HARRY M. HINE
Without Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia, we would never have heard of the woman to whom it is addressed; but her father, the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus, appears in other ancient sources. During the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius he wrote a history of the civil wars, but during the latter’s reign (in 25 CE) he was prosecuted on a charge of treason, he committed suicide, and his works were burned. After Tiberius’s death in 37, Cordus’s reputation was reinstated and his historical work circulated once more (though it does not survive today). Seneca refers to this rehabilitation, so the Consolation must have been written after the death of Tiberius, and most likely during the reign of Gaius (37–41); for Seneca seems to be in Rome at the time of writing (chapter 16.2), which rules out the years of his exile (41–49), and a date after 49 is hard to reconcile with the information Seneca gives about Marcia’s age. A date of composition under Gaius would make this the earliest of Seneca’s surviving prose works.
The work is a consolation, a work that offers comfort to someone who has been bereaved. Consolation had become a highly developed literary genre, drawing on various philosophical and rhetorical traditions. Two of the most influential prose consolations in antiquity no longer survive—the On Grief of the Academic philosopher Crantor (ca. 335–275 BCE), and Cicero’s Consolation, written for himself after the death of his daughter Tullia in 45 BCE. In fact, Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia is the earliest full-length consolation that survives. It may be compared with his Consolation to Polybius and two consolatory letters (63 and 99). All his consolations draw on traditional themes, such as praise of the deceased, exhortation not to indulge in excessive grieving, and the argument that, whether death is the end or the soul survives, for the deceased person death is better than life. Seneca simultaneously acknowledges that he is writing within an established tradition and draws attention to his own creativity when at 2.1 he says that he will depart from usual practice and begin with examples rather than advice. Stoicism is not prominent in his consolations: he repudiates the strict Stoic doctrine that the wise man will not grieve at all. He does, however, draw on the doctrine that grief, like all other emotions, is the product of false beliefs. In the case of grief, these are false beliefs about the nature of death and its effects on the deceased and the bereaved.
We do not know exactly what prompted Seneca to write this work for Marcia, for he does not claim any particular relationship or friendship with her or her family. It has been conjectured that by addressing Marcia, the daughter of one of Sejanus’s victims, Seneca was attempting to distance himself from Sejanus, who had been discredited and executed under Tiberius; for Seneca’s family had connections with Sejanus. But the conjecture cannot be proved. The ostensible reason for the work is that Marcia was still grieving for Metilius, her son who had died three years earlier, and Seneca wanted to persuade her to put her grief behind her. But the interval since her son’s death, and the fact that in sizable sections of the work (as indicated in the notes to the translation) Marcia fades into the background as Seneca addresses a generalized male audience, show that the work is not simply a work of private, personal condolence.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Elizabeth Asmis and the press’s reader for suggesting improvements to the translation, but I alone am responsible for remaining deficiencies.
Structure
1 Introduction
2–5 Examples: the contrasting reactions of Octavia and Livia to loss of a son
6–11 General advice about death and bereavement
12–19.3 Advice specifically related to Marcia’s situation
19.3–25 Metilius’s present condition does not justify continued mourning
26 Conclusion: Marcia’s dead father is imagined appealing to her
Further Reading
Manning, C. E. 1981. On Seneca’s “Ad Marciam.” Mnemosyne Supplement 69. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Olberding, A. 2005. “The ‘Stout Heart’: Seneca’s Strategy for Dispelling Grief.” Ancient Philosophy 25:141–54.
Shelton, J.-A. 1995. “Persuasion and Paradigm in Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam 1–6.” Classica et Mediaevalia 46:157–88.
Wilcox, A. 2006. “Exemplary Grief: Gender and Virtue in Seneca’s Consolations to Women.” Helios 33, no. 1: 73–100.