“Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Let it never be said that Clive Staples Lewis shied away from the most confronting topics.

Indeed during the Second World War, C.S. Lewis was a regular voice on BBC Radio, broadcasting a series of ten to fifteen minute talks on questions of morality and faith to wartime Britain. The talks proved enormously popular, and would later be adapted into one of his most important works outside of the Chronicles of Narnia — Mere Christianity.

As part of this series, on the 11th October 1942 Lewis spoke on the specific topic of Sexual Morality, in which he presented a remarkably frank case for chastity, and why the modern world has made it even more important to pursue this seemingly archaic virtue.

So today, we explore what C.S. Lewis can teach you about how to remain chaste in an unchaste world, and why you should…

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Chastity or Modesty?

As Lewis states, "Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues”. It flies so completely in the face of what modern Western society promotes that it has made even ostensibly devout Christians feel vulnerable when championing it. It is for this very reason however that it is crucial to stop surrendering this ground, which simply leaves a vacuum that malign actors have already begun occupying.

Lewis begins however by reminding us that while Christian chastity and social modesty are often conflated, they are not the same thing. One is a fixed virtue, and the other is contextual, and confusion over this has needlessly muddied the moral waters. Chastity, after all, is tied to a single specific act. There is no fudging the issue. Modesty, however, is generally tied to mutable perceptions of language and dress, which vary according to era, culture and climate. Lewis asserts that a person’s modesty, therefore, can only really be judged by their intent:

“When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Consequently, the problem is not when somebody carelessly leaves a button undone, but when somebody purposefully breaks societal rules simply for shock value, to make others uncomfortable or to “excite lust”. In other words, when it is intentional over accidental sin. Being excessively prudish over the latter needlessly undermines the prosecution of the former.

Since chastity is a personal choice of wholly personal responsibility, while modesty is largely dependent on external factors, Lewis advises us to be charitable in judging somebody who may only be passively rather than actively immodest:

“While this confusion lasts I think that old, or old-fashioned, people should be very careful not to assume that young or “emancipated” people are corrupt whenever they are (by the old standard) improper; and, in return, that young people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Ultimately, conflating modesty with chastity is unhelpful as it distracts us from the actual virtue of the latter, and what really corrupts it…

The Purpose of Sexuality

Arguably the most contested frontline in the war for the Western soul, especially since the 1960’s, is the question of whether life is sacred. Directly connected to this is its obvious continuation — is the act of creating life sacred too?

“The old Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.

But I have other reasons for thinking so.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

One of the great virtues of C.S. Lewis, which propelled him into one of the most respected voices in Christianity of the last century, was his ability to translate theology into endearing and everyday language, with highly relatable examples. On sexual morality, he was no different, comparing the sexual appetite to that of food:

“The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Even leaving any theological considerations aside, and looking at the matter with basic practical honesty, “This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function”. Like all appetites, it shifts in scope in response to our conscious decisions and actions:

“The sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Again like all appetites, when it is fed beyond what its original purpose calls for, the returns diminish, and the damage spirals. Yet while the glutton’s vice is plainly visible in his physical build, that of the unchaste is not made less serious simply by its concealment to the eye:

“You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Which brings us to core of Lewis’s broadcast — addressing the encroaching societal lies that are currently corrupting sexuality, and how chastity can both counter them and make you stronger…

The Lies That Corrupt Sexuality

In unusually direct words, Lewis explains why it is essential to talk about this:

“I am sorry to have to go into all these details, but I must. The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

84 years have passed since Lewis spoke these words, and the wisdom behind them has only grown. So too, alas, has the vigour with which sexual immorality has been promoted, which all began with the seemingly innocuous idea that ‘liberalising’ sexuality — and therefore indulging an appetite that struggles to limit itself — would make for a more contented society. But this line of thinking in itself became an appetite, as Lewis describes:

“They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

The more ‘liberalised’ sexuality has become, the more ‘sexual inflation’ has risen. With every decade that has passed, the more mainstream media has resembled the pornography of yesteryear, as if the philosophy were ‘things are out of control, so the solution is to further slacken controls’. This, of course, is charitably assuming that the liberalisation of sexuality has been promoted by political, civic and media pressure out of good intentions, and not out of a deliberate desire by third party actors to corrupt and fragment society.

Lewis, therefore, is invoking G. K. Chesterton’s proverbial fence — the idea that a social norm or custom should never be abolished until the reasons why that custom existed in the first place are properly understood. Pre-world war society did not frown upon unchecked sexuality because it ‘didn’t understand it’. It did so off the back of generations of accumulated understanding of how destructive to both individuals and society unleashed animal instinct could be.

Regardless of the reasons why this is really happening, however, Lewis brings the discussion back to us as individuals:

“I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

A moral lapse risks a cascade. A man who stumbles in sin will almost certainly drown in it without exceptional personal will, or a highly supportive community ready and eager to help. As Lewis points out, an entire moneyed industry is out there ready to pounce on any who have stumbled, and whose business model profits directly from their drowning.

Once again, we do not even need to enter deep theology. On a purely practical and earthly level, succumbing to such pressures as these will make you vulnerable to worse ones, as your appetites spiral into costly addiction.

So how can we ourselves course-correct, and raise a shield against this widening panorama of temptation?

How to Embrace Chastity

“Before we are cured, we must want to be cured”, Lewis reminds us. It is not going to happen if you simply sit back and hope things get better. We cannot know how long the wider war will continue. Decades of worsening societal conditioning could still be ahead of us. So for us individually, it has to begin now, with a conscious decision.

It must of course be a serious decision. Here Lewis invokes one of the grandest examples in history of a wayward man who went on to embrace a life of chastity — Saint Augustine of Hippo. Later in his life, the saint reflected upon his failed attempts to escape temptation in youth, realising that had failed because they were half-hearted, encapsulated by the infamous yet relatable words:

“Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.”

Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, VIII.7

Three things had stood between Augustine and chastity. As Lewis explains, the same three things stand between us and chastity too:

1 - Reject the Normalisation of Vice

“Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so “natural”, so “healthy,” and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

As suggested above, the proliferation of messaging, teaching and imagery corrosive to sexual virtue in the Western world — which Lewis was already noticing in 1942 — has now continued for so long and to such an extent that it is no longer tenable to simply write it off as innocent, accidental or experimental.

However, it is critical to understand that the primary aim of this propaganda is not to convince you that perversions are right, but that they are normal. The greatest deception of Satan, it is said, lies in convincing the world he does not exist. So too is convincing you, through decades of demoralisation propaganda, that what you are seeing is natural, forcing your animal subconscious to therefore view it as desirable.

The way it works, of course, lies in glamorising the act, yet grafting onto it a false consequence. ‘Find yourself’, it says, encouraging you to share your body with many others. ‘You can settle down later’, it reassures you, quietly muffling the damage this will all do to your ability to effectively pair bond, or ever find contentment with the lone spouse you will need to raise your children.

Understand, therefore, that what is happening is being purposefully guided, and view the sources of it no differently than you would a fraudster trying to clone your credit card. What is being promoted is not normal, and the illusion of normality persists only because the majority, who are in truth as repulsed as you, fear censure for saying it publicly. When the darkness does eventually lift, you will be surprised at how many others had remained awake all along too.

In order to be chaste therefore, you must first stop allowing societal forces which do not have your best interests at heart to tell you what kind of being you are…

2 - Stop Pretending Chastity is Impossible

“In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a compulsory question, one must do the best one can. You may get some marks for a very imperfect answer: you will certainly get none for leaving the question alone.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Along with the glorification of vice, virtue is either ridiculed or dismissed as unachievable, to further sell the deception that vice is natural and that it is futile to resist it. Many are the metaphors for this, and that of Lewis — of leaving a difficult exam question blank instead of trying and potentially getting it right — is fabulously quaint.

It should be emphasised again that chastity does not and has never meant total abstinence from sex. It means the moderation of it and the practice of it within an environment that closes off the possibility of long term damage to either the parties directly involved or the broader community, while ensuring only the positive consequences remain. This of course, is perfectly possible — it has been the default lifestyle for much of the arc of our civilisation.

Of course our ancestors sinned. Fornication and infidelity occurred even at the highest strata of society. But it was recognised at the time as scandalous, invited public condemnation, and was never celebrated as a viable life choice. Invariably, it also carried consequence, either in legal or social repercussions.

Our ancestors were tempted, but they married young, and thus their instinct had already been channelled into healthy outlets by the age at which many today begin their years of temptation. The age at which marriage occurs, and the expense it incurs, are social and economic factors, not religious ones. It is precisely the culture of liberalised sexuality that has fed its own appetite, prolonging and deepening temptation by encouraging people to put off marriage.

Practising chastity may be challenging. But as Lewis emphasises, just because something is challenging does not make it impossible, especially if artificial obstacles are inflating the actual difficulty:

“Not only in examinations but in war, in mountain climbing, in learning to skate, or swim, or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff collar with cold fingers, people quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

3 - Know that Self Control is Not Repression

It is often argued that chastity is a form of ‘unhealthy suppression’. The final recognition therefore is that you do not, in fact, have to accept a binary choice between absolute denial or wanton profligacy.

As Lewis has already pointed out, sexuality is an appetite, and both starvation and gluttony are equally damaging. The chaste man, therefore, has succeeded in balancing the equation by bringing his desire under control instead of allowing his desire to control him:

“On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue — even attempted virtue — brings light; indulgence brings fog.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

To embrace chastity, therefore, is not a ‘self-punishment’. It is an investment in your person to prevent your desires from experiencing runaway inflation.

The Centre of Moral Gravity?

With all of this said, Lewis concludes his talk with a reassuring note. That despite the tremendous stigmas that surround discussion of sexuality, and the false presentation of Christianity as an overly stern policeman on the matter:

“The centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

As before, we must be careful not to judge a man for sins he can yet redeem, especially if our own are in fact more serious. We as humans are defined by the ‘Animal’ and the ‘Diabolical’ selves. A stumble of chastity is an ‘animal’ sin, and a Christian should always be ready to forgive a stumble that is earnestly admitted. Intentional cruelty, spite and arrogance however are ‘diabolical’, and are unambiguously worse, though this does not let the animal sins off the hook:

“That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.”

C.S. Lewis, Sexual Morality, Mere Christianity III.5

Chastity, therefore, is both desirable and obtainable, and it is never too late to take back control of yourself…

2,779 years ago today, the city of Rome was founded, and the principal taproot of the Western world was planted.

Yet as Romulus marked the boundaries of his new city, few present on the 21st April 753 BC could have imagined that the rustic plot of land before them would one day be the seat of an empire widely revered as the apex of civilisation. But it did, and many of the reasons why are due precisely to the character of its founder.

One year ago, we considered the wider story of Rome’s foundation. In a special piece today, we take an in-depth look at Romulus specifically and how the three key virtues that he embodied shaped both his kingship and the character of the Roman people themselves…

1 - Iustitia - The Pursuit of Justice

Both Romulus and Remus may have been born to an exalted lineage, but they grew up in the most humble of settings. Before their eighteenth birthday, as far as either knew they were the sons of a lowly shepherd, and lived accordingly. As a result, Rome’s first and founding king was the living fusion of classes — noble in bearing yet commoner in upbringing:

“When they came to be men, they showed themselves both in dignity of aspect and elevation of mind not like swineherds and neatherds, but such as we might expect those to be who are born of royal race and are looked upon as the offspring of the gods; and as such they are still celebrated by the Romans in the hymns of their country. But their life was that of herdsmen, and they lived by their own labour, generally upon the mountains in huts which they built, roofs and all, out of sticks and reeds”

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, I.79

The boys were not yet aware that they had been cheated out of their royal destiny when they were mere babies, when Amulius had usurped the Alban throne from their grandfather Numitor. Yet the misrule and injustice that had resulted was evident in the rampant crime that stalked the land, and both started to fight back against it:

“The children thus born and thus brought up, when arrived at the years of manhood, did not loiter away their time in tending the folds or following the flocks, but roamed and hunted in the forests. Having by this exercise improved their strength and courage, they not only encountered wild beasts, but even attacked robbers laden with plunder, and afterwards divided the spoil among the shepherds. And in company with these, the number of their young associates daily increasing, they carried on their business and their sports”

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, I.4

Romulus in particular however, who “seemed to exercise his judgement more, and to have political sagacity” (Plutarch, Life of Romulus, 6), was better able to rally the downtrodden of Latium to the cause.

When the boys turned eighteen, Remus was captured in an ambush set by a band of enraged robbers, and taken to Amulius. It was at this moment that the shepherd Faustulus at last revealed to Romulus his true identity and royal lineage. The only reason, however, that Romulus was well placed to do something about it, to rescue his brother and overthrow the usurper, was due to the years of credibility he had built up as somebody prepared to risk his life for the pursuit of justice. All of which had been done before he was presented with the opportunity of greatness.

His followers — the first ‘Roman army’ — were not a legion of professional soldiers, but a band of aggrieved farmers and outcasts who rallied not just to a man, but a cause that he believably championed. Only together were they able to overthrow Amulius.

It is indeed clear that the spectacular popularity Romulus would go on to enjoy with the ordinary people years later was precisely due to the fairness of his justice towards the powerful and powerless alike. During the brief period in which Romulus shared the kingship with the Sabine prince Titus Tatius, the sources are explicit that the former deservedly emerged as sole King of Rome due to his integrity in the face of his colleague’s corruption:

“In the fifth year of the reign of Tatius, some retainers and kinsmen of his, falling in with ambassadors from Laurentum on their way to Rome, attempted to rob them of their money,⁠ and when they would not stand and deliver, slew them. It was a bold and dreadful crime, and Romulus thought its perpetrators ought to be punished at once, but Tatius tried to put off and turn aside the course of justice. This was the sole occasion of open variance between them; in all other matters they acted in the utmost concert and administered affairs with unanimity. The friends of the slain ambassadors, shut out as they were from all lawful redress, through the efforts of Tatius, fell upon him as he was sacrifi­cing with Romulus at Lavinium, and killed him, but escorted Romulus on his way with loud praises of his justice.”

Plutarch, Life of Romulus, 23.1-3

It is clear too, that the justness of Romulus was instrumental in forging a unique Roman identity which stood out against its neighbours and established a moral weight to ‘Romanness’ itself:

“There was yet a third policy of Romulus, which the Greeks ought to have practised above all others, it being, in my opinion, the best of all political measures, as it laid the most solid foundation for the liberty of the Romans and was no slight factor in raising them to their position of supremacy. It was this: not to slay all the men of military age or to enslave the rest of the population of the cities captured in war or to allow their land to go back to pasturage for sheep, but rather to send settlers thither to possess some part of the country by lot and to make the conquered cities Roman colonies, and even to grant citizen­ship to some of them.”

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, II.16

It may seem a basic ethical advance today — to settle and commit to ‘Romanising’ conquered peoples rather than putting them to the sword — but for a ruler of a small city state in the 8th century BC to choose this, at a time when existential tribal wars were commonplace, was truly extraordinary.

Not for nothing therefore did the Romans go on to worship Iustitia (the origin of ‘Lady Justice’) as a goddess. Not for nothing, either, did multiple authors centuries later deplore the rapacious sackings of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC as heinous acts which fundamentally ruptured the Roman character and fatally tarnished the legitimacy of the Republic. As Velleius Paterculus put it, “The path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in headlong course” (History of Rome, 2.1).

Romulus was just, and at her height, so too was Rome. At the same time, the justice of the Roman state would be rooted in the most basic societal unit of all — the family…

2a - Pietas to Family

One of the chief Roman virtues, pietas, has an easy but misleading translation in English. It is the direct root of piety, but the Roman concept was far broader than pure religious devotion, and therefore far more significant on a societal level.

Pietas is better translated as duty, and with it the Romans intended obligation to the family and country as much as to the gods. Furthermore, by ‘family’ they did not simply mean your immediate relations, but your ancestors too. The image of Aeneas dutifully carrying his elderly father on his shoulders from the burning ruins of Troy is a potent image of pietas in classical mythology. More immediate to the first Romans, however, was the example of Romulus himself.

As mentioned previously Romulus had already distinguished himself before the Foundation of Rome by overthrowing the cruel Amulius from the throne of Alba Longa. A crucial detail that needs to be reiterated is that Romulus did not do this out of a personal quest for power. The uprising swelled due to the general injustice of Amulius, but the catalyst for Romulus taking up arms was the duty he owed to his captured brother, and moreover, his duty to avenge the injustice done to his mother and grandfather:

“When the youth heard every circumstance of their fortune from the beginning, he was touched both with compassion for his mother and with solicitude for Numitor. And after taking much counsel with Faustulus, he decided to give up his plan for an immediate attack, but to get ready a larger force, in order to free his whole family from the lawlessness of Amulius, and he resolved to risk the direst peril for the sake of the greatest rewards, but to act in concert with his grandfather in whatever the other should see fit to do.”

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, I.80

It is also crucial to reiterate that up until this point, Romulus did not know that Rhea Silvia or Numitor were in any way related to him. According to the prevailing accounts, it is only after Remus was captured that the shepherd Faustulus divulged this truth to him. Romulus, therefore, takes up arms not out of any sentiment towards the individuals, but out of pure pietas — duty to family because it is the right thing to do.

Fine, you may counter. But since he is still restoring his family to the monarchy, is this not simply indirect personal ambition?

No, it wasn’t. For a start, once the uprising is successful, and Amulius is slain, both Romulus and Remus immediately submit to Numitor and pledge absolute fealty to him, before removing themselves from the Alban royal succession:

“When the young princes, coming up with their band through the middle of the assembly, saluted their grandfather king, an approving shout, following from all the people present, ratified to him both that title and the sovereignty. Thus the government of Alba being committed to Numitor, a desire seized Romulus and Remus to build a city on the spot where they had been exposed and brought up.”

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, I.6

Romulus and Remus move to found a new city precisely to not intrude upon the governance of the city they had just liberated. There was no earthly reward for their deeds other than restoring the proper balance, and the knowledge that the evil committed against their house had been avenged.

One of the great achievements of Romulus as king was indeed his meshing of family and civic duty, resulting in one of the most characteristic aspects of Roman civilisation — the close bond between clients and their patrons. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus recounted, it was Romulus who first legislated this, establishing an explicitly paternal bond — patron and patrician after all deriving from pater (father) — between elites and their social inferiors:

“It was the duty of the patricians to explain to their clients the laws, of which they were ignorant; to take the same care of them when absent as present, doing everything for them that fathers do for their sons with regard both to money and to the contracts that related to money; to bring suit on behalf of their clients when they were wronged in connexion with contracts, and to defend them against any who brought charges against them; and, to put the matter briefly, to secure for them both in private and in public affairs all that tranquillity of which they particularly stood in need.”

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, II.10

In short, Romulus birthed the concept of noblesse oblige, recasting the cold and inhuman structure of the state into one massive extended and interconnected family. Thus did Romulus elevate pietas into a civic virtue, and needless to say, this played a fundamental role in establishing a uniquely Roman identity built on organic and meaningful social cohesion.

But you may be thinking that there is a large elephant in the room. After all, didn’t Romulus kill Remus? How could the murder of his own brother possibly square with pietas?

Perverse though it may initially sound, the death of Remus actually represents the other side of the pietas coin. Ironically, it reveals the one thing that superseded family duty in the eyes of the Romans…

Read more

I once asked my grandmother a simple question which received a profound answer.

“What would you say was the biggest difference between the world of today, and that of your childhood?”, I ventured. Since she had grown up in the rural Yorkshire of the 1930’s, matured under one world war and outlived the ‘Cold’ one, while witnessing much of the arc of Europe’s decay, I was fascinated to hear what she would choose.

To my then surprise, I was entirely taken aback when she replied almost immediately, with no reference at all to either technology or geopolitics.

“People were more content”, she spoke, with a forthright confidence tempered by a distinct flash of melancholy in her eye that I have never forgotten. It was not really until this moment that I had ever properly considered the meaning of the word ‘content’, and the simple yet critical distinction that separates ‘being content’ from ‘being happy’.

Yet over two millennia ago, one of the favoured poets of the Emperor Augustus wrote an iconic satire on exactly this subject.

So what does it mean to ‘be content’, and what can Horace teach us about the forgotten art of ‘being content’, and achieving a fulfilling life?

Is the Faraway Grass Greener?

Content, adjective - Pleased with your situation and not hoping for change or improvement

Key to the difference between contentedness and happiness is time. We are made ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ by emotional stimuli that tend to be temporary. To be ‘content’, however, is by definition ‘long term’.

A miserable life can be punctuated by happy moments. A content life, however, maintains a positive baseline even in neutral gear. ‘Happy’ or ‘sad’ moments are merely deviations from a life already worth living. It is therefore important to distinguish between a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ day and a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ life. The challenge, of course, is that it is in our rawest nature to assume that we have been dealt the worst hand in life, especially when our judgement has been impaired by a bad day.

One could argue that this is ultimately the primary driver of human ambition, to aspire to a ‘better’ life. Horace indeed begins his Satire, in an address to his patron Maecenas, by aiming at precisely this:

“How come, Maecenas, no one alive’s ever content

With the lot he chose or the one fate threw in his way,

But praises those who pursue some alternative track?”

Horace, Satires, I.1

He proceeds to cite amusing yet timelessly relatable examples of men who wished they had a ‘better’ job:

“‘O fortunate tradesman!’ the ageing soldier cries

Body shattered by harsh service, bowed by the years.

The merchant however, ship tossed by a southern gale,

Says: ‘Soldiering’s better. And why? You charge and then:

It’s a quick death in a moment, or a joyful victory won’”

Horace, Satires, I.1

How many times do we find ourselves thinking ‘If only I had X, life would be better’?

A more common and contemporary incarnation of Horace’s merchant could be the man who looks with envy upon his peer who gets to ‘travel a lot’ with work. How splendid it must be, he understandably reasons, to escape stale rhythm and frequent distant lands, all on the company payroll?

His peer, however, may well return that envy, seeing that the promise of ‘travel for work’ failed to establish a fulfilling baseline to his work. He travels, yes, but has to wake up earlier, loses part of his weekend, and said ‘travel’ consists almost exclusively of the most unpleasant aspects of ‘travel’ — transit between airport and office and hours of waiting in stressful terminals — and finding that evenings are no respite from the working environment. How splendid it must be, he understandably reasons, to have a family home to return to each evening following a brief commute? I just want to relax!

So what if these men could suddenly switch lives? Horace asks that very question:

“Here’s what I’m getting at. If some god said: ‘Here I am!

Now I’ll perform whatever you wish: you be a merchant

Who but now was a soldier: you the lawyer become a farmer:

You change roles with him, he with you, and depart. Well!

What are you waiting for? They’d refuse, on the verge of bliss.

What in reason would stop Jove rightly swelling his cheeks

Then, in anger, and declaring that never again will he

Be so obliging as to attend to their prayers”

Horace, Satires, I.1

Few things indeed demean a man like complaining without correcting. Just how seriously have you considered the consequences, both intended and unintended, of that life you assume to be better than yours? If you would not accept in an instant the opportunity to take it, then that is the soul within you applying the brakes and warning you that you have not yet thought this through properly.

Turning your back on everything and chasing a new life could be the best thing you ever did. It could also be a disaster you will lament until the grave.

So how can we better judge what will bring us a contented life? As Horace declares, “joking aside, let’s turn to more serious thoughts”…

What Are We Working For?

Instead of allowing ourselves to be tempted by individual aspects of otherwise complex lifestyles, Horace advises greater introspection.

After all, how can we be sure that the life you covet is superior to the one you currently possess unless you are clear about what exactly it is you want to be working for?

“The farmer turning the heavy clay with sturdy plough,

The rascally shopkeeper, the soldier, the sailor

Who boldly sails the seas, all say they only do so

So as to retire in true idleness when they are old,

Having made a pile: just as their exemplar

The tiny labouring ant drags all she can together,

Adding what’s in her mouth to the heap she’s building,

Neither ignorant of nor careless of her tomorrow.”

Horace, Satires, I.1

There is perhaps no cliché more tired than ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness’. Not because it is not true, but primarily as we have abdicated genuine consideration of its meaning in favour of merely quoting the phrase. One man who did consider it, in extraordinary depth, was Aristotle, in a text we have previously explored at INVICTUS.

The insight of Horace, however, is no less relatable to the plight of modern man. As per his well-chosen metaphor, the man who is simply enduring a job, saving money in the hope of enjoying retirement, is no better than a worker ant. Arguably, however, it is worse. As humans, we are imbued with qualities which elevate us above the beasts, and forcing the life of an automaton upon the soul of a man is to force a square peg into a round hole.

If your job brings no joy beyond watching the savings rise in your bank account, you will never lead a content life, since the soul is fed yet going malnourished. Likewise, what good is placing your hopes in future happiness, if you endure a lifetime of ‘grind’ only to drop dead the day before your retirement? Is that really a gamble worth taking?

“Nothing deflects you from riches, not scorching heat, fire

Winter, sword or sea, while there’s a man richer than you.

Yet what good is all that mass of silver and gold to you,

If, fearful, you bury it secretly in some hole in the ground?

‘If I broke into it,’ you say, ‘ it would all be gone, to the last

Brass farthing.’ Yet if you don’t what’s the point of your pile?”

Horace, Satires, I.1

‘What is the point of your pile’ indeed? What are you actually saving for? If you know that the activity or possession you covet will improve your life, what is stopping you from claiming it now? Or more pressingly, if you do not possess it now, how can you be sure that it will improve your life at all?

The content man, after all, understands the most sincere sources of satisfaction are to be found in the everyday, not the rare occasion:

“Tell me then, what difference is there to the man

Who lives within Nature’s bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred

Acres or a thousand? ‘But it’s sweet to take from a big heap.’

Even so why praise your granaries more than our bins,

So long as we’re able to draw as much from the smaller?”

Horace, Satires, I.1

In order to be content, after all, we do not need anything like as much as we think. We spend exorbitantly in order to chase either thrill or peace. But thrill, as a temporary stimulation, by definition cannot be permanent. Peace however can, but can be achieved as readily in a comfortable chair in the garden or on a blanket in the park as on a distant beach.

What matters is that your source of peace is readily accessible in time and place, such that it can form a part of your daily life rather than an annual treat.

What Horace has to say next, however, is vital for identifying that peace. All it takes is two things….

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“A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

Fatherhood is, if nothing else, the highest stakes balancing act a man will face in his life.

When to step in, and when to step back, is the near daily judgement call of a father. Should he get it right, both father and child will grow. Should he get it wrong, the child will slip, and it is the father’s curse to live long enough to witness the fall.

Likewise with affection. How can a father express paternal love in a manner which fortifies his child instead of spoiling him?

It is a timeless question which has troubled men of all stations throughout history, and in the late 16th century, one French nobleman sought to answer it, in an aptly named essay titled Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children.

Here is what Michel de Montaigne can teach you about becoming a better father, and ensuring your family legacy lies in safe hands…

The Truth of Paternal Love

Fully a product of the French Renaissance, Michel Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne, received a classical education so rigorous that when he became a teenager, Latin was the only language he knew.

As a respected courtier of Kings Charles IX and Henry IV, Montaigne was also intimately familiar with the customs of aristocratic France, and he would draw upon all of this when he began to compose his grand inquiry into human nature — the Essays — in the 1570’s. Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, which forms Chapter VIII of the second book of the Essays, is indeed intended for an aristocratic audience.

Addressing his work to a certain Madame D’Estissac, the widow of a nobleman, he praises her lavishly for the devotion with which she has raised her son, the future Monsieur D’Estissac. The ‘cause’ of the essay is that son, and Montaigne hoped by his words to leave a record for him of the sacrifices which raised him. It is with a harsh truth that he thus begins:

“If there be any law truly natural, that is to say, any instinct that is seen universally and perpetually imprinted in both beasts and men (which is not without controversy), I can say, that in my opinion, next to the care every animal has of its own preservation, and to avoid that which may hurt him, the affection that the begetter bears to his offspring holds the second place in this rank”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

In other words, our most basic instinct is self-preservation, followed by the love of a parent for their child. Yet Montaigne observes, citing Aristotle, that it is the fate of a creator to love his creation more than that creation will ever love him in return:

“He who confers a benefit on any one, loves him better than he is beloved by him again: that he to whom is owing, loves better than he who owes; and that every artificer is fonder of his work, than, if that work had sense, it would be of him…

He who confers a benefit exercises a fine and honest action; he who receives it exercises the useful only”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

It is the natural order of things, therefore, for paternal love to be selfless, and it is futile for a father to expect his son to reciprocate that love equally. A father’s love, therefore, should serve to foster that same paternal love in his child, so that it will in turn be shown to his grandchild.

Montaigne develops this with a surprisingly cutting and bold observation. That a father should not confuse being taken in by the ‘cute’ stage of fatherhood, when the child is an infant, with actual paternal love:

“Tis oft-times quite otherwise; and, most commonly, we find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterwards, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men; and some there are, who are very liberal in buying them balls to play withal, who are very close-handed for the least necessary expense when they come to age.”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

By all means, we should play with our children. Montaigne’s point, however, is that we should not lose sight of the fact that the person they grow up to become afterwards is what everything hinges on. While maternal love is essential for infancy, paternal love grows in importance as the child departs it, and as he approaches autonomy.

A father who misjudges this crucial dynamic is heading for bitterness in old age, as his warped instinct laments his adult son’s loss of innocence, and sees him as his rival and not his successor:

“Nay, it looks as if the jealousy of seeing them appear in and enjoy the world when we are about to leave it, rendered us more niggardly and stingy towards them; it vexes us that they tread upon our heels, as if to solicit us to go out; if this were to be feared, since the order of things will have it so that they cannot, to speak the truth, be nor live, but at the expense of our being and life, we should never meddle with being fathers at all.”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

So how are we to avoid this trap, and cultivate fatherly affection in a manner constructive to both ourselves and our sons?

How a Father Can Fail

There are many ways in which we could judge the success or failure of fatherhood. An obvious one that many would cite today is the child spiralling into a life of crime and substance abuse.

Montaigne’s assertion however is arguably more helpful, as it establishes a metric for the father himself:

“Tis unjust that an old fellow, broken and half dead, should alone, in a corner of the chimney, enjoy the money that would suffice for the maintenance and advancement of many children, and suffer them, in the meantime, to lose their’ best years for want of means to advance themselves in the public service and the knowledge of men.”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

In other words, if a father feels he cannot trust his matured children to manage the family estate responsibly, and therefore clings onto it to the bitter end, paternal love has corrupted to paternal spite. Your role as father, as we have after all established, is not to ‘enjoy’ your time with your children, but to raise them into responsible heirs to your family legacy. That therefore is the sole benchmark of consequence when it comes to judging a father.

The death of a wholesome and successful father, Montaigne argues, should not be the moment of traumatic transition from one generation to the next. Passing on responsibility for the headship of the family should have occurred well in advance. The benefits, after all, are twofold. On the one hand, the father will be there to advise, and thus be able to steer the direction of the family. On the other, the son will not be thrown into the deep end without preparation, and will benefit from an apprenticeship of responsibility.

Furthermore, Montaigne argues that at the same time, it is particularly repugnant to horde wealth that our children could make better use of than ourselves:

“A man by this course drives them to despair, and to seek out by any means, how unjust or dishonourable soever, to provide for their own support: as I have, in my time, seen several young men of good extraction so addicted to stealing, that no correction could cure them of it”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

If the child is upstanding, well-intentioned and honed with correct morals, yet faced with an arbitrary barrier caused by financial want, the father should then step in if he possesses the means that would otherwise simply languish untouched in the bank.

A father who, conversely, insists on withholding everything until his death when he could have done otherwise, is, Montaigne argues, committing a double evil. Firstly, he is needlessly fostering a temptation to sin in his children. Secondly, and more damaging to himself, he is encouraging his children to view him as valuable only for what he will leave behind, in place of who he is here and now:

“A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection; he must render himself worthy to be respected by his virtue and wisdom, and beloved by his kindness and the sweetness of his manners; even the very ashes of a rich matter have their value; and we are wont to have the bones and relics of worthy men in regard and reverence. No old age can be so decrepid in a man who has passed his life in honour, but it must be venerable, especially to his children, whose soul he must have trained up to their duty by reason, not by necessity and the need they have of him, nor by harshness and compulsion”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

A father has failed in his affection, therefore, when he has made his children dependent on him by coercion and the imposition of arbitrary authority. It is quite logical as a result that Montaigne equates this with the use of force against a child, which he viewed as a perversion of paternal love which backfires far too often:

“I condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul that is designed for honour and liberty. There is I know not what of servile in rigour and constraint; and I am of opinion that what is not to be done by reason, prudence, and address, is never to be affected by force… I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more wilfully obstinate”

Michel de Montaigne, Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, II.8

Montaigne therefore has much wisdom to offer on the ‘youth’ phase of fatherhood. Yet what is arguably more important is the ‘mature’ phase of fatherhood. A father, after all, is the creator of a new generation, and it is a fundamental part of his duty to prepare himself and his family for the transition to that generation.

Crucially, as Montaigne argues, how a father passes the baton on is the difference between a family enduring in strength, and falling apart in acrimony.…

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“We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit”

Robert Falcon Scott, Letter To Sir J. M. Barrie, March 1912

To be a leader is to be responsible for others. What could be a more harrowing test for a leader, therefore, than the dread realisation that those he is responsible for are going to die, and there is absolutely nothing he can do to save them?

It is precisely this monstrous scenario which confronted Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the fateful Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, in the March of 1912.

Crushed by the disappointment of being beaten to the Pole by a rival team, Scott and his four companions would then be crushed by an Antarctic freeze whose fury exceeded all predictions of the time. Over weeks of torturous hardship, the expedition transformed into one of the most tragic last stands of Man against Nature in history.

It was too much for the human body to endure, and one by one, all five would perish in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. But from this tragedy a heroism emerged which would inspire a nation, and from his moving final acts, leave a case study of leadership in the face of doom.

So, 114 years after his heroic end, let us explore what Captain Scott’s extraordinary diaries and moving final letters can teach you about how a true leader faces certain failure…

At INVICTUS, our mission is to explore the practical wisdom you can learn from the greatest leaders, thinkers, and artists of the past, through their own words and deeds.

If this resonates with you then subscribe below to receive an in-depth article every week exploring how influential figures were able to achieve what they did, and how you can start following in their footsteps…

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What is Beyond Control is Beyond Worry

The 17th January 1912 should have been the crowning moment of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s life.

After 13 years of preparation, and 78 days fighting against the elements, himself and the four men of the Terra Nova expedition he had chosen — Henry Robertson Bowers, Edward Adrian Wilson, Edgar Evans and Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates — reached the South Pole. They were the first Englishmen to do so. To their dismay, however, they were not the first men.

On their approach, they had discovered Polheim, a tent crowned with a Norwegian flag, containing a letter which confirmed that a team led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the Pole by just five weeks. In his journal — which was recovered alongside his body many months later — Scott recorded his aching disappointment, and the shame he felt at having let down his companions:

“Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority”

Robert Falcon Scott, 17th January 1912

Only one team could ever be the first to the Pole. Finding out they had been denied the chance forever, knowing the pain it had taken to get here, and the thought of returning all the way to Britain as failures, must have been agonising. Regardless, Scott allowed himself only the briefest outburst, before doing all that was in his limited power to raise the men’s spirits:

“Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend tomorrow. We have had a fat Polar hoosh [A high-energy stew commonly eaten by polar explorers] in spite of our chagrin, and feel comfortable inside — added a small stick of chocolate and the queer taste of a cigarette brought by Wilson. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it”

Robert Falcon Scott, 17th January 1912

Hindsight, however, has rendered those last words exceptionally poignant. 862 miles on foot, across the world’s most inhospitable terrain, now stood between Scott’s team and salvation. Little did they know however, that the Antarctic summer of 1912 would be a rare anomaly, and one far worse than the experts who had advised Scott in London had even imagined was possible.

Scott’s foremost quality, however, was his acceptance of what was in his control, and what was not. There was nothing he could do to stop the plunge in temperatures to a crippling -40°C, nor prevent the horrifying consequences of the weather on his men. A week out from the Pole, Edward Wilson was struggling with snow blindness and Titus Oates was having problems walking, while Edgar Evans was suffering from blistered fingers, and his nose was frostbitten.

What he could do, however, was balance morale and progress. The days could be terrible, so Scott at least made sure the nights offered something to look forward to, as his later entry on the 4th March rather sums up:

“Things looking very black indeed. As usual we forgot our trouble last night, got into our bags, slept splendidly on good hoosh, woke and had another, and started marching”

Robert Falcon Scott, 4th March 1912

As long as Scott was keeping the men on track, fed and rested to the best of his ability and the means available, he was doing all he could. The tragedy of Terra Nova, however, was that the uncontrollable overpowered the controllable.

On the 4th February, both Scott and Evans plunged into a crevasse that opened up in front of them. While Scott miraculously avoided serious harm, the already suffering Evans evidently suffered a serious head injury, and would never be his normal self again. “A rather trying position. Evans has nearly broken down in brain, we think”, Scott wrote on the 16th. The next day, seeing Evans lagging behind, Scott went back for him, reaching him just as he collapsed in the snow. But there was nothing he or anyone could do for a man slipping into a coma in deepest Antarctica, except be with him in his most vulnerable moment. The 35 year old Edgar Evans died later that night surrounded by his comrades.

The unseasonable chill was a double curse to the Terra Nova team. Apart from the obvious danger to the men themselves, the friction caused by the ice crystals on the ground made it even harder to pull the sledges. Progress was demoralisingly slow, and every delay threw off the timings of the carefully organised expedition. As a result, when Scott and his men reached the Mount Hooper depot on the 9th March, hoping to meet supplies and salvation from the coast, they met ice and air:

“Yesterday we marched up the depot, Mt. Hooper. Cold comfort. Shortage on our allowance all round. I don’t know that anyone is to blame. The dogs which would have been our salvation have evidently failed. Meares had a bad trip home I suppose.”

Robert Falcon Scott, 10th March 1912

To this day, the conduct of Cecil Meares and the explanation for why he was not there remains debated. To his credit, Scott refused even in his own private diary to blame anybody. In any case, he knew that any reasons were irrelevant in that moment. He was there and the essential supplies were not.

As expedition leader, Scott now had to face the blunt truth that they did not have sufficient food or fuel to leave Antarctica alive. As a leader, his priority now was no longer survival, but legacy…

If You Cannot Save Lives, Save Memories

“No idea there could be temperatures like this at this time of year with such winds. Truly awful outside the tent. Must fight it out to the last biscuit, but can’t reduce rations.”

Robert Falcon Scott, 14th March 1912

The Mount Hooper depot had been among the last of Scott’s hopes, and so too that of the men. Two days later, when it became clear that reaching the next supply base, fifty five miles yonder at One Ton Depot, was all but a mathematical impossibility, Scott was forced to give the very worst of orders.

He commanded Wilson, who was in charge of the medicine, to hand each man 30 opium tablets, as “the means of ending our troubles to us, so that any one of us may know how to do so”. Nobody would be forced to endure a slow death, and a painless way out remained should they choose it. To their credit, when the bodies were later found, nobody had touched them. Time, however, was all but up.

On the 16th March, Oates, by now almost immobilised by frostbite and gangrene, and wracked by guilt at slowing the others down, committed a sacrifice which has since passed into immortality:

He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning—yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’. He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.”

Robert Falcon Scott on Lawrence Oates, 16th March 1912

Scott, unwilling to anchor a man to life who had already made his peace with death, did not stop him. What he did do, however, was turn his thoughts back to what little power did remain to him. He could no longer save his men’s lives. But he could save the memories their loved ones — and the world — would have of them. Trusting a search party would find their bodies one day, Scott began to write messages for the families of the men. In his diary entry for the 16th March, he wrote the following for Oates, who had been a veteran of the Boer War:

“Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates’ last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not — would not — give up hope to the very end”

Robert Falcon Scott on Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, 16th March 1912

What a comfort it would surely have been to Oates’ mother, to know her son had not died alone, and that he died a dutiful son and soldier.

Only a few more days passed before Scott, now suffering from debilitating frostbite himself, would need to write the others. Inching on through the blizzard, the last three of the Terra Nova got within just eleven miles of the next depot, before the storms grew too much. Immobilised in their tent, their life force drained over the last ten days of March. It would appear that Bowers was the next to go, and Scott wrote the following letter to his mother:

My Dear Mrs. Bowers,

I am afraid this will reach you after one of the heaviest blows of your life. I write when we are very near the end of our journey, and I am finishing it in company with two gallant, noble gentlemen. One of these is your son. He had come to be one of my closest and soundest friends, and I appreciate his wonderful upright nature, his ability and energy. As the troubles have thickened his dauntless spirit ever shone brighter and he has remained cheerful, hopeful, and indomitable to the end. The ways of Providence are inscrutable, but there must be some reason why such a young, vigorous and promising life is taken.

My whole heart goes out in pity for you.

Yours,

R. Scott

To the end he has talked of you and his sisters. One sees what a happy home he must have had and perhaps it is well to look back on nothing but happiness.

He remains unselfish, self-reliant and splendidly hopeful to the end, believing in God’s mercy to you

Robert Falcon Scott, Letter to Mrs Bowers, March 1912

It was as brief as the deep chill would allow, as the dying Scott raced to write to as many as he could. By the last days of the month, he found himself alone in the tent, as Wilson too succumbed at his side. To his comrade’s now widow, the Captain extolled his bravery at the end:

My Dear Mrs. Wilson,

If this letter reaches you Bill and I will have gone out together. We are very near it now and I should like you to know how splendid he was at the end — everlastingly cheerful and ready to sacrifice himself for others, never a word of blame to me for leading him into this mess. He is not suffering, luckily, at least only minor discomforts.

His eyes have a comfortable blue look of hope and his mind is peaceful with the satisfaction of his faith in regarding himself as part of the great scheme of the Almighty. I can do no more to comfort you than to tell you that he died as he lived, a brave, true man — the best of comrades and staunchest of friends.

My whole heart goes out to you in pity,

Yours,

R. Scott

Robert Falcon Scott, Letter to Mrs Bowers, March 1912

So little had remained to Scott, but at the same time, everything. By a few words, he had ensured his men would be remembered, and remembered as heroes. His duty to them fulfilled with admirable humility, the Captain then turned to his own family…

Remember Your Family

One cannot imagine the feeling, or perhaps by then that total absence of feeling which comes with the accepting embrace of certain death, that accompanied Robert Falcon Scott as he commenced his last letter to his wife Kathleen with the words “To my Widow”.

Certainly, he harboured great foresight, thinking of almost everything. First of course, a reminder that he was with her in all ways except in body:

“Dearest darling — we are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through — In our short lunch hours I take advantage of a very small measure of warmth to write letters preparatory to a possible end — the first is naturally to you on whom my thoughts mostly dwell waking or sleeping — If anything happens to me I shall like you to know how much you have meant to me and that pleasant recollections are with me as I depart…

…Well dear heart I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly as I’m sure you will – The boy will be your comfort. I had looked forward to helping you to bring him up but it is a satisfaction to feel that he is safe with you”

Robert Falcon Scott, Letter to My Widow

He proceeds to reassure her that he will bear no ill will at all should she choose to remarry, and indeed encourages her to do just that if honourable circumstances permit it, and it will make her happy. Moreover, no man can remain unmoved by the brief paragraphs Scott was then able to write about his son. Wisdom he had doubtless hoped to impart over many long years, compressed now into mere lines on a page:

“I must write a little letter for the boy if time can be found, to be read when he grows up. The inherited vice from my side of the family is indolence - above all he must guard, and you must guard him, against that. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know – had always an inclination to be idle. My father was idle and it brought much trouble…

You see I am anxious for you and the boy’s future – make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games – they encourage it at some schools – I know you will keep him out in the open air – try and make him believe in a God, it is comforting. Oh my dear my dear what dreams I have had of his future and yet oh my girl I know you will face it stoically…”

Robert Falcon Scott, Letter to My Widow

It is notable that Scott, of the last Terra Nova men, had been perhaps the most sceptical when it came to faith. Yet one has the distinct impression that his last days had a powerful effect on him indeed — as of course they would — and that sharing the company of devout men rekindled that faith. Certainly Wilson’s own last letter to his parents reveals the immense spiritual fortitude with which he had faced his own death:

“Looking forward to the day when we shall all meet together in the hereafter. I have had a very happy life and I look forward to a very happy life hereafter when we shall all be together again. God knows I have no fear of meeting Him–for He will be merciful to all of us”

Dr Edward Wilson to his Parents, March 1912

In any case, at least one of Scott’s last wishes was handsomely fulfilled. Kathleen ensured that his son, then three and half years old, would develop more than a mere ‘interest' in natural history. Forty nine years later, Peter Scott would help to found the World Wide Fund for Nature, and would receive a knighthood for services to animal conservation.

But beyond his men, and his kin, Captain Scott was well aware that there was a third party waiting for news…

Let Death Mean Something

As one of the last great wildernesses on Earth, the South Pole remained the last Holy Grail of the Heroic Age of Exploration. Tremendous prestige was guaranteed to whoever conquered it. The Terra Nova expedition had hoped to do so in the name of Britain, and Scott was acutely aware of this burden of expectation.

Concluding the letter to his widow, Scott made plain his duty to his King and Country:

“There is a piece of the Union flag I put up at the South Pole in my private kit bag together with Amundsen’s black flag and other trifles – give a small piece of the Union flag to the King and a small piece to Queen Alexandra and keep the rest a poor trophy for you!”

Robert Falcon Scott, Letter to My Widow

At the same time, the question of what kind of example he was setting evidently troubled Scott greatly in his last days. Among the twelve letters he was able to author before the end, there are frequent urgings to his friends to look beyond the material failure of the expedition:

“After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick”

Robert Falcon Scott to Sir Francis Charles Bridgeman, March 1912

Captain Scott would rather have died than ‘succeeded’ if the price of victory meant leaving a man behind. Indeed, as a true Edwardian gentleman he was proud to die with this principle unstained:

“I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future, and that the country ought to help those who are left behind to mourn us”

Robert Falcon Scott to Sir James Barrie, March 1912

To this end, Scott wrote one final, extraordinary appeal, this time to the British people themselves. The Message to the Public would soon become famous, and read across every corner of the Empire. It is a straightforward piece, which achieved three things. Firstly, Scott succinctly explained the reasons for his failure. Secondly, and more crucially, he emphasised that this failure should not deter future attempts in better conditions:

“The Beardmore Glacier is not difficult in fine weather, but on our return we did not get a single completely fine day; this with a sick companion enormously increased our anxieties…

…But all the facts above enumerated were as nothing to the surprise which awaited us on the Barrier. I maintain that our arrangements for returning were quite adequate, and that no one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of the year. On the summit in lat. 85° 86° we had -20°, -30°. On the Barrier in lat. 82°, 10,000 feet lower, we had -30° in the day, -47° at night pretty regularly, with continuous head wind during our day marches”

Robert Falcon Scott, Message to the Public, March 1912

Scott was adamant that the Terra Nova should be taken as something to be learned from, that men should continue to seek to do extraordinary things, and that unforeseen disasters are simply the price of discovery.

In that vein, he concluded his letter with a stirring call to Britannia, to not give up on heroism:

“We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

R. SCOTT

Robert Falcon Scott, Message to the Public, March 1912

To his final appeal, the nation responded extravagantly. Over £75,000 (At least £10 million in today’s money) was raised in public donations to support the dependents of the dead men. By order of the Educational Council, the story of Scott’s expedition was read to over 750,000 schoolchildren, as the men of the Terra Nova became the last great heroes of ‘old’ Britain, before the First World War mounted its near fatal challenge to the notion of heroism mere months later…

The Noblest End

His last tasks as leader performed, on the 29th March 1912, the last man of the Terra Nova’s polar conquerors left his last diary entry:

“Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

R. Scott.

For God’s sake look after our people”

Robert Falcon Scott, 29th March 1912

It is a mark of Scott’s determination that the Terra Nova should mean something that along with their dwindling provisions, the men had hauled thirty-five pounds of Arctic rock samples to the very end. Upon their recovery, the data retrieved from those very samples would be used to help scientists calculate the age of Antartica itself.

The scientific contribution of the Terra Nova was grand therefore, yet its heroic legacy is grander still.

Seven months later, when a recovery team at last found the lonely tent of the Terra Nova, the bodies revealed something that the letters alongside them could not. Scott, it transpired, had died last, and his final act was to throw his arm over the body of Wilson, in one final brotherly embrace. As Royal Naval surgeon Dr Edward Atkinson would go on to state in his subsequent report:

Thus can nobility of spirit transform earthly defeat into everlasting triumph...

Do you ever wake up in the morning to find yourself more drained than you were the night before? As if the debt of stress is somehow never paid off, no matter how many hours of sleep you get?

‘That’s just how life is now’, the contemporary man may retort with quiet resignation, as he braces for another day of ‘the grind’. After all, the only apparent ‘solutions’ offered are questionable therapy and prescription medicines, for a problem which should not even exist in the first place. What, you may wonder, can our ancestors possibly have to say about this most stereotypically modern of struggles?

Rather a lot actually. Two thousand years ago, the Stoic philosopher Seneca considered how ‘preoccupied’ living gives the false impression that ‘life is too short’. Between his time and ours, however, the problem of ‘sleep not working’ was explored in further detail by none other than the man who largely sparked the Italian Renaissance.

In the 1360’s, the Tuscan poet and scholar Petrarch drew upon libraries of ancient wisdom to author one of the Western world’s most criminally overlooked treasures — De remediis utriusque fortunae, or Remedies for Good or Ill Fortunes. One of the 254 essays of practical wisdom contained within, simply titled Leisure and Rest, was written for anybody who feels crushed by routine and cheated by leisure.

Today therefore, we explore what Petrarch can teach you about what is really causing your tiredness, and how you can start waking up actually feeling refreshed…

To Enjoy Leisure, or To Use It?

Petrarch, who survived the Black Death to witness the hellscape it left in its wake, was a man determined to revive not only the glories of Antiquity, but the ways of thinking which enabled them.

The way he writes De remediis utriusque fortunae is typical of this. Instead of being a solid text of dry and continuous thought, he adopts the ancient Greek model of presenting each essay as if it were a natural conversation. Leisure and Rest, indeed, is a ‘dialogue’ between the allegorical figures of Joy and Reason, who both represent the two sides of human nature — the emotional, and the rational — and so begins the verbal duel:

JOY: Leisure and rest from exertion have come to me.

REASON: Two of the most welcome goods in human life, provided that immoderate use does not turn them into the gravest of ills, which has happened to many, inflicting harm to the body as well as to the mind, swelling the one and corroding the other.

JOY: I enjoy the most delightful leisure.

REASON: You should say “I use the most delightful leisure.” Here on this earth nothing can be enjoyed, but many things can be used — thus says the salutary doctrine.’

Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunae, 21

‘Hurrah!’, our emotional side celebrates, ‘I have time for a bit of leisure!’. Petrarch, however, wastes no time before ensuring our rational counterpart hits us with a warning. That having ‘time for leisure’ is not by itself any guarantee that this will translate into actual ‘leisure time’.

On the contrary, if misused, what you are calling leisure could well be the exact opposite, “inflicting harm to the body as well as to the mind”. But Joy, unable to see past impulse, gets a little defensive:

JOY: I have delightful leisure.

REASON: It matters much what kind of leisure this is, because there are two kinds of leisure. One which is active, full of work even when at ease, and concerned with honest efforts. Nothing is sweeter than this. The other kind is sluggish and dull, wholly given to repose. Nothing is more detestable, nothing more similar to the grave. And thus the first kind produces often great attainments, useful to the world and bringing glory to its authors; but the second brings nothing, save inglorious torpor and numb stupefaction. The first is fit for the philosophically minded, the second for dullards given to their bellies and snoring, who seek to eat and sleep without interruption.

Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunae, 21

‘It must be leisure because I enjoy it’, we might be tempted to say, dismissing Reason as a bore intent on overcomplicating it. But Reason sees beyond short-term sensory stimulation, and considers the consequence which follows.

Petrarch here revives Aristotle’s argument, that in order for a man to actually be be happy, his body, intellect and soul must each be satisfied. This is what he means by “full of work even when at ease” — that work and leisure ought to both involve facing a task and overcoming it. The difference is that at ‘work’, the achievement is likely for somebody else. In ‘leisure’, it should be for you.

If your leisure activities produce nothing that outlasts the ‘buzz’ you feel in the moment, therefore, they are simply a fleeting distraction. Hence why, when they are over, you feel guilt and further tiredness.

Worst of all however, as Petrarch warns, is the man who considers leisure as ‘just doing nothing’, for such a man already has one foot in the grave…

Beware the Brother of Death

In response to Reason’s pressing, Joy reframes leisure as “welcome repose”. Yet Reason is unconvinced:

REASON: This repose is not the one to be enjoyed without end. Think, therefore, in what sort of repose you take delight.

JOY: I have found welcome repose.

REASON: You say repose. Do you wish to say reclining, or sleep, which certain poets call the brother, and others the image, of death — and very properly so?

Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunae, 21

While Reason may initially appear somewhat pedantic, Petrarch is underscoring once again an important distinction. That of ‘rest’ for its own sake compared to ‘rest’ which serves as an opportunity to pursue something else. ‘Rest’, after all, does not actually have a straightforward meaning. If understood as the absence of exertion, then many activities could constitute ‘rest’, from reading to painting. If understood as a synonym for ‘relaxation’, then even physical activities could be classified as ‘rest’, from walking in the countryside to a Sunday drive.

The problem arises, Reason is arguing, when ‘rest’ is taken too literally and understood to mean ‘inactivity’, and therefore when people assume you are ‘resting’ only when you are actually sleeping. Or, approached differently, when the man who has survived an arduous day believes that sleep is the only possible remedy.

Petrarch reminds us that our ancestors considered Sleep to be the brother of Death. Likely he is referring to the poet Virgil, whose Aeneid said precisely this:

“There at the Gate, in the very throat of Hell,

Vengeful care and sullen Grief make their bed,

and pallid Sickness dwells, with sad Old Age,

and Fear, and evil Hunger and vile Need,

forms dread to look upon, with Toil and Death:

then Death’s brother Sleep, and cruel Pleasure of the mind corrupt”

Virgil, Aeneid, VI.384-390

The imagery is clear, and logic too. What unites Sleep and Death is a common withdrawal from the world, what separates them is permanence. Sleep therefore is ‘imperfect’ Death, and the man who treats sleep as a refuge from waking life, rather than a complement to it, is a man who has largely given up on life.

This of course is not to say that you should not sleep. The body obviously needs it, but sleep is rejuvenating the body alone, while keeping the intellect and soul — the elements that actually elevate you from the beasts — in stasis. Unless all three are nourished in life, sleep alone will result in a net loss.

Besides, as Petrarch continues, the physical activity of the body is neither here nor there, as a man can just as easily be crippled by anxiety while laying flat on the ground as when he is running:

REASON: The minds of many are at rest although they walk around, yet some who sit or lie down are troubled. Sleep itself, which is called animalium quies — the rest of all living creatures — brings hidden pains and visions, and the wild fury of horrible phantasms — about which that saintly man who was afflicted complained when he addressed God in familiar terms.

JOY: I recline restfully in my bedroom.

REASON: Who, I ask you, do you think rested more sweetly — Vatia in his country seat, or Scipio fighting the enemy in Africa, Cato fighting the snakes, or Regulus fighting both? There is no repose without joy, nor can there be true joy without virtue.

Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunae, 21

Reason offers the intriguing counter that a man who is more physically active is actually more likely to experience wholesome rest than his idle counterpart. The first example Petrarch cites, Servilius Vatia, was a man who on paper had it all. But withdrawn on his estate on Capri, cut off from the world, he was “famous for his wasted opportunity, buried rather than living within the walls of his country house” (Petrarch, De Vita Solitaria, I.376). Unable to find meaningful purpose during his days, ‘leisure’ was empty and achieved nothing beyond hurrying him towards Death.

Scipio, Cato and Regulus, however, who each served their country actively, could go to bed at night satisfied that they had achieved something. Sleep was a genuine ‘time out’ from something worthwhile. “There is no repose without joy, nor can there be true joy without virtue”.

So what does Petrarch propose we do? How can we start making our leisure and rest work for us, instead of against us?

His answer is surprisingly straightforward, and one that ironically many university students today will surely have realised when faced with an imminent deadline…

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2,070 years ago last Sunday, on the 15th March 44 BC, the most famous political murder in history took place, killing the most famous Roman in history.

The ultimate ‘event’ in history, the assassination of Julius Caesar forms the dramatic turning point of the great epic of history — the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. It is also a highly personal story, of how carelessness can ruin even the greatest of men.

Both Julius Caesar and his great nephew Augustus, after all, won spectacular victories. How both men responded to those victories, however, was the difference between losing an empire and founding one.

So to mark this extraordinary anniversary, let us explore a simple yet important question — what are the lessons of the Ides of March?

What did Julius Caesar get wrong, what did Augustus get right and what can we learn from their opposing examples?

Misusing a Victory

One of the great ironies that surrounds Julius Caesar is that his enemies were far more ruthless than he was.

Indeed a theme which appears again and again in accounts of Caesar is his readiness to forgive his enemies — his clemency. A temple to Clementia was indeed raised in his honour1, while Mark Antony whipped up the mob at Caesar’s funeral by declaring the fallen dictator’s titles to be “a testimonial of his clemency”2. In an often forgotten letter, written just weeks after crossing the Rubicon, Caesar himself even outlined that clemency was the cornerstone of his strategy:

“Let us see if by moderation we can win all hearts and secure a lasting victory, since by cruelty others have been unable to escape from hatred and to maintain their victory for any length of time except L. Sulla, whose example I do not intend to follow. This is a new way of conquering, to strengthen one's position by kindness and generosity”

Julius Caesar, Letter to Oppius and Cornelius, March 49 BC

Throughout the civil war which followed, Caesar pardoned so many of his foes that he even pardoned several individuals multiple times. After his opening victory of the war at Corfinium in February 49 BC, Caesar captured as many as fifty senators, all of whom he pardoned, including the commander Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. Many of these men did not share Caesar’s sense of martial honour, and immediately rejoined Pompey and the war, rendering the victory rather pointless. Ahenobarbus himself would fight against Caesar twice more, before falling in the decisive Battle of Pharsalus.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of his clemency, however, is the simple fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated by men he had pardoned. Both of the key ringleaders — Brutus and Cassius — had not only been pardoned by Caesar after Pharsalus, but would go on to enjoy his patronage. Immediately after the battle, Caesar granted Cassius a military command, and would later promise him the consulship. Just one year before his assassination, Caesar appointed Brutus to the prestigious role of praetor urbanus. As Napoleon Bonaparte himself remarked:

“It was not difficult for the plotters to succeed, as Caesar trusted them”

Napoleon Bonaparte, On the Wars of Julius Caesar, 16.III

Caesar’s naive belief that publicly pardoning his foes would entirely and immediately win them over reached such an absurd extreme that he dismissed any and all evidence to the contrary, even when it was brought to him by his actual friends:

“They came very near being detected for two reasons. One was the number of those who were privy to the plot, although Caesar would not receive any information about anything of the sort and punished very severely those who brought any news of the kind”

Cassius Dio, Roman History, XLIV.15

Herein lies the problem of clemency. Unless the forgiveness of the injured party is mirrored by sincere repentance on the part of the injurer, clemency can be counterproductive. In the case of Caesar, it was fatal.

A father may wish he could only ever share moments of peaceful bliss with his children. But children need discipline to thrive, and every time a boundary is crossed without rebuke, the authority of the father weakens, and the child tips further into imbalance.

It is telling that after the assassination, when Brutus found himself in command against Caesar’s avengers, and was tempted to follow Caesar’s precedent, Cicero warned him of the consequences:

“I strongly differ from you, Brutus, and I do not admit your clemency doctrine. A salutary sternness is superior to the empty show of clemency. But if we choose the role of clemency we shall never have any lack of civil wars.”

Cicero to Brutus, 17th April 43 BC

Julius Caesar was a military genius, of that there is no question. His critical flaw, however, was not realising that his enemies had mobilised for total war, and viewed the battlefield as merely one of many theatres to be contested with all resources at their disposal. He had entered into a war that was existential for the Roman elite, who had demonstrated repeatedly that it did not play fair. It was prepared to kill in order to preserve the oligarchic stranglehold over the Republic, and to kill openly, as the murders of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus had shown.

Thus the idealistic clemency of Caesar was admired by many, but ridiculed by his foes, who lost their fear of consequence and grew emboldened in rebellion. If he had wished to maintain a moral upper hand, taking prisoners and treating them well would have sufficed, and demonstrative punishment did not have to mean execution. By continuously brandishing a blank cheque of forgiveness however, before the total war had been won, Caesar misused his victories, extended the war and handed his enemies fresh opportunity to win.

Worse, it would hand his enemies the opportunity to corrupt him…

Falling For Your Own Propaganda

Caesar’s clemency alone may not have been sufficient to doom him. But the result of it certainly was. No longer able to mobilise armies against him, the enemies of Caesar turned to words. Caesar, however, was not aware that he was still at war.

The danger of flattery is a subject we have indeed covered at INVICTUS. As we explored, flattery is worse than theft because the flatterer seeks to take something from you by dishonest means, but does so by also corrupting you in the process.

What happened to Julius Caesar is perhaps the supreme example of exactly this. Once his enemies realised that praise was the means by which to penetrate the Caesarian armour, they were relentless:

“When they had begun to honour him, it was with the idea, of course, that he would be reasonable; but as they went on and saw that he was delighted with what they voted, — indeed he accepted all but a very few of their decrees, — different men at different times kept proposing various extravagant honours, some in a spirit of exaggerated flattery and others by way of ridicule”

Cassius Dio, Roman History, XLIV.7

Whether Cassius Dio was exaggerating when he continued that “some actually ventured to suggest permitting him to have intercourse with as many women as he pleased” we cannot know. But what is abundantly clear is that the honours and titles showered upon Caesar reached a level at which alarms bells should have begun screaming.

When a person publicly flatters you to the extent that their words or proposals demean themselves, that person in truth almost certainly despises you. The sources are indeed clear that Caesar’s enemies used flattery to lure him into a deadly trap:

“Others, and they were the majority, followed this course because they wished to make him envied and hated as quickly as possible, that he might the sooner perish. And this is precisely what happened, though Caesar was encouraged by these very measures to believe that he should never be plotted against by the men who had voted him such honours, nor, through fear of them, by any one else; and consequently he even dispensed henceforth with a bodyguard”

Cassius Dio, Roman History, XLIV.7

Caesar, convinced that these people were sincere in their praise, and that serious opposition had died at the Battles of Pharsalus and Munda, walked straight into the trap by not only accepting these, but appearing to enjoy it.

This of course would be crowned, so to speak, by the ultimate poisoned chalice, when people, and most famously Mark Antony, began to publicly offer Caesar a crown. Exactly who engineered the spectacle of offering Caesar the kingship of Rome is unclear. Whether Caesar had genuinely orchestrated it to ‘test the waters’, or Antony actually did wish to restore the Roman monarchy, or else the Dictator’s enemies were behind it all does not really matter. What did matter was that it appeared plausible that Caesar mighty secretly be desiring permanent autocratic power.

Caesar’s track record of permitting and accepting outlandish flattery, even if it might well have been out of naivety, had punctured the veil of sincerity and convinced too many that his ambitions were selfish. In order for the Senate to safeguard their own position, destroy Caesar and undo his life’s work, they needed to paint him as a cartoon villain. This they would do, fostering in Caesar the hubris which would ultimately unshield him, and which was epitomised by his infamous boast on the 15th March 44 BC

“Well, the Ides of March are come,” and the seer said to him softly: “Ay, they are come, but they are not gone.”

Plutarch, Life of Caesar, 63

Caesar was defeated, but in truth, he was extraordinarily lucky. Were it not for the incompetence of the conspirators allowing Mark Antony to escape, Rome might well have been condemned to decades more of the Republic’s corruption and misrule, and Caesar henceforth remembered as a mere curiosity of history, rather than a driver of it.

Fortunately, Caesar’s adoptive son was waiting in the wings, and would learn from his mistakes. As a result, he would achieve both lasting power and popularity.

So what did Augustus get right that Caesar got wrong?

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We have all heard the expression ‘Patience is a Virtue’. Yet our society is apparently driven by the opposite sentiment.

The primary selling point of almost any product today, after all, is convenience rather than quality. Delivery times and ‘accessibility’ are advertised over durability, and ‘Need it Now’ is assumed to equal ‘Need it Better’.

As a result, ‘Patience is a Virtue’ is often stated ironically, often as a joking rebuke to somebody who is trying to hurry us. In a culture of immediacy, the patient man is ridiculed as a dinosaur.

Yet the quality of patience is far more than the ability to endure a lengthy queue. When properly directed, the patient man is not simply resigning himself to ‘dead time’. He is cultivating a virtue that Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the founding fathers of Western Christianity, hailed as essential for bettering ourselves. So much so that he authored a treatise, De Patientia — On Patience — to explain how.

Here is what Saint Augustine can teach you about why you should cultivate patience, and when you need to practise it…

Constructive Suffering

Augustine begins with a simple yet powerful observation. That the very word ‘patience’ itself derives from the Latin patiendo — ‘suffering’.

To be patient, therefore, is quite literally to suffer. That said, a key difference distinguishes a patient from a suffering man. While both face something unpleasant, the patient man does so in the knowledge or hope that something better will follow:

“The patience of man which is good, praiseworthy, and deserving the name of virtue is said to be that by which we endure evils with equanimity so as not to abandon, through a lack of equanimity, the good through which we arrive at the better. By their unwillingness to suffer evil, the impatient do not effect their deliverance from it; instead, they bring upon themselves the suffering of more grievous ills”

Saint Augustine, De Patientia, 2

True patience, therefore, is properly seen as a man’s primary weapon against temptation. It is the column which supports the soul and prevents its collapse under pressure. Should it yield, so too will our other virtues.

After all, when we succumb to impatience, we rarely do so without further injuring ourselves, or others with words or actions. What defines the patient man, on the other hand, is not simply his ability to endure suffering, but how he responds to it:

“But the patient, who prefer to bear wrongs without committing them rather than to commit them by not enduring them, both lessen what they suffer in patience and escape worse things by which, through impatience, they would be submerged”

Saint Augustine, De Patientia, 2

When we yield to impatience, we are attempting to force the future into the present before it is ready. By doing so, we necessarily unbalance ourselves, and risk long-term gain for short-term and illusory satisfaction. Breaking away from a long queue, firing a curse word back as you do, might give impulsive satisfaction, but it will almost certainly be replaced with remorse that lasts far longer.

A clearer definition of what patience really is, therefore, is the ability to “bear wrongs without committing them”. To face evil and emerge not only uncorrupted by it but strengthened by it, as opposed to the impatient man who has surrendered to it. The patient man, likewise, conserves and expands resources, while the impatient man squanders them on fruitless battles.

This then is why patience can be a virtue. It is suffering that is put to use. But as Augustine proceeds to explain, patience is only a virtue in very specific circumstances…

When to Be Patient?

“Strong desires make labor and suffering tolerable. And no one voluntarily undertakes to suffer torture except for what will bring delight”

Saint Augustine, De Patientia, 4

Saint Augustine was not an impractical man. On the contrary, his conversion to Christianity followed a famously dissolute youth. He was well aware of the realities of the world, and does not argue that we should simply dig in against every little frustration. Virtuous patience, after all, is not the same as stubborn persistence.

Simply tolerating hardship, too, is not by itself virtuous. If it were, Augustine reminds us, we will soon find ourselves praising hardened criminals:

“Why should I mention highway robbers, all of whom spend sleepless nights lying in wait for travellers? And to catch the harmless passersby they plant their bodies and minds, fixed on thoughts of harm, under any darkened sky.”

Saint Augustine, De Patientia, 4

Patience, therefore, is a virtue only if it is serving a higher purpose, and if it is “a means of greater happiness” (3). Saint Augustine of course argues that a love of God is the surest anchor of higher purpose, though the principle can easily be broken down into more immediate units, by using one simple analogy:

“Doctors, by inflicting pain on the body, try to keep it from death, while its enemies, on the other hand, by threatening the body with punishment and death, are working for the eternal death of the body and soul in hell”

Saint Augustine, De Patientia, 6

When faced with any situation that tests us, therefore, whether it is dealing with an argument that threatens to get heated, or a person who you feel is slowing you down, apply a simple filter to the possible actions that lie before you. Will the option that allows you to resolve the situation quickly result in damage either to your body or your soul? If not, proceed. If so, now is the time to be patient.

Put even more bluntly, patience is your insurance against distraction. It should be used to keep you focused on your long term goals and prevent you from endangering their fulfilment, as per Augustine’s most regularly quoted reflection of the entire treatise:

“For, patience is the attendant of wisdom, not the handmaid of passion. Patience is the friend of a good conscience, not the enemy of innocence”

Saint Augustine, De Patientia, 4

An impatient man can never be wise, because wisdom is earned by overcoming successive obstacles, banking the knowledge gained after each so as to make overcoming the next easier. Wisdom needs time to mature, and it is patience that grants that time.

Saint Augustine’s critical point, however, is that patience is not a mere ‘survival strategy’, and it is most certainly not a trap for the innocent or the naive.

As he proceeds to explain, it is a strategy for victory, and one that Napoleon Bonaparte would echo in one of his most famous quotations…

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Do you have friends, or do you have flatterers?

That person who complimented you — do they truly wish you well, or do they want something from you?

It is a reality that confronts us on so regular a basis that discussion of it might today seem more suited to gossip than reasoned reflection. But to our ancestors, it was a deadly serious matter.

Not for nothing, after all, did Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy consign flatterers to the penultimate circle of Hell, further into the Abyss even than those who commit murder. The condemnation of flattery was likewise a common theme in Classical thought, along with discussion of what friendship truly is.

One of the most influential writers and philosophers of the Greco-Roman world, Plutarch of Chaeronea, indeed dedicated an entire essay of his Moralia to the subject.

Today therefore, we explore how the aptly named How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend can help you identify destructive friendships and build more wholesome ones…

The Danger of Flattery

Flattery, noun - The action or practice of flattering; false or insincere praise; adulation; cajolery, blandishment.

Taking into account the current Oxford English Dictionary definition of the term, it may seem a shrill overreaction to consider Flattery a sin worse than Greed, Gluttony, Lust and Wrath, as Dante did. Indeed it might be, if we considered purely the act of flattery, and ignored the consequence.

Plutarch, however, emphasises repeatedly in his essay what that consequence is. Among the most succinct of these is as follows:

“Those who injure the character by their praise, aye, and by their flattery undermine the morals, act like those slaves who do not steal from the bin, but from the seed corn. For they pervert the disposition, which is the seed of actions, and the character, which is the principle and fountain of life, by attaching to vice names that belong properly only to virtue”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, XII

As per the metaphor he presents, Flattery therefore is fundamentally worse than Theft. For if a scoundrel seizes your wallet and makes off with it, it is certainly heinous, but the consequence will likely be inconvenience for you in the short term only, while making you more cautious in the future. Crucially, there is virtually no possibility that you will view the act as anything less than what it is — evil.

But a flatterer’s crime has many consequences. A person who seeks to curry your favour only ever does so because they want something from you, whether it be a tangible reward or intangible benefit. If they succeed in their efforts, they have obtained something from you by dishonest means, but worse, they have also corrupted you in the process.

A man robbed by violence many times is likely to be fortified by his experiences. A man who succumbs to flattery many times is caught in a spiral that will drag his entire character down along with his moral defences. Thus the flatterer succeeds in:

“Implanting in everybody’s mind self-deceit and ignorance of his own good or bad qualities, thus making his good points defective and imperfect, and his bad points altogether incorrigible”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, I

The long term consequences of this can be devastating to individuals, to families, to businesses and indeed nations. After all, the flatterer by nature targets those who wield influence. For Plutarch, the fallout of this was demonstrably corrosive to societies, citing the words of the great historian Thucydides, who decried the power of unchecked Flattery to rebrand immorality as admirable:

“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected.”

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, III.82

Just because Flattery occurs everyday does not, therefore, mean it is trivial. On the contrary, that it hides in plain sight is an indication of its severity and its infectious nature.

So, how can we identify those who are merely using us under the pretence of friendship?

How to Identify a Flatterer

Part of the reason why Plutarch proved so influential over the course of the centuries is that, unlike in the ‘higher’ philosophy of men like Plato and Aristotle, his essays are concise, easy to translate and easy to read, being digestible in a single sitting.

Indeed in How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, we can identify a simple set of signs to look out for:

1 - Inconsistent Admiration

Since the flatterer operates by feigning sympathy, and seeks to convince others that he is ‘just like them’, as Plutarch points out, he cannot have fixed principles:

“We must first then look at the even tenor and consistency of his principles, if he always delights in the same things, and always praises the same things, and directs and governs his life after one pattern, as becomes the noble lover of consistent friendship and familiarity. Such a person is a friend. But the flatterer having no fixed character of his own, and not seeking to lead the life suitable for him, but shaping and modelling himself after another’s pattern, is neither simple nor uniform, but complex and unstable, assuming different appearances, like water poured from vessel to vessel, ever in a state of flux and accommodating himself entirely to the fashion of those who entertain him.”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, VII

He is at all times calculating which position it is you hold, so that he can pretend he holds it too. This calculation can only be made on the basis of what you do and say, or what others have said about you.

If you suspect that someone is seeking to ingratiate themselves with you, and the stakes are sufficiently serious, Plutarch advises an easy test. At some point down the line, pretend to change your conviction on something. It could be anything, but the more it stands in contrast to something you actually believe, and the more controversial, the better. Observing the reaction of the other person will flush out many amateur flatterers, who will be tempted to mimic your conversion and forced to improvise an explanation when pushed.

2 - The Mirror of Temper

“The true friend does not imitate you in everything, nor is he too keen to praise, but praises only what is excellent”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, IX

The most naked act of Flattery lies in praising your good deeds. But Flattery, being an offshoot of Fraud, rarely stops there. A flatterer determined to conquer your empathy will aim even lower, and minimise your flaws by pretending he possesses them too.

“For seeing that their friends are unfortunate in marriage, or suspicious about the behaviour of their sons or relations, they do not spare themselves, but make quite a Jeremiad about their own sons, or wife, or kinsfolk, or relations, proclaiming loudly their own family secrets”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, IX

‘Oh, I do that too’ he may retort, or else ‘Don’t worry, people do that all the time’. A true friend will praise your successes, but confront your wrongdoing. A flatterer will almost never do the latter, and thus out of sycophancy lead you further astray. Beware the man who mirrors the worst of you.

3 - The Constant Second Fiddle

The tactical objective of the flatterer is to force your ego to outflank your reason:

“Whereas among real friends there is no rivalry or jealousy of one another, but they are satisfied and contented alike whether they are equal or one of them is superior. But the flatterer, ever remembering that he is to play second fiddle, makes his copy always fall a little short of the original, for he admits that he is everywhere outstripped and left behind, except in vice”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, X

While he will pretend to share your virtues and vices, or else hobbies and peeves, the illusion tempts your ego by casting him as the apprentice to your master. No matter how great his success may truly be, he will always be ready with some contrivance to dull it in comparison to your own.

Likewise, if you lament of failure, he will always respond by telling you that his own is worse:

“If his friend is superstitious, he says he is a fanatic; if his friend is in love, he says he is madly in love; if his friend laughs, he will say, ‘You laughed a little unseasonably, but I almost died of laughter’”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, X

In the presentation of the flatterer, you have always “reached a height he cannot soar to”. One must always question the value of a friendship with one who apparently has nothing to teach you.

4 - Praise for Imagined Virtue

The clumsy flatterer will praise you for what you are, yet also for what you are not. This is particularly the case when you have achieved public prominence, and people are intimidated to present any serious challenge or genuine opposition to you.

The flatterer will ‘bend the rules’ so that he can assign you greater talent than you actually possess. The sons of the successful must be especially careful to watch out for this, lest they end up having:

“learnt nothing really well and properly except how to ride, for their master praised and flattered them in their studies, and the person who taught them wrestling always let them throw him, whereas the horse, not knowing or caring whether his rider were a private person or ruler, rich or poor, soon threw him over his head if he could not ride well.”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, XVI

Since this form of Flattery almost always occurs when others are listening, observing the reactions of others to it can help you quickly identify how prominent Flatterers are in your immediate circle.

5 - Selective Outrage

“Next he pretends to know nothing of real and great crimes, but he is a terrible fellow to inveigh against trifling and external shortcomings, and to fasten on them with intensity and vehemence, as if he sees any pot or pipkin out of its place, or anyone badly housed, or neglecting his beard or attire, or not adequately attending to a horse or dog.”

Plutarch, How One May Discern a Flatterer From A Friend, XVII

The flatterer, accustomed to the practice of Fraud, is defined by inconsistency of conduct and of standards.

His perceived need to ‘keep up appearances’ opens many cracks between his public and private life, and severely distorts his behaviour across contexts. A flatterer will fawn over his dinner guest, yet disdain the waiter. Disproportionate wrath, too, will be levelled at anybody who reveals, or threatens to reveal, the falsity of his persona.

Likewise, one often finds the flatterer to be outspoken on trivial things, yet silent on the serious. Plutarch here cites the example of Ptolemy VIII, the fearsome ruler of Egypt. For when he wished to be intellectual, his sycophantic advisors would waste time late into the night mirroring it, disputing mere grammar or vocabulary, but none objected in the slightest to his cruelty during the day.

Armed with Plutarch’s wisdom therefore, we have a good chance of unmasking the malign influences in our life. But with our flatterers identified, how on the other hand can we know who our true friends are?

Fortunately, Plutarch follows up with timeless advice on what real friendships should be doing for you. Perhaps surprisingly, he begins by arguing that true friends should bring you pain as much as pleasure…

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Dear lector augustus,

As February comes to close, we’d like to share a brief update with you about the direction of the publication.

In the coming months, James will take the lead as the primary writer, while Evan will contribute more selectively. This change allows us to focus our efforts and ensure the continued quality of what we publish.

As part of this transition, our regular publishing schedule will move to one article per week. To reflect this adjustment, we are reducing our subscription price to $6.90/month or $49.90 annually, effective from today. If you are already a paid subscriber, you don’t need to do anything: billing will update automatically.

Our commitment remains what it’s always been, which is to provide thoughtful and high-quality work that rewards your time and attention, focused on the practical wisdom we can learn from the greatest leaders, thinkers, and artists of the past, through their own words and deeds. If you are new to INVICTUS, below you can find a quick look back at five pieces which have proved especially popular with our readers in recent months.

In the meantime, we continue to be honoured to count you among our readers, and sincerely grateful for your continued support.

As always, thank you for reading, and we look forward to this next phase of INVICTUS!

Ad finem fidelis,

-Evan & James

It is an ironic truth that victory can be the ruin of men just as readily as defeat.

Defeat, after all, if survived in the short term, can lead to introspection and improvement. Victory however, tempts hubris, and can easily invite stagnation within and the rancour of friends if the victor loses touch with what genuinely enabled that victory.

How we respond to victory, therefore, is no less important than how we respond to defeat. One man who understood this well was indeed the most powerful man of the 16th century — Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

So much so that while his dramatic victory over the Ottomans at Tunis in 1535 is all but forgotten today, the Emperor’s visit to Sicily and Naples immediately afterwards is widely commemorated and fondly remembered across the Italian South, where he remains a revered figure.

Today, we explore what Charles V can teach you about guarding against arrogance, and consolidating your victories…

Who is it all For?

Charles V was a man defined above all by the most solemn sense of duty. For a man who by election and inheritance had come to be sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Burgundy, much of Italy and beyond, this was a priceless virtue.

Quiet and reserved by nature, the Emperor was uncomfortable with adulation and celebration. Peace-loving and cultured, throughout his long reign he was continually frustrated by the interruption of war, whether it came from the French king or the Ottoman sultan. A deeply pious man, he further deplored the schism which increasingly ruptured Western Christianity throughout his lifetime. But Charles V, despite the enormous extent of his domains, never once failed to answer the call of office or faith.

1535 would see perhaps the most spectacular example of this, when the thirty five year old Emperor was forced to respond to Ottoman expansion across North Africa. When allied Tunis fell to the armada of Suleiman the Magnificent, leaving the entire western Mediterranean vulnerable to invasion, Charles V rallied his disparate realms and assumed direct command. In an impressive feat of logistics as well as leadership, the vast multinational Christian force repelled the Ottoman fleet, navigated the contested Strait of Sicily and landed on the shores of north Africa on the 15th June 1535.

By the month’s end Charles succeeded in ousting the Turks from Tunis, defeating the Sultan’s greatest lieutenant, Barbarossa, in the process. It was a resoundingly efficient victory, and the Emperor could easily have just returned to the imperial heartlands of Germany to celebrate the triumph.

But he did not. Charles, after all, knew that what had just happened held more relevance for some of his subjects than others. North Africa, after all, was a distant concern for fishermen on the shores of the Baltic. But Charles was also the King of Sicily, and for the Sicilians, Ottoman expansion and Barbary pirate raids were a constant and existential threat. The Turks, after all, had come within a day’s sail of the island, and what Sicilians feared above all was that they would simply be forgotten after the glory of victory died down — especially as Sicily had been ruled from abroad for some centuries.

It was a fear that Charles would allay in spectacular style…

The Art of Productive Celebration

Just two weeks after the reconquest of Tunis, Sicilians relieved at their salvation were stunned with fresh news — the victorious Emperor was coming to visit them in person.

But this was to be no mere passing salute. For the Emperor had decided to postpone his return to the Empire, and better acquaint himself with his Italian subjects. Using the celebration of the Tunisian victory to do this was one of the true masterstrokes of Charles V.

Thus on the 20th August 1535, Charles disembarked at Trapani before ecstatic crowds. For the first time in a century, a King of Sicily had set foot on Sicilian soil, and that man was the hero of Europe. The euphoria was only enhanced by the presence of twenty thousand Christians in the resplendent entourage who Charles’s campaign had liberated from the chains of Ottoman slavery.

The Emperor further endeared himself to the populace by style and substance. Still today the Trapanesi proudly recount how Charles referred to the city in his speeches as the Chiave del Regno — literally the ‘Key to the Kingdom’. This was not mere idle flattery however. Charles was under no illusions that the Ottoman threat had been permanently beaten back, and Trapani, being the largest port on Sicily’s western coast — and closer to Africa than Italy — was indeed the key to the island’s defensive network. The Emperor’s visit would prove to be a significant spur to investment in the city’s fortifications, and the ramparts built in the years which followed indeed deterred any further Muslim aggression against the city, and remain a source of pride today (see picture above).

Charles remained in Trapani for two weeks — a remarkable commitment for a city that was not a capital — during which time he acquainted himself with her local governance. Celebration there was aplenty, but it was backed up with fresh substance. Parades, after all, are temporary, but laws are generally not. Thus the Emperor’s arrival was quickly supplanted in the popular memory by his confirmation of an array of legal privileges for the city, which would go on to spark something of a social and economic boom. Consecrating these reforms with a solemn pledge to uphold them, sworn by Charles in the Cathedral itself, crowned a fortnight which still defines the city’s identity to this day.

For the Trapanesi, the visit of Charles V was a triumph beyond anything they had cause to expect. The defeat of the Turks abroad was one thing, but enjoying tangible and local gains was quite another.

But nothing would compare with what happened next, when Charles demonstrated decisively that your attitude is vastly more important than your means when you want to capitalise upon a victory…

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Such is the prestige of the title of Caesar that it is easy to forget that the emperors of Rome were men of flesh and blood, who rose in the morning and retired, exhausted, to bed in the evening like anyone else.

It is easy, too, to assume that the Roman Empire was governed in the manner post-Enlightenment intellectuals and Hollywood directors would like you to believe it was — an absolute autocracy where the Emperor’s word was as good as divine mandate.

In reality, imperial rule was a habitual struggle to balance multiple competing factions, from senatorial oligarchs to ambitious generals, against the duty to both the Roman people and the Roman gods. Any emperor who dared to subvert these checks upon his duty swiftly met with conspiracy and demise.

As a result, the most successful of the Caesars were those able to get things done while maintaining good relations with each of these factions. That of course meant dealing with constant pressure, powerful interests and regular interpersonal conflict. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the only surviving account that any Roman Emperor left of his own personal philosophy, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, has much to say on how to handle a stressful life.

So, here is what the most beloved of all Roman Emperors can teach you about preparing for the day, dealing with conflict and recovering afterwards…

Choosing Your Battles

“Remember to put yourself in mind every morning, that before night it will be your luck to meet with some busy-body, with some ungrateful, abusive fellow, with some knavish, envious, or unsociable churl or other”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.1

After dedicating the first book of the Meditations to naming all those he felt gratitude towards, the opening of the second is as memorable as it is cutting.

As the most famous incarnation of the ancient ideal of the ‘philosopher king’, there is something of a tendency to view Marcus Aurelius as a man entirely detached from the world. In a sense he was, but he was not naïve. A philosopher he was, but a Stoic philosopher, and the essence of Stoicism lies in the belief that inner peace and tranquility can only be achieved by recognising and accepting what is in your power to control, and what is not.

A cynical reading of this would be ‘no matter what you do, there will be bad people’. A more patient reading of the Meditations, however, reveals that this is not exactly what the Emperor intended:

“Now all this perverseness in them proceeds from their ignorance of good and evil; and since it has fallen to my share to understand the natural beauty of a good action, and the deformity of an ill one — since I am satisfied the person disobliging is of kin to me, and though we are not just of the same flesh and blood, yet our minds are nearly related, being both extracted from the Deity”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.1

The Stoic mind, therefore, recognises that people can be unpleasant and hostile, but also that even in such moments they are still people. When someone is rude to us, our instinct might be to insult and dehumanise them. ‘What an awful person’, we might think, dismissing them forever. But are they? Are they really?

An instinctive reaction to rudeness is revulsion and anger, and to succumb to it is flawed for two reasons:

“Are you angry at a rank smell or an ill-scented breath? What good will this anger do you? But you will say, the man has reason, and can, if he takes pains, discover wherein he offends. I wish you joy of your discovery. Well, if you think mankind so full of reason, pray make use of your own. Argue the case with the faulty person, and show him his error. If your advice prevails, he is what you would have him; and then there is no need of being angry”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, V.28

As humans, we are — or should be — in a perpetual state of growth, while also being continuously subjected to influences both benign and wicked. That man who shouted on the phone, or who barged past you onto the bus — is he always like this, or did your paths happen to cross at a moment when he was under particularly acute stress? Or, more importantly, imagine all those moments when you yourself lost control in the presence of bystanders. Those strangers may well have dismissed you as an ‘awful person’. Now consider how many times that has happened throughout your life, and thus how many people in the world have written you off as an ‘awful person’. Is that representative, or just?

Secondly, overreaction closes off the possibility of transforming destructive anger into wholesome learning. As Marcus informs us elsewhere, “the obstacle is the way” (V.20). If we are all of the same kin, all children of Heaven, then conflict is an opportunity either for your or the other party’s growth. Take it, otherwise the interaction remains a sore forever. Should argument erupt over how something should be done, one or both parties should emerge enlightened from the dispute, and your being prepared to be that party is essential to being a better person.

“If any one can convince me of an error, I shall be very glad to change my opinion, for truth is my business, and nobody was ever yet hurt by it. No; he that continues in ignorance and mistake, it is he that receives the mischief”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI.21

Winning an argument is a temporary victory. Remaining in error, however, is a permanent defeat.

In the crudest possible sense, every negative interaction is merely a battle. Winning a battle, however, is meaningless without a wider strategy for the war…

Maintaining Perspective

“But, it may be, the distribution of the world does not please you. Recall the alternative, and argue thus: either Providence or atoms rule the universe.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.3

No matter how benevolent our intent or sincere our beliefs, not all our interactions with others will end positively. Perhaps bad faith, or else unfortunate circumstance made dialogue impossible. Depending on the situation and the identity and role of the other person, it may even have created more problems.

Such moments are prone to leaving us to wallow in negative emotion that can easily spill over into the rest of the day or week. The surest way to guard against this, as Marcus reminds us, is to maintain a sense of perspective. Whether you believe that “Providence” or “atoms” govern the universe is irrelevant. In the same way that one cannot judge the soul of a man on the basis of his worst moments alone, we cannot allow our lives to be hijacked by fleeting moments of failure. As men, we have a terrible propensity for allowing ourselves to be wounded, and compounding the blow by refusing to staunch the bleeding:

“Consider, likewise, how many men have embroiled themselves, and spent their days in disputes, suspicion, and animosities; and now they are dead, and burnt to ashes. Be quiet, then, and disturb yourself no more”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.3

If you adhere to “atoms”, none of it matters at all. If you hold to “Providence”, it also does not matter, because every man is on a journey, and as long as you draw breath, that journey has not ended.

It is here that the Emperor issues us with a call, to himself as much as to us, to duty and to our higher purpose:

“Take care always to remember that you are a man and a Roman; and let every action be done with perfect and unaffected gravity, humanity, freedom, and justice. And be sure you entertain no fancies, which may give check to these qualities. This is possible, if you will but perform every action as though it were your last; if your appetites and passions do not cross upon your reason; if you keep clear of rashness, and have nothing of insincerity and self-love to infect you, and do not complain of your destiny. You see what a few points a man has to gain in order to attain to a godlike way of living for he that comes thus far, performs all which the immortal powers will require of him.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.5

“Perform every action as though it were your last”. Or, on a more everyday note, when interacting with a person you otherwise do not know, especially those who you are unlikely to see again, ensure your conduct in that meeting aligns with how you wish them to remember you. If practised regularly, you will achieve that “godlike state” where all the good in your life matters, and all fault in it does not.

This sense of perspective is something you should consciously remind yourself of every day. No matter how gruelling the prospect of the day ahead seems:

“When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself: I am getting up now to do the business of a man”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, V.I

The business of a man is to grow, and do what he can to make the community and society around him grow too. Unless a person is directly preventing either of these things, they are not a truly negative presence in your life, and there is no reason to consider them as such. On the contrary, they are there to make you a better businessman.

Perhaps the most memorable line of Marcus Aurelius on perspective rather beautifully underscores Stoic philosophy on facing adversity:

“Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, V.18

Such is the balance of the universe that all is relative. If an evil plagues many, then many are required to fight it. If an obstacle lies before you specifically, then it is not too big for you to breach alone. The Emperor is thus reminding us to be careful in the apportionment of blame. The system may well be against you in some fields. But in others, are you absolutely sure it is not your own inertia or pride that is obstructing you?

Now, your thoughts may well be drifting towards a certain elephant lurking in the room. This is all well and good if a person is simply combative or rude. But what if you are dealing with someone who is actively trying to undermine you? Someone who is not simply ‘having a bad moment’, but who is betraying you in the most heinous of ways?

Marcus Aurelius, who himself faced treason and rebellion during his reign, has a remarkably simple yet effective answer…

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You must make of your life a work of art…True superiority is found in this.

-Gabriele d’Annunzio

Of all the advice I’ve received in my life, none has been so impactful as the following:

Live your life as art.

At first, it sounds compelling. But the more you dwell on it, the more abstract it becomes. What does it mean to live life as art? Does that not entail a certain degree of selfishness? Decadence? Detachment from reality?

Not so. In fact, quite the opposite. When conceived of properly, living life as art makes you more grounded in reality, not less. It makes you more rooted, more loving, and more charitable to those around you.

Today, I want to share what it means to live your life as art, and practical tips for how to begin doing so. Because, in the words of Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” .

To play your part well, therefore, you must understand that you are indeed a character in a grand performance…

Scripts, Scenes, and Storyboards

There is much confusion as to why you should live your life as art in the first place. Fundamentally, it is not something you do for others, but for yourself. At first glance, though, this seems to be at odds with Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” — because isn’t the whole point of theatre to perform for the audience?

Yet just as method actors bring their characters to life by becoming as opposed to performing them, so too does living your life as art make your life a gift to others. It’s not about LARPing for the sake of your ego, but embracing an internal transformation that spills over into the real world. In other words, by doing it for yourself, it becomes something you do for others.

The biggest mistake people make, though, is to focus on the physical: on clothes, food, decor, etc. While these are important (and we will address them in the next section), they are completely insignificant if you do not first pay attention to the theory, or what I like to call the “scripts, scenes, and storyboards” of life.

Taken together, these elements compose the heart of who you are on the world’s stage. The script, for example, defines your character, the stakes, your voice, and your limits. It makes an actor ask: Who is this? What would they never do? What would they always do? Applied to your life, the script translates to your personal canon. It defines non-negotiable principles and moral red lines just as much as the virtues you are trying to embody.

The storyboard, on the other hand, is what helps you visualize scenes in advance, so as to prevent improvisation from going too far. Way too many people ruin their lives by acting as though they’re perpetually in the grand finale of their life’s drama. But what if it’s just Scene 1 of Act II? By conceiving of your life in “scenes”, and by recognizing that no one scene tells the full story, you can begin to look ahead to the rest of the storyboard to see how things play out down the line.

While it’s easy to critique the vanity and excess of those with “main character energy”, there’s actually incredible value in casting yourself as the protagonist in a larger story. Why? Because we hate to suffer, yet the stories we love most are full of it.

Batman’s hero arc begins with him being orphaned. Joseph’s with being sold into slavery. Gladiator’s Maximus sees his family murdered, and Aeneas flees from Troy as it burns to the ground.

In all of these cases, the main characters experienced struggles that are objectively more difficult than the vast majority of the ones you face today. Yet you don’t pity them or lament their bad fortune to the same degree you would if the same things happened in your own life. Why? Because you know the ending.

By reframing your life’s difficulties as temporary scenes in early acts, you can begin to conceive of how you’ll rewrite your story by the end of the play. Engage the imagination as much as you like in order to do so. In a tough marriage and feel like you made a mistake? Pretend you’re an 18th century aristocrat in an arranged marriage, who eventually learns how to make it work and cultivate romance with his wife. The possibilities are endless.

In living your life as art, the script, scenes, and storyboards matter far more than the props you use or the costumes you wear on stage. That is not to say, however, that they are unimportant…

Dress, Decor, and Decorum

Just as the frame around a work of art influences how you perceive it, so do the objects in your life influence how you perform and carry yourself:

Research on enclothed cognition, the persistent influence of clothing on a wearer’s psychology, found that said influence depends on two factors: the physical experience and the symbolic meaning of wearing clothing.

One series of experiments gave participants lab coats that were described as either doctor’s coats or painter’s coats and instructed to complete visual search tasks. The participants who were told they wore doctor’s coats performed better at their task than those wearing painter’s coat, despite the coats being exactly the same. Another finding was that actually wearing the coat had a greater impact than merely seeing the coat nearby while performing tasks.

-PJ Poscimur, The Symbolic Power of Clothing

This phenomenon is not limited to the field of clothing, but applies to everything in your environment. This is why, if you desire to live your life as art, you must surround yourself with beautiful, meaningful things.

Your wardrobe is the best place to start, but after that you can move to the kitchen, your office, etc. Replace your ballpoint pen with a fountain pen. Change out kitsch coffee mugs with ornate and elegant ones. Hang great art on your walls, and hang it in high quality frames. Use a leather notebook to capture your thoughts and to-do lists, wear an analog watch instead of checking your phone, or change paper towels for linen napkins at the dinner table.

These details might seem small, but they have a major impact on your psyche. So much so, in fact, that the objects we surround ourselves with often trap us in a sort of feedback loop. Italian author Gabriele d’Annunzio captures this perfectly in his description of his character Andrea Spirelli’s carefully cultivated surroundings:

All those objects, amid which he had so many times loved and enjoyed and suffered, had for him acquired something of his own sensibility. Not only were they witnesses to his loves, his pleasures, his sorrows, but they were participants. In his memory, each form, each color…was a note in a chord of beauty.

-Gabriele d’Annunzio, Il piacere

The objects you surround yourself with, from the clothes you wear to the pen you write with, are notes in a chord of beauty that provides the soundtrack to a life lived as art. Functionally, they achieve the same end as architecture: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

Art as Love

As stated in the intro, living your life as art is something you do for yourself, but which ultimately redounds to the good of others. One of the main ways it does so is by strengthening you in virtue and charity.

This is because the protagonists we admire most are not those who lament their past decisions or the fact life has been cruel to them. Rather, they are those who persevere through injustice and hardship. In casting yourself as the protagonist of your life, therefore, you will indirectly imitate these virtues. “What would Aragorn do in my situation?” might seem like a silly question, but it will never lead you astray if you answer it honestly.

The key, of course, is to recognize what’s actually admirable, and which protagonists you should seek to model your life on. It’s okay to pick and choose virtues from men who are otherwise flawed in other domains, as long as you remain oriented in the right direction. The main thing is to never allow yourself to view real life as a hindrance to your art: for example, your work, your kids, your spouse, etc.

To live your life as art means to take the banal, everyday, and at times frustrating aspects of life and elevate them to a higher plane of existence. It is, in other words, a call to enchant the ordinary.

For what else is art but reality seen through the lens of enchantment?

I hope you enjoyed this article. But even more, I hope you join us in Venice this May for what is bound to be a thoroughly enchanting retreat.

Applications close this Saturday, so submit yours now before it’s too late:

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It is said that a man should dress for the job he wants, not the one he endures. It stands to reason, therefore, that a man who desires a better world should do what he can to will that world into being.

As we explored last week, Casanova stands as a model of how not to respond to a society in decline. Yet among his fellow Venetians there was another, living at the same time, and facing that same decline, who responded far more constructively. That man was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Both Casanova and Tiepolo saw a Venice in decay. But while the former would surrender to and feed it, the latter would actually fight it, in the most graceful of ways. Raised in a world which had abandoned the ethereal for the emotional, and the grand for the personal, Tiepolo embraced the epic. In place of raw, dark and claustrophobic images of violence, he painted sweeping vaults that cast the viewer directly into the Heavens.

To Tiepolo, the world was a stage, and one in need of better scenery.

Here is what the greatest painter of the 18th century, and the author of Europe’s greatest splendor, can teach you about willing a better world into being: both in and outside the home…

But first — We’re going to Italy!

This May, we’re hosting two exciting retreats to Bergamo and Venice. To learn more and apply to join us, click the button below. Applications close February 14th:

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Now, back to the article…

From the Shadow to the Sun

In 1697, little did the one year old Giovanni Battista Tiepolo know that his home country, the Republic of Venice, had just commenced her final century.

To others, however, the writing was beginning to shine upon the walls. The boy’s own father, Domenico Tiepolo, would likely have been one of them. As a merchant who worked in maritime commerce, he would have been all too aware of the collapse of Venetian political and economic power. Venice, who had once dominated Mediterranean trade, now struggled to pay even for the escort of her own ships.

Even the art seemed to reflect this gloominess. Venice had not produced a painter of international renown since the death of Tintoretto, a hundred years earlier. In the decades that followed, the violent realism of Caravaggio — himself a tortured soul — had come to dominate Italian canvases, or at least the perception of what ‘proper art’ was. Such chiaroscuro compositions were dark both in theme and execution, where scarcely lit figures emerged from an inky and depressing blackness. It was a world which Tiepolo would struggle against, and eventually overcome.

As happens with tragic frequency among the great men of history, Tiepolo was barely a year old when his father suddenly died. Unlike what happened to Caravaggio however, Tiepolo was raised lovingly by his widowed mother, Orsola, along with his five siblings. When the growing boy demonstrated a clear passion for the art of painting, he was not only permitted but encouraged to pursue it, and enrolled in the workshop of the city’s most prominent master, Gregorio Lazzarini.

By all accounts, Lazzarini was a patient and attentive teacher, able to sharpen Tiepolo’s technical ability, and direct it to productive ends. That said, the early works of Tiepolo, following his admittance in 1717 to the Fraglia, or painter’s guild of Venice, were still rather conventional. The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (pictured above), which he painted around 1722 for the Church of San Stae, is a typical example. High contrast, mildly claustrophobic and somewhat brutal, it fell well within the tradition of Caravaggio.

Fortunately for Tiepolo, however, his rapid mastering of the ‘standard of the day’ allowed him to build the confidence to leave it behind. As Vincenzo da Canal wrote in 1732, Gregorio Lazzarini’s star pupil:

“…Would however break from his diligent manner, and as a being of fire and spirit, embrace one both rapid and resolute”

Vincenzo da Canal, Vita di Gregorio Lazzarini, 1732

It would not take long to glimpse the rapid and resolute potential of a Tiepolo unchained.

The art of fresco may be reckoned among the most gruelling skills any painter could hope to master. Painting a complex image onto canvas is one thing. Painting it onto wet plaster, however, is quite another. Now imagine decorating a ceiling in this manner, laying on your back, your face a foot from the surface, and able to see only a tiny portion of the full composition at any one time. This is the art that Giovanni Battista Tiepolo would both revive in dramatic style, and elevate to newfound grace.

Barely three years after completing the The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, Tiepolo would unveil the first of a great many masterpieces indeed, on the ceiling of the Palazzo Sandi in Venice. The Force of Eloquence could scarcely be more different from the Martyrdom. Sprawling across the crown of the palace hall, it is as if the ceiling itself has been lifted away, and we are staring directly into the vault of Heaven. It is colourful, it is bright, it is ethereal, it is joyful.

Making the space to breathe, Tiepolo had found the perfect medium for his talent and his vision. Painting on ceilings, he required his viewers to crane their necks, and he would reward them for doing so with works that were both literally and metaphorically uplifting. As the title suggests, it is an allegorical celebration of the heights that eloquence can elevate a man to. A vision, quite simply, of a better world.

It was a vision that would capture the imagination of a generation. In a Venice accustomed to darkness, Tiepolo had lit a blazing torch…

Painting Away Decline

Frescoes, even those on ceilings, were of course far from new to Italian art. Michelangelo, after all, had frescoed the vault of the Sistine Chapel two hundred years earlier. Tiepolo, however, had revived the awe which ceiling fresco alone is able to muster.

Gone were the crowded compositions of the Baroque. In Tiepolo, the sky itself — the dome of Heaven — was the protagonist that humbled its figures.

What colourful figures they were, however. Reminiscent not of the musty taverns of 17th century Italy, but of something else that was swelling in popularity in the last century of old Europe — the Opera. In the words of Pietro Metastasio, the foremost librettist of the age:

“I imagine dreams and fables; and even on paper

While I adorn and draw fables and dreams,

In them, fool that I am, I take such a part,

That I weep and am disdainful of the ills I crafted...”

Pietro Metastasio, Sogni e favole io fingo; e pure in carte, 1733

So too was it with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who soon became a byword for dreams, and known as the man who could breathe life into dreams, and heaven into the home.

From the completion of The Force of Eloquence, Tiepolo would for the rest of his days never struggle for work, particularly after a commission from Dionisio Dolfin, Patriarch of Aquileia, to decorate the Patriarchate in Udine, would further propel him into the elite ranks of in demand artists. If his twenties had been devoted to finding his niche, his thirties would be his reward.

In 1730, he received his first major commission from abroad, in what was then the Austrian-ruled Duchy of Milan. As would become common in Tiepolo’s career, the occasion for his work was celebratory. Ahead of the aristocratic marriage between Filippo Archinto and Giulia Borromeo, he was charged with the beautification of Palazzo Archinto. The Palace, unfortunately, was bombed by the Allies of World War Two in 1943, though mercifully, photographs taken beforehand allow us to reconstruct Tiepolo’s lost frescoes, one of which, Perseus and Andromeda, we can see above. Here we see the beginnings of the trademark ‘Tiepolo Sky’, or pastel skies punctuated by dramatic swirls of gold and other vibrant colours.

His clients could not get enough of it, and by its completion, Tiepolo was famous. As Vincenzo da Canal observed at the time:

“He is extraordinarily prolific in his ingenuity; for this engravers and copyists seek to engrave his works, to obtain his inventions and read his bizarre thoughts; and already his drawings are so highly esteemed that books of them have been sent to the most distant countries.”

Vincenzo da Canal, Vita di Gregorio Lazzarini, 1732

In 1736 he was actually headhunted by King Frederick I of Sweden, who charged Count Carl Gustaf Tessin with inviting Tiepolo to decorate the Royal Palace of Stockholm. It was an honour no Venetian painter had known for generations, as demonstrated by Tessin describing him as a “follower of Veronese” (One of the most successful painters of the 16th century). Remarkably, however, Tiepolo declined, electing to focus on his own country.

His own country would indeed appreciate it. Indeed one rather gets the impression that Tiepolo had managed to unlock something in his compatriots. An awareness that something missing in Venice for a very long time was returning. As Anton Maria Zanetti, an influential Venetian art critic and dealer of the day wrote:

“[He is] Among the principal subjects that honour the Venetian tradition and are worthy of a truly talented painter, the vivacity of his spirit, combined with his intelligence, is truly remarkable. His unique merit is his ability to invent, and by inventing, to draw and refine at the same time a multitude of figures with novelty, multiplicity, and excellent array of tools and other things; combining this with a perfect understanding of clarity and of the most lucid beauty, which makes him worthy of distinction and of consideration among the highest ranks”

Anton Zanetti, Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pittura della città di Venezia, 1733

Amid his innumerable contributions to Venice, from the private palazzi of the nobility to the most splendid of her churches, his combination of vibrant light, operatic flamboyance and vivid colour conquered a city that had long prided itself on the search for beauty.

Tiepolo’s achievement, therefore, was already extraordinary. He had allowed his countrymen a vision of a brighter, better and more uplifting world. But Tiepolo’s greatness was, unlike with so many famed artists before and since, grounded in a simple yet wholesome reality.

His example indeed shows that you do not need to choose between family and greatness, and that one can indeed reinforce the other…

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Travel is overrated.

I say this not as someone who’s never traveled, but as one who’s visited over 20 countries. That number isn’t something I put much stock into, by the way. Of all the countries I’ve been to, only two or three have been ones that I very intentionally decided to visit. I never set out to see all these places, it’s just how my life has worked out.

Nowadays, to say that travel is overrated is almost anathema. In certain circles, it might brand you as low-class, ignorant, or — horror of horrors — MAGA. This is because when you say “travel is overrated”, what people actually hear you say is “travel isn’t good.”

While I think there is certainly room to critique the default assumption (held with an almost religious fervor) that travel is, in all cases, nothing but an inherent good, I’ll leave that to the side for now. Travel, for the most part, is a good thing. But there are many good things in life. Few good things, however, are as over-valued as travel is.

In today’s article, I want to share with you exactly why it is that travel is overrated. Then, I’ll lay out my three points for making the most of travel, and how to ensure it actually delivers on the goods people expect of it.

As for where to begin, why don’t we start with the wisdom of an ancient Roman? I’m writing this from Italy, after all. When in Rome…

Modern Medicine, or Ancient Disease?

Travel is often seen as a cure to the woes of everyday life. Bored? Travel. Gap year? Travel. Need to find yourself? Travel. Going abroad seems to be the solution to everything.

On the surface, this might seem like a new phenomenon, because never before have people been able to travel to other continents so inexpensively. But surprisingly, it’s a problem that goes back not just decades, but millennia.

Writing in the first century AD to the Roman procurator of Sicily, Stoic philosopher Seneca reprimanded him for his naive views on travel. In Letter XVIII to Lucilius, Seneca says:

Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

Though you may cross vast spaces of sea…your faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.

Here we see the first indicators that excessive travel is less a modern solution to boredom and dissatisfaction than it is an indicator of a personal malaise. Of course, there is definite fun to be had in exploring new places. But for many, travel is used as a means of escape, a break from the monotony of everyday life. It is less a pull towards something than it is a push away from something else.

Such an approach to travel, however, will never satisfy you, which is why those who frequently travel often seem addicted to it. Their life revolves around planning and going on their next trip. Travel becomes their “personality”, which is to say that it really just masks a lack of one.

Picking up on the never-satisfying nature of travel, Seneca continues:

Socrates made the same remark to one who complained; he said: “Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.”

What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

In short, travel isn’t a solution. It will never fix anything about you. Functionally, it’s just a more expensive version of watching Netflix: it’ll make you forget about your problems for a short while, before you’re eventually thrust back into the real world.

This is why travel is overrated. It’s not a bad thing, but people treat it like the Holy Grail of self-transformation when in reality it’s just expensive Netflix. But of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Travel can, when done well, be exceptionally eye-opening. When grounded in a deeper cause and purpose, even short trips can change your outlook on life and change how you interact with the world.

(Speaking of which, applications for our retreats to Venice and Bergamo close on the 14th, so apply now if you want to join us)

The real key to making travel meaningful comes down to following three main rules. I call them the “three L’s” of travel. Having spent nearly a decade abroad, these are what I’ve learned to be the most important things to do if you really want your travel to transform you.

They’re simple, but not necessarily easy. The most meaningful things in life, however, rarely are…

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The popular culture of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries has done much to convince a tragic number of men and women alike that the hedonistic life is the only one ‘worth’ pursuing.

Why concern yourself with such ‘old-fashioned’ notions of purity, of monogamy, of marriage and family, or the judgement of society — let alone God — when you can ‘live in the moment’, ‘find yourself’ and ‘enjoy your youth’? In other words, why not aspire to the life of Giacomo Casanova, whose very name has become the archetype of the hedonist par excellence?

Yet the dark allure that has grown around Casanova requires that you see only the caricature of him, rather than the man who actually lived. For the true Casanova, far from being a model of masculinity, is a warning from history as relevant today as ever.

Fortunately, we do not need to rely on the testimony of others. We can read his own, in the record he himself left. So let us explore what his own words can tell us about the dangers of pursuing a life of pleasure and fame…

But first — Want to explore Casanova’s Venice in person?

This May, we’re hosting two exciting retreats to Bergamo and Venice. To learn more and apply to join us, click the button below. Applications close February 14th:

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Now, back to the article…

The Price of Pleasure

The most obvious legacy of Giacomo Casanova lies in the dictionary. Casanova itself, after all, is a name that has become a common noun, denoting a promiscuous man, a seducer and a libertine — that is, a man who objects to moral principles, and relishes their subversion.

While the real Casanova was far more than a womaniser, it would of course be futile to avoid discussing his most infamous quality. It should nevertheless be noted, however, that the primary source for Casanova’s life is indeed his own incomplete autobiography — Histoire de ma Vie (‘Story of My Life’) — which he composed in the unhappy latter years of his life. In the preface to the Histoire de ma Vie, Casanova describes the nature of this autobiography as follows:

“Dear reader, I trust that, far from attaching to my history the character of impudent boasting, you will find in my Memoirs only the characteristic proper to a general confession, and that my narratory style will be the manner neither of a repenting sinner, nor of a man ashamed to acknowledge his frolics. They are the follies inherent to youth; I make sport of them, and, if you are kind, you will not yourself refuse them a good-natured smile”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Preface

Following on as it does from an extended passage detailing his own professed faith as a Christian, yet so too his commitment to being a “free agent”, it is left tantalisingly ambiguous throughout the autobiography what Casanova intends by “confession”. Is this an act of sincere repentance, or is he letting us in on apparently forbidden secrets, happy to take us for the ride?

Whether Giacomo Casanova truly counted over a hundred and twenty lovers — including several men — therefore, is curious trivia, but ultimately unimportant. More significant is how he embarked on this path, and the endgame of it.

History is littered with examples of men who suffered defining tragedy in their earliest years. For some, it was their cruel making, the driving force behind their will to better themselves, or their societies. For others, it was their breaking, and Giacomo Casanova sadly falls into the latter camp.

As the son of two actors who worked in a city then notorious for its loose morals, Casanova’s life was unlikely to ever be conventional. Wherever it might have lead, however, was abruptly cut off at the age of barely six, when his father died in 1731. With his mother forced to travel around Europe for work, the boy was briefly raised by his superstitious grandmother, before being sent off to a torrid boarding school in Padua. Without family oversight, Casanova was ill-prepared for the early adulthood that was forced upon him, when at the age of eleven, he was aggressively fondled by his tutor’s wayward daughter Bettina, “which I thought innocent, but which caused me to be angry with myself”. Thus began the first scandalous relation of Giacomo Casanova, and the spiral of his life:

“In spite of a good foundation of sound morals, the natural offspring of the Divine principles which had been early rooted in my heart, I have been throughout my life the victim of my senses; I have found delight in losing the right path, I have constantly lived in the midst of error, with no consolation but the consciousness of my being mistaken”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Preface

As the events in Padua established within him, and as his above words imply, despite his reputation as a ‘conqueror’ of women, time and time again the true overriding characteristic of Casanova was his passivity. Despite his almost defensive assertions of being a “free agent”, Casanova was a man unable to break free from instinctive impulses which entirely hijacked his life. Endless friendships would be ruined, and business opportunities sabotaged, by this slavery to his passions.

So overwhelming was temptation to him that Casanova would not be dissuaded even upon discovering that rampant promiscuity brings with it more than moral risk:

“But, alas! The path of pleasure is not strewn only with roses! On the third day, I found out, much to my dismay, that a serpent had been hid under the flowers”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Volume I, Chapter VII

It is ultimately impossible to know just how many venereal diseases Casanova contracted over the course of his consuming life. Multiple times in the autobiography he details the agony and horror of discovering some new malady in either himself or a lover. It is almost certain that he was still a young man when his body was riddled with gonorrhea and, even worse, syphilis, with all of the destructive consequences this can have upon the mind and body.

In one especially disturbing revelation, during his time in Germany he commenced an affair with a woman infected with something “which devoured her interior parts and left no marks outwardly, and was thus all the more dangerous”. Despite knowing this:

“I cannot imagine what had become of my wits to let myself be so beguiled, while every day I renewed the poison that she had poured into my veins”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Volume IV, Chapter XIII

Indeed scarcely a chapter of the Histoire de ma Vie goes by without Casanova facing disabling bouts of fever that consign him to bed for days or weeks at a time, while it is strongly implied that by the end of his life, syphilis had left “indelible marks” on his face. Only pure luck, and the timely interventions of scores of doctors, kept him alive until middle age.

A man who cannot control himself, however, is easily controlled by others, and Giacomo Casanova was thus vulnerable to forces far more nefarious than his own instincts…

Feeding the Beast

Casanova, for all of his base struggles, was far from an unintelligent man. On the contrary, his extraordinary wit and quick-thinking proved to be his primary asset throughout his life, be it in the pursuit of women or of fleeting fortune.

As per his own preface, nothing incensed Casanova more than “fools”, and nothing gave him greater pleasure than exploiting the foolish. “I always feel the greatest bliss when I recollect those I have caught in my snares” (Histoire de ma Vie, Preface), he remarked. In his youth, he had pursued an interest in medicine, and more often than not, relished making others believe he possessed occult power when all he had performed were simple remedies.

But much like his instinct, Casanova never succeeded in tempering his thirst for knowledge with wisdom or caution. ‘Occult’ indeed is a word which surrounds Casanova from his earliest days. It was his grandmother, after all, who upon misdiagnosing Casanova’s frequent nosebleeds, took the boy to a “witch” on Murano, whose rituals and incantations profoundly disturbed the boy. Even more disturbing, however, was his grandmother’s warning to him the following day:

“She cautioned me to be silent, threatening me with death if I dared to say anything respecting my night’s adventures”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Volume I, Chapter I

Thus from another childhood trauma was born the second great vice of Casanova — the fascination for the secret, and obsession with the forbidden.

Disarmed in instinct and discernment, Casanova fell all too easily into the lap of the malintentioned. Deceived as so many otherwise gifted Europeans of his age were with the promise of arcane knowledge, in 1750 he enrolled into a certain brethren already on the road to infamy:

“It was in Lyons that a respectable individual, whose acquaintance I made at the house of M. de Rochebaron, obtained for me the favour of being initiated in the sublime trifles of Freemasonry. I arrived in Paris a simple apprentice; a few months after my arrival I became companion and master”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Volume II Chapter V

In this regard, the memoirs of Casanova are quite remarkable, in that they form a rare and open admission of initiation into Freemasonry. Despite his proud recollection of this however, Casanova is curiously evasive as to how far his involvement with the group went. Bound as Freemasons are to oaths of secrecy, however, this is predictable. He does, however, “advise all well-born young men, who intend to travel, to become Freemasons”, and subtle throwaway references throughout the narrative indicate that visits to enrolled Masons or Masonic Lodges regularly punctuated his travels.

His lone description of what Freemasonry is, however, is a curiously weak attempt at deflection:

“It is a charitable institution, which, at certain times and in certain places, may have been a pretext for criminal underplots got up for the overthrow of public order, but is there anything under heaven that has not been abused? Have we not seen the Jesuits, under the cloak of our holy religion, thrust into the parricidal hand of blind enthusiasts the dagger with which kings were to be assassinated!”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Volume II, Chapter V

Thus does Casanova casually vindicate one of the most serious charges that has long been levelled against the Freemasons, that they conspire towards the “overthrow of public order”. The other, more closely guarded, is that enrolment in the Masons requires one to disavow the basic creeds of Christianity, and work towards the overthrow of Christian governance everywhere, for such a world, its civic and religious bonds broken, is an ‘illuminated’, or ‘enlightened one’.

It is no coincidence that the later 18th century is indeed called the ‘Enlightenment’, when an otherwise impossibly high proportion of the revolutionary leaders who overthrew France, and the Catholic colonies of the New World soon after, were known Freemasons. That the first French Republic sought the violent destruction of the Church and Christian faith, and its replacement with a ‘Cult of Reason’, under an authoritarian government which believed in the violent export of its ideology, is likewise not coincidental.

Casanova, cryptically, does concede that:

“Freemasonry, in the midst of many men of the highest merit, reckons a crowd of scoundrels whom no society ought to acknowledge, because they are the refuse of mankind as far as morality is concerned”

Casanova, Histoire de ma Vie, Volume II Chapter V

After all, a generation earlier Pope Clement XII had formally banned all Catholics from involvement with Freemasonry — a ban upheld by Pope Francis in 2023 and remaining in force today:

“Thus these aforesaid Societies or Conventicles have caused in the minds of the faithful the greatest suspicion, and all prudent and upright men have passed the same judgment on them as being depraved and perverted. For if they were not doing evil they would not have so great a hatred of the light”

Pope Clement XII, In Eminenti, 1738

‘Depravity’ and ‘perversion’ are words that have long surrounded Freemasonry, particularly since its propagation across Europe and North America in the later 18th century. Their reputation for subversive morality, and strategy of reeling in recruits with the temptation of occult wisdom, would have drawn Casanova to them like a moth to a torch.

Thus from 1750, Casanova was a man corrupted in body and in spirit, having self-excommunicated himself from the Church. He had, therefore, sacrificed a great deal indeed in his pursuit of pleasure. But was it worth it?

The answer is more complex than you might expect. What Casanova documents next reveals neither absolute remorse nor unrepentant debauchery, but a much more complex truth…

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Men and women from every era have found something special in Venice: from Lord Byron to John Ruskin, Richard Wagner, Cosimo de’ Medici, and even Jeff Bezos, just to name a few. The city that stole the relics of Saint Mark also produced such figures as Marco Polo, Antonio Vivaldi, and the infamous Giacomo Casanova (more on him next Tuesday). In short, it’s a city that has something for everyone.

In today’s conversation, Lucy and I explore what makes Venice so unique, and highlight some of the reasons people can’t help but fall in love with it. This interview is free for all readers of INVICTUS.

If you enjoy this conversation and would like to experience Venice in person with me and James this May, click below to learn more about our retreat Building Heaven Out of Hell: The Values that Made Venice:

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The annals of history are defined by the great men who steered its course. Their stories are, by definition, inspiring and worthy of remembrance in their own right.

The danger of merely knowing of them instead of studying them, however, lies in assuming that their example cannot be replicated. That they are there to be superficially celebrated rather than learned from.

In reality of course, such men rarely achieved greatness without first treading an arduous road to prepare for it. More often than not, the road to greatness is paved, ironically, by humility. By the willingness to listen to and learn from others, and take criticism constructively.

One man who was defined by precisely such a road was the man who rescued sculpture from stagnation, and near single-handedly launched the Neoclassical era from the cradle to the dominant aesthetic of the Western world — Antonio Canova.

Yet Canova could count upon no exalted lineage nor any exceptional advantage in his pursuit of greatness. He did it the old-fashioned way, by watching, learning and improving.

Here is what the last great artist that Venice produced can teach you about becoming a master in your field…

But first — we’re going to Italy!

This coming May, we’re hosting two exciting retreats to Bergamo and Venice. To learn more and apply to join us, click the button below:

Learn more & apply

Now, back to the article…

Finding Your Passion

On the 1st November 1757, Antonio Canova was born into a country defined by decadent decline. Four generations had passed since the Republic of Venice had last known glory worthy of celebration. Doge Francesco Morosini’s spectacular defeat of the Ottomans, and the conquest of the Morea, was a distant memory now, and those gains had since been squandered.

Geopolitically, Venice was a shadow of her former self, whose once great dockyards were silent, and whose ancient families more often lost their fortunes in the city’s casinos than made new ones in commerce. Born in the small town of Possagno on the Venetian Terra Firma, Antonio himself was little different. The Canova family, after all, was of honourable descent, but impoverished by years of reckless investments. Worse, Antonio was just three when he lost his father. With his mother remarrying not long after, the boy was treated as an afterthought, all but abandoned upon the doorstep of his grandfather Pasino, a local stonemason who specialised in altars.

Denied an ordinary or comfortable youth, Antonio was just a child when he was sent to work in a marble quarry. Over the years of this labour, however, he began to experiment with stone, carving modest figures. One of these he gifted to the son of a Venetian senator, Giovanni Falier, in whose rustic villa Antonio’s grandfather happened to be working as a gardener at the time.

Welcomed into the villa, it was here that the barely ten year old Antonio Canova revealed his genius and his passion, when to the astonishment of the household he modelled a patriotic Lion of Saint Mark out of butter for Falier senior’s banquet table (an iconic moment immortalised by the above painting).

The senator, amazed, arranged for Antonio to be apprenticed to the sculptor Giuseppe Bernardi in Pagnano, and then Venice proper. But while his talent was clear, it was still rough, unhoned and undirected.

But sculpting was not to be a mere trade to Antonio Canova. Indeed while the hours spent in Bernardi’s workshop formed his training, it was those beyond which formed his true education.

Following his arrival in Venice in 1768, the still minor Canova would find no shortage of inspiration. One of his favoured sanctuaries was the residence of Filippo Farsetti, the city’s foremost patron of the arts, on the Grand Canal. More particularly, however, it was Farsetti’s collection of plaster casts of ancient statues that captivated him. For hours, Antonio would ponder them, sketching them and dreaming. Sensing his calling, in his evenings he attended the Academy of Fine Arts to better learn how to draw the nude human form — the bread and butter of classical sculpture.

This life of ‘double education’ enabled Canova to rapidly outstrip his peers, particularly when Bernardi’s death in 1773 suddenly cast him into the deep end. Farsetti himself however, evidently impressed by the boy who had taken such an interest in his household ornaments, gave him his first independent opportunity in Venice. It was a modest start, but the two Baskets of Fruit Canova carved for him in 1774 (one of which is pictured above) form an impressive debut for a teenager.

After all, one cannot be a master of anything until one has mastered the basics. From there, one can turn to mastering the classics…

Studying the Greats

Canova did not rest upon his laurels. In 1775, after winning the second prize at the Venetian Academy, for a terracotta copy he had made of one of Farsetti’s plaster casts, he seized the chance to prove the worth of his evening classes.

Senator Giovanni Falier, who doubtless still fondly remembered the butter lion that the boy had crafted for his table, commissioned Canova to carve his first full size Baroque sculptures. Working on them for the best part of three years, the Orpheus and Eurydice he produced in 1777 delighted Falier, though the appreciation Canova was winning amongst the Venetian aristocracy ensured that the pieces were almost immediately superseded.

Now able to work more quickly and more confidently, on the occasion of the 1779 Feast of the Ascension, the twenty two year old Canova unveiled his first true masterpiece — Daedalus and Icarus. With two figures in the same sculpture this time, a father and son, emotion expertly carved into their faces, it was a Baroque painting in marble form. With his ability to translate sketches into stone, and his command of a chisel trained by Berardi and those long months at the quarry, it was the perfect symbol of all Canova had worked for.

The man who commissioned Daedalus and Icarus, the delighted Procurator Pietro Pisani, paid Canova 100 gold zecchini for it. The sculptor, however, decided to invest the money in his own education. No longer content with working from mere copies, Canova resolved to cut out the middle man and study at the source, and for that he would have to travel to Rome.

By the late 18th century, a Grand Tour of Italy was the essential education of an aspiring gentleman. As a Venetian, Canova had a head start in such an education, not least due to the diligent curiosity he had pursued in Venice herself. But upon arriving in Rome, the awe Canova felt was no less than that felt by the plethora of aristocratic British, French and German tourists who were discovering the Eternal City.

His achievements back home would enable him to experience it in that much more glamour, for he was hosted by the Venetian Ambassador himself, Senator Girolamo Zulian, who all too happily granted lodgings in Palazzo Venezia to the man who was the talk of cultured Venice.

By every account, including that of his own diaries, it was a moment of profound discovery for Canova. In Venice, he was on the verge of becoming a large fish in a small lake. In Rome, he was but a minnow in a vast ocean. In Rome, seat of the old empire, and stage of the Papacy itself, standards were exceptionally high. How could they not be, in a city whose ruins provided a continual benchmark for what quality could be?

True to his nature, for Canova there were scarcely enough hours in a day to discover Rome and record her in his sketchbooks. From the Capitoline to the Vatican, he would find all the inspiration he would ever need. At the same time, Zulian ensured that his appreciation would remain rooted in meaning by assigning his own secretary to instruct Canova in languages, the Greek and Roman classics and the intricacies of ancient mythology.

But a man who aspires to greatness cannot waste away the years purely in study. Sooner or later he must raise his head above the battlements and take a risk.

So in 1781, when the Ambassador commissioned a sculpture from Canova, it was time to prove that his studies had been a good investment. Even more so when Zulian instructed the boy to choose his own subject for the statue.

What he delivered would astound Rome, and prove that true mastery does not seek to destroy what came before, but build upon it…

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Almost any of the famous paintings you see of Venice today are made by one artist: Canaletto. One of the most successful painters of the 18th century, he was the undisputed master of this field, and even sold over 200 of his works to the British king.

But of course, it wasn’t always this way. At the start of his career, Canaletto was laughed at by Venice’s art establishment and derided by his peers for making “postcards”. So what changed, and how did he turn it all around?

The secret lies in Canaletto’s ability to form and keep strategic partnerships. By teaming up with the right people at the right time, he was able to go from overlooked “postcard” painter to one of the European aristocracy’s (and King George III’s) favorite artists.

Today, we look at how Canaletto leveraged his partnerships to become one of history’s most famous landscape painters, and how you follow his example to achieve success.

But first — we’re going to Italy!

This coming May, we’re hosting two exciting retreats to Bergamo and Venice. To learn more and apply to join us, click the button below:

Learn more & apply

Now, back to the article…

Mastery Meets Marketing

Before Canaletto was a painter, he was a set designer for the theatre. His experience there gave him an eye for detail, which was a strength he leveraged once he decided to get into painting. But unfortunately, some of the habits of Canaletto’s old profession stuck.

In his early work, such as the painting above, you can tell that Canaletto’s technical skills were well developed: everything is depicted properly, but something about the painting lacks energy. It doesn’t “pop”. Able to see the diamond in the rough, however, was an Irishman by the name of Owen Swiny, who approached Canaletto with two ideas that would transform his career.

Swiny’s first suggestion was that Canaletto stop seeking the approval of the Venetian art establishment, and instead paint for foreigners. Wealthy tourists who wanted to remember their time in Venice would be a perfect market, and one well-disposed to purchasing Canaletto’s landscapes of the city.

Swiny’s second suggestion followed up from the first: make the paintings brighter! No tourist, he said, wanted to remember dreary skies, but rather warm and sunny days. So it was that the signature blue skies of Canaletto’s paintings were born.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see these changes as obvious improvements. But for Canaletto, as with all who find themselves on the receiving end of feedback, it wasn’t so clear at the moment. It is to Canaletto’s credit, therefore, that he didn’t remain so stubbornly centered on his own artistic vision, but instead remained open to Swiny’s advice.

Because as we shall see, it was thanks to Swiny that Canaletto first burst onto the international stage…

Dealing with Distribution

Once Canaletto began implementing Swiny’s advice, the Irishman began promoting his work. Since he spoke English, Swiny could introduce Canaletto’s work to British buyers, especially young aristocrats stopping in Venice on their Grand Tour. He continued to aid Canaletto creatively, giving him insight on how to improve the paintings for British customers.

The set-up worked perfectly, and Swiny was rewarded with a cut of all the earnings he sent Canaletto’s way. The artist’s reputation began to grow, winning the attention of increasingly prominent buyers. Chief among them was the British consul to Venice, Joseph Smith.

If Swiny was the talent-spotter, Smith became the systems builder, and soon struck up a partnership with Canaletto to take his work mainstream. Using his status as a diplomat to win trust with elite buyers, Smith then took over the administrative side of the business, controlling the pricing, access, and distribution of Canaletto’s work. As a result, demand for Canaletto paintings skyrocketed, and soon even King George III became an interested buyer.

On the surface, both Swiny’s and Smith’s contributions to Canaletto’s career seem pretty basic in retrospect. None of what they suggested or implemented was truly revolutionary, and Canaletto could have, at least in theory, done it all himself. And why shouldn’t he have?

One of the first rules of business, after all, is to never give away equity. This is for good reason, as there are plenty of downsides to giving away half of your business. Most people assume that it’s always better to keep everything under your control.

Except, history seems to prove quite the opposite. For most people, going it alone doesn’t actually work out for the better. It might seem counterintuitive, but there’s actually a powerful reason why this is — and if you can understand it, then you can learn to leverage it to your advantage, just as Canaletto did…

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When describing the condition of the contemporary Western world, many would, for readily understandable reasons, use the expression “in decline”. But is ‘decline’ a state of being, or a state of mind?

While it would seem ludicrous to us today, there were, after all, prominent thinkers alive during the Pax Romana who earnestly believed that things had never been worse. A certain degree of cynicism towards the present is natural, but there is no question that societies traverse phases of confidence, and others of despair.

In the later 17th century, the Republic of Venice was such an example of the latter. Once the commercial conqueror of the West, the Venetian Rialto at its height was the Wall Street and City of London of its day. With the growth of the European overseas empires, however, the world’s trade lanes had shifted to the oceans, Italy was no longer an essential stepping stone, and the end of crusading fervour had rendered the eastern Mediterranean geopolitically stagnant.

Slowly, but surely, Venice was bleeding the territories of her once great empire to the ascendent Ottoman Turks. In 1669, after an expensive 24 year war, she lost her last great possession beyond the Adriatic — the island of Crete. It was a painful moment for all patriotic Venetians, including her most talented admiral, Francesco Morosini.

A generation later, however, Morosini would avenge the loss of Crete in stunning style. Vanquishing the Turks, in 1687 he secures Venice’s greatest conquest in almost half a millennium, throwing his country an astounding lifeline.

Here is how the last great Doge of Venice demonstrated that decline need not be inevitable, and what he can teach you about responding to personal or national humiliation…

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Now, back to the article…

The Cretan Quagmire

If there was a state which embodied the expression ‘punching above one’s weight’ more than any other, the Republic of Venice was certainly among the top contenders.

Based out of a once unsanitary and malaria-ridden lagoon, over the centuries a small fishing colony of Roman exiles exploded into a maritime empire that spanned half the Mediterranean, and controlled the commerce of much of it. In 1204, unquestionably heinous and pursued out of naked self-interest though it was, by the Fourth Crusade she all but destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire and established a protectorate over much of Greece.

It was indeed amid that infamous campaign that Venice acquired her first major overseas colony — Crete, the lynchpin of any power that wished to control the Eastern Mediterranean.

By the 17th century however, those days seemed long ago indeed. Many states in the West had since consolidated into great powers, and near all the east was now subject to the Ottoman Empire, whose aggressive expansion had felled countless Christian armies and principalities. Venice had fought many wars against the Turks, and emerged maimed from all of them. Each defeat, and each loss of land, only made the next war more grueling, and its result more humiliating. Venetian life now, it seemed, was a perverse waiting game for the next inevitable disaster.

It was into this sorry state of affairs that Francesco Morosini was born on the 26th February 1619 to the ancient Venetian House of Morosini. Descended from a line that had produced three Doges of Venice, two Queens and many a cardinal, expectation weighed heavily upon him indeed.

It is a sign of the foresightedness of the Morosini however that Francesco was not educated in the traditional manner of a Venetian merchant, instead being sent to the new military academy of San Carlo at Modena, where he would study alongside the sons of martial nobility. War would define his life, and much of it trying desperately to defend his faltering country.

Just 21 when he was appointed a galley captain in the Venetian navy, he would be allowed just four years of relative normalcy before the hammer struck. Following a foolish provocation by the Knights of Malta, who then took refuge on Venetian Crete, in 1645 the enraged Sultan Ibrahim declared war on Venice, resolving to dismember her empire once and for all.

Thus on the 30th April 1645, a mighty armada of 400 ships, loaded with 50,000 men, sailed from Constantinople directly for Crete. With much of Christian Europe tied down in the Thirty Years’ War, Venice had little hope of finding meaningful allies. Panic ensued, as the parish churches of the Republic called for all families to donate to the war effort. Prestigious offices were auctioned off, and admittance to the nobility itself could now be bought. Anything and everything which could raise money was done, no matter how many traditions they trampled.

Unable to resist the Turkish onslaught on land, the Venetian forces on Crete withdrew to the capital city of Candia, where in the summer of 1647, one of the most gruelling sieges in human history began. That the besieged would resist for a full twenty two years however, is testament to the bravery and determination of a Venice even in decline.

Throughout all of this, Morosini was rapidly baptised in war across the Aegean theatre. On the 10th July 1651, his capture of a 60 gun Ottoman warship at Triò earned him renown, while the ferocity of the war, and frequent death of Venetian commanders, enabled his steady promotion.

To his immense frustration, Venetian high command was prone to irresponsible risk-taking, banking on large-scale engagements to try and destroy the Ottoman fleet outright. Morosini, however, favoured the Fabian strategy of dismantling the Turkish supply lines through limited precision strikes. While the Venetian navy would indeed score technically impressive victories, they would too often come at too high a cost. Inevitably, after one gamble too many, on the 19th June 1657 the Ottomans shattered the Venetian navy in the Dardanelles, killing Supreme Admiral Lorenzo Marcello in the process.

With Crete now wide open, the Republic turned in desperation to Morosini, who on the 20th August 1657 was promoted to Capitano Generale da Mar. What seemed like a great honour, however, was a poisoned chalice…

The Darkest Hour

Supreme Admiral Morosini inherited an appalling situation. Over a decade of all-out war had severely depleted the resources he could call upon, and with them he was now expected to cancel out a litany of strategic failures.

His task was not helped either by Provveditore Generale Antonio Barbaro continually diverting supplies away from the navy to futile land operations. Nevertheless, on the 8th March 1668 Morosini executed a masterful night-attack on an Ottoman flotilla off the island of Standia. With five enemy vessels captured, and over two thousand Christian slaves liberated, it was a momentary illusion of glory, earning the Admiral the title of Knight of Saint Mark.

But with Venice spending a crippling 4,392,000 ducats on the war in 1668 alone, Morosini knew that a war of attrition would only favour the Sultan. Occasional arrivals of ‘help’ from Western Europe, too, were more of a hindrance than a help, as the contingents were often poorly coordinated and unprepared for the quality of Ottoman gunnery. They would also have an alarming tendency to withdraw from the theatre at the slightest reversal, leaving nothing but further depleted rations in Candia.

In June 1669, when a contingent of Louis XIV arrived, a promising start swiftly descended into farce, when a stray shot ignited a cache of gunpowder barrels, sparking panic among the French that the entire terrain was mined. On the 24th July a recklessly captained French warship was destroyed by Turkish shore batteries, and within a month the entire force was gone.

With his garrison reduced to just 3,600 men, and realising that there was no hope of any further reinforcements that year, Morosini decided to take matters into his own hands. Knowing that the Senate had debated the possibility of negotiated peace several times in the past, but was too proud and too slow to follow through, the Admiral chose to bypass the chain of command, and settle directly with the Turks.

Fighting for Crete was by now a lost cause, and the only choice that remained was between losing everything, or possibly salvaging something. Thus, on the 6th September 1669, Francesco Morosini placed his reputation, and even freedom, on the line by illegally signing a treaty on behalf of his government. Morosini would of course have to surrender the island, but in exchange, on account of the respect that the Turks had for him, the Admiral extracted valuable concessions — continued possession of certain other bases, and the salvation of the island’s artistic and archival treasures, as well as the lives of the civilian population, who were furthermore free to leave for Venetian territory.

It was a respectable peace, and the best that could realistically have been achieved. Nevertheless, by the terms of the treaty, on the 26th September 1669, 465 years of Venetian presence in Crete ended.

Morosini’s enemies among the Venetian political class, many of whom bore direct responsibility for the war’s outcome, were outraged. Manoeuvring at once to project their own failures onto him, a vast smear campaign was assembled to cast the beleaguered admiral as ‘the man who lost the empire’. Moreover, to sell the message and further deflect blame, factions in the Council formally accused Morosini of embezzlement of public funds.

On top of that, the loss of Venice’s largest colony, compounded with her titanic war debts, would plunge the Republic into economic ruin that took decades to recover from. It was the end of an era, and a disaster beyond compare. Morosini had fought for his country, been ignored in all the moments when he could have made a difference, and made a scapegoat for the errors of others.

Years of painful wilderness followed. The one ray of light was his acquittal of criminal charges, though this occurred only when the advance of the investigations threatened to implicate powerful people who had actually embezzled public money, and who pressured the trial into shutting down. Yet Morosini, weathering these humiliations, knew that for all the intrigues in Venice, the true enemy would not remain in the background for long.

In 1683, the Ottomans, now at the apex of their power, launched an invasion of the Holy Roman Empire itself, striking at the capital of Vienna. As the weeks passed, and the plight of the Christian West grew ever more acute, the now sixty four year old Francesco Morosini could well have slipped into quiet retirement, accompanied by resentment and despair at just how much had gone wrong.

What he did instead would demonstrate the power of sticking to your values, and seal his immortality as one of Venice’s greatest heroes…

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