For whoever dreads what cannot be avoided can by no means live with a quiet and tranquil mind.
-From Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Book 2
The Month Quintilis, being renamed July
Around the time Cicero was writing the Tusculan Disputations, Julius Caesar was completing his final campaign against the Pompeians thus ending the civil war Rome had been plunged into by Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon.
As I have been reading through the Tusculan Disputations (now available for free on Standard Ebooks), an over arching impression has stuck with me: So often in my English protestant and Spanish Catholic upbringing on the furthest flung edges of those two influences seated between San Diego and Tijuana, I was taught that the spirit was silent during the time between Malachi and Matthew. This teaching while proven false by the Maccabean books alone, has continued to be unsettling in my pursuits of classical literature from both Greek and Roman sources. It is in the classical sources ones finds the Spirit at work in the elites of a republic soon to be an empire; their hearts and minds, evidenced in their writings, are entertaining thoughts of an eternal soul inhabiting a finite body. An all wise man who has not yet come. A nuanced understanding of labor and pain, adding another stone to the structure of understanding one must have when considering sacrifice.
As we move from the month of Julius to the month of his adopted son and first emperor Augustus, we should reflect on our relationship with time. While those of us still in allegiance to Christ know our year to be anno Domini, the concept of pain applied to time is one heavy weight to work under.
I myself am still daily enduring the pain from the injury received now almost 2 months ago to my left leg. How much longer until I return to normal? How long until I am healed?
Cicero and Caesar were contemporaries in a time with a different anchor on the concept of a year. Anno Urbis Conditae, in English, “in the year since the city's founding”, anchored the passing of time to the origins of the state. It’s telling the study of time to those in antiquity was that of music! Consider that all their worship was ultimately unto the state.
In light of this, it is humbling to receive that the State, my state or anyone else’s State will not heal me. While they may dole out free grain for a time, in a way their own sacrament, ultimately the State isn’t worth our adoration.
Caesar and Cicero would both be murdered shortly after these writings, and murdered by some of the most prominent men on behalf of the state! And of course it was Christ who had to be handed over by the highest man designated by the State to be sent to the cross.
But I don’t want to ramble. I’m already a day late on delivering these notes to you. And hope you’ll consider pain and time today that what we choose to endure and how we measure that endurance speaks volumes to the coordinates of our heart.
I’ll leave you with this excerpt, as it brought a smile to me to know Latin men had something spicy to say about other languages long before me!
There is some difference between labor and pain. They border upon one another, but still there is a certain difference between them. Labor is a certain exercise of the mind or body, in some employment or undertaking of serious trouble and importance; but pain is a sharp motion in the body, disagreeable to our senses. Both these feelings, the Greeks, whose language is more copious than ours, express by the common name of Πόνος. Therefore they call industrious men painstaking, or, rather, fond of labor; we, more conveniently, call them laborious, for laboring is one thing, and enduring pain another. You see, O Greece! your barrenness of words sometimes, though you think you are always so rich in them. I say, then, that there is a difference between laboring and being in pain. When Caius Marius had an operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he felt pain; when he headed his troops in a very hot season, he labored. Yet these two feelings bear some resemblance to one another, for the accustoming ourselves to labor makes the endurance of pain more easy to us. And it was because they were influenced by this reason that the founders of the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of their youth should be strengthened by labor—which custom the Spartans transferred even to their women, who in other cities lived more delicately, keeping within the walls of their houses; but it was otherwise with the Spartans:
The Spartan women, with a manly air,
Fatigues and dangers with their husbands share;
They in fantastic sports have no delight,
Partners with them in exercise and fight.
-From Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Book 2