Chapter 44: The Decline of Sublimity

Since you are engaged in useful learning, my dearest Terentianus, I shall not hesitate to occult this question which is left, a question for which one of the philosophers recently sought elucidation, saying: “Wonder holds me, as no doubt many others, how it is that though in our age there are natures which are highly persuasive and political, insightful and apt, and most fertile in producing pleasing touches in speeches and writings, yet there no longer come to be—except rather rarely—-men who are sublime and transcendentally great. So universal is the infertility which has hold over our life. 2. Or, heaven knows, must we believe that assertion being bruited about, that democracy is a good nurse of great men, in which alone do those powerful in speeches and writings both reach their acme and die? That assertion says, you see, that freedom is sufficient to nourish the sensibilities of those who are great in mind and to raise their expectations, and at the same time to excite both an animated zeal for striving with each other and a love of esteem for first prizes. 3. Besides, because of the awards available in their polities, the superiorities of the souls of public speakers are on every occasion professionally exercised and polished and, in the freedom of their practice, bedazzle their audience. But nowadays,” he said, “we are likely to learn from childhood to live under a justified slavery, with our own still tender sensibilities just out of the swaddling clothes of its customs and behavior, and we lack the taste of that finest stream of speeches and writings and the one most able to breed them—I speak of freedom,” he said, “for this is why we emerge as great in nothing except flattery.” 4. Because of this he used to say that though the other abilities we have arise even in household servants, no slave ever comes to be a public speaker: the lack of free speech, you see, boils up in him, and, as it were, guards the one who has been battered over and over again by habitual mistreatment: [5.] “the day of slavery,” according to Homer, “robs us of half our excellence.” “Now,” he says, “if what I hear may be believed, just as the cages in which Pygmies—but only the ones called nani—are reared not only restrict the development of those they enclose but also crush them because of the bond that lies around their mouths, so one might explain that every kind of slavery, even if it should be most justified, is a cage of the soul and a common prison house.” 6. I of course took him up and answered him: “Finding fault with the present over and over again, my best of friends, is easy and a peculiarity of human beings; but see whether it is not the peace of the world that corrupts great natures—but much rather this unlimited war which holds in occupation our cravings and, in addition, (heaven knows) our emotions, which stand guard over our lives nowadays and drive and carry them off to their heights. The love of material things (of which we are all now insatiably sick) and the love of pleasure drive us into slavery—rather (as one might say), they plunge us—men, lives, and all—down into an abyss: though love of money is a disease that makes for pettiness, love of pleasure is one which makes men most ignoble. 7. Indeed, I am not able to discover by reasoning how those of us who over-esteem limitless wealth and (to say it more truly) make it into a divinity can avoid admitting into our souls the vices that naturally follow it. Extravagance, you see, accompanies immoderate and uncurtailed wealth, holding onto it and (as they say) keeping step with it, and when wealth opens the way into cities and houses, extravagance comes in at the same time and sets up house together with him. And when they have stayed for a time, they hatch younglings in our lives (according to the wise), and swiftly begetting offspring, they breed vanity and luxury—not as bastards, but as very legitimate offspring. And if anyone should allow offspring bred of this wealth to come to maturity, they swiftly implant inexorable despots in our souls—contumely and lawless­ ness and shameless impudence. 8. Thus it is necessary for these things to happen and for humanity no longer to gaze up openly at the cosmos nor for there to be any speech and writing made for later fame, but it is necessary for such vices little by little to accomplish their end in the cycle of corruption in our lives, and for the greatness of our souls to dwindle and wither away and become what no one will emulate, when mortal man wonders utterly at his own bloated parts and neglects to develop what is deathless. 9. You see, no one who in making a judgment has accepted a bribe may still come to be a free and sound judge of what is justifiable and fine (you see, what belongs to the bribe-taker necessarily seems to him fine and justifiable); whenever bribes determine our lives, and the chasing after others’ deaths and the lying in wait for settlements, and the purchasing of profit from every source at the price of our souls—each man made captive and prisoner from the love of material things—would we, indeed, in such a plague-stricken corruption of life believe that there still remains any kind of free and unbribable judge to decide what works are great and will come down through the ages and that this judge will not be out-electioneered by the craving for gain? 10. But perhaps for such as us it is better to be governed than to be free, since such acquisitiveness, if let entirely loose, as if from prison, against its neighbors, would burn up the world with its vices. 11. And, on the whole, I said that ease was the expending the natures bred nowadays-an ease in which all of us (except for a few) live out our lives, without struggling or undertaking anything except for the sake of praise and pleasure and not for the benefit. derived from emulation and a worthy esteem. 12. “It is best to let these things go at random,” and to make room for what comes next-this was to be the emotions, about which I promised to write in their own collection of notes; this topic has a place in the other parts of speeches and writing and of sublimity itself, as well as to us …