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Dialogues and On ClemencyConsolation to Polybius
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Consolation to Polybius

1 ⟨…⟩1 compared with our own, they are firm; but if you bring them down to the terms of nature, which destroys all things and calls them back to where it brought them forth, they are perishable. For what immortal thing have mortal hands ever made? The famous Seven Wonders, and any far more wonderful that the ambition of later years has raised, will one day be seen leveled with the ground. So it is: nothing is everlasting, few things are long-lasting; each thing is fragile in its own way, the ends of things vary, but whatever has begun also ends. Some threaten the universe with destruction, and this whole, which embraces all things divine and human, will one day, if you think it right to believe it, be scattered and plunged back into its ancient chaos and darkness. Let someone go now and weep over single lives; let him lament the ashes of Carthage, Numantia, and Corinth, and anything else that has fallen from a greater height, when even this, which has nowhere to fall, is going to perish; let someone go and complain that the fates, which will one day dare so great a crime, have not spared him. Who is of such proud and unbridled arrogance that, under this necessity of nature which calls all things back to the same end, he wants himself alone and his own set apart, and would snatch one house of his own from the ruin that hangs over the universe itself? The greatest comfort, then, is to reflect that what has happened to you has been suffered by all before you and will be suffered by all after you; and that is why, it seems to me, Nature made common what she had made hardest, so that equality might console us for the cruelty of fate.

2 This too will help you not least, if you reflect that your grief will do no good either to him whom you long for or to yourself; for you will not want to prolong what is useless. If we are going to gain anything by sorrow, I do not refuse to pour out for your fortune whatever tears my own has left me; even now I will find something to flow from these eyes, already drained by the weeping of my own house, if only it will do you good. Why do you hesitate? Let us lament together, and I will even make this suit my own: “Fortune, most unjust in the judgment of all, until now you seemed to have held in your lap a man who by your gift had won such regard that, as rarely happens to anyone, his good fortune escaped envy. And now you have dealt him the greatest grief he could suffer while the emperor2 is safe; you had circled him well on every side, and you saw that only on this side did he lie open to your blows. For what else could you have done to him? Taken his money? He was never in its power; even now he drives it from him as far as he can, and with every means of getting it so ready to hand he seeks no greater profit from it than to despise it. Taken his friends? You knew he was so lovable that he could easily put others in the place of those he lost; for of all the men I have seen powerful in the emperor’s household, he is the one, I think, whom everyone finds it useful to have as a friend, and still more a pleasure. Taken his good name? It is too firmly founded with him for even you to shake it. Taken his good health? You knew his mind was so grounded in liberal studies, in which he was not only raised but born, that it rose above all the pains of the body. Taken his life? How little harm you would have done! Fame has promised his genius the longest age; he himself has seen to it that he would endure in the better part of himself and, by composing splendid works of eloquence, would set himself free from mortality. As long as letters are held in any honor, as long as the strength of the Latin tongue or the grace of the Greek survives, he will flourish beside the greatest men, whose genius he has matched or, if his modesty refuses that, attached himself to. This, then, is the one way you devised to hurt him most; for the better a man is, the more often he has to bear you, who rage without any discrimination and are to be feared even in the midst of your benefits. How small a thing it would have been for you to spare this wrong to a man on whom your favor seemed to have come on a sure principle, and not, as is your habit, at random!”

3 Let us add to these complaints, if you like, the young man’s own character, cut off in its first growth: he was worthy to have you as a brother. You certainly were most worthy never to have grief from a brother, even an unworthy one. He has the same testimony from all men; he is missed for your sake and praised for his own. There was nothing in him you would not gladly have owned. You would have been good even to a less good brother, but in him your devotion found fit material and exercised itself far more freely. No one felt his power through a wrong; never did he threaten anyone with you as his brother. He had shaped himself on the model of your modesty and reflected how much you were both the ornament and the burden of your family: he was equal to that load. O harsh fates, fair to no virtue! Before your brother knew his good fortune, he was taken away. I know my indignation falls short; for nothing is harder than to find words equal to a great grief. Yet even now, if we can accomplish anything, let us lament: “What did you mean by this, Fortune, so unjust and so violent? Did you so quickly regret your favor? What cruelty is this, to charge into the midst of brothers and thin out so united a band by so bloody a robbery, to throw into confusion a house so well filled with excellent young men, not one of them falling short of the rest, and to take your toll of it without any cause! Is there no use, then, in an innocence that meets every law, no use in old-fashioned frugality, no use in the greatest power of the greatest good fortune kept with the greatest restraint, no use in a sincere and safe love of letters, no use in a mind free of every stain? Polybius3 mourns, and warned by one brother of what he may fear for the rest, he fears even for the very comforts of his grief. A shameful deed! Polybius mourns, and grieves at something while the emperor is gracious to him! Beyond doubt, headstrong Fortune, this is what you were after: to show that no one can be defended against you, not even by the emperor.”

4 We can go on accusing the fates; we cannot change them. They stand hard and inexorable; no one moves them by abuse, no one by weeping, no one by pleading his case; they never spare anyone or let anything off. Let us spare, then, tears that do no good; for this grief will sooner add us to the dead than bring the dead back to us. If it torments us and does not help, it should be laid aside at the first moment, and the mind should be recovered from empty comforts and from a kind of bitter pleasure in grieving. For unless reason puts an end to our tears, fortune will not. Come, look around at all mortals: everywhere there is ample and constant matter for weeping. One man is called to his daily work by toilsome poverty; another is harried by ambition that never rests; another fears the riches he wished for and suffers from his own prayer; one is tormented by loneliness, another by the crowd forever besieging his front hall; this man grieves that he has children, that one that he has lost them. Our tears will run out before our reasons for grief. Do you not see what kind of life Nature has promised us, when she wanted weeping to be the first act of human beings at birth? With this beginning we are brought forth, and the whole course of the years that follow agrees with it. So we spend our lives; and therefore what we must do often we ought to do in moderation, and, looking back at how much sorrow hangs over us from behind, we ought, if not to end our tears, at least to save them. There is nothing we should spare more than this, which we use so often.

5 This too will help you not least, if you reflect that your grief is welcome to no one less than to the one to whom it seems to be offered: he either does not want you tormented or does not know it. So there is no sense in a duty that, to the one it is paid to, is superfluous if he feels nothing and unwelcome if he feels. I would boldly say there is no one in the whole world who takes delight in your tears. What then? Do you believe that your brother has toward you a feeling no one else has, that he would harm you by tormenting you, that he wants to draw you away from your occupations, that is, from your studies and from the emperor? That is not likely. For he gave you affection as a brother, reverence as a parent, respect as a superior; he wants to be longed for by you, not to be a torment to you. What good is it, then, to waste away in a grief that, if the dead have any feeling, your brother wants ended? With another brother, whose wishes might seem uncertain, I would leave all this in doubt and say: “If your brother wants you tormented by tears that never cease, he is unworthy of this affection of yours; if he does not want it, let go of the grief that clings to you both. An unloving brother should not be longed for like this, and a loving one would not want to be.” But with this brother, whose devotion is so well proven, you must take it as certain that nothing could be more bitter to him than for this misfortune of his to be bitter to you, for it to torment you in any way, for it to trouble your eyes, which least deserve this ill, and drain them too, with no end to weeping. Yet nothing will draw your devotion away from such useless tears so well as reflecting that you ought to be an example to your brothers of bearing this wrong of Fortune bravely. What great generals do when things go badly, deliberately feigning cheerfulness and hiding adversity under a show of gladness, so that the soldiers’ spirits may not collapse too if they see their commander’s mind broken, you too must do now: put on a face unlike your mind and, if you can, throw off all grief entirely; if not, hide it within and hold it in so that it does not show; and see to it that your brothers imitate you, for they will think honorable whatever they see you doing and will take their spirit from your face. You ought to be both their comfort and their consoler; but you will not be able to stand against their grief if you indulge your own.

6 This too can keep you from excessive mourning, if you remind yourself that nothing you do can be hidden. The agreement of mankind has laid a great role on you: you must sustain it. All that crowd of consolers stands around you, probing your mind and looking to see how much strength it has against grief, and whether you only know how to handle prosperity deftly or can also bear adversity like a man: your eyes are watched. Everything is freer for those whose feelings can be hidden; you are not free to keep anything private. Fortune has set you in a strong light; everyone will know how you have conducted yourself under this wound of yours, whether at the first blow you lowered your arms or stood your ground. Long ago the emperor’s love raised you to a higher rank, and your studies brought you up to it. Nothing common becomes you, nothing low. And what is so low and womanish as to give oneself up to grief to be consumed by it? In an equal mourning you are not allowed what your brothers are; the opinion received of your studies and your character does not permit you many things; men demand much of you and expect much. If you wanted everything to be allowed you, you should not have turned all faces toward yourself: now you must deliver as much as you promised. All those who praise the works of your genius, who copy them out, who have no need of your fortune but do need your genius, are guardians of your mind. You can never do anything so unworthy of your claim to be a complete and learned man that many will not regret their admiration of you. You may not weep without measure; and not only that: you may not even stretch your sleep into part of the day, or escape from the uproar of affairs to quiet leisure in the country, or refresh a body worn out by constant duty at its laborious post with a pleasure trip, or occupy your mind with the variety of the shows, or arrange your day as you please. Many things are not allowed you that are allowed to the humblest, who lie in some corner: a great fortune is a great servitude. You may not do anything at your own discretion: so many thousands of people must be heard, so many petitions put in order; so great a mass of affairs, streaming in from the whole world, must be sorted, so that it can be laid in its proper order before the mind of the greatest of emperors. You may not, I say, weep: so that you can listen to the many who weep, to those in danger who long to reach the pity of the gentlest of emperors, you must dry your own tears.

7 Even so, these things help you only with lighter remedies; when you want to forget everything, think of the emperor. See how much loyalty, how much diligence you owe in return for his kindness to you: you will understand that you may no more stoop than the figure of legend, if there is one, on whose shoulders the universe rests. The emperor himself, to whom everything is allowed, is for that very reason not allowed many things: his watchfulness protects everyone’s sleep, his labor everyone’s leisure, his diligence everyone’s pleasures, his preoccupation everyone’s holiday. From the moment the emperor dedicated himself to the world, he took himself away from himself; and like the stars, which unroll their courses forever without rest, he is never allowed to stop or to do anything for himself. To a certain degree, then, the same necessity is laid on you too: you may not look to your own interests, to your own studies. While the emperor holds the world, you cannot give yourself to pleasure or to grief or to anything else: you owe yourself wholly to the emperor. Add now that, since you always declare that the emperor is dearer to you than your own life, it is not right for you to complain of fortune while the emperor is safe: with him unharmed, your family is safe, you have lost nothing; your eyes ought to be not only dry but glad. In him you have everything; he stands for everything. Though nothing is further from your most modest and devoted heart, you are ungrateful toward your good fortune if you let yourself weep for anything while he is safe.

8 I will show you now a remedy not stronger, indeed, but more familiar. Whenever you have gone home, then is the time to fear sorrow: for as long as you look upon your divinity, it will find no way in to you; the emperor will hold the whole of you. When you have left him, then grief, as if given its chance, will lie in wait for your solitude and creep little by little into your mind as it rests. So there is no reason to let any time go empty of your studies: then let your letters, loved so long and so faithfully, repay you; then let them claim you as their high priest and worshiper; then let Homer and Virgil keep you long company, who have deserved as well of the human race as you have deserved of them and of everyone, since you wanted them known to more people than they wrote for. All the time you entrust to their keeping will be safe. Then compose, as far as you can, the deeds of your emperor, so that they may be told through all the ages by a herald of his own household; for he himself will give you both the matter and the model for shaping and recording history. I do not dare lead you so far as to string together fables too, and Aesop’s tales, a work Roman talent has not attempted,4 with your usual charm. It is hard, of course, for a mind struck so violently to turn so soon to these lighter studies; but take it as proof that it has grown strong again and been restored to itself if it can go on from more serious writing to these looser things. For in serious work, however sick it still is and struggling with itself, the very austerity of the subjects it handles will call it away from grief; these, which must be thought out with a relaxed brow, it will not bear until it has steadied itself in every part. So you ought first to exercise it with sterner material, then to temper it with lighter.

9 This too will be a great relief to you, if you often question yourself this way: “Am I grieving on my own account or on account of him who has died? If on my own, the show of affection is gone, and grief, whose one excuse is that it is honorable, begins to fall away from devotion once it looks to its own advantage; and nothing suits a good man less than doing his accounts in mourning for a brother. If I grieve on his account, one of these two things must decide it: for if the dead have no feeling left, my brother has escaped all the troubles of life and has been restored to the place where he was before he was born, and free of every evil he fears nothing, desires nothing, suffers nothing; what madness is this, that I never stop grieving for one who will never grieve? If the dead have some feeling, then my brother’s mind, released as if from a long imprisonment, at last its own master and free to choose, rejoices and enjoys the spectacle of Nature, looks down on all things human from a higher place, and gazes from nearer at things divine, whose reason it had so long sought in vain. Why then do I waste away with longing for one who is either happy or nothing? To weep for the happy is envy; to weep for what is nothing is madness.” Or does this move you, that he seems to have lost great goods just as they were pouring around him? When you reflect that there are many things he has lost, reflect that there are more he does not fear: anger will not torment him, illness will not afflict him, suspicion will not harass him, envy, greedy and forever hostile to others’ success, will not hound him, fear will not trouble him, the fickleness of Fortune, quick to hand her gifts to someone else, will not disquiet him. If you reckon it rightly, more has been spared him than taken from him. He will not enjoy wealth, nor your influence together with his own; he will not receive benefits, nor give them. Do you think him wretched because he has lost these things, or happy because he does not miss them? Believe me, the man who has no need of fortune is happier than the man who has it at hand. All those goods that delight us with a showy but deceptive pleasure, money, rank, power, and many others at which the blind greed of mankind stands gaping, are held with toil and looked upon with envy, and in the end they weigh down the very people they adorn; they threaten more than they help; they are slippery and uncertain, never held securely; for even if one fears nothing from the future, the mere guarding of great prosperity is full of anxiety. If you are willing to believe those who look more deeply into the truth, all life is a punishment. Thrown into this deep and restless sea, which ebbs and flows with alternate tides, now lifting us with sudden gains, now carrying us down with greater losses, and tossing us without pause, we never stand in a steady place; we hang and float and are dashed against one another and sometimes are shipwrecked, and we are always afraid. For those who sail this sea, so stormy and open to every tempest, there is no harbor but death. So do not begrudge your brother: he is at rest. At last he is free, at last safe, at last eternal. He leaves behind him the emperor and all his offspring alive, and you alive with the brothers you share. He left Fortune before she changed anything of her favor, while she still stood by him and heaped gifts on him with a full hand. He now enjoys an open and free sky; from a low and sunken place he has sprung up to that place, whatever it is, that receives into its happy bosom souls set free from their chains; and now he roams there freely and surveys all the goods of Nature with the highest pleasure. You are wrong: your brother has not lost the light, but has been given a purer one. That road is common to all of us: why do we weep over the fates? He has not left us; he has gone on ahead. Believe me, there is great good fortune in the very necessity of dying. Nothing is certain even for a whole day: when the truth is so dark and tangled, who can divine whether death begrudged your brother or looked after him?

10 This too, given your sense of justice in all things, must help you: to reflect that no wrong was done to you in losing such a brother, but a benefit given in that you were allowed so long to have the use and enjoyment of his devotion. He is unfair who does not leave the giver the right to decide about his own gift; he is greedy who counts not as gain what he has received but as loss what he has given back. He is ungrateful who calls the end of pleasure a wrong; he is a fool who thinks there is no profit in goods except present ones, who does not also find rest in past ones and judge those more certain that have gone, since there is no fear that they will end. A man narrows his joys too much who thinks he enjoys only what he has and sees, and counts having had the same things as nothing; for every pleasure leaves us quickly: it flows and passes and is carried off almost before it comes. So the mind must be sent back into past time, and whatever once delighted us must be brought back and handled again in frequent thought: the memory of pleasures lasts longer and is more faithful than their presence. Count it, then, among the highest goods that you had the best of brothers! There is no reason to think how much longer you might have had him, but how long you did have him. Nature gave him to you, as she gives others their brothers, not to own but on loan; then, when it seemed good to her, she asked for him back, and she followed not your fill of him but her own law. If someone took it hard that he had to repay a loan, especially one whose use he had received free of interest, would he not be thought an unjust man? Nature gave life to your brother; she gave it to you as well. If she, using her own right, has called in her debt sooner from the one she chose, the fault is not hers, whose terms were known, but that of the greedy hope of the mortal mind, which keeps forgetting what Nature is and never remembers its own lot unless it is reminded. Rejoice, then, that you had so good a brother, and be content with the use and enjoyment of him, though it was shorter than you prayed for. Reflect that what you had was most delightful, what you lost was human; for nothing is less consistent than to be troubled that such a brother was yours for too short a time and not to rejoice that he was yours at all.

11 “But he was taken from me when I did not expect it.” Each of us is deceived by his own credulity and, in the things he loves, by a willing forgetfulness of mortality. Nature has declared that she will make no exception to her necessity for anyone. Every day the funerals of people known and unknown pass before our eyes, yet we look the other way, and we call sudden what we have been told all our lives would come. It is not, then, the injustice of the fates but the perversity of the human mind, insatiable for everything, which is indignant at being turned out of a place it was admitted to on sufferance. How much fairer was the man who, on being told of his son’s death, spoke words worthy of a great man: “When I fathered him, I knew then that he would die.” You need not wonder at all that from such a man was born one who could die bravely. He did not take the death of his son as news; for what is new in a man’s dying, when his whole life is nothing but a journey toward death? “When I fathered him, I knew then that he would die.” Then he added something showing still greater wisdom and spirit: “And it was for this that I raised him.” We are all raised for this; whoever is brought forth to life is destined for death. Let us rejoice in what will be given, and give it back when it is asked for: the fates will seize one at one time, another at another; they will pass no one by. Let the mind stand ready for battle, and never fear what is necessary, always expect what is uncertain. Why should I speak of generals and the sons of generals, and men made famous by many consulships or triumphs, who have met their inexorable lot? Whole kingdoms with their kings, peoples with their nations, have borne their fate: all men, no, all things, look toward their last day. The end is not the same for all: life deserts one in midcourse, leaves another at the very threshold, and barely lets go of another in extreme old age when he is already weary and longing to depart; at one time or another, but we are all heading for the same place. Whether it is more foolish to be ignorant of the law of mortality or more shameless to refuse it, I do not know. Come, take into your hands the poems of either author, made famous by the great labor of your genius, which you have so turned into prose that, though their structure is gone, their charm remains (for you have carried them from one language into another in such a way that, hardest of all, every one of their virtues has followed you into a foreign speech): there will be no book in those writings that does not offer you a great many examples of the shifts of human life, of uncertain misfortunes, and of tears flowing from one cause after another. Read with how great a spirit you have thundered in mighty words: you will be ashamed to falter suddenly and fall away from such grandeur of speech. Do not let it come about that whoever has admired your writings as models asks how so frail a mind conceived things so grand and so solid.

12 Turn rather from these things that torment you to the many great things that console you, and look at your excellent brothers, look at your wife, look at your son: for the safety of them all Fortune has settled with you for this one share. You have many in whom to find rest. Save yourself from this disgrace, that everyone should think one grief counts for more with you than so many comforts. You see that all of them are struck down together with you and cannot help you, and you understand that, on the contrary, they are waiting for you to lift them up; and so, the less learning and genius they have, the more you must stand against the common ill. And this itself serves as a comfort, to divide one’s grief among many; because it is shared out among several, only a small part of it ought to settle with you. I will not stop offering you the emperor again and again: while he governs the earth and shows how much better an empire is guarded by benefits than by arms, while he presides over human affairs, there is no danger that you will feel you have lost anything; in him alone you have protection enough, comfort enough. Lift yourself up and, as often as tears well up in your eyes, so often turn your eyes toward the emperor: they will be dried by the sight of that greatest and most glorious divinity; his brightness will dazzle them so that they can look at nothing else, and will hold them fixed on himself. He whom you look upon day and night, from whom you never turn your mind away, is the one you must think of, the one you must call to your side against fortune. Nor do I doubt that, since he has such gentleness and such kindness toward all his own, he has already covered over this wound of yours with many comforts and already piled up many things to block your grief. What more? Even if he had done none of this, is not the emperor himself, merely seen and thought of, the greatest comfort to you? May the gods and goddesses lend him long to the earth! May he equal the deeds of the deified Augustus and surpass his years! As long as he is among mortals, may he find nothing in his house mortal! May he find his son, after long proof of loyalty, fit to rule the Roman empire, and see him as his father’s partner before he sees him as his successor! May the day be late, and known only to our grandchildren, on which his family claims him for heaven!

13 Keep your hands off him, Fortune, and show your power over him only on the side where you do good! Let him heal the human race, so long sick and afflicted; let him restore and put back in its place whatever the frenzy of the previous emperor shook loose! May this star, which has shone out on a world cast headlong into the depths and sunk in darkness, shine forever! May he pacify Germany, open up Britain, and lead triumphs like his father’s and new ones too; and his clemency, which holds first place among his virtues, promises that I too shall watch them. For he did not cast me down so as not to wish to raise me up; no, he did not even cast me down, but when I was struck by fortune and falling, he held me up, and as I went headlong he set me down gently, using the moderation of a divine hand. He interceded for me with the senate, and he did not only give me my life but asked for it.5 Let him see to it: let him judge my case to be whatever he wishes it to be; either let his justice see that it is good or his clemency make it good. Either way his benefit to me will be equal, whether he knows me to be innocent or wills me to be. Meanwhile it is a great comfort in my miseries to see his pity ranging over the whole world: since from the very corner where I am pinned down it has dug out several men buried under a ruin of many years and brought them back to the light, I do not fear that it will pass me alone by. He himself knows best the time at which he ought to come to each man’s aid; I shall do everything I can so that he need not blush to reach me. O fortunate clemency of yours, Caesar, which lets exiles live a quieter life under you than the leading men lived lately under Gaius!6 They do not tremble or wait for the sword every hour or panic at the sight of every ship; through you they have, as well as a limit to the savagery of fortune, hope that it will improve and peace in the present. You may be sure that those thunderbolts are the most just of all which even those struck by them worship.

14 This emperor, then, who is the public comfort of all mankind, has already, unless I am wholly deceived, revived your mind and applied greater remedies to so great a wound. He has already strengthened you in every way, already recounted with his most tenacious memory all the examples that would drive you to calm of mind, already set out with his accustomed eloquence the precepts of all the wise. No one, then, could better take on this part of speaking to you: when he speaks, words will have another weight, as though sent from an oracle; his divine authority will crush all the force of your grief. Imagine him, then, saying to you: “Fortune has not singled out you alone to strike with so heavy a wrong; there is no house in the whole world, nor has there ever been, without some lamentation. I will pass over common examples, which, though lesser, are countless, and lead you to the calendars and the public annals. Do you see all these ancestral masks that have filled the hall of the Caesars? Not one of them is not marked by some misfortune in his family; not one of these men, who shine out as the ornaments of the ages, was not either tortured by longing for his own or longed for by his own with the greatest anguish of mind. Why should I tell you of Scipio Africanus,7 who received the news of his brother’s death in exile? That brother who had rescued his brother from prison could not rescue him from fate; and how impatient of equal justice the devotion of Africanus was became plain to all: on the same day on which Scipio Africanus had taken his brother out of the hands of the officer, he, a private citizen, also vetoed a tribune of the people. Yet he longed for his brother with as great a spirit as he had defended him. Why should I tell you of Scipio Aemilianus,8 who almost at one and the same time saw his father’s triumph and the funerals of his two brothers? Yet, a youth and almost a boy, he bore the sudden desolation of his family, collapsing on top of Paullus’s very triumph, with as great a spirit as was fitting for a man born so that Rome should not lack a Scipio nor Carthage survive.

15 “Why should I tell you of the harmony of the two Luculli,9 broken by death? Or of the Pompeys? Fortune in her savagery did not even leave them this, to fall in one and the same ruin. Sextus Pompey first outlived his sister,10 by whose death the bonds of a well-knit Roman peace were loosened; and he likewise outlived his excellent brother, whom Fortune had lifted up only so as to cast him down from no less a height than she had cast down his father; and yet after this misfortune Sextus Pompey was equal not only to his grief but to war. Countless examples of brothers separated by death come to mind from every side; indeed, on the contrary, hardly any pairs of brothers have ever been seen growing old together; but I will be content with examples from my own house. For no one will be so lacking in feeling and sanity as to complain that Fortune has brought mourning on anyone, when he knows that she has coveted even the tears of the Caesars. The deified Augustus lost Octavia, his dearest sister, and Nature did not take away the necessity of mourning even from him for whom she had destined heaven; no, harassed by every kind of bereavement, he lost his sister’s son, who was being prepared to succeed him;11 in short, not to list his griefs one by one, he lost sons-in-law, children, and grandchildren, and no one of all mortals felt more that he was a man, while he was among men. Yet his breast, which could hold all things, held so many and such great griefs, and the deified Augustus was the victor not only over foreign nations but also over sorrows. Gaius Caesar, grandson of my great-uncle the deified Augustus, in the first years of his youth lost his dearest brother Lucius, one Prince of Youth losing another, while preparing for the Parthian war, and he was struck by a much heavier wound to his mind than he later suffered in his body;12 and he bore both with the greatest devotion and the greatest courage. Caesar, my uncle,13 lost my father, Drusus Germanicus, his younger brother, as he was opening up the depths of Germany and bringing the fiercest nations under Roman rule; he lost him in his arms and amid his kisses. Yet he set a measure to mourning not only for himself but for others, and when the whole army, not only sorrowful but stunned, was claiming the body of its Drusus for itself, he brought it back to the Roman manner of mourning and judged that discipline must be kept not only in soldiering but also in grieving. He could not have checked the tears of others if he had not first held back his own.

16 “Mark Antony, my grandfather,14 second to no one except the man who defeated him, at the time when he was setting the state in order and, armed with the power of a triumvir, saw nothing above him and, except for his two colleagues, everything below him, heard that his brother had been killed. Headstrong Fortune, what games you make for yourself out of human ills! At the very time when Mark Antony sat as judge of the life and death of his fellow citizens, Mark Antony’s brother was being ordered led to execution! Yet Mark Antony bore this sad wound with the same greatness of mind with which he had endured all his other adversities, and this was his mourning: to offer his brother the blood of twenty legions. But to pass over all other examples, and to keep silent about other deaths even in my own case, Fortune has twice attacked me with mourning for a brother, twice learned that I could be hurt but not beaten. I lost my brother Germanicus,15 and how I loved him anyone surely understands who thinks of how loving brothers love their brothers; yet I so governed my affection that I neither left undone anything that ought to be asked of a good brother nor did anything that could be blamed in an emperor.”

Imagine, then, that the father of the people is recounting these examples to you, and that he is showing you too how nothing is sacred and untouched for Fortune, who has dared to lead funerals out of the very household from which she was to seek gods. So let no one be surprised that she does anything cruelly or unjustly; for can she know any fairness or any restraint toward private houses, when her implacable savagery has so often brought death to the very couches of the gods? We may abuse her not only with our own voice but with the voice of the whole people, yet she will not be changed; she will hold her course against all prayers and all complaints. This is what Fortune has been in human affairs, and this is what she will be: she has left nothing undared, she will leave nothing untouched; she will go more violently through everything, as she always has, daring for the sake of wrong to enter even those houses that are approached through temples, and she will dress doors wreathed with laurel in black. This one thing let us obtain from her by public vows and prayers, if she has not yet resolved to consume the human race, if she still looks kindly on the Roman name: that she will wish this emperor, given to the fallen affairs of men, to be sacred to her as he is to all mortals! Let her learn clemency from him, and be gentle to the gentlest of all emperors!

17 You ought, then, to look at all those I named a little earlier, who have been either taken up into heaven or stand next to it, and to bear calmly that Fortune stretches out her hands toward you too, since she does not keep them off even those by whom we swear. You ought to imitate their firmness in enduring and overcoming griefs, as far as it is right for a man to walk in divine footsteps. However great the differences of rank and nobility in other things, virtue is set in the middle for all: it disdains no one who only judges himself worthy of it. You will certainly do best to imitate those who, though they might have been indignant that they were not exempt from this ill, still judged that being made equal to other men in this one thing was not a wrong but the law of mortality, and bore what had happened neither too bitterly and harshly nor softly and effeminately; for not to feel one’s ills is not human, and not to bear them is not manly. And yet, having gone around all the Caesars from whom Fortune snatched brothers and sisters, I cannot pass over this one, who ought to be struck from the whole roll of the Caesars, whom Nature brought forth for the ruin and shame of the human race, who burned the empire and overturned it from its foundations, an empire the clemency of the gentlest of emperors is now restoring. Gaius Caesar, when he lost his sister Drusilla,16 a man who could no more grieve than rejoice as an emperor should, fled the sight and company of his fellow citizens, did not attend his sister’s funeral, did not pay his sister the rites due to her, but at his Alban villa he lightened the ills of that most bitter death with dice and the gaming board and other common pastimes of the kind. Shame on the empire! A Roman emperor mourning his sister, and dice were his comfort! That same Gaius, in his frenzied inconstancy, now letting his beard and hair grow, now cutting them, now wandering the coasts of Italy and Sicily, and never quite sure whether he wanted his sister mourned or worshiped, at the very time he was setting up temples and sacred couches for her, was punishing with the cruelest penalties those who had not been sad enough; for he bore the blows of adversity with the same intemperance of mind with which, carried away by success, he swelled beyond human measure. Far from every Roman man be this example: to call one’s mourning away with ill-timed amusements, or to aggravate it with the ugliness of squalor and filth, or to divert it with the ills of others, a comfort hardly human.

18 You, however, need change nothing of your habits, since you have learned to love those studies which best exalt good fortune and most easily lessen calamity, and which are at once the greatest ornaments and the greatest comforts a man has. Now, then, plunge yourself deeper into your studies; now set them around you like fortifications for your mind, so that grief may find no way in at any point. Prolong your brother’s memory too with some monument in your writings; for this is the one work in human affairs that no storm can harm and no age consume. The others, which consist of piled stones and masses of marble or mounds of earth raised to a great height, do not last long, since they themselves perish too: the memory of genius is immortal. Give this lavishly to your brother, set him in it; you will consecrate him better with a genius that will last forever than you will mourn him with useless grief. As for Fortune herself, even if her case cannot be pleaded before you now (for everything she has given us is hateful for the very reason that she has taken something away), it must be pleaded then, as soon as time has made you a fairer judge of her; for then you will be able to make your peace with her. For she has provided many things with which to make good this wrong, and she will still give many with which to atone for it; and in the end, this very thing she has taken away she herself had given you. Do not, then, use your genius against yourself; do not take your grief’s side. Your eloquence, of course, can make small things pass for great and, again, make great things slight and bring them down to the least; but let it save these powers for something else, and now give itself wholly to your comfort. And yet consider whether even this is not already superfluous; for nature demands something of us, but more is taken on through vanity. I, however, will never demand of you that you not grieve at all. And I know there are some men whose prudence is more hard than brave, who say the wise man will not grieve: these seem to me never to have met with a misfortune of this kind; otherwise Fortune would have knocked their proud wisdom out of them and driven them, even against their will, to confess the truth. Reason will have done enough if it cuts away from grief only what is excessive and overflowing; that it should allow none at all, no one should hope or desire. Let it rather keep a measure that imitates neither a lack of devotion nor madness and holds us in a state that befits a mind that is loving, not shaken: let tears flow, but let them also stop; let groans be drawn from the depths of the breast, but let them also end; so govern your mind that you can win the approval of the wise and of your brothers. See to it that you want your brother’s memory to come to you often, that you celebrate him in conversation and bring him before you by constant recollection; and you will achieve this only if you make his memory pleasant rather than tearful; for it is natural that the mind always shrinks from what it returns to with sorrow. Think of his modesty, think of his skill in handling affairs, his diligence in carrying them out, his constancy in his promises. Tell others all his words and deeds, and recall them to yourself. Think what he was and what he might have been hoped to become: for what could not safely be promised of such a brother?

These things I have put together as best I could, with a mind grown stale and dulled by long neglect. If they seem to answer too little to your genius or to heal your grief too little, reflect how little a man can spare time for consoling another when his own ills keep him occupied, and how hard it is for Latin words to come to a man around whom echoes the uncouth din of barbarians, offensive even to the more civilized barbarians.

Notes

  1. 1. The beginning is lost.

  2. 2. Claudius, emperor AD 41–54, whom Seneca calls “Caesar” throughout.

  3. 3. Polybius, a freedman of Claudius, was his secretary for literary studies and later for petitions; he had put Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek.

  4. 4. Phaedrus had already published Latin verse fables after Aesop under Tiberius.

  5. 5. In AD 41 Claudius banished Seneca to Corsica on a charge of adultery with Julia Livilla, sister of the emperor Gaius (Caligula); he was recalled in 49.

  6. 6. Gaius Caesar, the emperor known as Caligula (reigned 37–41).

  7. 7. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, who defeated Hannibal in 202 BC. In the 180s BC his brother Lucius Scipio Asiaticus was threatened with prison over public funds; Africanus ended his life in voluntary retirement at Liternum.

  8. 8. Scipio Aemilianus, son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was adopted into the Scipios; his two younger brothers died just before and after their father’s triumph over Macedonia in 167 BC. He destroyed Carthage in 146 BC.

  9. 9. Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the general of the war against Mithridates, and his brother Marcus.

  10. 10. Sextus Pompey was the younger son of Pompey the Great. Seneca seems to mean Julia, Julius Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife, whose death in 54 BC loosened the alliance between Caesar and Pompey; she was not Sextus’s sister. The brother is Gnaeus Pompey, killed after the battle of Munda in 45 BC.

  11. 11. Marcellus, son of Octavia, married to Augustus’s daughter Julia; he died in 23 BC.

  12. 12. The imagined speaker, Claudius, was Augustus’s great-nephew. Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Augustus’s grandsons and adopted sons, each held the title “Prince of Youth”; Lucius died in AD 2, and Gaius, wounded in Armenia, died in AD 4.

  13. 13. Tiberius, later emperor. His brother Drusus the Elder, Claudius’s father, died in Germany in 9 BC after a fall from his horse; Tiberius reached him before he died.

  14. 14. Mark Antony, triumvir with Octavian and Lepidus from 43 BC, was Claudius’s maternal grandfather. His brother Gaius Antonius was put to death in 42 BC on the order of Marcus Brutus; the twenty legions are the armies of Brutus and Cassius defeated at Philippi.

  15. 15. Germanicus, Claudius’s elder brother, died in Syria in AD 19.

  16. 16. Julia Drusilla, sister of Gaius, died in AD 38 and was declared a goddess.