LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA
TRANSLATED BY HARRY M. HINE
(1.1) If I did not know, Marcia, that you have drawn back from the frailties of the female temperament just as much as you have from all other kinds of fault, and that people look up to your character as though it were some ancient paragon, I would not dare to attack your grief head-on—for even men readily cling to grief and brood over it—nor would I have formed the hope that at such an unfavorable time, before such a hostile judge, on such a hateful charge, I could get you to acquit the misfortune you have suffered. But your strength of character, which is already well established, and your courage, whose worth has been demonstrated under severe testing, have given me confidence.
(2) It has not gone unnoticed how you behaved in regard to your father, whom you loved just as much as your children, except that you did not wish him to outlive you. Or maybe you did wish even that; for great love sometimes allows itself to contravene normal moral rules. As far as you were able, you tried to prevent the death of your father Aulus Cremutius Cordus.1 After it became clear to you that this was the only escape from slavery available to him when Sejanus’s henchmen were closing in,2 you did not support his intention, but you signaled acceptance of defeat; you openly shed tears,3 and you swallowed your sighs, yet did not conceal them beneath a cheerful expression—and all this in that period when doing nothing unloving was equivalent to showing great love. (3) As soon as the changing political climate provided an opportunity,4 you enabled the public to have access once more to your father’s literary talent, which had been the target of the punishment; you rescued him from real death,5 and restored to our public records the books that that exceptionally brave man had written in his own blood. You performed a superb service to Roman literature, for an important part of it had gone up in flames; a superb service to later generations, who will inherit a reliable, undistorted history, which cost its author dear; a superb service to him whose memory is strong and will remain strong for as long as a knowledge of Roman history is held to be valuable, for as long as there is anyone who wants to look back to the achievements of his ancestors, for as long as there is anyone who wants to know what it is to be a Roman man, what it is to remain unflinching when everyone else is forced to bow the head and submit to the yoke of a Sejanus, what it is to be a human being with unfettered intelligence, mind, and hands. (4) The state would have suffered a great loss, by Hercules, if you had not rescued him after he had been cast into oblivion on account of two excellent characteristics, his eloquence and his outspokenness. He is being read, he is popular, he is welcomed into people’s hands and hearts, and he has no fear of the passage of time. But those butchers will soon have even their crimes, the only things for which they deserved to be remembered, consigned to silence.
(5) This noble-mindedness of yours has prevented me from taking any notice of your sex, or of your face, which is still marred by so many years’ continual sadness, just as it was disfigured by it at the start. And observe that I am not being underhanded with you or thinking of cheating your feelings: I have reminded you of sufferings that are long past; and so that you may realize that the present wound also needs healing, I have shown you the scar of an equally severe injury. So other people may treat you gently and soothingly, but I have decided to do battle with your grief; I shall bring your weary, exhausted eyes under control, eyes which, if you want to know the truth, flow more from habit than from longing; I shall do this, if possible, with your support for the remedies, but if not, I shall do it even against your will, even if you embrace and cling to your grief, which you have kept alive in place of your son. (6) For where will it end? Everything has been tried to no avail: the comforting words of friends and the influence of great men who are related to you have been exhausted; love of literature, a blessing you have inherited from your father, proves an ineffectual comfort, barely creating even a brief distraction, and it makes no impression on your deaf ears; nature’s own remedy, time, which heals even the greatest distress, in your case alone has proved powerless. (7) Three years have now passed, and there has been no lessening of that initial shock; your mourning renews and strengthens itself each day; through the passage of time it has established squatter’s rights, and has reached the point where it thinks that it would be shameful to stop. Just as every kind of fault becomes deeply embedded unless it is stamped out while it is still growing, so these sad, wretched, self-destructive faults in the end feed on their own bitterness, and the unhappy mind finds a perverse pleasure in grief. (8) So I wish I could have begun this treatment in the early stages: a milder medicine could have been used to check the attack while it was still building up; but chronic diseases need to be fought more vigorously. For with wounds as well, healing is easy while they are fresh and still bleeding; but when they have festered and turned foully ulcerous, they must be cauterized and cut open again and must allow fingers to probe into them. As things stand, I cannot attack such a hardened grief by polite or gentle means: it has to be shattered.
(2.1) I know that everyone who wants to give advice begins with instructions and ends with examples. Sometimes it is useful to change this pattern. Different people need different treatment: some are guided by reason; some need to be confronted with famous names, with prestige that will constrain their thinking when they are captivated by superficial appearances. (2) I shall set before you two outstanding examples of your own sex and your own generation: one, a woman who let grief sweep her away, the other, someone affected by a similar misfortune but by a greater loss, who nevertheless did not allow her sufferings to control her for long but soon recovered her usual frame of mind. (3) Octavia and Livia, one the sister of Augustus, the other the wife, lost young sons, both in the sure hope that he would be emperor:6 Octavia lost Marcellus, on whom his uncle, also his father-in-law, had begun to depend,7 on whom the burden of imperial power had begun to weigh, a young man of mental alacrity and powerful intellect, but with a frugality and self-control that deserved no little admiration in someone of his years or wealth; doggedly hardworking, a stranger to pleasures, ready to bear whatever burdens his uncle wanted to place and, so to speak, build on him; he had carefully chosen foundations that would not buckle under any weight. (4) Throughout her entire life she never brought her weeping and lamenting to an end;8 she would not listen to any words of helpful advice, and would not even let herself be distracted; intent on one thing, with her whole mind fixed on it, throughout her life she behaved just as she had at the funeral. I do not say she did not venture to get herself up, but she refused to be helped up, thinking that abandoning her tears would be a second bereavement. (5) She would not keep any image of her beloved son, or allow any mention to be made of him. She hated all mothers, and was especially enraged at Livia, because the happiness that she herself had been promised seemed to have transferred to that woman’s son. She was most at home with darkness and solitude; she never even thought of her brother; she rejected poems written to celebrate the memory of Marcellus, and other literary tributes;9 and she shut her ears against any kind of comfort. Withdrawing from her official duties, and detesting the excessive brilliance of her brother’s greatness and good fortune, she buried and hid herself away. When her children10 and her grandchildren gathered around her, she did not take off her mourning clothes, an insult to all her family, for though they were alive, she thought of herself as childless.
(3.1) Livia had lost her son Drusus, who would have made a great emperor, and was already a great commander. He had entered deep into Germany and had set up Roman standards where there was scarcely any knowledge of the Romans’ existence.11 He had died on campaign; while he was ill, the enemy themselves, with intense respect, gave him safe passage, joined in observing a truce, and did not dare to pray for the outcome that suited them. At his death, which he had met in the service of the state, there was a tremendous sense of loss among the citizens, the provinces, and the whole of Italy; throughout the country, municipalities and colonies had poured out to pay their mournful respects as his funeral cortège proceeded toward the city with all the appearance of a triumph. (2) His mother had not been allowed to drink in her son’s final kisses or the sweet sound of his dying words; on the long journey, as she escorted the remains of her beloved Drusus, she was upset by the many pyres blazing throughout the length and breadth of Italy, as though she were losing him all over again with each one. Nevertheless, as soon as she had placed him in the tomb,12 she laid both him and her grief to rest, and mourned no more than was honorable or just while Caesar was still alive. And finally, she never stopped praising the name of her dear Drusus, recalling him everywhere both in private and in public, gladly speaking about him and hearing about him: she lived with his memory, something no one can preserve and revisit if it has been allowed to become a source of sadness.
(3) So choose which of these examples you think the more commendable. If you want to follow the first one, you will absent yourself from the company of the living; you will avoid both other people’s children and your own, and even the very child you miss; mothers will regard you as a bad omen when you encounter them; you will spurn pleasures that are honorable and permissible, as though inappropriate to your misfortune; you will hate the light in which you linger, and will bitterly detest your age, because it does not instantly strike you down and bring your life to an end; and—something most shameful and quite out of keeping with your character, which is very highly regarded—you will demonstrate that you do not want to live and yet are incapable of dying. (4) But if you devote yourself to the other more self-controlled, more humane example set by a truly great woman, you will not be distressed and will not endure agonies of torment; for in heaven’s name, what madness it is to punish oneself for one’s misfortune, and to add to one’s own miseries!13 The same virtue and the same reserve as you have maintained throughout your life will be on display in your present circumstances too; for even grieving has its own form of modesty. As for the young man, he thoroughly deserves to make you happy with every mention or thought of him, and you will do him greater honor if he continues to be just as cheerful and joyful in his mother’s presence as he was during his lifetime.
(4.1) I shall not steer you toward instructions of a more rigorous sort, ordering you to endure human experience in an inhuman way, or drying a mother’s eyes on the very day of the funeral.14 I shall go to arbitration with you: the dispute between us will be whether grief should be great or unending. (2) I have no doubt that the example of Julia Augusta, with whom you were on friendly terms, pleases you more.15 She now beckons you to join in a conversation: in her initial turmoil, when a person’s misery is at its most recalcitrant and extreme, she let Areus, her husband’s philosopher,16 console her, and acknowledged that she had benefited greatly from that course of action: more than from the Roman people, whom she did not want to sadden with her own sadness; more than from Augustus, who was reeling from the loss of one of his two supports,17 and must not be thrown off balance by his family’s grief; more than from her son Tiberius, whose love ensured that at that untimely funeral, which made the nations weep, the only loss she suffered was to the number of her children. (3) This, I imagine, was how he approached her, this was how he began to address a woman who carefully protected her reputation: “Down to this day, Julia,18 as far as I know—and I have been a constant companion of your husband; I have known not only what was said in public but all the inmost feelings of both your hearts—you have been at pains to ensure that there was nothing for which anyone could reproach you; not only in more important matters but in the most trivial ones, you have been careful not to do anything that you would want public opinion, that most outspoken critic of emperors, to forgive. (4) I think there is nothing more glorious than when those who are at the pinnacle of society grant pardon for many actions, but seek pardon for none; so in the present circumstances too you need to stick to your usual practice, and do nothing that you might wish you had not done at all or had done differently.
(5.1) “Then I beg and implore you not to present a difficult and intractable face to your friends. For you should be aware that all of them are at a loss how to behave, whether to speak about Drusus in your presence, lest either failure to recall the outstanding young man should hurt him, or mention of him should hurt you. (2) When we have left your presence and have gathered together, we celebrate his deeds and words with the respect that he deserves; in your presence we maintain total silence about him. So you are missing out on a supreme pleasure, the praises of your son—for which, I have no doubt, you would ensure everlasting survival, if the opportunity arose, even at the cost of your own life. (3) So permit, or rather invite, conversations where he is the topic, and keep your ears open to the name and memory of your son; do not think this depressing, as others do who in similar misfortune regard listening to words of comfort as a part of their suffering. (4) As things are, you have gone to the one extreme: forgetting the better times, you are focusing on the worse aspects of your fortune. You are not turning your attention to the life you shared with your son and the enjoyable times you spent with him, or his boyish, adorable charms, or the progress of his education; you dwell on that final scene, and add as much as you can to its horror, as though it were not horrid enough already. Do not, I beg you, long for a most perverse kind of glory, that of being regarded as the most unfortunate of women. (5) At the same time remember that it is no great achievement to behave bravely when conditions are favorable, when life is proceeding smoothly: a calm sea and following wind do not display the steersman’s skill either; some challenge must arise to test his courage. (6) So do not be dejected, but rather stand firm, and bear whatever burdens fall on you without being terrified, once the initial disturbance is past.19 Nothing shows greater contempt for fortune than a calm mind.” After saying this, he drew her attention to her surviving son, he drew her attention to her grandchildren from the son she had lost.20
(6.1) Your own circumstances were addressed on that occasion, Marcia, it was you that Areus sat beside; change the cast list, and he offered comfort to you. Still, Marcia, suppose that you have been robbed of more than any other mother has ever lost—I am not trying to mollify you, nor am I making light of your misfortune: (2) if fate can be overcome by weeping, let us resort to weeping; let every day be spent in grieving, let sleepless misery consume the night; let our hands pummel our bruised breasts, let our very faces come under attack, and let sorrow, to advance its cause, employ every kind of cruelty. But if no breast-beating can bring back the dead, if fate, unchanging and fixed for eternity, is not altered by any distress, and death keeps whatever it has taken, let there be an end to a grief that is just being wasted. (3) So let us keep control of ourselves and not allow that force to drive us off course. It is shameful when a ship’s helmsman has the rudder wrested from his grasp by the waves, when he abandons the sails as they flap wildly, and leaves his vessel at the mercy of the storm; but even in a shipwreck, praise is due to a helmsman who is overwhelmed by the sea as he is still clinging to the rudder and struggling.
(7.1) “But grieving for one’s relatives is natural.” Who can disagree, as long as it is done in moderation? For when we are merely separated from our dear ones, never mind when we lose them, there is an unavoidable stab of pain, and a contraction even in the most resolute minds.21 But what imagination adds goes beyond what nature commands. (2) In the case of mute animals, see how agitated their grieving is, and yet how short lived: with cows, their bellowing is heard for one or two days, and with mares, their erratic, demented charging around lasts no longer; when wild animals have followed the tracks of their cubs and wandered all through the forests, when they have returned repeatedly to their ransacked lairs, they extinguish their rage within a short time; birds squawk around their empty nests with loud shrieks, but in a moment they fall silent and resume their flight. No animals mourn their offspring for long, apart from human beings; they encourage their own grief, and the duration of their affliction depends not on what they feel but on what they decide.
(3) You can tell it is not natural to be broken by grief because, first of all, the same bereavement wounds women more than men, barbarians more than people of peaceful, cultured races, and the uneducated more than the educated. Yet things that derive their force from nature maintain the same force in every instance: if something shows variation, evidently it is not based on nature. (4) Fire will burn people of every age, citizens of every city, men as well as women; steel will display its ability to cut in bodies of every kind. Why? Because they get their power from nature, which does not discriminate among persons. Different people have different reactions to poverty, grief, and ambition, depending on the habits that have become ingrained in them; and they are rendered weak and unable to endure by a preformed belief in the frightfulness of things that should not be feared.
(8.1) Second, what is natural does not diminish with time: but the passing days eventually exhaust grief. No matter how stubborn it is, reviving every day and fervently resisting any remedies, nevertheless time, the most effective tamer of fierce emotions, robs it of its strength. (2) You, Marcia, still suffer enormous sorrow, and it now seems to have developed a callus: it is not the keen sorrow it was at the beginning, but a stubborn, recalcitrant one. However, the passage of time will gradually free you even from this: whenever your attention is elsewhere, your mind will relax. (3) At the moment you are keeping yourself under surveillance; but there is an important difference between allowing yourself to grieve and ordering yourself to. It suits the excellence of your character much better to impose an end on your mourning rather than wait for its end, and to refuse to hold out until the day when, against your wishes, grief will fade away. You should renounce it yourself!
(9.1) “So what is the origin of the great stubbornness with which we lament our loved ones, if it does not occur at nature’s command?” It is because we do not anticipate suffering until it happens; rather, as though we ourselves were exempt and had set out on a more tranquil journey than other people, we fail to learn from the misfortunes of others that they are common to all. (2) So many funeral processions pass our house: yet we do not think about death. There are so many untimely deaths: yet we plan for our children getting their toga,22 for their military service, for their inheriting their father’s estate. We are confronted by so many wealthy people who suddenly face poverty: and yet it never occurs to us that our own wealth is equally precarious. This makes our fall all the greater: it is as if we are struck out of the blue. But when things have long been anticipated, their attack has less power. (3) You23 must realize that you stand exposed to every kind of blow, and that the weapons that have struck others have been whizzing past you. Just as if, with poor equipment, you were climbing up to attack some city wall or a high point occupied by a large enemy force, you should expect to be wounded, and should reckon that your body is the target of the rocks that are raining down, and of the arrows and the spears. Whenever someone falls beside you or behind you, cry out: “You will not deceive me, fortune, or find me complacent or heedless when you destroy me. I know what you are up to: you struck somebody else, but you were aiming at me.” (4) Who has ever examined his life in the recognition that he is going to die? Which of you has ever ventured to think about exile, poverty, grief? Who would not, if he were advised to think about them, spit out the advice like words of ill omen, and bid the curse fall on his enemies, or on the unwelcome adviser himself? (5) “I didn’t think it would happen.” How can you think that anything is not going to happen when you know that it can happen, and you see that it has happened to many people? What a fine line of poetry this is, deserving better than to have come from the stage:
“What can happen to one person can happen to anyone”!24
That man lost his children: you too can lose yours. That man was condemned: your innocence too is within range. This delusion deceives and unmans us, when we suffer what we never foresaw that we could suffer. Those who have anticipated the occurrence of suffering rob it of its force when it arrives.
(10.1) All the extraneous, glittering things that surround us, Marcia—children, honors, wealth, large atria, forecourts packed with a crowd of clients who are kept at bay, a famous name, a noble or beautiful wife, and all the other things that depend on uncertain, fickle chance—these are paraphernalia that do not belong to us but are on loan; not one of them is a gift. The stage is furnished with borrowed props that will revert to their owners; some things will be returned on day one, others on day two, a few will remain right up to the end. (2) So we should not be proud of ourselves as though it were our own possessions that surround us: we have received them on loan. We may enjoy the use of them, but the giver manages his gift and sets the time limit.25 We must ensure that what has been granted for an unspecified period is always available, and when we are summoned, we must hand it back without complaint: it is a very poor kind of debtor who starts lashing out at his creditor. (3) So we must love all our relatives, both those who, in accordance with the laws of birth, we want to outlive us, and those who, with complete justification, we pray will predecease us; but we must love them in the knowledge that we have received no promise that their lives will be endless, indeed no promise that they will be long. Our minds need frequent prompting to love things on the understanding that we are sure to lose them, or rather that we are already losing them: you should treat all of fortune’s gifts as coming without a guarantee. (4) So seize the pleasures afforded by your children,26 let your children enjoy you in turn, and extract all the joy you can without delay: no promise has been made about the coming night; I have granted too long an extension—no promise has been made about the next hour. You must hurry, you are being hotly pursued: soon your unit will be scattered; soon, as the battle cry goes up, all that camaraderie will be destroyed. Nothing escapes the looting: wretched people, you do not know how to live on the run!
(5) If you are grieving because your son is dead,27 it is the moment of his birth that should be in the dock; for notice of death was served on him as he was being born; he came into being under this regulation; this fate started to accompany him as soon as he left the womb. (6) We have arrived in the kingdom of fortune, a harsh and intransigent place, and we shall suffer deservedly and undeservedly at its will. It will subject our bodies to reckless, humiliating, cruel mistreatment: it will burn some of them with fire, deployed either as a punishment or as a remedy; others it will bind in chains—sometimes letting enemies do this, sometimes fellow citizens; others it will toss up and down, naked, on the treacherous seas, and after they have wrestled with the waves it will not even throw them up onto sand or shore, but will bury them in the stomach of some huge sea creature; others, after they have been utterly debilitated by various kinds of illness, it will keep long poised between life and death. Like a temperamental, capricious owner who neglects her slaves, it will veer between punishments and rewards.
(11.1) What need is there to shed tears over life’s individual stages? For the whole of life requires tears. New misfortunes will assail you before you have dealt with the old. So you women, who show no restraint in your suffering, must be especially restrained, and must share out the resources of the human spirit among many griefs. And then, why this forgetfulness about your own condition, about the universal human condition? You were born a mortal and you have given birth to mortals:28 though you yourself are a decaying, feeble body, repeatedly targeted by diseases, did you hope that from such weak material you had carried in your womb something robust and everlasting? (2) Your son has died, that is, he has completed the course and reached the finish line which those you think more fortunate than your own offspring are fast approaching. The entire multitude that goes to law in the forum, that <claps> in the theater, that prays in the temples, is advancing at different speeds toward this point: what you love and honor, and what you despise, will be reduced to the same ashes. (3) Plainly that <saying> attributed to the Pythian oracle, “Know yourself,” <is relevant> here.29 What is a human being? A pot that can be broken by the slightest knock, the slightest jolt. There is no need of a great storm to cause destruction: in any collision, a person will break into pieces. What is a human being? A weak, fragile body, naked and, in its natural state, unprotected, requiring external help, exposed to all the humiliations of fortune, and, even when it has built up its muscles, a meal for any wild beast, a sacrificial victim for any; formed from weak, impermanent constituents, handsome only in its external features; unable to endure cold, heat, or hard work, yet prone to sink into decay through idleness and inactivity; fearful about the things it eats, one moment <passing away> for lack of them, <the next> being destroyed <by excess>; a body anxious and troubled about its own protection, whose breathing is fragile and insecure, which is shaken by a sudden fright or by the sound of an unexpected noise assailing its ears, constantly feeding its own anxiety, sick and useless. (4) In such a body are we surprised to discover death, which can be caused by a single hiccough? For the body to drop dead, is great exertion required? A smell, a taste, tiredness, insomnia, liquid, food, and all the essentials of life can be deadly. Wherever the body travels, it is immediately aware of its vulnerability, being unable to tolerate some climates: unfamiliar kinds of water, a breath of an unaccustomed breeze, the slightest causes and upsets make it ill. It is sickly, an invalid, and inaugurates its life with tears. Yet what a commotion is incessantly created by this despicable creature, what grand thoughts it harbors when it forgets its own condition! (5) People entertain ideas of immortality and eternity, and make provision for grandchildren and great-grandchildren, yet while they are planning for the long term, death is destroying them; and what is called old age is the passing of only very few years.
(12.1) Is your grief, if it has any rational basis at all, focused on its own sufferings, or on those of the deceased? In the loss of your son, are you swayed by the thought that you derived no pleasure from him, or that you could have enjoyed greater pleasure if he had lived longer? (2) If you say you have enjoyed no pleasure, you will make your loss more bearable; for human beings do not miss very greatly things from which they derived no joy or happiness. If you admit that you did derive great pleasure from him, you must not complain about what has been withheld, but must give thanks for what has been granted; for you have obtained sufficient reward for your labors from your involvement in his upbringing, unless perhaps those who devotedly nurture puppies and birds and faddish sorts of pet gain some pleasure from the sight and touch and fond adoration of dumb animals, whereas those who nurture children do not find the process of bringing them up to be a reward in itself. So even if you have derived no benefit from his hard work, no protection from his attentiveness, no guidance from his wisdom, the very fact that you have had him and have loved him is reward enough. (3) “But it could have been longer lasting and greater.” Yet you were better off than if you had never had a son, since, if faced with the choice between being happy for a limited time or not at all, it is better for us to receive blessings that will evaporate than none at all. Would you rather have had a worthless son, one who counts as a son in name only, or one with the great talents that your own son had, a young man who swiftly displayed wisdom, swiftly displayed love, swiftly became a husband, swiftly became a father, swiftly took all his duties seriously, swiftly became a priest—and constantly gave the impression of being in a hurry? Virtually no one receives blessings that are both great and long lasting; only slow-maturing happiness endures and reaches the finish line. The immortal gods were not going to give you a son for long, so they gave you one who immediately displayed qualities that people <struggle to> develop even over a long period of time.
(4) And you cannot say that you were singled out by the gods to be refused the chance to enjoy your son: cast your eyes over the whole multitude of people known and unknown, and everywhere you will find those who have been through greater sufferings. Great commanders have experienced them, so have emperors; in mythology, not even the gods have been left unscathed, in order, I think, that our bereavements should be lightened by the realization that even the divine can suffer ruin.30 Look around at everyone, I tell you: you will not be able to name a single family <so> wretched that it cannot draw comfort from one more wretched. (5) But, by Hercules, I do not take so poor a view of your character as to think you can bear your misfortune more easily if I parade a huge number of mourners before you: a mass of wretched people is a cruel form of consolation. But I shall produce some examples, not to show you that human beings have often been bereaved—for it would be ridiculous to accumulate examples of our mortality—but to show you that many people have softened a harsh blow by bearing it with composure.
(6) I shall begin with a most fortunate man.31 Lucius Sulla lost his son, but that neither blunted the malevolence and the intense courage he showed toward enemies and fellow citizens, nor made it look as though he was wrong to assume that cognomen of his. He adopted it after the loss of his son, fearing neither the hatred of humans, for whom his excessive good fortune meant suffering, nor the ill will of the gods, who stood accused of being responsible for Sulla’s good fortune. But let us treat the character of Sulla as something on which final judgment has yet to be passed—even his enemies will admit that he was right to take up arms, and right to lay them down again:32 there will be agreement on the point here at stake, that a suffering that affects even the most fortunate is not the most extreme kind.
(13.1) Pulvillus the pontifex ensured that Greece should not be overproud of the father who, when news of the death of his son reached him as he was in the middle of a sacrifice, simply told the piper to stop playing, removed the garland from his head, and then completed the rest of the ritual;33 for Pulvillus, when he received news of the death of his son as he was holding on to the doorpost during the dedication of the Capitol,34 pretended he had not heard, and chanted the traditional words of the pontifex’s hymn; not a single groan interrupted his prayers, and just after hearing his son’s name he was seeking Jupiter’s favor. (2) Do you think such a grief ought to have an end point, when its first day and first shock could not tear a father away from the public altars and the proper performance of the ceremony? By Hercules, he deserved to make a dedication that went down in history, he deserved a most exalted priesthood, for he did not stop worshipping the gods even when they were angry with him. However, when he got home, his eyes did fill with tears and he did utter some cries of grief; but when he had done what custom required for the deceased, he resumed the expression he had maintained on the Capitol.
(3) Paulus, around the time of that celebrated triumph in which he made Perses walk in front of his chariot in chains, gave away two sons to be adopted, and buried <the two> he had kept for himself. What do you reckon was the caliber of the ones he kept when one of those he parted with was Scipio?35 The Roman people were full of emotion as they watched Paulus’s empty chariot.36 He still made a speech, and he thanked the gods for granting his prayer; for he had asked that if the envy aroused by his great victory demanded any payment, the debt should be settled at his own expense, not the state’s. (4) You see what courage he showed? He regarded his bereavement as a blessing. And who could have been more deeply affected by so great a reversal of fortune? At a single stroke he lost his sources of both comfort and support. Yet Perses was not allowed to see Paulus sorrowful.
(14.1) Now, why should I take you through innumerable examples of great men and look for the ones who were wretched, as though it were not harder to find ones who were fortunate? For how few families have remained intact right up to the end, without any tragedy striking! Pick any year you want and make a roll call of its magistrates—Lucius Bibulus and Gaius Caesar, if you like: you will observe that those colleagues, despite their mutual hostility, were as one in their misfortune.37 (2) Lucius Bibulus, a good man but not a courageous one, had two sons who were killed at the same time, after enduring humiliating treatment at the hands of Egyptian soldiers; so the circumstances of the loss called for tears just as much as the loss itself. Throughout his year of office Bibulus had insulted his colleague by lurking at home, yet the day after he received the news of the double death, he resumed his normal duties as commander.38 Who could devote less than one day to two sons? That was how quickly he stopped mourning his children, though he had mourned his consulship for a year. (3) When Gaius Caesar was campaigning across Britain, being incapable of allowing the ocean to limit his good fortune,39 he heard that his daughter had died, taking the fate of the nation with her.40 He could see clearly that Gnaeus Pompeius would not take kindly to anyone else in the state being great,41 and would seek to limit his advancement, which he felt was threatening, even though it was of general benefit. Nevertheless, within three days Caesar resumed his duties as commander, and conquered his grief as quickly as he always conquered everything else.
(15.1) Do I need to remind you of the bereavements of other Caesars? I think that fortune sometimes attacks them in order that they may confer on the human race the further benefit of demonstrating that even those who are reputedly born of the gods and destined to father gods42 do not have the same control over their own fortune as they have over other people’s. (2) The deified Augustus, after he had lost his children and grandchildren and the supply of Caesars was exhausted, used adoption to shore up his abandoned house:43 he bore all this with the bravery of someone who was already directly concerned and had a personal stake in ensuring that no one should complain about the gods.44 (3) Tiberius Caesar lost both the son he had fathered and the one he had adopted.45 Yet he himself spoke in praise of his son before the Rostra; he stood with the corpse placed in full view, save that a curtain was hung up to shield the pontifex’s eyes from the dead body.46 While the Roman people wept, his face showed no emotion; he demonstrated to Sejanus, who was standing next to him, how resolutely he could endure losing those closest to him.47
(4) Do you see what a large number of men of great distinction were not exempted from the misfortune that strikes everything down, men on whom were showered so many good qualities of mind, so many honors both public and private? But of course this storm circles around and around, randomly destroying everything, or carrying it off as though it owned it. Get everyone to examine their accounts: no one has managed to be born without incurring a cost.
(16.1) I know what you are saying: “You have forgotten that you are offering comfort to a woman: you are giving examples of men.” Who says that nature has been stingy in its treatment of women’s characters, and has imposed narrow restrictions on their virtues? Believe me, they have just as much strength, and just as much potential for moral goodness, <so long as> they want it; they endure grief and hardship just as effectively, if they have developed the habit. (2) In which city are we talking like this, good gods? The one in which Lucretia and Brutus overthrew a king who was oppressing the citizens of Rome: we are indebted to Brutus for liberty, to Lucretia for Brutus;48 the one in which Cloelia ignored the enemy and the river, and for her outstanding courage we have virtually treated her as a man: for, seated on horseback in her statue at a busy spot on the Sacred Way, as our young men climb into their cushioned litters, Cloelia rebukes them for traveling in that manner in a city in which we have awarded horses even to women.49 (3) But if you want examples of women who were brave when they lost relatives, I shall not go from door to door searching for them; I shall offer you two Cornelias from one household. First the daughter of Scipio, mother of the Gracchi:50 she recalled twelve births with as many funerals; the others, who made no impact on the city at their birth or their demise, are of no significance, but Tiberius and Gaius, who will be acknowledged as great men even by those who deny that they were good, those she saw murdered and then denied burial. But to those who consoled her and called her wretched she said, “I shall never stop saying that I am fortunate, I who gave birth to the Gracchi.”51 (4) Cornelia, the wife of Livius Drusus, had lost a most eminent young man of exceptional ability; he was marching on in the footsteps of the Gracchi, and left numerous bills still in progress when he was murdered in his own home, and it was uncertain who was responsible for the killing.52 Still, she bore the untimely and unpunished death of her son with as much courage as he had shown in proposing his laws. (5) Now, will you make your peace with fortune, Marcia, if, after hurling its weapons at the Scipios and the mothers and daughters of the Scipios, after aiming them at the Caesars, it has not pointed them away from you either?
Life is filled and plagued with a variety of misfortunes, which grant no one a lasting peace, scarcely even a truce. You had brought four children into the world, Marcia. They say that no missile falls ineffectively when it is thrown at a densely packed army on the march: is it surprising that such a large group could not pass on its way unscathed by spite or harm? (6) “But fortune was more unjust because it didn’t merely take my sons away but picked them out.” But you should never talk of injustice when you get the same share as someone more powerful: it left you two daughters and grandchildren from them. And it has not removed all trace of the son for whom you grieve the most, forgetting the one you lost earlier: you have two daughters of his, great burdens, if your attitude is wrong, great comforts, if your attitude is right. Make this your aim, that when you see them, you should be reminded of your son, not of your sorrow. (7) When trees are toppled either because a wind has torn them up by the roots or because the sudden blast of a twisting tornado has snapped their trunks, the farmer nurtures the shoots they leave behind, and in <place> of the lost trees he at once plants out seeds and cuttings; and in an instant (for as with losses, so with gains, time moves rapidly and swiftly) the new growth is more luxuriant than what was lost. (8) So let these daughters of your Metilius be a substitute for him, let them fill the void; relieve your grief for one person with the comfort you get from two. This is human nature, that nothing is dearer to us than what we have lost; we are very unfair toward what remains, because of our longing for what has been taken from us. But if you care to assess how very lenient fortune has been with you, even when it was in a rage, you will realize that you have something more than consolations: look at your many grandchildren, and at your two daughters. You should also say this to yourself, Marcia: “I would be upset if everyone’s fortune were determined by their character, and bad things never happened to good people: as it is, I can see that bad and good people are afflicted in the same way, without distinction.”
(17.1) “But it is hard to lose a young man whom you have raised, just when he was beginning to lend help and distinction to his mother and his father.” Who would deny it is hard? But it is human. You were born for this,53 to suffer loss, to perish, to hope and to fear, to upset others and yourself, to dread death and yet also desire it, and, worst of all, never to understand your true condition.
(2) If someone said to a man who was heading for Syracuse: “Find out beforehand about all the disadvantages and all the delights of your intended journey, and only then set sail. These are the things you might marvel at: first of all you will see the island itself, separated from Italy by a narrow channel, but once, so it is thought, joined to the mainland; suddenly the sea burst in and ‘split Hesperia’s flank from Sicily’s.’54 Then you will see the Charybdis of mythology (for you will be able to skirt the edge of that voracious whirlpool); it stays calm while it is unaffected by the south wind, but if a strong gale blows from that direction, it swallows ships in its broad, deep mouth.55 (3) You will see the spring of Arethusa, famed in poetry, with its sparkling pool, transparent right to the bottom, pouring out ice-cold waters, whether it finds them rising up there for the first time, or it restores a river that has flowed undiminished belowground, beneath all those seas, preserved from contamination with the tainted water.56 (4) You will see a harbor that is the calmest of all that have been formed by nature or improved by human hands for the protection of fleets, so safe that there is no access even for the raging of the mightiest storms. You will see where the power of Athens was broken, where that natural prison, carved out of the rocks to an immeasurable depth, incarcerated all those thousands of captives.57 You will see the immense city itself, whose layout covers a greater area than the entire territory controlled by many another city. You will see very mild winters, and never a day without some sunshine. (5) But when you have made all those discoveries, the oppressive, unhealthy summer will spoil the advantages of the winter climate. There you will find the tyrant Dionysius, the destroyer of liberty, justice, and law, a man greedy for absolute power even after Plato, for life even after exile;58 he will burn some people, he will beat others, he will order others to be beheaded for some trivial offense, he will send for males and females to serve his lust, and for the disgusting devotees of the palace’s licentiousness it will not be enough to couple with just two people at the same time. You have heard what could attract you, and what could put you off: so either set sail or stop right here.” (6) After this advice, if someone still said that he wanted to enter Syracuse, the only person he could fairly complain to would be himself, given that he had not just stumbled into the situation but had arrived with eyes open, and fully informed.
Nature says to all of us:59 “I deceive no one. If you bring up children, you may have attractive ones and you may have ugly ones. Perhaps many will be born to you: one of them could be the savior of his country, or equally its betrayer. (7) Do not abandon the hope that they will gain such a good reputation that no one will dare to reproach you on their account; but also imagine them incurring such disgrace that they become bywords for evil. There is nothing to prevent their being the ones who perform your funeral rites and your children being the ones who deliver your eulogy; but be prepared for the possibility of placing a boy, perhaps, on the pyre, or a young man, or an old man—for the age is irrelevant, since any funeral procession that includes a parent is untimely.” After these terms have been set out, if you still bring up children, you free the gods from any reproach, for they have given you no guarantees.
(18.1) Come on, now, picture your entry into the whole of your life in the same terms. I have explained what could entice you and what could put you off if you were wondering whether to visit Syracuse: imagine me coming to give you advice as you were being born: (2) “You are about to enter a city shared by gods and men,60 one that embraces everything, is bound by fixed, eternal laws, and ensures that the revolving heavenly bodies carry out their duties untiringly. There you will see countless stars twinkling; you will see the universe filled with the light of a single star, the sun on its daily course marking out the periods of day and night, and on its annual course demarcating summers and winters more evenly.61 You will see the moon taking over at night, borrowing a gentle, reflected light from her encounters with her brother, at one time hidden, at another looming over the earth with her face full,62 changing as she waxes and wanes, always different from the previous night. (3) You will see the five planets following different courses and straining against the motion of the hurtling world;63 the fortunes of nations depend on their slightest movements, and the greatest and the smallest things are shaped by the arrival of a favorable or an unfavorable star. You will marvel at gathering clouds and falling rainwater and zigzagging lightning and the heavens filled with thunder. (4) When you have had your fill of the spectacle of the world above and turn your gaze down to earth, you will be welcomed by a different kind of world with different marvels: here sprawling, level plains that stretch out endlessly, here the high-soaring summits of mountains rising up with huge, snowy ridges; streams tumbling down, and vast rivers flowing east and west from a single source; woodlands with their treetops swaying, and enormous forests with their wildlife and the dissonant choiring of birds; (5) cities in varied locations, nations cut off by difficult terrain, some retreating up precipitous mountains, others fearfully encircling themselves with the shores of lakes and with marshes;64 crops promoted by cultivation, and trees with no one to cultivate their wildness; streams gently flowing through meadows, pleasant bays, and shores receding to form a harbor; and all those islands scattered across the empty waters, adorning the seas where they emerge. (6) What about the brilliance of stones and gems, the gold that flows mingled with the sand of swift torrents, bursts of blazing fire in the middle of the land and also in the middle of the sea,65 and the ocean encircling the land, interrupting the continuity of the nations with its trio of gulfs66 as its tides surge with complete abandon? (7) Here you will see, swimming in waters that are restless and billowing even when there is no wind, creatures of a size exceeding land animals, some of them ponderous, moving under another’s control,67 some swift, faster than rowers at full stretch, some sucking in water and breathing it out, causing grave danger to passing sailors. Here you will see ships looking for unknown lands. You will not see anything left unattempted by human boldness, and you will be both a spectator of, and a partner in, great endeavors: you will learn and teach skills, some that sustain life, some that enhance it, some that guide it. (8) But in that same place there will be thousands of afflictions of body and mind, wars, robberies, poisons, shipwrecks, climatic and bodily disorders, bitter grief for those dearest to you, and death, which may be easy or may result from punishment and torture. Think it over and weigh up what you want: to reach the one set of experiences you must run the gauntlet of the other.” You will reply that you want to live, of course. (Or on second thought, I suppose, you will not put yourself in a position where any curtailment causes you grief!) So live on the terms agreed. “No one consulted us,” you say. But our parents were consulted about us when, knowing life’s terms, they raised us to live by them.
(19.1) But let me move on to sources of consolation: let us first see where treatment is needed, then what kind of treatment. A person who is grieving is affected by longing for the loved one. That in itself seems to be bearable; for while they are still alive we do not weep for people who are absent or are going to be absent, even though we lose all contact with them when we lose sight of them. So it is our belief that tortures us, and evils are only ever as great as our valuation of them. We have the remedy in our own hands: let us think of the deceased as absent, let us deceive ourselves; we have sent them on their way, or rather we have sent them on ahead and are going to follow. (2) A person who is grieving is also swayed by this thought: “There will be no one to protect me, to save me from being treated with disrespect.” I offer a consolation that is far from commendable, but it is true: in our city bereavement creates more goodwill than it destroys, and loneliness, which used to be the curse of old age, gives it such power that some people pretend to dislike their sons, and disown their offspring, deliberately making themselves childless.68
(3) I know what you will say: “I am not troubled by my own losses; for people do not deserve consolation if they are upset by the death of a son in the same way as by that of a servant, if in their son’s case they find time to think of anything except the son himself.” So what is troubling you, Marcia? That your son has died, or that he did not live long? If it is that he has died, you ought to have grieved for him all along; for you knew all along that he was going to die. (4) You must realize that a dead person is not afflicted by any sufferings, that the things that make the underworld seem terrifying are just myths, that no darkness looms over the dead, no prison, no rivers blazing with fire, no river of Oblivion,69 no law courts and defendants, nor in that state of utter freedom are there tyrants all over again.70 Poets have indulged in these fantasies and have hounded us with empty terrors. (5) Death is a release from every pain, a boundary that our sufferings cannot cross; death restores us to the state of peace in which we lay before our birth. Anyone who feels pity for the dead should also feel pity for the unborn. Death is neither a good nor an evil; for only a something can be a good or an evil; but what is itself nothing, and reduces everything to nothing, does not leave us at the mercy of fortune. For evil and good subsist in some material object: fortune cannot get a grip on what nature has released; a nonexistent person cannot be wretched. (6) Your son has crossed the frontier, leaving behind this place of slavery; immense and everlasting peace has welcomed him. He is not attacked by fear of poverty, or by anxiety over wealth, or by stabs of the lust that corrodes the mind with pleasure; he is not affected by envy of other people’s prosperity or oppressed by others’ envy of his own, and his sensitive ears are not assailed by insults of any sort; he anticipates no disasters, either public or personal; he is not anxious about the future, hanging on results that always lead to greater uncertainty.71 He has finally come to a halt where nothing can force him out, nothing can terrify him.
(20.1) O, how lacking in awareness of their sufferings are those who do not praise death and do not look forward to it as nature’s finest discovery, whether it sets a seal on our happiness, or keeps disaster at bay, or ends the old man’s jadedness and weariness, or cuts a young life short in its prime when even better things are expected, or calls a halt to childhood before the more difficult stages are reached: for everybody death is an end, for many a cure, for some an answer to prayer; and it does no one a greater favor than those to whom it comes without waiting to be asked. (2) It brings freedom from slavery against the owner’s wishes; it removes the chains from captives; it lets out of prison those to whom unbridled power had denied release; it shows exiles who are always straining their minds and eyes toward their homeland that it does not matter beneath whose soil one is buried; when fortune has shared out common possessions unfairly, and has given one person ownership of another even though they were born with equal rights, death is the great equalizer. After death, no one any longer acts at the whim of another; it lets no one feel inferior; it is available to all; it is what your father longed for, Marcia; it is, I tell you, what ensures that birth is not a punishment, what ensures that I do not fall when faced with fortune’s threats, that I can keep my mind sound and in control of itself: for I have something to which I can make a final appeal. (3) Here I see crosses, not all of the same kind but constructed differently by different people: some hang their victims upside down with their heads toward the ground, others drive a stake through their private parts, others stretch out their arms on the gibbet; I see racks, I see scourges, and instruments of torture specially tailored to each joint72—but I also see death. Here are cruel enemies, arrogant fellow citizens: but here I also see death. It is no problem being a slave if, when you grow tired of being someone else’s property, you can cross over to freedom with a single step. Life, you are dear to me, thanks to death!
(4) Think what a blessing a timely death can be, and how many people have been disadvantaged by living too long. If Gnaeus Pompeius, the glory and the mainstay of the empire, had been carried off by ill health when he was at Naples, he would have departed as the undisputed leader of the Roman people; but as it turned out, a brief extension toppled him from his pinnacle. He saw legions slaughtered before his eyes, and from that battle in which the senate formed the front line he saw (what a pitiful remnant!) the commander emerge alive;73 he saw the Egyptian butcher, and he surrendered to an underling the body that the victors held sacrosanct. Even if he had been left unharmed he would have regretted being spared; for what was more shameful than for Pompey’s life to depend on the generosity of a king?74 (5) If Marcus Cicero had fallen at the time when he evaded Catiline’s daggers, directed at him and at his country alike, when he was the savior of the state he had liberated, or even if he had died soon after his daughter, he could still have died happy. He would not have seen swords drawn against the lives of fellow citizens, or assassins carving up the possessions of the murdered so that they might actually meet the expenses of their own deaths, or the auction of consular spoils, or slaughter put out to public tender, or robbery, war, plunder, and so many more Catilines.75 (6) If the sea had swallowed up Marcus Cato when he was on his way back from Cyprus and from administering the king’s inheritance, even if it had also swallowed up the money he was bringing home to pay for the civil wars, would that not have been a blessing? He would certainly have died believing that no one would dare to do wrong in the presence of Cato; but an extension of just a few years compelled a man born for the sake of freedom—not just his own but also his country’s—to flee Caesar and to follow Pompey.76
So an early death caused him no suffering, and it actually spared him suffering of all kinds.77
(21.1) “But he died too soon and too young.” First of all, suppose he could have looked forward to . . . think of the longest time that a human being can keep going: how long is that? Born for a very short period, soon to make way for others, we see each new arrival assigned to these temporary lodgings. Am I talking just about our own lives, which <we know> roll forward with incredible speed?78 Count up the centuries that cities have lasted: you will see how even those that boast of their antiquity have not been standing for long. All human affairs are brief and transient and occupy a negligible fraction of infinite time. (2) This earth, with its cities and peoples and rivers and its encircling sea, we count as a pinprick in comparison with the universe; our life span occupies a smaller portion than a pinprick if it is compared with all of time, whose duration exceeds that of the world, since the latter repeats itself over and over again within the course of time.79 So what is the point of prolonging something that, however great the increase, will still be next to nothing? The only way our life can be long is if we find it sufficient. (3) You may give me the names of long-lived men whose length of years has passed into history, you may count up the hundred and ten years of each one: when you let your mind focus on the whole of time, the difference between the shortest and the longest life will be as nothing, if you examine the length of time a person lived and then compare the length of time he did not live.
(4) Furthermore, from his own viewpoint his death was well timed; for he lived as long as he had to, and there was nothing more left for him to do. There is no single measure of old age for humans, no more than there is for animals, for it exhausts some of them within fourteen years, and their maximum life span is just the first stage of a human being’s; each creature is given a different potential for living. No one dies too soon, because he was not going to live any longer than he did live. (5) A boundary stone has been firmly fixed in place for each of us: it will always remain where it has been set up, and no effort or influence will move it farther away. Realize this, that your losing him was planned: he reached his allotted span “and arrived at the goal of the life assigned to him.”80 (6) So you should not make yourself depressed by thinking, “He could have lived longer.” His life was not cut short, nor does chance ever intervene in a person’s years. Each person is paid what he was promised; the fates go their own way and do not add to or subtract from what has once been promised. Prayer and effort are futile: each person will get what was allocated to him on his first day. From the moment he first saw the light, he started on the journey toward death and drew closer to his fate, and the years that were added to his adolescence were subtracted from his life. (7) We are all prone to the mistake of thinking that only the elderly and those getting on in years are heading toward death, despite the fact that right from the start infancy, and youth, and every stage of life, are taking us in that direction. The fates are doing their job; they make sure we are not conscious of our execution, and so that it may creep up on us more easily, death lurks beneath the very word life: infancy metamorphoses into childhood, childhood into puberty, and the old man does away with the young one. The stages of growth, if you calculate correctly, are actually losses.
(22.1) Are you complaining, Marcia, that your son did not live as long as he could have? So how do you know whether he would have gained from living longer, or whether this death was to his advantage? Can you find anyone today whose circumstances are so firmly rooted and grounded that he has nothing to fear from the passage of time? Human affairs are slippery and fluid, and no stage of our life is as exposed and vulnerable as the one that gives the most pleasure; so we should wish for death when we are at our happiest, because amid all the instability and turmoil of life nothing is certain except what is past. (2) Your son’s handsome body attracted the gaze of the degenerate city, but he kept it pure by vigilantly guarding his honor; however, who can guarantee you that his body could have escaped every illness and preserved its fine appearance unblemished into old age? Think of the thousands of faults that affect the mind: upright, talented individuals who show promise in their youth do not always maintain it until old age, but are often driven off course; either degeneracy attacks later in life, hence all the more shamefully, and starts to bring discredit on honorable beginnings; or they sink to the level of cafés and bellies, and all they care about is what they eat and what they drink. (3) Think too of fires, collapsing buildings, shipwrecks, and the butchery inflicted by doctors who remove bones from the living, force their entire hands into their intestines, and cause all sorts of pain as they treat their private parts. Next think of exile (your son was no more blameless than Rutilius), of prison (he was no wiser than Socrates), of a breast pierced by a self-inflicted wound (he was no more saintly than Cato):81 when you have digested all this, you will realize that the people who have been best treated are the ones whom nature quickly pulled back to safety, for this was the kind of campaign in which they could expect to serve during their lives. Nothing is as deceptive as human life, nothing as treacherous: by Hercules, nobody would have accepted it were they not unaware of being offered it. So, if the most fortunate thing is not to be born, second best, I think, is to enjoy a brief life and be quickly restored to our original state.
(4) Picture to yourself that period which caused you such pain, when Sejanus made a gift of your father to his client Satrius Secundus.82 He was angry with him for his outspokenness on one or two occasions, for he had not been able to endure in silence when Sejanus was not just being foisted on us but was clambering over us. There was a proposal that a statue of him be set up in the theater of Pompey, which Caesar was rebuilding after a fire:83 Cordus exclaimed that this would really ruin the theater. (5) Well, why should he not have been bursting with indignation at the prospect of Sejanus standing on the ashes of Gnaeus Pompeius, of a treacherous soldier being glorified in the memorial to a very great general? An indictment was patched together,84 and the fierce dogs, which he used to feed on human blood to make them obedient to himself alone and savage toward everyone else, began to howl around the man ***.85 (6) What was he to do? If he wanted to live, he had to plead with Sejanus; if to die, he had to plead with his daughter, and both of them would refuse to listen: he decided to deceive his daughter. So after bathing, to use up more of his strength, he retired to his bedroom as if to take a meal, and dismissing his slaves, he threw some food out the window, to create the impression that he had eaten it; then he missed dinner, pretending he had already had enough to eat in his bedroom. On the second and third days he did the same; on the fourth day his physical deterioration gave the game away. So he embraced you and said, “My dearest daughter, this is the only thing I have kept from you in my entire life: I have started the journey to death and now I am about halfway; you neither should nor can call me back.” Then he ordered all the daylight to be shut out, and he buried himself in darkness. (7) When his intentions became known there was public delight, because the prey was being snatched from the jaws of the greedy wolves. The accusers, at Sejanus’s bidding, went to the consuls’ court and complained that Cordus was dying so that they could intervene in what they had forced him to do; they really felt that Cordus was escaping from them. It was a major issue at the hearing, whether plaintiffs lost the <right> to die; while this was being debated, while the accusers came to court a second time, he had secured his own acquittal. (8) Do you see, Marcia, what reversals threaten us unexpectedly in evil times? Are you weeping because one of your family had to die? He almost lost the right to do so.
(23.1) Quite apart from the fact that the whole of the future is uncertain, and fairly certain to get worse, minds that are released quickly from human society have the easiest journey to the world above; for they drag very little impurity or baggage with them. Liberated before they could become desensitized and too deeply infected with earthly affairs, they fly back to their place of origin with greater agility, and more easily wash away any trace of dirt and grime. (2) Great intellects never enjoy lingering in the body: they long to leave and break away, they resent these restrictions, for they are used to roaming through the universe far above and looking down on human affairs from on high. That is the basis for what Plato proclaims:86 the wise man’s mind is entirely oriented toward death; this is what it wants, this is what it thinks about; it is constantly motivated by this desire in its striving toward the transcendent.
(3) Tell me, Marcia, when you saw in that young man an old man’s wisdom, a mind that had overcome every kind of pleasure, that was flawless, free from faults, seeking wealth without greed, honors without self-interest, pleasure without excess, did you think you could enjoy him unscathed for long? Whatever reaches its climax is close to its end; perfect virtue escapes and vanishes from our sight, and things that ripen early do not keep till the end of the season. (4) The brighter a fire blazes, the sooner it goes out: it is longer lived when it wrestles with slow-burning, tough fuel, enveloped in smoke and gleaming through the murk; for the source that feeds it grudgingly also makes it last. In the same way, the brighter that human intellects shine, the shorter lived they are; for when there is no room for growth, decline is close at hand. (5) Fabianus says87—something our parents saw as well—that at Rome there was a boy with the physique of an enormous man; but he quickly passed away, and sensible people all predicted he would die soon;88 for he could not live to the age that he had anticipated prematurely. That is how it is: precociousness is a sign of an imminent demise; the end is approaching when potential for growth is all used up.
(24.1) If you start to value him in terms of his virtues, not his years, then he lived sufficiently long. He was left as a ward in the care of guardians until he was fourteen, and was always under his mother’s guardianship. Although he had his own home, he did not want to leave yours, and he was still living with his mother at an age when children can barely stand living with their father. His stature, his fine appearance, and his robust physical strength made him a young man born for military service, but he refused to go into the army so as not to leave you. (2) Work out, Marcia, how rarely mothers who live in separate houses see their children; consider how all the years during which mothers have sons in the army are lost to them, and spent in anxiety: you will realize that you had an extended period of which you lost nothing. He never left your sight; under your eyes he developed the intellectual pursuits for which he had an outstanding talent, one that would have matched his grandfather’s, had he not been inhibited by modesty, which keeps many people’s achievements in obscurity. (3) As a young man of exceptionally handsome appearance, surrounded by such a host of seductive women, he gave none of them what they hoped for, and when some of them were brazen enough to try to flirt with him, he blushed as though it were his fault that he was attractive to them. This purity of character meant he was thought worthy of a priesthood while still a child; no doubt he had his mother’s backing, but not even his mother could have exerted much influence except in support of a good candidate. (4) While you contemplate these virtues, hold your son in your embrace, as it were. Now he has more time for you, now there is nothing to call him away; he will never cause you anxiety, never grief. You have already been through the only kind of sorrow that could be occasioned by such a good son; the future is free from the clutches of chance and is filled with pleasure, provided that you know how to enjoy your son, provided that you understand what was most valuable about him.
(5) It is merely an image of your son that has perished, a likeness that was not very close; he himself is eternal, and is now in a better state, stripped of external baggage and left with just himself. What you see enveloping us—bones, muscles, the covering of skin, the face, our servants the hands, and the other things in which we are swathed—for our minds these are chains and darkness; the mind is smothered, choked, and poisoned by them, it is cut off from what is real, from where it truly belongs, and is plunged into what is unreal. It is in perpetual conflict with this burdensome flesh, to save itself from being dragged back and sinking; it struggles up toward the place from which it was banished. There eternal rest awaits it, and it will see purity and brightness instead of chaos and gloom. (25.1) So there is no reason to rush to your son’s tomb: in it lie the most worthless bits of him, which caused him the greatest trouble, his bones and ashes, no more parts of him than were his clothes and the other things that covered his body. He has escaped intact, leaving nothing of himself on earth; the whole of him has departed; after lingering for a short while just above us while he was being purified and was getting rid of any remaining faults and all the encrustation of mortal life, he was then raised up high and hurried to join the souls of the blessed. (2) He has been welcomed by a sacred entourage, by Scipios and Catos, and, among those who despised life and are free thanks to <death>, by your own father, Marcia. He takes his grandson under his wing—even though everything is interrelated there—as he rejoices in the unfamiliar light; he teaches him about the paths of the neighboring stars, and gladly initiates him into nature’s secrets, relying not on hypothesis but on his experience of everything as it truly is. And as a visitor is grateful to have a guide in an unfamiliar city, so he, all eager to understand the causes of celestial events, is grateful to have someone from his own family to explain things. He also <tells> him to direct his gaze toward the earth far below; for it is good to look down from on high at what you have left behind. (3) So, Marcia, behave as though you are in full view of your father and your son, who are not as you knew them, but far nobler, living in the highest heaven. You should feel ashamed of <entertaining> humble, commonplace <thoughts>, and of weeping for your relatives when they have been transformed into something better. They have <gained possession of> eternity and <have been> set free to wander in vast, open spaces;89 no intervening seas or high mountains or pathless valleys or shallows of the treacherous Syrtes bar their way;90 they can reach everything easily,91 and they move about readily, unencumbered; they are accessible to each other and they mingle with the stars.
(26.1) So imagine, Marcia, that your father, who had as much influence over you as you had over your son, is speaking from that heavenly citadel—not with the eloquence he employed to lament the civil wars and to proscribe forever those responsible for the proscriptions, but with an eloquence far superior to that, as he himself is now more exalted: (2) “Why, my daughter, are you in the grip of such long lasting grief? Why do you persist in such ignorance of the truth that you think your son has been unjustly treated because he has gone to join his ancestors at a time when his family circumstances were undiminished and he himself was undiminished? Do you not realize with what storms fortune convulses everything, how it treats no one kindly and indulgently except those who have had least to do with it? Should I give you the names of kings who would have been supremely happy if death had rescued them sooner from the ills that threatened them? Or the names of Roman generals whose greatness will be undiminished if you subtract a little from their life span? Or the names of the noblest and most famous men resolutely awaiting the stroke of a soldier’s sword on their unflinching neck? (3) Look at your father and your grandfather: he fell into the clutches of a foreign assassin;92 I let no one have any power over me, and depriving myself of food, I showed that the bravery of my writing reflected the bravery of my living. Why, in our family, is the person whose death was the most fortunate being lamented the longest? We are all united, and no longer surrounded by deep night, we see that nothing in your world is, as you suppose, desirable, nothing is sublime, nothing is glorious, but everything is insignificant, oppressive, anxious, and aware of only a tiny fraction of the light we enjoy! (4) Need I say that here no armies charge at each other in a frenzy, fleets are not shattered against fleets, family murders are not planned or even contemplated, and the marketplaces do not buzz with court cases all day and every day? Need I say that nothing is kept secret, minds are laid bare, hearts are transparent, life is lived in public and in the open, and all of history is visible, together with events to come? (5) I gained pleasure from writing about the deeds of a single generation, unfolding in the remotest part of the universe and among a tiny number of people: but now it is possible to see many generations and the interplay and succession of many eras throughout the whole of time; it is possible to look at kingdoms about to rise or fall, at the collapse of great cities, and at new inroads made by the sea. (6) If the universality of fate can be of any comfort to you in your bereavement, realize that nothing will remain standing where it now stands, that old age will topple everything and sweep it away. It will toy not just with human beings (for what a tiny fraction of the power of fortune they represent) but with places, with countries, with whole sections of the world. It will flatten entire mountains and in other places will force up new cliffs; it will swallow seas, divert rivers, disrupt communication between nations, and undo the partnership and cohesion of the human race; elsewhere it will make cities disappear into huge chasms, shake them with earthquakes, send plague-ridden air from deep below, cover all habitation with floods, kill every living creature as it drowns the earth, and scorch and burn all that is mortal in huge fires. And when the time comes for the world to extinguish and renew itself, everything will destroy itself by its own strength, stars will collide with stars; and as all matter goes up in flames, the bodies that now shine in an orderly configuration will all burn in a single fire. (7) We also, the blessed souls destined for eternity, when god decides to recreate the world, as everything else collapses, we too shall be a small appendage to the wholesale destruction, and we shall be returned to our original elements.”
How fortunate is your son, Marcia, who already knows all this!