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Member 3 Against Poverty and Want and Other Such Adversities

Good sir, I am a servant—to use Seneca’s words—but still your humble friend; a servant, yet your companion under the same roof, and, if you think more carefully, your fellow servant. In the world’s eyes I am your drudge, but perhaps in God’s sight I am your better: my soul is more precious, and I am dearer to him.

“Even slaves are objects of the gods’ care,” as Evangelus proves at length in Macrobius: the humblest servant is most precious in his sight.

You are an Epicure; I am a good Christian. You are many leagues ahead of me in means, favour, wealth, and honour: a Narcissus to Claudius, a Massa to Nero, a Parthenius to Domitian, a favourite, a golden slave. You cover your floors with marble, your ceilings with gold, your walls with statues, fine pictures, exquisite tapestries, and so on. What of it all? “You tread upon riches,” and so forth: what does any of this have to do with true happiness?

I live and breathe beneath that glorious sky, nature’s majestic Capitol. I enjoy the brightness of the stars, the clear light of sun and moon, the countless creatures, plants, birds, beasts, fish, and herbs: everything sea and land provide, far surpassing all that art and wealth can give.

I am free; and, as Seneca said of Rome, “A roof sheltered free men; afterwards slavery lived beneath marble and gold.” You possess Amalthea’s horn: abundance, pleasure, the world at your command. I am despised and poor. But a rash word, a blow struck in anger, a game of tables, a loss at sea, a sudden fire, the ruler’s displeasure, a brief illness, and so on, may make us equals in an instant.

Meanwhile, enjoy your moment; triumph and lord it over me for a while. “Ashes make us equal,” as Alfonso said: death will make us all equal at last. In the meantime I live frugally, dress plainly, and eat poor food. Is that a disgrace? Am I the worse for it? Does it make me contemptible? Am I to be blamed?

A learned man in Nevizzano was rebuked for sitting among gentlemen, but replied, “My nobility is about my head; yours descends towards the tail.” They fell silent. Let them mock, sneer, and abuse you: their scorn falls on the one who made you as you are. “Whoever mocks the poor reproaches their maker,” Proverbs 11:5, “and whoever rejoices at affliction will not go unpunished.”

For the rest, the poorer you are, the happier you are. “He is richer, but not better,” says Epictetus: richer than you, not better, nor so free from lust, envy, hatred, and ambition.

Happy the man who, far from business, Ploughs his ancestral fields with his own oxen.

Happy because he is free from the world’s turmoil: he seeks no honours, hungers for no advancement, neither flatters nor envies nor trims his conduct to the times, but lives privately, well content with his condition.

He nourishes neither greedy hopes nor empty care in his heart, Untroubled by how the fates may fall.

He is untroubled by affairs of state: whether kingdoms prosper better through hereditary succession or election; whether monarchies should be mixed, limited, or absolute. The Ottoman and Austrian houses are all the same to him. He does not inquire about colonies or new discoveries; whether Peter was in Rome, or Constantine’s Donation has legal force; what comets or new stars signify; whether the earth stands still or moves; whether there is a new world in the moon, or infinitely many worlds, and so on. He is untouched by fear of invasions, factions, or rivalries.

Happy in spirit, and most like the gods themselves, Is he whom glory, glittering in corrosive paint, does not entice, Nor the evil pleasures of arrogant luxury; He lets his days pass quietly and, living simply, Spends an innocent life in tranquil silence.

A happy soul, like God himself, Worn down neither by vain glory nor by strife, Nor by the wicked pleasures of that proud, swollen wealth, But leading a quiet, poor, contented life.

He enjoys a safe, quiet, blissful condition, if only he could recognise it.

But here is the misery: he refuses to recognise it. He envies the rich their wealth, splendid tapestries, and delicate food. As Simonides puts it to Hiero, the rich man has all the pleasures of the world: “He sleeps on ivory beds, drinks wine from bowls, and anoints himself with the finest ointments”; he knows nothing of Joseph’s affliction, stretching himself on ivory beds and singing to the sound of the viol.

It troubles him that he has nothing like it. There is a difference, he grumbles, between thin porridge and pheasants, between tossing in straw and lying on a down mattress, between wine and water, a cottage and a palace.

He hates nature, as Pliny describes him, for making him lower than a god, and is angry with the gods that anyone ranks above him. Although he has received much, as Seneca continues, he thinks himself wronged because he has not received more. Far from giving thanks for his tribuneship, he complains that he is not a praetor; nor does that satisfy him unless he can become consul.

Why is he not a prince, a monarch, an emperor? Why should one man have so much more than his fellows, one have everything and another nothing? Why should one man be another’s slave or drudge? Why should one gorge himself and another starve, one live at ease and another labour without any hope of better fortune? So they grumble, mutter, and complain, without considering the instability of human affairs, judiciously comparing one condition with another, or properly weighing their own present circumstances.

What they are now, you may soon become; and what you are, they may well become. Wait a little; compare the future and the past with the present, consider the outcome, and take comfort from it. This can be seen as clearly in commonwealths, cities, and families as in the circumstances of private individuals.

6706.The argument adapts Seneca, Letter 47.1, rather than the margin’s 74, changing Seneca’s statements about slaves into the servant’s first-person appeal. The first marginal clause is unclear in the scan and provisionally transcribed sumne; its intended human-equality claim is clear from the cited parallel. “Servant” overlaps with the ancient condition of slavery.

6707.Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.11.1–14: Praetextatus defends slaves’ humanity and divine care against Evangelus’s objection. Burton assigns the defence to Evangelus instead. The dagger before Macrobius has no separately identifiable marginal entry and is retained; the later Letters 66 and 90 entry belongs with Seneca.

6708.“Epicure” here means a pleasure-seeker, not a neutral label for Epicurus’s philosophy. A parasang is an ancient distance measure; “many leagues” preserves the comparison without imposing a precise conversion. The named imperial favourites, especially “Nero’s Massa,” require historical collation. “Curious” means exquisitely wrought.

6710.Compare Seneca, Letter 90.10: culmus, “straw,” sheltered free men, while slavery lives beneath marble and gold. Burton prints culmen, “roof,” adds postea, and changes habitat to habitavit; the modern rendering follows him. Amalthea’s horn is the horn of plenty. “Tables” is a board game of the backgammon family.

6712.“Insult” means triumph or exult over someone, not merely speak abusively. Cinis æquat means ashes make equal. The attribution to Alfonso through Panormita remains to be checked against the cited work.

6714.The head-and-tail reply contrasts intellectual worth with inherited status. The Nevizzano anecdote needs collation. The scriptural quotation is Proverbs 17:5, not the printed 11:5; Burton’s reference is retained in the modern column and corrected here.

6716.Compare Epictetus, Enchiridion 44: greater wealth does not establish that a person is better. Burton extends the point into his claim about poverty and freedom from passions. The marginal collectior means more composed or collected within oneself; it does not literally mean poorer.

6717.Horace, Epodes 2.1 and 3, with the intervening line omitted. In the full poem the praise of rural life is eventually revealed as the speech of a moneylender who returns to lending. Burton extracts it as consolation; the omitted line is not silently supplied.

6719.The Pliny margin adapts Letters 7.26.2, a description of conduct during illness, here transferred to the contented poor man. Burton’s qualitercunque relictus differs from Pliny’s quantulumcumque, ut relicturus. “Temporize” means accommodate oneself opportunistically to prevailing circumstances.

6720.Poliziano, Rusticus 24–25. Burton prints Nec twice where the consulted text has Non and substitutes fata, “fates,” for sceptra, “sceptres.” The modern translation follows his wording; the political context of the original helps explain the following paragraph.

6721.“Mixt” and “temperate” distinguish mixed or limited forms of monarchy from absolute rule. The Ottoman and Austrian houses are rival dynastic powers. Peter’s presence at Rome and Constantine’s Donation are controversies about ecclesiastical authority. Burton includes contemporary cosmological questions in the catalogue of worries the contented man escapes.

6724.Poliziano, Rusticus 17–21. Burton prints mordaci, “biting” or “corrosive,” for mendaci, “deceptive”; the modern version retains that difficult image. His separate English rendering replaces the plural gods with God and adds “strife.” The Gyges story is in Valerius Maximus 7.1.2, not the printed 1.7.

6727.Compare Xenophon, Hiero 1: Simonides supposes rulers enjoy greater pleasures, but Hiero argues that their pains are greater and their pleasures fewer. This is a literary dialogue, compared here in English translation. The z note actually quotes Horace, Satires 1.6.128–129, on freedom from ambition. The following luxury images adapt Amos 6:4–6: ivory beds, wine, ointments, music and indifference to Joseph’s affliction.

6728.“Laplolly,” a form of loblolly, is thin porridge or gruel. “Brave” means splendid, and “repine” means fret or complain enviously. The sequence gives concrete voice to objections against Burton’s praise of poverty.

6731.Tribune, praetor, and consul are Roman public offices, here forming a ladder of unsatisfied ambition. Seneca, On Anger 3.31.1–2, supplies the complaint that receiving much still seems insufficient and the progression from praetor to consul. Burton adapts it, adding the tribuneship. The exact Pliny formulation remains unlocated in the consulted opening of Natural History 7.

6732.“Judicially conferring” means judiciously comparing; “estate” means one’s condition or circumstances. Burton answers the complaints by invoking the instability of fortune, which becomes the following discussion’s subject. His account of poverty remains a consolatory argument, including its tensions and sweeping judgements.