Of the Parsimony of the Ancients

What strikes me most in the great men of antiquity — and I mean here not the philosophers, who might be expected to cultivate poverty as a doctrine, but the generals and statesmen — is how little they permitted themselves by way of personal luxury, and how deliberately this restraint was maintained. Scipio Africanus, who had conquered Carthage and commanded armies that made the world tremble, ate plainly and kept a plain house. Fabricius, offered a bribe of great value by Pyrrhus’s ambassador, said only that he would rather command men who had gold than have gold himself — and sent the ambassador away. Cincinnatus was ploughing his own small farm when the messengers arrived to tell him he was dictator of Rome.

These were not poor men in the sense of having no access to wealth. They were rich men who had chosen frugality, which is a very different thing. The man who is frugal because he has nothing is simply making a virtue of necessity; there is no credit in it. The man who is frugal in the midst of abundance, who has tasted luxury and set it aside, who keeps his habits plain while his treasury is full — this man has done something that requires not only self-knowledge but a constant, daily exercise of will.

“The ancients understood that desire, once indulged, does not diminish. It grows. The man who refuses the first luxury is not depriving himself — he is preserving the ability to be satisfied with what he has, which is the most useful capacity a man can maintain.”

I confess I have not lived up to this standard myself. I keep a comfortable house, I eat well, I have spent money on books when I might have spent it more virtuously. But I respect the standard, and I believe the ancients were right to hold it. There is a freedom in frugality that expenditure purchases at great price and never quite delivers — the freedom of the man who can do without, who is not the prisoner of his own tastes and comforts, who can travel light through whatever fortune brings him. The extravagant man is, in a deep sense, never fully at liberty. His needs have become his master.