Fortune, none of it perishes from neglect, none is subtracted by wasteful giving, none of it is unused; the whole of it, so to speak, yields income. And so, however small the amount of it, it is abundantly sufficient, and therefore, whenever his last day shall come, the wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with steady step.

Perhaps you ask whom I would call “the preoccupied”? There is no reason for you to suppose that I mean only those whom the dogs that have at length been let in drive out from the law-court, those whom you see either gloriously crushed in their own crowd of followers, or scornfully in someone else’s, those whom social duties call forth from their own homes to bump them against someone else’s doors, or whom the praetor’s hammer keeps busy in seeking gain that is disreputable and that will one day fester. Even the leisure of some men is engrossed; in their villa or on their couch, in the midst of solitude, although they have withdrawn from all others, they are themselves the source of their own worry; we should say that these are living, not in leisure, but in idle preoccupation. Would you say that that man is at leisure who arranges with finical care his Corinthian bronzes, that the mania of a few makes costly, and spends the greater part of each day upon rusty bits of copper? Who sits in a public wrestling-place (for, to our shame I we labour with vices that are not even Roman) watching the wrangling of lads? Who sorts out the herds of his pack-mules into pairs of the same age and colour? Who feeds all the newest athletes? Tell me, would you say that those men are at leisure who pass many hours at the barber’s while they are being stripped of whatever grew out the night before? while a solemn debate is held over each separate hair? while either disarranged locks are restored to their place or thinning ones drawn from this side and that toward the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a bit too careless, just as if he were shearing a real man! How they flare up if any of their mane is lopped off, if any of it lies out of order, if it does not all fall into its proper ringlets! Who of these would not rather have the state disordered than his hair? Who is not more concerned to have his head trim rather than safe? Who would not rather be well barbered than upright? Would you say that these are at leisure who are occupied with the comb and the mirror? And what of those who are engaged in composing, hearing, and learning songs, while they twist the voice, whose best and simplest movement Nature designed to be straightforward, into the meanderings of some indolent tune, who are always snapping their fingers as they beat time to some song they have in their head, who are overheard humming a tune when they have been summoned to serious, often even melancholy, matters? These have not leisure, but idle occupation. And their banquets, Heaven knows! I cannot reckon among their unoccupied hours, since I see how anxiously they set out their silver plate, how diligently they tie up the tunics of their pretty slave-boys, how breathlessly they watch to see in what style the wild boar issues from the hands of the cook, with what speed at a given signal smooth-faced boys hurry to perform their duties, with what skill the birds are carved into portions all according to rule, how carefully unhappy little lads wipe up the spittle of drunkards. By such means they seek the reputation for elegance and good taste, and to such an extent do their evils follow them into all the privacies of life that they can neither eat nor drink without ostentation.

And I would not count these among the leisured class either—the men who have themselves borne hither and thither in a sedan-chair and a litter, and are punctual at the hours for their rides as if it were unlawful to omit them, who are reminded by someone else when they must bathe, when they must swim, when they must dine; so enfeebled are they by the excessive lassitude of a pampered mind that they cannot find out by themselves whether they are hungry! I hear that one of these pampered people—provided that you can call it pampering to unlearn the habits of human life—when he had been lifted by hands from the bath and placed in his sedan-chair, said questioningly: “Am I now seated?” Do you think that this man, who does not know whether he is sitting, knows whether he is alive, whether he sees, whether he is at leisure? I find it hard to say whether I pity him more if he really did not know, or if he pretended not to know this. They really are subject to forgetfulness of many things, but they also pretend forgetfulness of many. Some vices delight them as being proofs of their prosperity; it seems the part of a man who is very lowly and despicable to know what he is doing. After this imagine that the mimes fabricate many things to make a mock of luxury! In very truth, they pass over more than they invent, and such a multitude of unbelievable vices has come forth in this age, so clever in this one direction, that by now we can charge the mimes with neglect. To think that there is anyone who is so lost in luxury that he takes another’s word as to whether he is sitting down! This man, then, is not at leisure, you must apply to him a different term—he is sick, nay, he is dead; that man is at leisure, who has also a perception of his leisure. But this other who is half alive, who, in order that he may know the postures of his own body, needs someone to tell him—how can he be the master of any of his time?

It would be tedious to mention all the different men who have spent the whole of their life over chess or ball or the practice of baking their bodies in the sun. They are not unoccupied whose pleasures are made a busy occupation. For instance, no one will have any doubt that those are laborious triflers who spend their time on useless literary problems, of whom even among the Romans there is now a great number. It was once a foible confined to the Greeks to inquire into what number of rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, whether moreover they belong to the same author, and various other matters of this stamp, which, if you keep them to yourself, in no way pleasure your secret soul, and, if you publish them, make you seem more of a bore than a scholar. But now this vain passion for learning useless things has assailed the Romans also. In the last few days I heard someone telling who was the first Roman general to do this or that; Duilius was the first who won a naval battle, Curius Dentatus was the first who had elephants led in his triumph. Still, these matters, even if they add nothing to real glory, are nevertheless concerned with signal services to the state; there will be no profit in such knowledge, nevertheless it wins our attention by reason of the attractiveness of an empty subject. We may excuse also those who inquire into this—who first induced the Romans to go on board ship. It was Claudius, and this was the very reason he was surnamed Caudex, because among the ancients a structure formed by joining together several boards was called a caudex, whence also the Tables of the Law are called codices, and, in the ancient fashion, boats that carry provisions up the Tiber are even to-day called codicariae. Doubtless this too may have some point—the fact that Valerius Corvinus was the first to conquer Messana, and was the first of the family of the Valerii to bear the surname Messana because be had transferred the name of the conquered city to himself, and was later called Messala after the gradual corruption of the name in the popular speech. Perhaps you will permit someone to be interested also in this—the fact that Lucius Sulla was the first to exhibit loosed lions in the Circus, though at other times they were exhibited in chains, and that javelin-throwers were sent by King Bocchus to despatch them? And, doubtless, this too may find some excuse—but does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human. O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds! When he was casting so many troops of wretched human beings to wild beasts born under a different sky, when he was proclaiming war between creatures so ill matched, when he was shedding so much blood before the eyes of the Roman people, who itself was soon to be forced to shed more. he then believed that he was beyond the power of Nature. But later this same man, betrayed by Alexandrine treachery, offered himself to the dagger of the vilest slave, and then at last discovered what an empty boast his surname was.

But to return to the point from which I have digressed, and to show that some people bestow useless pains upon these same matters—the man I mentioned related that Metellus, when he triumphed after his victory over the Carthaginians in Sicily, was the only one of all the Romans who had caused a hundred and twenty captured elephants to be led before his car; that Sulla was the last of the Roman’s who extended the pomerium, which in old times it was customary to extend after the acquisition of Italian but never of provincial, territory. Is it more profitable to know this than that Mount Aventine, according to him, is outside the pomerium for one of two reasons, either because that was the place to which the plebeians had seceded, or because the birds had not been favourable when Remus took his auspices on that spot—and, in turn, countless other reports that are either crammed with falsehood or are of the same sort? For though you grant that they tell these things in good faith, though they pledge themselves for the truth of what they write, still whose mistakes will be made fewer by such stories? Whose passions will they restrain? Whom will they make more brave, whom more just, whom more noble-minded? My friend Fabianus used to say that at times he was doubtful whether it was not better not to apply oneself to any studies than to become entangled in these.

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men’s labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

Those who rush about in the performance of social duties, who give themselves and others no rest, when they have fully indulged their madness, when they have every day crossed everybody’s threshold, and have left no open door unvisited, when they have carried around their venal greeting to houses that are very far apart—out of a city so huge and torn by such varied desires, how few will they be able to see? How many will there be who either from sleep or self-indulgence or rudeness will keep them out! How many who, when they have tortured them with long waiting, will rush by, pretending to be in a hurry! How many will avoid passing out through a hall that is crowded with clients, and will make their escape through some concealed door as if it were not more discourteous to deceive than to exclude. How many, still half asleep and sluggish from last night’s debauch, scarcely lifting their lips in the midst of a most insolent yawn, manage to bestow on yonder poor wretches, who break their own slumber in order to wait on that of another, the right name only after it has been whispered to them a thousand times!

But we may fairly say that they alone are engaged in the true duties of life who shall wish to have Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and all the other high priests of liberal studies, and Aristotle and Theophrastus, as their most intimate friends every day. No one of these will be “not at home,” no one of these will fail to have his visitor leave more happy and more devoted to himself than when he came, no one of these will allow anyone to leave him with empty hands; all mortals can meet with them by night or by day.

No one of these will force you to die, but all will teach you how to die; no one of these will wear out your years, but each will add his own years to yours; conversations with no one of these will bring you peril, the friendship of none will endanger your life, the courting of none will tax your purse. From them you will take whatever you wish; it will be no fault of theirs if you do not draw the utmost that you can desire. What happiness, what a fair old age awaits him who has offered himself as a client to these! He will have friends from whom he may seek counsel on matters great and small, whom he may consult every day about himself, from whom he may hear truth without insult, praise without flattery, and after whose likeness he may fashion himself.

We are wont to say that it was not in our power to choose the parents who fell to our lot, that they have been given to men by chance; yet we may be the sons of whomsoever we will. Households there are of noblest intellects; choose the one into which you wish to be adopted; you will inherit not merely their name, but even their property, which there will be no need to guard in a mean or niggardly spirit; the more persons you share it with, the greater it will become. These will open to you the path to immortality, and will raise you to a height from which no one is cast down. This is the only way of prolonging mortality—nay, of turning it into immortality. Honours, monuments, all that ambition has commanded by decrees or reared in works of stone, quickly sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not tear down and remove. But the works which philosophy has consecrated cannot be harmed; no age will destroy them, no age reduce them; the following and each succeeding age will but increase the reverence for them, since envy works upon what is close at hand, and things that are far off we are more free to admire. The life of the philosopher, therefore, has wide range, and he is not confined by the same bounds that shut others in. He alone is freed from the limitations of the human race; all ages serve him as if a god. Has some time passed by? This he embraces by recollection. Is time present? This he uses. Is it still to come? This he anticipates. He makes his life long by combining all times into one.

But those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled; when they have reached the end of it, the poor wretches perceive too late that for such a long while they have been busied in doing nothing. Nor because they sometimes invoke death, have you any reason to think it any proof that they find life long. In their folly they are harassed by shifting emotions which rush them into the very things they dread; they often pray for death because they fear it. And, too, you have no reason to think that this is any proof that they are living a long time—the fact that the day often seems to them long, the fact that they complain that the hours pass slowly until the time set for dinner arrives; for, whenever their distractions fail them, they are restless because they are left with nothing to do, and they do not know how to dispose of their leisure or to drag out the time. And so they strive for something else to occupy them, and all the intervening time is irksome; exactly as they do when a gladiatorial exhibition is been announced, or when they are waiting for the appointed time of some other show or amusement, they want to skip over the days that lie between. All postponement of something they hope for seems long to them. Yet the time which they enjoy is short and swift, and it is made much shorter by their own fault; for they flee from one pleasure to another and cannot remain fixed in one desire. Their days are not long to them, but hateful; yet, on the other hand, how scanty seem the nights which they spend in the arms of a harlot or in wine! It is this also that accounts for the madness of poets in fostering human frailties by the tales in which they represent that Jupiter under the enticement of the pleasures of a lover doubled the length of the night. For what is it but to inflame our vices to inscribe the name of the gods as their sponsors, and to present the excused indulgence of divinity as an example to our own weakness? Can the nights which they pay for so dearly fail to seem all too short to these men? They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.

The very pleasures of such men are uneasy and disquieted by alarms of various sorts, and at the very moment of rejoicing the anxious thought comes over them: “How long will these things last?” This feeling has led kings to weep over the power they possessed, and they have not so much delighted in the greatness of their fortune, as they have viewed with terror the end to which it must some time come. When the King of Persia, in all the insolence of his pride, spread his army over the vast plains and could not grasp its number but simply its measure, he shed copious tears because inside of a hundred years not a man of such a mighty army would be alive. But he who wept was to bring upon them their fate, was to give some to their doom on the sea, some on the land, some in battle, some in flight, and within a short time was to destroy all those for whose hundredth year he had such fear. And why is it that even their joys are uneasy from fear? Because they do not rest on stable causes, but are perturbed as groundlessly as they are born. But of what sort do you think those times are which even by their own confession are wretched, since even the joys by which they are exalted and lifted above mankind are by no means pure? All the greatest blessings are a source of anxiety, and at no time should fortune be less trusted than when it is best; to maintain prosperity there is need of other prosperity, and in behalf of the prayers that have turned out well we must make still other prayers. For everything that comes to us from chance is unstable, and the higher it rises, the more liable it is to fall. Moreover, what is doomed to perish brings pleasure to no one; very wretched, therefore, and not merely short, must the life of those be who work hard to gain what they must work harder to keep. By great toil they attain what they wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New distractions take the place of the old, hope leads to new hope, ambition to new ambition. They do not seek an end of their wretchedness, but change the cause. Have we been tormented by our own public honours? Those of others take more of our time. Have we ceased to labour as candidates? We begin to canvass for others. Have we got rid of the troubles of a prosecutor? We find those of a judge. Has a man ceased to be a judge? He becomes president of a court. Has he become infirm in managing the property of others at a salary? He is perplexed by caring for his own wealth. Have the barracks set Marius free? The consulship keeps him busy. Does Quintius hasten to get to the end of his dictatorship? He will be called back to it from the plough. Scipio will go against the Carthaginians before he is ripe for so great an undertaking; victorious over Hannibal, victorious over Antiochus, the glory of his own consulship, the surety for his brother’s, did he not stand in his own way, he would be set beside Jove; but the discord of civilians will vex their preserver, and, when as a young man he had scorned honours that rivalled those of the gods, at length, when he is old, his ambition will lake delight in stubborn exile. Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether born of prosperity or of wretchedness; life pushes on in a succession of engrossments. We shall always pray for leisure, but never enjoy it.

And so, my dearest Paulinus, tear yourself away from the crowd, and, too much storm-tossed for the time you have lived, at length withdraw into a peaceful harbour. Think of how many waves you have encountered, how many storms, on the one hand, you have sustained in private life, how many, on the other, you have brought upon yourself in public life; long enough has your virtue been displayed in laborious and unceasing proofs—try how it will behave in leisure. The greater part of your life, certainly the better part of it, has been given to the state; take now some part of your time for yourself as well. And I do not summon you to slothful or idle inaction, or to drown all your native energy in slumbers and the pleasures that are dear to the crowd. That is not to rest; you will find far greater works than all those you have hitherto performed so energetically, to occupy you in the midst of your release and retirement. You, I know, manage the accounts of the whole world as honestly as you would a stranger’s, as carefully as you would your own, as conscientiously as you would the state’s. You win love in an office in which it is difficult to avoid hatred; but nevertheless believe me, it is better to have knowledge of the ledger of one’s own life than of the corn-market. Recall that keen mind of yours, which is most competent to cope with the greatest subjects, from a service that is indeed honourable but hardly adapted to the happy life, and reflect that in all your training in the liberal studies, extending from your earliest years, you were not aiming at this—that it might be safe to entrust many thousand pecks of corn to your charge; you gave hope of something greater and more lofty. There will be no lack of men of tested worth and painstaking industry. But plodding oxen are much more suited to carrying heavy loads than thoroughbred horses, and who ever hampers the fleetness of such high-born creatures with a heavy pack? Reflect, besides, how much worry you have in subjecting yourself to such a great burden; your dealings are with the belly of man. A hungry people neither listens to reason, nor is appeased by justice, nor is bent by any entreaty. Very recently within those few day’s after Gaius Caesar died—still grieving most deeply (if the dead have any feeling) because he knew that the Roman people were alive and had enough food left for at any rate seven or eight days while he was building his bridges of boats and playing with the resources of the empire, we were threatened with the worst evil that can befall men even during a siege—the lack of provisions; his imitation of a mad and foreign and misproud king was very nearly at the cost of the city’s destruction and famine and the general revolution that follows famine. What then must have been the feeling of those who had charge of the corn-market, and had to face stones, the sword, fire—and a Caligula? By the greatest subterfuge they concealed the great evil that lurked in the vitals of the state—with good reason, you may be sure. For certain maladies must be treated while the patient is kept in ignorance; knowledge of their disease has caused the death of many.

Do you retire to these quieter, safer, greater things! Think you that it is just the same whether you are concerned in having corn from oversea poured into the granaries, unhurt either by the dishonesty or the neglect of those who transport it, in seeing that it does not become heated and spoiled by collecting moisture and tallies in weight and measure, or whether you enter upon these sacred and lofty studies with the purpose of discovering what substance, what pleasure, what mode of life, what shape God has; what fate awaits your soul; where Nature lays us to rest When we are freed from the body; what the principle is that upholds all the heaviest matter in the centre of this world, suspends the light on high, carries fire to the topmost part, summons the stars to their proper changes—and ether matters, in turn, full of mighty wonders? You really must leave the ground and turn your mind’s eye upon these things! Now while the blood is hot, we must enter with brisk step upon the better course. In this kind of life there awaits much that is good to know—the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, knowledge of living and dying, and a life of deep repose.

The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.

And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name. Life has left some in the midst of their first struggles, before they could climb up to the height of their ambition; some, when they have crawled up through a thousand indignities to the crowning dignity, have been possessed by the unhappy thought that they have but toiled for an inscription on a tomb; some who have come to extreme old age, while they adjusted it to new hopes as if it were youth, have had it fail from sheer weakness in the midst of their great and shameless endeavours. Shameful is he whose breath leaves him in the midst of a trial when, advanced in years and still courting the applause of an ignorant circle, he is pleading for some litigant who is the veriest stranger; disgraceful is he who, exhausted more quickly by his mode of living than by his labour, collapses in the very midst of his duties; disgraceful is he who dies in the act of receiving payments on account, and draws a smile from his long delayed heir. I cannot pass over an instance which occurs to me. Sextus Turannius was an old man of long tested diligence, who, after his ninetieth year, having received release from the duties of his office by Gaius Caesar’s own act, ordered himself to be laid out on his bed and to be mourned by the assembled household as if he were dead. The whole house bemoaned the leisure of its old master, and did not end its sorrow until his accustomed work was restored to him. Is it really such pleasure for a man to die in harness? Yet very many have the same feeling; their desire for their labour lasts longer than their ability; they fight against the weakness of the body, they judge old age to be a hardship on no other score than because it puts them aside. The law does not draft a soldier after his fiftieth year, it does not call a senator after his sixtieth; it is more difficult for men to obtain leisure from themselves than from the law. Meantime, while they rob and are being robbed, while they break up each other’s repose, while they make each other wretched, their life is without profit, without pleasure, without any improvement of the mind. No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes; some men, indeed, even arrange for things that lie beyond life—huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works and gifts for their funeral-pyres and ostentatious funerals.

But, in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers, as though they had lived but the tiniest span.

“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Far from the madding crowd”

“The paths of glory”

“Celestial fire”

“The unlettered muse”

“Kindred spirit”

“Some mute inglorious Milton”

When Abraham Lincoln was asked to help John Locke Scripps write a bio on him for his campaign, Abraham Lincoln quoted Gray’s Elegy:

“Why Scripps, … it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy,

The Short and simple annals of the poor.

That’s my life, and that’s all you or any one else can make of it.”

Gray's monument

It is believed that Gray wrote his masterpiece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire in 1750. The poem was a literary sensation when published by Robert Dodsley in February 1751 and has made a lasting contribution to English literature. Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and it was pirated, imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek. It is still one of the most popular and most frequently quoted poems in the English language: Before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to his officers, adding: “Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec tomorrow”

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

by Thomas Gray

The language of this poem is ancient and can often be confusing to the modern English speaker. A full explanation of all vocabulary used can be found in this book or can be downloaded as PDF here.

Notes and translations are provided with the text. Where a note exists, the line number will be shown in blue, and upon clicking the number, you will be taken to notes on that particular line…

My analysis of the poem can be found here.

Notes

] curfew: originally rung at eight o’clock as a signal for extinguishing fires; after this practice had ceased, the word was applied to an evening bell.

Gray’s annotation:

[tolls]

[Era gia l' ora, che volge 'l disio

A' naviganti, e 'ntenerisce 'l cuore

Lo di ch' han detto a' dolci amici addio:

E che lo nuovo peregrin d' amore

Punge, se ode] — squilla di lontano

Che paia ‘l giorno pianger, che si muore.

[(It was already the hour which turns back the desire

Of the sailors, and melts their hearts,

The day that they have said good-bye to their sweet friends,

And which pierces the new pilgrim with love,

If he hears) — from afar the bell

Which seems to mourn the dying day.]

Dante. Purgat. l. 8. [Canto 8 lines i-vi.]

] tinklings: made by sheep-bells.

] Cf. Robert Colvill’s “Britain, a Poem,” II, 45-57:

Even thus, the keen ey’d falcon swift descends

On Pallas’ bird victorious; long he watch’d

The tempting spoil, and she his rage defy’d,

Close shelter’d in her ivy mantl’d tower;

Compell’d abroad, while circling slow she wheels

In quest of food, and least expects the snare,

Strait from his airy flight the victor stoops,

As lightning-swift, and bears the captive prey. (450-57)

] rude: unlearned.

] incense-breathing: cf. Paradise Lost, IX, 193-4. Also Pope, Messiah, 24: “With all the incense of the breathing spring.”

] The cock’s shrill clarion: cf. Paradise Lost, VII, 443-44: “the crested cock, whose clarion sounds/The silent hours.” Cf. Paul Whitehead’s “The State of Rome” (1739), lines 173-74:

But hold, War’s Rumour! mark the loud Alarms!

Hark the shrill Clarion sounds to Arms, to Arms!

] broke: old `strong’ form of the past participle, `broken.’

] homely: domestic.

] short and simple annals: parish registers of births, christenings, marriages, and deaths (Richard Leighton Greene, “Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,” The Explicator 24.6 [Feb. 1966].)

] Cf. Henry Needler’s “Horace. Book IV. Ode VII. Paraphras’d,” lines 30-34:

When once th’ inevitable Hour is come,

At which thou must receive thy final Doom;

Thy Noble Birth, thy Eloquence Divine,

And shining Piety shall nought encline

The stubborn Will of unrelenting Fate …

and Richard West’s “A Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline” (Dodsley’s Collection of Poems [1748]: II, 273):

Ah me! What boots us all our boasted power,

Our golden treasure, and our purpled state?

They cannot ward the inevitable hour,

Nor stay the fearful violence of Fate.

A collective (singular) subject is possible, though the word `hour’ might also be the subject of the word `awaits.’

] Cf. Pope’s “The First Book of the Odyssey,” lines 391-92:

O greatly bless’d with ev’ry blooming grace!

With equal steps the paths of glory trace ..

] Trophies: memorials.

] fretted: adorned with carved or embossed work. Cf. Hamlet, II, ii: “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.”

] Cf. Samuel Whyte’s “Elegy II” (1722), lines 119-20:

No breathing Marble o’er his Dust shall stand;

No storied Urn shall celebrate his Name …

] provoke: in its original sense, to call forth, to challenge.

] rage: as often in the poetry of the eighteenth century, poetic fire (furor poeticus).

] Hampden: John Hampden (ca. 1595-1643), one of the noblest of English Parliamentary statesmen; a central figure of the English revolution in its earlier stages.

] Cf. Joseph Trapp’s “Virgil’s Aeneis,” IV, 512-14:

He, to protract his aged Father’s Life,

Chose Skill in Med’cine, and the Pow’rs of Herbs;

And exercis’d a mute inglorious Art.

] conscious truth: truthful awareness of inward guilt.

] In the Eton MS. this line was followed by four stanzas which were omitted in the published text. Here, according to Mason, the poem was intended to close; the “hoary-headed swain” and the epitaph were after-thoughts.

pious: dutiful.

] Cf. Henry Jones’ “On seeing a Picture of his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, which was presented to the University of Dublin” (1749), lines 61-64:

Her favour’d Sons from ‘midst the madding Crowd,

Her Sons select with gentle Hand she drew,

Secreted timely from th’austere and proud,

Their Fame wide-spreading, tho’ their Numbers few.

madding: outraged.

] Gray’s note refers to Petrarch’s sonnet 169:

Ch’i veggio nel pensier, dolce mio fuoco,

Fredda una lingua, & due begli occhi chiusi

Rimaner doppo noi pien di faville.

[For I see in my thoughts, my sweet fire,

One cold tongue, and two beautiful closed eyes

Will remain full of sparks after our death.]

Petrarch. Son. 169. [170 in usual enumeration]

] lawn: meadow. In the Eton MS. after lìne 100 there is the following stanza: “Him have we seen the greenwood side along, /While o’er the heath we hied, our labours done, /Oft as the woodlark pip’d her farewell song,/With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.” Mason is puzzled by Gray’s rejection of this stanza for the published text.

Sometimes compared to another elegy, John Milton’s “Lycidas,” lines 25-31:

Together both, ere the high lawns appear’d

Under the opening eyelids of the morn,

We drove afield, and both together heard

What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,

Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,

Oft till the star that rose at ev’ning bright

Toward heav’n's descent had slop’d his westering wheel.

] next: following morning. sad: serious.

] In some of the first editions of the poem, the following stanza preceded the epitaph: “There scatter’d oft, the earliest of the year,/By hands unseen are show’rs of violets found;/The redbreast loves to build and warble there,/And little footsteps lightly print the ground.” According to a marginal note of Gray, it was “omitted in 1753.” Mason explains the omission by saying that Gray found it formed “too long a parenthesis in this place.” The epitaph is not in the early Eton manuscript of the poem.

] Here lies: the Latin “hic jacet.”

] Cf. John Oldmixon’s “Epistle V: Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Essex” (1703), lines 37-40:

Warm’d by my Smiles, and kindled into Man,

Thy Soul to feel Heroick Flames began:

Till then to Fortune, and to Fame, unknown,

Who since defended, and adorn’d the Throne.

] Science: knowledge in the general sense. Cf. Ode on Eton College, 3, and note.

] Gray’s note:

— paventosa speme. [— fearful hope]

Petrarch. Son. 114. [115 in usual enumeration]

Commentary by Lorenz Lammens

Cleanth Brooks thought of the Elegy as ironic but it struck Samual Johnson as sentimental. Like any work of art, the poem presents itself as a mirror, it triggers a response in which we are reflected. Both Brooks and Johnson were probably right, because the poem stands as much on its own as it carries the soul of the reader within it.

And so does it reflect our society. Gray’s poem can be read as one that seeks the universal man within us, from the perspective of death. All the pomp of our society is stripped by this final event, and within it we are all the same. Gray then uses this as an allegory for life itself: if we are all the same in this final event, than perhaps we are more a product of events as we are ourselves. The woman next to us might be “Some mute inglorious Milton” and Milton himself might have lived an uneventful life if born in different circumstances.

In my intro I mentioned some people who quoted Gray’s Elegy, including Lincoln; in fact, there are many phrases you might recognize still today. An astounding three-quarters (well, nearly) of its lines (128!) have made it in the Oxford book of Quotations.

The true power of the poem, even for Lincoln when he quoted the work, is that we recognize its phrases through their power to console us. Yes, it laments someone’s passing, but in a way that affirms the life that preceded it, and it paints a glorious picture that lifts it from its seeming mediocrity and talks in terms that give meaning and a sense of solidarity. Even a bleak sentence such as “The Short and simple annals of the poor” shone in meaning to Lincoln, because it was an accurate description, and the idea of this seemingly deplorable life of the poor was connected in a carefully constructed web of meaning with Milton and Cromwell and all that is good and strong in human kind, without turning away from mankind’s darker side. The latter would have made the poem slip in a false romanticism, a dreamers lie, and the poem might have seem apologist. But Gray somehow encompasses the full spectrum of human existence.

The poem takes the side of the unremarkable, and therefore takes the side of everything that is unremarkable within us (human kind is vain, and cannot identify with art unless it sees himself reflected in it – this is when it develops meaning). The poem mourns our lost potential and takes our most desperate times in a loving embrace. It depicts a fellow who died after decade of anonymous labor, without the seed of education ever been planted within him, scarcely remembered in this world and unknown to any future humanity. With him is buried all his potential, unrealized – yet, Gray says, his life had many joys and by far fewer ill effects on others, unstained by the blood that often covers the spear of change, carried by the rich, the powerful, the famous, the Cromwell’s of this world. In the end, Gray values smaller things, the things that bond us, like friendship, which in its last act is confirmed in mourning, being cried for by someone else who cared for you. “On some fond breast the parting soul relies, / Some pious drops the closing eye requires”. Gray’s phrasing remains remarkably restrained and universal.