Seneca here cautiously reveals the jealous suspicion with which the first Cæsars viewed all foreign, and especially quasi-religious, innovations, and his own public compliance, to some extent, with the orthodox dietetic practices. Yet that in private life he continued to practise, as well as to preach, a radical dietary reformation is sufficiently evident to all who are conversant with his various writings. The refinement and gentleness of his ethics are everywhere apparent, and exhibit him as a man of extraordinary sensibility and feeling.
As for dietetics, he makes it a matter of the first importance, on which he is never weary of insisting. “We must so live, not as if we ought to live for, but as though we could not do without, the body.” He quotes Epikurus: “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to conventionalism, you will never be rich. Nature demands little; fashion (opinio) superfluity.” In one of his letters he eloquently describes the riotous feasting of the period which corresponds to our festival of Christmas—another illustration of the proverb, “History repeats itself”:—
“December is the month,” he begins his letter, “when the city [Rome] most especially gives itself up to riotous living (desudat). Free licence is allowed to the public luxury. Every place resounds with the gigantic preparations for eating and gorging, just as if,” he adds, “the whole year were not a sort of Saturnalia.”
He contrasts with all this waste and gluttony the simplicity and frugality of Epikurus, who, in a letter to his friend Polyænus, declares that his own food does not cost him sixpence a day; while his friend Metrodorus, who had not advanced so far in frugality, expended the whole of that small sum:—
“Do you ask if that can supply due nourishment? Yes; and pleasure too. Not, indeed, that fleeting and superficial pleasure which needs to be perpetually recruited, but a solid and substantial one. Bread and pearl-barley (polenta) certainly is not luxurious feeding, but it is no little advantage to be able to receive pleasure from a simple diet of which no change of fortune can deprive one.... Nature demands bread and water only: no one is poor in regard to those necessaries.”[28]
Again, Seneca writes:—
“How long shall we weary heaven with petitions for superfluous luxuries, as though we had not at hand wherewithal to feed ourselves? How long shall we fill our plains with huge cities? How long shall the people slave for us unnecessarily? How long shall countless numbers of ships from every sea bring us provisions for the consumption of a single month? An Ox is satisfied with the pasture of an acre or two: one wood suffices for several Elephants. Man alone supports himself by the pillage of the whole earth and sea. What! Has Nature indeed given us so insatiable a stomach, while she has given us so insignificant bodies? No: it is not the hunger of our stomachs, but insatiable covetousness (ambitio) which costs so much. The slaves of the belly (as says Sallust) are to be counted in the number of the lower animals, not of men. Nay, not of them, but rather of the dead.... You might inscribe on their doors, ‘These have anticipated death.’”—(Ep. lx.)
The extreme difficulty of abstinence is oftentimes alleged:—
“It is disagreeable, you say, to abstain from the pleasures of the customary diet. Such abstinence is, I grant, difficult at first. But in course of time the desire for that diet will begin to languish; the incentives to our unnatural wants failing, the stomach, at first rebellious, will after a time feel an aversion for what formerly it eagerly coveted. The desire dies of itself, and it is no severe loss to be without those things that you have ceased to long for. Add to this that there is no disease, no pain, which is not certainly intermitted or relieved, or cured altogether. Moreover it is possible for you to be on your guard against a threatened return of the disease, and to oppose remedies if it comes upon you.”—(Ep. lxxviii.)