Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Virtues of the Mantle. It Pleads in Its Own Defence.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
V.—Virtues of the Mantle. It Pleads in Its Own
Defence.
“Still,” say you, “must we thus
change from gown61
to Mantle?”
Why, what if from diadem and sceptre? Did Anacharsis change
otherwise, when to the royalty of Scythia he preferred
philosophy? Grant that there be no (miraculous) signs in proof of
your transformation for the better: there is somewhat which this
your garb can do. For, to begin with the simplicity of its
uptaking: it needs no tedious arrangement. Accordingly,
there is no necessity for any artist formally to dispose its wrinkled
folds from the beginning a day beforehand, and then to reduce them to a
more finished elegance, and to assign to the guardianship of the
stretchers62
the whole figment of
the massed boss; subsequently, at daybreak, first gathering up by the
aid of a girdle the tunic which it were better to have woven of more
moderate length (in the first instance), and, again scrutinizing the
boss, and rearranging any disarrangement, to make one part prominent on
the left, but (making now an end of the folds) to draw backwards from
the shoulders the circuit of it whence the hollow is formed, and,
leaving the right shoulder free, heap it still upon the left, with
another similar set of folds reserved for the back, and thus clothe the
man with a burden! In short, I will persistently ask your own
conscience, What is your first sensation in wearing your gown? Do
you feel yourself clad, or laded? wearing a garment, or carrying
it? If you shall answer negatively, I will follow you home; I win
see what you hasten to do immediately after crossing your
threshold. There is really no garment the doffing whereof
congratulates a man more than the gown’s does.63
| 63 Of course the meaning is,
“on the doffing of which a man congratulates himself more,”
etc.; but Tertullian as it were personifies the act of doffing, and
represents it as congratulating the doffer; and I have scrupulously
retained all his extravagances, believing them (in the present treatise
at least) to be intentional. | Of shoes we say nothing—implements
as they are of torture proper to the gown, most uncleanly protection to
the feet, yes, and false too. For who would not find it
expedient, in cold and heat, to stiffen with feet bare rather than in a
shoe with feet bound? A mighty munition for the tread have the
Venetian shoe-factories provided in the shape of effeminate
boots! Well, but, than the Mantle nothing is more expedite, even
if it be double, like that of Crates.64
Nowhere is
there a compulsory waste of time in dressing yourself (in it), seeing
that its whole art consists in loosely covering. That can be
effected by a single circumjection, and one in no case
inelegant:65
| 65 “Inhumano;”
or, perhaps, “involving superhuman effort.” | thus it wholly
covers every part of the man at once. The shoulder it either
exposes or encloses:66
| 66 Oehler attempts to defend
the common reading, “humerum velans exponit vel
includit;” but the correction of Salmasius and Lud. de la
Cerda which he quotes, “vel exponit,” is
followed in preference. If Oehler’s reading be retained, we
may render: “a covering for the shoulder, it exposes or
encloses it at will.” | in other respects
it adheres to the shoulder; it has no surrounding support; it has no
surrounding tie; it has no anxiety as to the fidelity with which its
folds keep their place; easily it manages, easily readjusts
itself: even in the doffing it is consigned to no cross until the
morrow. If any shirt is worn beneath it, the torment of a girdle
is superfluous: if anything in the way of shoeing is worn, it is
a most cleanly work;67
| 67 i.e., the
“shoeing” appropriate to the mantle will consist at
most of sandals; “shoes” being (as has been
said) suited to the gown. | or else the feet are
rather bare,—more manly, at all events, (if bare,) than in
shoes. These (pleas I advance) for the Mantle in the meantime, in
so far as you have defamed it by name. Now, however, it
challenges you on the score of its function withal.
“I,” it says, “owe no duty to the forum, the
election-ground, or the senate-house; I keep no obsequious vigil,
preoccupy no platforms, hover about no prætorian residences; I am
not odorant of the canals, am not odorant of the lattices, am no
constant wearer out of benches, no wholesale router of laws, no barking
pleader, no judge, no soldier, no king: I have withdrawn from the
populace. My only business is with myself: except that
other care I have none, save not to care. The better life you
would more enjoy in seclusion than in publicity. But you will
decry me as indolent. Forsooth, ‘we are to live for our
country, and empire, and estate.’ Such used,68
| 68
“Erat.”—Oehler, who refers to “errat” as
the general reading, and (if adopted) renders: “This
sentiment errs (or wanders) in all directions;” making
olim = passim. | of old, to be the sentiment. None is
born for another, being destined to die for himself. At all
events, when we come to the Epicuri and Zenones, you give the epithet
of ‘sages’ to the whole teacherhood of Quietude, who
have consecrated that Quietude with the name of
‘supreme’ and ‘unique’ pleasure. Still,
to some extent it will be allowed, even to me, to confer benefit
on the public. From any and every boundary-stone or altar it is
my wont to prescribe medicines to morals—medicines which will be
more felicitous in conferring good health upon public affairs, and
states, and empires, than your works are. Indeed, if I
proceed to encounter you with naked foils, gowns have done the
commonwealth more hurt than cuirasses. Moreover, I flatter no
vices; I give quarter to no lethargy, no slothful encrustation. I
apply the cauterizing
iron to the ambition which led M. Tullius to buy a circular table of
citron-wood for more than £4000,69
| 69 Reckoning the 1000
sesterces at their pre-Augustan value, £8, 17s. 1d. | and Asinius Gallus
to pay twice as much for an ordinary table of the same Moorish wood
(Hem! at what fortunes did they value woody dapplings!), or, again,
Sulla to frame dishes of an hundred pounds’ weight. I fear
lest that balance be small, when a Drusillanus (and he withal a slave
of Claudius!) constructs a tray70
| 70
“Promulsis”—a tray on which the first
course (“promulsis” or
“antecœna”) was served, otherwise called
“promulsidare.” | of the weight of 500
lbs.!—a tray indispensable, perchance, to the aforesaid tables,
for which, if a workshop was erected,71
| 71 As Pliny (quoted by
Oehler) tells us was the case. | there ought to
have been erected a dining-room too. Equally do I plunge the
scalpel into the inhumanity which led Vedius Pollio to expose slaves to
fill the bellies of sea-eels. Delighted, forsooth, with his novel
savagery, he kept land-monsters, toothless, clawless, hornless:
it was his pleasure to turn perforce into wild beasts his fish, which
(of course) were to be forthwith cooked, that in their entrails he
himself withal might taste some savour of the bodies of his own
slaves. I will forelop the gluttony which led Hortensius the
orator to be the first to have the heart to slay a peacock for the sake
of food; which led Aufidius Lurco to be the first to vitiate meat with
stuffing, and by the aid of forcemeats to raise them to an
adulterous72
flavour; which led
Asinius Celer to purchase the viand of a single mullet at nearly
£50;73
| 73 Reckoning the 1000
sesterces at the post-Augustan value, £7, 16s. 3d. | which led Æsopus the actor to preserve in
his pantry a dish of the value of nearly £800, made up of birds of
the selfsame costliness (as the mullet aforesaid), consisting of all
the songsters and talkers; which led his son, after such a titbit, to
have the hardihood to hunger after somewhat yet more sumptuous:
for he swallowed down pearls—costly even on the ground of their
name—I suppose for fear he should have supped more beggarly than
his father. I am silent as to the Neros and Apicii and
Rufi. I will give a cathartic to the impurity of a Scaurus, and
the gambling of a Curius, and the intemperance of an Antony. And
remember that these, out of the many (whom I have named), were men of
the toga—such as among the men of the pallium you would not
easily find. These purulencies of a state who will eliminate and
exsuppurate, save a bemantled speech?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
