Not Having Enough Money
The Art of Survival: Part 4
Vivas ut possis quando nec quis ut velis. Live as you can, since you cannot live as you want (Caecelius Statius, The Necklace, 171). Remember Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield, who was always spending more money than he had and wound up in debtors’ prison and was finally shipped off to Australia? He’s a larger-than-life character, a good soul who just couldn’t control his spending, so that even his family must inevitably suffer. We have the same problem today with people maxed out on their charge accounts and hopelessly in debt.
Why do people live beyond their means? Are they addicts to shopping, too materialistic, trying to keep up with the Joneses? Haven’t they been brought up properly? Or are they continually being tempted by Madison Avenue with a constant barrage of advertisements designed to entice them to spend more than they have to keep them in debt?
Or take the student debt crisis that makes it impossible for young people in their twenties and thirties to live normal lives because of the exorbitant debt hanging over their heads. Many of them are forced to live at home with their parents, postponing marriage, having a family, and getting on with their lives. Why doesn’t government help, or should it help, or is it responsible for this debt, as many believe today in the person of a recent Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos?
Caecilius Statius (fl. 179 BCE) dominated Roman comic theater between the time of Plautus and Terence. Legend has it that to avoid competition with his friend Ennius, Rome’s contemporary tragic playwright, Caecilius decided to write comedies instead. Except for some 300 lines of fragments, however, none of his plays survive. Sic transit gloria mundi!
Quoniam non potest id fieri quod vis, id velis quod possit. Since you can’t have what you want, want what you can have (Terence, The Woman of Andros, 305). If you have only so much money and fail to live within your means, you don’t want to have a collection agency coming after you. You simply have to curtail your expenditures to reflect your income. Not to do so is to court disaster. Can compulsive spending make you its slave? Ponder the old Greek paradox that you’re rich to the degree that you can do without things. Curtail your desires and you’re a rich person by not becoming a slave to your wishes, which can cause your downfall.
People want to work to make more money, but they can’t find anything but dead-end jobs with substandard wages, with no health care or benefits. If they do want to better themselves by going to college, they can’t afford to unless they’re willing to incur enormous debt, because the government, which used to subsidize college education, now, according to one theory, wants to discourage the poor, the working and middle classes from going to college because they might use that education to become politically active and agitate against the GOP.
If a single mother wants to work, she can’t because she cannot afford child care. How should government fix these problems? Or should it? Or doesn’t it want to in order to keep the poor and middle class in a precarious state of existence? Is the Republican Party against the very people it should be serving by doing everything in its power to make their very survival impossible, or is this a naive notion since the GOP is only about helping the rich and powerful?
Terence (190–159 BCE), was an ex-slave with a deeply humanistic worldview. His plays, based on the Greek plays of Menander, lacked the popular appeal of Plautus and were written for a more refined audience and resemble drawing room comedies of manners, full of deep humanity.
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Qui timide rogat docet negare. A timid request invites a refusal (Seneca, Hippolytus, 593). One is always more favorably disposed toward someone who asks for something with confidence than someone who asks timidly. One thinks, “What is he hiding? He seems a little shifty. I don’t trust him.” Someone asking with confidence, on the other hand, is much more likely to have his request granted because his confident manner makes the giver more well-disposed.
This quotation, of course, isn’t referring to young people, who may be a bit hesitant when asking an adult for a request. An older person understands this and would regard this as normal. The quotation refers only to adults making such requests, although if an adult is down-and-out it may be hard to act in a confident manner.
Mortalis nemo est, quem non attingat dolor morbusque. Sickness and sorrow leave no one untouched (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 3. 25. 59). Sickness and sorrow are part of the human condition. As hard and unfair as these crosses may be to whoever must bear them, you must also remember that everyone bears such crosses in life, some even far worse than others. Granted, this may be small consolation for whoever is sick or in bad health, but one simply has to learn to accept these things as a part of life, and over time one gradually becomes accustomed to bearing these burdens. When one is young, everything seems difficult in the beginning, but one slowly learns to bear them with forbearance if not with grace. Fate is not singling you out, but this has always been the universal lot of being human.
Nobody’s denying that everyone has his fair share of sickness and sorrow, and we moderns aren’t complaining about that, since we know that everyone has crosses to bear. What we’re saying is that there are two kinds of suffering — the one that’s part of the human condition, like sickness, accident, and bad luck, and the other which isn’t, but is man-made, like cutting food stamps to the poor or evicting people from their homes because they’re out of work and can’t pay the rent or make a mortgage because of Covid.
Or suffering that could be eliminated by going to the doctor’s, the hospital, or taking the proper medicine, but which many cannot because of the lack of adequate health care in the richest country in the world. It’s the profit motive of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that keep sick people from getting medical treatment, and many die because they don’t have insurance or their premiums are too high since Big Pharma charges exorbitant prices.
Other countries take care of their poor, but our government doesn’t and refuses to do anything about it because the politicians who could are bankrolled by lobbyists who make sure that they receive lots of money for their re-election campaign by not doing anything to help the average citizen. In the old days we used to call this “taking a bribe,” but now, because of Citizens United, it goes by the euphemism of “free speech,” which makes a mockery of the Supreme Court.
We don’t believe those old stories anymore about there not being enough money to pass more meaningful health legislation so that everyone is covered in this country. There’s always enough money for war and corporate bailouts, but never enough to fix our decaying cities and infrastructure or properly fund Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security because the wealthy and corporations refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, instead of hoarding it in their offshore accounts.
Cicero (106–43 BCE) was the Roman Demosthenes, a towering statesman, and a gift to the Romans from the Greeks, at whose feet he sat for years to pass on their legacy in his writings. He exposed Catiline’s conspiracy against the Republic and thereby averted a revolution. He supported Pompey against Caesar in the Civil War and wrote his Philippics against Mark Antony, who later had him executed. His works include treatises on rhetoric, politics, philosophy, religion, law, letters, and orations, almost sixty of which have come down to us.
His wide-ranging interests can be seen from the following titles: Tusculan Disputations (on happiness, philosophy, suffering and death), On Friendship, On Old Age (its burdens, compensations, and the soul’s immortality), On the Nature of the Gods (different views on the nature of the gods, fate, and free will), On Divination (fate and prophecy), On Fate, Hortensius (a plea for the study of philosophy, now lost, but which transformed Saint Augustine), On Laws, On the State, and Moral Duties on civic responsibility.
Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.
