"Frugality" - An Ancient Concept - Rome
Around 1575, Michel de Montaigne sat down to write an essay entitled "On the Frugality of the Ancients". For some reason, the few anecdotes he had garnered from Seneca and Plutarch never gelled into an extended meditation. He did not get further than a single page of notes. Perhaps the time was not right or some connection was missing, and his theme remained marooned in the realm of antiquarian interest rather than moving forward into the present. So let me take up where he left off.
Montaigne begins with a wonderful story about the Roman general Atilius Regulus, commander-in-chief of the Roman army during the first of the wars against the Carthaginians. Regulus wrote to the Roman senate saying that the ploughman he had left in charge of his estate (seven acres in size) had run off with the farm equipment and so he needed to go back home and sort things out. He was especially worried that his wife and children might be suffering hardship: those were the days of self-sufficiency. The senate decided to appoint another man to manage the farm and voted that Regulus's wife and children be supported out of public funds.
Several things stand out from this story. Apart from what seems to us an odd order of priorities - imagine if General David Petraeus had applied for leave from duty when he was head of the multinational force in Iraq to deal with a domestic issue - you can't help noticing the sheer modesty of the commander-in-chief's circumstances. Seven acres is one smallish field, hardly enough to maintain a family.
Modesty is also the theme of Montaigne's other anecdotes. When Cato the elder, the most famous example of antique Roman frugality, was governor of Sardinia, he conducted his inspections on foot, accompanied by one officer of state carrying his robes and a sacrificial vessel. No Air Force One, bulletproof car or huge retinue of goons and advisers for him. Returning from duty as consul in Spain, Cato sold his horse (just one, note) rather than incurring the cost, to the state, of shipping it back to Italy.
At around the same time, when the visionary politician Tiberius Gracchus was appointed tribune of the people, one of the highest offices of state, the Roman senate granted him the princely travel allowance of nine sestertii (around 25 pence, or 40 cents) per day. Interestingly - a fact that Montaigne does not mention - two of these examples of ancient frugality met untimely and violent ends. To be frugal in a time of excess does not necessarily ensure popularity with your peer group.
I've certainly heard of some people coming under pressure from their colleagues to claim more expenses; under-claimants cast the others in a bad light. Perhaps something like that was occurring in the expenses culture of the House of Commons: a few more MPs as frugal as the Conservative Ann Widdecombe or the Liberal Democrat David Howarth, who claimed either a few hundred pounds or nothing at all in second home allowance, would have put the whole system in a dubious light. As for the claims of thousands of pounds for home cinema systems or moat-clearing, one can imagine Cato the elder, scourge of plutocrats and proponent of simplicity, revolving in his grave.
Where the high-claiming MPs were wrong, I think, was in assuming that frugality was an ancient or outmoded virtue, perhaps appropriate to the time of Regulus or Cato but no longer applicable in the world of globalised capitalism. Where, after all, would capitalism be if everyone was frugal? What they did not see was the very contemporary collision between their easy assumption of a kind of legalised excess, and the emergent politics of climate change.
A startling new report for the UK government's own Sustainable Development Commission by Professor Tim Jackson, entitled Prosperity without Growth , explores this collision with a verve and passion you would not expect from a government-sponsored initiative. Prof Jackson regrets that "the role of government has been framed so narrowly by material aims and hollowed out by a misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms". (Incidentally, he wrote this shortly before the revelations about the legislators' own personal material aims and unbounded consumer freedoms.)
More daringly, Jackson questions the shibboleth of economic growth and the potentially destructive way in which the "profit motive stimulates a continual search by producers for newer, better and cheaper products and services", and a restless desire on the part of consumers to purchase those products and services. The resulting "iron cage of consumerism" is neither environmentally sustainable nor humanly sustaining.
Can antique Roman frugality offer us a way back, a way out or even, paradoxically, a way forward? Maybe a look at the roots of the word will help. Frugality, which sounds so stern and ascetic, actually comes from the Latin word for fruit. To be more precise, the words for frugal in English and Romance languages derive from the Latin frugi , an indeclinable adjective formed by the dative of frux (fruit), and often combined with bonae - so "to or for the good fruit". Being "for the good fruit" means being honest and temperate, dedicated to long-term flourishing: as vital for human beings as for the earth itself.
FT May 23 |
