I’m no gym rat myself, but I’ve encountered plenty of complaints, at home and online, about the noisy men who work out at gyms. Here’s a case where truly there is nothing new under the sun. Around the year 65, Seneca, the philosopher and former tutor to Nero, wrote this to his friend Lucilius: “I swear it — silence is not as necessary to a scholarly retreat as you might think. Here is cacophony sounding all about me — for I am living right upstairs from the bathhouse. Call to mind every sort of awful noise that grates on the
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