Cyrus was livid. The river had dared to make away with his sacred white horse, the horse of the warrior who had ground Croesus into the dust and terrified the Greeks. He screamed and cursed, and at the height of his fury decided to pay back the Gyndes for its insolence. He vowed to punish the river by making it so weak that a woman would in future be able to cross it without so much as wetting her knees.
Setting aside plans for the expansion of his empire, Cyrus divided his army into two parts, marked out 180 small canals running off from each bank of the river in various directions and ordered his men to start digging, which they did for an entire summer, their morale broken, all hope of a quick defeat of the Assyrians gone. And when they were finished, the once-rapid Gyndes was split into 360 separate channels through which water flowed so languidly that astonished local women could indeed wander across the trickling stream without hoisting their skirts. His anger assuaged, the King of Persia instructed his exhausted army to resume the march to Babylon.
3. Seneca collected similar examples of feelings of persecution at the hands of animate objects. One concerned the Roman governor of Syria, Gnaeus Piso, a brave general but a troubled soul. When a soldier returned from a period of leave without the friend he had set out with and claimed to have no idea where he had gone, Piso judged that the soldier was lying; he had killed his friend, and would have to pay with his life.
The condemned man swore he hadn’t murdered anyone and begged for time for an inquiry to be made, but Piso knew better and had the soldier escorted to his death without delay.
However, as the centurion in charge was preparing to cut off the soldier’s head, the missing companion arrived at the gates of the camp. The army broke into spontaneous applause and the relieved centurion called off the execution.
Piso took the news less well. Hearing the cheers, he felt them to be mocking his judgement. He grew red and angry, so angry that he summoned his guards and ordered both men to be executed, the soldier who hadn’t committed murder and the one who hadn’t been murdered. And because he was by this point feeling very persecuted, Piso also sent the centurion off to his death for good measure.
4. The governor of Syria had at once interpreted the applause of his soldiers as a wish to undermine his authority and to question his judgement. Cyrus had at once interpreted the river’s manslaughter of his horse as murder.
Seneca had an explanation for such errors of judgement; it lay with ‘a certain abjectness of spirit’ in men like Cyrus and Piso. Behind their readiness to anticipate insult lay a fear of deserving ridicule. When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us:
‘So and so did not give me an audience today, though he gave it to others’; ‘he haughtily repulsed or openly laughed at my conversation’; ‘he did not give me the seat of honour, but placed me at the foot of the table.’
There may be innocent grounds. He didn’t give me an audience today, because he would prefer to see me next week. It seemed like he was laughing at me, but it was a facial tic. These are not the first explanations to come into our minds when we are abject of spirit.
5. So we must endeavour to surround our initial impressions with a fireguard and refuse to act at once on their precepts. We must ask ourselves if someone who has not answered a letter is
necessarily
being tardy to annoy us, and if the missing keys have
necessarily
been stolen:
[The wise do] not put a wrong construction upon everything.
6. And the reason why they are able not to was indirectly explained by Seneca in a letter to Lucilius, the day he came upon a sentence in one of the works of the philosopher Hecato:
I shall tell you what I liked today in [his writings]; it is these words: ‘What progress, you ask, have I made?
I have begun to be a friend to myself
.’ That was indeed a great benefit;… you may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.
7. There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we respond to noise. Seneca lived near a gymnasium. The walls were thin and the racket was continuous. He described the problem to Lucilius:
Imagine what a variety of noises reverberates around my ears!… For example, when a strenuous gentleman is exercising himself by swinging lead weights, when he is working hard, or else pretends to be working hard, I can hear him grunting; and whenever he releases his pent-up breath, I can hear him panting in wheezy, high-pitched tones. When my attention turns to a less active type who is happy with an ordinary, inexpensive massage, I can hear the smack of a hand pummelling his shoulders … One should add to this the arresting of an occasional reveller or pickpocket, the racket of the man who always likes to hear his own voice in the bathroom … the hair-plucker with his shrill, penetrating cry … then the cake seller with his varied cries, the sausage man, the confectioner and everyone hawking for the catering shops.
8. Those who are unfriendly with themselves find it hard to imagine that the cake seller is shouting
in order to sell cakes
. The builder on the ground floor of a hotel in Rome (1) may be pretending to repair a wall, but his real intention is to tease the man trying to read a book in a room on the upper level (2).
(Ill. 13.14)
Abject interpretation: The builder is hammering
in order to
annoy me. Friendly interpretation: The builder is hammering
and
I am annoyed.
9. To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. We should place a fireguard between the noise outside and an internal sense of deserving punishment. We should not import into scenarios where they don’t belong pessimistic interpretations of others’ motives. Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious:
All outdoors may be bedlam, provided that there is no disturbance within.
3
Of course, there would be few great human achievements if we accepted all frustrations. The motor of our ingenuity is the question ‘Does it have to be like this?’, from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books. The Romans were consummate at refusing frustration. They hated winter cold and developed under-floor heating. They didn’t wish to walk on muddy roads and so paved them. In the middle of the first century AD the Roman inhabitants of Nîmes in Provence decided they wanted more water for their city than nature had granted them, and so spent a hundred million sesterces building an extraordinary symbol of human resistance to the status quo. To the north of Nîmes, near Uzès, Roman engineers found a water source strong enough to irrigate the baths and fountains of their city, and drew up plans to divert the water 50 miles through mountains and across valleys in a system of aqueducts and underground pipes. When the engineers confronted the cavernous gorge of the river Gard, they did not despair at nature’s obstacle but erected a massive three-tiered aqueduct, 360 metres long and 48 metres high, capable of carrying 35,000 cubic metres of water a day – so that the inhabitants of Nîmes would never be forced to suffer the frustration of a shallow bath.