PLINY
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[6] You will smile, and well
you may. I, whom you know so well, have caught three boars, and very fine ones
at that. Me? you say. Yes, but without altogether abandoning my leisure for
study and repose. I was sitting by the hunting nets; close at hand was not the
spear or the javelin, but the pen and wax tablets; and I was contemplating
something and making notes, so that even if I returned with empty hands, I
should at least have my tablets filled. (2) There
is no reason why you should look down on this kind of exercise; it is
remarkable how the mind is stirred by the activity and movement of the body;
and now the woods on all sides, coupled with solitude and that very silence which
is granted to hunting – these are powerful inducements to thought. (3) And so when you go out hunting, you may with
my advice take your wax tablets along your bread satchel and wine flask: you
will find that Minerva wanders in the hills no less than Diana.
[27] Our leisure affords both
me the chance to learn and you the chance to teach me. So I should very much
like to know whether you think that ghosts exist, and have a form of their own
and some kind of divine power, or that they are insubstantial and illusory and
take shape [only] from our fears. (2) For
myself, I am led to believe that they exist in particular from what I hear
happened to Curtius Rufus. While still a man of little importance and unknown,
he had attached himself as a companion to the man who gained [by lot] the
governorship of Africa. One afternoon he was walking up and down in the
colonnade [of his house] when there appeared to him the figure of a woman, of
superhman size and beauty. She said to the frightened man that she was [the spirit
of] Africa, foreteller of the future: for he would return to Rome and hold
office, and then return with supreme authority to the same provice, and there
die. Everything happened [as she predicted]. (3) Moreover the story is told that when he was
visiting Carthage and stepping out of the boat, the same figure met him on the
shore. Certainly when stricken by disease, interpreting his future from the
past, and misfortune from good fortune, he discarded all hope of recovery,
though none of his people despaired of his life.
[6] I have been spending all
this time with my writing-tablets and journals in most welcome peace. "How
could you," you will say, "in the City?" The Circus-games were
on, a spectacle of the type which draws me not in the slightest. There is
nothing new in it, nothing different, nothing in it that it would not be enough
to have seen only once. (2) So I am
all the more surprised that so many thousands of men should so childishly and
repeatedly love to watch horses galloping and men setting foot upon chariots.
If, indeed, they were attracted by the speed of the horses or the drivers'
skill, there would be some sense in it; but in fact it is the dress that they
support, the dress that they like; and if, during an actual race and in the middle
of a contest, the parties' respective colours were to be exchanged, they will
transfer their enthusiasm and support and instantly desert those famous drivers
and horses which they recognise from afar and whose names they are shouting. (3) Such is the influence and power in one
worthless shirt - I don't mean with the crowd, which is worth even less than
the shirt, - but with certain respectable people. When I reflect that these
people are so insatiably idle in what is a futile, dull and common business, I
take a certain pleasure in the fact that I am not taken in by this pleasure. (4) And
I am very glad to be devoting my leisure to literary pursuits during these
days, which others are wasting in the idlest of occupations. Farewell.