IV. The Most Powerful Man in the World Could Not Buy Leisure

Even Augustus, who ruled the empire, could not free himself from the drain of public life. Seneca quotes from his private letters.

You think this problem only affects ordinary people? Listen to what powerful men say when they think no one important is listening.

The Emperor Augustus had more power than any person alive. Every decision in the empire passed through him. He held the fate of nations. He had everything the world could offer. Still, his letters and his private words come back to the same wish, over and over: he wanted rest. He wanted to live for himself. He said he would be the happiest man alive on the day he could put down the burden of power.

He never got that day. He died still carrying it.

There is a letter Augustus wrote to Rome's ruling council. In it, he promised that when he finally retired, his rest would be worthy of his former greatness. He wrote these words: my eagerness for that time, so earnestly prayed for, has led me to enjoy it already in words, even though the reality is still far away. He could not have the thing itself, so he imagined it in writing just to feel something like it. The most powerful person alive, savoring leisure in his imagination because he could not find it in his life.

Cicero, one of the most brilliant men Rome ever produced, was tossed between Pompey and Caesar, between the old republic and the new empire, between his ambitions and his fears. He called himself at one point 'half a prisoner.' Half a prisoner. He was one of the freest men in Rome by any external measure.

Drusus, a man of great energy and ambition, complained in his later years that he had never had a holiday, not even as a boy. He had been ambitious from childhood, arguing cases in court before he was old enough to be considered an adult. He was right. He had given every year away.

The most powerful people in the world, the ones who seemed to have everything, were privately desperate for what even the poorest free person could have at any moment. Time that belonged to them. Time to simply be alive in.

They could not buy it. Power could not get it for them. They had everything except the thing that mattered.