Sundays with Seneca
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On Style and Character
In a letter known today as On Style as a Mirror to Character, Seneca wrote,
You have been asking me why, during certain periods, a degenerate style of speech comes to the fore, and how it is that men’s wits have gone downhill into certain vices—in such a way that exposition at one time has taken on a kind of puffed-up strength, and at another has become mincing and modulated like the music of a concert piece. You wonder why sometimes bold ideas—bolder than one could believe—have been held in favor, and why at other times, one meets with phrases that are disconnected and full of innuendo, into which one must read more meaning than was intended to meet the ear. Or why there have been epochs which maintained the right to a shameless use of metaphor. For the answer, here is a phrase that you are wont to notice in the popular speech—one which the Greeks have made into a proverb: “Man’s speech is just like his life.”
Exactly as each individual man’s actions seem to speak, so people’s style of speaking often reproduces the general character of the time, if the morale of the public has relaxed and has given itself over to unmanly behavior. Recklessness in speech is proof of public luxury, if it is popular and fashionable, and not confined to one or two individual instances.
A man’s ability cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul is wholesome, well-ordered, serious, and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is also contaminated. […]
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