Ancient & modern
IN a message for World Tourism Day, the Pope argued that the purpose of tourism should be to help people 'discover themselves and others' by experiencing 'other ways of life, religions and ways of looking at the world'. The younger Seneca (Al) 1-65), millionaire philosopher and briefly adviser to Nero, would have disagreed. He thought that travel was largely pointless.
In Letter CIV to his friend Lucilius, Seneca begins by discussing the effects of his retreat to his villa at Nomentum, ten miles north-east of Rome. Seneca's health was not good, and, while he agrees that he is feeling physically all the better for it, he goes on to point out that a mere location is not enough by itself to deliver benefits; only mastery of the mind will do that. He tells the story of someone complaining to Socrates that travelling abroad had never done him any good, to which Socrates replied, 'Not very surprising, really, since you took yourself along with you.'
Seneca's conclusion is that, if a man really wants to change and escape the things that trouble him, he needs not to be in a different place, but to be a different person. 'Suppose you have arrived in Athens or Rhodes [the height of sophistication for Romans]; suppose you have arrived anywhere you like — what difference does the character of the place make? You will be bringing to it your own.'
If one is racked by fears of poverty, lust for honours, or terror of death, tourism will not help. Travel, he argues, has never helped anyone check his impulses, control his temper or develop sound judgment. It merely makes an already unstable mind yet more unstable, and therefore dissatisfied. All it does is 'distract us for a while through the novelty of our surroundings, like children fascinated by something they have not come across before'.
Not that there is anything wrong with seeing new sights, Seneca goes on: the Nile and the Tigris are jolly interesting. Tut this information will not make us better or saner. To do that, we ought rather to spend our time in study and in reading the writings of wise men; we should try to make sense of the truths they have discovered, while searching for truths as yet undiscovered ourselves. This is the way to free the mind from its miserable slavery and win it into freedom.'
A mere change of scenery cannot cure a disordered mind any more than it can a broken leg, says Seneca. Perhaps the Pope should start offering real holidays in the Vatican Library.
Peter Jones
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