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Dialogues and On ClemencyConsolation to Marcia
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Consolation to Marcia

1 If I did not know, Marcia, that you have withdrawn as far from a woman’s weakness of mind as from the other vices, and that your character is looked upon as a kind of model from the old days, I would not dare to stand in the way of your grief, a grief that even men cling to and brood over by choice; nor would I have conceived any hope that, at so unfavorable a time, before so hostile a judge, against so odious a charge, I could bring you to acquit your fortune. What gave me confidence was the strength of your mind, already tested, and your virtue, proved in a great trial.

It is well known how you conducted yourself toward your father, whom you loved no less than your children, except that you did not wish him to outlive you. And I am not sure you did not wish that too; for great devotion allows itself certain liberties against good custom. You did all you could to prevent the death of your father, Aulus Cremutius Cordus;1 but once it was clear to you that, surrounded by the henchmen of Sejanus,2 he had this one way of escape from slavery open to him, you did not favor his plan, but you gave in, defeated. You shed tears openly; you choked back your sobs, it is true, but you did not hide them behind a cheerful face; and you did this in an age when it was great devotion to do nothing undutiful. As soon as the change of times gave you some opening, you brought your father’s genius, on which the punishment had been inflicted, back into men’s use; you rescued him from the true death and restored to the public records the books which that bravest of men had written in his own blood. You did the greatest service to Roman letters: a large part of them had been burned. The greatest service to posterity, to whom an uncorrupted record of events will come, one that cost its author dear. The greatest service to the man himself, whose memory flourishes and will flourish as long as there is any value in knowing Roman history, as long as there is anyone who wants to go back to the deeds of our ancestors, as long as there is anyone who wants to know what a Roman man is: what a man is who stays unconquered when every other neck has been bowed and forced under Sejanus’s yoke, what a man is who is free in intellect, in spirit, in hand. By Hercules, the state would have suffered a great loss if you had not dug him out of the oblivion into which he had been thrown for two of the finest things there are, eloquence and freedom. He is read, he flourishes; taken into men’s hands and hearts, he fears no lapse of years. But the crimes of those butchers, the only thing for which they have earned remembrance, will soon be forgotten too.

This greatness of mind of yours forbade me to consider your sex, forbade me to consider your face, which so many years of unbroken sorrow, once they had clouded it, have kept clouded. And see how little I mean to creep up on you or to rob your feelings by stealth: I have brought old ills back to your memory, and, so that you would know this wound too can be healed, I have shown you the scar of a wound just as great. Let others, then, handle you gently and flatter you; I have resolved to do battle with your grief, and I will stop those weary, worn-out eyes, which, if you want the truth, now weep more from habit than from longing. If possible, I will do it with you on the side of your own cure; if not, even against your will, though you hold and embrace your grief, which you have kept alive in place of your son. For what end will there be? Everything has been tried in vain: the exhausted exhortations of your friends, the influence of great men related to you. Your studies, the good you inherited from your father, pass by deaf ears, a futile comfort, barely enough to distract you for a moment. Even time, that natural remedy which settles the greatest troubles, has lost its power in you alone. The third year is already passing, and in the meantime nothing of that first onrush has abated. Your mourning renews and strengthens itself daily; delay has given it a right of its own, and it has come to think it shameful to stop. Just as all vices settle in deep unless they are crushed as they rise, so too these sad and wretched things, which rage against themselves, end by feeding on their own bitterness, and grief becomes the perverse pleasure of an unhappy mind. I would have wished, then, to approach this cure in the early days; a gentler medicine might have checked its force while it was still rising: against what has grown inveterate the fight must be harder. Wounds too are easily healed while they are fresh from the blood; once they have festered and turned into an evil ulcer, they must be cauterized, opened to the bottom, and made to admit the probing fingers. I cannot now approach so hard a grief with deference or gently: it must be broken.

2 I know that all who wish to counsel someone begin with precepts and end with examples. It pays to change this custom for once, since different people must be handled differently. Some are led by reason; others must be shown famous names and an authority that leaves the mind no freedom, dazzled as they are by what looks fine. I will put before your eyes two very great examples of your sex and your age: one, a woman who gave herself up to be swept away by grief; the other, a woman who, struck by the same misfortune and a greater loss, still did not give her ills a long dominion over her, but quickly put her mind back in its place. Octavia and Livia, the one Augustus’s sister, the other his wife, lost young sons, each with the sure hope that her son would one day be emperor.3 Octavia lost Marcellus. His uncle, who was also his father-in-law, had begun to lean on him, to rest on him the burden of empire: a young man quick in spirit, powerful in talent, and yet, for one of his years and his wealth, remarkable for frugality and self-restraint; patient of toil, a stranger to pleasures, able to carry whatever his uncle might wish to lay on him and, so to speak, to build on him. His uncle had chosen well: here was a foundation that would give way under no weight. Through the whole of her life Octavia made no end of weeping and moaning; she admitted no words that brought her anything wholesome; she would not even let herself be distracted. Intent on one thing and fixed on it with her whole mind, she was all her life what she had been at the funeral. I do not say she lacked the courage to rise; she refused to be lifted, and judged it a second bereavement to let her tears go. She wanted no portrait of her dearest son, no mention of him made to her. She hated all mothers, and raged above all against Livia, because the good fortune promised to herself seemed to have passed to that woman’s son. Most at home with darkness and solitude, not even turning to look at her brother, she rejected the poems composed to celebrate Marcellus’s memory and the other honors that letters paid him, and shut her ears against all comfort. Withdrawn from her customary duties, hating the very good fortune of her brother’s greatness, which shone too brightly around her, she buried and hid herself. With her children and grandchildren sitting beside her she did not put off her mourning dress, an insult to all her family, since with them alive she thought herself bereaved.

3 Livia had lost her son Drusus, who would have been a great emperor and was already a great general. He had gone deep into Germany and planted the Roman standards where it was barely known that Romans existed. He had died on campaign, and the enemy themselves honored him in his sickness with reverence and a mutual truce and did not dare to wish for what was to their advantage. Added to this death, which he had met in the service of the state, was the immense longing of the citizens, the provinces, and all Italy; through Italy, as the towns and colonies poured out to perform the mournful office, his funeral procession was led all the way to the city, very like a triumph. His mother had not been allowed to take her son’s last kisses and the dear words of his dying lips. She followed the remains of her Drusus on the long journey, harrowed by so many pyres blazing throughout Italy, as though she were losing him again each time; yet as soon as she had laid him in the tomb, she laid down her grief along with him, and grieved no more than was honorable, or fair, while the emperor was alive and well. In short, she never ceased to celebrate her Drusus’s name, to keep him before her everywhere, in private and in public, to speak of him and to hear of him most gladly: she lived with his memory, which no one can keep and dwell with who has made it a sorrow to himself.

Choose, then, which example you think more commendable. If you want to follow the first, you will remove yourself from the number of the living. You will turn away from other people’s children and from your own, and from the very son you long for; you will cross the path of mothers like an evil omen; you will reject honorable, permitted pleasures as unbecoming to your lot; you will cling to the daylight you hate and be the bitterest enemy of your own years, because they do not hurry you headlong and finish you as soon as possible; and you will show, the most shameful thing of all and the most foreign to a mind known for its better side, that you do not want to live and cannot die. If you apply yourself to the other example, that of a very great woman, and do so with more moderation and more gentleness, you will not live in misery or wear yourself down with torments. For what madness is it, for heaven’s sake, to exact penalties from yourself for your unhappiness and to add to your own ills! The integrity and the modesty of character you have kept all your life you will show in this matter too; for there is a kind of restraint in grieving as well. And that young man himself, so worthy to make you glad whenever he is named or thought of, you will set in a better place if he comes before his mother as he used to when he was alive, cheerful and full of joy.

4 Nor will I lead you to sterner precepts and bid you bear human things in an inhuman way, or dry a mother’s eyes on the very day of the funeral. I will go with you before an arbiter, and the question between us will be this: should grief be great, or should it be endless? I have no doubt that the example of Julia Augusta, whom you cultivated as a friend, will please you more: she calls you to her counsel. In her first fever, when miseries are most impatient and fierce, she offered herself to be consoled by Areus, her husband’s philosopher,4 and she admitted that this had helped her greatly: more than the Roman people, whom she did not wish to sadden with her sadness; more than Augustus, who was staggering with one of his two props taken away and was not to be bowed further by the mourning of his family; more than her son Tiberius, whose devotion made her feel, in that bitter funeral wept over by whole nations, that she had lost nothing but a number. This, I suppose, was how he approached her, this his opening with a woman who guarded her reputation most carefully: “Up to this day, Julia, so far as I know, and I have been the constant companion of your husband, who knows not only what is given out in public but all the more secret movements of your minds, you have taken care that there should be nothing in you anyone could find fault with. And you have observed this not only in greater matters but in the smallest, so as to do nothing for which you would want rumor, the freest judge of rulers, to pardon you. I think nothing finer than for those placed at the very summit to grant pardon for many things and to ask it for none. So in this matter too you must keep your habit, and commit nothing you would wish done less, or done otherwise.

5 “Next, I beg and implore you not to make yourself difficult and intractable to your friends. You must surely know that none of them knows how to behave, whether to say something about Drusus in your presence or nothing, for fear that forgetting a most illustrious young man may wrong him, or mentioning him may wrong you. When we have withdrawn and met by ourselves, we celebrate his deeds and his sayings with the regard he deserved; in your presence there is a deep silence about him. So you are missing the greatest of pleasures, your son’s praises, which I do not doubt you would prolong into all eternity, if the power were given you, even at the cost of your life. So allow, no, seek out the conversations in which he is talked of, and offer open ears to your son’s name and memory; and do not count it a burden, as others do, who in such a misfortune think it part of the ill to hear words of comfort. As it is, you have thrown your whole weight to one side, and, forgetting the better things, you look at your fortune from its worse side. You do not turn to your son’s company and the pleasure of meeting him, to his sweet boyish endearments, to the progress of his studies: you dwell on that last face of things, and onto it, as though it were not ghastly enough in itself, you heap whatever you can. Do not, I beg you, covet the most perverse glory of all, that of seeming the unhappiest of women. Consider too that it is no great thing to bear yourself bravely in prosperity, when life goes on with a fair wind: a calm sea and an obliging wind do not show even a helmsman’s skill; something adverse must strike him to prove his spirit. So do not give in; on the contrary, plant your step firmly and bear whatever burden has fallen on you from above, frightened only by the first crash of it. Nothing brings more reproach on Fortune than a calm mind.” After this he showed her the son who was still alive; he showed her grandchildren from the son she had lost.

6 It was your case, Marcia, that was argued there; it was by you that Areus sat. Change the name: it was you he consoled. But suppose, Marcia, that more has been snatched from you than any mother ever lost (I am not soothing you or making light of your calamity): if the fates can be conquered by weeping, let us pool our tears. Let every day pass in mourning, let sorrow consume the night without sleep; let hands be laid on a torn breast, let blows be aimed at the face itself, and let grief, if it will do any good, exercise itself in every kind of savagery. But if no beating of breasts calls the dead back, if a lot unmoved and fixed forever is changed by no misery, and death holds on to whatever it has taken, then let grief cease, since it is wasted. Let us steer ourselves, then, and not let that force carry us off course. A disgrace is the pilot who has had the rudder torn from his hands by the waves, who has abandoned the flapping sails and given the ship up to the storm; but even in shipwreck the pilot deserves praise whom the sea overwhelms still holding the helm and straining against it.

7 “But longing for one’s own is natural.” Who denies it, so long as it is moderate? For at the mere departure of those dearest to us, not only at their loss, there is an unavoidable sting, and even the firmest minds contract. But what opinion adds is more than what nature commanded. Look at dumb animals: how intense their longings are, and yet how brief. Cows are heard lowing for a day or two, and the wild, frantic running of mares lasts no longer. Wild beasts, when they have followed the tracks of their cubs and roamed the forests, when they have come back again and again to their plundered dens, put out their fury within a short time. Birds, after circling their empty nests with loud shrieks, are quiet a moment later and take to their flight again. No animal feels a long longing for its young except man, who abets his own grief, and is affected not as much as he feels but as much as he has decided to.

And so that you may know that being broken by mourning is not natural: first, the same bereavement wounds women more than men, barbarians more than people of a peaceful and civilized nation, the uneducated more than the educated. Yet what has received its force from nature keeps the same force in everyone: clearly, what varies is not natural. Fire will burn people of every age and of every city, men as well as women; iron will show its power to cut in every body. Why? Because their powers were given them by nature, which makes no distinction of persons. Poverty, mourning, ambition: each person feels them differently, according to how habit has dyed him, and a frightening opinion formed in advance about things that are not to be feared makes him weak and unable to bear them.

8 Then again, what is natural does not lessen with delay; but grief is consumed by length of days. However stubborn it is, rising up daily and boiling over against every remedy, time, the most effective means of taming its ferocity, still wears it down. There remains in you even now, Marcia, an immense sorrow, and it seems to have grown hard already, no longer the agitated sorrow it was at first, but persistent and obstinate; yet this too the years will take from you little by little: whenever you are busy with something else, your mind will loosen. As it is, you keep watch over yourself; but it makes a great difference whether you allow yourself to grieve or order yourself to. How much better it suits the refinement of your character to make an end of mourning rather than wait for one, and not to wait for the day when grief stops against your will! Renounce it yourself.

9 “Why, then, are we so stubborn in lamenting ourselves, if it does not happen at nature’s command?” Because we never picture any ill to ourselves before it comes; as though we were exempt and had set out on a more peaceful road than others, we are not reminded by other people’s misfortunes that misfortunes are common to all. So many funerals pass our house: we do not think of death. So many deaths of the young: we turn over in our minds our infants’ coming of age, their military service, their succession to their father’s estate. The sudden poverty of so many rich men falls before our eyes, and it never enters our minds that our own wealth too stands on slippery ground. So we necessarily fall harder: we are struck as though unawares; blows long foreseen land more softly. Do you want to know that you stand exposed to every blow, and that the weapons which have pierced others have quivered all around you? Imagine you are going up, half-armed, against some wall, or a position held by a large enemy force and hard to climb: expect a wound, and think that the stones flying down from above, and the arrows and javelins with them, are all aimed at your body. Whenever someone falls at your side or behind your back, cry out: “You will not deceive me, Fortune, nor catch me off guard or careless. I know what you are preparing: you struck someone else, but it was me you were aiming at.” Who ever looked at his possessions as though he were about to lose them? Who among you ever dared to think of exile, of want, of mourning? Who, if he were advised to think of them, would not spit the thought out like an evil omen and bid it go onto the heads of his enemies, or of the untimely adviser himself? “I didn’t think it would happen.” Do you think anything will not happen which you know can happen, which you see has happened to many? Here is a splendid line, too good to have come from the stage:

“What can happen to anyone can happen to you.”5

That man lost his children: you too can lose yours. That man was condemned: your innocence too is within range of the blow. This is the error that deceives us and unmans us, when we suffer what we never foresaw we could suffer. He who has looked ahead to coming ills takes the force out of them when they arrive.

10 Whatever it is, Marcia, that glitters around us from outside, children, offices, wealth, spacious halls and vestibules packed with a crowd of clients left waiting at the door, a famous name, a wife of noble birth or great beauty, and everything else that hangs on uncertain and changeable chance, these are borrowed trappings, someone else’s; none of them is given to us as a gift. The stage is dressed with props lent to us and due to go back to their owners; some will be taken back on the first day, some on the second, and few will stay to the end. So there is no reason for us to admire ourselves as though we were placed among our own possessions: we have received them on loan. The use and the enjoyment are ours, but the term is set by the giver who controls his gift. We must keep ready what was given us for no fixed date, and return it without complaint when it is called in: it is the worst kind of debtor who abuses his creditor. All our own, then, both those we hope will survive us by the law of birth and those whose most just wish is to go before us, we must love as though we had been promised nothing about their lasting forever, no, nothing about their lasting long. The mind must often be reminded to love things as things that will leave, rather, as things already leaving: whatever Fortune has given, possess it as though it came without a guarantee. Snatch the pleasures your children give, let your children enjoy you in turn, and drain every joy without delay: nothing is promised about tonight—I have granted too long an adjournment—nothing about this hour. We must hurry; the enemy is at our backs. Soon this company will be scattered, soon these fellowships will be broken up with a shout. Everything is being plundered: poor wretches, you do not know how to live in a rout.

If you grieve that your son has died, the fault lies with the time when he was born; for death was announced to him at his birth. He was begotten under this law; this fate went with him straight from the womb. We have come into the kingdom of Fortune, a harsh and unconquerable kingdom, to suffer at her whim what we deserve and what we do not. She will abuse our bodies violently, insultingly, cruelly. Some she will burn with fire, applied as a punishment or as a remedy; some she will put in chains, a thing allowed now to an enemy, now to a fellow citizen; some she will toss naked on uncertain seas, and when they have wrestled with the waves she will not even cast them up on the sand or the shore, but will bury them in the belly of some enormous sea beast; others she will waste with every kind of disease and hold for a long time suspended between life and death. Like a capricious, wanton mistress careless of her slaves, she will go astray in her punishments and her rewards alike.

11 What need is there to weep over parts of life? All of life is cause for tears. New troubles will press on you before you have settled with the old. You women, then, who bear things without moderation, must above all learn moderation, and the strength of the human heart must be spread out against many griefs. And what is this forgetfulness of your own condition and of the common one? You were born mortal, and you gave birth to mortals. Did you, yourself a rotting, perishable body assailed again and again by disease, hope that from such frail matter you had carried something solid and eternal? Your son has died; that is, he has run his course to the end toward which the things you think more fortunate than your child are hurrying. To this end goes all that crowd, at unequal paces, which wrangles in the forum, applauds in the theaters, prays in the temples: what you love and revere and what you despise, one heap of ashes will make equal. This, surely, ⟨…⟩ that saying ascribed to the Pythian oracle: Know yourself.6 What is man? A vessel that any knock, any toss will break. It does not take a great storm to scatter you: wherever you strike, you come apart. What is man? A weak and fragile body, naked, defenseless by its own nature, in need of others’ help, thrown open to all the insults of fortune; even when it has trained its arms well, it is food for any wild beast, a victim for anyone. It is woven of weak and fluid stuff, handsome only in its outward lines, unable to bear cold, heat, toil, and yet bound to rot from mere disuse and leisure; afraid of its own food, since it fails now for lack of food, now bursts from too much; anxious and fretful in its keeping, with a breath held on sufferance and clinging poorly, which a sudden fright or a loud, unexpected sound in the ears shakes out of it; forever feeding its own anxiety, flawed and useless. Do we wonder at death in this thing, which takes no more than a single sob? Does it need a great effort to bring it down? Smells, tastes, weariness, sleeplessness, drink, food, and the very things it cannot live without are deadly to it. Wherever it goes it is at once aware of its weakness; it cannot bear every climate; strange water, a breath of unfamiliar air, the slightest causes and upsets make it sick; it is rotten and ailing, and begins its life with weeping. And yet what tumults this contemptible creature stirs up, into what grand schemes it falls, forgetting its condition! It turns over immortal, eternal things in its mind and makes arrangements for grandsons and great-grandsons, while death crushes it in the middle of its long undertakings, and what is called old age is the round of a very few years.

12 Your grief, if there is any reason in it: does it look to its own troubles, or to those of the one who has died? Are you moved, in the loss of your son, because you received no pleasures from him, or because you could have received greater ones if he had lived longer? If you say you received none, you will make your loss more bearable; for people long less for things from which they had received no joy and gladness. If you admit that you received great pleasures, you ought not to complain of what was taken away but to give thanks for what you were given. For the rearing itself brought you a large enough return on your labors; unless perhaps people who raise puppies and birds and the trifling playthings of the mind with the greatest care get some pleasure from the sight and touch and fawning of dumb creatures, while for those who raise children the rearing itself is not the reward of rearing. So even if his diligence brought you nothing, his care kept nothing safe for you, his prudence gave you no advice, the very fact that you had him, that you loved him, is the reward. “But it could have been longer, greater.” Still, you were treated better than if it had never been granted you at all; for if the choice were offered, whether it is better to be fortunate for a short time or never, it is better for us to be given good things that will leave than none. Would you rather have had some degenerate who would merely fill the place and the name of a son, or a son as gifted as yours was, a young man early prudent, early devoted, early a husband, early a father, early attentive to every duty, early a priest, hurrying in all things? Hardly anyone is given good things both great and lasting; only a slow good fortune endures and goes on to the end. The immortal gods, not meaning to give you a son for long, gave you at once a son such as long years can hardly make.

You cannot even say that the gods singled you out as the one woman not allowed to enjoy her son. Cast your eyes over the whole crowd of those you know and those you do not: everywhere you will meet people who have suffered worse. Great generals have felt these things, rulers have felt them; the myths have not left even the gods exempt, I suppose so that it might lighten our bereavements that the divine too can fall. Look around, I say, at everyone: you will not name a house so wretched that it does not find comfort in a more wretched one. By Hercules, I do not think so ill of your character as to suppose you could bear your misfortune more lightly if I paraded a huge number of mourners before you: a crowd of the wretched is a spiteful kind of comfort. Still, I will mention some, not so that you may learn that this commonly happens to people (it is absurd to collect examples of mortality), but so that you may learn there have been many who softened harsh things by bearing them calmly.

I will begin with the most fortunate. Lucius Sulla lost a son,7 and that did not blunt either his malice or his fierce courage against enemies and citizens alike, nor make it seem that he had falsely taken the famous surname Felix, “the Fortunate,” which he took after losing his son, fearing neither the hatred of men, whose sufferings paid for that too prosperous success, nor the resentment of the gods, whose reproach it was that Sulla was so fortunate. But let the question of what Sulla was go among the matters not yet judged (even his enemies will admit that he took up arms well and laid them down well); the point at issue here will stand: that is not the greatest evil which comes even to the most fortunate.

13 Let Greece not admire too much that father who, when his son’s death was announced to him in the middle of a sacrifice, only ordered the flute player to be silent and took the garland from his head, and duly finished the rest. Pulvillus the pontiff did as much, when his son’s death was announced to him as he was holding the doorpost and dedicating the temple on the Capitol.8 He pretended not to hear it and pronounced the solemn words of the pontifical formula, with no groan interrupting the prayer, and won Jupiter’s favor with his son’s name still ringing in his ears. Do you think there ought to be some end to the mourning of a man whose first day and first onrush of grief did not draw him, a father, away from the public altars and the words of good omen? By Hercules, he was worthy of that memorable dedication, worthy of the highest priesthood, a man who did not stop worshiping the gods even when they were angry. Yet when he went home, his eyes too filled with tears and he let out some words of lament; but once he had performed what custom required for the dead, he went back to that face he had worn on the Capitol.

Paullus, about the time of that most glorious triumph in which he drove Perseus in chains before his chariot, gave two sons in adoption and buried the two he had kept for himself.9 What do you think the sons he kept were like, when Scipio was among those he lent? The Roman people did not look at Paullus’s empty chariot without emotion. Yet he gave a speech to the assembly and thanked the gods for granting his prayer; for he had prayed that, if some price had to be paid to envy for so great a victory, it should be paid by his own loss rather than the state’s. Do you see with how great a spirit he bore it? He congratulated himself on his bereavement. And whom could so great a change have shaken more? He lost his comforts and his supports at once. Yet Perseus did not get to see a sad Paullus.

14 Why should I lead you now through countless examples of great men, and search for the wretched, as though it were not harder to find the fortunate? For how many houses have stood intact in all their parts to the end, with nothing in them thrown into disorder? Take any single year and call over its magistrates: Lucius Bibulus, if you like, and Julius Caesar. You will see that between colleagues who were bitter enemies fortune was in harmony. Lucius Bibulus, a better man than a brave one, had two sons killed at the same time, and mocked besides by Egyptian soldiery, so that the agent of his loss was as much a thing to weep over as the loss itself. Yet Bibulus, who in his whole year of office had hidden at home to throw odium on his colleague, came out on the day after the double funeral was reported and went about his usual duties as general. Who can give less than one day to two sons? So quickly did he end his mourning for his children, a man who had mourned his consulship for a year. When Caesar was crossing Britain and could not keep his good fortune within the bounds of the ocean, he heard that his daughter had died, and that she was drawing the fate of the state after her.10 Already Gnaeus Pompey stood before his eyes, a man who would not bear calmly that anyone else should be great in the state, and who would set a limit to Caesar’s rise, which he found oppressive even while it grew to their common advantage. Yet within three days Caesar was back at his duties as general, and he conquered his grief as quickly as he used to conquer everything.

15 Why should I recount to you the funerals of the other Caesars? Fortune seems to me to wound them now and then for this purpose, that even in this way they may serve the human race, by showing that not even those who are said to be born of gods and to be fathers of gods have their own fortune in their power as they have the fortune of others. The deified Augustus, having lost his children and his grandchildren, with the crowd of Caesars used up, propped up his empty house by adoption; yet he bore it as bravely as befitted one whose own cause was already being tried, and to whom it mattered most that no one should complain of the gods. Tiberius lost both the son he had begotten and the son he had adopted;11 yet he himself delivered the eulogy for his son from the rostra, and stood in full view of the body laid out, with only a veil placed between to keep the pontiff’s eyes from the corpse, and while the Roman people wept he did not change his expression. He let Sejanus, who stood at his side, see how patiently he could lose his own.

Do you see how great a number of the greatest men there are whom this misfortune, which lays everything low, has not spared, men on whom so many good qualities of mind, so many distinctions public and private, had been heaped? But this storm, clearly, makes its rounds, lays waste everything without choosing, and drives all before it as its own. Have each of them render his accounts: no one has been born with impunity.

16 I know what you will say: “You have forgotten that you are consoling a woman; you cite examples of men.” But who has said that nature dealt grudgingly with women’s characters and narrowed their virtues? They have, believe me, equal vigor, an equal capacity for the honorable, if only they choose; they endure pain and toil as well as men do, if they are used to them. In what city, good gods, are we saying this? In the city where Lucretia and Brutus threw a king off the necks of the Romans: we owe our freedom to Brutus, Brutus to Lucretia. In the city where we all but enrolled Cloelia among the men for her remarkable daring, when she scorned both the enemy and the river: seated on an equestrian statue on the Sacred Way, the busiest place in Rome, Cloelia reproaches our young men, who climb into their cushioned litters, for going about like that in a city where we have given even women a horse. If you want me to cite examples of women who bore the loss of their own bravely, I will not go begging from door to door; from one family I will give you two Cornelias. First, the daughter of Scipio, the mother of the Gracchi. She acknowledged her twelve births by as many funerals; and with the others it is easy, since the state never noticed their births or their deaths; but Tiberius and Gaius, whom even a man who denies they were good will admit were great, she saw both killed and left unburied. Yet when people consoled her and called her wretched, she said: “I shall never say I am not fortunate, I who bore the Gracchi.” The other Cornelia, mother of Livius Drusus, had lost that most illustrious young man of brilliant talent, as he walked in the footsteps of the Gracchi; he was killed in his own house with so many of his bills left unfinished, and his murderer was never known.12 Yet she bore her son’s bitter and unavenged death with as great a spirit as he had carried his laws. Will you now make your peace with fortune, Marcia, if she has not held back even from you the weapons she has hurled at the Scipios and at the mothers and daughters of the Scipios, the weapons with which she assails the Caesars?

Life is full of all kinds of misfortune, and beset by them; from them no one has a long peace, hardly even a truce. You had raised four children, Marcia. They say no weapon falls in vain that is hurled into a packed column: is it any wonder that so large a band could not get by without arousing envy and suffering loss? “But fortune was all the more unjust in that she did not merely snatch away my sons, she picked them out.” Yet you should never call it a wrong to share equally with someone stronger. She has left you two daughters and their children; and the very son you mourn most (you have forgotten the first) she did not take from you entirely: you have two daughters by him, great burdens if you bear it badly, great comforts if you bear it well. Bring yourself to this: when you see them, let them remind you of your son and not of your grief. When his trees have been overturned, torn up by the roots by the wind or snapped off by the sudden twisting onrush of a whirlwind, the farmer nurses the offspring that is left from them, and at once sets out seeds and seedlings in place of those he has lost; and in a moment (for time is swift and quick for gains as for losses) they grow up more flourishing than the ones that were lost. Put these daughters of your Metilius in his place now, fill the empty place, and lighten one grief with a double comfort. It is indeed the nature of mortals that nothing pleases them more than what they have lost: we are less fair to what is left us because of our longing for what was snatched away. But if you are willing to reckon how much fortune spared you even in her savagery, you will know that you have more than comforts: look at all your grandchildren, your two daughters. Say this too, Marcia: “I would be moved if each person’s fortune matched his character and ills never befell the good; as it is, I see that, with no distinction made, the bad and the good are tossed about alike.”

17 “But it is hard to lose a young man you have raised, who was already a protection and an honor to his mother and his father.” Who denies it is hard? But it is human. You were born for this: to lose, to perish, to hope, to fear, to disturb others and yourself, both to fear death and to wish for it, and, worst of all, never to know what your true condition is.

If someone said to a person bound for Syracuse: “Learn beforehand all the troubles and all the pleasures of your coming journey, and then set sail. These are the things you can marvel at. First you will see the island itself, cut off from Italy by a narrow strait; it is agreed that it was once joined to the mainland, but the sea suddenly broke in and

“severed the Hesperian shore from the Sicilian.”13

“Next you will see (for you will be allowed to skirt that most greedy whirlpool of the sea) the famous Charybdis of the stories, lying smooth as long as the south wind is still, but, if any stronger wind has blown from that quarter, sucking ships down into its huge, deep maw. You will see the fountain of Arethusa, most celebrated in song, a pool gleaming and clear to the very bottom, pouring out the iciest waters, whether it found them springing up there for the first time, or gives back a river that sank into the earth and ran whole beneath so many seas, kept safe from mixing with the inferior water. You will see the calmest harbor of all those that nature has placed, or human hands have improved, for the protection of fleets, so safe that not even the fury of the greatest storms finds any room there. You will see where the power of Athens was broken, where that natural prison, hewn out of the rock to an endless depth, held so many thousands of captives; you will see the great city itself, and a territory wider than the bounds of many cities, the mildest winters, and no day without the sun. But when you have come to know all this, a heavy, unhealthy summer will spoil the benefits of the winter climate. Dionysius the tyrant will be there, the ruin of freedom, justice, and law, greedy for absolute power even after Plato, for life even after exile. Some he will burn, some he will flog, some he will have mutilated for a slight offense; he will summon males and females to his lust, and among the foul herds of his royal excess it will be too little for him to couple with two at once. You have heard what can tempt you and what can frighten you away: so either sail or stay.” After this warning, if someone said he wanted to go to Syracuse, could he have any just complaint against anyone but himself, since he had not stumbled into these things but had come knowingly and with his eyes open?

Nature says to all of us: “I deceive no one. If you raise children, you may have handsome ones, and you may have deformed ones. Perhaps many will be born to you; one of them may as easily be the savior of his country as its betrayer. There is no reason to despair that they will be held in such esteem that no one will dare to speak ill of you on their account; but picture also that they may be so disgraceful that they themselves become a byword for abuse. Nothing forbids them to perform the last rites for you and to deliver your eulogy; but prepare yourself as though you were going to lay a child, or a young man, or an old man on the pyre; for years have nothing to do with it, since every funeral that a parent follows is untimely.” If you raise children after these terms have been set out, you free the gods from all reproach, for they promised you nothing certain.

18 Come, now, apply this picture to your entrance into life as a whole. When you were deliberating whether to visit Syracuse, I set out for you whatever could delight you and whatever could offend you; now imagine that I come to advise you at your birth. “You are about to enter a city shared by gods and men, which embraces all things, is bound by fixed and eternal laws, and keeps the heavenly bodies turning in their tireless offices. There you will see countless stars twinkling; you will see one star fill everything with light, the sun, which marks out the spaces of day and night in its daily course, and in its yearly course divides summers and winters still more evenly. You will see the moon take his place by night, borrowing a gentle, softened light from her meetings with her brother, now hidden, now hanging over the earth with her whole face, changing as she waxes and wanes, always unlike the night before. You will see five stars driving on different paths and striving against the headlong whirl of the universe; on their slightest motions hang the fortunes of nations, and the greatest things and the smallest are shaped according to whether a kindly or an unkindly star has come into play. You will marvel at the gathered clouds and the falling rain, the slanting thunderbolts and the crash of the sky. When, sated with the spectacle of things above, you lower your eyes to the earth, another form of things will receive you, wonderful in another way: here the level spread of plains stretching endlessly, there the peaks of mountains rising high on great, snowy ridges; the fall of rivers, and streams flowing from a single source both east and west; groves swaying on the topmost summits, and so many forests with their animals and the discordant chorus of birds; the varied sites of cities, and nations shut off by the difficulty of the ground, some withdrawing into steep mountains, others settling timidly around riverbanks, lakes, and valleys; crops helped by tillage, and trees that grow wild without a tiller; brooks winding gently through the meadows, lovely bays, and shores curving back into harbors; so many islands scattered over the vast deep, which break up the seas with their presence. And what of the gleam of stones and gems, and the gold that runs among the sands of rushing torrents, and the torches of fire bursting out in the middle of the land and again in the middle of the sea, and the ocean, the bond of the lands, which cuts the continuity of nations with its three gulfs and surges in its vast license? Here you will see, swimming in waters that heave restlessly even without wind, animals larger than any on land, some heavy and moving under another’s guidance, some swift and faster than galleys under full oars, some drinking in the waves and blowing them out again, to the great danger of those who sail past; here you will see ships seeking lands they do not know. You will see that human daring has left nothing untried, and you will be both a spectator of those who attempt great things and yourself a great part of them. You will learn and teach arts, some that equip life, some that adorn it, some that govern it. But there too will be a thousand plagues of body and of mind: wars and banditry and poisons and shipwrecks, the inclemencies of the climate and of the body, the bitter loss of those dearest to you, and death, whether easy or by way of punishment and torture, no one knows. Deliberate with yourself and weigh what you want: to come to those things you must go out by way of these.” You will answer that you want to live. Why not? No, I think you will not come near a thing from which you would be sorry to have anything struck off! Live, then, on the terms agreed. “No one consulted us,” you say. Our parents were consulted about us, and they, knowing the conditions of life, raised us to live on them.

19 But to come to the comforts, let us first see what is to be treated, then how. What moves a mourner is longing for the one he loved. In itself this is plainly bearable; for we do not weep for those who are absent, or will be absent as long as they live, although all our enjoyment of them has been taken from us along with the sight of them. It is opinion, then, that tortures us, and every ill is as great as the price we have set on it. We have the remedy in our own power: let us judge that they are away, and let us deceive ourselves. We have sent them off; no, we have sent them ahead, and we shall follow. This too moves a mourner: “There will be no one to defend me, no one to protect me from contempt.” To use a comfort hardly creditable, but true: in our city childlessness brings more influence than it takes away, and solitude, which used to ruin old age, now so far leads it to power that some men pretend to hate their sons, disown their children, and make themselves childless by their own hand.

I know what you will say: “My own losses do not move me; for no one deserves comfort who resents his son’s death as he would a slave’s, and who has room to consider anything in his son besides his son himself.” What, then, moves you, Marcia? That your son has died, or that he did not live long? If it is that he has died, you should always have grieved; for you always knew he would die. Consider that the dead are touched by no ills, that the things which make the underworld terrible to us are fables, that no darkness threatens the dead, no prison, no rivers blazing with fire, no river of Forgetfulness, no judgment seats and defendants, and, in a freedom so unconfined, no tyrants a second time. The poets have played with these things and troubled us with empty terrors. Death is the release from all pains and the end beyond which our ills do not pass; it puts us back into the tranquility in which we lay before we were born. If anyone pities the dead, let him pity the unborn too. Death is neither good nor evil; for only what is something can be either good or evil; but what is itself nothing and reduces everything to nothing hands us over to no fortune. For evils and goods have to do with some matter: fortune cannot hold what Nature has let go, nor can anyone be wretched who is no one. Your son has passed beyond the bounds within which men are slaves; a great and eternal peace has received him. He is not assailed by fear of poverty, or the cares of wealth, or the goads of lust that tear at minds through pleasure; he is not touched by envy of another’s good fortune, nor weighed down by envy of his own; not even his modest ears are struck by any abuse. He foresees no public disaster, no private one; he does not hang anxious over the future, on an outcome that always depends on something more uncertain still. At last he has come to rest where nothing can drive him out, where nothing can frighten him.

20 How ignorant men are of their own ills, that they do not praise death and look forward to it as Nature’s best invention! Whether it closes in prosperity or drives off calamity, whether it ends an old man’s satiety and weariness, or carries off youth in its flower while better things are still hoped for, or calls childhood back before its harsher stages, it is the end for all, a remedy for many, a prayer for some, and it has deserved best of none so much as of those to whom it came before it was called. It frees the slave against his master’s will; it lightens the captives’ chains; it leads out of prison those whom a tyrant’s power forbade to leave; it shows exiles, whose minds and eyes are always straining toward their homeland, that it makes no difference among whom one lies buried; when fortune has divided common goods badly, and given one man to another though they were born with equal rights, it makes all things equal. It is the thing after which no one has done anything at another’s bidding; it is the thing in which no one has felt his lowliness; it is the thing that has stood open to all; it is, Marcia, what your father longed for; it is, I say, what makes being born no punishment, what keeps me from falling before the threats of misfortune, what lets me keep my mind unharmed and master of itself: I have something to appeal to. I see crosses there, and not of one kind only, but made differently by different peoples: some have hung their victims head down toward the ground, some have driven a stake up through their private parts, some have stretched out their arms on a gibbet; I see cords, I see scourges, and a separate engine for each limb and each joint: but I see death too. There are bloodthirsty enemies there, arrogant fellow citizens: but I see death there too. Slavery is no hardship when, if you weary of your master, a single step will take you over to freedom. Life, I hold you dear, thanks to the benefit of death.

Consider how much good a timely death holds, how many have been harmed by living longer. If illness had carried off Pompey at Naples, that glory and pillar of the empire, he would have died the undisputed first citizen of the Roman people: as it was, the addition of a little time threw him down from his height. He saw his legions slaughtered before his eyes, and from that battle in which the senate was the front line (how unhappy the remnant that survived!) he saw that he himself, the general, had survived. He saw the Egyptian executioner and offered to a henchman a body that even the victors would have held sacred, though even if he had been spared he would have repented of his safety; for what would have been more shameful than Pompey living by the favor of a king? If Marcus Cicero had fallen at the time when he escaped the daggers of Catiline, which were aimed at him and at his country alike, as the savior of the state he had set free, or if, at the last, he had followed his daughter’s funeral, even then he could have died fortunate. He would not have seen swords drawn against the heads of citizens, nor the goods of the murdered shared out among their murderers, so that men died even at their own expense, nor the auctioneer’s spear selling off the spoils of former consuls, nor murders contracted for by the state, nor robberies, wars, plunder, so many Catilines. If the sea had swallowed Marcus Cato as he was returning from Cyprus and the settlement of the king’s inheritance, or even together with that very money he was bringing, the pay for a civil war, would it not have been well with him? This at least he would have taken with him: that no one would dare to do wrong in Cato’s presence. As it is, the addition of a very few years forced a man born for freedom, not only his own but the state’s, to flee from Caesar and to follow Pompey.

So an untimely death brought him no ill: it even released him from having to endure all ills.

21 “Still, he died too soon, before his time.” First, suppose he had lived on: grant him the longest span a man is allowed to go: how much is it? Brought forth for the briefest time, we look on this life as an inn we have been crowded into, soon to give up our place to the next comer. Am I speaking of our lifetimes, which time rolls away with incredible speed? Count up the centuries of cities: you will see how short a time even those that boast of their antiquity have stood. All human things are brief and perishable, and occupy no part of infinite time. This earth, with its cities and peoples and rivers and the circuit of the sea, we treat as a point when we compare it with the universe; our lifetime is a smaller portion than a point if it is compared with all time, whose measure is greater than that of the universe, since the universe measures itself out again so many times within its span. What does it matter, then, to stretch out something whose increase, however great, will never be far from nothing? Our life is long in one way only: if it is enough. You may name to me long-lived men whose old age has been handed down to memory, you may count up a hundred and ten years: once you have let your mind range over all time, there will be no difference between the shortest life and the longest, if you look at how long a man has lived and compare it with how long he has not lived. Next, he died ripe for himself; for he lived as long as he had to live; nothing further remained for him. Men do not have one and the same old age, nor do animals: some are worn out within fourteen years, and the longest life for them is only the first stage for a man; to each a different capacity for living has been given. No one dies too soon, because he was not going to live longer than he did. Each man’s boundary is fixed: it will always stay where it was set, and no diligence or favor will move it farther. Hold to this: you lost him by design. He took what was his,

“and reached the goal of the span he was given.”14

So there is no reason to burden yourself with the thought: “He could have lived longer.” His life was not cut short, and chance never breaks in on the years. What is promised to each is paid out; the fates go their own way, and neither add anything nor take anything away from what they have once promised. Prayers and efforts are in vain: each will have as much as his first day assigned him. From the day he first saw the light he set out on the road to death and drew nearer his fate, and the very years that were being added to his youth were being taken from his life. We all go about in this error, of thinking that only the old and those already bowed are sinking toward death, when infancy at once, and youth, and every age carries us there. The fates do their work: they take from us the awareness of our own death, and, the more easily to creep up on us, death hides under the very name of life. Childhood turns infancy into itself, youth turns childhood, and the old man has carried off the young. Our very growth, if you reckon rightly, is loss.

22 Do you complain, Marcia, that your son did not live as long as he could have? How do you know whether it was to his advantage to live longer, or whether this death served his interest? Can you find anyone today whose affairs are so well placed and founded that he has nothing to fear as time goes on? Human things slip and flow, and no part of our life is so exposed or tender as the part that pleases us most. That is why the most fortunate should wish for death: in such inconstancy and turmoil, nothing is certain but what is past. Who can guarantee you that your son’s beautiful body, which he kept pure under the strictest guard of his modesty amid the eyes of a dissolute city, could have escaped so many diseases as to carry the grace of its beauty unharmed into old age? Think of the thousand blemishes of the mind. Fine characters have not carried into old age the hope of themselves they raised in youth, but have generally been turned aside: either luxury came late, and all the fouler for that, invaded them and began to disgrace a handsome beginning, or they gave themselves wholly to the tavern and the belly, and their chief concern was what to eat and what to drink. Add fires, collapsing buildings, shipwrecks, the lacerations of surgeons who pick bones out of living bodies, thrust whole hands into the bowels, and treat the private parts with more than one kind of pain. After these, exile: your son was no more innocent than Rutilius. Prison: he was no wiser than Socrates. A breast pierced by a self-inflicted wound: he was no holier than Cato. When you have looked these over, you will know that it goes best with those whom Nature, since this was the wage life had in store for them, has quickly taken into safety. Nothing is so deceitful as human life, nothing so treacherous: by Hercules, no one would have accepted it if it were not given to those who do not know. So if it is the most fortunate thing not to be born, the next best, I think, is to die after a brief span and be quickly restored to our former state.

Picture to yourself that most bitter time when Sejanus made a present of your father to his client Satrius Secundus. He was angry with your father over one or two remarks spoken too freely, because Cordus had not been able to bear in silence that Sejanus was not merely being placed on our necks, but was climbing onto them. A statue was being voted to Sejanus, to be set up in the theater of Pompey, which had burned down and which the emperor was rebuilding; Cordus cried out that now the theater was truly being destroyed. What then? Should he not burst at the sight of Sejanus set up over the ashes of Gnaeus Pompey, a faithless soldier enshrined in the monument of the greatest of generals? The indictment is signed, and the fiercest of hounds, which Sejanus fed on human blood to keep them tame to himself alone and savage to all the world, begin to bark around the man, unshaken as he still was.15 What was he to do? If he wished to live, he had to beg Sejanus; if to die, his daughter; and both were inexorable. He decided to deceive his daughter. So, after taking a bath to drain his strength further, he withdrew to his bedroom as though to have a bite to eat, and when he had sent his slaves away, he threw some of the food out of the window so that he would seem to have eaten; then he went without dinner, as though he had already eaten enough in his room. He did the same on the second day and on the third; the fourth gave him away by the very weakness of his body. So, embracing you, he said: “Dearest daughter, this is the one thing I have hidden from you in my whole life: I have set out on the road to death, and I am already almost halfway along it. You neither should nor can call me back.” And with that he ordered all light shut out and buried himself in darkness. When his plan became known, there was public rejoicing that the prey was being snatched from the jaws of those ravenous wolves. The accusers, at Sejanus’s prompting, went to the consuls’ tribunal and complained that Cordus was dying, to stop what they themselves had driven him to: so much did Cordus seem to them to be escaping. A great question was at stake: whether they were to lose their right to the accused man’s death. While it was being debated, while the accusers came back a second time, he had acquitted himself. Do you see, Marcia, how great the reversals are that break in unexpectedly in evil times? You weep because one of your own had to die? He was very nearly not allowed to!

23 Besides the fact that the whole future is uncertain, and certain only to turn out worse, the way to the gods above is easiest for souls released early from human company; for they have taken on the least dregs and weight. Set free before they could harden and take in earthly things too deeply, they fly back lighter to their origin, and more easily wash off whatever stain and smear clings to them. Great spirits never love to linger in the body; they long to go out and break free, they can hardly bear these narrow confines, used as they are to roaming through all things and looking down from on high on human affairs. That is why Plato cries out that the wise man’s soul leans wholly toward death, wants this, meditates on this, and is always carried by this desire, straining toward what lies outside.

What? When you saw in him, Marcia, an old man’s prudence in a young man, a mind that had conquered all pleasures, corrected, free of vice, seeking wealth without greed, offices without ambition, pleasures without luxury, did you think you could keep him safe for long? Whatever has reached the top is near its end. Perfect virtue snatches itself away and removes itself from our eyes, and what has ripened at the first does not wait for the last season. The brighter a fire burns, the sooner it goes out; it lives longer when it is set to slow, stubborn fuel and, smothered in smoke, shines out of the murk; for the same cause that feeds it meanly makes it last. So too with gifted minds: the more brilliant, the briefer; for where there is no room left for growth, the setting is near. Fabianus says,16 and our parents too saw it, that there was a boy at Rome with the stature of a huge man; but he soon died, and every sensible person had said beforehand that he would die soon; for he could not reach the age he had seized in advance. That is how it is: too great a ripeness is the sign of an end close at hand; the finish draws near when growth is used up.

24 Begin to judge him by his virtues, not by his years: he lived long enough. Left a ward, he was under the care of guardians until his fourteenth year, and under his mother’s guardianship always. When he had a household of his own, he did not want to leave yours, and he went on living with his mother, though children can hardly bear to live with a father. A young man whose stature, beauty, and sound bodily strength made him born for the camp, he refused military service so as not to leave you. Reckon, Marcia, how rarely mothers who live in separate houses see their children; consider how many years are lost to mothers who have sons in the army, years spent in anxiety: you will see that this time was long, and that you lost none of it. He never went out of your sight; under your eyes he shaped his studies, with an excellent talent that would have equaled his grandfather’s, had not modesty stood in his way, the modesty that has kept many men’s progress silent. A young man of rare beauty, among so great a crowd of women who corrupt men, he gave hope to none of them; and when the shamelessness of some went so far as to tempt him, he blushed as though he had sinned by pleasing them. By this purity of character he brought it about that, while still a boy, he seemed worthy of a priesthood, with his mother’s support, no doubt, but not even a mother would have prevailed except for a good candidate. Contemplate these virtues, and hold your son as if in your lap! Now he has more time for you, now he has nothing to call him away; he will never be a worry to you, never a grief. The one thing you could grieve over in so good a son, you have grieved; the rest, beyond the reach of misfortune, is full of pleasure, if only you know how to enjoy your son, if only you understand what was most precious in him. Only the image of your son has perished, and a likeness not very like him; he himself is eternal and now in a better state, stripped of burdens not his own and left to himself. These things you see wrapped around us, bones and sinews and the covering skin, the face and the serving hands and the rest in which we are swathed, are the chains and the darkness of souls. The soul is buried by them, stifled, stained, kept from what is true and its own and thrown into what is false. Its whole struggle is with this heavy flesh, so as not to be dragged down and sink; it strives toward the place from which it was sent down. There eternal rest awaits it, as it leaves the confused and gross and looks upon the pure and clear.

25 So there is no reason for you to run to your son’s tomb. What lies there is the worst of him and what troubled him most, bones and ashes, no more parts of him than his clothes and the other coverings of the body. He is whole, and leaving nothing of himself on earth, he has fled and departed entirely; and after lingering a little above us while he is cleansed and shakes off the faults that clung to him and all the rust of mortal life, he is then raised to the heights and runs among the fortunate souls. A holy company has received him, the Scipios and the Catos, and among those who scorned life and were set free by the gift of death, your father, Marcia. He draws his grandson to himself (though there all are kin to all) as the boy rejoices in the new light, and teaches him the courses of the stars near them, and gladly leads him into the secrets of nature, not by guesswork but with true knowledge of all things; and as a guide to unknown cities is welcome to a stranger, so to one who asks the causes of heavenly things is an interpreter from his own family. And he bids him turn his gaze down to the depths of the earth; for it is a pleasure to look back from on high on what one has left behind. So conduct yourself, Marcia, as though you were set under the eyes of your father and your son, not as you knew them, but as beings so much loftier, placed in the highest place. Blush to think anything low or common, and to weep for your own, who have been changed for the better! They have been released into the free and vast spaces of eternal things. No seas lie between to shut them off, no height of mountains, no pathless valleys, no shallows of the shifting Syrtes: everything there is level, and they, moving easily and unencumbered, pass through one another and mingle with the stars.

26 Imagine, then, Marcia, that from that citadel of heaven your father, who had as much authority with you as you had with your son, speaks to you, not with the genius with which he wept over the civil wars, with which he proscribed the proscribers forever, but with one as much loftier as he himself now stands higher: “Why, daughter, does so long a distress hold you? Why do you live in such ignorance of the truth as to judge that your son was badly treated, because, with his house intact, he himself went intact to his ancestors? Do you not know with what storms Fortune throws everything into confusion? How she has shown herself kind and easy to none but those who had the fewest dealings with her? Shall I name kings to you who would have been the most fortunate of men if death had withdrawn them sooner from the ills bearing down on them? Or Roman generals, whose greatness would lack nothing if you took something from their years? Or men of the noblest birth and highest fame, settling their necks and bowing them to a soldier’s sword? Look at your father and your grandfather. He fell into the power of another man’s assassin; I gave no one any power over me, and, cutting myself off from food, I showed that I had as great a spirit as I seemed to have when I wrote. Why is the longest mourning in our house for the one who died most fortunately? We are all gathered together here, and, no longer surrounded by deep night, we see that nothing among you is, as you think, desirable, nothing lofty, nothing splendid, but all things low and heavy and anxious, and seeing only the smallest part of our light! Need I say that here no armies rage in clashes with one another, no fleets are shattered by fleets, no parricides are planned or even imagined, no forums ring with lawsuits all day long; that here nothing is hidden, minds are laid bare and hearts open, life is lived in public and in the open, with a view of all time and all that is to come?

“It used to delight me to put together the deeds of a single age, done in the farthest corner of the world and among a very few. Now I may look on so many centuries, the chain and succession of so many ages, all the sum of years; I may look ahead to kingdoms that will rise and kingdoms that will fall, to the collapse of great cities and new courses of the sea. For if the common fate can be any comfort to you for your longing, nothing will stand where it stands now; time will lay all things low and carry them off with it. It will make sport not of men only (for how small a part of fortune’s power are they?) but of places, of regions, of whole quarters of the world. It will bury whole mountains and elsewhere thrust new crags up on high; it will drink up seas, turn rivers aside, and, breaking off the commerce of nations, dissolve the society and fellowship of the human race. Elsewhere it will swallow cities in vast chasms, shake them with earthquakes, and send up plague-laden vapors from the depths; it will cover with floods whatever is inhabited and kill every living thing in a drowned world, and scorch and burn all mortal things with vast fires. And when the time comes for the universe to put itself out in order to be renewed, these things will destroy themselves by their own strength, stars will crash into stars, and, all matter ablaze, whatever now shines in its ordered place will burn in a single fire. Then we too, fortunate souls who have been allotted eternity, when it pleases god to build all this anew, as all things fall, we too, a small addition to the vast ruin, shall be changed back into our ancient elements.”

Notes

  1. 1. Aulus Cremutius Cordus, a historian, was prosecuted in AD 25 for praising Brutus and Cassius; he starved himself to death, and the senate ordered his books burned. Copies saved by Marcia were later published again.

  2. 2. Lucius Aelius Sejanus, praetorian prefect under Tiberius and the most powerful man in Rome until his fall and execution in AD 31.

  3. 3. Marcellus, Octavia’s son, married Augustus’s daughter Julia and died in 23 BC, at nineteen. Livia’s son Drusus, brother of the future emperor Tiberius, died in Germany in 9 BC after a fall from his horse.

  4. 4. Julia Augusta is Livia, who took that name when Augustus adopted her in his will. Areus of Alexandria was a Stoic philosopher in Augustus’s household.

  5. 5. Publilius Syrus, a writer of mimes in Caesar’s time, whose one-line maxims were collected.

  6. 6. A gap in the text; the sense is probably “This is what that saying … means.”

  7. 7. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, victor in the civil war of 83–82 BC and then dictator, took the surname Felix (“Fortunate”).

  8. 8. The Greek father is Xenophon, told at a sacrifice that his son Gryllus had fallen at Mantinea (362 BC). Marcus Horatius Pulvillus dedicated the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol in 509 BC.

  9. 9. Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeated Perseus, king of Macedon, at Pydna in 168 BC. One of the sons he gave in adoption became Scipio Aemilianus, who later destroyed Carthage.

  10. 10. Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Caesar’s colleague as consul in 59 BC, kept to his house for most of that year; his two sons were killed in Egypt in 50 BC by soldiers stationed there. Caesar’s daughter Julia, Pompey’s wife, died in 54 BC; her death loosened the tie between the two men.

  11. 11. Tiberius’s son Drusus died in AD 23; his adopted son Germanicus had died in AD 19.

  12. 12. Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, was the mother of the tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, killed in 133 and 121 BC. The tribune Marcus Livius Drusus, son of the second Cornelia, was murdered in 91 BC.

  13. 13. Virgil, Aeneid 3.418.

  14. 14. Virgil, Aeneid 10.472.

  15. 15. The text is corrupt here; read as “the indictment is signed” and “unshaken as he still was.”

  16. 16. Papirius Fabianus, rhetorician and philosopher, was one of Seneca’s teachers.